Mark Twain - Ron Chernow, 1039 pages + notes and index
Since 1990, author Ron Chernow has crafted a series of biographies of figures in American history that go far beyond answers to basic who / what / when / where questions to address WHY those individuals came to exert such influence in the world in their day and HOW their work still affects the world today. His books The House of Morgan and Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller provided insight into how both American business and government were corrupted by concentrations of wealth which still count among America's biggest threats in the present. His biography Alexander Hamilton provided insight into the personalities that drove the debates over the methods of governance America would adopt and demonstrated how Hamilton's intellect, writing abilities, sheer productive output and certainly ego resulted in him having perhaps the greatest influence on the precedents set – often intentionally, with great debate and sometimes randomly – for America's unique federalist form of government. Chernow went on to write biographies on George Washington and Ulysses S. Grant that provided insights on how two different generals evolved into Presidents and how those evolutions were shaped in part by slavery within the United States.
Chernow's latest book Mark Twain traces the literary and intellectual evolution of a man who became world renown for not only his novels but his satires and critiques delivered via short stories, op-eds and stage appearances throughout the world. This new biography is as well-researched as all of Chernow's prior work but the net effect on the reader is far different than any of the other works. After plowing through all 1039 pages, two possible conclusions are likely to come to mind... 1) Thank God I'm done. 2) I dislike virtually every person referenced in this book, including Mark Twain. ESPECIALLY Mark Twain.
That seems like an odd conclusion to reach for someone who is then spending the time to review the book. Why not just walk away and avoid reviewing the book at all? Primarily, because Chernow's intent in writing these biographies and the reader's intent in reading them isn't (and shouldn't be) one of mere entertainment. The goal is enlightenment.
In prior biographies, Chernow's research identified previously unknown events or contributors to those events influenced by the subject of the book that are interesting in their own right. As those previously unknown influences are tallied over the subject's life, Chernow makes a case for how the overall arc of that career wasn't merely a collection of random collisions between person and circumstance but a result of a willingness of that subject to exert their sense of propriety consistently over time, even in circumstances where doing so bucked current thinking. Essentially, each subject came across as someone playing chess and consistently thinking three or four moves ahead of the world around them.
In contrast, after reading Mark Twain, the reader comes away with an impression that Twain's fame in large part stemmed from the coincidence of three forces at a critical point in America's history:
- a writer growing up with a poor education in a racist society
- a writer possessing a gift for terse, satirical aphorisms that cut through hypocrisy and flowery language and communicated an idea with punch
- the evolution of mass media in a world made smaller via trains and steam ships that made world travel not just possible but common
Chernow never makes the case directly, but the real takeaway from the biography is that Mark Twain could be viewed as the world's first successful "influencer." And that suggestion carries with it all of the skepticism, if not outright scorn, that the term attracts when applied in the present. Prior to reading the book, a reader might have been expecting to glean more insight into the complex thought that Twain put into his work over his career to "bend the arc" consistently in a desired direction. After reading the book, it is possible for a reader to come away with the impression that Mark Twain became a "great American novelist" because he wrote what he lived every day – ignorance, greed, hypocrisy -- and peppered his output with comedic, sound-byte friendly outbursts of moral outrage on racism, women's rights and business.
The Naive Narrator
An interesting parallel between the biography Mark Twain and the work of Twain himself is the challenge posed by the language used at some past point in time. Twain's work most famously encountered this problem in Huckleberry Finn in which Twain's prose replicated the dialects and attitutes he encountered throughout his childhood, nearly verbatim, including frequent use of the N-word. From its publication to the present, many readers have great difficulty in seeing value in a book using such an offensive word hundreds of times. Twain infused the prose of the book with the word as part of his use of a naive narrator mechanism for delivering the core point of the book (in the famous "I guess I'll go to Hell" scene).
