Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

First, shame on you if you haven’t yet read Mark Twain’s classic novel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which might be the “great American novel.” Put aside this blog and crack open the book (or flip to a free copy on your iPad) and read it before continuing to my thoughts about the novel.

Okay, now that we’re all on the same page, so to speak, let’s look at some controversies surrounding the novel.

Oddly enough, the primary controversy in Twain’s lifetime, and the reason the novel was occasionally banned, isn’t the problem that has caused protests in our time. Almost immediately upon its publication in 1885, Huck Finn generated complaints because its protagonist is such a realistic boy from the lower class. In other words, he curses, plays hooky, and has no use for Sunday school. He also has the temerity to befriend a runaway slave, Jim, which completely contradicts the social mores of the time. Huck, in short, is definitely not a role model for young boys.

Twain, however, didn’t mind that Huck Finn caused such a ruckus that it was banned from the Concord, Massachusetts, public library. As I pointed out in the first of my two books about him, upon hearing the news, Twain exulted to one of his business agents, “That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.” He was undoubtedly pleased, then, that his novel was regularly banned from libraries over the next 25 years of his life.

In our time, of course, the primary reason that Huck Finn has been banned is because of the word “nigger.”

It’s a troubling and unsettling word, no doubt, and on some pages of the novel, it seems like nearly every other word is “nigger,” which has led a number of school boards and libraries to ban the book as being racist. While I don’t doubt that that the novel’s language can cause pain, and therefore it needs to be discussed and taught with sensitivity, it’s clearly not a racist book.

First, and most obvious, the novel’s narrator, Huck, is using the only word he knows to describe the slaves that he sees in the Mississippi River valley ca. 1845. It’s never been a word used in polite society, but it was an everyday word, especially for people in Huck’s social class, and it’s really just a descriptive word for a black person, free or slave, in that time period in that part of the United States. In other words, when someone uses that word today, he undoubtedly wants to inflict emotional pain or start a fight, but the characters in the novel (aside from Pap, who is definitely abusive and violent) have no such intent. Just as I say “table” to describe a flat surface with four legs at waist-level, Huck Finn says “nigger” to describe a black person. Indeed, even Jim uses the word “nigger” to refer to himself or to other blacks.

Complicating matters, however, is that Twain certainly understood the paradox of Huck using that word so freely, especially after it’s clear that he has come to see Jim as a friend. For example, consider this passage late in the novel, which occurs when Huck, pretending to be Tom Sawyer, explains to Aunt Sally why his steamboat was late:

It warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. We blowed out a cylinder-head.

Good gracious! anybody hurt?

No’m. Killed a nigger.

Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.

It’s clear to me, from this passage, and from a few others in the novel, that Twain is offering a sort of dramatic irony to make a point about racism. In other words, Huck doesn’t grasp the significance of what he has just said (he doesn’t have a clue that it’s repugnant), but Twain’s readers do understand. In short, Twain shows us the callousness of Southern slaving-holding society in this scene, even though Huck and Aunt Sally don’t “get” their own callousness. I would argue that Huck and Aunt Sally certainly are racists but the book and its author are not. It’s a subtle distinction, one that is undoubtedly often lost except to careful readers, but it’s a crucial one.

Of course, one can also argue, with some evidence from the text and from Twain’s own reflections on the novel, that I’m probably over analyzing this passage. After all, Twain himself, not entirely tongue in cheek, warned at the beginning of the novel:

PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

Do clothes make the man?

Lee Siegel, writing in the Times, has some interesting observations about how fiction writers can reveal character through the clothes that they give to their creations. But after citing many examples from classic literature (from The Illiad to Ulysses), he argues that fashion doesn't seem as vital to contemporary novelists. As he points out:

A world of difference exists, however, between Fitzgerald’s very deliberate portrait of Gatsby wearing “a white flannel suit, silver shirt, and gold-colored tie” when he meets Daisy again after many years, and, say, Jennifer Egan’s casual description of a character dressed in “black cords and a white button-up shirt” in her brilliant novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad.”

Gatsby is wearing the novel’s themes: white as the fantasy of self-remaking without the blemishes of the past; silver and gold the currency-tinged colors of an impossible happiness. Egan’s character is simply wearing clothes.

He concludes that today’s fiction is a reflection of today’s society: Just as we often pay little attention to the clothes that we wear in real life as we buy them off the rack from chain stores, our novelists pay little attention to the clothes that their characters wear.

Siegel's essay reminds me of what Mark Twain had to say on this topic:

Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society.

What was your first sexy book?

What was the first sexy book that you read? The New York Times would like to know.

For me, I think it was one of Henry Miller's novels that I picked up in 1973 when I was eleven. At least, I can't remember an earlier one.

I do remember, however, that a few years earlier I had asked my mother what a word meant:

"Mom, what's this word?" I asked. "Orgies?"

She looked shocked and asked for the book. After looking at the title and then reading the paragraph, she handed it back and said the word meant "a celebration."

