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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Ron Chernow on the Big Issues that Dominated Mark Twain's Life
00:37:17
Our Full Bio series continues with a conversation about Mark Twain with biographer Ron Chernow.
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Alison Stewart
This is all Alison from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on tomorrow's show, we've got Jasmine Amy Rogers, the star of Boop. The Musical on Broadway. She's having a big week over the weekend. She won the Drama Desk Award for outstanding lead performance in a musical. She's also nominated for a Tony for Best Actress at this Sunday's award show. And now there's a petition to have her perform there too. Nearly 5,000 people have signed it. That's a lot of hype for a 26 year old actress in her Broadway debut. And and she'll be with us tomorrow to talk about stepping into the role of the iconic Betty Boop. That's in the future. But now let's get back into today's show with this month's full bio conversation. Full Bio is our monthly book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography to get a fuller understanding of the subject. This month we are discussing Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. Chernow has written biographies of Alexander Hamilton, President Ulysses S. Grant, and won the Pulitzer for his book Washington A Life about our first President. As we learned yesterday, Mark Twain was born Samuel Clemens in 1835 in Missouri. He was one of seven children born to an outgoing mother and a father who died when Samuel was 11 years old. He worked as a printer's apprentice on a steamboat but found his way as a writer and a speaker. Today we'll learn about Mark Twain, a man of extremes. As he said, everyone is a moon and has a dark side, which he never shows to anybody. Mark Twain could be as vengeful as he was kind. He was in the 1% but lost it all due to an obsession he had with an invention. He lost millions and millions of dollars, much of it his wife's inheritance. He went through an evolution on racism. Mark Twain called himself, quote, a bigot as a young man, but ended up writing an anti slavery novel, but full of the N word. All of this was documented in his writings and letters. And there may be some coarse language in this episode which was lightly edited. Let's get into the mind of Mark Twain with Ron Chernow. When did he become Mark Twain?
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Ron Chernow
Well, when he was writing in Nevada, it was the habit of a lot of the journalists and a lot of the humorists to adopt pen names. And so it was at that point that he went from being Sam Clemens to Mark Twain. Mark Twain. He went back to his steamboat days for that name, because mark Twain means two fathoms or at 12ft. And on the steamboat they would drop a lead anchor there in order to gauge the depth of the river. And if the lesman cried Mark Twain, it meant that the depth was 12ft at that point. So that's where the name came from. And it was a wonderful choice of name. And in fact, he became very good friends with Helen Keller. And Helen Keller told him that she thought it was a perfect name because the nautical significance it gave, a sense of beauty, but also of depth that called to mind the river, which was exactly perfect for him.
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Alison Stewart
Which of his works do you think people should pay more attention to?
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Ron Chernow
More attention to? I think the first book, which is called Innocence Abroad. It was actually his best selling book in his lifetime. What happened was he went on this. It was like an early tourist cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. And so he went with all of these rather stodgy, pious American tourists. And he wrote all these letters. And then it became this book, the Innocents Abroad. And he's not only satirizing what he sees in Europe, but he's satirizing his fellow passengers. And so, you know, at that time, people would do the grand tour of Europe because Americans would fawn over European culture. Mark Twain was having none of that. So, for instance, you know, they were going to a lot of museums and he developed this pathological hatred of the old masters. He said, the old masters are all dead, and I wish they had died sooner. They go to the Sistine Chapel where the Conclave just met. And he said, Michelangelo's nightmare, he said, full of repulsive monstrosities. He then goes to Milan and he sees da Vinci's the Last Supper. And he said that there were a dozen people Copying the Last Supper in the room there. And he said, I couldn't help but notice that all of the copies were much better than the original. And then this very, very funny statement. He said, there are a lot of house painters in Arkansas who wouldn't be painting signs for living if they had lived in the days of the Old Masters. But anyway, this was such a breath of fresh air at the time when everyone was sort of fawning over European culture. And here was this fresh voice that. That was so bright and brash and cynical, and he had no filter. I mean, there wasn't any sense of political correctness at the time. So anything he could satirize and get away with because he makes all these comments about different races and religions and nationalities, he has a kind of harsh wisecrack for everyone. But at the time, that was okay. So by the time he gets back to the United States after months on the Quaker City, because he's been filing these letters, he returns a celebrity. The book sells 100,000 copies, a gigantic amount at the time. He never again sold as many copies. And that drove him crazy.
