DOCUMENT RESUME

ED 262 416 CS 209 334

AUTHOR Kaplan, Justin

TITLE Born to Trouble: One Hundred Years of Huckleberry

Finn. The Center for the Book Viewpoint Series No.

13. Lecture Presented at the Broward County Library

(Fort Lauderdale, Florida, September 11, 1984).

INSTITUTION Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

REPORT NO ISBH-0-8444-0494-2

PUB DATE 85

NOTE 26p.; Lecture sponsored by the Florida Center for the

Book in the Broward County Library.

PUB TYPE Speeches/Conference Papers (150) -- Viewpoints (120)

EDRS PRICE MF01 Plus Postage. PC Not Available from EDRS.

DESCRIPTORS *Books; *Censorship; Educational Trends; *Literary

Criticism; *Literary History; Moral Issues; *Novels;

Public Opinion; Social History; Social Problems;

United States Literature

IDENTIFIERS *Huckleberry Finn; *Twain (Mark)

ABSTRACT

Presented at the Broward County Library (Florida) on

September 11, 1984, to coincide with Banned Books Week and to mark

the centennial of the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," the address

in this booklet reviews the reasons why this classic book has always

been in trouble with the censors. Drawing upon the Pulitzer Prize

winning biography, "Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain," the lecture updates

the chronology of the banning of "Hulk Finn," which began when the

Concord Public Library in Massachusetts attacked the book in 1885.

(HOD)

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* Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ***********************************************************************
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USWh ka la )1

TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES

INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC),"

born to

trouble

one hundredyears of

Huckleberry Finn

.J.- Justin Kaplan

co

ro U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION NATIONAL INSTITUTE OF EDUCATION

0 .. EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION

CENTER IERICI :This document has been reproduced as

1 exeived from the person or organization

originating it

I) Minor changes have been made to improve

1 I W reproduction quality.

i

Points of view or opinions stated in this dom.

ment do not necessarily represent official NIE

Position or policy.

2
born to trouble

one hundred years of Huckleberry Finn

A lecture sponsored by

the Florida Center for the Book

and presented at

the Broward County Library

Fort Lauderdale, Florida

on September 11, 1984

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, 1 SalHuckleberry Finn, drawn by E. W. Kemble, 1884,

for the first American edition of the note!, published in 1885 by

Charles L. Webster and Company in New York.

4
born to

trouble

one hundred years of HuckleberryFinn

Justin Kaplan

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS WASHINGTON 1985
The Center for the Book

VIEWPOINT SERIES No. 13

Library of Congress Cataloging inPublication Data

Kaplan, Justin.

Born to trouble.

(The Center for the Book viewpoint series; no. 13)

"A lecture sponsored by the Florida Center for the

Book and presented at the Broward County Library,

Fort Lauderdale, Flori.'a, on September 11, 1984."

1. Twain, Mark, 1835-1910. Adventures of Huckleberry

FinnAddresses, essays, lectures. 2. Twain, Mark,

1335.1910CensorshipAddresses, essays, lectures.

3. Prohibited booksAddresses, essays, lectures.

4. CensorshipUnited StatesHistoryAddresses, essays,

lectures. 1. Title. 11. Series: Center for the

Book viewpoint series; 13.

PS1305.K36 1985 813'.4 85-600027

ISBN 0-8444-0494-2 (pbk.: alk. paper)

Copyright g) 1985 by Justin Kaplan

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements for permanence

established by the American National Standard for Information Sciences

"Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials," ANSI Z39.48-1984.0

13 b.1 COPY AVAILABLE 6
preface

The Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, created by a 1977 Act of Congress, stimulates public interest in books, reading,

and the written word. The center's programs of symposia, lectures,

publications, exhibitions, and other events enhance the role of

books in society. These programs are supported by private gifts

from individuals and corporations.

This publication is a cooperative endeavor of the new Florida

Center for the Book in the Broward County Library and the Center

for the Book in the Library of Congress. As Cecil Beach, director of

the Broward County Library, explains in the foreword, Justin

Kaplan's lecture was the Florida's Center's first public program.