Huck was an ignorant child raised by a violent father and ignorant aunt amid a racist society who absorbed everything he was taught without thinking. As the book progresses and Huck spends time with Jim drifting down the Mississippi, despite all of that ignorant, racist coaching, Huck's conscience wakes up as he realizes Jim is his equal in every respect. Huck reaches this conclusion after realizing he is technically helping a fugitive slave escape, a criminal offense in his society and a "sin" according to his warped "Christian" upbringing. As Huck weighs his options – turn Jim in like a "Christian" or help him escape and "sin" -- his conscience finally snaps and leads him to the correct moral answer while his "logical" mind, warped by his upbringing, tells himself he'll go to Hell for helping a black man escape slavery.
The N-word permeates the text to reflect how racism permeated America at the time, yet the wrongfulness of racism, despite that head start, could still be grasped by an ignorant, unschooled child. The reader, being multiple chapters into the book by this critical point, is already steps ahead of this ignorant child narrator and "knows" what the correct thing to do is. Via this narrative device, Twain's point was essentially if an ignorant thirteen year old boy can solve this morality problem, why can't YOU, an educated adult? If you're reading this book and think you're ahead of the narrator in this plot, why aren't YOU applying this in your life? The fact that Twain didn't suddenly STOP using the N-word in the book after that point in the plot makes a more subtle, but equally important point. Great, you learned a lesson ("slavery is evil and needs to be eliminated") but if you were wrong on that, you were likely wrong on many related topics and that more moral evolution on your part is required.
Possibly without realizing it, Chernow faced a similar problem researching and writing about Twain himself. With the exception of Alexander Hamilton, who was a VERY gifted writer, most of Chernow's biography subjects were primarily "doers" rather than thinkers and writers. In contrast, Twain was a writer by profession and his first inclination in nearly every circumstance was to write. The output of that inclination might be a travelogue, a short story, a novel, a flowery letter to a family member or fan or a BLISTERING diatribe at some party who suddenly fell out of favor for some real or imagined offense.
In short, Twain's use of the naive narrator in Huckleberry Finn was authentic because he was writing from his personal experience. One takeaway from the entire biography is that, in modern parlance, Twain demonstrated EVERY behavior of someone with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He hated school, stopped attending at age 12 but was a voracious reader so he was nearly entirely self-taught. At various points in the biography, it is mentioned that as an adult, people who encountered Twain were amazed at how he could hold forth in discussions on virtually any topic. Such a genius.
Autodidact or ADHD
What also becomes obvious from the biography which Chernow doesn't really mention is that Twain may have been self-taught, but it is not clear he learned much from what he read. If a self-described autodidact reads Isaac Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy but cannot explain the basics of calculus or calculate a derivative, did reading the book really accomplish anything other than introduce vocabulary to throw out at a party? Twain's decisions about business investments and the handling of his own publishing work created repeated, catastrophic financial losses throughout his career. Twain not only repeated the same mistakes after some lull in activity, he repeatedly made identical flawed choices, sometimes within DAYS of concluding efforts to recover from prior failures.
As one example, Twain became convinced he was being cheated of royalties from his first publisher so he decided he would start his own publishing firm. The first project undertaken by his firm used a subscription model in which books were essentially sold door-to-door rather than via a retail bookseller. The books were sold under an installment plan so a set being purchased for say $40 dollars for 10 volumes would collect that $40 dollars over time, yet the customer would receive the entire set of books up front. Twain failed to grasp the cash flow problem created by that model. He further failed to recognize that the more successful the sales of the book became, the more acute the pressure for up-front costs to PRINT the books would be without any incoming cash. Did any of Twain's vast readings cover concepts of basic business and accounting?
Many of those mistakes reflect not only ignorance in matters of finance, general business and investing but an impulsivity obviously attributable to ADHD from a modern vantage point that is clear throughout the book. While Chernow's exposition covers this pattern of behavior in exhausting detail, Chernow never returns to the perspective of the present to address this dynamic in modern terms.
The Consummate Hypocrite
Over Twain's entire life, his choices reflected a consistent streak of hypocrisy regarding both wealth and power. Twain managed to marry up well, finding a wife whose family netted consistent income from a coal processing business serving the railroads – a business equivalent to printing money. Once married, Twain moved frequently between various homes and apartments in Connecticut and New York. The "homes" were not newlywed fixer-uppers or starter homes. Twain's home in Hartford, Connecticut featured TWENTY FIVE ROOMS, 11,500 square feet of space and a staff including a coachman, a housekeeper, a personal maid for wife Livy and a butler. And despite that luxury, they still summered most years at another home owned by Livy's side of the family. Those fixed costs mounted quickly during slack periods in Twain's writing income or when his failed business ventures triggered recognition of enormous losses.