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Alison Stewart
Ooh, I'm going to call him from Mark Twain from here on. Okay, based on all your research and reading all of his letters, what would Mark Twain say is his best work?
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Ron Chernow
That's a very interesting question, because his answer changed after he wrote Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He said that was his best book and that was his favorite. But then later on, and most people don't know that he wrote such a book, he wrote a novel called the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. He was obsessed with the figure of Joan of Arc. And so in later years, he said, joan of Arc is my best book. I know it for certain. You know, he was very adamant. He was very dogmatic in his opinions. Of course, Huck Finn most people would regard as the most important book that he wrote. And Joan of Arc is simply not read anymore. And so. And it doesn't have. There are a number of books that he wrote. They have a kind of charm. I mean, John of Arc is one. Prince and the Pauper. I remember growing up, we would all read Prince and the Pauper.
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Alison Stewart
I read Pudd' nhead Wilson.
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Ron Chernow
Pudd' Nhead Wilson, Connecticut Yankee. There are all these books that once upon a time, everyone knew something about them. Whereas I think that now, probably to the extent people know his books, it would be Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, maybe Life on the Mississippi. He also wrote a hilarious book called Roughing it about his adventures out west. He actually published, again, people think of him just these two or three books. He published two dozen books. I mean, this is someone who wrote not only a novel about Joan of Arc, wrote a polemic against Mary Baker Eddy, the head of Christian Science. He wrote a book arguing that Shakespeare didn't write the plays we attribute to Shakespeare that were really written by Francis Bacon. He even wrote something called 1601, which was a pornographic satire set in the court of Queen Elizabeth I. So it's sort of a vast amount of Mark Twain that people know nothing about.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Ron Chernow. We're talking about his book, Mark Twain. It's our choice for full bio. You describe his style, his style of wit, as vinegar, not oil. How was he able to monetize it? How was he able to make a living?
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Ron Chernow
Well, you know, he published two dozen books, probably somewhere between 1,000, 2,000 magazine articles, gave thousands of lectures. He was on the lecture circuit. They called it Lyceum circuit at the time. And he probably made more money from lecturing than he did from his book royalties. And then, of course, he married an heiress, even though he completely squandered her inheritance with his crazy speculations. And so he could have. I mean, the tragedy of Mark Twain's life is that given the fact that he made a lot of money from book royalties and from lecture fees, he marries this extremely wealthy woman. He could have and should have had this easy, placid life. But by his own admission, he said, I have to speculate, such being my nature. And he can't stay away from these speculations. And he squanders in contemporary dollars, literally millions of dollars on these, forcing them, finally. And he also.
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Alison Stewart
A printing press. He becomes obsessed with a printing press.
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Ron Chernow
Obsessed with a printing press. I know this is a strange story. It was invented by a man named James W. Page. It was a typesetter or comp. He was convinced that it would revolutionize the newspaper business. He also was convinced that every newspaper in the world would either have to buy or rent the Page compositor. He said it would make him so rich, he would be part of the Vanderbilt gang. So for 14 years, he's pouring millions of dollars into this machine, including Livy's money, and it goes bust. So at the beginning, he so reveres James W. Page. He says he's the Shakespeare of mechanical invention. Then later on, he's saying, if I saw James W. Page drowning, I would throw him an anvil. The hero worship went in tourists. But he lost so much money on that. And Then also lost money on a publishing house that he had started. That the family has to close up the house in Hartford and then move to Europe for nine years to economize. Although their idea of economizing was very different from yours or mine. They're in a 30 room villa outside of Florence. They're in a lavish hotel suite in Vienna. It's not exactly clear how they're saving money, but that's what they were saying.
