Can a biography be too closely focused on its subject? But Twain is so much a part of the history of the United States, the 74 years of his life spanning the era in which the country became itself. I am willing to allow, certainly, that this may be a matter of personal taste. Chernow dives minutely into Twain’s marriage to his beloved Livy, assesses his struggles as a parent and provides heart-rending detail, for instance, on the suffering of his youngest daughter, Jean, incapacitated by seizures.
But when it comes to the wider framework around Twain’s life, the deeper context of the political and financial standing and crises of the United States – a country nearly catastrophically divided in his lifetime, the legacy of which we all live with still – one wishes for more. It’s eye-popping to read of Twain’s almost comic inability to resist any huckster with a gleam in his eye; he married well, and made plenty of money from his writing, but he lost astonishing sums in speculation. A fiendishly complex typesetting machine, a contraption for printing carpets, a patent digestive nostrum: the very same fellow who wrote The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg fell for them all. Yet I would have read less about Jean’s affliction and more about other chumps, great and small, who lost fortunes at the time, and what that said about Twain’s native land. Twain was the publisher of the memoirs of General (later President) Ulysses S Grant: but most of what we hear about Grant is Twain’s opinion of him. (Chernow is also the biographer of Grant. Maybe he’d had enough of him.)
Strange to read a biography of Mark Twain – that most vibrantly entertaining of writers and personalities – and feel a little weary of him by page 900 or so. At the end of his life, his (apparently non-sexual) obsession with very young girls springs disturbingly to the fore: he called them his “angelfish”, and once they turned 16, he lost interest and dropped them (there really was a “school” of angelfish) with stunning abruptness. Chernow doesn’t excuse Twain but notes that his subject’s apparent thirst for a kind of pure, uncorrupted adoration was bottomless. Despite his love for his wife, he never recovered from his boyhood crushes; and, as Chernow notes, his greatest works are marked by a distinct lack of rounded, adult female characters.