Customer Reviews

Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain: A Biography

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This scholarly and readable life of Twain begins with his thirties and carries the master humorist through the glorious successes and bitter tragedies that would haunt him. Well written and full of insightful analysis into his real character this book brings to life a persoanlity so large that it took a new era (Gilded Age) and two centuries to contain it! For his boyhood try Deep Waters- an equally good review of his wit and life.

Kaplan's National Book Award and Pulitzer winner starts with Samuel Clemens' arrival in the East already quite famous due to the popularity of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." Almost immediately Clemens sets off to earn his living as a humorous lecturer. Kaplan shows us the many techniques he used such as the extended pause and how carefully he orchestrated his performances.

Clemens' first literary success was INNOCENTS ABROAD about his trip accompanying a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land. It was always one of his most successful books. It was also published by subscription, which means that it was sold pretty much door-to-door.

For me, one of the most entertaining parts of the book was Clemens' courtship of coal heiress Livy Langdon, whose brother, Charlie, had been one of the pilgrims on the INNOCENTS ABROAD trip. She rejected him, telling him she could never love him. He convinced her theirs could be a brother/sister relationship. Then he fell out of his carriage and she had to nurse him back to health.

Much of the book details Clemens' obsession with James W. Paige's typesetting machine, which eventually bankrupted him. According to Kaplan, Clemens always led a duel existence (hence the title), with Mark Twain, the famous writer and social critic, and Samuel Clemens, the incompetent entrepreneur, always at loggerheads.

Kaplan is almost offhandish when it comes to the early deaths of Clemens' daughters Susy and Jean. Clemens never recovered from Susy's death and Jean's preceded his own by just a few months. His wife Livy had been an invalid several years before her death, partly due to heart problems and partly because of nervous prostration brought on by her relationships with Clemens, but they were married for thirty-four years.

The pictures leave a bit to be desired. We never get a good look at Livy as an adult and Jean and Clara are not shown at all, somewhat surprising since Ken Burns found several for his PBS documentary.

It's no wonder this book won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. This is a serious, entertaining and informative treatment of one of the greatest American writers, and, in terms of his life and attitude, one of the best representations of 19th century America. In detail that becomes adornment to its subject, the author proceeds to map out the course of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, as he progresses as a writer and as a person. Great insights are revealed of his social behavior and, inasmuch as possible and believable, his thoughts. This is a great book; a must for any serious reader.

Wordy in places, but still the best, most comprehensive biography of Samuel Clemens.

Mark Twain was an easy author to admire but a hard man to love. Justin Kaplan gets at both sides of this singular figure of American letters in this fast-moving if often hyper-analytical and maudlin biography.

To get the negative out of the way early, there's a lot more psychobabble here than I expected. Kaplan's book won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award after its 1966 publication, and maybe I approached it too much with that acclaim in mind. His wife Livy is described when we first meet her as Twain's "superego", and much of the rest of the man's life story is similarly fed through a Freudian prism. There's also a good deal more information about Twain's various failed business ventures and invention gambits than you'd expect, or I think, really need.

Another choice Kaplan made was one I came around to in time, which was to start the book in the middle of Twain's life. When we meet him, Samuel Clemens is coming off his first success, the short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County," and seeking his fortune on the East Coast, where writing talents had their best shot at fame and fortune. Ironically, Clemens found his by leaving the Coast, on a boat with a group of religious pilgrims which would form the basis of his breakthrough first book, "The Innocents Abroad." In the process, he formed the alter ego by which Clemens became famous, Mark Twain.

"He was, at the very least, already a double creature," Kaplan writes. "He wanted to belong, but he also wanted to laugh from the outside."

On the boat, for example, he coddled blue-nosed ladies and made shows of piety while jotting down notes for the book that would send them up for national ridicule. "The pleasure ship was a synagogue, and the pleasure trip was a funeral excursion without a corpse," he wrote. Even so, one of his fellow passengers would become a lifelong confidante and authority figure to Twain, while another would prove Twain's entrée to meeting Livy.

For Kaplan, Twain is all about the conflict between those two halves. Kaplan even makes strained note of the similarity between the words "twain" and "twin," as if it helps explain Clemens' choice of nom de plume. He railed at plutocrats, but craved money more than most. He doted on his children, but was seen by them as remote and foreboding. He was a humanist who cherished enemies more than friends.

The best part of Kaplan's book showcases Twain at his literary peak, high atop his "gingerbread Gothic" manse in Hartford, Connecticut, writing "Life On The Mississippi" and "The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn" in an attic room Kaplan memorably likens to a steamship pilothouse where Twain's connection to America's heartland was formed.

