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The Book Review
Ron Chernow on His New Mark Twain Biography
00:42:47
The biographer Ron Chernow has written about the Rockefellers and the Morgans. His book about George Washington won a Pulitzer Prize. His book about Alexander Hamilton was adapted into a hit Broadway musical. Now, in “Mark Twain,” Chernow turns to the life of the author and humorist who became one of the 19th century’s biggest celebrities and, along the way, did much to reshape American literature in his own image. On this week’s episode of the podcast, Chernow tells host Gilbert Cruz how he came to write about Twain and what interested him most about his subject.
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- [00:00]
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- [00:36]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm Gilbert Cruise, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review Podcast. It's possible that you know Ron Chernow as the Author of the 2004 biography Alexander Hamilton, the source material for the smash Broadway musical. Of course, Ron is much more than just a Hamilton man. He is the Pulitzer Prize winning author of several other major biographies, including Washington A Life Grant, about the President and Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant, and the life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. His new book, Mark Twain, looks at one of the most famous American citizens of the 19th century, one of the most revered American writers of all time. Ron, welcome back to the Book Review podcast.
- [01:30]
Ron Chernow
It's lovely to join you, Gilbert. Thank you.
- [01:33]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, for any nonfiction writer, picking the next topic can be a heavy task, but you're picking someone who you're going to be married to for many years. So can you remember approximately or precisely, if you can, the moment when you said, Mark Twain is my guy?
- [01:49]
Ron Chernow
Well, it's interesting that you use the marriage analogy, because whenever I address writing students about biography, I say, this is far and away the most important decision that you will make. Choice of topic. And I say that it's a lot like marriage. If you pick the right person, nothing can go wrong. If you pick the wrong person, nothing can go right. Everything flows out of that. I can pinpoint the moment when my Mark Twain obsession began. I was a freelance magazine writer in Philadelphia, circa 1975, and I saw a poster one night of Hal Holbrook, Mark Twain tonight, exclamation point. And I went off, I think, knowing nothing about, about Hal Holbrooke and a little bit more about Mark Twain. And Holbrooke stood up there with the white suit and the cigar and the mustache, and for 90 minutes he dispensed the most wonderful political witticisms. And I still remember a lot of them. He said that, quoting Twain, there's no distinctly Native American criminal class except for the Congress. Or he said, pretend that you're an idiot and pretend that you're a congressman. But I repeat myself and there was something so fresh and funny and tart about this. We tend to think of American culture as gung ho and optimistic. And here was somebody who reveled in these cynical wisecracks. And the wisecracks had staying power, which is interesting because usually humor is very topical and the laugh disappears along with the circumstances that gave rise to it. One interesting thing I found late in Mark Twain's career, somebody gave him an anthology of American humorists, and there were about 40 or 50 people in it. And he noticed that he was the only one who was still remembered at all. The rest had passed away. So that kind of started. And I think it's interesting, Gilbert, because I had done two degrees in English literature. But I think the thing that triggered this Mark Twain mania in me was more Mark Twain the platform artist, Mark Twain the political pundit, Mark Twain the original celebrity, even more than Mark Twain the novelist or short story writer.
- [03:58]
Gilbert Cruz
Now, what would you say, having done this many times at this point, what are the factors that go into choosing a subject? You say you went to see Hal Holbrooke. Maybe it set you off on a path. But then do you have to think, okay, how many books have been written about this person? What is the archive situation? What can I bring to this?
- [04:17]
Ron Chernow
This may sound rather grandiose, but I like to think that all of the books that I've done are people who created building blocks of American culture. So I did the Morgans, the Warburgs, the Rockefellers, the rise of American finance and heavy industry. Then I slid into Founding Fathers and suddenly was doing American Revolution, Constitutional Convention, the origins of our political system. Then I did Grand Civil War, Reconstruction with Mark Twain. I really felt that I was doing something comparable for American literature. As Ernest Hemingway famously said, modern American literature began with a little book called Doug Finn. So that was one thing. I felt that he was very seminal in terms of bringing to American literature, really bringing the heartland alive, writing about ordinary people in the vernacular, in taking this wild, throbbing kind of madcap culture of America's small towns and rural areas and really introducing that into fiction. A couple of other things that I always look for in books, I have something of a contrarian streak. For instance, with Alexander Hamilton. I'd read a lot of books and it was always the same saga. It was the. The sacred Thomas Jefferson, upholder of civil liberties. And then there was this villainous man named Alexander Hamilton who's constantly trying to undercut him. And most importantly, you already put your finger on it, is I'm a Documents, person. Some historians and biographers are thrilled by artifacts. They're thrilled visiting the home, visiting the battlefield, whatever I communicate with my people via words. So I'm looking for a very rich documentary trail. And over the last 50 years, out at the University of California at Berkeley, this fabulous Mark Twain Papers project that they have amassed so much information about him that we now have 12,000 letters written by Mark Twain and his family. We have 19,000 letters written to them. We have 50 thick notebooks, hundreds of unfinished and unpublished manuscripts, on and on and on. And for me, I devour documents. So this was really ideal. And I felt that when I go back, a lot of the earlier Mark Twain biographies that were really very good, the resources that they had compared to what we have right now, really rather paltry in comparison. So I was able to, particularly once he's in his adolescence, able to reconstruct his life almost on a daily basis.
