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San Francisco Chronicle
07-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Trump's tactic to ‘flood the zone' is now threatening Mark Twain's legacy
When you enter the offices of the Mark Twain Papers and Project at UC Berkeley, you'll see portraits and photographs of the revered writer and humorist hanging on the walls. A few tchotchkes of dubious taste, like a porcelain bust with a head of his greying hair, are scattered around — all part of the largest repository of Twain materials in the world. Brought to UC Berkeley in 1949, the project's primary purpose isn't collecting fun souvenirs; it houses everything major that Twain wrote and furthers scholarly interpretations of his work. The suite of offices on the fourth floor of the Bancroft Library holds numerous editions of his 30 published books, more than 11,000 letters he and his family wrote, 17,000 letters written to him, as well as 600 unpublished manuscripts, business documents, scrapbooks, bills and photographs. Hundreds of scholars have used the collection to inform their books, documentaries and other works. 'The Mark Twain Papers ranks as one of the foremost scholarly achievements of our era,' Ron Chernow, who relied on the papers to prepare his recently published biography of Twain, aka Samuel Clemens, wrote in his acknowledgements. The project is so significant that the federal government has funded it for the past 58 years. In doing so, it helped editors decipher and organize the 5,000 pages Twain left as an autobiography and publish it, as Twain requested, 100 years after his death. The 2010 book became a New York Times bestseller. Even President Donald Trump admires Twain. He wants a statue of the author to be included in his proposed, yet unfunded, 'National Garden of American Heroes,' which would open to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. But in April, the National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded a $450,000 grant to the Mark Twain Papers and Project, undermining its ability to continue. It was part of the cost-cutting effort of the Department of Government Efficiency, an organization not established by government statute and led until recently by Elon Musk. Two young men from DOGE, one who dropped out of college, commandeered the offices of the NEH in early April and unilaterally decided, without consulting any of the experts inside the agency, to cancel 1,500 grants, according to a lawsuit filed by three major scholarly organizations looking to claw back the canceled funds. Days later, the two men let go of 85% of the NEH's 180-person staff. 'NEH has cancelled awards that are at variance with agency priorities, including but not limited to those on diversity, equity, and inclusion (or DEI) and environmental justice, as well as awards that may not inspire public confidence in the use of taxpayer funds,' the agency explained in an April 24 press release. In the swirl of outrage surrounding the Trump administration's various actions, cancellation of the Twain grant has not drawn any attention — no news reports, no public announcements or cries of anger. That it has almost been unnoticed reflects the precarious times in which we live. The University of California has been tempered in its reaction. It has joined two lawsuits, but Rich Lyons, the UC Berkeley chancellor, and UC President Michael Drake have only spoken about the Trump cuts in concerned but not outraged terms. The university and the rest of the UC system appear to be avoiding the limelight, probably to avoid Trump's wrath. They don't want to be targeted like Harvard. Outrage fatigue has also settled in. The Trump administration has rescinded funds to the Lawrence Hall of Science, San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, Transit Books and SFJazz, among many others. It has yanked funding from major research centers, forcing labs doing critical research to scramble to survive. The Trump administration has fired weather experts and downsized Social Security offices. Students have been abducted off the street. So, what is one more cut to another revered institution? It matters, not just because it damages the study of Mark Twain, whose biting political commentary would help us weather these dark days. ('Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself,' Twain famously said.) It matters because it is part of a strategy, stated by Trump ally and political strategist Steve Bannon, to 'flood the zone' and overwhelm dissenters. By deluging citizens with the pace of his destructive acts, Trump has created a sense of paralysis. How do you know what to protest when there are so many things to be angry about? There is a call for mass demonstrations on June 14, Trump's 79th birthday and the date he has set for a $45 million military parade in Washington. I plan to participate in the protests because I want Trump to know the United States is a better place when we support the arts and sciences and lift people rather than denouncing broad sectors of our society and callously deporting people without due process. In the meantime, the Bancroft Library is appealing NEH's decision to slash Mark Twain funding. 'Without that funding, the project won't be able to continue beyond the calendar year,' said Kate Donovan, director of the Bancroft Library. Even though it is an effort, we must resist the urge to collapse from exhaustion. We must fight back against every grant lost, every lab shuttered.
