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All Of It with Alison Stewart
Full Bio: Ron Chernow on the Life of Mark Twain
00:31:14
Biographer Ron Chernow discusses his new biography of celebrated American author Mark Twain.
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- [00:00]
Alison Stewart
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Alison Stewart
Hi, it's Martha Stewart. You know, I spend a lot of time thinking about dirt at 3am at all hours of the day. Really what people don't know is that not all dirt is the same. You need dirt with the right kind of nutrients. Miracle Gro organic raised bed and garden soil is so dense, so full of nutrient rich, high quality ingredients. Miracle Gro is simply the best. This is all of it from wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on the show this week on Thursday will talk with Tony nominated actor Jasmine Amy Rogers about the new Broadway musical Boop, in which Jasmine brings the animated flapper icon Betty Boop to life on stage. Tomorrow we'll talk about the fitness brand SoulCycle and a new podcast that explores how it became an obsession for many New Yorkers. The POD is called Cult of Body and Soul. And then later in the week, we'll also discuss a very important documentary called For Kalief, which explores the efforts of Vanita Browder to seek justice for her son Kalief, who died by suicide in 2015 after spending more than 800 days in solitary confinement on Rikers Island. That's happening this Thursday. That's our plan. 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. Mark Twain, AKA Samuel Clemens, was the first literary celebrity, chernow writes. Mark Twain discarded the image of the writer as a contemplative being living a cloistered existence and thrust himself into the hurly burly of American culture, capturing the wild, uproarious energy throbbing in the heart. Probably no other American author has had such an eventful life. Today we'll get into that life. It all started for him in Missouri. Samuel was left fatherless. At 11 years old, he left school to become a printer's apprentice. He also worked on a steamboat, traveled west with his brother, and found some success in writing. His breakthrough was a story called Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog. Let's get into today's full bio with Ron Chernow, the author of Mark Twain. How did you get into writing biographies, Ron?
- [03:16]
Ron Chernow
Well, you know, I started out as a journalist. For 10 years I worked as a freelance magazine writer. And then for three years I worked for a public policy foundation called the 20th Century Fund. They had to change the name at the millennium. And I was in charge of financial policy studies. And I was reading a lot about Wall street history and reading about the old Wall street of a century ago. There was all these kind of very private, clubby, very discriminatory firms. And this was in the 1980s, and Wall street had become this razzle dazzle world of huge conglomerates. So I was curious how one world had changed into another. And I realized that if I just did a straight history of Wall street, it would be a very tedious fact sheet. So I got this idea which actually worked, that if I took a family or firm that had been at the center of everything that happened on Wall Street, I would be able to engage people in the passions and the interests of these people. Turned out to be the J.P. morgan family and banking empire. And one of the things that I discovered that really hooked me on biography is that when you involve people in a story, when they get caught up in the emotions of these characters, they're able to absorb enormous amount of information. And you can give the history lesson that if it was presented just as straight history, they would not be able to absorb.
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Alison Stewart
Well, let's learn about Mark Twain.
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Ron Chernow
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
He was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835 to Jane Lampton and to John Marshall Clemens, who died when Samuel was just 11 years old. How did his parents meet?
- [04:57]
Ron Chernow
They had met in Kentucky, in southern Kentucky. And they were very different types because he was a sort of cold and aloof person. She had just been jilted by young doctor. She was spirited and vivacious. Loved parties, loved to dance. Turned out to be a very cold and loveless marriage. And so Mark Twain grows up with these two very different examples of parents. He said very interesting things about his father. He said his relationship with his father, they existed in a state of armed neutrality. And he said, my knowledge of my father amounted to little more than an introduction, a rather chilly way of describing his relationship with his father, which gives you some sense of how cold and forbidding he felt. His father was the mother, Jane Lambton Clementons was, you know, she was spirited, she was vivacious, she loved any kind of spectacle, whether it was A circus or a funeral. Young Sam said that she had a disposition of pure sunshine. He said that she was just kind of pure gold. So you could see that he gets all of his emotional sustenance, the mother. And the mother has a wit that is very reminiscent of Mark Twain. In fact, Mark Twain was born in a town called Florida, Missouri. He was a premature baby. He was a sickly runt. In later years, he was having conversation with his mother. And he said to his mother, you must have been the entire time when I was a baby, worried about my health, whether I would survive. And she said, yes, I was the entire time. And Twain said to her, you were afraid I wouldn't make it. And she said to him, with the deadpan exactly that Mark Twain would do, she would say, no, I was afraid that you would.
