Duplicity is the most notable, perhaps the essential characteristic of the greatest American novelists; and surely the most duplicitous of all is Mark Twain, precisely because he wears the mask of straightforward simplicity. The notorious “Notice” affixed to Huckleberry Finn reads: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be persecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” This apparently bluff warning, however, comes to us not directly from “the Author,” but “Per G. G. Chief of Ordnance”; it is, that is to say, proffered as a joke, a piece of fiction. And who is “the Author,” anyhow? Huckleberry Finn, who purports to tell the story which follows? “Mr. Mark Twain,” who, Huck informs us in his first paragraph, told a few “stretchers” in Tom Sawyer? Or Samuel Langhorne Clemens, who lurks somewhere behind the Mark Twain who looks over the shoulder of Huck. If he is Huck or Mark, he is only a character speaking inside a story or a lifelong impersonation, not very different from the “Ishmael” who ironically warns us against taking Melville’s account of the whale hunt as a “hideous and intolerable allegory.” And if he is Samuel Clemens, who likes to boast of how he took his readers in, he can scarcely be trusted!
But who is the persona called Mark Twain and loved alike by lovers of literature and those who sincerely hate it? He is, first of all, a funny man, but more particularly, one who is funny at the expense of culture: an anti-literary writer, whose best books are travesties of others—of the Arabian Nights, the romances of Walter Scott, the tales of King Arthur. When he was not writing burlesques, he was mocking the piety of tourists before old masters, getting the goods on Shelley, exposing the absurdities of James Fenimore Cooper, being snide at the expense of Jane Austen, mocking the New England Brahmins in a speech which he hoped vainly they would take for a good-natured joke, or (over and over!) revealing how romantic literature had corrupted the American South! The self-distrust of the American writer, projected ambiguously in such authors as Poe and Hawthorne, he worked into an open attack on the artist as the Other. It is Twain’s contempt for culture which won him quite early the kind of popular acclaim never accorded in his lifetime to an American writer of equal merit. No literate philistine could help feeling at home with his apparent espousal of experience over sensibility, truth over elegance, simplicity over sophistication, artlessness over art.
In some quarters, his pose has been hypostasized into a position, and he is spoken of as the founder of a school which descends via Dreiser to Hemingway and James Jones: an Americanist or Redskin (the term is Philip Rahv’s) school opposed to the Europeanizers or Palefaces. Twain is markedly different, however, from most other writers put in the Redskin camp. Like Whitman or Dreiser or Hemingway, he deals with native materials and relatively simple people, using colloquial speech; but unlike them, he is not an open rebel, a self-declared enemy of society. His avoidance of sex, for instance, betrays the sense in which he is, however crude in his manners, basically genteel: at worst, a genteel Noble Savage, the friend of enlightened clergymen. Even his pornographic 1601 was written for the bland approval of the Congregational minister, Joseph Twichell, who enjoyed condescending to the author, in whom, for all his “coarse spots,” he found the heart of a conformist.
Just once in his writing career, Twain seemed to have made an error in judgment—with the publication of Huckleberry Finn. He had, as was his practice, read the manuscript to his wife and sent it off for approval to his moral arbiter and friend, William Dean Howells; then had censored it to meet all their objections, as well as his own more finicky ones. Yet his book was banned by the committee of the Public Library of Concord, Massachusetts, who found it “rough, coarse, inelegant, dealing with a series of experiences not elevating. . . .” and concluded that “it is the veriest trash.” Newspapers all over the country joined in the chorus of disapproval, extending their disapproval to Tom Sawyer, and declaring of both that “they are no better in tone than the dime novels which flood the blood-and-thunder reading population.” The polite reviewers were frightened into silence, even Howells, who had applauded in private, not daring to write his usual adulatory notice; but no one, least of all Twain, was prepared to defend the book on the grounds that it was, indeed, “irreverent . . . irreligious . . . inelegant,” truly “subversive.” The single review of Huckleberry Finn to appear was published as a letter to the Century Magazine and insisted upon Huck’s “courage” and “manliness,” as well as “the total absence of morbidness in the book.”