- [06:48]
Gilbert Cruz
Writing history, writing biographies, can be so heady. Talk to me about the feelings. Talk to me about the emotion of finding an amazing letter that you did not expect to find.
- [06:57]
Ron Chernow
Oh, it's excitement. Being a biographer is like being what they used to call a second story man. It's like you're breaking into someone's house in the night and you start rummaging around in the drawers. And you will always find things that shock you. If you go into a biography excessively admiring the person, you're going to be disillusioned. If you go in really hating the person, you'll find unexpected, redeeming features. So I think that I could just give you one moment. I talk a lot in the book about Mark Twain's adventures or maybe misadventures in business. He was a compulsive speculator. He said, I've always been the easy prey of a cheap adventure. He said, I have to speculate, such being my nature. Speculations got so bad, he not only lost his own fortune, but his wife's inherited fortune investing in this typesetting machine, the page typesetter, that he thought would revolutionize the business. You also always thought that he was much smarter than his publishers, so he started his own publishing company. Anyway, the page typesetter business and his publishing house both went bankrupt more or less simultaneously. So he is forced to undertake this around the world global tour, which was very grueling. He was forced to live in Europe for nine years to try to economize. So here his speculation has had this really devastating effect on his life. And I was startled because he lived in Vienna for Two years. We don't tend to associate Mark Twain with Vienna. He lived in Vienna for two years and he finds out one day that someone wants to sell the American rights to a machine called the Raster. The Raster was a machine that would print on textiles and carpets and things like that. And he becomes obsessed with it. In 24 hours, he imagines he's become the world's leading authority in this field. And he writes to a man named Henry H. Rogers, who was a mogul at Standard Oil who had rescued him from bankruptcy, and he said we should buy up the world rights to this. Rogers asked someone in the business who actually knows about this, who says that this invention is worthless. But as I was reading it, it was really a man who was in the grip of a compulsion. He had not only put himself but his family through such misery because of his failed speculative investments. And here he's ready to plunge in all over again. That, for me was a major moment of revelation. And it made me realize that I was dealing with someone who was not just, let's say, an unlucky investor, but someone who was really, I guess he would be in a 12 step program now.
- [09:28]
Gilbert Cruz
I really was fascinated by how much of his life seemed to have been affected by paying off debts or by bad speculations. Obviously, most people, when they think of Mark Twain, they think of him as an author. They don't think of him as someone who had a bunch of wacky ideas, took a lot of money and lost it big.
- [09:49]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, now he was obsessed with money. He grew up in this small town of Hannibal, Missouri. His father, who died when Mark Twain was 11, must have failed in business four or five times. So he was haunted by the fear of poverty. He was haunted by the fear of downward mobility. And so even when he sold the rights to his first book, the Innocence Abroad, he writes to his publisher in Hartford of how important the money is to him. He said, I can hardly exaggerate how important this topic is for him. And usually when I speak to writing students and they ask for my advice, I always have one piece of advice, one big piece of advice for them, which is keep the overhead low. There's no more unstable or irregular life than that of a writer. Mark Twain builds up this tremendous overhead. He made a lot of money with book royalties. He made a lot of money with lecture fees. He marries an heiress. They create a 25 room house in Hartford, you know, with six servants. So he's always carrying this tremendous weight and it really begins to interfere with his writing. He Writes a very pathetic letter to his mother. He's in his 40s. And he said life has become a very badgering and harassing feeling a situation for me, he said, because of business worries. He also says that he suffers from the persecution of kindly letters from well meant strangers. That he was constantly barraged with this. And throughout his life he's just obsessed with money. And when he has it, he spends it, he gambles it. And actually he and his wife Livy, they were just incorrigible spendthrops. They would go off on a trip to Europe. You'd read that they would come back like 25 crates full of merchandise that they had bought for the house. And this unfortunately was putting tremendous psychological pressure on him and was really very damaging to his work. Again folks, any writers out there keep the overhead low. Learn this cautionary tale for the life of Mark Twain.
