♪ ♪ (theme music playing) RUBENSTEIN: Hello, I'm David Rubenstein.

I'm going to be in conversation now with Ron Chernow, who is a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and the writer of the book "Mark Twain," and, uh, we're very pleased to let you know we're coming from the Robert H. Smith Auditorium at New York Historical.

Ron, congratulations on your success already with the book.

CHERNOW: Thank you.

Pleasure to be with you, David.

RUBENSTEIN: So, uh, you've written Pulitzer Prize-winning books before, you've written bestsellers before, but what made you think that the world needed another Mark Twain biography?

(laughs).

There are plenty of biographies out there.

In fact, one was done not too long ago that did win the Pulitzer Prize.

So, what did you think you could bring to it that others hadn't brought to the life of Mark Twain?

CHERNOW: I was hoping that I could, um, write a fuller and richer biography if that was, uh, possible.

Uh, this is the largest literary personality that America has produced, and yet there's a way in which he's hidden behind the, uh, the stereotype.

Uh, everyone knows, uh, Tom and Huck and life on the Mississippi, but he published two dozen books.

They don't know that he did a novel on Joan of Arc, that he did a polemical screed against Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science.

Uh, they don't know that he wrote a book, a rather cockeyed book claiming that it was actually Francis Bacon and not William Shakespeare who wrote the plays attributed to Shakespeare.

Mark Twain even wrote, dare I say it, um, a pornographic satire called "1601" that was set in the court of Queen Elizabeth, the first and I was very curious how Mark Twain, having grown up in a slave-owning family, slave-owning state, uh, by the end of his life, has such a, um, tolerant and broad-minded view of race relations.

RUBENSTEIN: His name was not, of course, Mark Twain; it was Samuel Clemens.

So, he wrote about two dozen books in the course of his lifetime, but probably the two most famous are "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn."

CHERNOW: Right.

RUBENSTEIN: How long did it take him to write "Tom Sawyer?"

CHERNOW: Uh, "Tom Sawyer" was just a, you know, a few years, and it did not, it only sold, um, 37,000 copies.

And what happened was that at the time, the copyright laws, uh, were very weak, and there was a delay in publishing "Tom Sawyer," and while they were waiting, all these pirated editions from a firm called Belford Brothers in Canada started crossing the border and robbed him of all of this money.

And Twain became a militant, really kind of a maniac on the subject of, uh, of copyright.

He said that the copyright law in the United States was "framed by an idiot and passed by a Congress of muttonheads."

(laughter) RUBENSTEIN: Speaking of Congress, what was his other famous statement about members of Congress?

I think about it being idiots or something like that.

CHERNOW: Yeah, well, he, he, he, he said, "Suppose you're an idiot and suppose you're a congressman, but I repeat myself," that was.... (laughter) RUBENSTEIN: So, when does he write "Huckleberry Finn," which is the ultimate book that he wrote and considered by many to be the greatest... one of the greatest American novels ever.

CHERNOW: Yeah, it's interesting because if you read, you know, uh, "Tom Sawyer," which was written in the, uh, 1870s, it's a very kind of sunlit view of the town of Hannibal, which is called St.

Petersburg, uh, in the novel, and it's, you know, these, barefoot boys who, go fishing and, eat cornmeal cakes.

And, uh, the one thing that's not mentioned in the book, of course, is slavery.

He then, in the 1880s, returns to the town, even some of the same characters, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, but this time it's all about slavery.

Now slavery saturates the town, and, I think it's the greatest book that he wrote and revolutionary in American letters because instead of having, you know, an all-wise omniscient narrator who's telling the story and telling what to think, the entire story is narrated through the voice, uh, and through the mind of this young guttersnipe named Huck Finn.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, I think it was Hemingway or someone else who said that all American literature really began and descends from "Huckleberry Finn."

CHERNOW: Yeah, that, that's right because suddenly Mark Twain is writing about ordinary people, you know, in the vernacular of, uh, ordinary, uh, people.

And, you know, he, he once said, uh, "I never wrote for the cultivated classes, I wrote for the masses," and he made a wonderful statement once, he said that, um, um, great literature is like wine.

