Jan 1, 2017 Another Twain book courtesy of my mother-in-law: Ron Powers’ Mark Twain: A Life. Dedicated to Robert Hirst of the MTPO (what’s not to like about that), I found the first few chapters through adolescence to have more primary-sourced tidbits of info than anything else I’ve seen. So far so good….onto the next part.

April 10, 2017 – finished it. Well, I’m sorry to say this got a little uneven at the end. I think Powers ran out of steam after the early years but it’s tough to find fault given the enormous number of books already written on the life and times of Mr. Samuel Clemens. I didn’t get the sense that some of the larger events of his life (Paige typesetter debacle, bankruptcy, tour around the globe to pay off his creditors) got the attention they deserved. This is just an observation (and not a particularly astute one), and not a criticism. Perhaps Powers thought that he wanted to highlight items that hadn’t been given their due as opposed to covering the same old ground.

This is a great place to start if you’re looking for an introductory review of Twain’s life. But if you want to dig deeper you’ll need to read specialized treatments that provide more details about certain specific events, like Zacks’s Chasing the Last Laugh.

July 6 , 2016: Just finished Richard Zacks’s Chasing the Last Laugh. This book does a great job of detailing  Mark Twain’s 1896 journey around the globe to pay off his debts. Twain’s own travel book, Following the Equator, would be his official recounting of the trip. That book, stuffed with filler and anecdotes, and not one of Twain’s best, becomes a more interesting read thanks to Zacks’s behind-the-scenes retelling.

Twain’s poor investments and the bankruptcy of his publishing company left him deeply in debt by 1895. He’s also squandered his heiress wife’s money (although as Zacks tells it she would eventually recover a fair amount of her assets later in life thanks to some fortuitous events).

Thanks to some first-rate scholarship and some time spent at the Mark Twain Project, Zacks is able to sift through many of Twain’s letters to his wife Livy and his financial mentor and friend H.H. Rogers to give us detailed information about his lecturing tour. The lectures, this “mounting the platform” as Twain put it, was part stand-up-comedy and part storytelling. Twain had a number of 10 to 15 minute routines that he would draw upon for his 90 or so minute performance . These performances, given to the English-speaking populations of the far-flung British empire, would allow him to eventually pay off his entire debt (in today’s dollars it looked to be about $2.5m).

Zacks has done a great job of not regurgitating well-known information. We get a real sense of the content of these lectures; he and his wife’s predilection for fine accommodations despite their debts; his medical issues with carbuncles that kept him holed-up in hotels for most of the trip (after spending roughly a year on the road, Zacks claims he only had 40 days of actual sight-seeing!).

This is a quick-and-easy read but a good contribution to the life of Mark Twain.

May 27: Who is Mark Twain? Edited by Robert Hirst of The Mark Twain Project Online at U.C Berkeley. This is a collection of 26 essays by Twain, many of  them not previously published.

The gem in this is undoubtedly “Conversations with Satan”. The story starts out with an interview (yes) with the Devil. It then, somehow, meanders into a detailed discussion of cigars! What do cigars has to do with an interview with the Devil? Nothing. The story simply ends, probably because there was no way back to the original intent. Brilliant, of course.

Mark Twain, Following the Equator

Published in 1897, this was Twain’s travelogue around the globe to pay off his debts. And away we go….

May 13, 2016 – tough slogging, this one. I’m half way  through and some random observations:

When he’s in Australia, there seems to be antipathy towards the British because of their treatment of the aborigines; he gets to India and suddenly he’s an Anglophile. What gives, Mark? He documents in detail the “Great Mutiny”, the so-called Indian Rebellion of 1857. In discussing this he’s long on British bravery and Indian depravity and short on Indian grievances and British mistreatment. Of course we call it the “Mutiny” in the west – conveniently forgetting it was British imperialism that had put them there in the first place.  It will be interesting to see how his attitude shifts as he book continues its way through the Empire.

This book is fraught with Twain’s propensity to fill up pages with 3rd-party recollections and anecdotes and the occasional multi-page list. Despite this, of course, there is that which makes him one of the greatest writers in the English language – that zinger, that parenthetical rejoinder, that observation that ends a paragraph and leaves the reader with that broad smile of appreciation, mirth and awe.

May 21,  2016 Finally finished this one. Clearly not his best work but worth wading through the filler for Twain fans. I’m no Twain scholar, but I always find it off putting when he occasionally characterizes non-whites in his inimitable manner. I’m always wondering if he’s a bit of a racist or not; is it sarcasm when he compares white to non-white (sometimes obviously; other times not so obvious).

March 23, 2016 – Finished: Albert Bigelow Paine: Mark Twain: A Biography, 4 volumes (1912)

Not sure I can recommend this one. Paine was Twain’s official biographer and literary executor. This is a sugar-coated biography by the Victorian Paine. You don’t travel, drink and smoke as Twain did and not have a couple of skeletons in the closet. I’m not suggesting we need to stoop to the current view of everything needs to be disclosed, but  there’s probably a balance. If you’re a lover of Twain, this is a  necessary but not very lovable slog.

As of March 21,  2016 I’m still plowing through this. Some observations:

• The biography picks up when Paine meets Twain and you get a first person account of his life – sometime around 1905, when Twain is around 70 years old.
• Billiards, billiards,  billiards! Twain could and would play all night and Paine was his accomplice. Other than smoking, billiards seems to have given him more satisfaction than most anything in life.
• Has there anyone who’s lived in more places than Twain? Gypsies had nothing on him! His self-imposed European exile was a series of moves from one city and country to another. I couldn’t find a count of all the places he’s lived  (for over a month, say) but it has to be over a 100.
• Has there been any American who was more beloved by Europeans than Twain? He died before World War 1 broke out but was beloved by the people of both England and Germany. Who knows what impact he might have had…?