- [11:54]
Gilbert Cruz
There's a lot to learn from the life of Mark Twain. Clearly you once said in an interview that the people who interest me as biographical subjects are the people who I'm going to wrestle with. I'm curious where the wrestling happened with Twain or what are some places where that wrestling happened.
- [12:11]
Ron Chernow
Well, you know, it was okay. So my. I was saying I first fell in love with him when I saw Hal Holbrook imitating him, personating him. And my first impression of Mark Twain was of someone charming, genial, rather irresistible to me. His wit has always been irresistible to me. But then as I got into doing the book, I realized that there was like another layer of emotions below that. And it was someone who was moody, who was temperamental, who was extremely volatile even. He said, my emotions veer from one extreme to another. You often didn't realize he had such a sharp witness and he was so quick. He often didn't realize how hurtful his wit could be. There's a fascinating letter that he wrote to William Dean Howells when his three daughters were teenagers. And he said, I just had a thunderbolt. My daughter's told me that their entire lives they've been afraid of me. It shouldn't have been such a shock to him because he had a rougher style. This was in his wit. You could see it in the writing. Imagine being on the receiving end of some of those things. And in fact, he was very lucky in his choice of wife, Livy Langdon, because Livy was very prim and refined. She had an exquisite sense of tact and propriety. And Twain would just sometimes advertently, but more often inadvertently hurt people. I can't tell you how many letters there are in the Twain archive written the morning after dinner party. Dear Madam, my wife tells me that I may have been too sharp and brusque with you last night. And if so, I didn't mean it and I'm sorry. And so she. He said that when he first met Livy, there was about a 10 year age difference, so she's in early 20s, he's in early 30s. And he said I was a mighty rough course customer. And he made this wonderful statement. He said, Livy not only edited my manuscripts, but she edited me. And it was really true. And she taught him how to behave in polite society growing up in this backwater town. And in fact, they even had this system. I don't know if she would refer to this verbally or actually hold up the cards.
- [14:17]
Gilbert Cruz
This was a great detail.
- [14:18]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. And so that if they were sitting at a dinner party, the red card would mean, are you going to monopolize the lady on your right all the time? Or the blue card would mean, are you going to sit there not talking all night? And he'd really not grown up with fine manners. And so the daughters used to. I mean, they would laugh hysterically as they watched this happening. They called it mother dusting off father. But she had a lot of patience with him. I mean, he blew into her life like a tornado. You can imagine. In fact, he wrote her when they met, 200 love letters. She actually numbered them. There was so many of them. And so anyone else, I think would have been scared away.
- [14:57]
Gilbert Cruz
It seems like she had infinite patience.
- [14:59]
Ron Chernow
Infinite patience, yeah. And even when he gambled away, her inheritance was millions of dollars in contemporary money. There's not a single letter and we have abundant correspondence. She never called him on it. She never threw it in his face. What wife would not at a moment of anger, bring that one up? So it was true love. And as Twain himself noted, after she died, he said there was never a single letter from her that didn't end. I worship you, I idolize you, I adore you. And it was really honestly meant. But she really had to put up with a lot of flaws. It was fully reciprocated. He adored her. He was just very lucky that he found her.
- [15:39]
Gilbert Cruz
So for you as a writer, the wrestling was man of genius who could act like a child well into his older years.
- [15:47]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. And also what was very difficult, and I had some inkling of this at the beginning, but it was even more than I thought. He would have vendettas against people. He was one of these People.
- [15:56]
Gilbert Cruz
He had so many grudges, so many grudges.
