Renowned Biographer Ron Chernow on the Life of Mark Twain

WALTER ISAACSON: Thank you Bianna and Ron Chernow, welcome to the show.

RON CHERNOW: It’s a pure delight to be here, Walter. Thank you.

ISAACSON: In your great biography of Mark Twain that just came out, you have a sentence near the beginning that says, “what any biography of Mark Twain demands is his inimitable voice, which sparkled, even in his darkest moments.” Man, there were a lot of dark moments from this book, but the prose reads almost like Mark Twain and the flowing of the river. Did you consciously try to mimic his voice in some ways?

CHERNOW: I didn’t try to mimic his voice. I have to tell you, you’ll appreciate this, Walter, as a biographer yourself. It’s very rough on the ego of a biographer to be writing a book about a writer who’s a greater writer than you are. I think that having, you know, spent six years with Mark Twain’s language and humor flowing through my veins, maybe it elevated my writing a little bit. I like to think that. But thank you for the, the compliment. I was not in any way trying to adapt my writing to it, although I must tell you that I felt writing this book my prose was a little bit looser and, and freer. When I was writing, let’s say about Ulysses s Grant, when you’re writing about the Battle of Shiloh, where there were 25,000 thousand casualties in two days, you can’t have a lot of fun with the prose You feel that you have to adopt a very kind of formal and solemn prose. Whereas in the case of Mark Twain, I think that it had a liberating effect on me as a writer.

ISAACSON: You know, the character in this book, that’s the non-human character, is the river. And it all flows. You have a narrative that flows like a river. How important was his childhood in Hannibal and becoming a river pilot?

CHERNOW: Well, when he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, which was right on the Mississippi River. And that here’s this remote backwater, it’s in the northeast corner of Missouri – slave holding family in a slave holding state. But he would walk out the door and turn to his left. And there just a block or two away was this broad shining, magnificent river. And the river brought all the world into his life because the, the, the Steamboats would dock. It was the big event of the day in the town. And off the Steamboats would pour everything from circuses to minstrel shows, to traveling salesman, to to passengers. So it connected him with a much larger world. And I think it gave him this, you know, fantasy of escape from this world.

ISAACSON: He grew up in a slaveholding family in a slaveholding state, and yet, in some ways, he writes what is the greatest anti-slavery book in the English language, at least. You know, Huckleberry Finn. Ironically, it still gets banned sometimes ’cause it uses the n-word. Tell me about his evolution on race. When did he realize how abhorrent slavery was?

CHERNOW: he’s born into a slave owning family, slave owning state. He said that in the world of his childhood, a universal stillness reigned about the evil of slavery. He was taught in church not only that slavery was acceptable, that slavery was sacred, and a peculiar pet of the deity that he said. So, when he’s a teenager, going through his, his, his letters, it’s full of very crude, racist language, exactly what you would expect from someone growing up in that environment. 

But then when he, what happens when he’s in his early thirties he woos and weds a young heiress from upstate New York named Livy Langdon. And the Langdon family brings much more than just wealth into his life, because they had been abolitionists active abolitionists on the Underground Railroad. They knew Frederick Douglass. They had actually comforted and sheltered Frederick Douglass.  And so Mark Twain’s views begin to change and change quite radically. His friend William Dean Howells, said that Mark Twain was the most de-southernized southerner that he -met because he really recreates himself as this northeastern liberal living in a mansion in Hartford, Connecticut. 

But I try Walter very hard in the book, ’cause there’s been so much controversy about Twain and race to, to, to show this extraordinary evolution of his views from crude racism of his youth. And I think that he becomes the most enlightened and tolerant of all white authors in the late 19th century. He does things like he pays for the law school education or a brilliant young black law student named Warner T. McGuinn. And he writes a very revealing letter to the Dean of the Law School in which he says – explaining why he’s paying for this black student – he says, “we have ground the manhood out of them, and the shame of it is ours, not theirs.” 

