Review: "Mark Twain," Ron Chernow

By Paul Carrier

You might believe that you cannot possibly have enough interest in Mark Twain to read a 1,000-page biography of him. Until, that is, you have read a 1,000-page biography of him.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was such a fascinating blend of brilliance, bravado and balderdash that a biographer as skilled as Ron Chernow (Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Ulysses S. Grant, etc.) should be able to craft a mesmerizing chronicle of such an engrossing character. Sure enough, Chernow delivers.                                

Mark Twain seemingly documents every facet of its subject’s life, including his literary genius, biting wit, luxurious tastes, mercurial nature and pigheaded foolishness. Not surprisingly, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, two of Twain’s most memorable creations, bear a startling resemblance to the young Clemens. As one chapter heading in Mark Twain puts it, Clemens was “a wild and mischievous boy” who, in his own words, retained his “appetite for notice and notoriety” into adulthood.

Best known for his literary output, Twain is perhaps underappreciated for other aspects of  his multifarious life. He briefly served as a soldier of sorts in a rebel militia unit at the start of the Civil War,  worked in print shops, and was a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi (which Twain later recalled as his “darling existence”). He held various newspaper jobs as a reporter whose articles often read like satire rather than news. He even tried his hand at prospecting in Nevada. (It didn’t go well.)

Twain made an early name for himself as a traveler, humorist and successful author who “fairly invented our celebrity culture,” according to Chernow. Notoriety followed the publication, in the 1860s, of The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (a short story) and The Innocents Abroad, an antic, book-length chronicle of Twain’s voyage through Europe and the Holy Land. Subsequent novels, notably The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), made an even more lasting impression.

Chernow is nuanced in examining Twain’s use of the N-word in Huckleberry Finn and that novel’s characterization of the runaway slave Jim. Chernow notes that while the upstanding residents of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain’s hometown, held sway in Tom Sawyer, that hierarchy is upended in Huckleberry Finn. There, it is the outcasts, Huck and Jim, who emerge as the principled characters.

Twain was an unpredictable fellow, to say the least. He was charming and genial when it suited him, especially on the lecture circuit. But Chernow explains that Twain was “an iconoclast to the core.” He could be irascible, acerbic, volatile, highly critical and prone to fits of anger. Overly trusting of others, he became vengeful when wronged. Yet he was a doting father to his three daughters when they were children and a devoted husband to his wife, Livy (Olivia Langdon), whom he adored.

The greatest comic of his day combined laugh-out-loud jocularity with a caustic outlook and unorthodox views. Twain, who was no fan of Christianity, described Jesus as the only true Christian in human history. He poked fun at the concept of Noah’s Ark, writing that Noah would have had to collect 146,000 birds, beasts and fish and 2 million insects requiring ”a fleet of Arks,” and the stench aboard the boats would have been unbearable. Twain quipped that when one deceased human arrived in heaven, a confused clerk there had to consult an enormous map to pinpoint the location of Earth (known in heaven as the wart), because our planet is completely  inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.

A man with contradictory impulses, Twain strongly supported women’s suffrage but had a lukewarm attitude toward Reconstruction. He grew up in poverty and had a lifelong fear of sinking back into it, which fueled an unfortunate knack for making notoriously bad investments to get rich. Twain was a master of wishful thinking in such cases. He heavily funded an experimental typesetting machine that was supposed to revolutionize printing. It didn’t work as promised. The venture collapsed and Twain lost a fortune.

Branching out into publishing, Twain took yet another wrong turn. His success in persuading Ulysses S. Grant to let him publish his memoirs was a boon for Twain because the memoirs sold so well they lifted Twain out of debt. But he interpreted that win as proof that he had what Chernow calls “a magnificent head for publishing,” which wasn’t remotely true. Twain the publisher turned his back on writing for quite some time, eventually filing for bankruptcy and heading back to both his writing table and the lecture circuit, to pay off substantial debts. He might never have regained his financial footing without the help of Henry H. Rogers, a sympathetic oil baron.

Over the years, Twain and his family became globe-trotters who dabbled in foreign languages and traveled in elite circles, thanks to Twain’s international celebrity. Later still, back home in America, Twain emerged as a highly vocal critic of what he decried as American imperialism in Cuba and the Philippines. He vigorously condemned autocratic rulers and became a vocal critic of racism and anti-Semitism. 

Chernow's biography is exhaustive but far from exhausting. Twain and his family lived lives that ranged from the gloriously serene to the unbearably tragic. A son died in infancy. The oldest of his three daughters died at 24. His middle daughter had sporadic psychological problems and his youngest daughter developed epilepsy. His wife, a profoundly stabilizing influence in Twain's life, was frail and sickly for years until she died at 58.

Mark Twain makes for difficult reading as its subject stumbles into his 70s because of Twain’s behavior. He developed a creepy (but seemingly non-sexual) obsession with young girls and took a hands-off approach to the needs of his adult daughters. Twain gave his overworked secretary and a scheming business associate far too much control over his affairs, with unfortunate results. He seemed oblivious to power grabs and personality clashes within his inner circle.

Chernow writes that Twain became increasingly nostalgic as he aged. “The paradox of Twain’s life was that the older and more famous he became and the grander his horizons, the more he pined for the vanished paradise of his early years.” As Chernow illustrates in Mark Twain, that wild kid from Hannibal left a remarkable legacy for biographers over the course of his 74 years.

