Hello, my name is Ron Chernow.
And I feel very, very warmly about anyone who has won the Mark Twain Award for American Humor, including our friend Conan O'Brien.
So it's a delight to be here.
Thank you very much.
Yeah.
Fall is here.
Hear the yell Back to school, ring the bell.
Brand new shoes, walkin' blues, Climb the fence, books and pens.
I can tell that we are gonna be friends.
Yes, I can tell that we are gonna be friends.
Hello and welcome to.
Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend.
This is kind of a special episode.
You probably know, I'm a huge history buff and I have read every single book that this gentleman has written, I believe.
He has another book out there.
He might have written a Nancy Drew mystery that I'm...
Unaware of.
But other than that, I think I have read all of his books.
His latest is a joy.
My guest, of course, is a Pulitzer Prize winning author, and his latest biography, Mark Twain, is out now.
And Twain, in my opinion, is more relevant at this moment than ever before.
And we need Twain.
And I'm just thrilled that this gentleman is here today and that he's written this magnificent book.
Ron Chernow, welcome.
I saw in your resume Conan, that you had studied history at Harvard and I had studied literature at Yale.
So you were in training for my career and I was in training for your career.
You want to trade?
Sure.
You've done.
You know, I've noticed something which is there's a and other people have pointed it out as well that you have written this string of spectacular biographies.
And I congratulate you on the Mark Twain.
I read all, I believe, 1,200 pages of this book and was enthralled.
I love it.
And I learned so much about Twain that I didn't know, because you've unearthed some amazing stuff about the man.
And to see his life, I mean, it's very hard to contain this guy's life.
And I think you have managed to do that brilliantly.
But I was looking at your work because I believe I have read all of your books, which I can't say to many people.
Judy Blume.
But it's you and Judy Blume.
But there's an interesting path to the order in which you wrote, because you start out and you write about JP.
Morgan and great Gilded Age industrialists, which then got you interested and whet your appetite for your next book, which is Rockefeller, which then got you interested in finance.
And you think I'll go back to the beginning the source who's running finance in America?
At the very beginning,
Well, Hamilton, you write that book.
And I know your plan all along was for it to be a musical with a lot of rap.
Yeah.
Yeah.
People, you know people always say to me at events Mr Chernow, did you imagine, as you were writing the book, that it was going to end up as a hip hop musical?
And I always say, I think the question answers itself.
Yes.
There is a real, I'm sure you've seen it, but there's an amazing tape. of Lin-Manuel Miranda.
He's been invited to the White House to perform his latest work.
This is obviously a bunch of years ago, 15 years ago or so.
He's invited to the White House, to the Obama White House, to perform his latest work.
And he gets up to the microphone and he says, I'm now going to perform... This is the...
President Obama and the first lady there and all these assembled people at the White House.
And he says, I'm gonna perform my latest work.
It's a musical about Alexander Hamilton.
Huge laugh, huge laugh.
And he goes, hold on, hold on, hold on.
No, no, no, I'm serious.
It sounded so absurd to people.
And then, of course, it became one of the most- No, in fact, with that song.
A few months earlier he had come to my brownstone in Brooklyn Heights and he sat on my couch and he started snapping his fingers and he did the opening number of the song.
And when he finished, he said, what do you think?
I said well, you've taken the first 40 pages of my book and you've condensed it into a four-minute song.
And I said, that's rather amazing.
But what I was thinking and I didn't say to him.
I said this is kind of embarrassing that it took me 40 pages to say what this guy has done in four minutes.
And then a few months later, he said, go on YouTube.
I performed it at the White House.
So there he is, not only performing it at the White House, but he got a standing ovation from Barack and Michelle Obama.
And I thought to myself, I'm really strapped to a rocket with this guy.
He's written one song in the show and he's already performed it at the White House and gotten the standing ovation from the president and first lady.
I loved when I went to see the play on Broadway in the initial run and it's the hottest ticket in town and I go to see it.
And I walk into the lobby and prominently displayed is your biography Hamilton, by Ron Chernow.
It's right there, and it's like, you know...
It's so it's what any historian would dream of.
Do you know what I mean?
That that, and I know you would are disappointed that your book on Grant did not become a hip hop musical.
But Hamilton leads to Washington.
Washington leads to Grant.
And I mentioned this to you out in the hallway.
I love the Grant biography because the most shocking thing to me that I had never appreciated before about Grant and I thought I knew about these guys he goes to West Point.
