In his last book, Culture and Anarchy, he described those two “polar opposites” as battling for the souls of men and women of his time. He died in 1888 convinced that anarchy was winning the war.
MARK TWAIN
1835–1910
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Samuel L. Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835 and moved to the flourishing river town of Hannibal, Missouri, when he was four. Experience was his best and almost his only teacher, and he went to work for his brother, a newspaper publisher, at sixteen. Young Clemens learned to write by setting in type the writings of other people, mostly the rough, popular humorists of the period before the Civil War.
He left home at eighteen, wandered around the country as an itinerant journalist for a while, and then suddenly decided to become a riverboat pilot. This idyllic experience he magically described in Life on the Mississippi (1883), the best of his autobiographical writings.
The Civil War put an end to Sam Clemens’s life on the river. He went to California, mainly to avoid the war— like many Westerners, he wanted no part of it. It was in California, in the 1860s, that he became Mark Twain, a name that itself was a nostalgic reminder of his happiest days. (The phrase was a leadsman’s cry, signifying that the shoaling water was just safe for navigation—was two fathoms, or twelve feet, deep.) He gained his first national fame with a widely reprinted humorous story, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” and his first great literary success was an account of a trip to Europe and the Holy Land, Innocents Abroad (1869).
Mark Twain liked boyhood. In 1876 he published the boys’ book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Everyone loved this book, and indeed they still do, even though the central character, Tom, is completely without warmth. The comic-book quality of the story of Tom and Becky lost in the cave with a villainous Injun Joe made it successful, but Mark Twain himself knew the book had no heart and immediately set about writing a better one. This was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which was finally published, after many delays in the writing, in 1884. It was hard to write—Tom Sawyer had been easy—and the reasons for that go to the center of the book’s meaning and significance.
Huckleberry Finn is many things. First—to get it out of the way—it is the American novel par excellence, the great American novel that will never have to be written because it appeared more than a century ago. Mark Twain’s birthplace was within a few miles of the geographical center of what was then the United States, and his book was equally close to the country’s spiritual center. It is about a white man and a black man, a free man and a slave. It is about a journey down the great central, dividing river in search of freedom for both white and black. How much more American can you get? Ernest Hemingway was right to say that “all real American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”
That is not in the long run very important. More important to us is the fact that Huckleberry Finn is a fine, funny story—at least the first two thirds of it, up to the point where Tom Sawyer arrives to both bore and offend every compassionate reader with his practical jokes at the expense of Jim. But that same reader cannot fail to appreciate the story of Huck’s escape from his wicked Old Man, and Jim’s escapes as well from many hard places, to say nothing of the wonderful foolishness of the “King” and the “Duke,” whose really vicious immorality is not lost on us however loudly we may guffaw at their scams and cheats.
Even more important for us are the background, the tone, and the style of this book—again, only the first two thirds of it, before the intrusion of Tom. Huck and Jim speak an American English that is quite extinct now but that seems as genuine as any dialogue ever spoken by any characters in fiction. And the great rolling river is even more eloquent than they are. It holds its course and its counsel, but even in its silence it seems to tell us of the Earth’s largeness and the littleness of men.
Most important of all, I think, is that Huckleberry Finn is not just the story of Huck’s escape from Old Finn, or of Jim’s from slavery; it is also, and preeminently, an account of the escape from the world itself, the world which, as Wordsworth said, “is too much with us”:
late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers; Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
That world, which is our own everyday world, is the one from which Huck and Jim escape as they float down the river in the moonlight on their raft. The moon sparkles on the water, fish jump in the silence, the shores are hardly visible, and it almost seems that it might go on like this forever. “We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.” So says Huck at the end of Chapter 18, but in the very next chapter the world intrudes once more, and Huck and Jim are never so free again, even though Jim eventually does obtain his legal freedom. Huck, at the end of the book, lights out for the Territory, where he hopes he may escape the “sivilization” he abhors. But of course he cannot escape it; none of us can, Mark Twain no more than the rest of us. That is why The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at bottom is such a sad book, funny as it is, and why Twain had so much trouble finishing it, and why, when he did get around to finishing it, he turned the end into a series of cruel jokes.
So-called escapist literature has a bad name, and rightly so in most cases. The great majority of escapist novels—all but a very few—are cheats and frauds, playing upon our susceptibilities for the sake of book sales, teasing our imaginations with sly delights but in the end leaving us empty and ashamed that we were so easily fooled. A small number of such books are among the greatest of all. Huckleberry Finn is one of them. It forces us to ask whether the best thing is not, after all, to escape from the world. The world, in turn, disapproves of that, and Mark Twain knew it did and was frightened. He didn’t want to be disliked. This radical revolutionary of the human spirit preferred to be thought of as an easygoing clown. Only to his closest friends would he reveal what he really thought of “the damned human race.” He was afraid he had revealed too much in Huckleberry Finn.
Huck’s story, as Mark Twain told it, was terrible enough. Huck had to escape to save his life; his father would have killed him. When he did escape, Mark Twain stopped writing the book because he did not know what else to do with his hero. He thought he ought to do something with him because, unlike the Huck at the end of the book, he—Mark Twain—felt obliged to be “sivilized.” But all he could think of was Tom Sawyer’s bad jokes at Jim’s expense.