In commenting on this episode, William Dean Howells, his close friend, said that Mark Twain as a white man, held himself personally responsible for what the white race had done to the black race. And in paying for this law student, he felt that he was making his own form of reparation to the black race. And he actually used that word “reparation.” So I describe a lot of activities in the book that Twain did on behalf of the black community. He was a major promoter, for instance, of the Fisk Jubilee singers. Fisk was a Nashville school that had been set up to educate blacks born into slavery after the Civil War. And Twain adores this group. He says their plaintive melodies moved him like nothing else. And he is a major force in promoting them. And the schools, he felt so strongly about the centrality of race and slavery. He said that the birthdate of American liberty was not 1776, but 1865, the year that slavery was outlawed. And he said, mockingly said, the Declaration of Independence should have said that all white men are created equal. So he becomes very advanced and very outspoken on this issue where his views are very benighted early on.

ISAACSON: That’s the point. I mean, you talk about how he’s very enlightened by the end on slavery, but there’s an evolution that happens, which makes the book interesting. And there’s even an evolution, I think, from reading the book between writing Tom Sawyer and writing Huckleberry Finn, because Tom Sawyer has sort of the celebration of the old Antebellum South, whereas Huck Finn is a much different book.

CHERNOW: Yeah, no, it’s interesting because Tom Sawyer, as we all know, is this sort of most beautiful paean to American, you know, boyhood. And Tom is this incurable fantasist who’s reading all of these romantic novels. And his mind is full of moonshine. And it’s this sunlit town. It’s kind of scrubbed clean of slavery. He then returns to the town of Hannibal, which he calls St. Petersburg in Huck Finn. And far and away the most likable, notable, noble figure in the book is the Slave Jim. And Jim is drawn with great affection and dignity and pride. There are, as many people pointed out, certain menstrual affectations that Twain has grafted onto that portrait. So it’s not a perfect portrait. 

But as Huck and Jim go down the river, all these southern towns full of southern whites that they’re passing the southern whites are, you know, violent and crude and profane. And the figure who stands up as the most noble and your main figure is the one main black figure in the in, in, in the story, Jim. 

And I know, you know Percival Everett has written this fantastic book called James in, in which he attends to give a much kind of fuller, richer portrait of Jim/James. And I don’t think that Mark Twain as a white man would’ve been capable of creating such a multidimensional figure at that time, multidimensional as he does with with, with Huck Finn. So, what I like about James, is I think that it’s a corrective to Huck Finn, but it’s not a debunking book. In fact, Percival Everett in an interview last year was asked, what do you say to people who wanna, and Huck Finn from the schools? And he says, I say, they’ve never read the book. You know, so I think that even as he is correcting Mark Twain, he’s been honoring Mark Twain at the same time. And also he is got an enormous number of people to go back and read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which is great.

ISAACSON: One of the things that you have in the book quite a bit is this dark side of Mark Twain and the depression he had. And how – and you say some mysterious anger, some pervasive melancholy fired his humor. Do you think that the depression was sort of intertwined with why he was a humorist?

CHERNOW: It’s an excellent question, question, Walter. I think that the, the, the answer is yes. You know, the image that Americans have of Mark Twain is of a very charming, congenial man standing up there in a white suit with a cigar spouting witticisms. And that was true of his public persona. Under the surface, he was kind of often very moody and temperamental. He himself said, I have a volatile temperament. And he said that my emotions veer from extreme to extreme. 

And I think as I, the deeper I got into the book, I felt that in a way he fit into a certain classic stereotype of the funny man, the funny man who is sad, the clown who is sad under the surface. And I think that he was using his humor as a way of relieving all of this kind of darkness and anger that he carried from his past.

He was very haunted by his childhood poverty. His father had failed in business five times. I think he had the difficulty when he was a child, he had this very cold and distant father. He only said two things about his father, and they’re both revealing. He said, our relationship amounted to little more than an introduction. And then he also said, my relationship with my father was one of armed neutrality. You know, so that there was, there was a kind of stunted emotional growth there. 

And the darker the topic, the funnier Mark Twain was, I mean, there’s so many funny lines that Mark Twain had about his own death. Of course, the most famous one is when he said that the reports of his death were greatly exaggerated. But there were plenty of these. Another time, the Associated Press called him up and said, there are rumors you’re dying. And he said, I would do no such thing at my time of life. So it’s kind of the darker the material, the funnier he was. And I think that tells you something about why his humor has been so long lasting. 