Commemorating the centennial of the publication of the Adventures

S
of Huckleberry Finn, the lecture was scheduled during Banned Books

Week. Justin Kaplan, whose biography Mr. Clemens and Mark

Twain won the Pulitzer Prize and the National 3ook Award in 1967,

is also the author of Mark Twain and His World (1974) and of

biographies of Lincoln Steffens and Walt Whitman.

It is a pleasure to commend and encourage the good work of the

Florida Center for the Book and to look forward to other cooperative efforts. May both our centers flourish!

John Y. Cole

Executive Director, The Center for the Book

in the Library of Congress

6 8
foreword

The Florida Center for the Book was established in 1984 by the

Broward County Library in cooperation with the Center for the

Book in the Library of Congress. At the dedication of the new Main

Library in Fort Lauderdale, Carol Nemeyer, Associate Librarian

for National Programs at the Library of Congress, explained that

the two centers 'or the book have a mutual objective of promoting

an appreciation of the role of books in society and a closer relationship between those who create books and those who read them.

The Broward County Library is committed to a strong program of

reading promotion and has helped projects inspired by the Center

for the Book in the Library of Congress reach a Florida audience,

particularly "Books Make a Difference" and "A Nation of

7

9
Readers." An award-winning weekly television program, "Library

Edition," features authors discussing their works and extends the

many book-based programs presented by the Broward County

Library.

With support from private contributions, the business community, and state and federal grants, the Florida Center for the

Book sponsors lectures, exhibits, and publications, Justin Kaplan's

address was the first public program of the Florida Center for the

Book. Presented on September 11, 1984, to coincide with Banned

Books Week, it also marked the centennial of the publication of the

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Mr. Kaplan reviewed the reasons

why this classic has always been in trouble with the censors. Drawing upon his own Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, Mr. Clemens

and Mark Twain, Kaplan updated the chronology of the banning of

Huck Finn, which began when the Concord Public Library in

Massachusetts attacked the book in 1885. Mark Twain himself

would likely have appreciated the irony that recently an effort was

made to ban the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the Mark

Twain Elementary School in Fairfax County, Virginia.

This lecture was presented in Fort Lauderdale at a time when the

Brow and County Library itself was under attack for its subscription

to Playboy magazine. The speaker therefore felt that this was a

particularly appropriate time to alert people to the dangers of all

types of censorship.

It is a pleasure to issue this lecture as a joint publication with the

Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The Broward

County Library acknowledges the support of the Ruffner Foundation and the Florida Endowment for the Humanities in cooperation

w ith the National Endowment for the Humanities in making the

original program possible.

Cecil Beach

Director, Broward County Library

Fort Lat tderclale, Florida

8 10
born to trouble:

one hundred years of Huckleberry Finn

"I am tearing along on a new book," Mark Twain told friends in the

summer of 1876. "It is Huck Finn's Autobiography. I like it only

tolerably well, as far as I have got, and may possibly pigeonholeor burn the MS when it is done." He wrote about one third of the

book then, coming to a full stop at the point in the story where

Hue . ii n, an outcast boy and a fugitive slave, pass Cairo,

Illinu., in the night. They had planned to sell their raft there, get on

a steamboat, and go up the Ohio River to the Free States. Instead,

confused by a heavy fog, they continue down the Mississippi into

the heart ofthe slave-holding South. They have no plausible reason

for going where they do except, perhaps, for Mark Twain's own

familiarity with the region. As Huck himself asks, Why would a

runaway slave "run South?"

9

11
The serious, perhaps insoluble plot problem Mark Twain created

for himself compelled him to put the manuscript aside for several

years. He worked on it again in 1879 or 1880 and got stuck a second

time. In 1884, eight years after he started Huckleberry Finn, he told

his English publisher, "I've just finished writing a book, and

modesty compels me to say it's a rattlir.g good one, too." But

whether he solved his plot problem even then remains doubtful.