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Alison Stewart
Well, part of his reason that he had to go to Europe was also to pay off this huge debt. He had to go and give tours and give lectures that he didn't really necessarily want to do, but he had to do it.
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Ron Chernow
That's right. I mean, from early on in his career, he was saying that he was going to give up the lecture platform. Although he did say at one point that lecturers were like burglars, always promising to give up the trade but never able to do it. But he finds he has to kind of keep going back out on the road in order to pay off all of the debts. And then finally he goes bankrupt and actually has to make around the world tour about 12 or 13 months. I mean, he speaks in India, Australia, South Africa was really rather grueling, but kind of as a matter of honor. And Livy was particularly insistent on this, you know, paying off every penny that they had, you know, lost while he was on tour.
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Alison Stewart
His daughter dies of meningitis. Did he learn anything, anything during that period, not being there with his daughter when she was dying?
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Ron Chernow
It's a good question. And I sort of wonder what the answer is. You know, what happened is okay. So on that round the world tour he went with Livyou actually held up surprisingly well, given her health. And then the middle daughter, Clara, the eldest daughter, Susie, who was in many ways his favorite daughter, Susie didn't go. She was afraid of sea travel. She had a phobia about it. So she stayed behind. And so at the very end of the round the world trip, they end up. Sam and Livy end up in London, and they're expecting the two daughters, Jean and Susie, to come over from the United States to come over to London. And then they get this disturbing telegram, you know, that Susie is sick. Livy and Clara immediately have a strong intuition that something is deeply wrong. And so they get on boat the next day and go back. And they were right because she was dying of meningitis. Mark Twain was not there when she died. He really flagellated himself, you know, for years. For he said, if it had not been for my damn speculations, I wouldn't have had to do the round the world tour. If it had not been for the round the world tour, I could have been, you know, with Susie, all of this would never have happened. And yet you're asking what lessons he learned. But a couple of years later, he again gets involved with one of these crazy speculations. He's in Vienna. This I think, well, the letters that I read by him, this one shocked me the most. He discovers that there's a new invention that was designed to print on carpets and tapestries and textiles. And he spends a day at the American embassy reading about this field. And in 24 hours, he feels he's converted himself into one of the world's leading authorities on this. And he had been rescued from bankruptcy by a Standard Oil mogul named Henry H. Rogers. He writes this letter to Henry H. Rogers telling him about this invention and saying that he and Rogers and Standard Oil should buy up the worldwide patent rights to it. He said they'll call it a global trust, but that can't be helped. And so suddenly he's gone from knowing.
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Alison Stewart
Nothing, I know everything, to know everything.
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Ron Chernow
And that he's going to be running a global monopoly of this. It would have been amazing under any circumstances that he was writing this. But the fact that this was not that long after Susie had died, where he's, you know, whipping himself for having engaged in speculations which led to the bankruptcy, which led to the round of the world tour, which led to his not being there with Susie. So I really think that if he were alive today, I think the speculative urge was so deep and so uncontrollable, I think he would be in a 12 step program today. He could not stop. It was a form of gambling. He called it business. But they were all highly speculative. And in fact, with the crazy, the page typesetter which finally lost the race, it turned out there was another compositor from a guy named Mergenthaler that won the race. And Twain is absolutely convinced that his machine is going to dominate the industry. It was only Jane Lampton Clemens out in Missouri who asked him. But what if the machine fails? It was the one question her son never asked himself.
