Ron Chernow

29:18And then he writes this 400-page script. She was like the surrogates in the white. This creed about how awful she is. A diss track. She was a brute, a simple heartless brute. He's not a diss track. She was an insect. He's like Kendrick Lamar. Yeah, well, he also hated Drake. He also hated Drake. Which is your next biography is of Drake. Oh, he can wrap your story. He can wrap your story there. You heard it here first. Ron Chernow's 1 ,800-page biography of Drake is going to drop in a year. But you know what's so funny is if you ask people for the sort of the quick concept, Mark Twain, again, you think of the mustache, you think of this sweetness, sort of a slouch, grumpy, the cigar, but all these funny, cranky comments.

30:05and it can all seem you know tom sawyer huck finn gliding down the river and then you look at later in life and there's so much tragedy i mean they lose this fortune uh his his um one daughter gene has epilepsy epilepsy yeah and it's it's terrible uh suzy uh when they've left the country she's wandering around their mansion which is shut down alone and she had meningitis and she pretty much dies almost alone while the while the family is in europe it's very tragic um he uh twain's wife is very sick he's constantly beset by these money troubles people suing him trying to get the money back and he does something that's really stunning you know today we live in this world where people declare bankruptcy they'll give you one penny on the dollar and then they start another business venture um not naming names here but but plenty of people who take advantage of this system uh mark twain it was very important to mark twain and his wife livy that when they had to declare bankruptcy this publishing house collapsed that they had created and they owed a lot of money and they swore that they would pay everybody back every single penny and then at an advanced age he starts this world tour and you i mean i couldn't i couldn't do a tour like this i have tons of energy i'm a lot healthier and younger i could not do what he did he goes at this time when it was difficult to travel he goes everywhere in the world to raise the money to pay everybody back and he didn't have to do that.

31:53Yeah. And he's suffering terribly from carbuncles. I mean, he just, it was really grueling for him to do it, but particularly Livy felt that there was this terrible stigma attached to bankruptcy. You know, for her, it was a real question of honor. Yeah. And in fact, you know, the eldest daughter, Susie, who died at 24 of bacterial meningitis. When they finally paid off the last of the debts, Livy writes that the happiest day that she'd had since her daughter died was the day that they paid off the last of the creditors. In fact, there's an interesting moment. Twain became very good friends with a standard oil mogul named Henry Rogers.

32:39And Rogers is kind of running rings around the creditors. He was a very, very shrewd Wall Street operator. He was helping Twain out. Yeah, he was helping Twain out. And Twain, you know, in New York, writes very proudly to Libby, who was then in Paris describing the way that Rogers handled the creditors. And Libby writes back, she said, I'm upset by the way we're handling the creditors. She really felt that they owed the creditors, which should be treating the creditors with much more dignity and respect. But it's an amazing story because it did take several years to pay off the debts. But you know what amazes me, Conan?

33:18Okay, so he goes through this terrible, grueling, it was a 12 or 13-month round-the-world tour. And then they're living in Vienna, and he discovers that there is this patent for a new process for printing on carpets and textiles and tapestries. After everything he's been through. After everything he's been through. He hears about this new invention. He hears about this new invention. He goes to the American consulate, and he spends his day reading up on this industry. He's known nothing about this before. After 24 hours, he's convinced that he's the world's leading authority on this. And he writes a letter to his friend, Henry Rogers, who is one of the main moguls of Standard Oil.

34:01And he suggests that they buy up the worldwide patents. The device was called the Raster. He said we should buy the worldwide patents for this. He said people will call it a trust, this global monopoly they will have. But we mustn't mind that. You know, people will talk, but that's okay. And so he's gone from knowing nothing about this to suddenly imagining that he's going to be the head of a global monopoly. Yeah, he really wanted to be, you know, what today we would call a billionaire. He wanted to be a billionaire. He wanted to be a financial whiz, which is so crazy because it's what he loved to make fun of.

34:44But it's also what he wanted to be. and the second half of his life or actually the last couple of acts of his life are the i mean to me he is so disillusioned and so dark and we think of twain again i keep coming back to this that we think of him as um this charming you know the the twain you see on stage in one man shows is just this fun scamp and rascal and you know the old riverboat pilot who's got his stories in the end And he is so dark and he's questioning everything. Yeah, no, I mean, he says that anyone who's not a pessimist is a damn fool. He actually says there was no life ever worth living.