The book was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn:

Well, then, pretty soon all hands got to talking about the diseased again, and how good he was, and what a loss he was, and all that; and before long a big iron-jawed man worked himself in there from outside, and stood a-listening and looking, and not saying anything; and nobody saying anything to him either, because the king was talking and they was all busy listening. The king was saying -- in the middle of something he'd started in on --

"-- they bein' partickler friends o' the diseased. That's why they're invited here this evenin'; but tomorrow we want ALL to come -- everybody; for he respected everybody, he liked everybody, and so it's fitten that his funeral orgies sh'd be public."

And so he went a-mooning on and on, liking to hear himself talk, and every little while he fetched in his funeral orgies again, till the duke he couldn't stand it no more; so he writes on a little scrap of paper, "OBSEQUIES, you old fool," and folds it up, and goes to goo-gooing and reaching it over people's heads to him. The king he reads it and puts it in his pocket, and says:

"Poor William, afflicted as he is, his HEART'S aluz right. Asks me to invite everybody to come to the funeral -- wants me to make 'em all welcome. But he needn't a worried -- it was jest what I was at."

Then he weaves along again, perfectly ca'm, and goes to dropping in his funeral orgies again every now and then, just like he done before. And when he done it the third time he says:

"I say orgies, not because it's the common term, because it ain't -- obsequies bein' the common term -- but because orgies is the right term. Obsequies ain't used in England no more now -- it's gone out. We say orgies now in England. Orgies is better, because it means the thing you're after more exact. It's a word that's made up out'n the Greek ORGO, outside, open, abroad; and the Hebrew JEESUM, to plant, cover up; hence inTER. So, you see, funeral orgies is an open er public funeral."

Mark Twain in Salon

Last week, the on-line magazine Salon reprinted a couple of pieces about Mark Twain. The first looks at how newspaperman Samuel Clemens made himself into a “brand” by borrowing the pseudonym “Mark Twain” from a humorous essay in Vanity Fair while the second is an excerpt about Christianity from volume II of Twain’s Autobiography, which will be published on Oct. 5.

I’m not wholly convinced by the explanation that he took his pen name from Vanity Fair, although the truth will likely never be known. I discussed the debate about the source of his name in the first of my two books about Twain. Check out pages 71-72.

Getting pumped!

What’s the best way to get in the proper frame of mood to write? Vigorous sex? A shot of smooth bourbon? A walk in the woods? This fascinating short article, by Maria Konnikova in Scientific American, discusses how such luminaries as Vladimir Nabokov, Mark Twain, and John Cheever got “pumped” before settling down to write:

It’s not so strange, then, that in ritual, artists find such consistent gratification and creative value. While ritual in itself may not play any role in the quality of the creative output, the simple act of engagement could heighten both anticipation and enjoyment of the entire creative process. And while the suffering artist is another stereotype that’s right up there with the quirky artist in popular appeal, when it comes to actual creative quality, few things beat the engaged mind.

Becoming Mark Twain

A few months ago, I published the essay below in the New York Times. I’m reprinting it here with hypertext links to provide some illustrations and context. The Times will publish another of my essays about authors in the Civil War next month.

By early February 1863, Samuel Langhorne Clemens must have felt glad that he was more than 18 months removed from any direct participation in the Civil War. No longer risking his life in a guerrilla war in northern Missouri, he was a newspaper editor in the Nevada Territory, causing some local scandals with his acerbic political commentary and tall tales. Although he occasionally wrote about the war raging back East, Clemens mainly focused his columns on mocking the territorial legislature or relating humorous anecdotes about the citizens of Nevada. Surely, though, he must have sometimes thought about his own war experiences in the summer of 1861.

Commercial traffic on the Mississippi River had ceased soon after war broke out, and Clemens, then 25 years old and a steamboat pilot for two years, decided in early June 1861 to join with some friends in enlisting in the Marion Rangers, a unit of the Missouri State Guard from the Hannibal area. While his father had once owned a slave, and while he had spent many boyhood summer days surrounded by slaves on his uncle’s farm, Clemens seemed to enlist more as a lark than for any political or ideological reasons. Indeed, in the months prior to joining the Rangers, Clemens had expressed both pro-Union and anti-Union views as the states seceded and war approached. His rather flippant attitude toward the war would change, however, as the realities of army life in the field set in.

Clemens, according to a fellow recruit, showed up for the Marion Rangers riding a mule and carrying a squirrel rifle and an umbrella. Disregarding his complete lack of military experience, his comrades elected him lieutenant, which made him second in command of the dozen or so men. According to Clemens’s 1885 short memoir of his war experiences, “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” the Rangers would occasionally attempt a military drill, but they soon collapsed into horseplay and then forget what little they had learned. Moreover, Clemens discovered that his friends would refuse any orders that he gave, arguing that he was certainly not their superior.

Clemens also wrote in his memoir that it rained almost constantly, and that he and the men lacked any uniforms or arms and relied on local farmers for food and shelter. Every few nights, he noted, a rumor of approaching Union troops would send the Rangers, at top speed, in the direction opposite of the supposed Yankees. Those enemies never materialized, and the Rangers were soon filthy and hungry. Clemens also related one particularly tragic night-time incident when the terrified Rangers shot and killed an approaching figure on a horse they assumed to be a Union advance scout, but who turned out to be a passing stranger. (The incident is probably fictional, as no record, aside from Clemens’s own memoir, exists.)

