In an essay entitled ‘American Literature and Language’ (1953), T S Eliot wrote that, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain ‘reveals himself to be one of those writers, of whom there are not a great many in any literature, who have discovered a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves but for others. I should place him, in this respect, even with Dryden and Swift, as one of those rare writers who have brought their language up to date, and in so doing, “purified the dialect of the tribe”.’ One can only imagine the amusement such an encomium would have aroused in Twain, whose plain speaking tended to scandalise the wealthy Protestant tribe with whom he chose to consort. Nevertheless, he certainly had a profound influence on such writers as William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor, as well as Eliot himself, whose own new way of writing owed a great deal to the creator of Huckleberry Finn.

Had Twain not had the boldness to renew the language, to make it capture the newness of his experience in an America in which newness was fairly exploding, it is questionable whether his successors would have followed suit with quite the confidence they did. Moreover, Eliot is altogether right that ‘there is in Twain … a great unconscious depth, which gives to Huckleberry Finn … a symbolism all the more powerful for being uncalculated and unconscious’. Readers of Twain’s masterpiece have notoriously been at odds as to its import, some regarding it as racist and others as a thoroughgoing denunciation of racism. But if we take Eliot’s point – that ‘the Mississippi of Mark Twain is not only the river known to those who voyage on it or live beside it, but the universal river of human life’ – it follows that we need some account of Twain’s own voyage on that ‘universal river’. That is what Ron Chernow has supplied with splendid meticulousness in his massive new biography.

Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and moved, at the age of four, to nearby Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. His father was a taciturn justice of the peace while his mother was a warm, refined, generous woman whose bond with her son was indissoluble. A bright, mischievous, unbiddable boy, Twain hated school and spent most of his barefoot days dreaming of becoming a river pilot. From the first, he loved showing off, a tendency he would later turn to lucrative account on the worldwide lecture circuit. Leaving school at twelve, he became an itinerant typesetter just as the new mass press was taking shape in America (his experiences would long animate his affection for newspapers and newspapermen). He served briefly as a Confederate soldier in the American Civil War and was a prospector in the Gold Rush, thus being centre stage at two of the defining events in American history.

Twain was prescient in recognising that the Gold Rush had introduced to the country a ‘lust for money’ that would contribute to the ‘hardness and cynicism’ of so much of American life in what he dubbed the Gilded Age, which made paupers overnight of many deluded speculators, including himself. As W H Brands says in his brilliant The Age of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the New American Dream (2002), ‘Clemens’s loss was literature’s gain.’ Looking back on his days out west, Twain would always see Hannibal as a little Eden, where no one thought about money because no one minded being poor.

Still, there was another side to Hannibal and it gave Twain his first glimpse into slavery’s cruel malignity. After running afoul of Twain’s parents for insubordination, Jennie, a young slave who had nursed the Clemens children, was whipped. She then pleaded to be sold down the river rather than stay with the family. For Twain, the sale his parents conducted was a ‘sore trial, for the woman was almost like one of the family’. His encounter with Jennie years later on a steamboat, during which she ‘cried and lamented’, made slavery all the more abominable to him.

Chernow’s biography is especially good at showing how ethics figured in the work of a man who was generally pleased to present himself as contemptuous of morality – certainly conventional morality. As his friend William Dean Howells attested, Twain fought all his days for liberty and justice. What he mocked was counterfeits of those honourable things. ‘I shall not insist here upon Mark Twain as a moralist,’ Howells wrote, ‘though I warn the reader that if he leaves out of the account an indignant sense of right and wrong, a scorn of all affectation and pretence, an ardent hate of meanness and injustice, he will come indefinitely short of knowing Mark Twain.’ His lifelong fight against the injustice of slavery certainly bears this out.

Twain’s affinity with goodness, the flipside of his appreciation of the abysses of our corruptibility, can be seen in his choice of wife, Olivia Langdon. Olivia, known to Twain as ‘Livy’, was the handsome heiress of an upstate New York coal baron, about whom Howells wrote, ‘She was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but he rejoiced, he gloried in it.’