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Alison Stewart
My guest is Ron Chernow. We're talking about his new book, Mark Twain. It's our choice. For full bio, Samuel Clemens, not Mark Twain, but Samuel Clemens was raised by parents who came from families that had enslaved people. It was part of his upbringing. He held beliefs as a teenage boy which you describe as rank, bigotry Yep. Yet he evolved. At one point he sent a young black man to Yale Law School. And I think the person that I got from the book that really sort of changed his mind or at least got him to think bigger was Mary Ann McCord.
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Ron Chernow
Yeah, this is a fascinating story. Twain used to spend summers in Elmira, New York, where, you know, his in laws had a farm, Quarry Farm. And he did a lot of his writing there. He had this very picturesque octagonal study overlooking the river. And there was a cook, a black woman named Marianne Cord, who was in her 60s or maybe 70s. And she was a very kind of hearty woman. And Twain always said, you know, she had kind of a smile on her face and laughter in her voice. And you know, one evening they're all sitting on the porch and Mark Twain turns to her. He was very, very fond of her and he says, how is it, I think they called her antiquant. How is it that you've never had any trouble in your life? She looks at him and she says, are you in earnest, Mr. C? And then she spills out this story again. I don't know if he was really as naive as he was pretending rather, this is just kind of setting up the story. But anyway, she then spills out this story. She was born into slavery. She'd married enslavement. She'd had seven children. And then she describes, you know, all eight of them being on the auction block. And she was, in an instant, her husband and six of the seven children. Well, actually all of the children and the husband were torn away. Of the seven, she never saw the husband again. Of the seven children, she only saw one, Henry, who did end up living in Elmira where she was. But you can imagine in an instant having your spouse and seven children, you know, torn away from you. And so at the end, when she finished telling the story, she said, no, I ain't never had no problem. Life is still evidence. And so what he did, he then wrote an article for the Atlantic Monthly called, you know, a true story, repeated, you know, word for word as I heard. It was actually the first article under Mark Twain's own name that appeared in the Atlantic Monthly. And it was part of, you know, this process that you put your finger on. He goes from being having pretty much the racist attitudes that one would expect from someone growing in that, you know, town to becoming a much, much more broad minded figure. And a lot of it has to do with, well, his relationship with the Langdons, who were abolitionists. They were part of the underground railroad. The relationship with Marion Cord. Then there' also black farmer John Lewis, who's working in Quarry Farm in Elmira, whom Twain admires. He saves the family, saves this runaway carriage. Also he adored a black butler named George Griffin who worked with them for many, many years. And had George Griffin been born a century later, he would have been a CEO. I mean he was a very, very bright, smart, engaging, you know, and he was their butler. And Mark Twain was extremely close. And so, you know, he goes from again, that sort of, you know, crude racist bigotry of his early years to I think being as broad minded and tolerant as probably any other white author of that time. And the most amazing story, which if I can tell the story, you mentioned it to one or T. McGuin, he speaks at Yale Law School and he meets a brilliant young law student, black, named Warner T. McGuinn. And Warner T. McGuin is living with the college's black carpenter and doing odd jobs. So he's in the school, but not fully. And so Mark Twain then writes to the law school dean and offers to pay for McGuinn's education because McGuinn is the head of the debating society. And Mark Twain writes to the law school dean, we have ground the manhood out of them, meaning the blacks, and we should pay for it. And his friend William Dean Howell said that Mark Twain held himself as a white person personally responsible for what the white race had done to the black and that paying for Warner McGuinn's education was part of his reparation. He used the term reparation for what the white race should do to the black. Now what happened with Juan T. McGuin became a very famous lawyer in Baltimore. One of major desegregation case. In his adjoining office he had a young lawyer named Thurgood Marshall. Thurgood Marshall later said Warner T. McGuin was one of the most brilliant lawyers he'd ever met. And had he not been black, he'd definitely have been a judge. So it's an interesting sort of line for Mark Twain, Warner Duke going to Brown versus Wardevent, you know, to the Supreme Court. So that was money very well spent by Mark Twain.
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Alison Stewart
I'm curious if you have thoughts on this. And Huck Finn, they use the N word. I think it's 219 times. Why was that important to Mark Twain?