He serves in fights in Mexico.
You know he's in the Mexican-American War and he's tries his hand at business and it's really not going well for him.
And this is, And the Civil War is approaching.
But as the Civil War is almost upon us, he is carrying and delivering firewood, like chopping it and delivering it to people in the cold to make enough money to put food on his family's table.
And then he decides to go sign up for the war.
And the period of time between him chopping wood and carrying it around to people's homes, door to door, and him being the most celebrated general in the biggest war in the history of the world is about two years.
Yeah.
It's insane.
And then two years later, he's next to Lincoln.
He's the most famous man in America.
Absolutely.
One of the things that attracted me to the grand story was that I felt that all the people that I had written about up until that point were kind of built for success.
You read about the early years of Alexander Hamilton.
He has a focus, a discipline, and drive intelligence.
You know, if he didn't do what, you know, he ended up doing, he would have succeeded at something.
Washington, a very impressive guy.
Even had the Revolutionary War not come along, he's still a very impressive, capable man.
Yeah.
And even John D. Rockefeller, when he's, you know, a young clerk on the Cleveland docks, he said, I was after something big.
Whereas you know 50, 100 pages into Ulysses S Grant.
You figure this guy's going to end up a footnote in history, at best.
And so I was attracted to the idea of writing about failure.
I had written about so much success.
And after As we all know, life is much more about failure for most of us than success.
And so with Grant, suddenly the Civil War comes along.
He had West Point.
He'd been in the Mexican War.
He stood out all this military lore in his head.
But he's working in his father's leather goods store in Galena Illinois, where he's working as a clerk junior to his two younger brothers.
You can imagine how that felt.
The war breaks out.
There's a tremendous shortage, particularly in the North, of, you know, trained officers.
And he suddenly meshes with his historical moment, you know?
And then he rises and rises and rises.
But he's almost 40 at that point.
He could easily have ended up living a life of total, you know, obscurity.
And I think this is one of the things that inspired a lot of people reading the story.
We all feel that we have something special inside of us, if only the right set of circumstances happens.
And Grant is kind of the greatest example of that.
He is.
If you saw it in a movie, you'd say, well, we got to fix that part.
Right.
Because the fact that you have him chopping wood and delivering it door to door and maybe getting a nickel for his trouble, and him saying thank you, thank you very much, and moving on to the next house,
And then he's a celebrated war hero two years later in the most consequential war of that century, if I can say that.
It's...
It's astounding.
It's absolutely astounding.
Today, we're here to talk about Mark Twain.
I've been waiting for this book because I've made my life in humor for better or worse, and Twain is the American humorist and he comes from this era.
That fascinates me.
And I was saying this to someone the other day Twain has been turned into kind of an emoji, you know, the white suit, the cigar, the aphorisms that we see all over the place on coffee mugs and everything, and kind of a lovable you know yeah emoji, for lack of a better word.
And...
This book shows you that his life is, I mean, it's an epic life.
It's uniquely American life.
He does so much and he travels such a far distance.
I don't mean he does it, you know, obviously in miles.
He circumnavigates the globe.
But I mean, just from what he started as and what he became is infinite life.
And it's all in one lifetime.
And then he has so many contrasts.
And I wanted to talk about some of those.
He's born in the South and he identifies as, he is a Southerner.
He is a Southerner and he has as a young as a kid and as a young man, he has all of the antebellum Southern beliefs.
Yeah, I mean, he's born into a slave-holding family in a slave-owning town in a slave-owning state.
Okay, he's born in Hannibal, which is tucked all the way up into the northeast corner of Missouri.
It's right on the Mississippi River.
So it's then and now a rather isolated rural area, except here is this broad shining, magnificent waterway that's kind of bringing once or twice a day the world through Hannibal and, And pouring off those steamboats might be circus players.
It might be traveling salesmen.
It might be a minstrel show, whatever.
He sees the whole world passing through him.
And it kind of begins to give him an intimation of a wider world.
But you're right.
I mean going through his letters, you know, when he's a teenager.
Not only statements kind of crude and racist about you know blacks, but Chinese.
I mean, you name it.
Yeah.
And this man grows an inconceivable amount in the course of his life.
You know from growing up in this.
You know small town backwater and he has all the prejudices you know of the general environment and he becomes so much more enlightened and tolerant a figure.
Well, I tried to touch on this in the.