He said, "My writing is like water, but everyone drinks water."

RUBENSTEIN: So, many people say "Huckleberry Finn" was the greatest anti-slavery novel ever.

CHERNOW: That's right, yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: And can you explain why people would say that?

CHERNOW: Yeah.

Well, I think, you know, what happens, uh, because we all know in, in, in the novel, Huck, uh, repeats the N-word, you know, almost 200 times.

Twain, of course, is doing that not to endorse racism, but to expose the racism.

But as they're fleeing down the Mississippi, he's with Jim, who is an older Black man who is escaping from, uh, uh, slavery, and it's, uh, it's a beautiful portrait of Jim.

Jim is very, uh, dignified and noble, he's sensitive and aff, and affectionate.

The whites in the book are almost all violent and crude and profane, but there have been kind of two controversies about, uh, "Huck Finn."

One is because of the presence of the N-word, it's been banned at almost all American high schools.

The second one was that, um, for decades, there was criticism of Jim, even though it was clearly a very affectionate and positive portrait, that there were certain affectations from minstrel shows, particularly that, that Jim is very, uh, superstitious and credible.

RUBENSTEIN: So, let's go through first Mark Twain's life.

Let's go through the... CHERNOW: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: ...the, uh, chronology.

Where is he born?

CHERNOW: He's born in the town of, of Florida, Missouri, which is all the way up in the northeastern corner of Missouri.

The population of the town was 100, so he said when he was born, he increased the population of the town by 1%, and he said there's no record of anyone else doing such a thing, not even Shakespeare.

(laughter) But then when he's four, they move significantly, 35 miles northeast to, to Hannibal, which was a tiny town also, not as tiny as Florida, Missouri, um, but with one big difference, um, it was on the Mississippi River.

And in fact, if you go to Hannibal today, Mark Twain's boyhood home is still there.

When you walk out the door and turn left, it's thrilling because there is this broad, shining, magnificent waterway, and here's this isolated town in a rural area.

But once or twice a day, little puff of smoke would appear in the distance, and then they would hear the sound of the whistle of the steamboat, and then suddenly the world poured forth, and what would come off that steamboat when it docked, it, it, it might be circus jugglers or minstrel show, or traveling salesmen.

So, it really kind of brought the whole world of that time into this little town.

RUBENSTEIN: So, what did his parents do?

CHERNOW: Okay, his father, who was a very cold and distant, uh, man, uh, was a, a storekeeper, a lawyer, a justice of the peace, failed at one job after another.

Mark Twain said only two things about his father, uh, he said that, um, "Our relationship was something like a, a, a, a state of armed neutrality."

Uh, he also said, "My knowledge, my father amounted to little more than an introduction."

Uh, so he clearly feared his, his father.

His mother, fortunately, was completely the opposite.

If you see pictures of her, she has an almost comical resemblance.

She had exactly the same drawl that Twain, uh, had.

She was spirited, vivacious, she loved to dance, she loved spectacles ranging from circuses to, uh, to funerals.

RUBENSTEIN: His father died when he was just 11?

CHERNOW: Father died when he was 11, uh, and not long after he stopped going to school.

So, this is really someone self-invented.

He's an autodidact.

Um, his older brother had a newspaper, so he goes to work as a printer's devil.

He said that as a printer's devil, acres of good and bad literature passed beneath his, uh, gaze.

And he started, I mean, he began to insert, uh, little squibs in these papers under comical nicknames like, you know, "Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass."

He doesn't think of himself as a writer yet.

RUBENSTEIN: But he's basically working for his brother, and then his oldest brother, um, ultimately goes out west, and he goes there with him?

CHERNOW: Yeah, well, by that point, he already had become, um, a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi.

He got his license after two years.

Then the Civil War breaks out, commerce is shut on the Mississippi.

Uh, for a couple of weeks, he's a member of a pro-Confederate militia in, uh, Missouri.

He didn't cover himself with glory.

He said, uh, "I knew more about retreating than the man who invented retreating."