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Ron Chernow
Yeah, I think again probably obvious that he's using the N word not to endorse racism, to expose it. You know, he's trying to show this kind of, you know, it's almost a pathological repetition of the word. And, you know, it's unfortunate, the controversy over the N word, which I fully, you know, understand it's had a way of kind of associating Mark Twain with racism, you know, even though it's kind of the great anti slavery book. It's a hard one, Alison, you know, for me, because, you know, I'm Jewish. So as I was writing this book, I kept thinking, well, what if, you know, I was a kid and I had to read a novel where the word was repeated 200 times? You know, how would I feel about that? Even if I understood, you know, the author's intentions, it would still not be a lot of fun turning the pages, you know, so it may be because Huck Finn is probably banned at, you know, all secondary schools. So maybe it is better wait till college read it with abolitionist literature or slave narratives or something like that, you know. So it's really been kind of two areas of controversy with Huck Finn. And then the other is the portrayal of James, of Jim. And Jim, you know, on the one hand is, I think, far and away the most dignified and sensitive and noble character in the entire book. Almost all of the whites in the book are violent and crude and profane and horrible. So Jim stands out as almost saintly. So what's the criticism about Jim? Criticism, Jim. And this goes back black critics, but not exclusively black critics going back, you know, 50, 75 years, you know, saying that there were certain they called minstrel affectations of Jim particularly. Jim is very superstitious. He's very credulous. And so they would say this really was not what blacks were like. This is how blacks were portrayed in minstrel shows. And so I think the reason, certainly one of the reasons Percival Everett wrote this wonderful novel.
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Alison Stewart
Well, did you read James. Have you read James Wand?
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Ron Chernow
Oh, yeah, yeah, And I read it. We have the same agent. So I had read it even before it came out. No, I think that it's wonderful. And so I think that what he's trying to do is it's not a debunking book, you know, because I think he admires Mark Twain. I think it's kind of more of a corrective that he feels that, you know, in Huck Finn Boy, he presents a very, very kind of realistic and detailed portrait of this young white guttersnipe, but that he was not equipped to do the kind of, you know, fully dimensional character that, you know, a black author could do. So he's, you know, so Jim has become James and it's a great book for people.
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Alison Stewart
Do you think Mark Twain would like James?
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Ron Chernow
You know, I don't know. The reason that I don't know is this, that I was struck by doing the book that Mark Twain was not generous in his comments about other authors. I mean, oh, that's interesting. I mean, you know, he hated Jane Austen, hated George Eliot, on and on and on. He hated Charles Dickens. I mean, oh, that's interesting. Yes. I can't really speak for my, I wouldn't even want to guess how he would react. But there was one thing that, because I've never met Percival Everett, but I've listened to number of his interviews and in one of the interviews he was asked what would you say to people who want to Ben Huck Finn from the schools? And he replied, I would say they've never read the book. You know, so, you know, he understands the kind of, you know, anti slavery spirit of it, whatever the limitations. And Mark Twain probably went as far as a white person could go. And I mean particularly amazing given you know, his own background in a slave owning state at the time. So, you know, one thing that's been very, very nice is when James came out, you know, a million friends sent me an email. My book club is reading James. And then often a month or two later I'd get a follow up. My book club is now reading Huck Finn, you know, so this has been a very, very fruitful dialogue between the two and it renewed interest in Doug Finn, renewed interest in Mark Twain.
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Alison Stewart
You're listening to Ron Chernow, author of the biography Mark Twain, our choice for full bio after the break. The end of Twain's life. That's next. This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. You're listening to Full Bio, our book series where we spend a few days with the author of a deeply researched biography. Our guest is Ron Chernow, the author of Mark Twain. We've arrived at Twain's later years. Mark Twain believed in women's suffrage and the right to vote. He once said, there is nothing comparable to the endurance of a woman. Yet as an older man, he engaged in a behavior that would be deemed unsuitable today. Let's get back into our discussion of Mark Twain with Ron Chernow. After Twain's wife died, he was devastated and he sought the affections of young women he called his angelfish. He was 70 years old. He said he saw them as granddaughters. People would say now that is inappropriate behavior. And his biographers, they've come on both sides what did your research tell you?
