My failure to rise more eagerly to Chernow’s biography might have more to do with genre than with the book itself—or rather it may be the genre that I mind in the book—the relentless march of linear chronology, so at odds with the way life and its endless circlings operate. The piling on of details is meant to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject, but the process somehow insulates us from the inner life. A flattening effect becomes a deadening effect. When Twain died, one of the reports included a marvelous anecdote from his early years, meant to illustrate his sometimes “leisurely” habits:
An old pressman who was printer’s devil in an office where Mark was an editorial writer tells this anecdote of his habits of work:
“One of my duties was to sweep the room where editors worked. Every day Mark would give me a nickel to get away from him. He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs.”
There is such skilled comedy in this vignette. The boy has been told to sweep the office. There sits Clemens, loafing. The boy approaches. He needs the man to move his legs, so he can get under with the broom. Tell you what, youngster, I will PAY you to leave me alone. No, better: “to get away from him.” Their absurd bargain becomes a ritual: “every day.” The rhythm, the language, everything.
Here’s Chernow: “Sam stuck to his lazy, messy habits, as one old pressman learned when he tried to sweep around him. ‘He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs.’ ” But the “old pressman” didn’t learn it. The boy he had once been did, the printer’s devil. And the boy didn’t learn it “when he tried to sweep around him”—sweeping around him is what he did do, what he was forced to do—he learned it when he tried to get the man to move, so he could sweep under him. The good but rhetorical sentence “He would rather die in the dust than uncross his legs” is preserved, but the best part, the gratuitous “nickel to get away from him,” is gone, and with it goes Clemens, the real presence.