ISAACSON: Well, one of the core parts of his humor is poking fun at the pretensions of the elite. And of course, he coins the term Gilded Age, which is what we refer to the late 19th century time of robber barons. Three of which I think you’ve written biographies of. And one reason it feels timely is we seem to be a new Gilded Age right now. Do you see this relevance of him to our new Gilded Age?

CHERNOW: I think that is part of Twain’s appeal. You’re right. His first novel was called The Gilded Age co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner. And he talked about the rampant materialism in America. He talked about our moral ulcers, and he said very powerful things about the robber barons of his own age. He said, of Jay Gould, he said, before Jay Gould Americans desired money. He said, after Jay Gould, they bowed down and worshiped it. He wrote an open letter to Commodore Vanderbilt in which he said, what an unfortunate narrowing thing is when a man has so much wealth and has made a God of it, rather than his servant. So we’re going through a very similar period now of – you’ve written about this brilliantly – of tremendous technological innovations creating huge new fortunes creating extremes of inequality.

But one thing I have to point out, Walter, is that, you know, Mark Twain on paper is always railing against the plutocrats. But in his private life, he is doing everything he possibly can to, to, to become one. That he not only wanted to be rich, he wanted to be filthy rich. I mean, there are a number of places that I talk about in the book where he invests in different new technologies that he imagines he’s gonna have a global monopoly. Now, some people kind of have this idea because he was always satirizing the rich that he had no interest in being the rich, which was exactly the opposite of the truth. One of his biographers said, I think rightly, there’s probably never been an American writer who was so obsessed with the chink and rustle and lure of money as Mark Twain.

ISAACSON: Over the years, the different types of biographies of Mark Twain reflect, sometimes, the current period we’re in. I know that, you know, Bernard Devoto did one back in the Depression, and then Justin Kaplan does Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, which shows the schizophrenia of, you know, his character invented in the writing he did. How do you see us looking at twain through the lens of our current times?

CHERNOW: I think, Walter, that maybe the most important thing right now is that Mark Twain was a fearless and courageous and outspoken figure that he, in many ways, functioned as the conscience of American society. And I think that he had views on a number of topics that resonate today. ___ his take patriotism. He referred to that laughable and grotesque word, patriotism. And it drove him crazy, the expression “my country, right or wrong.” He said we should support our country all the time and our government when it deserves it. 

He also, this resonates today. He was very alarmed by the hyper-partisanship of his time. It got so bad. He said that if the Democrats included the multiplication table in their electoral platform, the Republicans would vote it down at the next election. Sound familiar? And also a subject dear to us both. He was a fierce defender of the freedom of the press. He said that the I reverence of the press is the champion of liberty, and it’s our surest defense. And so I think this outspoken quality is very important at the moment, because we’re living at a moment where people on both the left and the right feel very muzzled. They feel fearful of expressing, you know, their true opinions. 

Mark Twain had that when he was younger. He was always afraid that if he told people what he really felt about politics and religion and other things, that he would alienate this large readership. But what happens as he gets older he lets it rip. And suddenly all of these very strong and radical views begin to emerge. 

ISAACSON: Okay. I once had an editor when I was writing who wrote in the margins, “all things in good time,” and she was fanatic – it was Alice Mayhew – of making sure you stuck to a chronology. How important is chronology in showing the growth of a person you, you have as a biography subject?

CHERNOW: You know, chronology is absolutely, you know, the backbone of the book, and you have to kind of periodically, you know, veer off into thematic stuff and, you know, giving a background. But I feel that the chronology not only gives a kind of propulsive, you know, force to, to, to the book, but I wanna show this person, as it were not just being Mark Twain, but becoming Mark Twain. I wanna show him you know, unfolding. And he’s someone who travels so far from his roots. He’s this barefoot boy from Hannibal. He ends up being the most worldly and well traveled American author. We tend to think of him as the quintessential American. He spent 11 years outside of the United States. So he is actually the most cosmopolitan figure among American writers. But for me, you know, the, the joy is kind of lining everything up chronologically so that you can see the changes taking place. And sometimes they’re almost imperceptible from page to page until you then sort of look back, you know, a chapter or look back 10 chapters and you see just how much this person has grown. And if it’s an interesting figure and an important figure, this person ends up being something that would’ve been almost unimaginable earlier in the life.

ISAACSON: Ron Chernow, thank you so much for joining us.

CHERNOW: It’s been a great pleasure, Walter. Thank you.