- [06:46]
Alison Stewart
Well, it's funny because in the book you say that Samuel was like. He was all Lampton.
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Ron Chernow
Yeah, absolutely.
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Alison Stewart
As his description of him, I know when his parents were together, when he was born, how did they end up in Missouri?
- [07:01]
Ron Chernow
Well, they had been in Tennessee. They had been in eastern Tennessee, which is kind of a very mountain, mountainous area. The father failed at one job after another as a storekeeper, as a postmaster. The fact that his father failed at so many businesses, I think left a permanent imprint on then Sam Clemens, later Mark Twain, because it left him with a dread of poverty that never left him. And it made him not only want to be well off, he always was looking for a killing for the big bonanza. And I think it traces back to this sort of dread of poverty that was created in his childhood. He was born in the town of Florida, Missouri, which still located is all the way up in the northeastern corner of Missouri. He said it was a town of 100 people. So that when he was born, he increased the population by 1%. He said there's no one else who ever did something so remarkable, not even Shakespeare. But then he was lucky. When he was 4, they moved to the town of Hannibal, still a very small town in an isolated rural area, but on the Mississippi. And so Mark Twain's boyhood home, which is still there to visit, when you walk out the door and you turn left, they're just a block or two away is this broad, magnificent, shining waterway. And once or twice a day, little puff of smoke would appear in the distance and they would hear the steamboat whistle. And when the steamboat would dock and the steamboat would bring the whole world of people in commerce into town, suddenly this town would come alive. And so, as Mark Twain said, you know the steamboat pilots were royalty on the river. And of course, he ends up becoming one.
- [08:53]
Alison Stewart
I'm curious who took on the role of a paternal figure in his life after his father passed away when he was just 11.
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Ron Chernow
It's an excellent question. Let me tell you how he became a steamboat pilot, because that'll answer the question. He had read a book. He was in his early 20s. He had read a book by a man named William Herndon who had made a 4,000 mile trek through the Amazon valley. And at one point in the book, Herndon talked about the fact that the Incas in the Andes chewed coca leaves, which gave them patience and prodigious strength to work in the mines. Sam decided that he was going to go to Brazil, monopolize the worldwide coca trade and join the ranks of the plutocratic regiment. So he takes a boat down the Mississippi to New Orleans. He said that when he got to New Orleans, he found out that there was no boat to Para, Brazil, as he had expected. And none was expected to leave during that century. But on the boat there was a very experienced pilot named Horace Bixby who offers to teach Sam the steamboat trade for $500, which was a considerable amount at that time. And Sam had been a lack, as we all know from Tom Sawyer. Sam had been a very lackadaisical boy who much more enjoyed playing hooky than going to school. But suddenly he is in training to become a pilot. And so along this 1300 mile stretch of the river, he has to study and master every snag, every shore, you know, every. So what I say in the book is that it gave him a kind of a structure and a discipline to his life that had not had before. And Bixby, although he loved Sam like a father, was a very tough taskmaster, which is frankly what he needed at that point because he was this sort of rascally, you know, mischievous kid who suddenly is taking very seriously this job. And the riverboat pilots were like royalty. And their salary was equal to the salary of the Vice President of the United States. And here he's in his 20s and he later said it was the darling time of my existence. There's never been period like it since. Which must have been news later on to his wife and three daughters.
- [11:07]
Alison Stewart
Oh, she's got stuff coming, don't worry. My guest is Ron Chernow. We are talking about his book, Mark Twain. It is our choice for full bio. What did Samuel Clemens before he got on that steamboat when he was a little kid? What did he want to be when he grew up.
- [11:24]
Ron Chernow
You know, I don't think that there was any specific ambition that he had at that point. You know, one thing Alison, understand about him as a writer, you know, a writer today is likely a person, you know, when they're a teenager, they start scribbling stories. They fantasize being writer. They go up to a fancy college, they take a creative writing course, or they go to the Iowa Workshop or whatever. This is not that kind of story. Because his father dies when he's 11. He ends up not long after leaving school and working as a printer's devil to his older brother Orion, who has a newspaper. And he said, significantly, as a printer's devil, he said acres of good and bad literature passed beneath his gaze. And as any writer will tell you, the best experience, best training you could have as a writer is to read a lot of bad literature, because then you don't make those mistakes. And so he's kind of very much just sort of driven by fortune. And as people who read the book will see, you know, he's a printer's devil. Then he's a steamboat pilot. He's briefly in the Confederate militia, then he's a miner, then he's a journalist. He kind of stumbles into one thing after another. It all ends up. It amounts to a person who is very versatile, who has had all sorts of different experiences, but he never, when he was younger, had a specific blueprint in mind of what he wanted his life to be.
