| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Dangerous Intimacy: The Untold Story of Mark Twain's Final Years. By Karen Lystra. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xxii, 342 pp. $27.50, ISBN 0-520-23323-9.)

In this new biographical study, Karen Lystra advances what she describes as "an entirely new picture of Twain's final years" (p. x). Among the principal defects of the old picture—most especially as it is embodied for Lystra in Hamlin Hill's Mark Twain: God's Fool (1973)—is the image of an aging writer crippled by rage and bitterness against God and man. "Much of the last decade of his life," Hill argues, Mark Twain "lived in hell" (Hill, p. xvii). Lystra is surely correct to combat what she calls "the myth of Twain's sustained geriatric despair" (p. 62), for there is evidence that the humorist enjoyed intervals of energy and pleasure in his late life. But it is equally clear that when he expressed himself most freely and honestly—in What Is Man? (1906), The Mysterious Stranger (1916), the so-called dream writings, the social criticism, and in letters, diaries, and autobiographical dictations—Twain was never far from contempt for humans, hatred of God, and anguished self-loathing. Such was the rather dire but durable burden of his interior life. Much of the rest of it—the banquets and speeches and fat-cat pleasure cruises, the late-night booze and billiards, and the flirtations with little girls—was distraction, often rather frantic, from what deeply ailed him.

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