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.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.
Appearances
where the morning after a dinner party, he would write to someone who'd been at the dinner party. The madam tells me that I might have been a little brusque and sharp at dinner last night, and I really didn't intend to offend you. In fact, the daughters laughingly called this mother dusting father off. In fact, it reached the point where they had this system of cards at a dinner table.
So a red card flashed to Mark Twain meant, are you going to monopolize that woman sitting on your right the whole time? A blue card meant, are you going to sit back and not say anything the entire dinner? So she's kind of guiding him.
But, you know, in fact, he said, because, you know, he said, Livy edited my manuscripts and then she edited me. And she kind of really gave him a life. And, you know, in many ways, she was a long-suffering wife. He loses her inheritance. We have extensive correspondence between them. she never, never threw it in his face.
The saddest one is that he and Libby, their first child was a boy who was named Langdon, which was her maiden name. Langdon died at 18 months. What happened was that they were at the Langdon place in Elmira, New York. And one chilly morning in May, they went out driving, and Twain felt that he had not wrapped the baby up enough in this chilly weather. And they came back, and the baby had a cold.
But then the baby recovered, and they went to Hartford. And after they went to Hartford, the baby died of diphtheria. Mark Twain told William Dean Howells, who was his closest literary friend, he said, I killed Langdon. He was convinced that that ride in the carriage... When it was emphatically not that. Emphatically, yeah.
In fact, his sister-in-law, Sue Crane, afterwards said, you know, they left Elmira and went to Hartford because the baby was better. The baby was fine. So he had this tendency... to flagellate himself, you know, and take responsibility. And it was really kind of crazy, you know, what happened with Susie, the eldest daughter, that he was not, you know, there at the time.
They had just come back from this round-the-world tour. There was no cure for meningitis at the time. You know, his being there would not really have helped Mattis, and in fact, she was sort of delirious and...
It's interesting, you know, because he's a novelist, and I think that he himself becomes a character perhaps greater than any of his creations. I think the life he lives is a story actually more dramatic than any that he... And it's full of light and shadow because it's full of literary triumphs, to be sure, full of personal calamities.
And I haven't had a chance to tell you just how much I loved your speech. that you gave for the Mark Twain Award because I think that I was so glad just the tone of it because Mark Twain was much more than just a humorist. He was a sage. He was a moralist.
He was a conscience of the person. I think that you really touched on that very, very exactly. But it's interesting because we know Mark Twain as a humorist and we tend to think of him with the white suit and the cigar. But Mark Twain said a couple of things about life. He said, life is a tragedy with comedy distributed here and there only to heighten and magnify the pain by contrast.
Unbelievable. And then he also said that life is a fever dream. with sweetness embittered by sorrow and pleasure poisoned by pain. I know you're all going to go off and jump off a bridge after I tell you these comments that he made.
He has this kind of deterministic view that we're just kind of machines, and there are stimuli, and we react to it, that we're really not creating anything. The funny thing is, Conan, that someone reading that, if it had not been written by Mark Twain, they would have said, well, what about Mark Twain?
Mark Twain would have been the best example of the fact that there is true originality in the world. world.
Yeah, he actually gets up after... And can't let that go. No, he can't let it go. Yeah, and he gets up after he's watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet with a friend, and he gets up at the end and he says to the friend, that was the best thing Francis Bacon ever wrote.
He was convinced that his discovery that Francis Bacon had written it said it's the great discovery of the age.
He loved the play. And I think what misled him is that as Mark Twain became famous, reporters were constantly flocking to Hannibal, Missouri and other places that he had lived. So like everyone who ever knew Mark Twain was interviewed 25 times. And he couldn't figure out why there wasn't
that same kind of trove, you know, of anecdotes and why weren't the people in Stratford telling all these stories about, um, if Shakespeare was doing all this, why weren't they writing?
It was a different media environment, you know, and his life was covered so extensively. Uh, and, uh, you know, with the kind of a handful of stories about, uh, but if Shakespeare lived in a different media environment, you know, we would know everything about him.
But so, you know, Mark Twain wrongly extrapolated from it to Elizabethan times, but he actually wrote this book called The Shakespeare Dead that he thought was going to, you know, set the world on fire. It didn't. He also thought that John Bunyan had not written Pilgrim's Progress. He thought John Milton was, but... Maybe he didn't write his own works.
Well, I'm so curious if you were alive today, if I can get to ask you a question. If I was alive today? That with Mark Twain, there was just no filter whatsoever. There was no kind of political correctness. He really felt as a satirist that everything was fair game.
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