- [15:58]
Ron Chernow
And it would start out he would fall in love with people and you could see him setting himself up for disappointment. So one that I spent a lot of time on the book is Bret Hart. Bret Hart. They were just about the same age, but they met in San Francisco. But Bret Hart was much further along in his career. So it was Bret Hart who was the most famous young writer at that point, not Mark Twain. Mark Twain thought that Bret Hart deserved it. Anyway. They had a very complicated, crazy relationship. They ended up collaborating on a play. The collaboration went disastrously. Bret Hart moved up to Twain's house in Hartford. Twain didn't like some of the wisecracks that Bret Hart had about his wife and about his house and other things. And they finally have it out. Well, he goes berserk on Bret Hart and he says, Bret Harte never had an honest idea in his life. He's a thief, he's a sot, he's a snot. And then he says Bret Hart is a man without a country. Said, no, that's too strong a term. He's an invertebrate without a country. And of course he was the master of the put down. But one of the things that was difficult about Mark Twain and something that I could not figure out, I wish I had him on the analytic couch, was that, you know, with most of us we all get angry with people and usually what happens in the face of right, you know, we tell them off and that clears the air one way or another. And gradually the emotions subsides, you know, and a few weeks later we can't even imagine whether all the fuss was about Mark Twain. The wounds never healed. I don't know why this was the case. And in fact he would try to work out these feelings of hostility by writing, writing letters, writing in his journal. But that did not seem to relieve the feeling at all. If anything, it almost seemed to inflame it. So it was one thing that I could not understand about him because I've never seen someone who would brood to that extent on a perceived injustice. And usually he did this four month tour with a wonderful writer from New Orleans, George Washington. Cable starts out, they love each other. And then he's upset by one thing or another that Cable is charging the laundry to the tour. He feels cable is stealing more stage time than he has. Cable is keeping the Sabbath, which is throwing the schedule off. And by the end he's saying cable is the pitifulest human louse. I have ever seen. So the statements that he would make be very extreme, but of course, part of his whole career with exaggeration and that exaggerated quality. You see it in his personal relationships as well.
- [18:46]
Gilbert Cruz
We've all met maybe people who just can't let something go. They pick up on a slight and it lingers with them and it lasts. And to someone who's not of that type, it seems slightly insane, but they can't forget it. There's a type.
- [19:01]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. And also, and this I have seen with other people, People who really know how to dish it out can take it themselves. It is a paradox. Because Mark Twain could be so brutal in terms of putting down other people. You did not want to tangle with them because he was much better verbally than you were. So you would think that somebody who was accustomed to that rough style of play would have a thick skin himself, which was not the case. He had a very thin skin throughout his life.
- [19:33]
Gilbert Cruz
I was actually curious about this. He is known for so many beautiful pieces of wit that he wrote down. But those are things that you could cross out, massage, work on. Was he like that in everyday life? That things just wonderful lines just come to him?
- [19:48]
Ron Chernow
It's an interesting question. Cause on the one hand, he was tremendously spontaneous on almost any topic under the sun. Reporters would gather around him and he could come up with something that was, you know, funny and pertinent on almost any topic under the sun. On the other hand, he started, actually started with his novel Pudd' nhead Wilson, that I think it was 35 chapters each. 35 chapter. Each of 35 chapters starts with Pudd' nhead Wilson's calendar. And it's one of these maxims. And that starts a period that really lasts for the rest of his life where he is self consciously minting these Mark Twain quotes. I mean, we quote Mark Twain all the time.
- [20:26]
Gilbert Cruz
What great market.
- [20:27]
Ron Chernow
Because he was manufacturing Mark Twain, because. And you could see, I found this interesting in his notebook. You could see him sometimes giving 5, 10, 15 different versions of a particular quote until he got the wording exactly right. So that surprised me a little bit. Because they were things and he wanted them to seem handed like he had. That was so fresh. He just come up with it. But he worked pretty hard. It was also when I started doing the book, since I've done a lot of lecturing in my own life, I thought, oh, Mark Twain is the most spontaneous man ever. That must have been a piece of cake for him. But found out that he would memorize speeches down to the smallest detail, and it would even mark something that was meant to come off as a kind of ironic, spontaneous aside. All of that had been planned in advance for the audience. He did have. One of his recurring dreams was about lecturing. He would be on the stage and he would be standing there in his shirt tails. And so there was perhaps more anxiety than we realized when he was on the stage.
- [21:38]
Gilbert Cruz
We'll be right back.
