Bessie or Becky : Should We Care about Text?

Size: px

Start display at page:

Download "Bessie or Becky : Should We Care about Text?"

Noah Webb
5 years ago
Views:

1 : Should We Care about Text? Victor Fischer Several generations of readers familiar with the character Becky Thatcher in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) have been perplexed by the brief appearance of someone Huck Finn calls Bessie Thatcher, whom he sees aboard the ferry-boat searching for his body in chapter 8 of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). Who is that character? Is she Becky s mother or perhaps her sister? The text provides no answer. The steam-ferry sails by and Bessie is not heard from again. When members of school classes and book groups are not all reading the same editions of Huckleberry Finn, they sometimes notice that the titles of their copies of the book are not all the same. Some say Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and others The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Moreover, the last words of the novel often differ: Some editions end with Aunt Sally she s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can t stand it. I been there before. Others end with six additional words the end. yours truly, huck finn. Why these differences? How did they come about? Which versions are correct? Careful readers have noted other discontinuities or anomalies in the text of Huckleberry Finn and wondered about them as well but have had no explanations. Does text matter? This essay argues that it does very much matter and that certain editions called critical editions, which are tasked with investigating variant readings and how the text was transmitted, can and do provide those answers and explanations. Choosing Editions In choosing an edition of a classic novel to read or study, some readers look for the most recent or the least expensive edition available, presumably reasoning that all editions will essentially be 27

2 the same and differences among them will be minor and negligible. Others know that the texts of first editions are likely to be the most accurate and authoritative and that some scholars consider them the most historically relevant, since they embody not only the words the author published, but also the contributions of the typesetters, editors, artists, binders, and publishers of their time. Such readers often look for a facsimile copy of a first edition such as those of the 1996 Oxford Mark Twain edition or one that promises to be closely based on a first edition. Sometimes, however, it happens that even a first edition has been compromised by unauthorized editorial interventions, inadvertent errors, or an author s inability fully to control the bookmaking process. One way to determine if that is the case and if it is, to learn what the author meant to publish is to begin with the earliest extant document containing the text, usually the manuscript, and trace every step of its transmission into a published book. Knowing who had the opportunity and motive to make changes in the text allows one to distinguish between an author s changes and unauthorized ones, leading not only to a more accurate text but to a history of the author s revision of it. The result is what is called a critical edition. First American Edition of Huckleberry Finn The text of the first American edition of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, published in 1885 by Mark Twain s own firm, Charles L. Webster and Co., is problematic. The transmission of the text from Mark Twain s handwritten manuscript through typed copies of it, which were heavily revised by the author and then used for typesetting, produced a far from perfect text. Mark Twain found the process of seeing the book through the press infuriating and sporadically relinquished control of it. His friend and fellow author, William Dean Howells, read the book before publication. He offered to have a clean, or fair-copy, typescript made of the heavily revised typescript for the first half of the book. He suggested doing that to make the typesetters work less prone to error, although adding an extra copying step is actually likely to introduce even more errors. 28 Critical Insights

3 Howells also offered to read the book s first printed proof pages. Mark Twain responded on August 7, 1884, after his own exasperated attempts to proofread the early galleys: I have no doubt I am doing a most criminal & outrageous thing for I am sending you these infernal Huck Finn proofs but the very last vestige of my patience has gone to the devil, & I cannot bear the sight of another slip of them. My hair turns white with rage, at sight of the mere outside of the package; & this time I didn t even try to glance inside it, but re-enveloped it at once, & directed it to you. Now you re not to read it unless you really don t mind it you re only to re-ship it to Webster & tell him, from me, to read the remnant of the book himself, & send no more slips to me, under any circumstances. Will you? The First Critical Edition I had the singular privilege of editing a critical edition of Huckleberry Finn twice, the first time with coeditor Walter Blair, best known for his pioneering work on Huckleberry Finn, especially his book Mark Twain & Huck Finn (1960), and his American humor studies. At that time, only the second half of Mark Twain s original manuscript was known to exist. The first half was presumed forever lost. Not long after publication of our critical edition, the lost first half of the manuscript was discovered in a Hollywood attic, astonishing the world (and causing Walter, then ninety years old, to tell the Chicago Tribune that it was a scholar s worst nightmare ). Having access to the full manuscript meant our critical edition work would need to be redone, which is why we produced a second critical edition this time with coeditor Lin Salamo, my colleague at the Mark Twain Project in Berkeley, California. These editions provided the fullest possible record of just how and how much the novel s first edition had departed from the text that Mark Twain had written. It also led to the discovery of how subsequent editions in his lifetime and afterward continued to stray even further from his original text, as new errors were introduced and reprinted. To produce a critical edition, it is necessary to determine just what documents and documentary evidence bearing on the text 29

4 survive or can be reconstructed. During the 1980s, the only part of the Huckleberry Finn manuscript known to survive had been written in 1883 (what became chapters 22-43), plus an interpolation into the missing first half (what became chapters 12½-14). Mark Twain s extensive literary working notes and many of the original illustrations by Edward W. Kemble also still survived. These materials revealed some page numbers of the otherwise lost part of the manuscript and of the lost typescript copies that Mark Twain had revised extensively and submitted to the printers as copy from which to typeset the book. There were also a selection of proof sheets marked by Mark Twain and printer s proofreader; a publisher s prospectus; and extensive but far from complete correspondence among the author, publisher, illustrator, and others. To reconstruct the journey of Mark Twain s text from his manuscript to first printed edition, we as editors drew on all these documents. Close comparison of the manuscript with the first edition revealed extensive revisions to the text that could only have been made by Mark Twain himself. That same journey from manuscript to printed page, however, also had many opportunities for errors and mistranscriptions, and for non-authorial spellings and punctuation (that is, alterations made by persons other than Mark Twain). This was because the text was copied and recopied in three successive typescripts, two of them heavily revised by the author and one that he most likely never saw. All those typescripts, unfortunately, are now lost. A comparison of the 1883 manuscript, surviving proof sheets, and the first edition revealed that the greater part of authorial revision must have taken place on the lost typescripts that served as printer s copy. It also became clear in comparing another, unrelated, 1883 Mark Twain manuscript, 1,002. An Oriental Tale, with a typescript made of it by the same typists who copied the Huckleberry Finn manuscript, that they were prone to eye-skips. Eye-skips occur when typists momentarily look away from the documents they are transcribing, marking their places by holding in mind the last words typed, and then return to those same words, not where they left off but further down in the text, thereby skipping over the intervening 30 Critical Insights

