"A man can't write successful satire unless he be in a calm judicial good humor. I don't ever seem to be in a good enough humor with anything to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it and curse it and foam at the mouth or take a club and pound it to rags and pulp."
--Twain giving an accurate description of the joker's impulse to William Dean Howells

This is one of those books that's so good that it makes me want to throw the computer out the window and learn how to become a mechanic before it's too late. Kaplan studies Samuel Clemens during the second half of his life, after age thirty, years after he left California and came east, achieving his first success with The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It. The popular image of Twain as a lovable, mustachioed old pappy in a white suit fades before this detailed portrait of the man. Kaplan's biography is a study in duality: the respectable Mr.Clemens and the disreputable pseudonymous author. (Satisfyingly, Twain's fallen back into disrepute--the one certain way of getting young people to read him.) Anyone who considers themselves a joker knows what it's like to burn with shame for having given way to some devil of levity inside, for having said what one was thinking, instead of holding one's tongue. The two-fold personality is reflected in a number of Twain's books; he was obsessed with twinning in The Prince and the Pauper, Puddin'head Wilson and the short story "Those Extraordinary Twins." Kaplan bolsters his theme: Twain was a twin, trying to be a man of the average people, while living splendidly as one of the most famous authors in America. Says Kaplan, "his troublement went far beyond the conventional split in the Victorian psyche."

He was an author whose first books were sold by subscription, door to door, by salesman to rural buyers (who as Kaplan says, might not have ever seen the outside of a bookstore.) Subscription book salesman made sure that the books they sold were big enough to convince farmers that they were getting lots of bang for their buck; they were sold by the weight and heft of the volume (which is why The Innocents Abroad and Roughing It are so packed with skim-worthy passages.)

Even though Clemens made good money from these books, he was frequently broke; he lived in a opulent style favored by his wife Livy, the daughter of a minor coal baron. To make ends meet he often had to revert to something he hated: the lecture circuit. Kaplan's description of the circuit, of bad transportation, bad food, bad lodging, squalid venues and boring people mirrors the tour diaries of rock bands you might have heard of that have hit the road.

The passage about the Royal Nonesuch in Huckleberry Finn (when the tramp Duke goes naked paints himself blue and goes on all fours as a Wild man of Borneo act to attract some rube-money) is, Kaplan suggests, how Twain saw himself, a monkey in a cage on exhibit, as he suffered through yet another cycle of suffocating halls, muddy roads and boarding houses.

The Twain here is tormented by guilt, boiling with ambition and doing his best to fit in with his wife's social circle. Social climbing is a sucker's game, and Clemens suffered for it with snubs and the unshakable feeling that as a writer of humor he was less important than the Bostonians whose influence ran the literary world of the time.

Clemens/Twain was also a rage-ball considering what a calm old grandfather he's remembered. After he lost a lost of money in the Panic of 1874, he was given to tirades about how the national right to vote was a bad idea.

Where Kaplan tends to censure Twain, though, I appreciate him all the more. His comedian's urge to destroy a crowd was pure, and when he was after the laugh, no national institution would stay his hand, not even Generals Grant or Sherman. I suspect Kaplan--a sympathetic biographer, I stress--was surprised at how destructive Twain could be when the humor was upon him.

Clemens, in his alter-ego as Twain, fired a Fort Sumter-like shot against the Eastern aristocratic belles letters traditions of the last century: the date was 12/17/77 at the Hotel Brunswick in Boston. "The disastrous cataclysm," Clemens wrote decades later, when he'd recalled how he'd made a jackass out of himself by delivering a lecture for Whittier's 70th birthday. It was a long joke about Longfellow, Emerson and Oliver Wendell Holmes being impersonated by three thieving tramps who overrun a miner's cabin in the Sierras. Clemens roasted himself for the speech later but Kaplan sees it rightly as an early discovery of the comic motifs that makes Twain's posthumously-published writings--the atheist writings collected in Letters from the Earth--some of his best.

The split between Clemens and Twain is clear: the urge for respectability made Twain's name and fortune, but it sabotaged and censored his writing. It was only posthumously that he could have the last laugh on enemies, the religious zealots and wealthy ignoramuses who have kept the nation backwards from Twain's time to ours.

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