Category: Midwest

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965, Gilberton Company, Inc, New York, New York. According to the comic book, “reproductions of any material in any manner whatsoever are prohibited.” I’ll just go to hell.

For our trip to Missouri, I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

I’ve read Huckleberry Finn a lot over 50 years, not counting the times as a child that I read the Classics Illustrated comic book or the abridged version in the Reader’s Digest Best Loved Books for Young Readers. It’s a complicated book, and even when I’m not reading it I find myself thinking about it. Mrs. Pat Miller, maybe the most frightening woman any of us ever knew, explained to 15-year old me that 14 year-old Huck was as certain as any Evangelical of the consequences of sin. In my upbringing damnation mattered, and in Huck’s milieu–and in mine–folks day-by-day and minute-by-minute walked a fine line along the edge of the fiery pit. When Huck said he was going to hell, there wasn’t any wiggle room.

I suspect that while more modern folk understand the importance of Huck’s moment as literature, they may not properly appreciate it as inevitable damnation.

Apparently if you’re writing about Huck Finn, it’s obligatory to recite how it’s always been controversial. After publication it was immediately banned by librarians in Concord (with the aid of Louisa May Alcott of Little Women), and was recently damned by the novelist Jane Smiley,¹ who was appalled that anyone ever took Huck Finn seriously. She compares it unfavorably to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which is a little like comparing Moby-Dick unfavorably to the Orvis Guide to Flyfishing. They’re all fine books I’m certain, and Kris greatly admires Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Me, not so much, but then I don’t much admire Ms. Alcott’s Little Women either.

As for Jane Smiley, that broke leg must have pained her something fierce.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. Classics Illustrated comic books are universally despised, but as a kid I loved them, and I still imagine the art when I read the book. Look at that purple night sky, that monstrous moon, that silhouette of a canoe in the moonlight . . . I would only note that in my experience the Mississippi is considerably broader than that river, and considerably muddier.

In addition to the criticisms of Mss. Alcott and Smiley, there has also been considerable discussion of Huck Finn’s racism, or lack thereof. The educator John H. Wallace deemed the novel “the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.”² Mr. Wallace demands that the original text only be used in graduate courses, and that his alternate text, which among other improvements eradicates the word “hell,” is the only thing that should be allowed in public schools. Of course that raises the question of where it is exactly that Huck is going to go when he frees Jim. How do you delete hell from a novel the climax of which resonates from the certainty of damnation?

The thing is, Huckleberry Finn doesn’t suffer from critics, and as often as not the criticism ponders things that should be pondered. Thinking about the critics’ concerns make reading the novel a richer experience. Conversely, Huck Finn doesn’t really need defense, certainly not from me. It’s a fine novel. There were a few things that this time around I focused on, and in no particular order here they are.

Pap. Pap is Huck’s father. He’s a drunkard. He sleeps in the hog lot on winter nights to stay warm. He is abusive, violent, insensible, and dangerous, and he only returns because he believes Huck is rich. In a delirium he tries to kill Huck with his clasp knife. There is a W.H. Auden quote to the effect that Pap Finn is the evilest creation in all bookdem.³ His chief role in the novel is to tee up Jim as the father surrogate for Huck and the moral compass of the novel, but he also explains Huck, both as to his condition as an outsider and what might be Huck’s likely future.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. I’m fond of the red printers smudge on Huck’s spotless white shirt, and how the stuff is piled against the back wall so the artist didn’t have to contend with the joinder of the wall and floor.

Early on Pap also focuses the racial satire of the book. Pap, the least appealing possible man and father, goes off on a black college professor, a man who is clearly Pap’s superior:

Why, looky here. There was a free nigger⁴ there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? they said he was p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote.⁵

Huck. A lot of modern criticism of Huckleberry Finn focuses on the escaped slave, Jim, and there’s reason for it. Without Jim, the novel is an extended fishing trip, and we all know how stupid it is to read about fishing trips. But Huck is there, too, and it is his journey. You just can’t read Huck Finn without considering Huck.

Huck is Pap’s child of a dead mother, abandoned to fend for himself. Always present is the possibility that someday Huck may turn into Pap. The Widow Douglas is trying to save him, and he’s a strong kid, with plenty of stratagems for self-preservation.

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. 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 the things go better.⁶

Part of the delight of the book is that Huck lies. Huck lies to every stranger, kinsman, and acquaintance, Huck lies, then embellishes that lie, and then expands some on the embellishment. He lies to lead everyone so far astray that they miss him altogether. When in the rare instance Huck does tell the truth, even he is astonished.

So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place is taking considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better and actuly safer than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. ⁷

This is particularly helpful in parsing one of the most difficult (and most written about) exchanges in the book, when Huck is describing the fictional explosion on a nonexistent steamboat that he, asTom Sawyer, was supposed to be traveling on.

“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. ((Chapter XXXII))

Huck is talking to Mrs. Phelps, Tom Sawyer’s aunt. Huck is thrilled that Aunt Sally thinks he’s Tom, because he knows it’s a deception he can carry off. He is there to steal Jim out of slavery, and his only purpose is to get the Phelps’ trust so he can free Jim. It is a convoluted bit of business, and the foregoing infamous bit of dialogue is part and parcel of it.

