Читать книгу Mark Twain's Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn - Alan Gribben - Страница 7

Alan Gribben

The Original Text Edition of Mark Twain’s most celebrated novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), departs from most standard reprintings by reconnecting Twain’s paired stories in order to restore the cohesiveness he originally envisioned. These works have customarily been separated by publishers, libraries, and bookstores, with Tom Sawyer relegated to “Juvenile” or “Young Adult” catalogs and Huckleberry Finn elevated to “Adult” lists, as though they have almost no relationship to each other. Severance of the two books has proceeded in spite of evidence that Twain wrote the opening chapters of Huckleberry Finn soon after completing the manuscript for Tom Sawyer, and the fact that Huckleberry Finn announces in the sequel’s very first sentence, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.’” Moreover, characters and settings are shared by both novels.

Twain even attempted to ensure that sample copies of Tom Sawyer were carried by his “canvassers” who fanned out through neighborhoods and farmlands to take book orders for Twain’s forthcoming Huckleberry Finn. (For nearly thirty years Mark Twain’s works were sold only through these “subscription” agents and could not be obtained in retail bookstores, a lucrative but somewhat disreputable practice for an author of his stature.) Twain recommended to his publisher that customers purchasing both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn be given a reduced price on the set. However, since Twain had left the press that brought out Tom Sawyer in 1876—and was rebelliously publishing Huckleberry Finn under the imprint of his own company—tangled negotiations with his previous firm prevented this joint sale of the volumes from materializing.

Owing to difficulties in resolving plot developments and to other interruptions, the sequel to Tom Sawyer was delayed for eight long years. The hitches in Twain’s composition of Huckleberry Finn are comprehensible when his basic plot dilemma is grasped: somehow the author had to move a fleeing boy and a runaway slave farther and farther south on the Mississippi River below St. Louis—in other words, down to the part of the river with which Mark Twain had become familiar as a steamboat pilot. Yet logically the slave (and therefore his helper Huckleberry Finn) should want to head north toward the “free” states where human slavery had already been abolished by the 1840s, the decade in which Twain’s novel takes place. Twain solved part of this predicament by having Huck and Jim become lost in a dense fog at night and drift past the Ohio River inlet that led north.

The second inspiration took longer to occur to Twain, but eventually he came up with the idea of having the raft on which Huck and Jim had lived so contentedly be commandeered by two rapscallions who, in a mockery of European titles, grandly style themselves the “King” and the “Duke.” That solution put Twain over the largest hurdle and he then managed to wrap up the novel by reintroducing Tom Sawyer, thus returning to the “boy book” playacting which had characterized Tom Sawyer and carried over into the early chapters of Huckleberry Finn. These serial stages of development meant that the volume did not issue in the United States until 1885. By that time even his most loyal readers had trouble thinking of the books as forming a seamless story, with the result that customers usually elected to order Huckleberry Finn in a green cover rather than the available blue cloth that would have matched the cover of the earlier Tom Sawyer.

I. Language in the Original Text Edition

Twain, it should be remembered, was endeavoring to accurately depict the prevailing social attitudes along the Mississippi River Valley during the 1840s; accordingly he employed in both novels a linguistic corruption of “Negro” in reference to African American slaves, and tagged the villain in Tom Sawyer with a deprecating racial label for Native Americans. By contrast, the adult “Mark Twain” narrator of Tom Sawyer is himself careful to use the then-respectful terms “colored” and “negro” in Chapter 1. In the 1870s and 1880s, of course, Twain scarcely had to concern himself about the feelings of African American or Native American readers regarding pejorative racial appellatives. These population groups were too occupied with trying, in the one case, to recover from the degradation of slavery and the institution of Jim Crow segregation policies, and in the other case to survive disease epidemics and the onslaught of settlers and buffalo-hunters who had decimated their ways of life, to bother about objectionable vocabulary choices in two popular books.

When Samuel L. Clemens (who would adopt the pen name “Mark Twain” in 1863) was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri, his views on slavery were in keeping with those of his fellow villagers. His father, significantly, had owned as many slaves as he could afford. In a letter written when he was seventeen, Sam Clemens mockingly alluded to Northern people attempting to free slaves as “infernal abolitionists” (August 23, 1853). But as an adult, after he had traveled widely and read more, he courted and married (in 1870) a woman whose New York State family had vehemently opposed slavery long before the Civil War. Twain ultimately made an unreserved turnabout from his younger attitudes, so much so that in 1874 he wrote a profoundly touching account of how the slave system had cruelly split up African American families—“A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” A similar impulse led Twain to portray Huckleberry Finn as (in Twain’s summation in one of his notebooks) a boy with “a sound heart and a deformed conscience”—that is to say, someone reared amid such pervasive prejudice that he had a hard time seeing through its premises.

