Obsessive author and arrogant genius…
In the late nineteenth century, Mark Twain was arguably probably the most well-known author in the world, with classics like “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and “Life on the Mississippi” (1883) cementing his standing as a cultural icon. But despite his accomplishments, Twain seethed at the thought that anybody would possibly criticize him.
Mark Twain around the time he wooed and wed Olivia “Livy” Langdon in 1869. A sprawling new biography particulars his good, yet typically arrogance-filled, profession. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut
For future editions of the e-book that rocketed him to fame, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain deliberate a “classic author’s revenge fantasy,” writes Ron Chernow in his new, sprawling biography, “Mark Twain” (Penguin Press), out now. Twain insisted on including a “prefatory remark” that recognized two newspaper editors that he significantly loathed as inspiration for his younger fictional protagonist.
“In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, & origin,” wrote Twain, Huck Finn was meant as a “counterpart of these two gentlemen as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago.” Twain was finally talked out of the vindictive plan by his spouse.
It’s a aspect of the author that not often will get remembered. During his life, Twain wrote 30 books, a number of thousand magazine articles and some 12,000 letters, but Twain’s foremost creation “may well have been his own inimitable personality,” writes Chernow. He’s turn into an “emblem of Americana . . . a humorous man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye, an avuncular figure sporting a cigar and a handlebar mustache.”
Twain standing before his boyhood home in Hannibal in May 1902. The home, he mentioned, was a lot smaller than he remembered it. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
But the reality wasn’t fairly so sanitized. Twain also had a “large assortment of weird sides to his nature,” writes Chernow.
Long before he grew to become Mark Twain, he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Mo., a “white town drowsing in the sunshine” on the banks of the Mississippi, as Twain would later immortalize. He created the Mark Twain pen title not just as a approach to escape his many collectors but as “the ultimate act of reinvention, the start of an attempt to mythologize his life,” writes Chernow.
Twain taking part in billiards in 1908 with some of the younger lady who grew to become his obsession during his later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
His books grew to become enormous bestsellers, but nothing in contrast to his stay performances. He may command a crowd with a mastery that was unmatched, once claiming that he would play with a dramatic pause during a studying “as other children play with a toy,” writes Chernow. During a speech in Utica, NY, in 1870, he stood silently on stage for a number of uncomfortable minutes. “After a prolonged, anxious interval, the audience erupted in laughter and applause, and Twain felt the full force of his power over them,” writes Chernow.
But offstage, he was consumed with petty grudges and paranoia. Twain once advised his sister that he was a man of “a fractious disposition & difficult to get along with.” He would accumulate insults, ready for the right second to unleash them on anybody who’d wronged or disillusioned him. “He could never quite let things go or drop a quarrel,” writes Chernow. “With his volcanic emotions and titanic tirades, he constantly threatened lawsuits and fired off indignant letters, settling scores in a life riddled with self-inflicted wounds.”
Mark Twain and fellow novelist George Washington Cable in 1884, when they shared high billing in a lecture sequence later dubbed the “Twins of Genius” tour. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut.
Twain also had a dangerous behavior of making horrible investments. “Again and again, he succumbed to money-mad schemes he might have satirized in one of his novels,” writes Chernow.
Most infamously, in 1880, he grew to become satisfied that a new typesetting machine, a “fiendishly complex” gadget referred to as the Paige Compositor, would turn into the longer term of publishing. “The typesetter does not get drunk,” Twain wrote of the contraption in his personal pocket book. “He does not join the printer’s union.” He invested $300,000 (about $10 million in at this time’s money), and believed so strongly that the machine would lead to riches that he toyed with shopping for all of New York state with his future riches.
A photograph of Twain when he was still recognized as Sam Clemens, posing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in 1850, when he turned 15. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“He was asking how much it would take to buy all the railroads in New York, and all the newspapers, too—buy everything in New York on account of that typesetting machine,” remembered his housekeeper and maid Katy Leary. “He thought he’d make millions and own the world, because he had such faith in it.”
But the Paige Compositor, with its hundreds of transferring elements, proved to be a colossal failure. Only two of the machines have been constructed, one of which is at present displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn.
Strangest of all, Twain developed a fondness for teenage ladies as he grew older. In his 40s, he started giving non-public lectures at the Saturday Morning Club, an all-girls’ non-public membership in which he was an honorary member. But this soon advanced into one thing decidedly creepier.
An embossed e-book cowl for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn displaying Huck, good friend of Tom Sawyer. One of many iconic Twain tomes. Corbis via Getty Images
At 70, he met 15 year-old Gertrude Natkin while attending a Carnegie Hall recital. They grew to become pen-pals, with Twain writing to her six instances a month, “discarding any inhibitions about expressing affection toward a teenage girl who was a complete stranger,” writes Chernow.
His only disappointment was that she wouldn’t stop getting old. On her sixteenth birthday, he wrote to her that “you mustn’t move along so fast . . . Sixteen! Ah, what has become of my little girl?” He was afraid to ship her a kiss now, he declared, because it might come “within an ace of being improper!”
Twain finally cut off ties with her, but Gertrude was just the start of his obsession with adolescent ladies. He created a “club of handpicked platonic sweethearts,” writes Chernow, dubbing them his “angelfish.” As Twain defined in one of his letters, “I collect pets: young girls — girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent.”
Jane Lampton Clemens, the eloquent and vivacious mom of Mark Twain in a picture from her later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Remarkably, the public didn’t look upon Twain’s angelfish as the “sinister hobby of a lecherous old pedophile, but as the charming eccentricity of a sentimental old widower,” writes Chernow. While it definitely seems to be much less than harmless, Chernow factors out that there have been never any accusations of predatory conduct from any of the ladies, and moms or grandmothers have been all the time current as chaperones. “The girls never reported forbidden sexual overtures from Twain,” writes Chernow. “They performed billiards and hearts and engaged in harmless pastimes.
Twain insisted until the tip that he’d merely “reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.” He had a bottomless need for unconditional love, which he never obtained from his own daughters.
Beyond the plain inappropriateness, his adolescent teenage feminine fixation was a symptom of Twain’s bigger obsession with youth. The older he grew to become, the more he believed “that only the young were capable of true happiness,” writes Chernow. His “angelfish” allowed him to disappear “back into his vanished youth, to stop time, to blot out all the disappointments of adult life.”
Twain’s writing was in some ways an attempt to seize the innocence of youth. As some critics famous, despite the Huck Finn character being fourteen, his thoughts was “devoid of sexual thoughts or fantasies,” writes Chernow.
Author Ron Chernow.
The older and more well-known he grew to become, the more Twain pined for “the vanished paradise of his early years,” writes Chernow. “His youth would remain the magical touchstone of his life, his memories preserved in amber.”
Twain finally wrote sequels in which both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn reappeared, but he had no curiosity in exploring them as adults. It was as if “Twain could not bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal,” writes Chernow. For him, youth was a present and previous age was a sham.
“I should greatly like to relive my youth,” he once wrote. “And then get drowned.”
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