During these budget crunch periods, did Twain ever consider downsizing? Nope. His ADHD driven stress-coping mechanisms kicked in, triggered his wanderlust and he would take the family on extended trips to live abroad while making appearances to make money etc. while leaving the staff in place, burning money at an even faster rate on two continents at a time. At a later point, Twain at least rented the Hartford home out during their absence but neither Twain nor his wife could reach the more logical conclusion that they needed to economize rather than frazzling their nerves and further stressing his wife's ever-fragile health worrying about money.
How much of Twain's tribulations regarding the cost of his homes and lifestyle were due to hypocrisy versus the previously mentioned ADHD demanding the constant stimulus of new things and his particularly poor allotment of common sense related to money is debatable. But Twain's willingness to hobnob with rich or powerful people was a pure reflection of hypocrisy and vanity. As an example, Twain's worldwide tour to raise money to retire debts led to a stint in South Africa. Twain's observations from that trip eventually made their way into his 1897 book Following the Equator which contained this scathing comment on whites in South Africa:
The great bulk of the savages must go. The white man wants their lands, and all must go excepting such percentage of them as he will need to do his work for him upon terms to be determined by himself. Since history has removed the element of guesswork from this matter and made it certainty, the humanest way of diminishing the black population should be adopted, not the old cruel ways of the past. Mr. Rhodes and his gang have been following the old ways.—They are chartered to rob and slay, and they lawfully do it, but not in a compassionate and Christian spirit. They rob the Mashonas and the Matabeles of a portion of their territories in the hallowed old style of “purchase!” for a song, and then they force a quarrel and take the rest by the strong hand. They rob the natives of their cattle under the pretext that all the cattle in the country belonged to the king whom they have tricked and assassinated. They issue “regulations” requiring the incensed and harassed natives to work for the white settlers, and neglect their own affairs to do it. This is slavery, and is several times worse than was the American slavery which used to pain England so much; for when this Rhodesian slave is sick, super-annuated, or otherwise disabled, he must support himself or starve – his master is under no obligation to support him.
The reduction of the population by Rhodesian methods to the desired limit is a return to the old-time slow-misery and lingering-death system of a discredited time and a crude “civilization.” We humanely reduce an overplus of dogs by swift chloroform; the Boer humanely reduced an overplus of blacks by swift suffocation; the nameless but right-hearted Australian pioneer humanely reduced his overplus of aboriginal neighbors by a sweetened swift death concealed in a poisoned pudding. All these are admirable, and worthy of praise; you and I would rather suffer either of these deaths thirty times over in thirty successive days than linger out one of the Rhodesian twenty-year deaths, with its daily burden of insult, humiliation, and forced labor for a man whose entire race the victim hates. Rhodesia is a happy name for that land of piracy and pillage, and puts the right stain upon it.
Taken out of context, the initial portion of that quote sounds atrocious – Twain is sarcastically stating the position of the white racist minority to highlight its offensiveness -- but Twain's true position becomes more evident as the quote goes on. However, that quote and that ultimate conclusion came well after leaving the country. While actually in the country, in the moment, he had no qualms with spouting his grossly uninformed opinions to the local press.
Upon arrival, he spoke in favor of a group of "rebels" led by Brit Cecil Rhodes who had attempted to topple the government controlled by Boers, a faction of white supremacists with ties back to Dutch settlers. (Those Boers are now referred to as Afrikaners, the same Afrikaners that jailed Nelson Mandela who eventually led a movement that removed them from power.) After meeting with some prisoners taken by the Boer government, Twain made some comments to the press about their living conditions, sarcastically terming them superior to many he had seen in mining camps of the American west. That led the government to dramatically worsen their accommodations for several months before they were released.