We should try to recognize Twain’s incentive as a prominent American literary realist to record the speech of a particular region during a specific historical era, including even abusive racial insults. Virtually all commentators agree that debasing labels—even the hurtful n-word—should not be allowed to overwhelm every other consideration about the merits of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. What these novels have to offer readers hardly depends upon one indefensible verbal designation. Vital components of the American identity and heritage, they should maintain their important places in classrooms and libraries.

Twain’s boldness extended beyond Huck Finn’s language and the racial epithets. The very subject of slavery—especially in the realistic way it is portrayed in Huckleberry Finn—was slipping out of view in the decades after the Civil War. Yet in the 1880s Twain had the nerve (very possibly goaded by a guilty conscience) to produce a work in which this affront to humanity permeates most of its chapters. His readers could not help but be reminded of the historical fact that ten percent of the Missouri population in 1850 consisted of African American slaves. In the contiguous state of Arkansas (where the latter part of Huckleberry Finn is set) the percentage was twenty-six, and that percentage rose drastically in the Deep South, with fifty-five percent of the residents of Mississippi consisting of enslaved workers. By 1860, four million of the twelve million people living in the Southern states were slaves who owned neither their bodies nor their labor.

His decision to employ a racially derogatory nickname for the murderer in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is equally purposeful. In Twain’s telling, the river village knows most residents by their ethnicity. Its severe schoolmaster has a Scottish title (“dominie”), the villain disguises himself as a “Spaniard,” a boy of “German parentage” recites a prodigious number of Bible verses, Huck Finn summons “the Welchman” to help the Widow Douglas, and so forth. Within this context the skulking villain’s mixed ethnic identity seems crucial in comprehending why he feels alienated from the other St. Petersburg townspeople, and why this marginalized figure might be tempted to strike out at one or more of the villagers who look down on him. Twain may have been capitalizing on the popular “Indian” stock character on the American stage; in melodramas like Dion Boucicault’s The Octoroon; or Life in Louisiana the surviving remnants of Native American tribes had been portrayed as implacably vengeful and bloodthirsty if angered. The offspring of an interracial relationship, Twain’s character has been stranded by the receding Western frontier. He resembles an actual mixed-race alcoholic with whom Sam Clemens was familiar as a boy in Hannibal and whom Twain’s Autobiography would recall. This outcast’s name (“Injun Joe”) in Tom Sawyer utilizes an insulting racial sobriquet for “Indian.” (Of course, the very name “Indian” itself commemorates a misnomer, perpetuated by erring explorers and cartographers eager for a new trade route to India.) Twain’s ethnic innuendo does provide a motivation for Indian Joe’s animosity toward the town’s residents, and perhaps this is why there are also slighting references in Tom Sawyer to Joe’s “half-breed” status.

II. Reasons to Read Tom Sawyer Before Huckleberry Finn

For a hundred years The Adventures of Tom Sawyer sold more copies than any of Twain’s other writings, and it has never once been out of print. Gradually that novel has become synonymous with our national literary reputation, even though midway through the twentieth century English professors imposed an implacable division between Tom Sawyer, with its limited village environs, and Huckleberry Finn, which features an eventful journey by raft in search of freedom. Part of the explanation for why Tom Sawyer nonetheless still holds a prominent place in the annals of American literature is that it contributed a fresh, flexible narrative voice to the art of novel-writing, replacing the stilted, artificial syntax of British fiction and the convoluted prose of American writers who emulated those cumbersome sentence structures. Twain had perfected this colloquial tone of addressing an audience in his preceding travel books and now applied that same relaxed, ingratiating style to his first solo novel. Chapter 7, for instance, deftly describes Tom Sawyer’s ennui in the schoolroom:

The harder Tom tried to fasten his mind on his book, the more his ideas wandered. So at last, with a sigh and a yawn, he gave it up. It seemed to him that the noon recess would never come. The air was utterly dead. There was not a breath stirring. It was the sleepiest of sleepy days. The drowsing murmur of the five and twenty studying scholars soothed the soul like the spell that is in the murmur of bees. Away off in the flaming sunshine, Cardiff Hill lifted its soft green sides through a shimmering veil of heat, tinted with the purple of distance; a few birds floated on lazy wing high in the air; no other living thing was visible but some cows, and they were asleep. Tom’s heart ached to be free or else to have something of interest to do to pass the dreary time.

This was also the book in which Twain developed his ability to narrate moments of effective suspense, as in Chapter 26 when Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are trapped in a deserted dwelling after two outlaws enter and discover the boys’ treasure-hunting tools. Tom and Huck watch anxiously through knotholes in the planking of the attic floor as the men plot a crime and—in the act of burying their own loot—accidentally uncover the treasure of an infamous land pirate, John Murrell. The boys’ jubilation at witnessing this immense discovery soon turns to fear as Indian Joe wonders, “Who could have brought those tools here? Do you reckon they can be upstairs?” When Joe turns and starts toward the stairway, the boys cringe in terror. That episode prefigures an incident in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) in which young Jim Hawkins falls asleep in an apple barrel and overhears Long John Silver recruiting pirates to seize the ship and find Captain Flint’s buried treasure. Jim Hawkins shivers in trepidation when Silver asks one of the sailors to fetch him an apple out of the barrel where Jim is hiding. Chapter 31 of Twain’s novel contains an equally suspenseful scene when Tom, lost in a dark cave, welcomes the sight of “a human hand, holding a candle, [which] appeared from behind a rock,” whereupon “Tom lifted up a shout,” only to see the hand “followed by the body it belonged to—Injun Joe’s!”