Uh, then his brother, by a nice coincidence, his brother is appointed secretary of the Nevada territory, and he takes Sam, who was about 10 years younger, along as his private secretary.

Well, this was, Virginia City, the site of the Comstock Lode.

It was the biggest silver mining discovery in American history.

But you know, when, uh, they're out in Nevada, uh, and he tries his hand at mining, he's, uh, broke, and he starts sending articles under the byline Josh to a newspaper called "The Territorial Enterprise."

He's desperate for money, and they offer him a job as city editor of the newspaper in this mining town.

And he later said that he was so broke, he said, "Had I been, um, offered a job translating the Talmud from the original Hebrew, I would've accepted it."

So, he starts this job.

His first day on the job, he's in a complete panic.

I mean, he knows nothing about journalism, he has no idea what he's gonna write about for his initial column.

And then he said, "A desperado killed a man in the saloon, and joy returned once more."

So, he's found his, his métier.

Then he adopts the Mark Twain pen name, which he had gone back essentially to his steamboat days, what Mark Twain meant, two fathoms, in other words, 12 feet.

The, the leadsman on the boat would drop this anchor to, to see how deep the water was, and he would yell back, "Mark Twain," which meant that the depth was only 12 feet.

RUBENSTEIN: So, he's out west with his, uh, older brother and writing articles, and they're reasonably well received.

He's an editor as well.

When does he decide to move back east?

CHERNOW: Well, he's there, you know, for a couple of years, and then he moves to, San Francisco.

Um, a newspaper hires him to go out to what we call the Sandwich Islands, which we now know as the Hawaiian Islands, and he writes very, very brilliant letters.

In fact, the Kilauea Volcano was erupting.

There were no restrictions then how clo, closely you could approach it, so he writes these very vivid descriptions, and he loved the islands.

It was for him paradise, uh, on earth.

And he has hilarious descriptions.

He said one day he went down to the beach and he saw all of these Hawaiian, uh, women bathing naked, uh, and they had left their clothes on the beach.

So, he said he went over and sat on their clothes so the clothes wouldn't be stolen, and then he kept warning the women that the sea was rising and it was dangerous, and that they should come back out onto the, the beach.

Uh, so, so then eventually what happens is, uh, he's hired to go on a cruise.

It was really a kind of early tourist cruise.

He's hired to go on a cruise on a boat called the Quaker City, goes to, uh, Europe and the Holy Land, and it was a time when Americans really kind of fawned over European culture.

And he writes this wildly satirical and reverent book about the, uh, the, the trip, and, uh, he has hilarious but damning things to say about European culture.

I mean, particularly, he hated the old masters.

They went to a lot of museums, and he said the, uh, old masters "are all dead, and I only wish they had died sooner."

You know, they go to the Sistine Chapel and he said, "This is Michelangelo's nightmare," and he said that the ceiling was covered with repulsive monstrosities, these, these poor cardinals at the conclave, right?

And then, then he, he goes to see the Last Supper in Milan, and he said that there were, um, a dozen people copying it, and he said, "I couldn't help but notice that all of the copies were better than the original."

(laughter) So anyway, that book that he wrote, "The Innocents Abroad," sold 100,000 copies.

It was his first book.

He never again sold that many copies of a book.

And he was really, it, it not only gave him a lot of money, but instant fame.

RUBENSTEIN: But did he come back to the United States and realize he was pretty good at writing books and just start writing books?

Is that what... CHERNOW: Yeah, absolutely.

You know, this is a different kind of story about a writer because nowadays, most writers, you know, you're a teenager, you start fantasizing about being a writer, you go to college and take a creative writing course.

That was not the case at all.

Mark Twain kind of kept stumbling into these different assignments.

And in fact, uh, when he got the, uh, contract to do "The Innocents Abroad" with this publishing firm in Hartford, he writes to the publisher and he says, "Money has a degree of, uh, importance to me that I can barely comprehend," you know.

So, he's always, he's very preoccupied with, with money.

RUBENSTEIN: When he comes back east eventually, um, he's writing books and doing other things, but he meets a woman and he marries her.