35:29No life was worth living. It was worth living. And he was asked if he would like to live his life all over again. He said, I would like to relive my youth and then drown myself. He made this statement that the only gift that God gave to the race was youth. He felt that everything else after that was bitterness and disappointment. And he's always kind of pining for this lost paradise of his youth, which is why he wrote so powerfully about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which, of course, has much darker tones to it. But it's a bit of a paradox because he had this adoring wife. He could not have had a better, you know, wife than than Livy.

36:14And she also she read everything Twain wrote and would temper him. Maybe not. I mean, but she would remove if she thought if she thought anything was a little, you know, that's a little racier. That language is a little you don't say breeches. That's you're talking about underwear. Let's take that out. So she was very genteel, which is a very funny. They were an odd couple in that way. But she was a great partner. Yeah, and actually one of the interesting parts of the story is Twain said when they first met that he, Twain, was a mighty, coarse, rough customer. And she took this man and she really, because he'd come from this little backwater town, she made him presentable in polite society.

37:00And he really didn't know how to do it. She helped him with what we would today call the anger management. He had a terrible temper. So he would vary off. If he was angry, he would sit down and he would write a very, you know, impetuous, no telling somebody off. And she trained him when he did that, not to send a letter, but to stash it in the drawer and wait a few days. And then when he would cool off. And I can't tell you how many letters there are, you know, in his archives where the morning after a dinner party, he would write to someone who'd been at the dinner party. The madam tells me that I might have been a little brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I really didn't intend to offend you.

37:40In fact, you know, the daughters laughingly called this mother dusting father off. Yeah, yeah. In fact, it reached the point where they had this system of cards at a dinner table. So a red card flashed to Mark Twain meant, are you going to monopolize that woman sitting on your right the whole time? A blue card meant, are you going to sit back and not say anything the entire dinner? You know, so she's kind of guiding him. These are soccer penalties. Yeah, these are soccer penalties. We have those cards for Conan. Yeah. Take it easy, Conan. Wrap it up. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, in fact, he said, because, you know, he said, Livy edited my manuscripts and then she edited me.

38:25Yeah. And she kind of really gave him a life. And, you know, in many ways, she was a long suffering wife. He loses her inheritance. Yeah. We have extensive correspondence between them. She never, never threw it in his face. He apologizes. I mean. Yeah. Apologize. Yeah. Another word I wrote down after, when I was reading the book, I wrote down guilt. Yeah. He has so much guilt, you know, today about, you know, he convinces his brother to become a steamboat captain. He says, this is great. I love doing this. And his brother's then killed in an explosion of a steamboat. And so Twain blames himself.

39:06Twain blames himself for so many things. You know, when his daughter dies, he's not there. because he's trying to raise money because he's lost all the money. So he blames himself for that. And you just think of almost like Marley and Dickens. He's got these chains of guilt that he's carrying around with him that go back to early childhood and somehow he's fighting against that. No, you're absolutely... I mean, the saddest one is that he and Livy, their first child was a boy who was named Langdon, which was her maiden name. and Langdon died at 18 months. And what happened was that they were at the Langdon place in Elmira, New York.

39:53And one chilly morning in May, they went out driving, and Twain felt that he had not wrapped the baby up enough in this chilly weather. And they came back, and the baby had a cold. But then the baby recovered, and they went to Hartford. and after they went to Hartford, the baby died of diphtheria. Mark Twain told William Dean Howells, who was his closest literary friend, he said, I killed Langdon. He was convinced that that ride in the carriage. When it was emphatically not that. Emphatically not that case, yeah. In fact, his sister-in-law's Ukraine afterwards said, you know, they left Elmira and went to Hartford because the baby was better.

40:35The baby was fine. So he had this tendency to flagellate himself, you know, and take responsibility. And it was really kind of crazy, you know, what happened with Susie, the eldest daughter, that he was not, you know, there at the time. They had just come back from this round-the-world tour. There was no cure for meningitis at the time. You know, his being there would not really have helped matters. And, in fact, she was sort of delirious and raving. It's really, I mean, it's Shakespearean. And he's built this massive house, which is, by the way, you can go see it. Yeah, it's still there. And it's absolutely beautiful.