Realism Overtakes Romanticism

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer departed from literary conventions by jabbing at British romantic writers and clichéd children’s books, notifying readers that the age of literary Realism had arrived in the United States. The narrator evokes a period only three decades previous to the 1870s, not the far romantic past; delineates ordinary undistinguished characters of middle- and lower-class standing rather than highborn heroes; and paints humble buildings and natural, uninflated landscapes. Twain was having fun at the expense of older English romantic authors by showing Tom sobbingly grieve over his love interest, Becky Thatcher, and ludicrously misconstrue nearly all of his revered literary “authorities.” Twain would develop this humorous tactic more fully in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Tom Sawyer misguidedly quotes his outmoded Romantic books relentlessly and, in Chapter 13, a sinking steamboat is named Walter Scott after the deceased but still esteemed author of Ivanhoe, Redgauntlet, Kenilworth, and other historical novels.

These parodies did not prevent vestiges of Romanticism from clinging to Twain’s Tom Sawyer in the form of disguises, graveyards, corpse-stealing, buried treasure, a haunted house, and a candle-lit chase through a cave. Indeed, elements of Romanticism and Realism clearly vie throughout the story. Twain’s novel helpfully illustrates the overlapping of two literary periods, despite his amusing satires directed at the school of writing from which he was diverging.

Tom Sawyer Reevaluated

One enormous advantage enjoyed by The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is that it has largely been left alone by academic commentators, and therefore proves less intimidating to read and teach than Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which today lies buried under a thickening (though frequently brilliant) avalanche of scholarly studies. Not more than a few dozen academic articles and only a couple of individual monographs have been devoted to Tom Sawyer over the past century. The book has largely been ignored by university professors because it has been categorized as a children’s book and thus (at best) a dress rehearsal enabling Mark Twain’s imagination to ready itself for a masterly sequel.

However, when the novel first appeared in the nineteenth century the line between juvenile and adult fiction was far from definite. Adults and young people often shared their reading materials. The spectacular success of the Harry Potter series with broad audiences reminds us of that formerly blurry distinction between juvenile and adult fiction. For over a decade, bookstores and movie theaters teemed with crowds of children, teenagers, and parents each night that a new Harry Potter installment was released. Similarly, more than a century and a quarter earlier, Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories in 1865 and 1872 were hardly restricted to young readers. It is worth noting that the charges on which Tom Sawyer is often arraigned (undue simplicity, overly obvious themes) have been applied as well to Harper Lee’s classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), most memorably by Flannery O’Connor but also recurrently by other commentators as well.

Slavery and Freedom in Tom Sawyer

A courageous feature of Tom Sawyer is that it fleetingly but valuably reminds us of an oppressive era of racism and slavery, though the subject is not treated nearly so pervasively and forcefully as in Huckleberry Finn. Tom Sawyer contains several references to slavery, a brief appearance by a young African American slave named Jim (evidently Aunt Polly’s slave, and not to be confused with the adult Jim who will later accompany Huck), and casual talk by the boys about folk beliefs they learned from slaves. If these allusions to an inhumane institution (accompanied by instances of the n-word) rankle us by marring the picturesque village scenes, we should ask ourselves this question: Would we rather have a novel written about the American South of the 1840s that entirely avoids the existence of slavery? Many writers of the post-Civil War period were scrupulously omitting all traces of slavery and African Americans from their books; others were starting to idealize the antebellum plantation system and portray slavery, now abolished, as having been more dependent on domestic loyalty than latent brutality. Twain, however, elected to make slavery an integral part of his stories, and in the sequel to Tom Sawyer he would render its functioning as far from idyllic.

All the same, neither slavery nor liberation were intended to be at the core of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as they would be of its successor, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (note that for the latter book Twain dropped the definite article “The” from its title page, perhaps to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). Tom Sawyer is about escape, too, but basically an escape from the restraints and responsibilities of adulthood. Tom and his gang simply want to hang onto their boyhood, like the eternal boys in James Barrie’s play, Peter Pan, or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up (1904). Adults in Tom Sawyer check your clothing to see if you have been swimming, sentence you to oppressive chores like fence-painting, and try to keep you from graveyard-visiting and treasure-hunting. True, these same adults might also mourn your presumed loss by drowning with an elaborate funeral and come looking for you in a cave when you are missing. However, Tom and his pals are determined to resist the incursions of adult burdens as long as possible and to prolong their precious, untroubled, free and easy days through every available strategy.