In the final chapters Tom Sawyer shows up at the Phelps plantation in northern Louisiana, helps steal Jim out of slavery, and then

tells us that Jim has been a free man all along. This ending, which

makes up roughly a quarter of the entire book, has become the

center of a continuing critical debate. Ernest Hemingway said that

"All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark

Twain called Huckleberry Finn... the best book we've had," but even

Hemingway thought that readers ought to stop eleven chapters

short for the end. "The rest," he said, "is ju3t cheating." T. S. Eliot

and Lionel Trilling were able to live with Mark Twain's ending.

Others think he ought to have been shot for it. Professor John

Seelye has written his own version, The True Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1970), in order to satisfy the critics. "And now that

they've got their book," Seelye says, "maybe they'll ,eave the other

one alone."

Mark Twain's long and painful process of creation gives a peculiar force to Huck's concluding words"There ain't nothing more

to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed

what trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it."

The trouble, however, did not end with the writing. Century

magazine, which published excerpts in advance of book publication, insisted on deleting references to nakedness, dead cats, and

the like. To bring out flucklebcrry Finn Mark Twain set up his own

publishing house and, by entering business on a large scale, prepared the way for his bankruptcy ten years later. As authorpublisher, he displayed the extremest genteel severity in reviewing

the illustrations by E. W. Kemble. He faulted some of them for

being "forbidding" or "repulsive." One, which showed a "lecherous old rascal" kissing a girl at the camp meeting in Chapter 20,

had to go altogether: "Let's not make any pictures of the camp10 1.2
meeting. The subject won't bear illustrating. It is a disgusting

thing." But despite Mark Twain's vigilance, an engraver at the

printing plant in New Yorkhis identity was never discovered

added a mischievous last-minute detail, a slight bulge at the fly, that

drastically altered the meaning of an otherwise inoffensive picture

of Uncle Silas with Aunt Sally. The offending plate was cut out by

hand and replaced in the 30,000-copy first printing, but the resulting delay meant that the book missed the 1884 Christmas trade and

went on sale in the United States about two months after it did in

England and Canada. At stake, a spokesman for the publishing

house declared, was the author's reputation for "decency and

morality," a reputation that was soon to be put to more severe

tests. Meanwhile, Mark Twain launched an unavailing lawsuit

against a firm of booksellers, described by him as "thieves and

swindlers," who were offering ciuckleberry Finn at a reduced price.

And finally, just when "I am not able to see anything that can save

Huck Finn from being another iefeat," the trustees of the Concord

(Massachusetts) Public Library expellcd the book from their

shelves as "trash and suitable only for the siorns." Their reasoning,

summarized as follows by a Boston newspaper, proved to be

somewhatbut far from totallyrepresentative of official opinion elsewhere in the country:

It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of

morality; it is couched in the language of a rough dialect, and all

through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an

employment of rough, o. arse, inelegant expressions. It is also

very irreverent. To sum up, the book is flippant and irreverent in

its style. It deals with a series of experiences that are certainly not

elevating. The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for

the slums than it is for respectable people, and it is trash of the

veriest sort.

"That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure," Mark Twain said, calculating the beneficial effects of excommunication. "For instance, it

will deter other lihraritb from buying the hook and you are doubtlcsb aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a

sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And secondly it will

cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, insttad

11

13
of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and

library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their Gwn indignant disappointment, that there is nothing

objectionable in the book, after all."

Huckleberry Finn may have been the first book to become a

best-seller because it was banned in Massachusetts, but the banning

of an American book of indisputable literary quality was far from

being the last instance of its sort. One has only to think of the

troubled history of Stephen Crane's Maggie and of Theodore

Dreiser's Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy. Today, books by J.

D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud, and Kurt Vonnegut are targets for

the vigilance committees, along with The American Heritage Dictionary. No longer merely random, local, or idiosyncratic, book

banning today is political, organized, and therefore more menacing

than ever.

"Those idiots in Concord are not a court of last resort," Mark

Twain said, "and I am not disturbed by their moral gymnastics."

