The Singular Mark Twain: A Biography

Rating:
Summary: A comprehensive evocation of a much-loved icon
Review: Fred Kaplan's perceptive and entertaining biography of America's premier writer brings to life not only the familiar Mark Twain the humorist and man of letters, but all of his other manifold aspects (or "selves," as the author liked to call them, perceiving himself as the plural Mark Twain) as well: the versatile riverboat pilot, panner for gold, and inventor of mucilage; the devoted family man who (like all successful men, according to Dwight David Eisenhower) had married above his station and remained faithful and passionately affectionate to a loving, responsive woman who joined him in defying Victorian strictures to the extent of occasionally holding hands in public, and who, like Abigail Adams, shared his professional life, reading and vetting everything he wrote, and also raised and disciplined their daughters, managed the household, tolerated and sometimes even enjoyed his profanity, and to a degree came to share his indifference to religion; the self-made writer who won acceptance into the highest ranks of the nation's literary, cultural, political, and professional life; the world traveler who became widely venerated abroad; the impulsive, chronically unsuccessful businessman who lost a fortune investing in printing "compositors" and hairpins but rebuffed an invitation to purchase shares in the nascent telecommunications industry; the political liberal, who loved "Negro" culture and often sang "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and, in bereft moments, Stephen Foster's "Why Do The Beautiful Die," and who deplored actual slavery in America, virtual slavery in the Belgian Congo, feudalism in Russia, anti-Semitism in Austria, and aggrandizement in religious institutions; the sensualist who admired the unselfconscious naturalness of uninhibited peoples in Hawaii, Fiji, and Nicaragua; the iconoclast who believed that Jesus was born but not raised and would never return to a randomly cruel world in which one incarnation was sufficient for anyone, and who agreed with an overheard slave's prayer, "Come yo'self, Lord, an' doan be sendin' yo' son, 'cause this ain't no time fo' chillun"; and the survivor, who saw his infant son and eventually his fragile wife succumb to heart disease, a daughter to meningitis, and a second daughter to epilepsy, leaving only a third daughter to survive him - and, even more sadly, although unknown to him, one whose own daughter was to commit suicide at age fifty-four, ending the line, and lending retrospective pathos to his geriatric admiration and acculturation of bright young girls as ersatz granddaughters.

Rating:
Summary: Not up to the subject
Review: I read about 200 pages of this, and quit when I realized that what was most interesting about the book was trying to figure out how the author managed to make Mark Twain, of all people, seem so tedious. The reader is often told how funny Twain was, but rarely given an example. The relationship of detail to big picture is shaky and inconstant. Get this from a library and skim it, but spend your time and money on Twain's own writings.

Rating:
Summary: Suturing the severed
Review: Several years ago Justin Kaplan sundered Sam Clemens and Mark Twain. It was an almost iconoclastic "psychological" study, typical of the times and thus immensely popular. It changed sharply the image of Clemens held by most Twain readers. Which one were they reading? Now Fred Kaplan has attempted to suture the parts and bring us a fresh picture of a whole man. Using new material and thorough analysis, Kaplan has produced a enduring biography of America's greatest writer. This study is comprehensive in scope and ably presented for long-time Twain aficionados. Newcomers to Clemens' work may be staggered by the wealth of information.

Pseudonyms were common among 19th Century journalists, Clemens' starting point in his writing career. Kaplan demonstrates that the detachment Clemens enjoyed as a "reporter" was transformed into a strong, unified character in his later writing. Factual works outlining his travel experiences later took second place to his fiction. While these books still carried the "Twain" banner, Kaplan shows it as an enlargement of his image, not a branching off. Fiction also enabled Twain to incorporate his linguistic attainments to a degree unmatched in his day. His portrayal of Mississippi Valley patois often led to critics labeling him "common", but Kaplan counters that Twain had a more comprehensive view of his fellow Americans than did most of his contemporaries.

Most contemporary readers of Twain were captivated by his humour, which was innovative and spirited. Kaplan, while recognising Twain's the appeal to his audience, gives little further acknowledgement to this aspect. Why, we wonder, did Twain, whose life was long beset by tragedies and the struggle for financial stability, continue to write with his unique form of wit. Even the latest works Twain produced were lively presentations, often heavy with irony. Kaplan relates this, but offers no explanation for its tenacity. Even Twain's inspired soliloquy of Belgium's King Leopold was laced with Mississippi Valley expressions. Reading any of the writings from Twain's long career, the light touch is always present, but it seems to slip by Kaplan with but scant notice.

Kaplan deals well, however, with Twain's serious side. Finances, in almost overwhelming detail, dominate the book. The problems with family - illness stalked the Clemens clan for decades - are thoroughly related. How many of these ills might be related to their economic plight? Twain saw firm links, described fully, but the biographer declines to judge their validity. Kaplan is stronger in description than in analysis. While this keeps him detached, the reader is offered few insights. No diagnosis of any of the family's illnesses intrude on the narrative. Kaplan also follows Twain's travels in detail, but the background panorama remains subtly hidden. A thorough knowledge of world events is a clear prerequisite for reading this life in context. The result is a straightforward relation of Twain's life, readable, thorough in personal details, but fails to place those intimacies within a broader scene.

