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Twain's late-life fascination with teenage girls presents yet another disturbing topic for contemporary readers. In many ways a Victorian man, he tended to place women on a pedestal and treated his wife with unfailing reverence. There was never the least hint of scandal in his married life. Yet, after Livy's death, Twain pursued teenage girls with a strange passion that, while it always remained chaste, is likely to cause extreme discomfort nowadays. Like many geniuses, Twain had a large assortment of weird sides to his nature, and this account will try to make sense of his sometimes bizarre behavior toward girls and women.

To portray Mark Twain in his entirety, one must capture both the light and the shadow of a beloved humorist who could switch temper in a flash, changing from exhilarating joy to deep resentment. He is a fascinating, maddening puzzle to anyone trying to figure him out: charming, funny, and irresistible one moment, paranoid and deeply vindictive the next. As he once observed ruefully, the "periodical and sudden changes of mood in me, from deep melancholy to half-insane tempests and cyclones of humor, are among the curiosities of my life."[19] Perhaps we should not be surprised that America's funniest man harbored ineffable sadness and displayed a host of contradictions. In a life of staggering variety, he managed to soar and plunge in emotional extremes. In the last analysis, Mark Twain's foremost creation—his richest and most complex gift to posterity—may well have been his own inimitable personality, the largest literary personality that America has produced.

PART ONE

Afloat

CHAPTER ONE

Loveless Marriage

Given the fine gusto with which Mark Twain flayed hereditary privilege, it seems fitting that he delighted in tracing his paternal ancestry to one Gregory Clement, who had served in the Parliament of England under Oliver Cromwell and joined in signing the death warrant of King Charles I. Twain confessed to being "wholly ignorant" of his forebears but applauded Gregory's action.[1] "He did what he could toward reducing the list of crowned shams of his day."[2] When the monarchy was restored, Gregory was declared guilty of regicide, his severed head posted as a warning atop Westminster Hall. Characteristically, Twain found pungent humor in his fate, declaring that Gregory was "much thought of by the family because he was the first of us that was hanged."[3] Unfortunately, Twain's descent from Gregory Clement was entirely fictitious, but it was hard to deprive him of a good story with such rich potential for laughter.

The earliest known English ancestor of Mark Twain was Richard Clements of Leicestershire, who lived in the early sixteenth century. In 1642 his great-grandson Robert boarded a ship for the American colonies and aided in founding the town of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Over the years the family drifted south to Pennsylvania and Virginia, where in 1770 it spawned Samuel B. Clemens, grandfather of our author. On October 29, 1797, he married Pamela Goggin in Bedford County in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. In 1742 her grandfather Stephen Goggin, Sr., had emigrated to Virginia from Queen's County, Ireland.

Samuel and Pamela Clemens, a prosperous young couple, were fully enmeshed in slavery, their ten workers toiling on four hundred acres in Bedford County. The couple brought forth a brood of five children, the eldest being John Marshall Clemens. Born on August 11, 1798, and named after the future chief justice of the United States, John Marshall, he was destined to be the author's father. When he was seven, his father died in a freak accident—crushed by a falling log during a house-raising—and at some point before adulthood he labored in an iron foundry. Thus robbed of a carefree childhood, he developed a grim, driven personality, with little levity in his nature. He clung to pretensions of supposed descent from the "First Families of Virginia"; what his son labeled "a sumptuous legacy of pride in his fine Virginia stock." Having inherited three enslaved people, he settled in Columbia, Kentucky—his widowed mother had moved to Adair County, near the Tennessee border, and remarried—where he earned a license to practice law.

It was there that he met Jane Lampton, who had grown up in the town. On May 6, 1823, at twenty-four, he married Jane, who was pretty and gregarious, just shy of twenty, and brought a dowry of three more enslaved people. Her father, Benjamin Lampton, was a prominent local citizen, having served as a lieutenant colonel during the War of 1812. As a skilled brick mason, he had constructed many fine buildings in town. Jane's maternal grandfather, William Casey—Indian fighter extraordinaire and Kentucky legislator—was so illustrious that the state named an adjoining county after him. A lively young woman, Jane enjoyed the social opportunities available to the daughter of two prominent families. "During her girlhood Jane Lampton was noted for her vivacity and her beauty," her eldest son said.[4] "She was a great horsewoman when she was young and riding parties were a feature of Kentucky life she was known as the best dancer in Kentucky," a descendant added.[5] Her famous son would inherit her wealth of red hair as well as her spunk, gift for language, and sprightly spirit.

Jane Lampton proudly claimed ancestry from the British Lambtons of Durham, giving her a dubious connection to a string of earls. As her famous son noted, "I knew that privately she was proud that the Lambtons, now Earls of Durham, had occupied the family lands for nine hundred years; that they were feudal lords of Lambton Castle and holding the high position of ancestors of hers" at the Norman Conquest.[6] Twain later poked fun at this family vanity, especially when one of Jane's relatives cooked up a preposterous claim to being the genuine Earl of Durham. Such genealogical pretensions would set up Mark Twain as a perfect satirist for big talkers, delusional dreamers, social climbers, and inflated windbags of every description.