You know Mark Twain’s story. You’ve got no excuse not to; there have been so many biographies. Starting in the American South as Samuel Clemens, he took his pen name from the call of the Mississippi boatmen on reaching two fathoms. His lectures, followed by his travel pieces and novels, enchanted America and then the world.
As a southerner, his principled stance against slavery gave him moral authority. The famous ‘Notice’ to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished’ – was swept aside, so that persons like H.L. Mencken could straightfacedly describe it as ‘the greatest novel ever written in English’. Though made rich by his writing and an ambitious marriage, Twain lost an enormous amount of money as a result of bad speculation. He died as famous as any author has ever been.
His lessons of vividness and concision have not always been well learnt. Some biographies, including this one, stretch Twain’s life out to 1,000 or even 2,000 pages of adoringly documented quotidian footling. In his funniest piece of literary criticism, Twain wrote of a piece by James Fenimore Cooper: ‘Number of words: 320. Necessary ones: 220; wasted by the generous spendthrift: 100.’ You wonder how a biographer could quote this and then sum up Twain’s objection to Cooper’s prose as ‘stiff, bloated and turgid’. Bloated and turgid of course mean the same thing.
Twain’s life demonstrates all sorts of things, but a very conspicuous one is the spell that Charles Dickens cast.
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