Tom Sawyer and Nostalgia for Vanished Boyhoods

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the book by which Mark Twain at last found his way back to the boyhood village he had so long overlooked as a source of literary material, the discovery of which would make him internationally famous. As a travel writer he had ransacked Europe, the Holy Land, Nevada, California, and Hawaii for subjects about which to write. In 1875 he had belatedly gotten around to writing a series of recollections about his Mississippi River piloting days. With Tom Sawyer he finally moved back even further in his memories to recapture his Hannibal upbringing.

The very idea that a boy’s thought-processes and actions were worthy of recording in a novel was itself still an innovation in the nineteenth century, despite Charles Dickens’s steps in this direction. Thomas Hughes (1822-1896), an English writer and reformer, is credited with launching the investigations of boyish minds with Tom Brown’s School Days (1857), largely based on Hughes’s remembrances of loyalties and cruelties at Rugby School. It seems probable that Twain’s memories of early day Hannibal were jogged by the now-forgotten Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s semi-autobiographical The Story of a Bad Boy (1869), the first true “boy book” in the United States, whose sentimental incidents were told somewhat archly. Aldrich’s Tom Bailey and his chums slip out of their homes at night, coalesce into a small gang, and play pranks on the upright citizens of their New England town. Twain scoffed at Aldrich’s Bad Boy on December 27, 1869, writing to the woman he would soon marry, Olivia Langdon, “ I could not admire the volume much.” Nevertheless in 1872 he began to experiment with the possibility of composing a work about his own Missouri boyhood. He aborted that effort, of which only a fragment known as “Boy’s Manuscript” survives, but in 1874 he got the novel underway that would rival and long outlast Thomas Bailey Aldrich’s creation, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (which had a protagonist named “Tom,” just like Aldrich’s book). Other male writers such as William Dean Howells, Charles Dudley Warner, and Booth Tarkington would follow in Twain’s wake by evoking the fun and the terrors of boyhood, but only Harold Frederic’s evocative tales and Stephen Crane’s poignant Whilomville Stories (1900) deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Twain’s works.

The lengthy popularity of Tom Sawyer owes much to its high-spirited protagonist’s rule-breaking imagination and risk-taking energy. Twain’s book did not confine itself to real events; the word “adventures” in its title would set the pace. The memorable back-from-the-dead scene in the church when Tom and his friends show up victoriously at their own funeral is only one instance of the practical joking and other heedless antics that dominate the novel. Twain very likely was counting on the desire of his adult audience to leave behind the recent Civil War suffering and the deaths of 625,000 soldiers and retreat into nostalgic memories of a prelapsarian world. His Preface expressed a wish “to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked.”

The scenes in Tom Sawyer in which the boys camp on Jackson’s Island—fishing, swimming, cooking turtle eggs—bring to mind a best-seller that appeared in 2006, The Dangerous Book for Boys, a guidebook that described how to tan an animal skin, build a tree house, tell directions if lost, and master dozens of other backyard and outdoor skills. Certain reviewers carped that the book exposed boys to possible injuries, but the public, perhaps perceiving the book as an antidote to the burgeoning Play Station culture, propelled it to bestseller lists in the United States and the United Kingdom. Seen in this light, was not The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, with all of its outdoor perils, in essence the prototypical Dangerous Book for Boys?

It is worth observing that Mark Twain once declared his novel to be a “hymn to boyhood.” As many commentators have noted, Twain’s choice of “St. Petersburg” (then the capital of Russia) as the name of the town for his setting subtly wraps the heavenly connotations associated with St. Peter around a town that offered a boy’s vision of paradisiacal diversions. Perhaps, then, there is relevance in the fact that young Sam Clemens can be said to have lost his own boyhood in the years after his father died prematurely in 1847, leaving the Clemens family insolvent. Sam Clemens was subsequently taken out of school by his older brother Orion and put to work for long hours in a print shop. That was the abrupt termination of his boyhood frolics. He could watch through the window as other boys passed by carrying fishing poles or with their hair wet from swimming.

British author Charles Dickens harbored that same sense of deprivation when his father’s debts compelled Dickens’s parents to withdraw him from school and set him to work in a dank, smelly bootblack factory in an industrial sector at the edge of the Thames River. Both authors would become famously identified with their fictions about orphaned boys who seek the joys of childhood and yet must endure the encroachments of the adult world. In this connection one cannot help but recall Mark Twain’s delight in his wife’s nickname for him: “Youth.” All in all, it would seem that more deference is due to Tom Sawyer, the departure point that Twain intended as the optimum introduction to his enduring story of a boy and a slave afloat on a river raft.