Perhaps the main function of Tom Sawyer Abroad, the first of two published sequels, was to try to put Huckleberry Finn in a favorable perspective, make it seem good, clean, quite undangerous fun; yet Twain never was wholly at ease with his greatest work. He certainly ranked it below the obviously uplifting Joan of Arc, and even agreed with his wife in her preference for the more vapid The Prince and the Pauper. To Twain, an unqualified national acceptance was as necessary to his concept of his role as failure and rejection had been to Poe. It is not merely that Twain was a successful writer, or that he was interested in making money; the essential point is that he could not abide any hint that he was not loved and trusted by the great audience which despised and distrusted other first-rate art. For him, literature was a way of arriving: the sole method of social climbing capable of winning him the approval of the moral arbiters of elegant society, without losing him the affection of the scarcely educated general public.
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It is tempting to label him the philistine as artist and let it go at that—attributing his triumphs to a grace which he did nothing to deserve. Yet it is evident that he had values and standards, for all his show of artlessness, and that he distinguished among his own books between those which he wrote merely for money and those he wrote for posterity. It is, perhaps, better to think of him as the artist as philistine, as one who, half deliberately at least, assumed a disguise in which he could penetrate into the midst of a populace grown restive under the pressure to love culture. In this sense, he plays the role of the stereotypical Westerner opposing the condescension of the East, the stereotypical husband resisting the demands of a culture-hungry wife, the stereotypical American tourist rising in resentment against the guides and tour books, the steamship companies, and the vast, commercialized museum of Europe itself!
Toward the end of the 19th century, American tourism began in earnest; and upon the ambivalence of the New World tourist to the Old World, source of his religion and his high culture, a long line of American writers commented, beginning tentatively with Cooper, and reaching a first climax with Henry James, Henry Adams, and Mark Twain. Though Twain had begun to break through to national recognition with the reworking of a Western tall story, his real entry into literature is made with Innocents Abroad (1869). It is worth remarking, precisely because it is so easy to overlook, that Twain is, with the possible exception of James, the most Europe-oriented, Europe-obsessed of our late-19th-century novelists. After the Innocents Abroad, he turns eastward again and again, confronting the Old World in A Tramp Abroad, The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Tom Sawyer Abroad, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, 1601, Following the Equator, The Mysterious Stranger; and the last posthumous collection of his stray pieces is called Europe and Elsewhere.
Whenever, as a matter of fact, Twain dreamed of producing “literature” rather than “entertainment,” like a good, genteel American of his period, he looked across the Atlantic for his subject matter and techniques, producing such stiff costume dramas, moistened with tears, as The Prince and the Pauper and Joan of Arc. The beginnings of his career as a writer Twain liked to date from the moment when a stray leaflet telling the story of Joan had blown against him in the streets of Hannibal. Yet he produced nothing of real merit out of his piety toward the European past, despite the time and energy he invested in research, writing, and revision. The other side of his ambivalence is more fruitful; and his only “Eastern” novel to approach in zest and inventiveness his great “Western,” Huckleberry Finn, is A Connecticut Yankee, in which he plays the philistine as self-satisfied boor rather than the philistine as tremulous worshiper at the shrines of history. Yet even A Connecticut Yankee does not quite come up to the freshness and vigor of the nonfictional The Innocents Abroad.
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Already in The Marble Faun, the subject matter of The Innocents Abroad is implicit; but it is a comic subject matter, which cannot really define itself in the Gothic ambience of Hawthorne’s melodrama. Hawthorne’s boredom as he tagged along behind his wife through the picture galleries of Europe, his sneaking conviction that the clean copies of the old masters made by American art students are superior to the cracked and dirty originals, reappear in Mark Twain, turned into frank and ribald jests. The comic cliché of the childhusband (staunchly American and honest) revolting against his mother-wife (Europeanizing and pretentious) is by no means the invention of Twain. As a matter of fact, he embarked on his actual first voyage to Europe without any wife at all, making do with a substitute “mother” picked up on the cruise: a Mrs. Fairbanks, to whom he read his mildly blasphemous articles, checking all questions involving “good-taste.”
His blasphemy is finally no more than pseudo-blasphemy: not a denial of, but a complement to the culture-religion of the American female, another aspect of our national sexual division of labor! In the end, though, Twain was only kidding, pretending to be a more hopeless boor than he in fact was, in order to provide for himself and Mrs. Fairbanks the special American volupte of intersexual acculturation. Twain in The Innocents Abroad has assumed the role not of the rebel but the Good Bad Boy; and the clue is there all the time in his calling Mrs. Fairbanks “Mother”—in his being bad just for her!