5 words. The result is that those intervening words are accidentally omitted from the typewritten copies, without the authors or typists knowledge. An example of an apparent eye-skip occurs in chapter 12 of Huckleberry Finn, when Huck describes the criminals lurking in the wrecked steamboat Walter Scott. Mark Twain wrote: I couldn t see them but I could tell where they was, and how close they was, by the whisky they d been having. In the first edition of the book, that same passage reads: I couldn t see them but I could tell where they was, by the whisky they d been having. The words and how close they was were probably omitted when the typist s eye skipped from the first to the second occurrence of they was. In chapter 13, the first edition created an unintended jump cut the term for an abrupt transition that makes the subject appear to jump from one spot to the other, without continuity resulting in Huck s going from rowing a skiff to pacing the deck of a ferryboat while searching for someone to help the thieves he and Jim had left on the Walter Scott. The first edition omitted two entire sentences from the account as Mark Twain had originally written it. Here is how the passage reads in the book s first and later editions: I closed in above the shore-light, and laid on my oars and floated. As I went by, I see it was a lantern hanging on the jackstaff of a double-hull ferry-boat. [omitted sentences] I skimmed around for the watchman, a-wondering whereabouts he slept; and by-and-by I found him roosting on the bitts, forward, with his head down between his knees. I give his shoulder two or three little shoves, and begun to cry. If one rereads the above passage, inserting the following sentences where their omission is marked above, the passage makes greater sense: 31

6 Everything was dead still, nobody stirring. I floated in under the stern, made fast, and clumb aboard. The omission was most likely the result of a typist s eye-skip from I floated to I skimmed. Errors like these were made in ways that eluded Mark Twain s control, but some errors were caused by his own inattention. For example, even though he had begun writing Huckleberry Finn in 1876, just on the heels of reading the proofs of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, he apparently forgot Becky Thatcher s first name and called her Bessie Thatcher in her sole appearance in chapter 8. In 1883, when he reviewed the typescript of the first part of the book before beginning to write the second half, he was bothered by that name. Three times he wrote notes to himself, such as Bessie or Becky? He clearly intended to correct the name but never did. As a result, the name in chapter 8 has remained Bessie in well over one hundred different editions that have been examined. His manifest intention to fix it was noted and the name was corrected in all the Mark Twain Project critical editions, along with an explanation of how the mistake came about. The Second Critical Edition In late 1990, the long-missing first half of the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn was discovered in a Hollywood attic. For the first time in more than a century, it was possible to see how Mark Twain himself had originally written chapters 1-12½ and 15-18½ in 1876 and chapters 18½-21 in When the discovery was announced in February 1991, it was greeted with extraordinary public interest worldwide. Although the manuscript was essentially a first draft, what it contained was so revealing that it seemed incumbent on the Mark Twain Project editors to include as much information as possible about it in the introduction, notes, and appendixes when we set out to edit the novel for the second time. Among the biggest surprises the newly found manuscript contained were passages Mark Twain decided to leave out of his book. Among them was a story narrated by Jim that we have called 32 Critical Insights

7 Jim s Ghost Story. Dropped from chapter 9, it was first published as Jim and the Dead Man in The New Yorker magazine in The manuscript also showed the author at work with extraordinary care and purpose as he revised his first draft of Huck s struggles with his conscience in chapter 16 and in other famous passages that he revised and transformed. Among them was the opening passage of chapter 19, in which Huck describes the sunrise on the Mississippi, a famous and beloved example of vernacular writing and of showing not telling, often used in the classroom. In 1957, Leo Marx said of it, Much of the superior power of Huckleberry Finn must be ascribed to the sound of the voice we hear. It is the voice of the boy experiencing the event. Of course no one ever spoke such concentrated poetry, but the illusion that we are hearing the spoken word is an important part of the total illusion of reality.... [T]he vernacular method liberated Sam Clemens. When he looked at the river through Huck s eyes he was suddenly free of certain arid notions of what a writer should write (Marx 140). An analysis of the manuscript alterations and those made on a lost typescript before the first edition was set made clear just how much of the style was achieved by Mark Twain s careful revision on the typescript, which, though lost, could now be editorially reconstructed. The evidence of his disciplined self-revision seemed a gift worthy of study, by general readers as well as by students and professors. Here is a small sample of the original manuscript reading followed by Mark Twain s revised reading: Manuscript: sometimes you could hear the screak of a sweep, or jumbled sounds of voices, it was so still, & sounds traveled so far; now you could begin to see the ruffled streak on the water that the current breaking past a snag makes; next, you would see the lightest & whitest mist curling up from the water; pretty soon the east reddens up, then the river reddens, & maybe you make out a little log cabin in the edge of the forest, away yonder on the bank on t other side of the river; then 33

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn STUDY-GUIDE Name PART ONE: Huck and Jim River and Shore CHAPTER 1 1. Who is Huck Finn? Give his history (summary of the end of the novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)