41:17Kind of almost garish. It's like this insane, someone said it looks like it's a steamboat. A cross between a steamboat and a cuckoo clock. Yeah, but I mean, you would go crazy for it. It's the kind of thing you and I would tour and go crazy for. And it's not unlike Theodore Roosevelt's house in Oyster Bay. this just big long thing that people built back then massive uh huge ceilings lots of flourishes lots of different colored stone and brick yeah um but that was their joy i think they lived there for 17 years and then uh they have to leave it because they can't afford to live there they banish themselves to europe and then of course she's there at some point alone wandering around dying, going from room to room, and all the furniture is covered up with blankets, and you're just like, oh, my God, this is...

42:09I mean, the sadness that he endures in the later part of his life, it's just like a boxer being hit over and over and over again. Yeah, it's interesting, you know, because he's a novelist, and I think that he himself becomes a character perhaps greater than any of his creations. I think the life he lives is a story actually more dramatic than any that he created. And it's full of light and shadow because it's full of literary triumphs, to be sure, full of personal calamities. And I haven't had a chance to tell you just how much I loved your speech that you gave for the Mark Twain Award because I think that I was so glad just the tone of it because Mark Twain was much more than just a humorist.

42:58He was a sage. He was a moralist. He was an activist. He was a conscience of the person. I think that you really touched on that very, very exactly. But it's interesting because we know Mark Twain is a humorist and we tend to think of him with the white suit and the cigar. But Mark Twain said a couple of things about life. He said, life is a tragedy with comedy distributed here and there only to heighten and magnify the pain by contrast. Unbelievable. Yeah. And then he also said that life is a fever dream with sweetness embittered by sorrow and pleasure poisoned by pain. I know you're all going to go off and jump off a bridge after I tell you these comments that he made.

43:49he made you know i mean uh it's so funny because um at the you you have this quote and this i underlined a few things in the book because the it's the it's this later parts that really got to me um at the end of his life he's pretty much saying i didn't do any of this this was not you know you can't think of a more self-made man yeah there's lincoln there's twain there's a couple of great self-made people who just comes from absolute, you know, nothing and, and is this force of nature. And you think, well, he really made himself. And at the end of his life, he's saying, I, it was just impulses, urges.

44:30I just did things. And now here I am. And now my life's over and it would all meant nothing. I mean, that's kind of his philosophy. You said this here in his work, he thought he barely said what he knew to be true, but hadn't dared to voice that the mind is a machine, that we mistake instinct for original thought, that free will is a farce, that our lives are predetermined by outside forces, and that all acts are selfishly motivated. It's funny that struck a chord with me because in the last couple of years, I've had this thought that's just been rattling around my head where people have said, hey, you've been around for a while and you've done some cool things.

45:08And I think I didn't do any of it. I don't know why the fuck sorry for the language but Sona does the writing I've heard the language I'm so fucking sorry please Mr. Chernow I apologize Sona writes these things for me and I'm not going to say this other stuff would you please substitute it with breaches yeah yeah you know in my own opinion I think I can't explain any of it I just have had these crazy impulsive drives and impulses and I maybe it is glandular you know what I mean at the end of the day what did I do I don't know what I did but and certainly it's and it's one one millionth of what Twain did but it's funny that at the end of his life he won't take credit for anything and he thinks that we're all just in the void he's very he has this kind of deterministic view that we're just kind of you know machines and their stimuli and we react to it that we're really not creating anything the funny thing is Conan you know that someone reading that If it had not been written by Mark Twain, they would have said, well, what about Mark Twain?

46:13Mark Twain would have been, you know, the best example of the fact that there is true originality in the world.

46:29He's obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare didn't write any of it, that it was all Francis Bacon. Yeah, he actually gets up after. And can't let it, can't let that go. And he gets up after he's watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet with a friend and he gets up at the end and he says to the friend, that was the best thing Francis Bacon ever wrote. You know, he was convinced that his discovery that Francis Bacon had written it said it's the great discovery of the age, you know. Also, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a little bit of professional jealousy. Like, you know, you know, there's no way that guy did all that.

47:07But, you know, he loved the play. And I think what misled him is that, you know, as Mark Twain became famous, reporters were constantly, you know, flocking to Hannibal, Missouri and other places that he had lived. So, like, everyone who ever knew Mark Twain was interviewed 25 times. And he couldn't figure out why there wasn't that same kind of trove, you know, of anecdotes. And why weren't the people in Stratford telling all these stories about Shakespeare? um yeah if shakespeare was doing all this why weren't they writing why aren't these anecdotes about there's so many anecdotes about me there'd be that many anecdotes about shakespeare and you're like well no no it was it was a different time different time it was it was a different media environment you know and his life was covered so extensively uh and uh you know with the kind of a handful of stories about uh shakespeare but if shakespeare lived in a different media environment You know, we would know everything about him.