Twain later met with the South African President of the country and had a pleasant chat with him. Only after leaving the country did Twain realize a) the "rebels" were tied to the British, b) the "rebel" faction under Cecil Rhodes was as racist as the Boers they wanted to oust from power and c) the native South Africans of the country would suffer equally under either faction, regardless of any distinctions between their historical motivations. Twain enjoyed a meal, bolstered his own fame via the publicity of meeting with a head of state and got something to write home about for his book but was unable to speak truth to power in the moment because he made no concerted effort to understand the actual truth before opening his mouth.
Bridging the Past to the Present
In general, some amount of "vernacular shock" is almost guaranteed when modern minds encounter letters and transcripts of communication from many generations in the past. At a minimum, styles of communication from yesteryear seem far more formal and stuffy than the flood of emails and texts most prevalent in the Internet era or even the movie and radio eras. However, when writing about a writer who already has an instinctual urge to WRITE about anything, it seems likely there will be far more material to review and much of that material will be even more over-the-top in whatever idioms were prevalent at the time.
This is absolutely the case with Twain the writer and with the content quoted within Chernow's biography. And because Chernow is attempting to write a "definitive" biography with diligently footnoted sources for every quote, much of Chernow's surrounding prose providing context for such quotes tends to stay within those historical idioms to avoid a jarring clash between the "context prose" setting up a quote and the literal quote. This snowballs into a very tiresome pattern for the reader. As a writer with a flair for dramatic superlatives, Twain's comments in letters consistently
- Describe every new place he is visiting as the most beautiful, magnificent place he has ever seen… Until he's been there two weeks at which point it becomes a cockroach infested dump he cannot wait to leave.
- Describe every new business partner as the most brilliant, honest mind he has ever encountered… Until a month later when he becomes convinced that partner is swindling him of all his rightful income from a venture.
- Describe every new home or villa he ever purchased or rented (and there were many) as an enchanted place of happiness and delight… Until someone gets sick and the place becomes forever tainted as a hell-hole.
- Describe new doctors or "medical facilities" for family members as the surest place to put someone on the mend… Until an inevitable setback occurs, at which point the doctors become know-nothing, over-charging hacks and he never wants to visit the facility again, even if a family member is still there awaiting the cure that will never come.
The extensive use of quotes from letters between Twain and his family and business partners and the overwrought, overly-dramatic language so prevalent in that era, over 1039 pages of it, quickly make the reader begin feeling like they are reading the literary equivalent of a mashup between the movie High Society with Grace Kelly (or The Philadelphia Story that came before it) and Seinfeld. A mashup reflecting a faux gentility of the rich who are nowhere as cultured and smart as they strive to appear...
...with a collection of characters incapable of hugging, showing even a minimum of concern for their fellow humans or learning anything from any of their experiences.
The family letters quoted throughout the book reflect that same upper-crust dialect that Tracy Lord and her little sister Dinah affect to mock two gossip writers who have arrived to collect dirt on her upcoming wedding. But while reflecting that faux devotion to each other on the page, nearly every Twain family member consistently lied to other family members about their own feelings, lied about the health and feelings of others in the family or seemed to spend inordinate amounts of time collecting sympathy from third parties regarding how they suffered so from the suffering of other family members they were actively keeping out of their sight.
Modern readers encountering letters dripping with this Victorian era melodramatic tone are likely to first immediately scoff at the overbearing hyperbole and faux sentimentality but then immediately discount that reaction. The thought might be people of that era didn't know what they didn't know and they had no radio, TV or Internet to distract themselves so they indulged in dramatic letters. They didn't understand the origins of conditions like epilepsy, a multitude of cancers, heart disease (congenital and diet-induced), alcoholism and depression. And untimely deaths weren't an exception, they were the norm. In that era from 1835 to 1910, Twain was a very old man at 74 when he died.
On the other hand, simply offering up a mulligan for Victorian era hyperbole and drama doesn't seem appropriate given the repeated boorish behavior throughout Twain's life. He not only learned nothing about actually operating a business, despite a major failure, he immediately repeated the same error within DAYS of undoing the financial damage from his first mistake. He learned nothing from dealing with scammers and crackpot doctors affecting his family matters and continued ceding complete control to new strangers who happened to cross his path who quickly failed him miserably if not outright cheated him.