- [21:52]
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- [22:21]
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- [22:51]
Gilbert Cruz
Welcome back. This is the Book Review podcast and I'm Gilbert Cruz. I'm joined this week by Ron Chernow, famed biographer this time of Mark Twain, great American author. There was another very interesting thing about this book, which was how much of his fame seemed to come from being a platform artist, a platform performer, basically a humorous lecturer of a sort. He would come into towns, he would go on these tours across the country or later in his life around the world and he would sell out theaters in halls and he would just get up there and give a speech or read from his book. And a not insignificant amount of his income at certain points of his life came through that.
- [23:29]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, actually it was more lucrative for him to be on the stage than to write books for sure. And from his first he was like any first time lecturer, he was petrified. The first speech he gave McGuire's Opera House in San Francisco, 1866. So he creates these hilarious posters that say doors open at 7, the trouble begins at 8. And then he had a lot of variants. One of the variants was doors open at 7, the orgies begin at 8. Another one was the insurrection begins at 8. My favorite one was he had a poster that promised that he would devour a child in the presence of the audience if there was a lady kindly enough to volunteer her infant for the occasion. His biggest problem I discovered, and anyone who's done a lot of lecturing will be able to identify with this, is that he would go into a town. A lot of these were sponsored speeches. And the richest person in the town, who would be the sponsor, would meet him at the train station but not let him go bleach onto. And then they would go to the lecture hall. And that rich sponsor would introduce Mark Twain and would drone on and on and on. And as good as Mark Twain was, he said, once you've lost the audience, if the person introduces you, goes on for 15 minutes, no matter how good you are, you've lost them. And so what he did was he made it a condition of his speeches that he would introduce himself. Now you're wondering how he did it. And there were two particularly funny devices. Number one, this is when he was out west in the Nevada and California mining towns. Audience would be waiting for him to appear. Stage would be empty, and suddenly there'd be a commotion in front. And a dusty old miner would stand up and he would turn to the audience and he would say, this Mark Twain don't know. The feller said, know only two things about him. He's never been in the penitentiary, and I don't know why. And then Mark Twain would come out. The other thing that he would do, and he could only do this when people still did not recognize his face, is he would come out on the stage again, no introduction. He would come out on the stage and he would stand to the corner like he was the house manager, not the speaker. And he'd say to the audience, I'm sorry, I have bad news. Mark Twain's train is running many hours late and he won't be able to appear tonight. Groans in the audience and then he would say, on the other hand, we have a substitute speaker named Samuel Langhorne Clemens. Then he would spin around and make the audience realize that indeed he's Samuel Langhorne Clemens was Mark Twain. And then they would all cheer. So he was a very imaginative guy in everything that he did, and he played successfully audiences all over the world. In fact, one problem that he had, even when he was still in his 40s, there were already Mark Twain impersonators. And these Mark Twain impersonators, they were all over the place. They were actually booking lecture fees and getting up there and doing Mark Twain. And friends there would write to him, heard you were in Adelaide this week. He said, no, I've been in London for the last year.
- [26:35]
Gilbert Cruz
It's like having the Beatles cover band while the Beatles are still around.
- [26:37]
Ron Chernow
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It was very similar.
- [26:40]
Gilbert Cruz
You have written, as you said at the beginning, about sort of American political and financial titans. Literally, in the case of one of your books called Titan, you've written about founding fathers. How did you make the turn to American artists? And what did you think at the beginning you might have to do differently when you're thinking about the life of a person who is creating?
- [27:04]
Ron Chernow
No, it's a good question. I have to remember I didn't study history in school. I did two degrees in English literature. So everything that I've written about has been self taught. And actually, when I first started writing books, I told my agent, Melanie, that I wanted to do literary biographies. And she said to me, said, well, Ron, I have to warn you that writers love to write biographies of other writers, but readers don't like to read them.
- [27:27]
Gilbert Cruz
You know, oh my God.