Livy was not only higher in the social register than her husband but, like Twain’s mother, refined and bright too. Nothing he wrote after his marriage would go to the printer without her shrewd editing. ‘Don’t give way to your invincible temptation to destroy the good effect of your story by some extravagantly comic absurdity,’ she would counsel him. For Chernow, ‘this was editorial criticism of a high order and went beyond merely bowdlerizing a book.’ Twain’s earlier biographer Van Wyck Brooks accused Livy of spoiling her husband’s creative genius by restraining his coarser proclivities. What Brooks failed to realise, however, is that both husband and wife preferred the decorous to the risqué, Twain even being tempted to scratch out the bawdy bits of Don Quixote before lending the book to his wife. Moreover, there was nothing of the unfeeling scold in Livy. Twain would attest later in life that Livy ‘poured out her prodigal affection in kisses and caresses … I was born reserved as to endearments of speech, and caresses, and hers broke upon me as the summer waves break upon Gibraltar.’

Starting with The Innocents Abroad (1869), a rollicking swipe at the American craze for foreign travel, Livy’s blue pen was instrumental to Twain’s success. The most profitable of Twain’s books, selling almost seventy thousand copies in its first year, it was followed by a number of other works that, if less successful, swelled his coffers further. Taken as a whole, Twain’s work is decidedly uneven, though at its best – and surely Roughing It (1872), Life on the Mississippi (1883) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) demonstrate this – it captures the yearnings and perfidies of his compatriots with an exuberance and wit that no other American writer has matched. 

Like James Joyce, another author whose fascination with a river suffused his art, Twain was deeply attached to his family, and Chernow explores this attachment in all its intricacy. The life of the family in the mansion Twain built in Hartford, Connecticut, was bittersweet. While Twain and his wife doted on their children and had high hopes for their futures, illness ravaged nearly all of them. His son Langdon died of diphtheria at nineteen months; his eldest daughter, Susy, died of spinal meningitis at twenty-four. Clara was the only child to outlive her father but had a breakdown that landed her in a sanatorium. Jean, the youngest child, was epileptic and died at twenty-nine of an apparent heart attack. When Livy died in 1904 of heart failure after a long decline, Twain was devastated.

To overcome such losses, Twain in his last years sought out the company of young girls. While it might be true that he was drawn to this company principally because it gave him access to the youth so vital to his being, there was still something of the Rector of Stiffkey in the man.

Once flush from book sales and lecture fees, Twain sought to make himself even richer by entering into a number of dubious business schemes. One involved the purchase of a publishing house that would operate by subscription. Another centred on the acquisition of an automatic typesetting contraption that promised to make publishing cheaper and more efficient. Both of these failed so spectacularly that the hapless author went bankrupt. In 1896, to pay off his debts, Twain went on a lecture tour of Australia, New Zealand, India and South Africa. He befriended the redoubtable Standard Oil tycoon Henry Huttleson Rogers, a fan of his books, who sorted out his investments, secured the copyright of his works and put the Twain family estate on a secure footing.

After this brush with financial ruin, Twain’s belief in progress, which had tempered even his darkest views on human folly, vanished and the books of his later years were uniformly gloomy, even nihilistic. To read ‘What is Man?’ (1906) is to see the despair that overtook the humorist when family deaths and divisions left him a lonely, embittered, irrational old man. Chernow describes how the ‘onetime bard of boyish hopefulness’ succumbed to a radical determinism in which men were little more than prisoners of ‘comforting lies, platitudes and pieties’. Twain eventually came to believe that his idyllic childhood in Hannibal – immortalised in The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer – had been only a dream, from which he had awakened to inescapable loss and misery. The boom and bust so redolent of American life haunted Twain, as it would F Scott Fitzgerald.

Despite its sad denouement, Chernow’s biography is an enthralling, even moving book. If the essence of most of Twain’s best writing is to remind readers of the dignity of our voyage on the river of life, despite all the indignities, heartbreaks and shipwrecks along the way, Chernow’s book chronicles the twists and turns of Twain’s own voyage with elan. He captures the author’s outsize personality, his profound fondness for the Mississippi, his relationship with his beloved wife and daughters, his delight in publicity, his musings on race and the outrages of slavery, his Balzacian fascination with money and the fierce indignation with which he confronted civilisation’s manifold shams. It is more the man than the artist that interests Chernow, but he often succeeds in showing how the complex, contradictory, suffering man influenced the artist. For anyone interested in Twain or in the America he anatomised so inimitably, this is a book to relish and prize, even if it does take rather an age to finish.