Mark Twain, Huck Finn, and Their Place in American Literature Talk at The Gunnery February 13, 2009 I am delighted and honored to be invited back to The Gunnery to talk with you this evening. I have spoke here several times before on such topics as Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy, James Joyce, and an overview of American literature. Instead of these or other great European writers, we will stick closer to home to consider one of America s most important writers Mark Twain and his contested masterpiece The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: a book some claim as the greatest American novel and others argue should neither be revered nor taught. Twain and his novel remain lightning rods, and I want to consider why this is so, as well as to place both in the wider context of American literature. I should warn you in advance that I am scheduled to return for another talk in April. In that one I will consider modern literature. My working title is Why Modern Literature Doesn t Suck, but I expect to arrive at a more elegant title eventually. So, tonight, if I want to insure an audience at all for my return visit, I should be either immensely entertaining or excessively brief. I will do my best to be both. To place Mark Twain and Huck Finn in the context of American literature, I want to cite two of the most famous quotes about man and book, from two of Twain s fellow American writers. The first comes from Ernest Hemingway who famously asserted: All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.... it s the best book we ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since. 1
Now, Hemingway with a deserved reputation as a marksman, really shoots from the hip here. Nothing before Huckleberry Finn? No Leatherstocking Tales by Cooper, no Hawthorne, Melville, or Whitman? Clearly we need to examine Hemingway s outlandish claim. The second quote comes from Twain s contemporary, the distinguished novelist and editor William Dean Howells who in a tribute to his friend following his death called Twain, the Lincoln of our literature. The full quote is: Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes I knew them all and all the rest of our sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature. Like Hemingway s, this seems an outlandish claim associating Twain with our greatest president, the man who held the union together during our greatest national tragedy the Civil War and who redeemed that bloody carnage by changing the meaning of that conflict from clash over state s rights to a war over human dignity and justice by freeing the slaves and reasserting the most fundamental of American ideals. How can Twain possible measure up to such a comparision? And even more ironically, given such a comparison, how can his masterpiece and its creator be castigated as racist and more candidates for censure than celebration? I would like to take on both of these quotes and the questions they provoke as a means of placing Twain s accomplishment in the context of the history and development of American literature, while arguing that the issue both writers raise about Twain and his masterpiece remain essential questions for our literature and for us as Americans. 2
Let s begin with Hemingway s assertion that all modern American literature comes from Huckleberry Finn. Hemingway seems to be suggesting that what makes American literature unique and distinctive begins with what Twain accomplished in this novel. Other writers before Twain had exploited the dramatic possibilities of the American landscape. Washington Irving had set some of his short stories along the Hudson River; James Fenimore Cooper had helped to shape enduring American myths by tapping into the poetic possibility of the American wilderness, creating in the character of Natty Bumpo, the prototypical American frontiersman and indentifying a primary and persistent American theme in the tension between the individual and society, between person freedom and the restraints of civilization. In Cooper s view, America was the last Eden, steadily being destroyed by progress, expansion, and settlement, forcing its heroes further and further west ahead of the forces limiting freedom and opportunities for self-fulfillment. That s afterall where and why Huck is heading at the end of the novel, lighting out for the western territories to avoid being civilized. Hawthorne had explored the moral and existential conflict inherent in America s Puritan past; while Melville had converted the American enterprise of whaling into a source of the most profound and intense metaphysical speculation. Why, then, in Hemingway s view, does modern American literature then not begin with one of these writers but with Twain? I think the answer Hemingway would offer is not that Twain is the first to treat artistically uniquely American geography, subjects, and themes but that it was the way he did so that was so radical and groundbreaking. By having the 12-year-old, semi-literate, white trash son of the town drunk, Huck Finn, tell his own story in his own words, Twain revolutionized American literature. No sustained work of literary art had ever before Huck Finn had ever been made out of the way Americans actual spoke. Hemingway, I think, has picked up upon Twain s discovery of the poetic and dramatic possibilities inherent in the 3
