Mark Twain, biographed

...he simply walked down to the Mississippi riverfront, plunged his hands into Old Muddy, sniffed— and reckoned the whole world of Twain and his boyhood was now fully in his mind...

...So it goes on...

...He moved his show from the West Coast to the East, and made his real fame with his reports from the Quaker City cruise to Europe—the first great transatlantic package tour, and "a funeral without a corpse...

...This is an effective rather than a radical biography...

...When the Rev...

...It's here that Hoffman comes through with some dramatic suggestions about Twain's own sexuality...

...But there was to be another Mississippi Valley, which would make it to literature, in Twain's Life on the Mississippi and many other parts of his work...

...It's a study that lets us see the nature and explore the firm factual details of a major, self-discovering American life as it was led in its time...

...He set out to out-lecture his rival Artemus Ward, whose early death helped clear the field...

...There will, of course, be more...

...With a woman shortage and a western culture of male bonding, gay relationships may have been more prevalent than we know...

...Hoffman tells the hard facts of these years, capturing the spirit of the new territory...

...But this was a view constructed in retrospect, written when the Mississippi had declined from the glory days following Western expansion and transcontinental spread, as well as from the blockades of the Civil War and the growth of railroads...

...The accounts started coming even during his lifetime...

...For the modernists of the first quarter of this century, he was something of an embarrassment...

...Apart from the speculation about homosexuality, most of the story is familiar...

...Frances Trollope foundered...

...The best modern life by far has been Justin Kaplan's Mr...

...He cultivated celebrities, political leaders, ministers and preachers, and solicited political appointments...

...So, though he moved in useful political circles in Nevada, he was soon in financial difficulties and caught up in several scandals...

...He became the American author, recognized worldwide, steered to global fame by his white-suited Midwesternness, his comic splendor, his vernacular drone...

...Hoffman tentatively suggests, on the strength of scattered new evidence in letters, that Clemens's early career as a western journalist (and notorious hoaxer) depended on several gay relationships, not least one with a cruising humorist named Artemus Ward...

...Twain has had plenty of biographers...

...He is particularly concerned (so was Kaplan) with the issue of how the temperamental Sam Clemens enacted, borrowed, struggled with the demanding and ever-shifting role of Mark Tvain...

...When brother Orion went west to the new Nevada territory, Sam went too, involving himself in mining, politics, and journalism, and beginning to make his mark in the role of public humorist...

...Kaplan's decision to concentrate on the adult Clemens has left other biographers with plenty of room to maneuver...

...Ernest Hemingway said the most famous thing about Twain, that all modern American literature came from one book called Huckleberry Finn...

...The time itself—a time of rising national power, bursting technological energy, great adventuring, stronger Ameri-canness—also helped in the making of Mark Twain...

...During his lifetime, Twain came to seem a white-suited wonderful Buffalo Bill...

...It all turned into his triumphant book The Innocents Abroad...

...He was quite simply the most inclusive, the most direct, eventually the most famous...

...Hoffman tells it vividly, bringing out Clemens/Twain's conflicts with his wife Livy and his obsessions with technologies, business adventures, and gadgetry of every kind, which took him to the brink of financial ruin...

...we will never be done with Mark Twain...

...but the Twain he impersonated developed radically from simple Western humorist into critical witness and entrepreneurial exploiter of the American era he himself helped name the Gilded Age...

...The boat was packed with newspaper reporters—but it was Twain's articles and his subsequent lectures that made it matter...

...He can surely be reckoned the greatest American writer—not necessarily the best, not the most artistically radical or adventurous, not the most profound...

...Malcolm Bradbury's comic novels include The History Man, Rates of Exchange, and Doctor Criminale...

...fortunately, his reputation in print began to rise not just in the new territory but in California, and then over on the East Coast...

...Kaplan starts the story when Clemens, around the age of 31, has just become Mark Twain and is heading from West Coast to East, carrying his humorist's and journalist's credentials off to tackle the Brahmin citadels...

...It was probably a visit to Britain early in the years of his fame that made him see the force of his identity...

...They were often marginal lands of resettlement for migrants from the East and the South, as Judge Clemens and family found when they came there in the 1830s and hit hard times...

...Twain" was in some ways a conservative figure, especially once he'd married Olivia...

...This was a process that continued over the years, until Mark Twain became a perfect product and trademark...

...The book validated a distinctive, teasing, and yet culturally vigorous way of seeing the European culture-citadel...