You know you get to give quick remarks at the end at the Twain Prize and I tried to touch on this, which is by the end of his life.
His views have evolved so much.
And he is living in this age of imperialism.
He's living in this age when Americans are getting really excited about you know, we're going to pretty much control the Caribbean.
We're going to take over the Philippines.
We're going to take the Sandwich Islands.
We're going to take Hawaii.
We're going to expand.
And Twain is saying, I don't like this.
And it's very unpopular.
And he's very much against All of the 19th century racism towards Chinese.
He's very progressive.
He has a lot of views that are completely evolved from how he grew up.
Yeah, you know it's interesting because he fairly early on becomes America's most popular and beloved humorist.
And he recognizes that it's something of a trap.
He's always afraid of kind of alienating his readers, particularly alienating his Southern readers, because he had very, very strong views on not just politics, religion and a lot of other things.
But as his life goes on, I really feel by the end of his life he's become the conscience of American society that he's dared to articulate, all of those things that he was afraid to say.
And I think that part of his power is he says things that all of us are thinking but won't say out loud.
And you mentioned.
You know his views on imperialism because at the beginning of the Spanish-American War he's actually very much on the side of the US.
He feels that we're defending these, you know, Cuban rebels against their Spanish overlords, and we take over the Philippines.
And he, again, idealistically imagines that we're going to liberate, you know, rather than subjugate the Philippine people.
And he gets up at a dinner in New York.
He was very often the toast master.
He was kind of the perfect person to host a banquet.
And he gets up there and he says that our soldiers in the Philippines are marching with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag.
Yeah.
We all know, because we've all lived through wars, we know how difficult it is to criticize your own government and your own country.
During a war.
During a war, yeah.
And people in the audience gasped.
And, in fact, another.
You know, one of the organizers of this event immediately rushed up to the podium and said no, our soldiers are not.
You know marching uh, with disgraced muskets under a polluted flag.
And you know increasingly, as he goes on uh, he's willing to take the heat, he's willing to make the enemies.
And one of the interesting things, one of many interesting things about doing this book is we all like to think.
As people get older, they become more mellow in their views.
Twain becomes more rabid yeah, In his rage, and he's not only taking on America and the Philippines, he's writing pamphlets against the Russian czar.
He's writing pamphlets against King Leopold II of Belgium for his behavior in the Congo Free State.
He's campaigning against municipal corruption in New York.
He's writing pamphlets defending the Jews.
He's speaking out.
Uh, in favor of women's suffrage, et cetera, et cetera.
There's also his uh uh was it called.
He wrote a uh article or pamphlet in the United States of lynched him.
Was it, was it, he was taking on topics.
No one wanted to talk about lynching in uh, in in the Jim Crow South, and he would talk about it.
Yeah, that was actually, you know, on so many things he became outspoken.
That was one where he finally drew back because originally he he was collecting a lot of clippings about lynchings in the united states, including in his own town of hannibal, and he had originally planned and proposed to his publisher that he was going to do a history of lynching in the united states.
He ends up writing an essay the united states have lynched him which unfortunately did not get published during his lifetime.
It was published 13 years after he died.
And what he writes is that he tries to analyze the psychology of lynch mobs.
And he says that it's really just kind of a few sadistic individuals who are instigating the crowd.
And he says that most of the people are cowards who are coerced into it.
I don't know if that's true.
I say in the book, actually, when you look at of a lot of lynchings.
It seems like there are a lot of smiling faces, you know, of whites in the crowd.
That turned out to.
That was kind of one topic that was a bridge.
You know, too far for him to do it.
But I do think he was preface.
I mean he was looking ahead to think he'd be aghast at the collective thinking of the news media now the internet, how people love to groupthink groupthink is.
I mean, he's talking about all these things.
There's so many places where he's talking about groupthink.
Uh, he actually has a very interesting essay called corn pone ideas and what he says and i keep thinking about this with our own contemporary politics that we have two sets of ideas.
We have our secret and sincere positions on things, and then we have the positions that we take publicly for the sake of our own safety.
He said that kind of life makes cowards of us all, the need to support our families.
We're afraid to voice things.
He also felt that politically, we all like to imagine that we're voicing original ideas, When in fact he said you know 99 of the time we are voicing ideas that we picked up from party leaders, from party organs that were kind of parroting things.
Well, now we have that.
We have that.
I mean, we have that over and over and over again now with...