Who is his wife?

CHERNOW: Yeah, so while he's on that boat, the Quaker City, there's a young man named Charlie Langdon who, uh, one night shows Mark Twain's little oval portrait of his sister Livy Langdon.

Uh, the Langdons were from Elmira in New York.

They, they were an extremely wealthy family.

Uh, Jervis Langdon, the father, had made a fortune in coal, timber, and railroad.

And Mark Twain looks at this picture.

Livy was then early 20s, he was early 30s, he looks at this and he said that, you know, from that moment on, Livy Langdon was in his mind and indeed became his adored wife.

Now, what happened was that, um, Livy was an heiress, uh, she was also physically very, very fragile, and she was very refined.

Um, Livy was of course fascinated, uh, by him, but this was like a tornado that had blown into the life of this, of this family.

So, um, what did he do, I mean the main weapon at his disposal was words, so he wrote her 200 very, very long letters, and it took her, it took him two years to not only finally convince Livy, but the parents.

RUBENSTEIN: Well, if you're an heiress and the father is saying, "You want to marry a writer?"

Um, I'm not sure that's gonna work out.

So, is that what her father said?

CHERNOW: Well, you know, what happened finally, because they were very charmed by, um, Mark Twain, um, but he was also kind of, you know, looked like a seedy disreputable character.

So, he'd been out, out in Nevada, he'd been out in San Francisco, so the father, Jervis Langdon, um, had Mark Twain send 10 letters of recommendation, uh, from his friends out west.

And when the 10 letters came in, Jervis Langdon sat down with Mark Twain, and all of the 10 letters described Mark Twain as, um, you know, idle and lecherous, and a drinker and a humbug and everything else.

So, Jervis Langdon said to him, "Don't you have a friend in the world?"

And Mark Twain shrugged his shoulders and said, "Apparently not."

Um, and then Jervis Langdon said to him, um, "I'll be your friend.

Uh, take the girl.

I know you better than they do."

It was really an extraordinary act of foresight because it was an extremely, extremely loving and happy marriage.

I mean, there's hardly, uh, a letter that she wrote to him, and we have many that did not end with her writing, "I worship you; I adore you; I idolize you."

Uh, and that feeling was fully reciprocated, but he was very difficult.

You know, she was very refined, she had an exquisite sense of, of, of tact and discretion, and here's Mark Twain, you know, who's from this backwater out in the Midwest, and she really made him presentable in, in polite society.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, their marriage, uh, was mostly when they were living in the East Coast.

They spent most of their married life on the East Coast.

Why Hartford, Connecticut?

A nice place, but how come Hartford?

CHERNOW: Yeah, well, Hartford, you know, which we know, um, for the insurance industry, and incidentally, uh, Twain was connected; he was an investor in Hartford Accident Insurance.

He actually gave a speech there in which he said, uh, that train wrecks had acquired a sudden charm for him as a director of, uh, The Hartford.

But the reason they ended up in Hartford was that his original publisher, American Publishing Company, was based there.

RUBENSTEIN: And he built a small house to live in?

CHERNOW: So, their house, which is still there to visit, was, uh, 25 rooms, six servants, 11,500 square feet.

So, he's living this fantasy life, and it could have... This is the tragedy of Mark Twain.

He invests a fortune in something called the Page Compositor.

It was a typesetting machine that he thought would revolutionize, um, newspapers worldwide and make him one of the richest men in the world.

He not only, uh, squandered in, in contemporary dollars, millions of, uh, dollars in his own money, but he squandered Livy's inheritance too.

So, what happens, he goes bankrupt and they're forced to go into exile to, uh, Europe for nine years.

RUBENSTEIN: So, to downsize your lifestyle, you go to Europe and you live in fancy hotels?

CHERNOW: Oh, my God.

I mean, you know, um, uh, Sam and Livy, they were like the original consumers, they were just incorrigible spendthrifts.

So, their idea of economizing in Europe, you know, they're living in a 30-room villa outside of Florence, they're living in this magnificent suite in a Viennese, you know, uh, hotel.