For most of the book, Chernow's exposition surrounding this would-be multi-decade soap opera uses a third-person narrator voice that mostly hews to the Victorian era vernacular as the subjects in the book. Only on relatively few occasions does the exposition step all the way back to present day sensibilities to cut through some of the self-delusional posturing of Twain and the other subjects to reference current knowledge regarding medicine, psychology and mental health. As a result, most of the reader's time is spent in that overwrought woe-is-me alas Mama frame that becomes annoying. It becomes so annoying, in fact, that by the end of the book, the only characters in the book that retained any sympathy were...
...Twain's younger brother Henry who died at age 20 in 1858 in a boiler explosion aboard a steamboat.
...His second daughter Olivia (Susy), who died at age 24 in 1896 of spinal meningitis. Susy was likely Twain's favorite child but shocked the family when she seemed to fall in love with another female student while away at Bryn Mawr college, leading to her withdrawal (or being withdrawn by her scandalized parents) after a single semester. Susy spent the next six years trying to piece together a singing career (picture Twain as Charles Foster Kane paying for opera lessons for his mistress Susan Alexander) while avoiding the glare of being "Mark Twain's daughter" and battling fatigue and depression.
...Twain's wife Olivia (Livy) who acted as his best editor and guardian against his more toxic vitriol reaching the public until she died at age 58 in 1904 of congestive heart failure.
...and Henry Rogers, a senior executive at Standard Oil who (luckily for Twain) befriended Twain at a point in 1893 where Twain was virtually bankrupt due to losses at his own publishing firm and a pipe-dream investment Twain made in a machine for setting type that was soundly beat to market by the Linotype. Rogers volunteered to help keep his financial books straight while Twain embarked on a worldwide speaking tour to restock his coffers. Rogers might have been the only person Twain encountered in all of his business dealings who a) actually knew what he was doing, b) in fact did not cheat Twain out of money and actually helped him tremendously and c) was never accused by Twain of thievery. And curiously, Rogers was a noted robber baron of the era, operating in multiple business sectors.
America's First Influencer
Prior to reading the book, the creative arc one might have expected to glean from a biography of Twain was that of someone raised ignert, who, like their character Huck Finn, learned instinctively at an early age some key lessons about slavery, hypocrisy and greed and, consistently over a career, further honed and unified those lessons, producing a body of work at the end that holds together. After reading Chernow's biography of Twain, a much different impression of that career arc emerges.
Twain wasn't the same type of literary artist in the vein of a James Fenimore Cooper or Herman Melville or Charles Dickens. He didn't focus exclusively on long-form work and those novels and travelogues he wrote rarely hinted at older "classic" works that might have informed his material. Twain was comfortable writing for multiple attention spans and his ADHD likely led to his unique ability to convert flashes of insight into short, pithy aphorisms that clicked with readers. In more modern terms, Twain was not so much an F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kurt Vonnegut or Toni Morrison but more like a topical stand-up comedian or mock-news anchor like Jon Stewart, Colin Jost or (less charitably) Dennis Miller. Miller struck audiences as edgy and hip in his SNL and HBO stints but the same characteristics that matched the zeitgeist in the 1990s never evolved and his commentary seemed to lose any edge based upon any underlying good and came across as snark for snark's sake which ceases to be entertaining.
Twain was among the first writers to expand their career and income by touring the world to recite their works as performances or simply tell new stories or provide ad hoc commentary on stage regarding current events to audiences. This mode of work is instantly familiar to audiences today and Twain was the first author to leverage this model of "infotainment" to achieve worldwide recognition and wealth. But reading history of years of such tours undertaken in parallel with events in his personal life where he was repeating business and personal mistakes over and over is also something people in the present would recognize in "influencer" culture. It is possible to be an influencer capturing clicks and likes and ad revenue without knowing a thing about any subject being "influenced." Knowledge and expertise are not the product being commoditized. Views and likes are being commoditized and there is zero correlation between expertise and popularity.