- [27:28]
Ron Chernow
But she said, if you want to do this for a living, you might want it. So anyway, this was always on my mental agenda that I wanted to do writer. Also when I decided to do Mark Twain, because people would say, oh, this is so different. And what I said to them, and I think that there was some truth to it, I said, I don't think that the experience of the book is going to be quite as different as you think. Yes, I'm going to be talking about all of his fiction, nonfiction, but there's going to be a lot of business in it. There's going to be a lot of politics in it. He was political certainly starting the 1870s to the end of his life. So there's a lot of politics, there's a lot of society. Also, I was very drawn to the family saga. I think this was the greatest family saga. He's talking about the adoring, the mutual adoration of Mark Twain and Livy Langdon. But just to see him through his relationship with the three daughters, because the three daughters, you know, when they're teenagers, they see him as this magical figure. A little bit scary, but magical. But he has a lot of difficulty as they make the transition to adulthood. He really doesn't know. He knows how to deal with girls. He does not know how to deal with women. And I think one of the things I try to do as a biographer is, I think, to try to see this person through as many different eyes as possible. And then I think readers have the ability, as we do in life. We see people in a lot of different moods. We hear a lot of stories about them, but somehow we put that together into a coherent picture. But I think that seeing him not just through his wife's eyes, but. But seeing him through the often critical perspective of the three daughters really, I think, brings a lot of dimension to the portrait of him that had not been maybe in some of the earlier biographies.
- [29:12]
Gilbert Cruz
Were you able, speaking as someone, as you say, who studied literature, were you able to dig into the texts in a way that felt as natural to you as digging into financial documents or the Federalist Papers? The way that.
- [29:28]
Ron Chernow
Well, I didn't try. I did not try for this to be a biography of literary criticism. So what I wanted to do, I actually did write about every book and all the major stories that he did, maybe some of them were not worth even discussing, but I would try to talk about the books because it's a biography more in the sense of what this tells us about Mark Twain at that given moment or what might have been happening in his book that would also. One reason that the book ended up so long is there were a lot of very funny things that Mark Twain wrote. Minor pieces, forgotten pieces, unpublished pieces, you know, And I would read something and I would say to myself, if I don't put this in, it's lost forever. If I do put it in, it becomes part of Mark Twain law. Even in the last weeks of his life, he wrote something that I adore. It was called Etiquette for the Afterlife. Here he's thinking about the afterlife and the etiquette for the afterlife. It's how to behave when you're with St. Peter at the pearly gates. He said, when you see St. Peter, don't speak to him first. That's not your place. Let him speak to you. He said, it's okay if you ask Peter for his autograph. There's no harm in that. He said, but don't tell him it's one of the penalties of greatness. He's heard that line before. And then he says, you're standing before the gates of heaven. Leave the dog out. He said, heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and the dog would go in. This is too good to resist. And there were dozens and dozens of these things. So I know that it expanded the length of the book.
- [30:56]
Gilbert Cruz
I did not bring up the length of the book. You brought up the length of the book. So how do you balance this feeling of I need to be as comprehensive as possible with I also am trying to write my own version of literature. I'm trying to write a good story, and I'm trying to write it in a way that is. That is going to last as well, in its own way.
- [31:15]
Ron Chernow
Yeah. I think if maybe there's one thing that I've learned as a biographer is how to move a story along. And I think it's almost a musical thing. I think that every piece of writing has its tempo. And since I've. All of my books, I'm the one bringing it up, have been long to carry a reader through it. I think you have to establish a rhythm in the writing that's carrying the reader along, making the reader. The reader doesn't even realize what it is. It's like the reader's been kind of lifted on this wave that is moving along. And then also had to learn how to balance different anecdotal material that would be vivid and easily accessible to the reader. And then if I have to digress, to give thematic or background material, just to sort of develop a sense of how long I can go without sort of getting back to my main story line and that. I noticed a lot of writers have trouble knowing that. And you feel like suddenly veering off and you want to say, come back to the main road. You're off on the sideline there.
- [32:16]
Gilbert Cruz
I want to ask you two questions about maybe the frustrations of being a biographer. One, have you ever picked a subject, started and then bailed? And then two, particular to this book, are there pieces of information that you wanted or parts of his life that you wanted to explore more, and you just couldn't find the documentation, the letters, the.
- [32:36]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, let me take the second one first. That I certainly would have liked to have known more about his relationship with his father, because that seemed to me. He talked a lot about his mother and was obviously very influenced by her. But one of the problems writing biography is you follow the paper trail. But very often it's the things not being talked about that tend to be the most crucial. It's kind of, where is this person being secretive? And Mark Twain said his relationship with his father amounted to little more than an introduction. There was 11 years of an introduction. And I had the feeling, as I write in the book, that the father who found humor in nothing spawned this son who found humor in everything. So there's something about that relationship that I think was. And also Twain has a very healthy skepticism of authority figures throughout his life. I have to think that goes back to his father, who was judge and lawyer what was the first question?
- [33:34]
Gilbert Cruz
The first question was, have you ever picked a subject gone aways and then said, this is not going to work.