- [12:49]
Alison Stewart
I'm glad you brought up his brother. Orion.
- [12:52]
Ron Chernow
Orion.
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Alison Stewart
Orion. Thank you. There were six siblings. Most of the children died as children, as teens. There was Samuel, his older brother, and his sister Pamela.
- [13:04]
Ron Chernow
Pamela. For some reason, they all had strange pronunciations.
- [13:08]
Alison Stewart
Pamela.
- [13:08]
Ron Chernow
Forgive me for correcting.
- [13:10]
Alison Stewart
No, thank you. Please do. Would you share a story about his two siblings that would explain something about Samuel Clemens.
- [13:23]
Ron Chernow
Well, he had a younger brother named Henry, whom he adored. And he said that aside from his wife, he had kind of a more perfect understanding with Henry than anyone else. Now, Sam was already working as a pilot on the river, and Henry got a job on one of the steamboats and was in a steamboat accident. The boiler blew up, threw Henry and all the passengers into the river. Now, the interesting thing about the story is this, that Mark Twain had had a dream prior to this explosion of walking into a room and seeing Henry in a casket with white flowers and then a single red flower in the middle. His brother is injured in this accident, and he goes to, I think it was Memphis, where all of the surviving passengers were taken and his brother died there. And the letters that Sam wrote to his family about it are heart wrenching. He said, there are gray hairs in my head where there were none before. It was a love, I think, of an unusual intensity between two brothers. And here was somebody who was, on the one hand, capable of fantastic passion and loyalty to people. And on the other hand, numerous points in his life was captive of vendettas. He was just a master of vendetta. He would have a vengeance that would never end. So that was kind of. So he lost the brother that he most loved. His older brother orion, who was 10 years older, was poor. Orion wanted to be a writer and an orator. Imagine having Mark Twain as your younger brother. And Orion was a dreamer. He was very impractical and had the clouds. And he sort of changed his politics every week and he changed his religion every week. But he was actually Sam's first boss. And he had promised to pay Sam money. The sprinter's devil. Sam never saw the money. And he was permanently bitter towards his brother. But his brother really saves him the following way. Okay, so he loves the life on the river. And then the Civil War breaks out, shuts commerce on the river for two weeks. Mark Twain is in a pro Confederate ragtag militia in eastern Missouri. He said that he knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating. So he doesn't cover himself with glory. He's very conflicted about the whole conflict. He is opposed to secession at this point. He's not necessarily opposed to slavery, though. But then, luckily for him, Orion has just been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. So he brings Sam along as to be his private secretary. But when they get there, there's not any secretarial work immediately to be done. So Sam decides that he's going to become a miner. And they were in Virginia City, which was the site of the Comstock load, the biggest silver mining boom in American history. And Sam goes out there with pickaxe. He, you know, loses every penny. And then he gets an offer to be the city editor of a newspaper there called the Territorial Enterprise. Now, he was so broke that he later said that if he had been offered a job translating the Talmud from the original Hebrew, he would have taken it. So he becomes a city actor. He had. He would write these satiric scripts for his brother's papers. I mean, he had had things published before. He'd even had some things published in the Territorial Enterprise under the name of Josh. But suddenly he's the city editor. He has no real background as a journalist. So he said his first day in the office, he was filled with panic because he had no idea how he was going to fill up his first column. And then he said, a desperado shot a man in the saloon and joy returned once more, his first article. And then he writes these articles that are kind of full of hoaxes and told tales. And he engages in the rivalry, swapping insults with other journalists around town. And so you can see him beginning to come to life as a writer. And he has his own kind of cynical, anarchic sense of humor and a fantastic verbal richness.
- [17:59]
Alison Stewart
You've been listening to our full bio conversation with Ron Chernow. We'll learn more about Mark Twain's life as husband and father after the break. This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart. 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. We've arrived at the sweetest part of Mark Twain's life, the love story he had with Olivia Louise Langdon. She was his wife, his editor, his etiquette teacher. They had four children together, one boy who died as a baby and three girls survived. Twain said of love, love is not a product of reasonings and statistics. It just comes. None knows whence and cannot explain its. Here's Ron Chernow. He knew a man named Charles Langdon who had a sister, Olivia Livy. They were heirs. I believe it was a coal fortune, is that correct?
- [19:13]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, it was coal. Mostly coal, timber and railroads.
- [19:17]
Alison Stewart
So from reading your book, you get a sense that Sam and Livy were a true love story.