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Ron Chernow
Yeah, you know, it starts out okay. So livy dies in 1904. By the following year, he's doing a lot of lecturing. Following year, he announces, I'm only going to lecture at women's colleges. He says, I have the college girl habit. It gets worse, you know. Then a year later, he starts collecting. And collecting was his verb. He said he started collecting teenage girls between 10 and 16. He called them his angelfish. They became members of his aquarium club. He was the admiral of the aquarium club and the soul member. And he spent an enormous, enormous amount of time with these. Much more with time with them than with his own daughters. They would spend entire days and even entire weeks, you know, with him. And he exchanged hundreds of letters with him. Now, on the one hand, you know, I tried to both present how this was perceived at the time, you know, and how we perceive it now at the time. He explained his behavior by saying, I woke up one morning and I realized I had grandfatherly feelings, but no grandchildren, you know, to expend them on. And people regarded this as a charming eccentricity. Endearing, of course, Mark Twain, the bard of, you know, American childhood. Of course he would want to be surrounded by children. In fact, there was a well known actress he knew who showed up at one of his dinner parties dressed as a 12 year old girl. She said, I want to be, you know, a member of the aquarium club. So it was seen in almost this kind of jocular way. He never, I have to point out, he was never once accused of any kind of sexual misbehavior or groping or anything like that. In fact, he was always careful to involve the mothers and the grandmothers who were very proud that their daughters, you know, were spending all this time with Mark Twain. But, you know, having made all those qualifications, we perceive this as really peculiar and disturbing. There's something going on. He said he had grandfatherly feelings. Well, why no boys? You know, why only girls? And you could see we have very kind of detailed accounts of him from his then secretary, Isabel Lyon, who was in her 40s. It was often, oh, she's a piece of work. She's a piece of work. She's often chaperoning the girls. But you could tell from reading her daily diaries there was like an obsessive quality to this. Not only in the amount of time that he spent, but, you know, when the girls were about to arrive, she would portray him nervously pacing in front of the door and looking at his watch. And when is she going to arrive? It was too important. He was too preoccupied with these girls. And, you know, then also he said that he'd been so embittered and disillusioned by life. And he said, you know, they're naive and they're innocent. He had all of these explanations, but I have no doubt how modern readers are going to react to this. But I did, when I was doing the research, I read a biography of Lewis Carroll because there's a certain parallel, like in the case of Lewis Carroll, you know, he was collecting nude photos of girls. He was collecting nude drawings of girls. I mean, there's sort of nothing like that with Mark Twain. But what was sort of going on under the surface psychologically with him? Boy, if we had him on the analytic couch today, yeah, we would have some questions about that for sure.
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Alison Stewart
I did want to ask about Isabel Lyons as we're wrapping up. She was sort of his right hand woman. She had control of the house. She kind of became sort of, we call it a work wife, kind of very much for his life. But she did work for him and she managed to get power of attorney. And it went dark. The relationship went very, very dark to the pilot. People read it, but he did terminate her.
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Ron Chernow
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
What did Isabel reveal about Mark Twain in his old age?