III. Critics’ Objections to Huckleberry Finn

Twain’s follow-up novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was more ambitious in plot and brilliantly allowed a single boy to narrate his own tale. All the same, the vast majority of commentators tend to express dissatisfaction with the manner in which Twain opened and concluded his masterpiece. This disappointment is even voiced by many of the novel’s most ardent admirers. The failing, for the preponderance of scholarly critics, is that Twain insisted on reinserting Tom Sawyer into the first three and last eleven chapters of the forty-three-chapter novel, thereby giving the book a subtle structural symmetry and avoiding a tragic climax. Academic critics also have two additional cavils. While they applaud the interracial friendship that develops in Huckleberry Finn between the African American adult and the parentless white boy, they are bothered by the stereotypical implications of Jim’s ungrammatical dialect and concerned about Huck’s periodic sense of superiority to him. Above all, however, they deplore Tom Sawyer’s tomfoolery in the concluding “evasion” (Tom’s term for it) sequence of Chapters 33 to 40 when he subjects Jim to absurd and time-consuming requirements rather than liberating the imprisoned man. These three objections—Twain’s handling of the “evasion” chapters, Jim’s speech patterns, and Jim’s relationship to Huck and Tom—merit thoughtful consideration.

The Pitfalls of Literary Burlesque

More than anything else, readers’ pronounced distaste for the so-called “evasion” episode at the end of Huckleberry Finn amounts to a rejection of Twain’s penchant for literary burlesque—a technique of ridicule through absurd exaggeration that he had mastered early in his writing career and repeatedly returned to in his sketches, short stories, and longer works. In 1859 Clemens had burlesqued the river reports of Isaiah Sellers, a veteran pilot, and the literary hoaxes of his Western years, such as “Petrified Man” (1862) and “A Bloody Massacre Near Carson” (1863) relied, in the former case, on the frequency of fossil finds and (in the latter instance) took advantage of the bloodthirsty credulity of frontier journalism. In the mature phases of his career, he often turned this literary form against authors he basically admired; literary burlesque supported, for example, his ingenious spoof of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Alfred Lord Tennyson’ Idylls of the King in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). The Duke and the King’s mishmash of Shakespearean plays in Chapters 20 and 21 of Huckleberry Finn likewise comes across as hilarious inasmuch as those garbled but immortal lines from the Bard remain familiar to us; the jumbled treatment of them is brief and delectable. But when Twain took aim elsewhere (in other works) at books for which he had less respect—as, for example, his burlesques of detective Allan Pinkerton’s boasting memoirs about his exploits or Twain’s mockeries of Arthur Conan Doyle’s infallibly ratiocinative Sherlock Holmes—the results often failed to endure as successful literature.

The chapters that wind up Huckleberry Finn’s journey fall somewhere between these examples in terms of their effectiveness. Although the prompt arrival of Tom Sawyer at the exact farm where Huck and Jim have landed asks us to accept a monumental coincidence, this happenstance is really not much more incredible than Abel Magwitch’s secret funding of Pip’s rise in social status in Dickens’s Great Expectations during the period when Miss Havisham appears to be favoring him. Timely rescues and discoveries of family connections were taken for granted in Oliver Twist and David Copperfield, since plot-line coincidences were a well-established literary convention of the nineteenth century. Roger Chillingworth arrives in the Puritan colony just in time to witness Hester’s humiliating climb upon the scaffold in Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, Lambert Strether glimpses two people at a revealingly intimate moment in James’s The Ambassadors, and the saloon safe fails to lock in Dreiser’s Sister Carrie on the day that George Hurstwood is contemplating a fantasy of leaving Chicago. To recall anticipatory examples, one need only contemplate the number of fortuitous or calamitous coincidences in the works of Richardson, Defoe, Smollett, and other trend-setting practitioners of the novel.

A far more profound difficulty for the twenty-first-century reader is that Twain gambled (and lost) on a bet that future generations would be familiar with, and enthralled by, a literary fad of his day that evaporated during the twentieth century. To furnish literary models for Tom Sawyer’s notions about prison escapes, Twain set out to burlesque a combined number of “dungeon” books that had chronicled the isolation, suffering, and escapes of prisoners who languished in damp and dreary cells in England and Europe. William Ainsworth’s The Tower of London (1840) was among the popular novels treating confinement and the prospect of imminent death. Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) recorded lurid details about the Bastille. Alexandre Dumas’s The Man in the Iron Mask (1839) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845) added elements of irony and revenge to tales of forced incarceration. Baron Friedrich von der Trenck’s Life was translated from German between 1788 and 1793 with American editions that followed; Trenck’s memoirs supplied Tom Sawyer with ideas about taming a mouse, using a penknife to dig, making a rope from bedsheets, sawing a bed-leg, and encountering a moat. Twain is on record as being fascinated by the memoirs of Casanova, a copy of which he acquired in 1879 and which provided details about imprisonment and escapes. Likewise Twain referred to Benvenuto Cellini’s Life (1728), a chronicle of banishment and frequent flight amid the beauties of the Renaissance, as “that most entertaining of books.” Joseph X. B. Saintine’s Picciola, a novel published in 1836, told the sad story of a man condemned to solitary imprisonment whose sanity and health are flickeringly kept alive by a plant seed that drifts in through the window of his cell and grows into a blossoming flower; he carefully tends and waters this single point of focus in his otherwise claustrophobic cell.