- [19:24]
Ron Chernow
True love story, yeah. And I think she saved him. Okay, so he was about 10 years older and two significant things when they met. He had seen, he had met Livy's brother, Charlie Langdon on the Quaker City. It was this cruise to Europe and the Holy Land. He had a little ivory miniature of her. And Twain said from the time he saw this kind of, you know, beautiful, intelligent, sensitive face staring out from him, that Livy Langdon was never out of his mind. Indeed, she became his adored wife. Now, Livy was very, very frag fragile 1 and 2. She was an heiress. And so the Langdons, who were a remarkable family, were naturally very protective of Livy. And Mark Twain, in order to woo her, resorted to the best weapon in his arsenal, which was worth. So he sends Livy 200 letters, 200 long letters. She actually numbers them. There are so many of them. And this goes on for a couple of years. And finally the Langdons realize that this tornado that has swept into their lives is not going to go away. And so Mr. Langdon asked Mark Twain, who had lived in Nevada and in San Francisco, if he could have some of his friends out west write letters of recommendation for him. So Mr. Langdon calls in, Twain says, you know, that he's gotten the 10 letters, that all of them say the same thing, that Mark Twain was idle and lecherous and drunken and. And disorganized. And he says to Mark twain, he said, don't you have a friend in the world? Mark Twain shrugs his shoulders and says, apparently not. And then Mr. Langdon says to him, I know you better than they do. Take the girl, you know. And so he blesses the marriage. And it was such a happy marriage. And I went through God knows how many letters between them. There was scarcely a letter that she wrote to him that did not end. I worship you. I adore you. I idolize you. And the love was fully reciprocated. There was never any kind of sense of scandal about his womanizing or anything like that. But that marriage really gave him a life because she was very refined socially. She had an exquisite sense of tact and propriety, as you say.
- [21:46]
Alison Stewart
What did she give to him as a man?
- [21:49]
Ron Chernow
Well, I think that I would. In two words, anger management. I mean, here's a very, very volatile personality. I can't tell you how many letters there are that Mark Twain wrote, Like the morning after a dinner party, saying, the madam tells me I may have been a bit brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I want to apologize. She trained him. If he sat down and he wrote a very impetuous, angry letter, which he was willing to do. She trained him to stuff it in the drawer and wait and then write another one when he cooled off. Even she made him presentable in polite society. The thing that I adored most was that they had a system of color coded cards. At a dinner party, she flashed a card that was red. It meant, would you stop monopolizing the woman on your right? If it was blue, it meant, are you going to sit there all night and not talk? And the daughters called this mama, dusting off papa, as well they should. Yeah. And he said, very accurately, he said, living edited my manuscripts. And then she edited me. You know, I mean, he was from this backwater town, this rather kind of rough backwater town, and he really didn't know how to behave.
- [23:02]
Alison Stewart
It's interesting, though, because there was A part where you said that his relationship with his mother taught him how to trust women. And it seemed like that's what he believed was his relationship with Livy as well.
- [23:17]
Ron Chernow
Yes. In fact, you know, one thing that I noticed in the book, Mark Twain was extremely sociable. I mean, he's a goes on in the years. It seems like he's the toastmaster at every banquet in town. I mean, he knows hundreds, he knows thousands of people. But I was struck by the, you know, the paucity of friends. Two friends that he had, Reverend Joseph Twitchell and Hartford William Dean Howells, the novelist. But he doesn't have a lot of really intimate male friends. But I think that because of that upbringing he can open up with women and women enable him to express much fuller, much richer range of emotions than with men. And also, as he said that he was not demonstrative. He only saw his parents kiss once. I think when one of the children died. And the daughter said that even when Mark Twain was with his wife, if he held her hand, he would have this kind of sheepish smile on his face. He really had not learned how to, to do that from his upbringing. But I think that because of certainly the cold father, Livy was very, very affectionate and I think just opened him up emotionally. Although it is still a weakness of his writing in general, the failure to portray mature women. He loves writing about teenage girls, but not mature women the way he loves writing about mature men. Pretty wild.
- [24:56]
Alison Stewart
Most people in our area will think of the Mark Twain House and Museum in Hartford. First of all, did they live in. They lived in that house.
- [25:05]
Ron Chernow
Yes, they lived in that house. And I mean, I don't know if there was any other writer in the 19th century who was living in that kind of Gilded Age splendor. The house had 25 rooms, 11,500 square feet. They had a very loyal staff of six servants. So they were living in almost inconceivable grandeur.
- [25:31]
Alison Stewart
They were sort of 1% y, very much so.