For a time, they were constantly being helped out by, um, Livy's mother, who would give them, uh, gifts, but they really did not know the meaning of economizing.

RUBENSTEIN: So what cities were they in?

They were in Europe for roughly nine years or so?

CHERNOW: Yeah.

They spent, um, uh, many months living in, uh, Berlin, uh, Vienna, Paris, uh, London.

Interestingly, the one that Mark Twain liked least was Paris.

He called it Paris the drizzly, Paris the, the damnable.

And when Mark Twain, I mean, he was, he was a healthy hater.

Once he started disliking something, he would, I mean, his notebooks are, are filled with these lines, uh, he said, um, "A, a, a Frenchman's home is, uh, with another man's wife," or he said that, um, "It's a, a lucky Frenchman who knows his own father."

You know, he kind of went on and on, uh, with this.

So, you know, Paris, which everyone else finds sort of very glamorous and romantic, Twain did not.

RUBENSTEIN: His wife passes away, uh, how many years into the marriage?

CHERNOW: They get married in 1870, she, uh, dies in 1904.

RUBENSTEIN: All right.

Does he ever seek anybody else as a marriage partner?

CHERNOW: No, he was doing a lot of lecturing, and he suddenly announces that he's only going to lecture at women's colleges.

Stop, it gets worse.

Uh... (laughter) ...and he announces to the press, "I have the college girl habit."

A year later, he starts collecting teenage girls.

Collecting was his verb, not mine.

He calls the girls his angel fish, and he makes them members of his aquarium club.

Guess who's the admiral and only male member of the club?

Mark Twain.

He spends a ridiculous amount of time with these teenage, uh, girls, much more time than he's spending with his own daughters, who really felt this as a, um, rebuke.

Now, at the time, maybe more innocent, uh, age, people saw this as a charming eccentricity; they saw it as endearing.

Of course, Mark Twain wrote "Tom Sawyer," he loves children; of course, he wants to spend all his time with children.

Although there were never any boys, it was, it was only girls.

We read about this now, and it's extremely unsettling and, uh, disturbing.

We see it in a different way.

But I remember I found one story.

He was very good friends with a well-known actress who one night showed up to dinner dressed as a 12-year-old girl because she wanted to be one of the angel fish.

This was how it was, you know, regarded at the, uh, at the time, people... And he was, I should say he was not furtive about it.

He would pose with the girls for the press.

There was never a single allegation of his touching or groping or anything like that.

In fact, he would incorporate the mothers and the grandmothers, you know, into this, uh, whole, whole thing.

And so, and, and the girls themselves, right, there was one angel fish, Dorothy Quick, who in later years wrote, um, a, a memoir called "Enchantment," you know, that th, those were the most wonderful days of her life spent with Mark Twain.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, um, Mark Twain gets involved with, uh, a person that you also wrote a book about, Ulysses S. Grant.

CHERNOW: Yeah.

RUBENSTEIN: Uh, can you explain how Grant, toward the end of his life, decided to write memoirs, which he had never done before, and all of a sudden Mark Twain inserts himself in there and becomes the publisher?

CHERNOW: Yeah, 'cause, um, uh, Ulysses S. Grant was already, uh, talking with the, uh, the Century publishers, then Mark Twain comes along and, um, convinces Grant that he was being cheated by the Century people, and in fact, Mark Twain, unlike the Century people, uh, realized correctly that Grant's memoirs were gonna be one of the great bestsellers of the 19th century.

Uh, Mark Twain, um, and Ulysses S. Grant, even though they seemed so dissimilar, became extremely close, uh, during this, uh, period, and, uh, Mark Twain said the greatest person he'd ever gotten to know on a personal basis was Ulysses S. Grant, and then when Grant died, Twain wrote to Livy, he said, um, uh, "Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man," and I can't think of a more beautiful tribute that he could've written.

RUBENSTEIN: Now, some people have said, how could Grant, who had never written any books before, wrote a book that is widely considered the greatest memoir ever written by a former president?