48:04But so, you know, Mark Twain wrongly extrapolated from it to Elizabethan times. But he actually wrote this book called The Shakespeare Dead that he thought was going to set the world on fire. It didn't. He also thought that John Bunyan had not written Pilgrim's Progress. He thought John Milton was. but um maybe he didn't write his own works this is his guilt yes yes it was all living it was all his wife cranking it out um it was bret hart yeah bret hart did it all no he was dead uh but um i just you know it's funny i think of if twain were alive today he'd be on the internet he would be into every conspiracy.

48:50And also, talk about a guy who you'd have to keep away from an infomercial. Any pop-up ad, anything. And Twain would be like, I've got to have the abdominizer. Why, that's the darn cuteness. That's the best invention I've ever... And Libby would be there saying, you bought 10 ,000 abdominizers? You know what I mean? I've got to have those gels in my shoes. a sneaker you can just step into i've got it but i mean you can just shake weight i gotta have the shake i gotta have the shake weight and i gotta gel like magellan i like the way that rolls off the tongue but he would just um be fall prey to every you know every the word would get around soon this is the guy as it does as you know uh as these programs start to know oh this sucker you know they're on to me you know they know that i like you know like a new kind of leather wallet that has like a little if they're on to me so i'm just constantly bombarded with a new way to a little travel gizmo i'm constantly being bombarded with those because the algorithm figures it out they would have figured out twain well i'm so curious if you were alive today if i can get to ask you if i was alive today that that um with with with mark twain there was just no filter whatsoever you know there was no kind of political correctness he really felt as a satirist that everything was fair game so that for instance you know when he wrote his first book which turned out to be his best-selling book called the innocents abroad you know he went he went with these tourists kind of early tourist crews to europe and the holy land and uh he's just sounding off on all these things there in italy and he's making jokes about dwarves yeah he said you know If you want to see dwarfs retail, go to Milan.

50:44If you want to see dwarfs wholesale, go to Genoa. He has all of these different things. Well, no one today would dare to make these sorts of jokes. And he really felt that the whole world was his field for humor. And I wonder how he would function today, where we're much more sensitive about offending different groups. Well, I mean, I think it's a really interesting area because, as you know, you talk about it a lot in your book, Huck Finn is very controversial. Yeah. On one hand, Ernest Hemingway said the American literature begins with Huck Finn. And many great writers have said that is the first great, great, truly great original American creative novel.

51:34and then um but it's got the n-word in it countless times um yet it also is exploring a real relationship between jim and huck and uh and and and jim is not a cardboard character um and so but and the n-word is part of the dialect of that time but for that reason a lot of people say it should be banned it shouldn't be read or the word should be removed and you think um if he were alive today he'd be canceled for things he did when he's 20 years old i mean in his personal correspondence when he's writing about race when he's when he's before he's evolved and that when i was reading that i was thinking we live in this era now where you know kids go online and do things say things and they get tagged yeah you're the kid who said that you're the kid that did this you're the kid that's saying that you're the kid um and i don't know you know there wouldn't be a mark twain he'd have yeah i mean this was somebody you couldn't he couldn't exist in a world that's keeping account where anyone can say wait a minute we just found something in your personal correspondence or in a speech you gave when you were 25, you're canceled.

52:58You're done. Yeah. You know, Mark Twain is a type of writer almost inconceivable today. He had no inhibitions. He felt no need to have any inhibitions. Although he was puritanical about sex. Very puritanical about sex. Which I totally get. And it's only late in life that he starts to kind of, I mean, that's another thing you bring up in the book. And I don't know that we have the time to go into it, But it's a facet of his life. Late in life, he is hanging around a lot of young women. When I say young women, age is what? 10 to 16. 10 to 16. And what's interesting about it is that there's no evidence that there was anything sexual about it.