Everyone spouts what they just heard on either CNN or Fox or that they saw on the internet, and it becomes their opinion.
Twain is talking about so many things that relate to today, and there's a couple of things that I...
Absolutely fascinating me about this guy is that you use the words to describe him glandular and volcanic.
There's something driving this guy from an early age that you could almost think would show up on a CAT scan.
It's like, oh, I see.
There was a growth pressing on the occipital lobe.
There's something going on with this guy that yields him greatness and also terrible folly.
He is obsessive.
He is nonstop obsessive.
I've never read about an author who churned out so much.
I mean when he got writing, he would say I mean he would just sometimes standing up, sometimes writing at the billiards table, sometimes in his little octagonal writing room.
He'd churn out chapter after chapter after chapter and go on these streaks of writing that when he turns it on, when it hits him, he's doing that till the end of his life.
I mean, he's so prolific to an almost crazy degree.
That would be enough.
But he's also he's traveling as pretty much the world's first stand up not the world's first, but a stand up comic as we would know it today.
Yeah, he's a very much in demand speaker.
He's traveling everywhere.
He's also getting into insane money making schemes.
Mark Twain, he has an idea for a like a board game.
It's the Mark Twain memory game.
He has ideas for a book that self-paced for when you put in clippings, all of them bomb.
And the sad thing is he really gets involved in this printing press, this settable type press that he thinks, the page press that he thinks is going to who revolutionized the world and ruins not only his fortune but his wife's inherited fortune.
They lose everything on this idea and he can't let it go like a gambler in Vegas.
And so he is so good at seeing the flaws in other people.
He's so good at seeing the vanity in other people.
And then he goes off and does the stupidest things you can imagine.
Like, again, you just think he's driven.
He can't stop himself in good ways and in bad ways.
He writes a letter at one point to his family.
He says they have to move, move, move, exclamation point.
And there is something driving him.
I mean, one of many contradictions of Mark Twain is he always described himself as lazy.
But, you know, we know Tom and Huck in the Mississippi.
He published two dozen books in his lifetime.
Somewhere between 1000 and 2000 magazine articles filled up 50 notebooks, gave thousands of interviews, gave thousands of speeches.
And I, of course, had to go through all of this.
And he was very aware of his own nature.
He said, my emotions veer from one extreme to another.
Timmy, would you suspect, I mean, today...
Today, someone would say, you need to go see a psychopharm, psychopharmacologist.
I mean, most great men in history would probably be told, you need to be on Prozac.
Let's put a little lithium in your coffee.
Let's do something.
Yeah.
And I mean, there was it was interesting because there were a lot of characteristics.
He was, you know, he claimed that he was lazy, but then he would go through kind of this hyper focused period.
He could be very scattered and disorganized, particularly before he met his wife, who really cleaned up his people.
Yeah.
You know people would walk into his room and there would be, you know, scraps of writing everywhere.
There'd be, you know, pipes and cigars everywhere.
It would be a complete mess.
I did describe this to a psychiatrist friend, who immediately said you know about attention deficit disorder.
I try not to use contemporary psychological language.
It seems inappropriate to project that, you know, back into the past.
But there's something like that, you know, that's clearly going on.
But I got very fascinated by the business investments.
In fact, at one point in the book I said it was sometimes hard to tell whether Mark Twain was a literary man with business sidelines or a businessman with literary sidelines.
He said, I have to speculate, such being my nature.
He admits late in his life, after he's lost several fortunes.
He said I was always the easy prey of the cheap adventurer.
And there was something very, very compulsive about the speculation, because the tragedy of the story is, you know, here's a man who made a fortune in book royalties.
He made a fortune in lecture fees.
He marries an heiress from upstate New York.
To a coal fortune.
Coal and rail and timber.
They're living in a 25-room mansion in Hartford with six servants.
He blows his own fortune.
He blows Livy's inheritance. they're forced into exile to economize in Europe for nine years.
Because it's cheaper to live in Europe.
Cheaper to live in Europe.
But still, you know they're living like in a you know 28 room villa in Florence, to quote unquote economize.
Yeah.
You know, they're living in a... There's no Airbnb.
There's no Airbnb.
And shout out to Airbnb, by the way.
You guys do a great job.
Sponsor.
Then they're living in a very lavish suite of hotel rooms in Vienna.