Uh, people think that maybe Samuel Clemens wrote that book.

CHERNOW: Yeah.

And they were, and they were wrong, um, because, you know, when I was doing the Grant book, I went down to the Library of Congress and I said, "I want to see the manuscript of Grant's memoirs."

I remember they wheeled it out there in these beautiful, kind of blue leather, uh, bindings.

And I went through every page of it, and almost all of it was in Grant's handwriting.

You could actually see the disease, the handwriting's becoming, you know, wavering.

Uh, but at first, they did not want to let me see the original, and I said, "Look, I'm gonna get asked this question so many times.

I wanna be able to say with authority that this book was all in Grant's handwriting."

RUBENSTEIN: Okay, so the book did become a bestseller.

CHERNOW: Yeah, the only other, uh, book of the 19th century that may have sold more was "Uncle Tom's Cabin", and coincidentally, in Hartford, uh, Mark Twain's next-door neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe.

RUBENSTEIN: Going back to, uh, Mark Twain's life, how long did he live?

CHERNOW: Uh, he lived till 74.

RUBENSTEIN: And he died ultimately of a heart problem?

CHERNOW: Yeah.

He had; he had angina.

You know, he smoked.

Oh, my God.

You know, he smoked cigars throughout his, his life.

He was smoking cigars even in his early, uh, teens, um, and he smoked up to 40 cigars a day.

He is, like, constantly sick.

He has this chronic bronchitis, which clearly comes from the cigars.

He also smoked, uh, uh, pipes.

And it's only in the final months of his life that, uh, the doctors start talking about his tobacco heart, and he finally admits that maybe, just maybe, it was the tobacco that was, uh, uh, killing him.

RUBENSTEIN: So, it is often said that when Winston Churchill had these famous, uh, one-liners, they were, um, not as spontaneous as people thought.

He would spend a lifetime preparing spontaneous remarks.

And in Mark Twain's case, did all these witty things happen on the spur of the moment, or did he prepare them and wait for the right moment?

CHERNOW: Well, he was fully capable of, of, of doing it spontaneously, but one of the things that interested me was with a lot of the speeches he wrote out verbatim, the speech, even he would indicate something that would appear like an aside.

That was, that was prepared too.

But, uh, what fascinated me, because in terms of the, um, the, the, the, the quotes, we have the quotable Mark Twain because that's what he wanted.

Um, and the last, um, maybe 20, 25 years of his life, uh, he would, in his notebook, he would write these aphorisms, these quotes, and sometimes he would write five or 10 or 15 different versions until he got exactly, you know, the emphasis that he wanted.

RUBENSTEIN: One of the most famous Mark Twain quotes is, I guess somebody reported he was dead, and he said, "Reports of my death are premature."

Is that... CHERNOW: Yeah, now, he, he, he had more funny lines about, about death.

He, he was at one point contacted by the Associated Press, and they said, "We hear reports that you're dying," and Mark Twain said, "I would do no such thing at this time of my life," you know.

Uh, he also, another time when this happened, uh, he said, "Well, yes, I'm dying, but I'm not aware that I'm dying any faster than anyone else."

But my favorite one, and this was just maybe a couple of months before he died, his daughter Jean, uh, said, "You know, father, there's someone in the living room, you know, who wants to see you," and, uh, he says to Jean, he says, "Oh, Jean, I could never do that.

I might drop dead at any moment, and it would be so embarrassing."

(laughter) RUBENSTEIN: What about the famous San Francisco quote?

Is that... CHERNOW: Yeah, no, the San Francisco I was disappointed to, to, to, to find this out, you know, the famous line that the coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

Mark Twain himself said that that joke was already stale while he was alive.

RUBENSTEIN: And what about, what did he say about Adam?

CHERNOW: Yeah, this is, I love this, this line.

He, um, said that Adam was very lucky because he knew every time he told the joke, he knew that nobody had ever told it before.

(laughter) RUBENSTEIN: Ron, congratulations on another successful book and, uh, thanks for being here this evening.

CHERNOW: My pleasure.

(audience applause) (music plays through credits)