Still, he remained hurt and puzzled by the reception of his masterpiece, a favorite child who had brought disgrace upon his father. As

novelist, humorist, and satirist he most often stood in opposition

to the genteel tradition, but as private citizen, family man, and

prominent householder of Hartford, Connecticut, he courted

acceptance and respectability, he would have been ashamed to be

classed with his older contemporary, the reprobate poet, Walt

Whitman of Camden, New Jersey. But just four years earlier

another work that today represents America and American culture

to the entire world, Whitman's Leaves of Grass, had also been

banned. The Boston district attorney, egged on by some of the same

people whc later ostracized Huckleberry Finn, warned Whitman's

publishers there that Leaves of Grass, dismissed by one early

reviewer as "a mass of stupid filth," fell "within the provisions of

the Public. Statutes respecting obscene literature." He suggested to

them "the propriety of withdrawing the same from circulation and

suppressing the editions thereof." The publishers in Boston

retreated. Whitman, who after a quarter of a century in the doghouse had almost become resigned to this sort of thing, took his

book to another firm, this time in Philadelphia. As a consequence

12

14
of having been banned in Boston, Leaves of Grass even enjoyed a

mild flurry of sales.

In the aftermath of the Concord expulsion of Huckleberry Finn

Mark Twain was more certain than ever that there was no such

thing as a unitary audience in America. Perhaps only seeking to

make the best of a bad situation, he dedared that he had always

written for "the mighty mass of the uncultivated," for "the Belly

and the Members" instead of "for the Head." "Indeed I have been

misjudged from the very first," he told Andrew Lang, an English

critic who regarded Huck as "nothing less than a masterpiece," the

"great American novel." "I have never tried in even one single

instance to help cultivate the cultivated classes. I was not equipped

for it, either by native gifts or training. And I never had any

ambition in that direction, but always hunted for bigger gamethe

masses."

By now a fixture among the classics of world literature, Huckleberry Finn clearly has reached "the masses." They have read it in

English, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Hebrew, and practically every

other tongue spoken on the globe. A 1960 estimate put the cumulative sales of the book at ten million copies, but that was some time

ago. (The current total might be closer to fifteen million.) This

country alone has about forty editions in print, including the

splendid omnibus volume in the Library of America series. But at

the same time, as the ongoing critical debate suggests, Huckleberry

Finn has also become the property of the lettered classes, who have

turned it into a sort of fresh-water Moby Dick.

H. L. Mencken recalled that his discovery of Huckleberry Finn

in 1889, when he was only nine years old and the book only four,

was "probably the most stupendous event of my whole life.... If I

undertook to tell you the effect it had upon me my talk would

sound frantic, and even delirious." For Mencken, Mark Twain was "the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist of the blood royal." In Huckleberry Finn, said T. S. Eliot,

Mark Twain reveals himself to be one of those rare writers "who

have brought their language up to date," and "who have discovered

a new way of writing, valid not only for themselves, but for others."

In some way his book has shaped the style and vision of virtually

13

15
every American writer, including Sherwood Anderson, Dreiser,

Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Salinger, and Bellow, in addition to Hemingway. By elevating Huck's vernacular speech to the level of literature, Mark Twain advanced a cultural as well as a literary revolution.

Huckleberry Finn is a relatively rare example, in a divided culture,

of a work of high literary art that is cherished by both the "cultivated" and the "uncultivated classes," as Mark Twain distinguished

themby the "Head" as well as "the Belly and the Members."