Although today’s readers may possibly have seen films based on Dumas’s exciting novels, our age is otherwise ignorant of this once-popular craze for stories of the horrors of captivity and the fortitude and cunning of dungeon prisoners. The appetite for these tales died out soon after the success of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894). Consequently the humor of Twain’s lampoons of his bygone sources seems pointlessly exaggerated and drawn out. My personal experiments with distributing samples of these dungeon narratives to my college students indicate that those pages can resurrect the comedy and enable students to find the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn more comprehensible and enjoyable, but this exploration can only take place in a classroom setting. Ordinary readers cannot be expected to trace the background of Twain’s attempt at burlesquing formerly popular stories.

What, then, are readers disappointed by Tom’s reappearance and his insistence on resuming his jejune games of pretending (in this instance based on his romanticized notions of dungeon literature) to do about the ending of a novel they otherwise cherish? Perhaps it would help to consider Mark Twain’s situation as he came to this juncture of his novel. He had started out to write another “boy book,” a sequel to his relatively well-received novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but then he had the fortuitous inspiration to let this outcast boy narrate his own story. Having rehearsed the same juvenile antics that characterized Tom Sawyer in the first three chapters of this new book, Twain abruptly introduces the sinister figure of Huck Finn’s father in Chapter 4 and the novel takes a far more serious turn. In Chapter 8 Huck, hiding out on Jackson’s Island, encounters Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway slave. For the next twenty-four chapters, critics agree that it is as if, ensconced in his airy little octagonal study atop the hill at Quarry Farm and looking down on the shining Chemung River snaking its way past the town of Elmira below, Twain held a muse-driven pen transmitting divine bolts of lightning from the heavens; he wrote, in several separated stretches, a story immensely better than he had probably intended, and far superior to any boy book that had preceded or would follow this masterpiece of fiction. But when the raft landed again and Jim was sold by the unscrupulous King, Twain, a master of short stories and newspaper and magazine sketches but an author invariably troubled by the intricacies of plotting a novel, had to confront the fact that he had moved Huck’s tale deeper into a South where slaves were more numerous and that institution firmly entrenched. He still envisioned this as a companion piece to the earlier, lightsome The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, despite the problems that had delayed its completion, and so he veered instinctively away from any possibility of a gloomy ending.

Would the book have been more authentic and less criticized if Twain had shown an inclination to face up to the realities of slavery in the 1840s and to the unlikelihood that Jim could have returned to St. Petersburg as a free man who owned himself? John Seelye tested this hypothesis in 1970 by rewriting Twain’s novel as The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; in that version we are spared the Phelps farm episode and the book-addled reemergence of Tom Sawyer, because Jim has died a heroic death attempting to swim across the river in manacles. Although Seelye’s tour de force was an enormous sensation when it issued, it hardly became the preferred version and was seldom invoked after a few years passed. Was Mark Twain not then correct, after all, in appending eleven fairly brief chapters at the end which in effect allowed his readers to decompress from the “raft” chapters that had gone before and returned the story to the level of the three “boy book” chapters of horseplay that had opened the novel? He avoided any horrific ending—the Boggs shooting and the Shepherdson-Grangerford massacre had given us an adequate taste of violence—and got to relive and share with readers the sights, sounds, food, and general atmosphere of blissful summers at his uncle John Quarles’s farm in interior Missouri. Tom Sawyer’s exaggerated dictates may not be what most readers would prefer, but they are really no more outlandish (and much less harmful) than the nonsensical claims uttered by the King and the Duke aboard the raft and at the Wilks family’s home, or the insane feuds of warring patriarchal clans that Huck witnessed, or the bitter glimpses of human nature to which Huck was exposed along the river. The novel in effect comes to a soft, safe end of the voyage, like a raft bumping gently and finally against the land at its eventual destination. The lightning in Twain’s pen had departed, but his memories of a Missouri farm and his determination to keep the narrative within the perimeters of a boy book took over and guided him into port.

The Magnetism of Folk Speech

Jim speaks with an untutored dialect because it was against the law in nearly all slave states (including Missouri) to allow slaves to attend school or otherwise learn to read and write. Penalties for conferring the gift of literacy on a slave were quite severe after the 1830s and usually consisted of substantial prison sentences as well as fines. Huck’s own education has been so hit and miss that in numerous passages his English is not much more standard than Jim’s. Yet both Jim and Huck are sufficiently communicative when they need to be, and their phrasing is often memorable. Huck reels off scattered bits of prose poetry (“it most froze me,” “ain’t got no show,” “lazying around,” “the song-birds just going it!,” “kind of clogged up the air”) and effortlessly invents examples of onomatopoeia (the “screaking” of rafts’ sweeps, “bull-frogs a-cluttering,” axes going “k’chunk!”). Twain appears to be saying that rules of grammar cannot harness the power and aesthetic of genuine folk speech. Jim hits the right note when it matters greatly, as in Chapter 16 at the moment that Huck is wrestling with his conscience and Jim calls out (just before Huck meets two slave-catchers): “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ fren’ Jim’s ever had; en you’s de only fren’ ole Jim’s got, now.”