Review: "Grant," Ron Chernow

By Paul Carrier

Americans tend to believe that we know Ulysses S. Grant, at least in broad outline. A dismal failure in civilian life before the Civil War, Grant rose to prominence and achieved tremendous success during that conflict despite bouts of drunkenness, only to undermine his legacy by quietly presiding over a presidential administration mired in corruption.

In his new biography, Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Chernow does not dispute such characterizations. But he explains, with great skill as both researcher and writer, that Grant was far more complex and impressive than we assume. Chernow contends that Grant’s accomplishments as president, particularly in the area of civil rights, have been unfairly overshadowed by the deficiencies of the disreputable people with whom this guileless man surrounded himself while in office.

Chernow’s characterization of Grant is nuanced and insightful. He presents the Ohio-born West Point grad as humble, unassuming and socially awkward, a doting father and devoted husband who was bold and audacious in warfare. Cool in a crisis, whether military or political, he was a dogged, unyielding soldier whose public image as an unfeeling butcher was belied by the distress he keenly felt but did not display when faced with massive battlefield casualties.

Grant was overly trusting in his dealings with others, which caused him no end of trouble during and after his presidency. He befriended or appointed thieves and con men, and was so naive that he sometimes clung to his misplaced faith in such people even after they were exposed as corrupt. Thoughtful but taciturn, Grant was a skilled writer with an opaque personality. An animal lover with a special affinity for horses, he was squeamish regarding food, insisting that his meat be well-done. Any trace of blood would destroy his appetite.

Chernow makes clear that Grant was, as alleged, an alcoholic who's drinking understandably darkened his reputation. He did not drink often, but when he did, he drank to excess. Yet he struggled mightily against this temptation, rarely allowed it to interfere with his duties, supported the temperance movement, and “managed to gain mastery over alcohol in the long haul, a feat as impressive as any of his wartime victories.”

Perhaps Chernow’s greatest accomplishment is his documentation of Grant’s standing as a champion of freed slaves, both during and after the Civil War. Initially no friend of the Radical Republicans, Grant hailed from an abolitionist family, but only gradually came to view the war as more than a struggle to preserve the Union. Over time, he became a man transformed on the issue of civil rights.

As president after the war, Grant did not flinch when white supremacists launched a reign of terror against black Republicans in the South. He condemned what amounted to an insurrection in the strongest possible terms and, for most of his presidency, repeatedly ordered federal troops into the hardest-hit areas, to protect African-Americans from intimidation, assault and worse.

Grant was “the single most important figure behind Reconstruction,” according to Chernow, who complains that earlier biographers failed to provide “a systematic account” of his relations with the slaves “whom he helped to liberate, feed, house, employ, and arm during the war.” As president, Grant “shielded (them) from harm,” in part by waging a concerted and (temporarily) successful campaign to obliterate the Ku Klux Klan.

One of the small joys of Grant is that Chernow, in this exhaustive and meticulous biography, pays careful attention to secondary characters, who are intriguing in their own right despite being overshadowed by the man himself. They include William Tecumseh Sherman and Phil Sheridan, s well as such stellar Cabinet appointees as Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and Attorney General Amos Ackerman.

Julia Dent, Grant’s wife, hailed from a slaveholding family and felt unappreciated by the Grant clan, in part because the Grants viewed her as a spendthrift with an indulgent attitude toward slavery. John Rawlins, Grant’s top aide during the war and secretary of war for a time during Grant’s presidency, struggled mightily to prevent him from drinking and openly reprimanded him when he did.

Elihu Washburne, a congressman from Illinois who hailed from a politically prominent Maine family, had Abraham Lincoln’s ear and used that connection to champion Grant’s advancement during the war. As president, Grant routinely found himself at odds with the imperious, high-handed Charles Sumner, a powerful senator from Massachusetts. Horace Greeley, the famed New York newspaper editor, became something of a laughing stock as Grant’s rather pathetic opponent in the 1872 presidential election.

Chernow’s narrative would be compelling (and considerably shorter) even if Grant had slipped back into obscurity after the war, secure in his standing as a great general. But what followed added so much to the scope of Grant’s life that it transformed his army career into one part of a much larger whole, rather than its sum and substance.

Grant served for a time as acting secretary of war, and did battle with President Andrew Johnson, a crude, boorish racist with little regard for the truth. (In fact, the similarities between the narcissistic Johnson and the current occupant of the White House are striking.)

Elected president in 1868 and again in 1872, Grant was unable to prevent some of his subordinates from engaging in rampant deceit and trickery, despite his own unimpeachable integrity. (“An honest man in a corrupt age,” Chernow says.) Later still, Grant found himself nearly penniless when a Wall Street con artist roped him into a Ponzi scheme.

Stricken with a painful and terminal cancer, Grant busied himself with the task of writing a memoir that he hoped would provide some financial security for his family. It did, and established Grant’s lasting reputation as a wordsmith as well. Chernow hails The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant as “a masterpiece” that is “probably the foremost military memoir in the English language.”

Chernow is an accomplished biographer whose previous subjects have included George Washington, John D. Rockefeller and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. It would be an overstatement to suggest that Chernow is an apologist for Grant; he does not downplay Grant’s drinking and naiveté, or the fact that he was fallible on the battlefield. But Chernow would seem to share the assessment Mark Twain offered when he learned of Grant’s death: “He was a very great man and superlatively good.”