Even so, this novel has never been out of hot water with official or

self-appointed guardians of public taste and morality, especially

where the young and impresTionable are involved. "When a library

expels a book of mine," Mark Twain said, "and haves an unexpurgated Bible around where unprotected youth and age can get hold

of it, the deep unconscious irony of it delights me and doesn't anger

me. PP During the twenty-five years of life remaining to him after the

publication of Huckleberry Finn, he had many such occasions to

enjoy the "deep unconscious irony" of actual or threatened expulsionfrom the library of the New York State Reformatory, the

Denver Public Library, the Omaha Public Library, the Brooklyn

Public Library. The reasons variously given were that the book was

"immoral and sacrilegious," put "wrong ideas in youngsters'

heads," and set "a bad example." A writer in Library Journal for July

007 reported that each year Huck was banned somewhere in the

United States (the title of his article was, "The Children's Librarian

versus Huckleberry Finn"). In 1931 Harper and Brothers published

an expurgated edition for elementary and junior high school

students. The editors claimed that their bobtailed version would

"let Huck... step down from his place on the library shelf and enter

the classroom," thereby providing "wholesome happiness for boys

and girls," and stimulating "even the most apathetic and difficult

pupils." In 1957 the New York City Board of Education removed

Huck from its list of approved texts. In 1976 a comparable action

was taken in the high schools of the state of Illinois.

What is it in this universally admired book that offends so many

people? Why is Huck always in hot water? Why must he always put

"civilization" behind him and light out for the Territory?

14

16
a terITIG

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,4 WEE.!,, I got a good going-over in .

?',' h, 1

, the morning, from old Miss

I Watson, on account of my

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.... clothes ; but the widow she

didn't scold, but only cleaned

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if:

, 1 looked so sorry that I

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tII 4 thought I would behave a1 while if I could. Then Miss

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Watson she took me in the III

ti

iy ,), ing come of it. She told

i closet and prayed, but noths.'t SA) A I)' me to pray every day, and

ti"41'41t4 I whatever I asked for I would

31155 WATSON'S LEOTURN.

get it. But it warn% so. I

tried it. Once I got a fishline, but no hooks. It warn't

any good to me without hooks. I tried for the hooks three or four times, but somehow

I couldn't make it work. By-and-by, one day, I asked Miss Watson to try for me, but she said I was a fool. She never

told me why, and I couldn't make it out no way.

I set down, one One, back in the woods, and had a long

think about it. I says to myself, if a body can get anything

"Miss Watson's Lecture," drawn by E W. Kemble to open chapter 3.

17
Many early readers found Mark Twain's great novel objectionable

because it violated genteel standards of social and literary decorum.

Instead of refined language, an exemplary hero, and an elevating

moral they encountered a narrative written in the idiom of a

shiftless, unlettered boy from the lowest class of Southern white

society. This should not have come as a complete surprise to them.

Huck had been introduced nearly ten years earlier, in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, as a "juvenile pariah ...cordially hated and

dreaded by all the mothers of the town, because he was idle, and

lawless, and vulgar and bad.... He slept on door-steps in fine

weather and in empty hogsheads in wet." But now this outcast, son

of the town drunkard, instead of being one of Tom Sawyer's many

playmates, was the sole hero-narrator of a book that ridiculed the

work ethic, polite manners, the Bible, prayer, and pious sentiments

in general, characterized as "tears and flapdoodle," "soul-butter

and hogwash." In addition to the camp meeting, Huck's story

included an obscene stage performance, "The Royal Nonesuch,"

described by the duke as "ruther worse than low comedy" and

featuring a naked man cavorting on all fours.

Offensive as they seemed at the time, these violations of decorum only screened a deeper level of threat and affront. Huckleberry

Finn, Lionel Trilling said, is "a subversive book." No one who

responds to its hero's internal struggles over right and wrong,

freedom and slavery, humanity and racism, will ever again be

certain that what appear to be "clear dictates of moral reason are

not merely the engrained customary beliefs" of a particular place

and time. The questions that Huck and Jim pose go to the very heart

of the social contract and our faith in public opinion as a guide to

conduct.