Jim’s Acquiescence to Huck and Tom

As for the contention that Huck condescends to his fellow passenger on the raft, one can assume that Twain was determined to provide a plausible picture of his own provincial ignorance at Huck’s age. Jim, on the other hand, knows that he is utterly dependent on Huck’s goodwill to keep him from being caught. He may out of necessity give the appearance of docility, yet he is hardly a buffoon. In a novel abounding in secrets—Huck himself pretends to be murdered, Tom Sawyer hides the news of Miss Watson’s manumission of Jim, and various other characters withhold or distort information—Jim keeps mum about a monumental discovery he made in Chapter 9 that probably would have dissuaded Huck from accompanying him any farther. At the time Jim shrewdly excused the deception to Huck as “too gashly” to reveal.

Regarding Jim’s overly obedient subjugation to Tom Sawyer’s romantic whims about the “evasion,” let it be remembered that in Chapter 40 when the injured Tom reaches the raft and commands Huck and Jim to cast off and “man the sweeps—man the sweeps,” it is Jim who boldly declares, “I doan’ budge a step out’n dis place, ’dout a doctor; not ef it’s forty year!” He thus voluntarily and selflessly casts himself back into slavery in order to save Tom’s life. Huck agrees with Jim about the seriousness of Tom’s wound, and they withstand Tom’s protests: “He raised considerable row about it, but me and Jim stuck to it and wouldn’t budge; so he was for crawling out and setting the raft loose himself; but we wouldn’t let him. Then he gave us a piece of his mind—but it didn’t do no good.” This incident goes far to rebut the many critics who denounce Huck and Jim’s inability to resist Tom’s grandstanding.

As a prisoner on the Phelps farm, Jim is obliged to make peace with Tom’s insistence that he inscribe his dungeon wall and plant a flower in the cabin and so forth (though he firmly draws the line at the suggestion that he adopt a rattlesnake as a pet). Huck, on the other hand, follows Tom’s ever-expanding script because he relishes the entertainment, especially its flourishes and embellishments. Tom is the foil who brings invention, glory, and British and European literature into Huck Finn’s deprived existence. It is Tom who creates elaborate schemes that pretend the world is a place of intrigue, suspense, and danger—without, of course, challenging except in play the social foundations of human slavery. Yet whereas Tom laboriously manufactures the dangers, it turns out to be Huck who has the nerve to overcome actual hazards along the river and try to do something about humanity’s injustices. (Ironically, too, it is the semiliterate Huck and not the show-offy Tom who manages to compose a lengthy picaresque novel.)

Huckleberry Finn as Realist

Tom and Huck are one of the best-matched teams in literature, and even at the outset of critical commentary on the novel in the 1920s it was apparent to careful readers that Twain had in mind a younger version of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Don Quixote was one of Twain’s favorite books because, Twain declared in Life on the Mississippi, Cervantes’s work “swept the world’s admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence.” A principal target of the Tom-and-Huck exchanges was the idealized fiction and poetry of English Romanticism that still in some respects overshadowed the American realistic movement of which Twain was a stalwart champion. Huck Finn’s habit of noting gross particulars, even while absorbing a sublime sight, likewise constitutes a vote against the earlier view that literature should primarily ennoble and beautify perceptions of the world. A single sentence in Huckleberry Finn aptly captures the gist of what Twain sought to accomplish in revolutionizing the outlook of fiction. Huck interrupts (in Chapter 19) his tribute to the splendor of dawn breaking over the river’s forested shoreline with a jarringly frank acknowledgment: “The breeze . . . comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank.” Few if any authors before Mark Twain (other than perhaps Walt Whitman) would have included in this context such an unsavory detail as the pungent odor of rotting fish.

Ernest Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn

In a semi fictional work, Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway’s narrator made an astute and widely quoted pronouncement about Huckleberry Finn. The key element in this opinion was the word “modern”: “All modern American literature,” Hemingway’s character declared, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before” (italics added). Hemingway had noticed a momentous difference between Twain’s novel and its literary precursors. In “modern” literature, as opposed to much British and American fiction of the nineteenth century, the reader is no longer being coached regarding what to think of the characters and their actions. This prior type of moral guidance had typically been threaded obliquely throughout the paragraphs of a novel, or else summarized overtly at the end of a chapter or a short story.

In contrast to this previous view of the author’s role as both narrator and interpreter, Twain devised a narrator so young and inexperienced that he often cannot quite figure out what he is describing. That is the case, for instance, in Chapter 22 when Huck sneaks into a circus and relates how an intoxicated man staggers out of the audience and demands a chance to ride one of the performers’ horses. The crowd hoots and jeers at the drunk’s interruption of the show, until the ring-master reluctantly gives in and allows the man to mount one of the animals. At first Huck is fearful for the man’s safety as the trained horse races around the ring at faster and faster gaits, with the helpless man “hanging onto his neck, and his heels flying up in the air.” Then Huck (along with the crowd) is astonished when this “sot” suddenly stands up on the galloping steed, sheds layers of clothing “so thick they kind of clogged up the air,” and reveals himself to be “slim and handsome” in an acrobatic costume that was “the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw.” Immediately he “lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum.”