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Ron Chernow
And you know what people often misunderstand about Mark Twain? You know, his first novel which he co wrote with Charles Dudley Wonder was entitled the Gilded Age. It was that book, that title, that gave us the Gilded Age. Because in his writings he was constantly satirizing the plutocrats of his day. People somehow imagine that he was not one of them. But as I say in the book, is that when he was not satirizing the plutocrats, he was doing absolutely everything in his power to, to become one of them. He was as money mad as any of the characters that he satirized, maybe more so.
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Alison Stewart
It was interesting to see how many servants they had.
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Ron Chernow
Yeah. And, you know, also, it was. It was a very difficult situation for Livy. Of course, Livy had grown up, you know, a rich kid, but they had a very active social life. Very lavish dinner parties. And she'd been very frail and very sickly when she was a girl, and she never kind of completely outgrew that. And it was very, very taxing on her. I mean, their social life was so active that even with a house full of servants, she was supervising them. And she wrote a letter that has a real kind of feminist. She writes an angry letter to her mother and says, a woman nowadays has to know how to dress, know how to bring up the children, how to cook, socialize, how to be a patron of the arts, how to sit on a philanthropic. She has this long, long list of things that she's expected to do. And so really, the burden of not only taking care of that house, but of overseeing this very active social life is all falling on her. And Mark Twain is aware that it's taking a toll on her, both psychologically and physically. But it's like with a lot of things, he can't help himself.
- [27:38]
Alison Stewart
They had three daughters who lived past their teenage years and a son who passed away at 19 months. He was their firstborn. How did the death of their son affect the family?
- [27:51]
Ron Chernow
It was terrible. You know, Langdon was his name, named after the in laws. And Langdon was late to walk, he was late to talk. It was. You know, it's funny, Alison, because we all know that infant mortality was much higher in the 19th century. So sometimes people say, well, they got used to it. They were tougher than we were. But when you think of the morning, the terrible mourning that they went through, I mean, particularly Livy Schrodzfer sad letter. She said, I feel my life is to be, you know, on one long road to the cemetery. And she had real sense for mortality. It took them a long time to recover from it. I think that they were smart. They immediately then went on and had three daughters who were healthy, at least at first. But this is a family that was plagued. Plagued by bad health. And it's a strange story because on the one hand, it's all these kind of literary triumphs. And I think people will find themselves, I hope, laughing throughout the book. But it's also a life that is filled with an unusual amount of personal calamity. Spoiler alert. By the time Mark Twain dies, so not only buried A son and a brother. But he's also buried two of his three daughters and his wife. So he just went through just insufferable, insufferable amount of sadness.
- [29:22]
Alison Stewart
It's interesting because his daughters were Susie and Jean. But I think we know the most about Clara because she survived the longest. But I wondered, was there something else? There's a reason that we know more about Clara. Maybe not.
- [29:38]
Ron Chernow
Clara was the middle daughter. And so Mark Twain dies in 1910. By then, you know, the two other daughters had died. Clara survives until 1962 and, you know, writes a lot of books. She had a very strangely competitive relationship with her father. She always complained that she didn't like being Mark Twain's daughter. She said that if she walked into a room or a reception, that's exactly how she was perceived. She said, I was always like a footstool, you know, in the room. And there's always kind of quiet resentment against her father. In fact, she pursued. She was talented. She pursued a career, first as a concert pianist and then as a singer when she made her debut. I'll tell you something about their relationship. You know, when she made her debut singing recital in Connecticut, she agonized over whether or not to have her father come out on stage at the end. He, of course, wanted to. He loved attention. So she goes back and forth, and finally she says to him, okay, you can come out at the end. And then he comes out on stage there at the end, and he starts talking and talking and talking, and he starts talking about how when he made his debut as a lecturer in San Francisco in 1866, and he goes on and on and on with all these funny stories, you know, so in the subsequent days, the reviews of the recital were all about. Mark Twain talks about making his debut in San Francisco. You know, there was nothing that, as he himself admitted, he had an appetite for notice and notoriety, even when he was, you know, boy. He later said, boys, he said, celebrity is a thing that a boy wants more than anything. He said he would be a clown in the circus or a pirate or sell himself to Satan in order to attract attention. And throughout his life, that never changes. He wants to attract attention. Attention. And so Clara always felt herself in this massive shadow cast by her father, who was not the most famous. I mean, he was most famous American domestically, but also worldwide.
- [31:59]
Alison Stewart
On tomorrow's full bio, Mark Twain on politics, race and gender.
- [32:05]
Ron Chernow
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Alison Stewart
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Ron Chernow
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