The Not at All Funny Life of Mark Twain

Ron Chernow's biography dwells more on the wreck of a man than on his sublimely comic work.

- Graeme Wood

In his last, most pathetic years, Mark Twain threw himself behind the crackpot theory that the true author of Shakespeare's plays may have been Francis Bacon. The penultimate book that Twain published in his lifetime, Is Shakespeare Dead? (1909), asked his readers to consider how few solid biographical details existed about Shakespeare the man, and how much critics had inferred from so little. They had built, Twain wrote, “an Eiffel Tower of artificialities rising sky-high from a very flat and very thin foundation of inconsequential facts.” The literary critic Northrop Frye, who dismissed the Bacon theory, nevertheless had a wry aside of his own about extrapolating too freely from scattered biographical details and the unflattering portrait that is the only surviving image of Shakespeare. “We know nothing about Shakespeare,” Frye wrote, “except a signature or two, a few addresses, a will, a baptismal register, and the picture of a man who is clearly an idiot.”

Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain forces a similar conclusion about its subject: clearly an idiot, and a born sucker. This conclusion will shock anyone who knows Twain only through his writing, in which the author is wise and witty and, above all, devastating in his portrayal of frauds, cretins, and sententious bores. In life, Twain (1835–1910) was quite different. He was gullible, emotionally immature, and prone to shoveling money into obvious scams. Twain therefore presents a tantalizing challenge for literary biography: to explain how someone able to spot and depict frailties of conscience, character, and judgment in others could be so powerless to correct them in himself. Forced to choose, as Yeats wrote, “perfection of the life, or of the work,” Twain left the former a total shambles—and then for good measure was struck by a series of family tragedies that would have been unbearable even for a much less self-destructive man.