After two weeks in the field, the Rangers heard a convincing rumor that a Union colonel, leading an entire regiment determined to destroy any Confederate irregulars in northeast Missouri, was heading toward Marion County. The Rangers quickly disbanded, with most of the men slipping back into civilian life but a few joining the regular Confederate Army. Clemens returned to relatives in St. Louis and tried to keep out of sight, since Union General John C. Frémont governed the city under martial law that threatened insurrectionists with hanging.

On July 18, 1861, about a month after the Rangers had disbanded, Clemens started west with his older brother, Orion Clemens, who had just been appointed the territorial secretary of Nevada. Clemens intended to make his fortune by mining silver, but he soon discovered that journalism was not only easier physically but also paid more regularly. By late 1862, he was a full-time newspaperman in Virginia City, and on Feb. 3, 1863, he decided to sign an article with the name “Mark Twain,” an old river expression that meant “two fathoms.” Within two years, his new name would be famous across the country, and from then on, Samuel Clemens, the erstwhile Confederate, would be known as Mark Twain.

Coincidentally, some years later, Twain discovered that the commanding officer of that regiment ordered to destroy Confederate irregulars was none other than Col. Ulysses S. Grant, an ex-Army officer who had recently resumed his military career after being cashiered for drunkenness in 1854. Grant had spent the years immediately before the war in the St. Louis area, where he and his wife had reportedly socialized with William and Pamela Moffett, Twain’s brother-in-law and sister. Many years after the war, and following his presidency, Grant would begin a friendship with Twain, who would later offer his own company to publish the ex-president’s memoirs. The collaboration was a success, and “The Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant” became a bestseller in late 1885, although Grant himself died in July 1885 shortly, after completing his final draft.

In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” Twain summed up his war-time experiences by writing, “And it seemed an epitome of war; that all war must be just be just that — the killing of strangers against whom you feel no personal animosity; strangers whom, in other circumstances, you would help if you found them in trouble, and who would help you if you needed it. My campaign was spoiled … I could have become a soldier myself if I had waited. I had got part of it learned; I knew more about retreating than the man that invented retreating.”

Sources: Joe B. Fulton, “The Reconstruction of Mark Twain: How a Confederate Bushwhacker Became the Lincoln of Our Literature”; Jim McWilliams, “Mark Twain in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch”; Ron Powers, “Mark Twain: A Life”; R. Kent Rasmussen, “Mark Twain A-Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings”; Mark Twain, “Great Short Works of Mark Twain.”

A pilgrimage to Hannibal, Missouri

I'm going to post an essay about Mark Twain in a few days, so I thought I'd first give give you a tour of his early life. These photos are from two visits I made in the early 1990s, which is why the images aren't digital and crisp. Click the links for more information about each site.

This first photo is of the Mark Twain Birthplace State Historic Park, located on the shore of Mark Twain Lake The cabin in which he was born was actually located a few miles away, in Florida, Missouri. It was later moved to this location and housed in this "shrine."

Twain was born as Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in this cabin in the new village of Florida. Within five years, however, when it became clear that Florida was never going to thrive, Twain's father moved the family to Hannibal, approximately 40 miles away on the Mississippi River.

The marker above stands on the actual location of where the birth cabin used to stand.

If you persist, you can find the old Florida cemetery nearby. The above stone marks the grave of John Quarles, the uncle of young Sam Clemens. Sam spent many summer days on his uncle's farm, listening to the slaves tell their stories and sing their songs. One particular slave, "Uncle Daniel," may have served as a model for the character of Jim in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The marker above, also in the Florida cemetery, is for Dr. Chowning, who delivered Sam Clemens into this world.

The Mark Twain Boyhood Home and Museum, located at 120 N. Main Street, Hannibal, is a wonderful monument to the man and his legacy. It houses many rare artifacts, including the typewriter that Twain used and the robes he wore when he received his honorary doctorate from Oxford University.

Across the street from the Boyhood Home is the Becky Thatcher Bookstore, which was actually the home of Laura Hawkins, an early girlfriend of Sam's and the inspiration for the character of Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Copies of my two books about Twain are in its permanent library.

The grave of Joe Douglass, the inspiration for "Injun Joe" in Tom Sawyer, is in the Hannibal cemetery. His friends always insisted that his portrayal as a drunken, violent man was a libel.

No trip to Hannibal is complete until you've taken a trip aboard the Mark Twain. If you're daring, you might sneak into the wheelhouse. My friend and fellow Twain scholar, Rick Hill, and I posed on the stern. Rick later lamented the sad passing of Injun Joe.

A last look at Hannibal, from the bluffs known as Lovers' Leap just outside of town.

So how is winter in North Dakota?

My family and friends from outside North Dakota often ask how we spend our winters, which run from early October through early May. Well, we drink a lot, get depressed often, and, on occasion, crack open a book. I recommend New Glarus Spotted Cow, the DSM, and Huckleberry Finn.