The central thesis of this critical biography is a tricky one laid out in its title, that being the dual identity of its celebrated subject. As author Justin Kaplan explains it, there were always two sides when dealing with Mark Twain.
He was an avowed atheist who took part in seances and embraced Christian Science, a celebrated voice of the South who lived in Connecticut, a critic of business who eagerly embraced the Industrial Age, a consummate insider who could never resist mocking authority.
“He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside,” is how Kaplan puts it.
As life took him from one century into the next, Twain’s long-abiding interest in the future and all the progress he expected it to bring gave way to an entrenched nostalgia for preferring the world as he knew it when. Kaplan quotes him:
“The 20th Century is a stranger to me,” he wrote in his notebook. “I wish it well, but my heart is all for my own century. I took 65 years of it, just on a risk, but if I had known as much about as I know now I would have taken the whole of it.”
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| Twain with his wife, Livy, and their three daughters at home in Hartford, Connecticut, where he enjoyed life most. "Our house was not unsentient matter - it had a heart, and a soul," Twain would recall after they were forced by debt to move out. Image from https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/mark-twain/selected-writings |
It is an appropriately sad elegy for Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain to go out on, depicting America’s most beloved humorist of his and perhaps all time reminding you once more how sorrowful his life really was. He buried his beloved wife and two of his three daughters, lost his favorite house to debt and saw many dreams for personal prosperity dashed when he kept making the same mistakes again and again.
Be warned: Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain, however concerned with the duality of Twain, really concentrates on the mopey side of the ledger. Don’t expect a Tom Sawyer romp along the banks of the Mississippi.
For one thing, Kaplan opens his biography with Twain in his thirties and nationally recognized for his first literary success, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County.” His ability to delight readers well-established, the man born Samuel Langhorne Clemens now sought to provoke them. “I have got a spirit that is angry with me and gives me freely its contempt,” he wrote his family in 1867.
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| While his writing career began taking off, Twain embarked on a second lucrative venture as a travelling lecturer. The time away from home took a toll, but Twain basked in his ability to captivate. "Lecturing is gymnastics, chest-expander, medicine, mind healer, blues destroyer, all in one," he said. Image from https://ejournals.sierracollege.edu/jsnhb/v1n3/twain.html |
To that end, he embarked on a cruise to the Holy Land in the company of pious Christians, who would become the satirical material for his first book, Innocents Abroad. Kaplan records how Twain, ever-divided, sincerely worked at impressing several of the good ladies he met on the voyage with expressions of humility and prayerfulness, even while mocking the whole enterprise in his manuscript.
Kaplan summarizes: The Jordan was just a creek, the Dead Sea a fraud, and in comparison to Lake Tahoe the Sea of Galilee looked like any ordinary city reservoir and was just about as big; still, an Arab boatman, to take a party sailing on its hallowed waters, demanded eight dollars – “Do you wonder now that Christ walked?”
Twain was struck by lightning nevertheless when, in another passenger’s cabin, he caught sight of a portrait of Olivia Langdon, the woman who would become his lifelong wife. In a meaningless universe, Kaplan writes, Twain took this sighting as one of several omens he would always point to as directing the course of his life.
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| Late in life, Twain began wearing white suits whenever out in public, and often at home. At a Congressional appearance, Kaplan writes, "he stood out in the dimly lighted committee room...like a blaze of sunlight." Image from https://www.history.com/articles/mark-twain |
A major failing of Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain is that it assumes a reader will be well versed in the many details of Twain’s long career. Central figures are introduced with the briefest of introductions; Twain’s lesser novels are mentioned in some detail but with little in the way of plot synopsis or critical analysis. While written for the layperson, there are many knowing allusions to the history and culture surrounding Twain which Kaplan does not pause to explain or elaborate on.
What is magnificent about the book is just how immersive it is, as in laying out the comfortable environs of Twain’s Hartford home where his most famous novel, The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, was written:
Like a pilothouse, which it resembled, the octagonal room offered a commanding view; he could see city and countryside, storms sweeping down the valley, flashes of lightning over the distant blue hills. Everything lay below the study and beyond. The writer Mark Twain worked in the same solitary, untouchable splendor as Sam Clemens the pilot.
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| The Mark Twain House in Hartford as it stands today. Kaplan memorably describes it as "gingerbread Gothic," testament to Twain's arrival as a celebrated success. Yet keeping up the house would up contributing to his family's short-term ruin. Image from https://marktwainhouse.org/ |
Moments like that can’t help but dazzle; and the first half of Mr. Clemens And Mark Twain abounds in them. Unfortunately, Kaplan’s focus on Twain’s duality as well as a secondary thesis about his abiding if misplaced attempts at succeeding as a businessman put everything in too much of a bleak, minor key. Entire chapters center on his embrace of book publishing and patent devices, especially a mechanical typesetter called the Paige Compositor which left him bankrupt and bitter.
Kaplan writes: Mark Twain’s disgust with his times was partly the index of his involvement with them, and his disgust grew more bitter through the 1870s, the decade which was the core of what he called the Gilded Age. He could observe in himself the same wild speculative mania he saw all around him.
However sad a man Clemens could be, and according to Kaplan friends and family found him at times quite difficult, Twain throughout his life made for great copy. Kaplan reveals how ready he was with a quip, or a “snapper,” as he liked to put it.
Twain's part in helping former President U.S. Grant (above) publish his memoirs from his deathbed so as to support his family is written on at length. The autobiography is critically praised to this day, but for Twain the publisher it was another in a sea of failures that drove him from the business.
Image from https://www.history.com/articles/how-ulysses-grant-died-memoirs-mark-twain
On the wife of a friend who treated him rudely as a guest, Twain wrote: “A strange and vanity-devoured detestable woman! I do not believe I could ever learn to like her except on a raft at sea with no other provisions in sight.”
About an unsuccessful play he collaborated on, “Ah, Sin:” “I never saw a play that was so much improved by being cut down; and I believe it would have been one of the very best plays in the world if his strength had held out so that he could cut out the whole of it.”
However funny, Twain was at bottom a pessimist, which invariably comes across: “The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” Kaplan quotes him saying. “There is no humor in heaven.”
This view became clearer as Twain aged. His fiction veered away from jumping frogs and playing pirate on Jackson’s Island to the nightmare world of The Mysterious Stranger and the dour essay “What Is Man?”
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| The older Twain became, the more he pined for boyhood days on the Mississippi, though his visits back to Hannibal, Missouri left him wistful. "It all seems so small to me," he said in 1902. "I suppose if I should come back here ten years from now it would be the size of a bird-house." Image from https://www.historytoday.com/archive/feature/life-mark-twains-mississippi |
Kaplan describes the latter as “shrill, philosophically shallow nihilism which enabled him to dismiss responsibility and to obliterate all distinctions between the real world and the dream world, or, using other favorite co-ordinates, between truth and lies.”
Still, even bleak Twain sparked expressions of delight. “Charming, original, wonderful” was the verdict of Twain’s friend and literary champion William Dean Howells on A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court, a book which ends on a once-bucolic Camelot burned out and its heroes reduced to armored corpses piled on a battlefield.
Kaplan’s
book won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography in 1967; today it comes across as
brilliantly written yet antiseptic and cold, concentrating so much as it does
on the tragic aftermath of fame rather than Twain achieving it in the first
place. Like Twain himself, Kaplan seems to distrust the popular figure of
national humorist, to the point of devaluing Twain’s stock in that department
and the lighter works he produced. Yet like many readers he can’t quite warm to
the curmudgeon Twain became. Kaplan makes you admire Twain without ever liking
him.
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