In his lifetime, Mark Twain was the greatest literary celebrity the world had ever known. In the US, he hobnobbed with presidents; on his many travels, he would dine privately with the German kaiser, the Austrian emperor, or the Prince of Wales. Visiting England to collect an honorary degree from Oxford University, he was cheered off his ship by the stevedores of the London docks, before making his way to Windsor Castle for tea with the king and queen.
He was the bracing, irreverently humorous voice of America. Like Charles Dickens, whom he heard read from his own work in New York, he became a performer as well as an author. In London he was feted when he read passages from his travelogue of the Wild West, Roughing It. Everyone loved the “twang of his drawl”. He went on to take his work in progress, Huckleberry Finn, round more than 100 American towns and cities, earning handsomely.
His pre-fame life, as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, formed the inspiration for much of his work. He spent most of his youth in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and delighted in the river: fishing and swimming and exploring its islands. Aged just 11, he became a printer’s apprentice at the Missouri Courier, giving him the skills of a journeyman typesetter and allowing him to earn a reliable living. At 21, he befriended a young river pilot, Horace Bixby, who schooled him on the 1,200 miles of shifting channels of the lower Mississippi, between St Louis and New Orleans. At 23, he received his licence as a steamboat pilot for that stretch of the river. His experiences would form the basis for his wonderfully readable Life on the Mississippi and his masterpiece, Huckleberry Finn. The river was even there in his pseudonym, which he first adopted in newspaper articles in his late 20s. “Mark twain” was the cry of a leadsman, who sounded the water with a rope and a weight and confirmed that the river was a safe two fathoms deep.
In his early 30s he went on a trip with American tourists to Europe and the Middle East, simply in order to get copy for The Innocents Abroad, an often hilarious travelogue. It was “the rocket that lifted Mark Twain to literary stardom”. (It remained the best-selling book of his lifetime.) That stardom was cemented by Huckleberry Finn, published in 1884. Ron Chernow, who is best known for the biography of Alexander Hamilton, on which the musical was based, rightly says that having the unlettered, 14-year-old Huck narrate the story meant it became one of the great demonstrations of “how expressive colloquial language could be”. There had been nothing like Huck’s deadpan humour, not least in his depiction of his monstrous, drunken, deeply racist father. Yet, as Chernow notes, the novel seems to have become almost unteachable in American schools and universities (he might have added, in British universities too). Huck grew up, like the author, in Missouri, a slave state. As he describes his adventures with the escaped slave, Jim, he uses the N-word some 200 times. This now presents “an almost insuperable problem for educators”.
Twain never became as enlightened as Chernow – who often apologises for him – would wish. Almost all his best books have something disturbing in them. The illustrations accompanying Life on the Mississippi stereotype Black people and Jewish tradesman in ways that would make any reader flinch from this brilliantly written book. It is not just his attitudes to race that need explaining. In his 70s he cultivated – mostly by letter – relations with girls he dubbed his “angelfish”: “I collect pets: young girls from ten to sixteen years old who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent.” Chernow hopes that, if not innocent, the preoccupation at least led nowhere.
Hamilton aside, Chernow has specialised in stories of American capitalism, including an account of the Morgan banking dynasty and a life of the oil plutocrat John D Rockefeller. His financial savvy is essential to this biography, and he shows how the highest earning American writer of the 19th century spent much of his life oppressed by money worries. The son of a feckless and often financially desperate father, keeping afloat was at the forefront of his mind. He was drawn to get-rich-quick schemes, and always being conned. He invested and lost huge amounts (millions in today’s money) in a series of mad projects, often involving new technology. As well as losing the money that he had earned, he managed to burn through much of his wife’s inheritance (his wife Olivia, known as Livy, was the daughter of Jervis Langdon, a wealthy colliery owner and coal dealer).
Convinced that publishers were villainous, Twain started his own house, which duly bankrupted him and sent him, aged 60, on a speaking tour round the world, via Australia, India and South Africa, in an attempt to pay off his massive debts. He also cranked out potboilers like Tom Sawyer, Detective. By his mid-60s, he had cleared those debts – only to lose further huge sums developing a “miraculous” health food product known as Plasmon.
The other great theme of this book is illness. Twain’s and Livy’s son had died of diphtheria as an infant. Their eldest daughter, Susy, was withdrawn from Bryn Mawr College (possibly to “save” her from a lesbian infatuation with a fellow student) and withdrew into lassitude, before dying of meningitis in her mid-20s. Chernow exhaustively chronicles the family’s further ailments: Twain’s youngest daughter, Jean, was epileptic, a source of shame as well as anxiety to her father. A witty sceptic about the medical profession, he was susceptible to every form of quackery in pursuit of a “cure”. Livy spent years ill and isolated before her death in 1904, after which Twain relied more and more on Isabel Lyon, a bookish middle-aged woman who called him “the King”. Chernow says that she was his “de facto mistress (minus the romance)”.
This is a huge book – well over 1,000 pages – because there is so much to go on. As well as thousands of Twain’s letters, there are 50 volumes of notebooks and half a million words of an autobiography, dictated to a stenographer in his last years. There are copious records of Twain’s lectures, as well as transcripts of interviews: he was interviewed more often than any other writer of his generation. It was as if he was trying to supply future biographers with material. When he quarrelled with his closest financial advisers in old age, he compiled an obsessively detailed, furious account of how he had been wronged. He even left posterity a detailed record of his dreams. Chernow makes out of all this an admirably animated, readable account of one of the modern world’s first celebrities. Somewhere deep inside it, almost hidden, glows the energy and humour of Twain’s very American prose.
• Mark Twain by Ron Chernow is published by Allen Lane (£40). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