Twenty years after he finished Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain

described its central and constitutive irony: "A sound heart and a

deformed conscience come into collision and conscience suffers

defeat." Huck's "deformed conscience" is the internalized voice of

public opinion, of a conventional wisdom that found nothing

wrong in the institution of slavery and held as mortal sin any

attempt to subvert it. Conscience, as Mark Twain remembered

from his boyhood in a slaveholding society, can be trained to

16 18
approve any wild thing you want it to approve if you begin its

education early and stick to it." Huck knows that Tom Sawyer,

"with his bringing-up," would never be able to set a slave free. But

Huck eventually recognizes slavery for the "wild thing" it was. He

follows the dictates of his sound heart and commits a sin as well as a

crime by helping Jim to run away from his legal owner. "All right,

then, I'll go to hell," Huck says. "It was awful thoughts, and awful

words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never

thought no more about reforming." Like Thoreau and Captain

John Brown, Huck rejects what he considers to be an unjust and

immoral law. He also rejects the craving for social approval that,

according to Mark Twain, motivates the behavior of most of us. He

is happy to remain a pariah. His story satirizes a number of beliefs

sacred to Arno-leans, consensual wisdom, for example, and the

primacy of the average man. "Do I know you?" Colonel Sherburn

says when he faces down the lynch mob. "I know you clear

through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the

North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a

coward." "Hain't we got all the fools in town on our side?" asks the

king. "And ain't that a big enough majority, in any town?"

Guided by sound hearts rather than deformed consciences, Huck

and Jim passed through agonies of remorse that are their own

particular hells. Jim rebukes Huck: "Trash is what people is dat

puts dirton de header dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." "I didn't

do him no more mean tricks," says Huck, "and I wouldn't done

that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel thatway." Jim

remembers committing an inadvertent act of cruelty to his own

daughter: "De Lord God Almighty fogive po' ole Jim, kaze he never

gwyne to fogive hisself as long's he live!" Seeking only selfapproval, not the approval of others, the white pariah boy and the

black runaway slave, "a community of saints," achieve a state of

near-prefect intimacy and equality on their raft, fragile island of

freedom between two shores of society. "Whatyou want, above all

things, on a raft," Huck says, "is for everybody to be satisfied, and

feel right and kind towards the others." Perhaps another of the

affronts that Mark Twain's novel offered and continues to offer is

that his two outcasts are a silent reproach to dry-land society. They

17 19
are simply too good for us, too truthful, too loyal, too passionate,

and, in a profounder sense than the one we feel easy with, too moral.

Banning is one way of dealing with this profound affront.

Another way is denial. Americans of Mark Twain's time and

somewhat after tended to cherish him as a nostalgic recorder of

boyhood high-jinks, a genial, harmless entertainer. As soon as the

smiles faded from their faces they trivialized his genius and irony,

his dark vision of humanity, and his moral passion. We see the

same process of lollypopping and willful expropriation of cultural

resources in I.B.M.'s current advertising campaign for their Personal Computer: it converts Charlie Chaplin, victim of the

machine and of Modern Times, into his ideological antithesis, a

smiling, even simpering, totem of post-industrial society.

There is one especially bitter irony in the career of Huckleberry

Finn. This novel, a savage indictment of a society that accepted

slavery as a way of life, nevertheless has come under a-tack in our

time for its alleged "racism." In 1957, for example, the N.A.A.C.P.

condemned the book as "racially offensive." Such charges have

supported exclusionary actions taken in many other states. In 1982

an administrator at the Mark Twain Intermediate School in Fairfax

County, Virginia, called it "the most grotesque example of racism

I've ever seen in my life." In 1984 school officials in Waukegan,

Illinois, removed Huckleberry Finn from the required reading list

after an alderman, according to the Associated Press, "objected to

the book's use of the word 'nigger.' " It seems unlikely that anyone,

of any color, who had actually read Huckleberry Finn, instead of

merely reading or hearing about it, and who had allowed himself or

herself even the barest minimum of intelligent response to its

underlying spirit and intention, could accuse it of being "racist"

because some of its characters use offensive racial epithets. These

characters belong to their place and time, which is the Mississippi

Valley thirty years before Emancipation.

As a historical portrait of slaveholding society, Mark Twain's

novel is probably more faithful as well as less stereotypical than

Harriet Beecher Stowe's beloved Uncle Tom's Cabin. And it is

worth recalling that Mrs. Stowe, like most of her fellow abolitionists, believed that there was no place for free blacks in American

18

20
societythey advocated colonization and repatriation to Africa.

