(2 of 2)
Hate List. But he could not come to terms either with his unruly genius or with life itself. "It is one of the mysteries of nature," he said in 1906, after his favorite daughter Susy died of meningitis at 24, "that a man, all unprepared, can receive a thunderstroke like that and live." He was, says Kaplan, obsessed with "the rustle and chink and heft of money." He kept a private hate list and added names to it all his years. "A liar, a thief, a drunkard, a traitor, a filthy-minded and salacious slut," he recorded, at 74, of a secretary fallen from his grace. The distinguished fared no better: he called Whitelaw Reid, owner of the New York Tribune, "a skunk, a eunuch, a missing link."
In concentrating on the dark side of Twain, Kaplan's book illuminates the man whose every smile in print was calculated to bite. Without that dark side, Twain might have taken the same level in literature that is occupied by so many of his contemporaries: Petroleum V. Nasby, Josh Billings, George Washington Cable and Bret Harte. But blandness was not in him. He was a reformer—all edges, out of patience with his times, and desperately anxious to transmit the message to all who would listen. Kaplan's book helps explain why the world is listening still.