From the Classics Illustrated comic book, 1965. It’s interesting how the fields of color, the yellow of the dress, the blue of the sky or Huck’s shirt, or the green of the grass, are made more interesting not by variations in shade, but by simple dots of contrasting or darker colors.

There are numerous interpretations of the dialogue. One is that Twain is caught in shameful and egregious callous racism. One is that it is heavily ironic, and that the irony is that Twain is noting the unconscious racism of Aunt Sally Phelps and Huck. For me, though, while it is noting the callous racism of Mrs. Phelps (who is otherwise a good woman), for Huck it’s just another lie, and it says nothing about Huck’s attitudes. Huck was never on a steamboat. No steamboat grounded, and no cylinder head blew. No one died. Huck is lying to put Aunt Sally off his track, because that’s what Huck does. Huck is there to save Jim, and he lies so that Aunt Sally won’t spot his motive.

The last chapters. It’s in the Constitution that if you talk about Huckleberry Finn, you have to quote Ernest Hemingway’s The Green Hills of Africa:

All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. ((Hemingway, Ernest, The Green Hills of Africa, London, Jonathan Cape, 1936), 29. As an aside, there’s a lot of discussion by academics about the common naming of Jim as Nigger Jim by commentators. Twain never uses the term. ))

After Chapter 31, after the Duke and the King sell Jim for a portion of a fictitious reward payable by a fictitious downriver plantation, there is a chaotic change in the novel. Huck leaves the river and is confused for Tom Sawyer at Phelps’ farm. Tom Sawyer appears and takes over the lives of Jim and Huck; he leads them through a series of unnecessary and often demeaning gyrations which, one supposes, Twain hopes the reader finds hilarious. In some ways, those gyrations are more typical of Twain than the rest of the novel, and more in the vein of Tom Sawyer, or Connecticut Yankee, or the Prince and the Pauper. It’s certain that after the brilliance of the trip down the river, the final chapters are mostly viewed as a failure.

I’m stupid though. They often make me laugh out loud.

I’ve read that psychologically, the last chapters are true to the nature of boys. Huck would be coerced by Tom Sawyer because peer pressure is a lot of what adolescence is about. I don’t know about that, but I would say that at least in the context of Huckleberry Finn and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, for Huck and Tom there’s nothing out of character in the last chapters. Tom is always the trigger for mayhem, and Huck is always at his least discerning and most likely to do something stupid when he subscribes to what someone else tells him. It’s a characteristic failure that he always trusts Tom Sawyer as to how things work, or at least follows along, and he often distrusts his own (usually better) judgment. Until Jim, Huck is the outcast, andTom was his truest friend.

As for Jim, what choice does he have but to go along with the absurdities? He has only one friend in the situation, Huck, and Huck trusts Tom, mostly. Even with all that, Jim performs the noblest act of the novel: he gives up his freedom to save Tom.

I must have read somewhere that if Twain had carried Huck Finn out to its logical conclusion, then it would have been a William Faulkner novel. It’s a view I’m not smart enough to have thought of myself, but heartily subscribe to. In a more likely end, Jim would have been lynched, or at least sold back into bondage. But Twain is writing not as Faulkner, but in the line of Oliver Twist or David Copperfield. Everything has to turn out right in the end, and it does, mostly.

Twain, Mark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York, Charles L. Webster and Company, 1885), frontispiece illustration by E.W. Kimble.

1. Smiley, Jane, “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Harper’s Monthly, January 1996, 61. Smiley re-read Huck Finn while immobilized with a broken leg. [↩]
2. Wallace, John H., “The Case Against Huck Finn,” in Satire or Evasion: Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn, ed. Leonard, James S., Tenney, Thomas A, and Davis, Thaddeus M. (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1992), 16. [↩]
3. I’ve been trying to find the exact quote, and of course it’s taken off for the territory. Auden certainly didn’t say the precise words I’ve attributed to him, but if he didn’t say something like the sense of it, then I’ll claim it as my own and be proud. [↩]
4. It appears more than 200 times in Huck Finn, and in talking about the book, there’s no getting around it. Much of the difficulty of Huck Finn‘s racism is not that it is a racist statement by Twain, but that Twain revels in irony, including the irony of the constant racist language. It doesn’t mean that Huck Finn shouldn’t be taught, ever, but that it takes a good and careful teacher, or at least the meanest teacher you ever had, with students who are old enough to get irony. It never helps that Twain often states as gospel what isn’t, just to illuminate what is. [↩]
5. Chapter V. It’s worth noting also that while Huckleberry Finn is a historical novel set in 1840, Twain writes Huck Finn between 1875 and 1886, during the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of segregated America, North and South. Arguably, Pap’s diatribe isn’t so much a statement of the world view of a particularly evil man, as a statement about the rise of Jim Crow in a particularly evil world. [↩]
6. Chapter I. Before being taken in by the Widow Douglas, Huck has apparently survived on slop, and he seems to appreciate its value. [↩]
7. Chapter XXVII. Huck deciding to tell the truth to Mary Jane. [↩]