Mark Twain, "the most desouthernized of southerners," according

to his friend William Dean Howells, believed that it was henceforward the duty of white people to make amends for the crime of

slavery. He may have been the least "racist" of all the major writers

of his time, Herman Melville excepted. Huckleberry Finn is a matchless satire on racism, bigotry, and property rights in human beings.

Jim considers hiring an Abolitionist to steal his two children

from their owner. "It most froze me to hear such talk," says Huck.

Here was Jim, whom "I had as good as helped run away, coming

right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children

children that belonged to a man I didn't even know; a man that

hadn't ever done me no harm." Here is Aunt Sally's response to a

steamboat explosion as described by Huck: 'Good gracious!

anybody hurt?"No'm. Killed a nigger."Well, it's lucky; because

sometimes people do get hurt.' " One has to be deliberately dense

to miss the point Mark Twain is making here and to construe such

passages as evidences of his "racism." Jim, unquestionably the best

person in the book, reflects the author's affection, humanity, and

moral passion. "I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me

against him, but only the other kind," Huck says. "I'd see him

standing m y watch on top his'n, stead of calling me, so I could go on

sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the

fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the

feud was; and such-like times; and would always call me honey, and

pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good

he always was."

Mark Twain "told the truth, mainly," Huck says in the opening

of the novel. "There was things which he stretched, but mainly he

told the truth." ("Truth is the most valuable thing we have," says

the autl.or himself, speaking in another voice. "Let us economize

it.") Huck confronts a corrupt adult world through a series of

day-to-day yarns, stretchers, and downright lies, but he himself is

ultimately and unflinchingly truthful. "You can't pray a lie," he

says. "I found that out." Much of this great book's power to offend

as well as endure derives from a commitment to truth-telling and to

a frequently brutal, painful realism. Huck and Jim live on their raft

19

21.
4

ON Tin:

te

must a been cicse on to one

o'clock when we got below the

island at last, and the raft did

seem to go mighty slow. If a

boat was to come along, we was

going to take to the canoe and

break for the Illinois shore; and

it was well a boat didn't come,

for we hadn't ever thought to

put the gun into the canoe, or

a fishing-line or anything to

cat. We was in ruttier too

muc:i of a sweat to think of so

many things. It warn't good

judgment to put ererythin on

the raft.

If the men went to the

island, I just expect they found

the camp tire I built, and watched it all night for Jim to come.

Anyways, they stayed away from ns, and if may building the fire

never fooled them it warn't no fault of mine. I played it as

low-down on them as I could.

When the first stre,:k of day begun to show, we tied up to

a taw -heed in a big bend on the Illinois side, and hacked off

Jim and Hack on the raft.

BEST COPY AVAILABLE

?2

7
because they are on the run from a nightmare society driven by

bigotry, violence, exploitation, greed, ignorance, and a sort of

pandemic depravity. The most conspicuous white inhabitants of

the Mississippi Valley are swindlers, drunkards, hypocrites, lunkheads, fools, rapscallions, deadbeats, bounty hunters, and triggerhappy psychopaths.

At first Huck appears almost to be matter-of-fact about the

horrors he meets up with. "Pap got too handy with his hick'ry, and

I couldn't stand it," he tells us. "I was all over welts. ...Once he

locked me in and was gone three days." Pap drinks himself into an

attack of delirium tremens, confuses Huck with the Angel of

Death, and tries to kill him with a clasp-knife. When Pap collapses

in a stupor, Huck waits out the night behind a loaded rifle pointed

at his father. Having considered the possibility of patricide, the boy

instead simulates his own murder and escapes. Soon after, Pap is

killed in a brawl.