Chernow's account of Twain's visit to South Africa described earlier provides all of the ingredients to make this point with perfect clarity but Chernow doesn't make this point in the book nor even hint at it. It could be one of the most important takeaways tying the life of Twain to modern circumstances. Sadly, the origins of "influencer" culture is not the only negative parallel to be drawn from Twain to present day fixations on fame, wealth, influence and...
A Second Creepy Parallel With the Present
Mark Twain might not only hold claim to being the first American "influencer", he might also hold claim to being America's first famous rich creep. The first reference Chernow makes to this aspect of Twain's life involves a speech Twain made to a girl's college in London, Ontario. The recently married Twain began flirting with the students after his lecture ended under the conceit of being an old man in need of directions around town. Later Twain began a habit of meeting ten to fourteen year old girls while traveling and "adopting" them as friends during the trip and doting on them as daughters or… (sigh) engaging in months of back and forth correspondence espousing their purity and beauty and charm. One obvious explanation is that these girls were initially adoring fans of his work and Twain enjoyed the adoration from anyone. But weekly correspondence? For months? Between a man in his 60s or 70s and girls under sixteen years old?
Sounding familiar yet?
After Twain's wife Livy died in 1904, Twain voluntarily ceded (to his later regret) control of all of his day to day affairs to Isabel Lyon, a woman already in his sphere acting as organizer of content for his planned autobiography. By the decade of 1900, Twain's obsession with being in the company of young girls Twain termed his "angelfish" reached a point where girls he met would be invited to stay at his house where they could play billiards with Twain and hang out in a dedicated room in his house that even his own daughters were not allowed to enter. Lyon, as the veritable chargè d'affairs of Twain's daily life, helped coordinate these visits, as Chernow describes:
Disappointed by his family, Twain indulged, as compensation, in his late in-life madness: the angelfish. In late July, he wrote to ten-year old Dorothy Quick and pleaded with her to visit him in Tuxedo Park [his residence at the time] for a week. He sent a parallel letter to her mother, promising that Isabel, a former governess in her forties, would pick up Dorothy and deliver her home safely. As further reassurance, Isabel wrote to Mrs. Quick to attest that "both Mr. Clemens & I want Dorothy to be happy, and I too shall love to have her here, as I do love little girls." So Isabel, among her varied duties, was now enlisted as special agent for the angelfish and deployed as protective camouflage to show the world that nothing untoward could happen.
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, anyone?
Charlie Rose and Yvette Vega, anyone?
Twain's behavior lasted his entire life. He continued to invite young girls for extended stays at his home until the year before he died. In fairness, there is absolutely zero written correspondence originated by any of the girls who came into his circle from the time of these visits or afterwards that alleges or even hints of ANY sexual contact or even impropriety. However, at the time, those with knowledge of these arrangements were creeped out as much as those seeing this with modern sensibilities and efforts were taken to hide these interactions from the public. Today, much of Twain's written and verbal interactions with DOZENS of these young girls would be immediately categorized as manipulative grooming behavior used by pedophiles or more generally by powerful men against powerless victims. In the present day, we are conditioned by modern realities to assume that when there is this much creepy smoke, there is almost inevitably creepy fire. It is very difficult to review this behavior from one hundred fifteen plus years ago and conclude otherwise.
Twain as the Quintessential American
It was previously mentioned that after reading all 1039 pages of Mark Twain, the reader is left in a position where virtually NONE of the persons referenced in the book are likable. This is most true about Mark Twain himself.
