In the late 19th century, Mark Twain was arguably the most famous author in the world, with classics like “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” (1876) and “Life on the Mississippi” (1883) cementing his status as a cultural icon. But despite his accomplishments, Twain seethed at the idea that anyone might criticize him.
For future editions of the book that rocketed him to fame, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Twain planned 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 identified two newspaper editors that he particularly loathed as inspiration for his young 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 eventually talked out of the vindictive plan by his wife.
It’s a side of the author that rarely gets remembered. During his life, Twain wrote 30 books, several 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 become 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.”
But the truth wasn’t quite so sanitized. Twain also had a “large assortment of weird sides to his nature,” writes Chernow.
Long before he became 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 name not just as a way to escape his many creditors but as “the ultimate act of reinvention, the start of an attempt to mythologize his life,” writes Chernow.
His books became huge bestsellers, but nothing compared to his live performances. He could command a crowd with a mastery that was unmatched, once claiming that he would play with a dramatic pause during a reading “as other children play with a toy,” writes Chernow. During a speech in Utica, NY, in 1870, he stood silently on stage for several 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 told his sister that he was a man of “a fractious disposition & difficult to get along with.” He would collect insults, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash them on anyone who’d wronged or disappointed 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.”
Twain also had a bad habit of making terrible 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 became convinced that a new typesetting machine, a “fiendishly complex” device called the Paige Compositor, would become the future of publishing. “The typesetter does not get drunk,” Twain wrote of the contraption in his personal notebook. “He does not join the printer’s union.” He invested $300,000 (about $10 million in today’s money), and believed so strongly that the machine would lead to riches that he toyed with buying all of New York state with his future riches.
“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 thousands of moving parts, proved to be a colossal failure. Only two of the machines were built, one of which is currently displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn.
Strangest of all, Twain developed a fondness for teenage girls as he grew older. In his 40s, he began giving private lectures at the Saturday Morning Club, an all-girls’ private club in which he was an honorary member. But this soon evolved into something decidedly creepier.
At 70, he met 15 year-old Gertrude Natkin while attending a Carnegie Hall recital. They became pen-pals, with Twain writing to her six times 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 aging. On her 16th 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 send her a kiss now, he declared, because it would come “within an ace of being improper!”
Twain eventually cut off ties with her, but Gertrude was just the beginning of his obsession with adolescent girls. He created a “club of handpicked platonic sweethearts,” writes Chernow, dubbing them his “angelfish.” As Twain explained 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.”
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 certainly looks less than innocent, Chernow points out that there were never any accusations of predatory behavior from any of the girls, and mothers or grandmothers were always present as chaperones. “The girls never reported forbidden sexual overtures from Twain,” writes Chernow. “They played billiards and hearts and engaged in innocent pastimes.
Twain insisted until the end 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 received from his own daughters.
Beyond the obvious inappropriateness, his adolescent teenage female fixation was a symptom of Twain’s larger obsession with youth. The older he became, 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 many ways an attempt to capture the innocence of youth. As some critics noted, despite the Huck Finn character being fourteen, his mind was “devoid of sexual thoughts or fantasies,” writes Chernow.
The older and more famous he became, 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 eventually wrote sequels in which both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn reappeared, but he had no interest 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 gift and old age was a sham.
“I should greatly like to relive my youth,” he once wrote. “And then get drowned.”
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