One problem Kaplan seems to have, with which I humbly concur, is that while unbeatable at one-liners ("nubs and snappers," he called them), Twain didn't always produce first-class books. Kaplan doesn't even think much of that celebrated swansong, "The Mysterious Stranger." He spends a great deal more time analyzing the faults of his first, co-written novel, "The Gilded Age" than the merits of "Huckleberry Finn," which seems consigned in this account to being a commercial disappointment banned in Concord, Massachusetts for lack of morals. Even when the sun is shining, Kaplan seems at pains to find the clouds.

Perhaps researching Twain so vigorously caused such a condition. "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow," Kaplan quotes Clemens saying. "There is no humor in heaven."

If there were indeed two halves to Twain, it's the darker side that gets the most attention here. Kaplan's book will alternately fascinate and repel Twain lovers, but left me feeling a bit too much in the cold.

"Iconic" has become a much-overused and hence devalued word, but surely Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain is an iconic American. "He was humorist, novelist, short-story writer, social historian, dramatist, journalist, occasional lecturer and frequent dinner speaker, inventor, entrepreneur, all-night raconteur and billiard player, lavish host, devoted family man." And that was as a mature adult, after boyhood on the Mississippi River, a stint as an irregular Confederate soldier, and a turn at being a scalawag in Nevada and San Francisco. In the diversity of his interests and exuberance of his personality, he seemed to personify the United States of his era. But he also was an exceedingly complex American. He wrote more about his times and himself than most authors, and more has been written about him than is the case with most. It surely would take an exceptional biography to capture the man, but I think that Justin Kaplan produced just that in MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN, which garnered both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award back in 1967.

Formally, Kaplan begins his biography of Clemens/Twain in 1866, when his subject was thirty-one and leaving the West to try his luck and test his ambitions in the East - a move that soon led to a trip to Europe and Palestine and his first book, "Innocents Abroad". Nonetheless, the book covers much of his youth in the course of explicating how Twain as an author mined, re-cycled, and imaginatively transformed his past. Indeed, how for Twain his personal past served both consciously and sub-consciously as a creative font is one of the themes of the biography. A related theme - reflected in the title and in the "Clemens/Twain" formulation that I have used - is the "twinship" or duality that marks him, in which the biographical man and the literary persona inform and influence one another until they become inextricably intertwined - more so than with virtually any other author who employed a nom de plume.

Yet another theme, and another duality of the man, concerns his ambivalence towards money and social prestige, how he was, in the words of his close friend William Dean Howells, "a theoretical socialist and a practical aristocrat." Mark Twain is famous for puncturing cant and hypocrisy, and for championing the rights and essential human dignity of the common man. Yet, as this biography illustrates time and again, "it is hard to think of another writer so obsessed in his life and work by the lure, the rustle and chink and heft of money." Further, as a man, Sam Clemens yearned to be accepted, admired, even adulated by the "establishment". Towards the end of his life, one of his closest friends and most frequent companions, as well as his business advisor, was Henry Huttleston Rogers, one of the architects and principal beneficiaries of the Standard Oil trust. Another of his friends and advisors was Andrew Carnegie. Thus, paradoxically, he was "the idol of the common man and also the pet and protégé of the very rich."

MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN is chockablock with the sort of illuminating and entertaining anecdotes and quips that make the man more than an author, that make him indeed an American icon. Here's one:

In 1907, Clemens and Andrew Carnegie were discussing the news that Theodore Roosevelt had determined to abolish the motto "In God We Trust", because coins "carried the name of God into improper places." Carnegie's comment was that on this score there was nothing unique about American coinage, that "the name of God is used to being carried into improper places everywhere and all the time." Clemens (at heart a skeptic who eventually eviscerated his beloved wife's faith) at first defended the motto: "It is simple, direct, gracefully phrased; it always sounds well--In God We Trust. I don't believe it would sound any better if it were true." The problem was, of course, that it simply wasn't true, or at least that it hadn't been true since the Civil War. Now, what the country trusted in was not God but "the Republican party and the dollar--mainly the dollar."

For me, the book (like many biographies, even very good ones) was not a fast read. It took me six weeks or so of intermittent reading. But that was not due to sub-par writing or organization. To the contrary, for the most part Kaplan's prose is top-notch and well-crafted, and the book is superbly organized and presented. Most important, I don't feel in the least the need to read anything else about Clemens/Twain. The two most conspicuous alternatives, I suppose, are his own Autobiography (just now being published in three "unexpurgated" volumes) and "Mark Twain: A Life", by Ron Powers. But Clemens was an inveterate storyteller and performer, obsessed with (even imprisoned by) his public image, and his autobiography, while perhaps a landmark of the genre, was doomed by the personality and style of its author to be something other than the sober, unadorned truth. And the Powers biography weighs in at 690 pages of text as opposed to the 388 pages of Kaplan - which, for me, decisively tips the choice in favor of MR. CLEMENS AND MARK TWAIN.