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Ron Chernow
Well, I think, you know, what happened. Okay, so Livy dies. And as I was saying earlier, you know, his wife had really organized his life. He didn't know how to do that himself. And after she died, he said, I don't know how to plan. She did all the planning. You know, see, he's not only bereft emotionally, he's sort of lost in terms of just how to live his life. And then this. He had hired Isabel Lyon because his wife had, over an extended period, died of congestive heart failure. He'd hired Isabel Lyon essentially to be his secretary. And after Livy dies, Isabel Lyon not only is his secretary, but she's assuming all these responsibilities, all these things that Livy had done. You know, she becomes the hostess, she's organizing the household, she decorates his new house, goes kind of on and on, and she really kind of takes over his life. Now, what Mark Twain never admitted was he'd kind of let this happen because Isabel was a single woman, you know, in her early 40s, you know, in an era where woman was 25, they'd start calling her, you know, an old man. So here's this woman who understandably would be concerned about her future and her security. She falls in love with Twain. In fact, her nickname for him, which she used constantly, was the king. And she's kind of shivering with delight. But there's also a designing quality about this as she's kind of taking over the house, taking over his life. So it's a sad story. And actually there have been two detailed books written about her. One very sympathetic, that she had adored. Mark Twain, had served him tirelessly for all these years, and then he boots her out of the house and then another book taking the opposite side, that she got what she deserved. So I'll kind of let people read it. But you know, Mark Twain announced during the last few years of his life, he said, I've worked hard my whole life, I just want to play. And so he doesn't want to take responsibility for anything. It creates a kind of vacuum in which all sorts of terrible things happen. In particular, his youngest daughter, Jean was epileptic. And he really did not have the luxury of opting out of this because he wanted to have a second childhood. And Jean was in many ways the worst casualty because Isabel did not like Jean and wanted to keep Jean out.
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Alison Stewart
Of the house and keep her in a sanitarium. Yeah, he died in April 1910. What changed for you as a writer about how you thought about Mark Twain when you finished the manuscript for this book?
- [35:11]
Ron Chernow
Well, you know, let me go back to when I first developed this Mark Twain obsession. I was 24 years old, I was living in Philadelphia and I saw one night that Hal Holbrooke was giving his one man show. And he stood up there for 90 minutes in the white suit with the cigar and the unruly mustache, and he told one political witticism after another. And that was, you know, for many years that was my image of Mark Twain. And there's truth to it, you know, that he was, he was charming, irreverent, he was hilariously funny, he was perceptive on every topic under the sun. I think, you know, in terms of doing the book, he turned out to be so much more complicated a man, you know, and sort of moody and temperamental and, you know, difficult under the surface. There are so many different sides to him. You never feel that you really quite get to the bottom of the man. It's a little bit humbling for the biographer to say that. And so, so I certainly, maybe someone asked me, did I end up admiring him. And I guess what I would say I was simply amazed by him, amazed what he had created. He was completely, completely self invented. No less than Alexander Hamilton. Actually somewhat similar kind of story, you know, as a Teenager, sort of pretty much, you know, almost orphaned. And he goes out there in the world and creates this personality and sets the world on fire. And he becomes, you know, he's very erudite. He was an autodidact. He educates himself in all sorts of subjects. He was an utterly remarkable man, but he could be, you know, vengeful. There were these dark sides to him. So part of the fun, if that's the right word of doing the book, is that I was wrestling with him every day. You know, who is this man? You know, what is his ultimate nature? Like his relationship with Livyou? Can't ask for a husband who was more tender or devoted. And then he goes and does this crazy business with the angelfish. You know, this is the same man.
- [37:28]
Alison Stewart
What's your favorite Mark Twainism?
- [37:31]
Ron Chernow
Well, there are two that I particularly like. You know, one funny and one wise. The funny one is good friends, good books, and a sleepy conscience. That is the ideal life. And the one that I find very, very wise is he said, the two most important days in anyone's life. The day we are born and the.
- [37:52]
Alison Stewart
Day we find out why Ron Chernow has written the book Mark Twain. Thank you for your time today.
- [37:59]
Ron Chernow
This was great, Allison. Thank you.
- [38:01]
Alison Stewart
Thanks again to Ron Chernow. Full bio is produced by Jordan Loft, engineered by Juliana Fonda, and written by me.
- [38:07]
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- [38:36]
Ron Chernow
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