Powers has his own imperfections. He is prey to the overblown epithet — bookshelves are ‘tome-scented’ — and to annoying irrelevancies. When the Clem- enses’ second daughter Clara is born in 1874, he cannot forbear to tell us all the other babies born that year who were to become famous. He is also not error-free. When Mark Twain is in Pretoria, Powers tells us that he visits the ‘Jamestown raiders’, which makes them sound like bad-hat cowboys rather than hirelings of the Randlords. He has Twain travel 200 miles northward from Lake Bourget and mysteriously find himself at Arles, rather than heading for Paris. And not even Guildford’s greatest admirers would describe it as ‘a graceful 12th-century farming village south-east of London’ — somebody buy the guy a compass.

But these petty flaws aside, Ron Powers really does get the hang of Mark Twain, the way he somehow lies hidden in plain sight, never quite what he seems and never quite the same from one moment to the next, either on the page or in person, unrivalled chronicler and embodiment of all the boundless energy and secret desolation of America. Howells put it beautifully:

He was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable perception and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for him, but he was not all there for you.

Mark Twain is, I think, at his best when he is at his most elusive, when you cannot quite see how he is mixing it up or where he is taking you and that is why you are good and hooked. Harold Bloom called Huck’s description of watching the sun rise over the Mississippi which begins Chapter XIX ‘the most beautiful prose paragraph yet written by an American’. Twain revised that passage at least three times over as many years, for he was furiously meticulous as he was furiously everything else. Is he writing here for adults, or for children, or for adults wishing they were children? Who cares, go with the flow.

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