What is Huckleberry Finn’s response to this obviously well-rehearsed circus act? Huck erroneously perceives it as a clever prank played by a stunt-rider on the ring-master. “The ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. . . . I wouldn’t a been in that ring-master’s place, not for a thousand dollars.” As with Hemingway’s minimalist short stories and clipped vignettes in In Our Time (1925), the reader rather than the author must undertake the interpretation. The author simply sketches a situation, in Twain’s book through Huck’s naive eyes, and then compels the reader to carry out the task of construing its meaning. This is the breakthrough feat that Hemingway recognized Twain had achieved for later American writers.

Underestimating Huckleberry Finn

It is possible to suppose that the main point of Huckleberry Finn is how its title character ultimately learns to view Jim as a fellow human being with valid feelings about his family and his future. That way of reading the novel is a principal reason why the boys’ ridiculous antics at the Phelps farm upset so many critics; Huck seems to fall back from the progress he had made in affirming Jim’s humanity and friendship. But we make a large mistake in merely settling for Huck’s discovery that his fellow passenger on the raft is remarkably sensitive and caring. What Twain presents is a far more complex proposition—that it is conformist and cowardly of us to take it for granted that any prevailing laws and customs, no matter how solidly established, are too sacred to be skeptically examined and intellectually tested by each of us as individuals. And this truly subversive slant to the novel challenges readers to ponder whether or not they themselves might be succumbing to social pressures by participating in practices that are in vogue and yet tremendously wrong. Twain was able to write about this sort of blindness so convincingly because he recalled how he himself had gone along with the institution of slavery through his adolescence and beyond, blithely overlooking manifold signs of its ethical and spiritual immorality.

Mark Twain wrote and published another boy book, The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages (1881), in the interval between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. That middle novel, though certainly worth reading, largely relied on Twain’s research in English history books and lacks the sense of “lived” experience that animates his images in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn of the Mississippi River, its villages, and its vessels. There are no other American books in the last half of the nineteenth century that offer a reader the pleasures of Twain’s two companion boy books with their ingenuity of plot and characterization, slice-of-life sharpness, penetrating irony, and sweepingly panoramic display of an entire sector of society.

The Raftsmen Episode in Huckleberry Finn

Besides reuniting Twain’s two novels, another editorial choice had to be determined for this book. Scholars have vigorously debated whether a lengthy passage extracted from the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn and published in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) to illustrate the rawness of early river days should be reinserted into the novel from which it was then omitted. In this adventure Huck swims to a large raft and listens while “a mighty rough looking lot” of raftsmen drink, argue, sing, dance, and swap yarns. They discover Huck in his hiding place, threaten to “paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel,” but let him go with a stern warning. Mark Twain later agreed to delete the episode from Huckleberry Finn for fear that the public might think he was duplicating “old matter” (Twain’s words) in his new book (since he had used it previously in Life on the Mississippi) and because the publisher pointed out that Huckleberry Finn was longer than Tom Sawyer, damaging the impression that they were companion volumes.

The author went along with his publisher’s suggestion on April 22, 1884 so obligingly (“Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out”) that most subsequent editions of the novel have followed suit. This present Original Text Edition incorporates the raftsmen passage into Chapter 16 as Twain initially wrote it in his manuscript and published it in the American edition of Life on the Mississippi. That episode, with its strutting, pugnacious braggarts and its chilling ghost tale about a child’s murder, contains some of Mark Twain’s best writing. Its inclusion enables readers to savor more of Twain contributions to the then-reigning “Local Color” school of regional fiction that prized vivid descriptions of an area’s vocations and peculiarities.

Textual Emendations

With the exception of the insertion of the raftsmen passage, the texts of both novels otherwise follow the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting facsimiles of Twain’s manuscripts. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected. Mark Twain occasionally added footnotes to his own books; these are here placed within the text and indicated by { } brackets.

Alternative Editions

An exact facsimile of Twain’s holograph (i.e., handwritten) manuscript of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer has been published in a two-volume edition (1982), and Twain’s holograph manuscript of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is now viewable in a CD issued in 2003 by the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Also invaluable are the authoritative edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1980) and the magisterial edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (2003) that have been issued in The Works of Mark Twain series by the Mark Twain Project at Berkeley.

Dr. Alan Gribben co-founded the Mark Twain Circle of America, compiled Mark Twain’s Library: A Reconstruction, and recently co-edited Mark Twain on the Move: A Travel Reader. Gribben has written numerous essays about Mark Twain’s life and image. He teaches on the English faculty of Auburn University at Montgomery and edits the Mark Twain Journal.