In fact, they go on one trip to Europe and they buy so many objects to beautify their house in Hartford that they come back with like 12 crates and 25 boxes of things.
They were like the original consumers.
And Livy was usually the restraining force on Twain's worst excesses.
But she herself was the original shopper.
And she wrote a very beautiful letter to her mother at one point and said it's terrible how attached we become to material things.
So here was a man, a couple, who should have had a lovely, placid life, had everything in the world.
He had talent.
He was making an enormous amount of money.
He'd married into an enormous amount of Probably the most famous person in America.
And actually the most famous American in the world.
In the world, yeah.
But particularly in the United States.
He was so fascinated that if he walked into a restaurant theater, everyone would stand up and applaud.
He was that famous.
Well, it happens.
When does it happen?
What's that?
When does it happen?
Sona calls ahead.
Okay, I see that.
And she says, Conan's going to be there soon.
And you know, you each get $25.
Hired actors.
Lots of them.
But you know, it's all, you know, the problems are self-inflicted wounds.
Oh, all of it is self-inflicted.
And he gets.
There are these contradictions.
Which is, He's a Southerner who becomes obsessed with living in the North, in Hartford, among all the most Northern liberal elites the Tony, the Yankees, the writers.
So he does that.
He makes that transformation. where he becomes the most Northern of Northerners.
He hated, hated Gilded Age millionaires desperately wanted to be one and did everything he could to be wealthy.
He had a publishing house, the typesetting machine, these crazy board games, all of it fails.
But he's this kind, generous.
There's so many stories of his kindness, his generosity, his sweetness of nature.
Yet when he decided to turn on you, He... Forget it.
He was... His rage knew no bounds.
And the language that he used when he decided.
I mean, these are people who you said like this is the greatest person I've ever met.
This Matt Gourley is the greatest person I've ever met.
I love Matt Gourley.
I love... You know, he's great.
He's my best friend.
I love him.
He's fantastic.
And then... And I've experienced this.
One little... Can we just end here?
No, no, no.
Just please... You can.
You can edit this for yourself.
Click that out.
No, no.
But then...
But then whatever the friend did that he decided was you know some kind of breach or lapse or any?
He, that snake, that monster, that you know that lower than low?
And he would just he couldn't. he couldn't contain himself.
There was no gray area.
There was no gray area.
He couldn't get it out of his system.
You know, when he was a young writer in San Francisco, he was about the same age as Bret Hart.
Remember Bret Hart, the outcast of Poker Flash?
Yep, yep.
Who was the celebrity at the time.
Who was the celebrity at the time and who Mark Twain thought was the most celebrated maybe the greatest you know?
Writer of the time.
They became very, very close friends.
They later collaborated on a play and Bret Hart was having money difficulties, came and lived in Mark Twain's house in Hartford.
He said things about the house that Mark Twain didn't like.
He said things about Livy, the wife that uh twain didn't like, and and mark twain then turned on him he would like fall in love with people uh, and then he would become severely disillusioned so that uh, you know, he finally says a brett hart, he never had an idea that he came by.
Honestly yeah uh, he said that he he would.
He was a man without a country no, that's too strong a term.
He was an invertebrate without a country.
You know burn, And there was no one who was better at put-downs than Mark Twain.
But you know, one of the things that I could not figure out about him.
We all have these experiences with people where we're suddenly disillusioned with them and maybe tell them off.
But when we do tell them off, It gets it out of our system and then we sort of calm down and we move on with our life.
Mark Twain would not let it go.
And if you can't let it go, the one who's going to end up being victimized by it is not the other person it's going to be.
Yeah, it's you that's carrying it.
It's kind of like this wound. that he keeps probing again and again and again.
I could not figure out.
I don't know if any psychiatrist could figure out.
I mean, he's late in life.
He's very disillusioned with the two most important people working for him, a man named Ralph Ashcroft and a woman named Isabel Lyon, who was his private secretary.
When he becomes disillusioned with them.
He ends up writing a 400-page manuscript entitled you know, and he says about Isabel, who had been his.
He was so close to her yeah, and she becomes really important after he loses his wife.
This is someone who cared for him, took care of him and then he writes this 400 page she was like this surrogate, this creed yeah, about how awful she is.
A diss track.
She was a brood, a simple, heartless brood.
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 quick concept of 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.
And 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.
His one daughter, Jean, has epilepsy.
Epilepsy, yeah.
And it's terrible.
Susie when they've left the country.