- [33:39]
Ron Chernow
When I decide to do a book, you know, Maybe I'll spend 2, 3, 4 months reading this person. I try to read the earlier biographies, but until you actually get into the original materials, usually for me, it's not until I've been sort of stewing this research for a year or two that I really begin to feel that I'm becoming acquainted with this person. And so it's. It's a leap in the dark. Luckily, all the people that I picked, the story, the character, turned out to be even richer than I had imagined. But there are all sorts of stories among biographers. I think it was McCullough who gave up a book on Picasso because he couldn't stand him, or I think Justin Kaplan with Charlie Chaplin. There were all these stories. One is that the person turns out to be less interesting, more boring than you thought. Possibly a bigger problem is just that you find this person detestable in some way, and you're locked in a room day after day with it. And actually, I think that's probably good. If you really end up loathing this person, you probably owe it to your subject to walk away from it, because you're not going to be able to write a book. And then it becomes, boy, once you start hating your subject, it really can become pathological because you're trapped. You've signed the contract. It's no exit.
- [34:58]
Gilbert Cruz
I have to think there are not a few biographers who have encountered that predicament. It seems like it'd be a scary thing because, as we said, not unlike a marriage, you are with this person for however long it takes to do the research and write the book.
- [35:13]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, and I've had good agent, good editor, and I always thought it was very important that I would not plunge ahead into a biography unless all three of us thought that it was a good idea. We all kind of troubleshoot. And so usually if there's something wrong with an idea, one of us will pick it up. And then also, was there kind of room for one more book sometimes with Kiss Mark Twain, There have been a lot of different books. I feel that I do a certain sort of narrative biography that may not be better or worse than whatever anyone else does, but it's different. It's my own version of that, and I felt that I could do that with Mark Twain.
- [35:50]
Gilbert Cruz
How does it feel when two of your subjects cross over? So you have Hamilton and Washington of Course, who are closely intertwined. And now you have Mark Twain. And we read in the book of the period in which Twain and Grant meaningfully cross paths. And I'm curious, when that happens, are you bringing new perspective to Grant that you didn't have when you wrote the book? 10, 15 years.
- [36:11]
Ron Chernow
It's like a Pirandello play. Suddenly characters from one place show up in another. Actually, with Mark Twain. My US Grant biography both opened and closed with Mark Twain. There were certain things that I had in the Mark Twain biography that I wish I had when I wrote the Grant biography. But believe it or not, Twain appears earlier in my books because he was bailed out by Henry Huddleston Rogers of Standard Oil. And so in my Rockefeller biography, I talk about the fact of Mark Twain used to hang out at the Standard Oil headquarters, became friends with John D. Rockfeld, Jr. To a certain extent, John D. Rockfeld, Sr. So in a way, it's like Mark Twain keeps. Has kept popping up in my life. It's been hanging around outside the door, and I figured, let me open the door and finally let this poor man in.
- [37:00]
Gilbert Cruz
One of the things that sort of becomes readily apparent over the book is how much of a celebrity he really was. First, of course, in America, partially because of his books, partially because of the speaking tours that he would take. What did celebrity look like back then?
- [37:15]
Ron Chernow
Well, he was so famous again with the white suit and everything. He was an instantly recognizable figure as much as any person.
- [37:22]
Gilbert Cruz
The mustache.
- [37:23]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, everything. People would immediately recognize him. And Mark Twain would walk into a theater or restaurant, people would stand up and applaud. Could actually be a problem. He said that it reached the point because he gave a lot of speeches. He was very often the host, toastmaster of a banquet. Said it was a problem that he would get up there before he opened his mouth. People were on the verge of laughter. People expected him to be funny all the time. And he was, but not all the time. One interesting thing is that he regretted quite a number of occasions later in his life. He wished that he had established two pen names, one for the humorous pieces, one for the unfunny pieces. Because he said this occurred a number of times. People don't know. He did a novel about Joan of Arc, and they originally left his name off the title page of Joan of Arc because Twain was always afraid. Everyone associated him with humor. That people picked up a book that didn't have any laughs, that they would be disappointed and feel cheated. But he loved it. He loved the attention. He. I talk about in the book from the time that he was a boy. He said that there was nothing that a boy craved more than tension. He said he would be a clown in the circus, pirate on a ship. He would be Satan himself if he could be envied and attracted by other boys. And that ran right through his. His life. He loved being complimented. He said, I can get more out of one good compliment than a dozen square meals. This was a man, I believe it, with a certain vanity that he reveled in. But it also led, as with his family, to lead to a certain blindness. And I guess he was so extraordinary, he had people constantly hanging on his every word. It's easy to imagine how that would lead to certain narcissistic behavior on his part.
