Revue de 'Mark Twain': New Bio explores the ups and downs of the emblematic writer

Mark Twain was the first celebrity of America, a multi -platus artist loved and recognized worldwide. Fans from America to Europe to Australia bought its books and flocked for its individual shows, and its powerful doses of humor and hard truth lacked both the Hauts-Nars and the Humble. After his death, his work lived through his novels, and his influence continued – the winning novel of the Pulitzer Prize for this year, “James” by Percival Everett, reverses the roles of the main characters of the “adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Twain”, replacing the narration of the teenager Huck with that of the Jim Slave.

Ron Chernow writes books on men of a great ambition from President Ulysses S. Grant to the financier JP Morgan – his biography of Alexander Hamilton has inspired the longtime musical of Broadway – and is an expert columnist for the ups and downs. But by facing the story of Twain, he signed for a wild ride. Twain was both a brilliant writer who exposed American hypocrisies with humor and mind, and an angry man who enjoyed revenge, treated resentment and blamed God for the fate of the blows that rained on the head. “What a fury background is for your pleasure,” said Twain's friend, novelist William Dean Howlls.

Born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, Twain grew up in the Hannibal slave community in Missouri, a city he would immortalize in “Huckleberry Finn” and his prequel, “The adventures of Tom Sawyer”. The agitated young man went from one job to another, then found his first vocation as a river boat pilot on the Mississippi, an experience that would shed light on the “life on the Mississippi” of Twain and other books. The river gave it its pen name (the phrase “Mark Twain” indicated a safe water depth) and inflicted an early blow in the loss of his younger brother: encouraged by Twain, Henry Clemens signed a crew of river boats, then died when the boat exploded. Twain blamed himself.

The Twain River ended with the civil war. Traffic has dried up and to escape conscription in the Confederate army, Twain headed west with his brother Orion in the territory of Nevada. He delighted with the exuberant disorder of his mining cities, and as a young journalist, he led to his sense of bubbling humor. His literary career began seriously when he moved to San Francisco, and helped by Californian writers such as Bret Harte, he became a national when, in 1865, a New York newspaper resumed his history “the famous jumping frog of County Calaveras”. Twain moved east, and his career took off like a rocket.

On a travel junket that inspired his first book, “Innocents Abroad”, Twain saw a portrait of his future wife, Olivia “Livy” Langdon. He fell in love with his image and sounded to meet her, and despite the many eccentricities of Twain, his distinguished family accepted him. They got married and their lives in Hartford, Connecticut, padded by the family richness of Living, was a graceful dream, because the largest of the age of Twain – Grant, Robert Louis Stevenson, Helen Keller – sought his company. But the tragedy struck again: their first child, a son, died at 18 months.

The couple had three other children – the girls – and the apparently wealthy of Living without the background supported him. She edited her manuscripts, led her house and smoked her rough edges. But the couple's Achilles heel was their shared taste for luxury. They lived regularly beyond their means, bringing the bills even if Twain, a reckless investor in the sense of terrible business, played both with his publishing income and his inheritance.

Throughout everything, he continued to write. The most sustainable of Twain's books is “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” published the United States in 1885 when Twain was 49 years old, the story of a fleeing boy and a escaped slave who fled the Mississippi. A series of Twain's comic novel “Tom Sawyer”, he penetrated the dark heart of the wild treatment of blacks by Hannibal. Chernow writes that “If Tom Sawyer offered a sunny view of Antebellum Hannibal, in` Huck Finn '' Twain plunged in the shadows. While he was dragging memories again, he now perceived a city involved in slavery. ”

Ron Chernow previously wrote biographies on historical personalities, notably Ulysses S. Grant and Alexander Hamilton.

(Beowulf Sheehan)

“Huck Finn” was the apotheosis of Twain's gift for the truth, while he exposed the sadistic oppression of the blacks and made the slave Jim the hero. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the book was prohibited for its use of a racial insult, but Chernow lends a strong argument for the meaning of the book, supported by the summary of the author of “James” Everett: “Anyone who wants to ban Huck Finn did not read it.”

Twain's sales of books did not balance the household budget and the family had to move to Europe to reduce spending, the start of years of exile. Their departure from America was the end of a dream and the start of a nightmare. The daughter of Twain, Susy, who had remained in America, died of bacterial meningitis at the age of 24. Then Living died. His loss triggered Twain's anger against ruthless fate, and his relations with his two surviving daughters have become increasingly distant. “Ah, this odious scam, human life,” he said, after his daughter Jean suffered a major epilepsy crisis.

“In most lives, there is a calm and a nice fall calm that even exceeds the most temporary personalities,” writes Chernow. “In the case of Twain, it was exactly the opposite: his emotions intensified, his indignation against injustice evassed more and more strongly, his rage has become almost rabid.” He continued to write and make appearances, attracting a huge crowd, perfecting his image as a cigar gear adapted to a white. But he also became self-indulgent and self-Islanding, assisted by poorly paid help, Isabel Lyon, who took up most of the aspects of his life, an arrangement which was a prescription for disaster. His main companions were his “Angesfish daughters”, prepubes girls with whom he arranged to keep company (Chernow illustrates that there was no sexual violence in this arrangement), but his retirement in a second childhood could not protect him from the loss of the final catastrophic family which came shortly before his own death.

The descending trajectory of the life of Twain shades its history in elements of the Greek tragedy. Twain was a cauldron of creativity and often of courage, speaking for black equality and the movement of suffrage, and against anti-Chinese harassment, colonialism and kings. But in his last years, he allowed the sorrow and the bitterness to overwhelm his life, and one wonders how such a brilliant man could have so little understanding of himself. At 1,200 pages, it is not a book for the occasional reader, and Chernow never fully reaches the heart of the contradictions in the conflictual soul of Twain. But he tells the whole story, in all his glory and his pain.

“Mark Twain” is a masterful exploration of the magnificent high and inexpressible stockings of an American literary genius. Twain himself said one day that “biographies are only a man's clothes and pimples-the biography of man himself cannot be written”. But it resembles the truth of the cross-life of a man's stars.

Gwinn, a journalist winner of the Pulitzer Prize who lives in Seattle, written on books and authors.