She's wandering around their mansion, which is shut down alone.
And she has meningitis, and she pretty much dies almost alone while the family is in Europe.
It's very tragic.
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.
Not naming names here, but plenty of people who take advantage of this system.
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 I mean, 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.
Yeah, and he's suffering terribly from carbuncles.
I mean, it was really grueling for him to do it.
But particularly, Livy felt that...
There was this terrible stigma attached to bankruptcy.
For her, it was a real question of honor.
In fact 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 the Standard Oil mogul named Henry Rogers.
Uh and uh, rogers is kind of running rings around the creditors.
He was a very, very shrewd wall street.
He was helping twain out.
Yeah, he was helping twain out.
And uh twain, you know in new york, writes very proudly to libby, who was then in paris uh, describing uh the way that um Rogers has 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 and they 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 amazed me, Conan?
OK, 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 a 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.
Yes, and he writes a letter to his friend henry rogers, who is one of the main moguls of standard oil, and he suggests that they buy up the worldwide patents.
The advice was the device was called the raster said we should buy the worldwide patents for this.
He said um, people will call it a trust, this global monopoly they will have.
But we mustn't mind that.
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 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, but 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.
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.
He is so dark and he's questioning everything.
Yeah, 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.
No 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 wife than Livy.
And she also, she read everything Twain wrote and would temper him.
Maybe not, I mean, but she would remove if she thought anything was a little you know.
Oh, that's a little racier.
That language is a little, you don't say breeches.
You're talking about underwear.
Let's take that out.
She was very genteel.
She was very genteel, which is a very funny.
They were an odd couple in that way, but she was a great partner.
Yeah.
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.
And 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 temperament.
So he would.
Very often, if he was angry, he would sit down and he would write a very, you know, impetuous note 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.
In fact, the daughters laughingly called this mother dusting father off.
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?
So she's kind of guiding him.
These are soccer players. penalties.
Yeah, these are soccer penalties.
We have those cards for Conan.
Wrap it up.
But you know, in fact he said, because you know he said Livy edited my manuscripts and then she edited me.
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.
We have extensive correspondence between them.
She never, never threw it in his face.
He apologizes a lot.
Another word I wrote down after... When I was reading the book, I wrote down guilt.
He has so much guilt today about... He convinces his... his brother to become a steamboat captain.
He says, this is a great, I love doing this.
And his brother's then killed in an explosion of a steamboat.
And so Twain blames himself.
Twain blames himself for so many things.
You know, when his daughter dies, he's not there.
He's, you know, cause 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.
The saddest one is that he and Libby, their first child was a boy who was named Langdon, which was her maiden name.
Langdon died at 18 months.
What happened was that they were at the Langdon place in Elmira, New York.
And 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.
Yeah, in fact his sister-in-law, Sue Crane, afterwards said you know they left Elmira and went to Hartford because the baby was better.
The 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 Mattis and in fact she was sort of delirious and
It's really, I mean, it's Shakespearean.
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.
Kind 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, it's... 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 a little.
It's not unlike Theodore Roosevelt's house in Oyster Bay this just big, long thing that people built back then.
Massive, huge ceilings, lots of flourishes, lots of different colored stone and brick.
But that was their joy.
I think they lived there for 17 years.
17 years, that's right.
And then 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 uh, i 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.
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...
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.
He 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 as 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.
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.
I mean it's so funny because you have this quote and I underlined a few things in the book because it's these 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.
There's Lincoln, there's Twain.
There's a couple of like 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 uh, I just did things.
And now here I am and now my life's over and it 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 know, you've been around for a while and you've done some cool things.
And 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.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
And I'm not going to say this other stuff.
Would you please substitute it with breaches?
Yeah, yeah.
But, you know, in my own opinion, I think...
And I can't explain any of it.
I just have had these crazy impulsive drives and impulses.
And I maybe it is glandular.
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.
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.
Yeah, he has this kind of deterministic view that we're just kind of machines and there are stimuli and we react to it, that we're really not creating anything.
The funny thing is Conan, that someone reading that if it had not been written by Mark Twain, they would have said well, what about Mark Twain?
Mark Twain would have been the best example of the fact that there is true originality in the world world.
He'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 that go.
No, he can't let it go.
Yeah, 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.
Yeah!
He was convinced that his discovery that Francis Bacon had written said it's the great discovery of the age.
