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. Perhaps Powers thinks it unAmerican to do any genealogical fossicking in this most American of all writers, but he thereby leaves out a dimension to the desperation of John Marshall Clemens and his barefoot brood stuck out in Hannibal, Missouri, a muddy hamlet on the shore of the Great River where the river boats never stopped long enough to stock up at the Clemens store.
But if he is short on decayed gentility, what Powers does render brilliantly is the anger of Mark Twain. As a skinny youth shifting type trays on the Hannibal Journal or learning the trade of a river pilot, he was unmissable: a tiny scarecrow boiling with resentment at his own obscurity and the world’s injustice, drunk half the time, with a belligerent glare and a great fuzz of red hair and an odd, rocking, shambling gait. By the time he was 40 he was an international celebrity.
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