In any case, Twain clearly thought of himself, and enjoyed thinking of himself, as heedless. For a writer of his caliber he had surprisingly little interest in assuming a fully adult role in the world, partly because adulthood struck him as an inferior state. Reflecting on the death of his eldest daughter, Susy, he writes that “Susy died at the right time, the fortunate time of life; the happy age—twenty-four years. At twenty-four, such a girl has seen the best of life—life as a happy dream. After that age the risks begin; responsibility comes, and with it the cares, the sorrows, and the inevitable tragedy. For her mother’s sake I would have brought her back from the grave if I could, but I would not have done it for my own.” When Twain was in his late sixties, after the death of his wife, he found companionship in a series of young girls. He took twelve-year-old girls as his dates to grown-up parties and entertained eleven-year-old girls for the weekend at his home. The Angel-fish, he called these young friends—though he does not have much to say about them in his memoir. And while it sounds completely creepy, it also feels deeply characteristic. There doesn’t seem to have been a hint of sexuality in these relationships, at least from his side. The man just preferred to feel like a boy.

He also enjoyed the excuse of childhood: the right to do and say the things a child can do or say and still be loved when an adult cannot. I do not mean this as an original criticism. Orwell long ago called it “the central weakness of Twain’s character,” in an essay that went on to charge him with a deeper fraud:

Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book [ Life on the Mississippi ] describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behavior is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates.

Whenever Twain writes about himself, and especially when he writes about his childhood, the reader senses that he has been invited to participate in a delightful fiction. In these dictations, Twain says several times words to the effect that “when people write their memoirs they do nothing but lie and puff themselves up. Because I will be speaking directly to you from the grave, with nothing to lose, this will be the first deeply honest autobiography.” But he isn’t any more interested in simple, artless honesty in death than he was in life. Honesty, for Twain, was not a virtue, and it was certainly not the best policy. It was a tool in his toolkit, to be used from time to time, when the occasion called for it.

BUT WHEN YOU READ even the most innocent of the funny stories that Twain tells about himself, and think about it for a minute, you realize that not only could it never have happened just the way he tells it, but the real point of the story is to settle, cheaply and painlessly, the question of what sort of person Mark Twain is. Here is a typical Twainian one, about his first days in his first real job, as an apprentice for the local newspaper in Hannibal:

It was a summer afternoon and just the kind of weather that a boy prizes for river excursions and other frolics, but I was a prisoner. The others were all gone holidaying. I was alone and sad. I had committed a crime of some sort and this was the punishment.... I had one comfort, and it was a generous one while it lasted. It was the half of a long and broad watermelon, fresh and red and ripe.

The young Clemens devours the melon and is left with a shell “big enough to do duty as a cradle.” He sits with his giant watermelon shell in some upper story window until an idea strikes him: he will drop it on someone’s head. He waits a bit for the right person to come along. At length he spots a candidate, his brother Henry:

He was the best boy in the whole region. He never did harm to anybody, he never offended anybody. He was exasperatingly good. He had an overflowing abundance of goodness—but not enough to save him this time. I watched his approach with eager interest.... His form became more and more foreshortened. When he was almost under me he was so foreshortened that nothing of his was visible from my high place except the end of his nose and his alternately approaching feet. Then I poised the watermelon, calculated my distance, and let it go, hollow side down.... He had about six steps to make when I let that canoe go, and it was lovely to see those two bodies gradually closing in on each other.... That shell smashed down right on the top of his head and drove him into the earth up to the chin. The chunks of that broken melon flew in every direction like a spray, and they broke third-story windows all around. They had to get a jack such as they hoist buildings with to pull him out. I wanted to go down there and condole with him, but it would not have been safe.