Also, I couldn't help but wonder if it was a little bit of professional jealousy.
Like, you know, there's no way that guy did all that.
He loved the play.
And I think what misled him is that as Mark Twain became famous, reporters were constantly 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 um?
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.
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.
But if Shakespeare lived in a different media environment, you know we would know everything about him.
But 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, you know, 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.
Maybe he didn't write his own works.
This is his guilt.
Yes, yes.
It was all Livy.
It was all his wife cranking it out.
It was Brett Hart.
Yeah, Brett Hart did it all.
No, he was dead.
But 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.
And 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 tootinest.
That's the best invention ever.
And Libby would be there saying, you bought 10,000 abdominisers?
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 to have it.
Shake weight.
I've got to have the shake weight.
I've got to have the shake weight.
I've got to gel like Magellan.
I like the way that rolls off the tongue.
But he would just fall prey to every...
The word would get around soon.
This is the guy, as it does, as these programs start to know, oh, this sucker, they're on to me.
They know that I like a new kind of leather wallet that has a little, 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 a question.
If I was alive today?
That with Mark Twain, there was just no filter whatsoever.
There was no kind of political correctness.
He really felt as a satirist that everything was fair game.
So that, for instance, when he wrote his first book, which turned out to be his best-selling book, called The Innocents Abroad, he went with these early tourist crews to Europe and the Holy Land.
And he's just sounding off on all these things there in Italy.
And he's making jokes about dwarves.
He said, you know, if you want to see dwarves retail, go to Milan.
If you want to see dwarves wholesale, go to Genoa.
You know, 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.
You know where we're much more sensitive.
You know 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.
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.
But it's got the N-word in it countless times yet it also is exploring a real relationship between Jim and Huck, and and and Jim is not a cardboard character.
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 if he were alive today.
And 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, before he's evolved.
And when I was reading that I was thinking we live in this era now where kids go online and do things, say things.
And they get tagged.
You're the kid who said that.
You're the kid that did this.
You're the kid that sang that.
You're the kid.
And I don't know, you know, there wouldn't be a Mark Twain.
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.
You'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, it's a facet of his life.
Late in life he is hanging around a lot of young women.
When i say young women, ages what like 10 to 16, 10 to 16 and and um, what's interesting about it is that there's no evidence that there was anything sexual about it, right?
No one uh, 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 angelfish.
His angelfish.
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, if there's a, 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 to have them around because he loved the attention of
I mean, first of all, he was fascinated with childhood.
He 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 example of 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 his 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.
He actually flaunted it.
Actually, one of the girls, Dorothy Quick, he met on the transatlantic liner.
And when it docked in New York, there would always be, you know, a scrum of reporters waiting for Mark Twain in New York.
And he gets off 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 A vuncular 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.
In 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 kind of buttons and bows and everything, because she wanted to be one of his angelfish.
So this is the way it was kind of handled.
People were reacting in this kind of very jovial way to it.
Whereas we look at this behavior now and it's very disturbing, very odd and disquieting.
He never acted on it.
I mean, it's very different.
When I was doing the research, I read a book about Lewis Carroll in the case of Lewis Carroll, where superficially might seem similar, but Lewis Carroll collected nude photos and nude drawings of the girls.
There 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 it.
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.
It's really kind of very creepy and I think that everyone who reads the book will have that reaction to it.
But I also kind of have to describe in fairness to him what it was and what it wasn't.
That 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.
Then, you know, which has been so well documented by Carol.
You had a wonderful line in your Kennedy science speeches that 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 human nature, because he'd traveled a lot, he'd met a lot of people.
He said, oh, no, no, 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, that we can feel that 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.
So you want to kill and kill again.
No, no.
Are we getting this?
I've been accused of a lot of things, not yet of being a serial killer, but somehow Hold 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.
And I...
He's just.
I mean, the 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're going to, 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 congratulate you and huge thrill to have you on the podcast because I love this stuff.
Oh, I feel like it's a privilege to be with you and the whole group today.
And I feel like you really have done honor to the book and to Mark Twain.
So thank you for reading it and reading it so closely and attentively.
It's really been a great experience.
I guess we all win then.
Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend with Conan O'Brien, Sonam Ovsessian, and Matt Gourley.
Produced by me, Matt Gourley.
Executive produced by Adam Sachs, Jeff Ross, and Nick Liao.
Theme song by The White Stripes.
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Take it away, Jimmy.
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