Decayed gentility and a feckless father. These make the springiest springboard for the angry artist. Dickens, Picasso, Joyce, Shaw, Francis Bacon all enjoyed these unsung advantages in life. So did Samuel Langhorne Clemens who called himself Mark Twain, after the cry of the leadsmen sounding the depths in the treacherous waters of the Mississippi (twain=two fathoms, or 12 feet).
The Clemenses had come west from Virginia by way of Kentucky with half a dozen slaves and irrepressible dreams of remaking their fortune. In this sloppy, imaginative, wandering hulk of a biography Ron Powers never bothers to chart the family’s history, so that you are surprised when every now and then reminders of their prosperous connections pop up — a well-to-do lawyer cousin in St Louis who lends Twain’s father the money to buy a general store, a doctor in London, another cousin in Berlin married to one of the Kaiser’s generals.
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