The River is Freedom, the Raft Paradise

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  From Mississippi Writings.  Library of America.  pp.617-912  *****

I don’t remember when I first read Huckleberry Finn.  My brother and I had old hardbacks of both that book and Tom Sawyer.  I thought of them as boy’s books (what a term), and probably first read it when I was young.[1]  Imagine my astonishment, years later, to read the words of Ernest Hemingway in The Green Hills of Africa: “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . [I]t’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”  I read it again around the time I encountered that statement.  I know that I taught it to a group of eleventh graders in 1972.  Sometime in the late seventies I read it aloud to my son.  Maybe that was the last time I read the book.

I think Hemingway meant it was the first novel not overly influenced by its British or European forbearers.  As great and original as writers like Melville and Hawthorne were, both were highly influenced by tradition; Hawthorne read like an 18^th century British novelist, and Melville, whose style did seem original, was hugely influenced by Shakespeare and especially Sir Thomas Browne.  Twain, on the other hand, wrote a prose that seemed entirely American and utterly his own.  It seemed to roll off his pen.[2]  That’s especially true in Huckleberry Finn, where he claimed to be writing in multiple dialects.[3] Twain was well read, but he came out of the American humorist tradition and wrote in it.  Innocents Abroad is a great early example.

Twain did most of his writing in his summer place, in Elmira, New York, and worked entire days, sometimes producing 10,000 words a day.  He was not much of a reviser, and when William Dean Howells got on him about that, he admitted he didn’t like that work, and pretty much accepted whatever revisions Howells proposed.  It was Howells who called him “the Lincoln of our literature,” and I think he was referring not just to his stature as a writer, but also to the fact that he seemed to be a home-grown product, 100% American, in a way other writers were not.

In Huckleberry Finn, Twain took up a taboo subject, the theft of a slave, the whole subject of slavery, which he obviously opposed, but he did so as a humorist, in the guise of writing a boy’s book.  Because the book was “funny,” and a story about a delinquent boy, he could get away with things he couldn’t have otherwise (though Twain, especially as he got older, was fearless in his often-radical opinions.  His posthumous work is scorching).

So the theme of the novel is controversial (I wonder if that was his intention when he first got the idea), but the vision it presents is idyllic.  Huck was a juvenile delinquent, a young one at that, Jim a renegade slave.  They were living as homeless people, which Huck had been for much of his life.  Yet they knew how to live in the wild, how to navigate the river; they were both strong swimmers and even averted a collision with a steamer that came downriver at night (Huck dove for it, as apparently did Jim; Huck said he knew he would have to get to a depth of thirty feet to avoid the ship’s wheel).  They hid during the day and sailed at night, letting the raft drift along with the current, and sat there staring at the stars.  They were often naked, according to Huck (Leslie Fiedler took note of that[4]).  It was an Edenic existence, surrounded by a world in turmoil.  If they’d been caught, Huck was clearly breaking the law and Jim might have been lynched, or certainly sold (an upcoming sale was why he fled in the first place).  But in the midst of that perilous situation, Huck, at least, was in paradise.[5]

They encounter various serious situations on this picaresque voyage, feuding families (the Sheperdsons and Grangerfords), low-down scoundrels who cheat local people, but though these things threaten them, we have the feeling we’re in a comedy and will emerge okay.  But when it came time to resolve the book’s larger situation, Twain was apparently stumped.  He abandoned the manuscript for years, then came back and created a contrived ending—right out of boy’s book territory—where Huck reunites with Tom Sawyer and finds a way for everything to work out.  Tom actually knows it has worked out already.

Hemingway told people to stop reading at that point (once Jim had been captured by the Phelps family), and that might be a good idea.  The last hundred pages, though still narrated by Huck, are in the spirit of Tom, whom Faulkner once referred to as “an unbearable prig.”  I’m not sure what that means, but it sounds right to me.  You could skip that whole section and read the last five or six pages, and you’d get the drift.  Jim is actually rescued by a lucky—though very possible—circumstance.

There are people, of course, who won’t read the novel because of its excessive use of the n-word.  (When I taught the book, back in the early seventies, I had two black students, and gave them the option of not reading it and choosing some other classic text.  One read it and one didn’t.)  I suppose it isn’t taught anymore for that reason, although it’s a teachable classic novel, and those don’t grow on trees.  If it’s just the word that bothers people, I get it (though those people will have to avoid all of Faulkner), but if they think Twain was racist and “we” know better, they don’t know what they’re talking about.  Twain was a man of his time, using the language of his time, and if he’d made Huck use some other word the book would have sounded preposterous.  Twain used that word because it’s what Huck would have said, and he had the conscience of an artist.  People can avoid the book because of the word—that’s their right—but they’re missing a great novel.

I look forward to Percival Everett’s take on it.

[1] My memory is that, among boy’s books, I enjoyed Booth Tarkington’s Penrod novels more.

[2] Except for Pudd’nhead Wilson, which is supposedly the first novel ever composed on a typewriter.

[3] “In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last.  The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work, but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with those several forms of speech.

“I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”

[4] According to one of my favorite professors, Buford Jones, Fiedler had a theory about the essentially homosexual nature of classic American literature.  This novel was a major case in point, as was Moby Dick.  He first wrote about this theory in an essay entitled, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!”

[5] We’ll hear from Jim later.  I’m rereading the novel in preparation of Percival Everett’s James.