The book will be welcomed by academics and those already well versed in Twain's life. Kaplan successfully refutes the claim that Clemens and Twain were separate personas, Twain shedding the intrusions of Clemens' financial worries or family illness when taking up his pen. Beyond that, Kaplan offers only descriptions of that background to Twain's successful writing career. A fine book, but limited in scope.
[stephen a. haines - Ottawa, Canada]

Rating:
Summary: Mark Twain & 19th Century American Culture
Review: The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan builds an intimate relationship for readers with the itinerant journalist who became one of America's most prolific authors, most humorous commentators and most entertaining public speakers. Kaplan arranges Twain's experiences, his relationships and his attitudes into a foundation beneath his extraordinary literary output. The result is a fascinating history of 19th century American culture.

Kaplan seeks to establish Twain as the American literary figure who looms above all others. He also shows him as an often irascible curmudgeon who frequently outraged people with whom he found fault. Like many creative giants, Twain didn't suffer fools gladly and employed his talent for sarcasm and satire to skewer self-righteous politicians, remorseless racists, hypocritical churchmen and many others, regardless of their status.

Samuel Langhorne Clemens' childhood in Florida, Missouri and later in Hannibal on the Mississippi River was spent in wild, imaginative play with a multi-ethnic neighborhood of kids all of ages. Sam's father, John Marshall Clemens, was a stern, physically unwell attorney and unlucky land speculator who died when Sam was 11 and of whom he was later to say, "My own knowledge of him amounted to little more than an introduction." His mother smothered frail Sam from infancy with love and helped him fight health problems with homeopathic remedies. Fire and brimstone sermons at Hannibal's Old Ship of Zion church were a regular feature of young Sam's week. In fact, Kaplan says Sam heard a steady litany at church and at home that "Satan was real, and he visited Hannibal often."

Sam spent his childhood summers at his aunt and uncle's farm near Florida where he found subsequent literary inspiration from adventures with his nine cousins and storytelling by his uncle's oldest slave, Uncle Dan'l. "I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with light playing on their faces ... and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story was reached." Back in Hannibal, Sam harvested more memories from a gang of friends like Tom Blankenship who Twain described as "ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he was as good a heart as ever any boy had. His liberties were totally unrestricted ... We liked him; we enjoyed his society. And as his society was forbidden us by our parents ... we sought and got more of his society than of any other boy's."

After his father died, Jane Clemens apprenticed 11-year-old Sam as a printer's devil to the publisher of the Hannibal Gazette to help earn money for the family. His young entry into the labor force undoubtedly affected his character, contributing to his driving ambition, extraordinary productivity and the sarcasm that seasoned much of his writing.

Another local paper, the Hannibal Journal, was offered for sale after many residents left town to escape a yellow fever outbreak and headed for the gold rush in California. Sam's older brother Orion borrowed $500 from a local farmer, bought the paper and hired Sam at $3.50 a week. Sam never saw a penny. The Journal failed after four years, partly because of a poor economy and partly because it wasn't very good. Sam described his brother, his editor and his boss as "full of blessed egotism and placid self-importance ... (who) wrote with impressive flatulence and soaring confidence upon the vastest subjects."

Armed with a concise style and a valise full of satire, Sam spent several years chasing work as a travel writer in St. Louis, New York, Philadelphia, Keokuk, Iowa, Carson City, Nevada, San Francisco, Hawaii and back in New York. Building fame along the way, Sam continued to harvest themes for subsequent stories. Especially fertile were the ideas Sam hatched from 1857 to 1861 while working as a pilot on Mississippi riverboats between St. Louis and New Orleans and writing articles for the New Orleans Picayune.

Twain shared his weak constitution with Olivia Langdon, daughter of a wealthy Elmira, New York businessman with whose family he stayed on a weekend visit to Elmira in August, 1868. He was smitten with Livy and probably also by her father's wealth. Their February, 1870, marriage sparked the genesis of Mark Twain's most famous work. He recalled telling Livy as a two-day-old bridegroom how "The old life has swept before me like a panorama; the old days have trooped by in their old glory, again; the old faces have looked out of the mists of the past."

From the late 1870s to the early 1890s, Twain came to fancy himself an astute money manager. Amidst that delusion, he dedicated much of his considerable wealth to speculative investments that evaporated in the 1893 depression. Twain's financial losses coincided with his evolution away from any semblance of Christian commitment. His antipathy toward organized religion is reflected in his irritation with George Washington Cable, an anti-slavery New Orleans writer and avowed Christian with whom he partnered on a lecture tour promoting Huckleberry Finn. "Mind you, I like him; he is pleasant company ... but in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it."

Because his life was so rich in such an exciting era and because so much of his work is autobiographical, Mark Twain is a fascinating character. Along with his intellectual brilliance, prodigious output and skillful self-promotion, Kaplan also shows us many of Twain's human frailties, including his addiction to tobacco, his affinity for Scotch whiskey and his brittle temper. If there is a criticism of Kaplan's work, it occasionally crosses the line between valid interpretation and unnecessary minutiae. In any case, The Singular Mark Twain is a tour de force that weaves Mark Twain's remarkable life and times into his brilliant work. It is a most interesting read.