- [39:15]
Gilbert Cruz
I'm curious what it was like to find yourself in the post Hamilton whirlwind, which is maybe in our American society right now, is as famous as a biographer gets for a period of time. You wrote this book. It became part of a sensation that still lasts to this day. My son and I were listening to Hamilton last night. What was that period like for you to all of a sudden be out there?
- [39:37]
Ron Chernow
Well, it was nice, you know, I had been a lifelong theater goer, so when I met Lin Manuel Miranda back in October 2008 and he asked me to be the advisor to this as yet non existent musical, and I did it not because I thought it was going to be a commercial sensation. Everyone thought that this was the single silliest idea for musical hip hop, musical about Alexander Hamilton. But I immediately said yes to Lyn because I'd been a lifelong theatergoer and I thought to myself, oh, wouldn't that be fun to actually watch the development of a show from the other side of the Footlights? And of course it was a thousand times more interesting. So it was just one of the great experiences of my life. And then when the show came out, you know, whatever sort of particle of fame that I got from that, the most delightful part was that the children would rush up to me in the street and they would want to sing one of the songs from the musical with me. They often knew the lyrics better than I did. I remember the first speech that I gave, okay, so Grant came out two years after Hamilton opened on Broadway. And the first speech that I gave on Grant was out in Ohio. And I'm looking out over the audience and there were a number of teenage girls who had come dressed in their own homemade Revolutionary War costumes. It was just absolutely delightful. And also the show, all of the different companies and hundreds of people have passed through the show and the various companies. At this point, it was predominantly actors in their 20s and 30s, predominantly black, Latino, Asian, biracial. Here I'm kind of this older slice of white bread. And because I'm part of the show, there's this family feeling and I'm accepted into it. And so I think that a lot of these young performers, if I had met them at a party, there would have been a certain distance. You know, in the world of the theater, everyone is huggy feely and they run up to you and they throw their arms around you. And it was very nice to be accepted into their world. Although I was the only person in that world who in a way, was not part of it. I was just a temporary fellow traveler in that world. But I just feel very grateful that I have it. We're about to, in August, celebrate the 10th anniversary of Hamilton on Broadway. And so the show goes on. No, no, there's not gonna be anyone who's curious. There's not gonna be a hip hop Mark Twain. I can guarantee that.
- [42:05]
Gilbert Cruz
It's great. It's great. I wasn't gonna ask. Cause that sounds terrible. You sort of briefly touched on this before, but I'd like to ask it again as we close out here. What do you think, if you're being intentional in this way, what do you think is the story of America that you're trying to tell through the figures that you have chosen to write these biographies about?
- [42:26]
Ron Chernow
Yeah, well, just talk about Mark Twain in response. Because I think that Mark Twain is the quintessential American. He once wrote in one of his notebooks, he said, I am not an American. I am. The American guy had no ego. No ego. I mean, it's sort of arrogant. Unfortunately true. He came from the heartland. I feel that his original, his authorized blog for Albert Bigelow Payne said accurately. He said Mark Twain had every human strength and every human weakness. And in a way, he's a culture at large because he has a lot of the qualities we like to think of as American. He's cynical, he's ironic. He's very skeptical of power and ability and monarchy. He's very democratic, small D. He has sympathy with the underdog. He tends to kind of notice marginal people among the people. He has all of these very, very nice qualities. But he has the money madness. He has that urge for money and success that afflicts our entire culture. And he can seem to overcome it. And he's railing against the plutocrats, but he's trying to become a plutocrat. So he sums up a lot of the contradictions in the culture, and maybe that's part of the attraction to him that like it or not, we see ourselves mirrored in Mark Twain.
- [43:45]
Gilbert Cruz
Ron Chernow, thank you for joining once again the Book Review podcast.
- [43:50]
Ron Chernow
Absolute pleasure. Gilbert, thank you.
- [43:53]
Gilbert Cruz
That was my conversation with Ron Chernow about his new biography, Mark Twain, one of the big nonfiction books of the season. I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review. Thanks for listening.
- [44:13]
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