By the time Huck finds himself a witness to the feud between the

Shephersons and Grangerfords, he is no longer even remotely

matter-of-fact. This is his account of the feud's bloody climax. All

of a sudden, bang! bang! bang! goes three or four gunsthe men

had slipped around through the woods and come in from behind

without their horses! The boys jumped for the riverboth of them

hurtand as they swum down the current the men run along the

bank shooting at them and singing out, 'Kill them kill them!' It

made me so sick I most fell out of the tree, I ain't agoing to tell all

that happenedit would make me sick again if I was to do that. I

wished I hadn't ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I

ain't ever going to get shut of themlots of times I dream about

them." He can't wait to "get out of that awful country."

In the course of his long journey along the shores of "that awful

country," Huck sees other murders. One of them is committed in

broad daylight on the main street ofa river town where the loafers

generally entertain themselves with milder spectacles. "There

couldn't anything wake them up all over, and make them happy all

over, like a dog-fight," Huck says, "unless it might be putting

turpentine on a stray dog and setting fire to him, or tying a tin pan

to his tail and see him run himself to death." The same village

21 23
loafers form the lynch mob that swarms up the street toward

Colonel Sherburn's house "a-whooping and yelling and raging like

Injuns." Much later Huck sees the king and duke, tarred and

feathered, being ridden out of another town. There is nothing

comic about this punishment. "I see they had the king and duke

astraddle of a railthat is, I knowed it was the king and the duke,

though they was all over tar and feathers, and didn't look like

nothing in the world that was humanjust looked like a couple of

monstrous big soldier-plumes. Well, it made me sick to see it."

Like the heroes of many more recent American novels Huck is

often sickened by what he sees. "It was enough to make a body

ashamed of the human race," he says. "I never see anything so

disgusting."

When Mark Twain followed his two heroes South into pain,

disgust, and danger, he did more than create a plot problem. Symbolically he enacted and predicted the dilemma of the humorist, a

punishing profession in several senses. The human race, says Mark

Twain's Satan, has only "one really effective weaponlaughter.

Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution these can

lift at a colossal humbugpush it a littleweaken it a little, century by centurybut only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at

a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand." But, as

Satan concludes, this is a weapon that requires of its user "sense

and courage," for humor when pressed to its extreme goes beyond

the pleasure principle. "Weapon," "blast," "assault"these are

some of Mark Twain's ways of nailing down the essential action of

humor. He also compares the action of humor to the "delicious"

surprise of the dentist's drill striking the raw nerve. One of the

funniest things about humor is that people don't take it seriously

enough. If they did they might discover that, at heart, great humorists are not merry as crickets, but quite the contrary. Enduring

humor is not kindly, not harmless. It has the power to inflict pain,

even commit mayhem, and unless it exercises this power is not

likely to endure.

Mark Twain's vocation, as he announced when he was thirty

years old, was "to excite the laughter of God's creatures." But he

discovered this to be a difficult and dangerous undertaking.

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24
"Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly

preach," he said, "but it must do both if it would live forever" (by

"forever" he means thirty years or more). From the day he chose

his vocation to the day he died he felt compelled to defend humor,

to free the noun "humorist" from the adjective "mere" and the

synonym "clown." To do this he ventured into ever darker, ever

more complex and punishing modes. One theorist of humor, Henri

Bergson, says that laughter depends upon "a momentary anaesthesia of the heart" and therefore "has no greater foe than emotion."

Huckleberry Finn, however, not only inflicts pain but challenges us

to feel and laugh at the same time. Perhaps Mark Twain asks too

much of us. Perhaps it is in the very nature of humor as he defined it

that, like Huck, its outcast hero, Mark Twain's century-old masterpiece was born to trouble.

23

TIM ZND. YOWLS TRULY, DUCK MN.

25
this booklet was designed by Adrianne Onderdonk Dudden

and printed originally in an edition of 3000 copies by

Gararnond/Pridemark P- tis in Ealtimore, Maryland. A second

printing of 5000 copies was also done by Garamond/

Pridernark Press. The text is Goudy Old Style, with display lines

in Italia, and was set by Brown Composition, Inc., in Baltimore.

The paper is 70 lb. Warren Olde Style.

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