No one will ever describe Ron Chernow as a miniaturist. He has written brick-size biographies of John D. Rockefeller, Ulysses S. Grant, George Washington, and Alexander Hamilton (read the book, then see the hip-hop version!), plus histories of the Morgan and Warburg banking dynasties.
Mark Twain is his latest subject, and the book is an absolute delight to read, written with flair (no surprise there) and keen psychological insight about a surprisingly complicated man prone to depression. Come to think of it, Chernow is a bit of a miniaturist, in the sense that he finds those tiny, telling details that bring alive his sweeping sagas.
JIM KELLY: What a monumental achievement! What drew you to writing about Mark Twain?
RON CHERNOW: Back in 1975, while working as a freelance magazine writer in Philadelphia, I wandered one night into a one-man show starring Hal Holbrook called Mark Twain Tonight! Holbrook stood up there in a white suit with a mustache and cigar and wryly dispensed witticisms about American politics that were so tart and tangy that they were forever engraved on my mind. “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” And: “Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” And: “I think I can say, and say with pride, that we have some legislatures that bring higher prices than any in the world.” What made those lines so sharp and fresh a hundred years later? It was this Mark Twain, the all-purpose pundit, the original celebrity, who first grabbed my attention even more than the novelist.
J.K.: Was there a Rosebud moment for you in writing about Twain, when you thought, Aha! This moment is crucial to understanding Twain?
R.C.: There were many startling moments of revelation. To take but one: Mark Twain had a speculative itch that he always needed to indulge. “All through my life,” he admitted, “I have been the easy prey of the cheap adventurer.” His many business fiascoes would finally force him into bankruptcy, compelling him to undertake a thrilling but grueling round-the-globe lecture tour to retire his debts. It would also lead to a nine-year exile in Europe, where the cost of living was lower.
When living in Vienna in 1898, he met a young Polish inventor who had devised a new method for printing on textiles. With no prior knowledge of this industry, Twain rushed to sell the American rights and even tried to convince his friend Henry H. Rogers, a Standard Oil mogul, that they should together create a global trust that would monopolize the business. Rogers contacted a mill investor in Massachusetts, who told him there was no American market for such an invention, and squelched Twain’s grandiose, wishful thinking. It was as if he had learned nothing from the bankruptcy that had so badly damaged his fortune and his family. His urge to speculate, derived from a lifelong fear of poverty, was incurable.
J.K.: Twain was a good friend of Ulysses S. Grant’s, a man whose biography you also wrote. They seemed to be such different men. What made them friends?
R.C.: Ulysses the Taciturn and Mark the Talkative might appear to be poles apart, but Grant, in private, could be a fluent conversationalist and captivating storyteller. The two men grew close when the terminally ill Grant wrote his memoirs for Twain’s publishing house. Twain had always revered Grant for the magnanimous way he ended the Civil War, at Appomattox Court House. He was no less impressed by the lean, taut eloquence of Grant’s memoirs and the quiet dignity with which Grant endured his agonizing illness. “Manifestly, dying is nothing to a really great and brave man,” Twain observed, and he concluded that Grant was “the greatest man I have ever had the privilege of knowing personally.”
J.K.: It is ironic that Twain, who was such a strong believer in civil rights, has been castigated for his portrayal of Black people, especially of Jim the runaway slave in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He uses the n-word more than 100 times in that book. I know Twain was only using the vernacular at the time, but would the book lose any of its power if the n-word was simply deleted from the text today? And, by the way, have you read Percival Everett’s novel James, which just won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction?
R.C.: Actually, the n-word crops up more than 200 times in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. To state the obvious, the word is used to expose Huck’s racism, not to endorse it. Some scholars have suggested deleting the word, but Twain was such a purist about language and took such inordinate pride in reproducing dialects in the book that I don’t think that anyone should tamper with the text. Better for students to wait and read the book in college with the necessary context than to start fiddling around with Twain’s wording.
It is indeed a sad irony that Mark Twain, who engaged more fully and appreciatively with the Black community than any other white author of his time, should be mistakenly accused of racism. Yes, I have read and admired the poignant James, which corrects some minstrel affectations that Twain grafted onto his portrayal of Jim. But I should also note that Percival Everett greatly respects Twain. When asked about banning Twain’s novel, he has said, “Anyone who wants to ban Huck Finn hasn’t read it.”
J.K.: You have written three books about banking, including The House of Morgan and The Warburgs. Today, when so much is written about banks being too big to fail and the damage done by risky mortgages and over-leveraged institutions like Silicon Valley Bank, are there any lessons from the past that you think are relevant? And perhaps this is too much of an aside, but will crypto-currency be the wrecking ball that brings down banking as we know it?
R.C.: I don’t have anything oracular to say about our current banking system, and I confess that I am mystified by the whole crypto-currency phenomenon. A currency is supposed to be a store of value, and I don’t see what value is stored in crypto-currency. It survives because of the shared faith of many investors. Do you know the Greater Fool Theory? It states that people buy inflated assets because they know they can sell them at a higher price to someone else—the greater fool. At some point the greater fool disappears and the asset class collapses.
J.K.: Growing up, who were some of your favorite authors, and is there a particular book or a person in your life who inspired you to become a historian?
R.C.: The first thing to know about me is that I did two degrees in English literature, expected to become a novelist, and never studied history. Everything that I have written about in my adult life has been self-taught. As a student, I was steeped in the Victorian and Edwardian novelists—Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—and dreamed of writing large, epic novels teeming with characters and events. Maybe with Mark Twain I have been able to realize that dream with an unbelievable story that I could never have invented.
When I wrote my first book, The House of Morgan, I was influenced by Arthur Schlesinger’s volumes on the New Deal, which showed how you could braid together a flowing narrative and clear analysis. I wanted my books to be very readable but also thought-provoking, and Schlesinger provided a ready model for that.
J.K.: Now comes the Paris Review question! How do you organize your writing day, how do you know when to stop researching and start writing, and do you have any tricks to keep from getting writer’s block, an affliction I seriously doubt you have ever suffered from?
R.C.: When I sign a book contract, I agree to a completion date and have never missed a deadline. How many writers around town can say that? With these large, complex characters, one needs the discipline of a deadline, or you can be swallowed up by the inexhaustible source materials.
With Twain I never suffered from writer’s block for a second. He lifts you on a beautiful wave of language as you feel his words coursing through your veins. Early in my career, when I had writer’s block, I had a foolproof device for getting over it. I would stand up and pace the room and pretend that I was explaining the passage to some dim-witted listener. That would get my blood pumping and the prose pouring from me again.
J.K.: Good news! I am not going to ask you about Donald Trump! But I will ask you about Hamilton and the Lin-Manuel Miranda show inspired by your biography. I assume when you were writing Hamilton’s biography that you did not have his life being turned into a hit Broadway musical on your bingo card. How much were you consulted? How surprised were you by its success? And here’s a free idea: a musical called Twain!
R.C.: Whenever I give a talk, someone in the audience will inevitably stand up and ask, “Mr. Chernow, when you were writing the Hamilton biography, did you ever expect that it would be turned into a hip-hop musical?” I always say, “I think the question answers itself.”
I was very closely involved in the creation of the show as its historical consultant. Lin sang the opening number to me while snapping his fingers in my living room, and he sent me all the early songs via e-mail as he finished them. What struck me as I listened was that, however unorthodox the form, Lin had true regard for the history. Aside from the beauty of the music, as an old English major I savored the linguistic richness of his lyrics.
Mark Twain’s huge personality and eventful life will doubtless lead to a dramatization, but I think we can safely rule out a hip-hop version.
Jim Kelly is the books editor at Air Mail