New York Post
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Post
Inside the mind of Mark Twain: Obsessive author and arrogant genius
In the late 19th century, Mark Twain was arguably the most famous author in the world, with classics like 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876) and 'Life on the Mississippi' (1883) cementing his status as a cultural icon. But despite his accomplishments, Twain seethed at the idea that anyone might criticize him. 9 Mark Twain around the time he wooed and wed Olivia 'Livy' Langdon in 1869. A sprawling new biography details his brilliant, yet often arrogance-filled, career. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut For future editions of the book that rocketed him to fame, 'Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,' Twain planned a 'classic author's revenge fantasy,' writes Ron Chernow in his new, sprawling biography, 'Mark Twain' (Penguin Press), out now. Twain insisted on including a 'prefatory remark' that identified two newspaper editors that he particularly loathed as inspiration for his young fictional protagonist. 'In character, language, clothing, education, instinct, & origin,' wrote Twain, Huck Finn was meant as a 'counterpart of these two gentlemen as they were in the time of their boyhood, forty years ago.' Twain was eventually talked out of the vindictive plan by his wife. It's a side of the author that rarely gets remembered. During his life, Twain wrote 30 books, several thousand magazine articles and some 12,000 letters, but Twain's foremost creation 'may well have been his own inimitable personality,' writes Chernow. He's become an 'emblem of Americana . . . a humorous man in a white suit, dispensing witticisms with a twinkling eye, an avuncular figure sporting a cigar and a handlebar mustache.' 9 Twain standing before his boyhood home in Hannibal in May 1902. The house, he said, was much smaller than he remembered it. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. But the truth wasn't quite so sanitized. Twain also had a 'large assortment of weird sides to his nature,' writes Chernow. Long before he became Mark Twain, he was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in 1835 and raised in Hannibal, Mo., a 'white town drowsing in the sunshine' on the banks of the Mississippi, as Twain would later immortalize. He created the Mark Twain pen name not just as a way to escape his many creditors but as 'the ultimate act of reinvention, the start of an attempt to mythologize his life,' writes Chernow. 9 Twain playing billiards in 1908 with some of the young woman who became his obsession during his later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. His books became huge bestsellers, but nothing compared to his live performances. He could command a crowd with a mastery that was unmatched, once claiming that he would play with a dramatic pause during a reading 'as other children play with a toy,' writes Chernow. During a speech in Utica, NY, in 1870, he stood silently on stage for several uncomfortable minutes. 'After a prolonged, anxious interval, the audience erupted in laughter and applause, and Twain felt the full force of his power over them,' writes Chernow. But offstage, he was consumed with petty grudges and paranoia. Twain once told his sister that he was a man of 'a fractious disposition & difficult to get along with.' He would collect insults, waiting for the perfect moment to unleash them on anyone who'd wronged or disappointed him. 'He could never quite let things go or drop a quarrel,' writes Chernow. 'With his volcanic emotions and titanic tirades, he constantly threatened lawsuits and fired off indignant letters, settling scores in a life riddled with self-inflicted wounds.' 9 Mark Twain and fellow novelist George Washington Cable in 1884, when they shared top billing in a lecture series later dubbed the 'Twins of Genius' tour. Courtesy of The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, Connecticut. Twain also had a bad habit of making terrible investments. 'Again and again, he succumbed to money-mad schemes he might have satirized in one of his novels,' writes Chernow. Most infamously, in 1880, he became convinced that a new typesetting machine, a 'fiendishly complex' device called the Paige Compositor, would become the future of publishing. 'The typesetter does not get drunk,' Twain wrote of the contraption in his personal notebook. 'He does not join the printer's union.' He invested $300,000 (about $10 million in today's money), and believed so strongly that the machine would lead to riches that he toyed with buying all of New York state with his future riches. 9 A photo of Twain when he was still known as Sam Clemens, posing in his hometown of Hannibal, Missouri in 1850, when he turned 15. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley 'He was asking how much it would take to buy all the railroads in New York, and all the newspapers, too—buy everything in New York on account of that typesetting machine,' remembered his housekeeper and maid Katy Leary. 'He thought he'd make millions and own the world, because he had such faith in it.' But the Paige Compositor, with its thousands of moving parts, proved to be a colossal failure. Only two of the machines were built, one of which is currently displayed at the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Conn. Strangest of all, Twain developed a fondness for teenage girls as he grew older. In his 40s, he began giving private lectures at the Saturday Morning Club, an all-girls' private club in which he was an honorary member. But this soon evolved into something decidedly creepier. 9 An embossed book cover for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn showing Huck, friend of Tom Sawyer. One of many iconic Twain tomes. Corbis via Getty Images At 70, he met 15 year-old Gertrude Natkin while attending a Carnegie Hall recital. They became pen-pals, with Twain writing to her six times a month, 'discarding any inhibitions about expressing affection toward a teenage girl who was a complete stranger,' writes Chernow. His only disappointment was that she wouldn't stop aging. On her 16th birthday, he wrote to her that 'you mustn't move along so fast . . . Sixteen! Ah, what has become of my little girl?' He was afraid to send her a kiss now, he declared, because it would come 'within an ace of being improper!' Twain eventually cut off ties with her, but Gertrude was just the beginning of his obsession with adolescent girls. He created a 'club of handpicked platonic sweethearts,' writes Chernow, dubbing them his 'angelfish.' As Twain explained in one of his letters, 'I collect pets: young girls — girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naive and innocent.' 9 Jane Lampton Clemens, the eloquent and vivacious mother of Mark Twain in a photo from her later years. Courtesy of Mark Twain Papers and Project, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley Remarkably, the public didn't look upon Twain's angelfish as the 'sinister hobby of a lecherous old pedophile, but as the charming eccentricity of a sentimental old widower,' writes Chernow. While it certainly looks less than innocent, Chernow points out that there were never any accusations of predatory behavior from any of the girls, and mothers or grandmothers were always present as chaperones. 'The girls never reported forbidden sexual overtures from Twain,' writes Chernow. 'They played billiards and hearts and engaged in innocent pastimes. Twain insisted until the end that he'd merely 'reached the grandfather stage of life without grandchildren, so I began to adopt some.' He had a bottomless need for unconditional love, which he never received from his own daughters. Beyond the obvious inappropriateness, his adolescent teenage female fixation was a symptom of Twain's larger obsession with youth. The older he became, the more he believed 'that only the young were capable of true happiness,' writes Chernow. His 'angelfish' allowed him to disappear 'back into his vanished youth, to stop time, to blot out all the disappointments of adult life.' Twain's writing was in many ways an attempt to capture the innocence of youth. As some critics noted, despite the Huck Finn character being fourteen, his mind was 'devoid of sexual thoughts or fantasies,' writes Chernow. 9 Author Ron Chernow. The older and more famous he became, the more Twain pined for 'the vanished paradise of his early years,' writes Chernow. 'His youth would remain the magical touchstone of his life, his memories preserved in amber.' Twain eventually wrote sequels in which both Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn reappeared, but he had no interest in exploring them as adults. It was as if 'Twain could not bear to imagine them stripped of their youthful appeal,' writes Chernow. For him, youth was a gift and old age was a sham. 'I should greatly like to relive my youth,' he once wrote. 'And then get drowned.'
