Ron Chernow
speaker
176 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard 20 Dec
Ron Chernow’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
Who was the celebrity at the time and who Mark Twain thought was the most celebrated, maybe the greatest, you know, writer of the time. They became very, very close friends. They later collaborated on a play, and Bret Hart was having money difficulties, came and lived in Mark Twain's house in Hartford. He said things about the house that Mark Twain didn't like.
He said things about Livy, the wife that... Dwayne didn't like. And Mark Twain then turned on him. He would like fall in love with people. And then he would become severely disillusioned so that, you know, he finally says at Bret Hart, he never had an idea that he came by honestly. He said that he was a man without a country. No, that's too strong a term. He was an invertebrate without a country.
Burn.
And there was no one who was better at put-downs than Mark Twain. But you know, one of the things that I could not figure out about him, we all have these experiences with people where we're suddenly disillusioned with them and maybe tell them off. But when we do tell them off, It gets it out of our system, and then we sort of calm down and we move on with our life.
Mark Twain would not let it go. And if you can't let it go, the one who's going to end up being victimized by it is not the other person it's going to be.
that he keeps probing again, again, again. I could not figure out. I don't know if any psychiatrist could figure out. I mean, he's late in life. He's very disillusioned with the two most important people working for him, a man named Ralph Ashcroft and a woman named Isabel Lyon, who was his private secretary. When he becomes disillusioned with them, he ends up writing a 400-page manuscript entitled
you know, and he says about Isabel, who had been his... He is so close to her. Yeah.
A diss track. She was a brute, a simple, heartless brute. She was an insect.
Yeah, and he's suffering terribly from carbuncles. I mean, it was really grueling for him to do it. But particularly, Livy felt that... There was this terrible stigma attached to bankruptcy. You know, for her, it was a real question of honor.
And in fact, you know, the eldest daughter, Susie, died at 24 of bacterial meningitis and When they finally paid off the last of the debts, Livy writes that the happiest day that she'd had since her daughter died was the day that they paid off the last of the creditors. In fact, there's an interesting moment. Twain became very good friends with the Standard Oil mogul named Henry Rogers.
And Rogers is kind of running rings around the creditors. He was a very, very shrewd Wall Street operator.
Yeah, he was helping Twain out. And Twain, you know, in New York, writes very proudly to Libby, who was then in Paris, describing the way that... Rogers has handled the creditors and Libby writes back. She said, I'm upset by the way we're handling the creditors. She really felt that they owed the creditors and they should be treating the creditors with much more
dignity and uh and and respect but it's an amazing story because it did take several years to pay off the debts but you know what amazed me conan okay so he goes through this terrible grueling it was a 12 or 13 month round the world um tour and then they're living in um vienna And he discovers that there is this patent for a new process for printing on carpets and textiles and tapestries.
He hears about this new invention. He goes to the American consulate and he spends a day reading up on this industry. He's known nothing about this before. After 24 hours, he's convinced that he's the world's leading authority on this.
And he writes a letter to his friend, Henry Rogers, who is one of the main moguls of Standard Oil. And he suggests that they buy up the worldwide patents. The device was called the Raster. He said, we should buy the worldwide patents for this. He said, people will call it a trust. this global monopoly they will have. But we mustn't mind that. You know, people will talk, but that's okay.
And so he's gone from knowing nothing about this to suddenly imagining that he's going to be the head of a global monopoly.
Yeah, I mean, he says that anyone who's not a pessimist is a damn fool. He actually says there was no life ever worth living. No life was worth living. It was worth living. And he was asked if he would like to live his life all over again. He said, I would like to relive my youth and then drown myself. He made this statement that the... Only gift that God gave to the race was youth.
He felt that everything else after that was bitterness and disappointment. And he's always kind of pining for this lost paradise of his youth, which is why he wrote so powerfully about Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, which of course has much darker tones to it. But it's a bit of a paradox because he had this adoring wife. He could not have had a better wife than Libby.
Yeah, and actually one of the interesting parts of the story is Twain said when they first met that he, Twain, was a mighty, coarse, rough customer. And she took this man and she really, because he'd come from this little backwater town, she made him presentable in polite society. And he really didn't know how to do it. She helped him with what we would today call the anger management.
He had a terrible temper. So he would very often, if he was angry, he would sit down and he would write a very, you know, impetuous note telling somebody off. And she trained him when he did that, not to send a letter, but to stash it in the drawer and wait a few days. And then when he would cool off, and I can't tell you how many letters there are, you know, in his archives.
Showing 121–140 of 176 · page 7 of 9
← Previous
Next →