53:42Right. No one, and he seemed, he was depressed. I'm not making excuses because it was strange. Everyone noticed it. Yeah. What did he call them? He called them his - His angel fish. His angel fish. Oh, God. And so he's having, and to the point where his wife and his kids are saying they're trying to suppress any of the information. You know, if there's a write-up, he doesn't want the young kids around, but there is no evidence that it was anything other than him playing pool with them and liking it. to have them around because he loved the attention of, I mean, first of all, he was fascinated with childhood.

54:25He loved having the attention of these young women who kind of adored him. Yeah. So, but it is kind of pathological. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, this is kind of a good. And who knows? We don't, I don't know. Kind of the difference between things were perceived then and now because he collects, and that was the term that he used, that he collected a dozen of these girls. He called them as angelfish. They became members of his aquarium club. They would come over with their mom or their dad or their governess. He was very careful to incorporate the mothers, the grandmothers into this. There was nothing secretive.

55:02He actually flaunted it. Actually, one of the girls, Dorothy Quick, he met on the transatlantic liner. And when the docked in New York, there would always be a scrum of reporters waiting for Mark Twain in New York. And he gets off the the boat with this 11 year old girl. And the next day newspapers across the country, you know, the headlines are Mark Twain, captive of little girl, you know, and people found this a very kind of charming and avuncular. Oh, Mark Twain, you know, he's written beautiful books about American children. Of course, he loves it. So far from being secretive about it, you know, he flaunted it.

55:41In fact, I tell the story in the book that one of his friends, who was a famous actress, came to dinner one day dressed as a 12-year-old girl with buttons and bows and everything, because she wanted to be one of his angelfish. So this is the way it was handled. People were reacting in this very jovial way to it. Whereas we look at this behavior now, and it's very disturbing, very, very odd and disquieting. He never acted on it. I mean, it's very different. When I was doing research, I read a book about Lewis Carroll. In the case of Lewis Carroll, where superficially it might seem similar, Lewis Carroll collected nude photos and nude drawings of the girls.

56:27There was nothing like that with Twain. What the underlying dynamic was, I really don't know. But he had kind of enough control over himself. But he liked that he would read aloud to them. They would play pool together. He did announce during his last three, four years of life, he said, I worked hard enough in my life. I just now want to play. You know, so it was like kind of a second childhood. But it's really strange and weird. I mean, I'm not here to defend it at all. It's really kind of very creepy. And I think that everyone who reads the other book will have that reaction to it. But I also kind of have to describe in fairness to him, you know, what it was and what it wasn't.

57:07That is one of the things that I really love about the book is you're like Twain. You're not afraid to go everywhere. You're not afraid to look at everything. Yeah. You're clearly odd and impressed by this guy. You are also you're exploring every nook and cranny. There are. He was fallible. you know when i keep saying he was people like to think of him as this emoji he was a great you know i'm thinking of people like lyndon johnson who embodied greatness but their flaws are also great that you know which has been so well documented you had a wonderful line in your kennedy science speech you said talked about the colossal mess of being human you know that's kind of what twain is about you know he was once asked how he knew so much about uh human nature because He traveled a lot.

57:56He had a lot of people. He said, oh, no, no, it's I look into myself. He felt that every human being has all of nature inside himself or herself. And I think that that's true, you know, that we can feel that, you know, we act on certain impulses, but we have inside of us almost every impulse. I think it's why you even, you know, watch a movie about some crime or something. And we can sort of imagine one side of ourself can identify with it. We control that. We control this. So you want to kill and kill again. No. Are we getting this? I've been accused of a lot of things, not yet of being a serial killer, but somehow.

58:36Hold on a second. I've got your travel records. Some suspicious behavior. Well, the book is a delight. You've done it again. Mark Twain.

58:53The sign to me of a great biography is that there's no way to completely capture this guy, but I think this is going to be the standard bearer. I think you need to read this book. You need to read this book because it's not just about Mark Twain. It's also about America. it's also about where we were then and it's also somewhat about where we are now so i i congratulate you and uh huge thrill to have you on the podcast because um i love this stuff oh i feel like it's it's a privilege to to be with you and the whole group today and i feel like you really have done honor to the book and to to mark twain so thank you for reading it and reading it so closely and attentively.

59:39It's really been a great experience. I guess we all win then.

59:46Conan O 'Brien Needs a Friend with Conan O 'Brien, Sonam of Sessian, and Matt Gourley. Produced by me, Matt Gourley. Executive produced by Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Nick Leow. Theme song by The White Stripes. Incidental music by Jimmy Vivino. Take it away, Jimmy. me?

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