American vernacular. Unlike the novel that preceded it, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Huck is first introduced, most memorably swinging a dead cat by its tail, Huckleberry Finn is not narrated by a cultured narrator but directly from the limited and often naïve perspective of a narrator had never been given voice in literature before. Huckleberry Finn will be the world as seen by a 12-year-old, told as a 12-year-old with his education and background would tell it. That had simply never been done before. Twain shows for the first time that great art and poetry can be made by rejecting learned models of literature and attending to the particulars that a boy would notice in the language he would use. Early in the novel Twain alerts us to the difference we should expect in the novel. Adopted by the Widow Douglas, Huck resists her efforts to make him respectable, as later the novel will resist the charge of irrespectablity on the basis of its language, moralty, or racism. Huck describes the respectable meals at the Widow s: The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn t really anything the matter with them. And here Huck draws a distinction between the respectable food he is served and what he is used to eating: That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and things go better. A barrel of odds and ends where things get mixed up is precisely the kind of melting-pot stew that Twain offers us instead of the Widow s respectable meal. Twain s literary food will come from what had never been served in literature before. To show the difference between the 4
vernacular language of Huck and conventional literary language, Twain offers one example of respectable literature in the novel: Emmeline Grangerford s unforgettable Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec d : And did young Stephen sicken, And did young Stephen die? And did the sad hearts thicken, And did the mourners cry? No; such was not the fate of Young Stephen Dowling Bots; Though sad hearts round him thickened, 'Twas not from sickness' shots. No whooping-cough did rack his frame, Nor measles drear with spots; Not these impaired the sacred name Of Stephen Dowling Bots. Despised love struck not with woe That head of curly knots, Nor stomach troubles laid him low, Young Stephen Dowling Bots. O no. Then list with tearful eye, Whilst I his fate do tell. His soul did from this cold world fly By falling down a well. They got him out and emptied him; Alas it was too late; His spirit was gone for to sport aloft In the realms of the good and great. Here Twain takes hilarious, satirical aim both at the artificiality of standard literary language its Twases, Lists, drears, Whilsts, and alofts words that Emmeline would never have heard spoken but read and her converting the reality of Stephen s rather pathetic death into a sanctified alternative: he s not dead at all but is sporting aloft in the 5
Realms of the good and the great. Instead of truth, Emmeline s art offers us sentimental consolation and abstractions that redeems the sordid truth. In contrast to this respectable poetry, consider this uncultured words by Huck describing life on the raft as he sees it: Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest--fst! it was as bright as glory, and you'd have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash, and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling, down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs--where it's long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know. Now that is real poetry: direct, vital, precise, with its metaphors drawn not from literary sources but from the world Huck knows. These poetic possibilities based on the truth of the American experience in the language of Americans are what Hemingway so admired. No writer before Twain had so magnificently tapped into this resource, breaking away from all the former rules of literary language to capture the American landscape and Americans warts and all, with all our honest authenticity. This is why I think Hemingway claims that true American literature begins here, with Huck s words that apprehend the world not through a distorted lens of language and culture but directly and freshly. But what about The Lincoln of our literature? How does Twain serve that function? Lincoln, the emancipator, addressed the discrepancy between the ideals of American freedom and democracy that Jefferson articulated in the Declaration: that all men are created equal and its reality that considered African Americans as only 3/5ths of a man, as property and not human. By freeing the slaves, Lincoln fulfilled the promise of American freedom and democracy. Twain, 6
particularly in Huck Finn serves a similar role in our literature, forcing us to attend to the central issues of the American experience. By sending Huck and Jim downriver into the heart of America s racial conflict and the divide between American s ideals of equality and freedom and the reality of racial injustice, Twain has written what can best be described as an American epic, the repository of our most cherished and powerful myths and traumas. Huckleberry Finn is only partially about the freeing of the runaway slave Jim; it is more fundamentally about the freeing of Huck from the prejudices and value system that turn Jim into Miss Watson s Nigger that denies his humanity. In the social hierarchy of their rivertown, Huck and Jim are low and lowest. The son of the illiterate town drunk, Huck is poor white trash, more an embarrassment than valued by his community; Jim is even lower on the social hierarchy. Together drifting on