Surely not another life of Mark Twain? He must by now be the most written-about figure in American literature. Scarcely a year goes by without some new study or monograph, and any new biographer will have to be the intellectual equivalent of a Houdini to escape the stranglehold of the obvious, the cliched, the twice-told and the well-worn.
Alas, it cannot be said that Andrew Hoffman has added very much to the memorable accounts already given us by Justin Kaplan and others. Hoffman has read all the right books and researched in all the right archives, but achieves striking effects only by pushing the evidence beyond its limits.
Twain's life is essentially the subversion of the American myth. A self-educated printer and Mississippi pilot with a talent for humour becomes first a newspaper editor, then the darling of the lecture circuit and finally a celebrity author. Rich and famous, with an aristocratic wife and all the glittering prizes within his grasp, he then suffers disillusionment and ultimately nihilistic despair as Fate buffets him grievously.
His first child dies in infancy, his daughter Joan drowns in her bath at 29 and another daughter, Susy, goes mad and dies of cerebral haemorrhage. His beloved wife Livia dies young, his business partners gull him into bankruptcy and his confidantes embezzle his fortune. His only surviving daughter then cruelly reveals the extent to which he has been duped.
The man who began by laughing at the foibles of mankind ends by hating the human species; finally, the only laughter he is capable of is the kind beyond tears.
All this is well known already, so what is there that is new in Hoffman's book? He does some digging that turns up a few trivial juvenile homosexual encounters - inevitable for 19th-century seamen or Mississippi river folk condemned to a "separate spheres" sexual apartheid - and this helps to explain perhaps why Twain was so often drawn to homosexuals or bisexuals: Artemus Ward, H.M. Stanley, Charles Warren Stoddard.
But otherwise Hoffman has little to add to the familiar story. For all his scholarship, he is often very careless. The explorer H.M. Stanley and his wife did not dine together with Twain in New England in 1886, for the very good reason that Dorothy Tennant was not in the United States then and did not become Stanley's wife until 1890.
The main thesis in Hoffman's book is that Mark Twain was an invented person, of whom by definition there can be no biography, and therefore that this is a life of Samuel Clemens instead. There is much posturing about invented selves, personae, large and small egos, the actor's lack of identity, role-playing and all the other conceptual shenanigans one can work into the simple fact of writing pseudonymously.
Instead of flogging to death the tiresome conceit that Twain and Clemens were different people, Hoffman might have done better to broaden his cultural framework and ask why so many Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic adopted noms de plume or de guerre. Apart from Twain, Artemus Ward and H.M. Stanley, the very different examples of George Eliot, Lewis Carroll and Emin Pasha would be worth investigating.
The other disappointment of this book is the exiguous treatment of Twain's works, doubtless on the grounds that Twain, not Clemens, wrote them. A good biography of Twain can chart the progress from facile optimism to near-suicidal melancholy by observing the passage from Roughing It (1872) to the posthumous The Mysterious Stranger (1916), and, in the opinion of the best critics, the later works like Pudd'nhead Wilson and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court plumb greater depths than the much-touted Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
But Hoffman is not interested in any of this. Instead, his index has separate entries for Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens and elaborate cross-referencing between them. Lovers of Gallic games involving terms such as "text", "closure", "intertextuality" and "postmodernism" will find this highly stimulating. Those wanting a good modern life of this American author will have to look elsewhere.
Frank McLynn is a biographer and critic