...The man himself was, as Hoffman puts it, an unstable narcissist, who was relatively uneducated but wonderfully self-taught, not least in basic strategies of survival...

...The political climate and economic growth made Western journalism lively, and so did the links that existed with the powerful bohemian culture that had already emerged in San Francisco, a literary frontier even then—and, Hoffman suggests, with a distinctive gay culture as well...

...Today there are critics who would ban it because of his characterization of Nigger Jim, while other advanced academics claim Twain as America's first post-colonial writer because of his American-vernacular style and his powerful critique of racism and slavery...

...Virginia Woolf said of biography, "There are some stories which have to be retold by each generation...

...Henry Ward Beecher and Gen...

...That mixture produced a bouncing yet bitter critical humor, fed with a strong sense of moral crisis and anxiety, and by a wide social and cultural imagination that reached through to the American heartland...

...As Hoffman shows, in order to make it in the East, in the world of wealth and "literature," Twain had to revise his history and whiten his character...

...He further portrays Clemens as an anxious figure, testily difficult, but capable of powerful charm...

...In one of them, Mrs...

...Published just at the same time as a major new edition of Twain's collected writings—the magnificent 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain—Hoffman's well-told biography is timely, refreshing, and well worthy to hold the stage...

...Van Wyck Brooks saw him as the good writer stopped by the provincialism of his culture from being great...

...That explains why novels like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson will remain unforgettable—and why they truly are great revelations of American culture...

...Borges had become blind, and so unable to see the tackiness of present-day touristic Hannibal...

...William Tecumseh Sherman dropped out of the cruise just before departure, Twain became the ship's comic celebrity, mocking American religiosity as much as European cultural icons...

...At various times, Twain was prepared to share his pseudonym with other writers, hide behind it, ditch it altogether, market it, protect it as trademark...

...Meantime, struggling out of debt and skillful at stunts and self-promotions, he was beginning to lift "Mark Twain" from humorous columnist to public figure...

...Novelist Andrew Hoffman has undertaken a large-scale new life of Tvain with several interesting results...

...Twain was an American embodiment, his humor considered a serious art...

...This ever-shifting personality—and what happened to it over the years that took Clemens through to his major fiction, through fame to bankruptcy, and out of it again, into final world honors—gives Hoffman his central theme...

...There was a time when Boston libraries banned Huckleberry Finn for its sauciness...

...The river was a great avenue of culture, he said—with its own grandeur, its cosmopolitanism, its Gothic arts, even its own castles and monasteries...

...it was a new form of travel writing, an anti-guidebook...

...For "Tvain" was a role, a performance, a mask for an often uncertain and sometimes difficult man...

...the old boy is somewhat different, but still there shining brightly at the end...

...Unlike Kaplan, Hoffman starts his story in those risky settlements along the Mississippi Valley, some of them with a utopian impulse, that grew up in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase and often ran into difficulties in the depression of 1837...

...they have shown no sign at all of damming up since...

...He charts the early attempts of the young Sam Clemens to work up a career of some kind—maybe as a printer-publisher or a typesetter, maybe piloting on the river, maybe taking some role in the endless politics of the fast-changing state in which the Great Compromise was attempted and failed...

...He wasn't the writer who did most to explore the aesthetic limits of American form (better for that Melville, or Whitman), nor the one who probed most deeply into the underlying problems and tensions of his industrializing post-bellum culture...

...But it was also a shifting icon...

...The humorist in turn became the great novelist...

...And also something in the way of a love letter for Olivia Langdon, from the pen of a cleaned-up, morally serious, and therefore potentially marriageable Mark Twain...

...A few years ago, when I visited his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri— not one of the finest of memorial sites for a world writer—I was told of a recent visit by Jorge Luis Borges, the wonderful Argentinian storymaker who is as much a master of cunning literary brevity as Twain was a master of spread and sprawl...

...in another, Charles Dickens found the false Eden he depicted so bitterly in Martin Chuzzlewit...

...Clemens and Mark Twain, a fine study of the complexity of the man, his relationship to his culture, and the nature of his fame...

...Twain was massively honored, as he later would be right across Europe...

...He had a gift for impersonation and often a rogue temperament...

...In other ways he was highly and observantly radical, not least on matters of race...

...Twain's has been retold far more often than that...

...Only later was it really possible to make that central riverscape what Twain made it: an idyll, a mythic center for the nation, the vital American artery, everyone's boyhood home...

...The British loved American humorists and saw their craft as an art form...