It is so good, and so perfectly as you expect the young Samuel Clemens to behave, that you don’t care exactly what really happened, or why. Whatever license he took didn’t improve just the story, it also improved Twain. He was a master at selling himself as the character who behaved badly, by choosing his vices carefully, so that they were acceptable to a wider audience. He was the felon who charmed the cops by confessing to misdemeanors. “That’s just like him!” you can hear his audience say, as he tells yet another story that seems to reveal his character, while hiding it. And maybe it is him: at some point in life you are who you pretend to be. But it is hard to know if that is who Twain was, or just who he thought people would reward him most for being. By the end of his life, Twain was so much more obviously interested in his celebrity than in his craft that his craft seems no more than a tool for preserving his celebrity. The more he had to lose, the less he had to say.

And he had a lot to lose. He was famous in a way writers probably shouldn’t be if they want to remain useful. If there is anything shocking about these dictations, it is how easily and lightly Twain wore his exalted status. Everywhere he went, including the White House, he was always the biggest star in the room. In a throwaway line in a screed about the decline of the U.S. postal service (after they had failed to a deliver a letter to him addressed to the wrong state), Twain mentions that in the good old days the post office delivered him a letter from Europe at his home in Hartford, Connecticut, addressed to:

Mark Twain

God Knows Where

Orwell, who had a nose for the moral failings of others, sniffs out this one, too: “He became that dubious thing, a ‘public figure,’ flattered by passport officials and entertained by royalty.”

But just as there are weaknesses in every strength (say, a gift for identifying moral failings in others), so there are strengths in every weakness. Writing with one eye on the audience is certainly a handicap; but the worry that the audience might rise and leave the auditorium at any moment pushes the writer to be clear, and brief, and obviously worth listening to. He is forced to pay special attention to the sound of his words. A distinctive literary voice is a bit like a talent for wiggling your ears, or for holding your breath underwater for two straight minutes. It’s not fair that some people simply sound particularly themselves and others do not, and it’s really not fair just how particularly himself Twain sounded, even when he lay in bed and rambled to a stenographer. But Twain’s voice is the reason people still read him. His voice is the reason you feel as if he is talking to you. And the crowds he played to in his lust for fame and fortune helped him to create that voice.

On the other hand, it takes a lot of effort to sustain a voice without becoming trapped by it. Not long before he committed suicide, I met Hunter S. Thompson at his home, late one night. He sat in a kitchen pulling on a half gallon of tequila straight from the bottle, surrounded by giant placards inscribed with various outrageous things that he had said or written. He had become less a writer than an actor trying not to forget the character he was meant to be playing. By the end of his life Twain was obviously grappling with this problem, too. In his dictations there are glimpses of a jarring, dissonant voice that he never fully admitted into his writing:

Paige [the perfectly nice man who invented the typesetting machine that cost Twain a fortune] and I always meet on effusively affectionate terms; and yet he knows perfectly well that if I had his nuts in a steel-trap I would shut out all human succor and watch that trap till he died.

And:

My experience of men had long ago taught me that one of the surest ways of begetting an enemy was to do some stranger an act of kindness which should lay upon him the irritating sense of an obligation.

And:

All creatures kill.... Man is the only one that kills for fun.

Yet anger of the sort that Twain felt near the end of his life—bitter, resentful, painful anger—did not suit the character he had created for himself to play. He buried not only his wife, but also three of his four children. He felt cheated or swindled by some large number of his business partners. He had lost faith in pretty much everything, and was uninterested in consoling and distracting himself with social and political causes. He wore his white suit everywhere he went, but his inner life had been stripped bare. A writer less invested in his own caricature might have responded more richly to the sadness of the passage of time. An ideal Twain might have lost his boyishness and become more recognizably grown-up.

In sum: if he had been a better character, he might have become a greater writer. That’s the theory, anyway. But I’m not so sure. If Twain had been a less slippery character, he’d have been a different character, and if he’d been a different character, he’d never have been the writer he was. He might not have ruined the ending of Huckleberry Finn, but only because he would never have written it in the first place.

Michael Lewis is a contributing writer for Vanity Fair and the author, most recently, of The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (W.W. Norton). This article originally ran in the July 14, 2011 issue of the magazine.

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