...the story could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.

Back in December, while Ben and RTT were paying their respects to Nancy’s grave, I hunted down Mark Twain’s. Left a red rose. Jury’s still out on life after death, but if there is such, I have no doubt that Sam Clemens, a moody, vindictive and – yes, Virginia – strangely humorless man in his daily life, is keeping a close watch on his own remains.

Ron Powers’ Mark Twain biography, by the way, is a magnificent book – less a biography than a sagital slice through the 19th century America. Enormous wealth of detail – this is what it felt like then, you find yourself thinking at least once on every page. Finishing it, I’m inclined to take the view that history is a coral reef, the dull accretion of small lives upon small lives with a twist and a burst of color every once in a while when one extraordinary life leaves its mark. The Great Man View of History, I suppose.

Powers does a rather subtle thing of separating out Sam Clemens from his literary creation without hitting the reader over the head with the duality (twainship?) He also answers one question I’ve always had: how did Clemens who lived through the epoch of the Civil War manage to be so little affected by it?

Clemens, of course, didn’t make history so much as observe it. Without Mark Twain, the course of American history would have meandered pretty much as it did meander. Mark Twain was less a catalyst, than a personification – though it’s impossible to imagine the unique circumstances of Clemens’ life befalling anyone else. It’s amazing enough that they befell him.

I had terrible insomnia last night. Western New York state is in the grip of a monster heat wave so I kept the windows open – moths and lightening bugs kept flying into the house. I read a hundred pages or so of the Twain bio, kept Dirty, Pretty Things on the media machine. Read about Clemens’ oldest brother Orion, so broken by the events of his own life and his younger brother’s ridicule that one night after dinner he went upstairs and drank half a pint of ammonia. Sadly, he survived. I read about Clemens’ publisher, a nephew by marriage, whose health and sanity were broken by Clemens’ relentless egoism and vindictive nature. Late in his life Clemens became obsessed with Joan of Arc, eventually producing a minor work entitled Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte. When I finally fell asleep, I dreamed of a parallel universe where Joan of Arc had never existed, and the disembodied voices of her sacred triumvirate, Saint Michael, Saint Catherine, and Saint Margaret, went roaming from ploughboy to ploughboy on their holy recruitment campaign. I was one such ploughboy. Why should I care if Burgundy is French or English? I told the voices grumpily. It’s all the same to me.

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I’m trying to figure out how to get out of the trap my life has become that doesn’t involve drinking ammonia. Haven’t quite made my peace with my position in the coral reef, I suppose.