their raft the two create an ideal community of mutual respect and value. Here is Twain s great statement about American democracy extending our sympathy to individuals who had been on the shore diminished and unempowered. What threatens this fragile, traveling republic of the raft, are the shore life that is shown as murderous and corrupt but also the civilized values that Huck carries with him. Twain would later describe his novel as the collision between a sound heart and a corrupted conscience, and the great drama of the book is the inner struggle that Huck has over his role in helping a runaway gain freedom. There are two scenes that best show this. The first is when in a storm Huck and Jim are separated, and when reunited Huck plays a Tom Sawyer-like joke on Jim convincing him that he had dreamed it all. Delivering the punchline to his cruel joke by pointing out the evidence of the storm to Jim as he tries to interpret his dream, Jim "What do dey stan' for? I'se gwyne to tell you. When I got all wore out wid work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz mos' 7
broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no' mo' what become er me en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en soun', de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo' foot, I's so thankful. En all you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could make a fool uv ole Jim wid a lie. Dat truck dah is TRASH; en trash is what people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's en makes 'em ashamed." Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there without saying anything but that. But that was enough. It made me feel so mean I could almost kissed HIS foot to get him to take it back. It was fifteen minutes before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterwards, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd a knowed it would make him feel that way. Huck here recognizes the claims of friendship that makes him ashamed of his behavior based on a denial of Jim s humanity and entitlement to the loyalty he has earned. The second great moment is the climax of the novel. The Duke and the king have turned Jim over as a runaway, and Huck now must finally battle with his conscience over what should be done. He decides to write to Miss Watson to allow her to reclaim her property: that, afterall is what the morality of his society says is the right thing to do. Jim is Miss Watson s property and it s a sin to steal. He does the right thing and writes the letter. Note the Sunday-school values that Huck has acquired here among the respectable: I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn't do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking--thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his'n, 'stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I 8
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; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had small-pox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the ONLY one he's got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper. It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: "All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up. There is no more powerfully, liberating moment in all of American literature than Huck s assertion here. Heart and loyalty to his friend, even a Nigger in the demeaning language of this culture, trumps conscience, even it means eternal damnation. At this moment, Huck is finally free, free from the corrupting values of his society that he has both seen enacted along the river and carried with him as a member of that society. Twain in one of the greatest affirmations in all of American literature asserts that the human heart is stronger than social rules and customs. In this rite of passage novel, Huck has been tested and realizes the maturity to defy the clearest of moral and religious laws on behalf of what he knows to be true: that Jim is a man, a husband, a father, and a friend, not 3/5 th or simply Miss Watson s Nigger. Note how subversive this book has become: the respectable have proven to be the real trash, and the trash poor white and slave are the moral exemplums of our entire American democracy. There s much more to talk about here in this great and disturbing, sinister novel. Does the ending of the novel defeat the book s hard-won moral vision? Is Huck now free from the prejudices he has been raised on, and is freedom really ever possible. Is Huck s freedom, only an evasion? 9
What will he find in the territories? Perhaps more of the same limiting and corrupting civilization because he will be bringing it with him. Lots to discuss, but not enough time to do so. Allow me just to close with some final words: Huckleberry Finn s greatest and importance stems from Twain s unwillingness to sugarcoat the reality of the American experience. In letting a typical American speak, Twain asks us both to sympathize and censure the culture and history that have gone into his make-up and have formed all of us. The central question of all American literature is what does it mean to be American? No writer has ever framed that question so powerfully or so honestly. The late television commentator Charles Kuralt was once asked to summarize the American experience, identity, and values in as few words as possible. He said he could do it in two words: Huckleberry Finn. Thank you very much for your attention. I would be happy to field whatever question you might have. 10