At the time of daughter Susy's death in 1896, Twain was abroad in Europe with wife Livy and daughter Clara working speaking engagements to earn money to escape debts that had triggered bankruptcy. However, the Clemens had received multiple telegrams at the beginning of August 1896 referencing medical issues with Susy back in the States. Finally, a telegram sent on August 14 led wife Livy and daughter Clara to book a return trip to America. Twain curiously chose to remain in England awaiting further confirmation. Chernow writes:
The next day at noon, Livy and Clara departed aboard the Paris from Southhampton on a voyage disturbed by fearful musings. Twain wrote a letter to his wife that expressed a pessimism inexplicably at odds with his behavior. "You & Clara are making the only sad voyage of all of the round-the-world-trip. I am not demonstrative; I am always hiding in my feelings; but my heart was wrung yesterday. I could not tell you how deeply I loved you nor how grieved I was for you nor how I pitied you in this awful trouble that my mistakes have brought upon you. You forgive me, I know, but I shall never forgive myself while the life is in me. If you find our poor Susy in the state I seem to foresee, your dear head will be grayer when I see it next. [Be good & get well, Susy dear, don't break your mother's heart.] This self-flagellation went on. "Livy darling, you are … the highest & finest & loveliest character I have ever known; & I was never worthy of you. You should have been the prize of a better man – a man up nearer to your own level." Twain was consumed by such dread about Susy it makes one wonder – and Twain himself would have cause to wonder – why he had not rushed with his wife and daughter to America.
As events turned out, Susy died on August 18, four days after Livy and Clara set sail to return and Susy was buried before Twain could reach New York on his later trip. In other words, Twain not only missed being able to be present for his daughter's death despite a heads up eighteen days prior, but chose to remain long enough to require his wife to deal with the funeral entirely on her own before returning. This was Twain's reaction for the death of his favorite daughter, in spite of reams of cloying correspondence about her being the best of everything in the world.
After losing wife Livy eight years later in 1904, responsibility for the care of eldest daughter Clara and youngest daughter Jean fell on Twain, who immediately offloaded it to Isabel Lyon. Lyon had already been in Twain's sphere, working to assist him in assembling material for his autobiography. Twain put her in charge of not only his business affairs but decisions about the treatment plans for his surviving daughters who both had many real health issues. His eldest surviving daughter Clara had tendencies towards depression and required frequent trips to sanitariums for "recovery." His youngest daughter Jean suffered from epilepsy which was treated as a taboo illness in society, resulting in her being shuttled off to a never-ending series of treatment centers to be "treated" by the latest voodoo of the day. Jean's inability to attempt leading a normal life and her lack of contact from the family, reinforced by Lyon, led Jean to write a letter to her father complaining that he knew nothing of recent improvements in her health because Lyon was purposely hiding information from him.
Twain responded with a letter to Jean that reflected the most consistent aspect of his behavior over his entire life:
Far from being upset at not being told of Jean's condition, he expressed approval, saying, "That is right, & as it should be, unless it is something that I could remedy. Clara, Miss Lyon & Mr. Paine keep all sorts of distresses from me, & I am very thankful for it – distresses which they are aware I could not remedy, I mean… But whenever there is anything that depends upon me & my help, I want to know all about it.
The mindset in that letter was reflected consistently throughout Twain's adult life in not only his interactions with his own family but his business affairs as well. He didn't want to be bothered with details and when the details spiraled out of control and he was sucked into a situation at its nadir, the blame was laid on anyone or everyone else, then solely with him for a brief spike of despair, then was suppressed to allow the cycle to repeat. Over and over.
That's a dangerous modus operandi for guiding a life yet many of the same behaviors can be seen in modern America. Fixations on fame and notoriety rather than hard-earned expertise and competence. Preferences for internally derived opinions over external, verifiable facts. A desire to avoid the hard work of remaining informed about boring but important day to day details. Insistence on modeling every problem and decision as a black and white issue rather than one of countless colors. Denial of any contributory responsibility for one's own fate despite decades of prior heads up regarding the possible impacts of one's decisions.
Mark Twain achieved the fame he desired but the money that came with it was never enough. Twain relied on his conscience at a few critical points in his life and was able to communicate moral insights sorely needed in America and the world at a few key points along the way. But Twain was unable to fully grasp the stunting nature of the limits of his self-driven education. He had much learning to do but avoided it to pursue more predictable rewards. As a result, as influential as some of his work remains to this day, Twain likely fell short of the best work he might have been capable of producing.
For that reason, Mark Twain may be the quintessential American. There are elements of Twain in all of us. America never was a perfect place and its imperfections have corrupted every generation raised here. But we know that. We the people, in order to form a more perfect union... It's up to everyone to try to do better, for everyone's benefit, not just our own. And recognize no matter how enlightened we think we are, there is darkness that remains to be eliminated.
WTH