Almost everywhere in his work, Twain writes as a boy for a world accustomed to regarding the relations of the sexes in terms of the tie that binds mother to son. Not only does he disavow physical passion, but he downgrades even the Faustian role incumbent on American authors. In him, the diabolic outcast becomes the “little devil,” not only comical but cute, a child who will outgrow his mischief, or an imperfect adult male, who needs the “dusting off” of marriage to a good woman. Twain’s typical fictional devices were contrived at a time when everywhere in the popular American novel the archetypes were being reduced to juveniles. As Clarissa becomes a small girl in The Wide, Wide World, so Werther becomes a child in Twain’s total work, turns into the boy-author Mark Twain; and not only the American women who made Susan Warner a best-seller approve, but their husbands, too, who laughed at their wives’ taste. Even dirty, tired adult Europe approves, finds no offense in The Innocents Abroad itself, since Twain was playing a role that European self-hatred and condescension to the United States demanded, acting the Good Bad Boy of Western culture. For everyone, male and female, European and American, he represents the id subverting tired ego-ideals, not in terror and anarchy, but in horseplay, pranks, and irreverent jests.
There is notoriously a price for assuming a mask, indeed, always a suspicion that what the mask hides is no face at all! And certainly one senses in Twain the insecurity of a man never quite sure of what he had to believe to survive: that somewhere beneath the high jinks of Twain, there was a real and quite serious Sam Clemens: with serious ideas, too dangerous to utter; and serious ambitions, too lofty to risk in the market place—even a serious vein of bawdry, too masculine and broad for the general reader. But his serious ideas eventuate in the sophomoric cynicism of “What Is Man,” his serious aesthetics in the sentimental banalities of Joan of Arc, his serious bawdry in the pseudo-archaic smutty jokes of 1601.
Finally, Twain is betrayed not by his contempt for culture, which is involved, ironical, and sometimes wickedly witty, but by his pretensions to culture. He was a man fitfully intelligent when he did not know he was thinking, a spottily skillful stylist when he was not aware he was writing artistically; but he lacked critical judgment completely (his notion of criticism was a hunt for boners in the Leatherstocking Tales), and was tormented by an urge toward self-parody that verged on self-punishment. He is, therefore, an embarrassment to admiring critics, who tend either to swallow whole his dishearteningly uneven achievement; or to admire him only for the bitter wisdom presumably concealed from the vulgar beneath the hilarious surfaces of his work. There are corresponding traps for dissenting critics, who may find Twain the beneficiary of a cult of native humor finally more deadly than the cult of museums which he exposed; or cry out that his “philosophy” is the product of a childish mind, and his dissembling of it for popularity’s sake shameful.
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To make of Twain either a cult or a case, however, is finally to lose the sense of him as a poet, the possessor of deep and special mythopoeic power, whose childhood was contemporaneous with a nation’s; and who, remembering himself before the fall of puberty, remembered his country before the fall of the Civil War. The myth which Twain creates is a myth of childhood, rural, sexless, yet blessed in its natural Eden by the promise of innocent love, and troubled by the shadow of bloody death. The world in which his myth unfolds is one in which passion is less real than witchcraft, ghosts more common than adulterers; but it is also one in which a pure love between males, colored and white, triumphs over witches and ghosts and death itself. It is, of course, a world already dreamed in the fiction of Cooper and Poe, Dana and Melville, but never before labeled: “For Children Only!”
It is hard to say whether the fear of sex, a strange blindness to its manifestations, or the attenuation of sexuality itself drove the American novel back over the lintel of puberty in the declining years of the 19th century. Twain himself seems to have believed that it was the last; in 1601, he suggests, in the guise of a joke, that genitality itself had withered to the vanishing point in America: “Then spake ye damned wyndmill, Sir Walter, of a people in ye uttermost parts of America that copulate not until they be five-and-thirty years of age, ye women being eight-and-twenty, and doe it then but once in seven yeares.” In the mouth of “ye damned wyndmill,” this is spoken contemptuously, but in his own voice, Twain makes a similar assertion about the young people of his childhood community, with a certain amount of pride: “Chastity. There was the utmost liberty among young people—but no young girl was ever insulted, or seduced, or even scandalously gossiped about. Such things were not even dreamed of in a society, much less spoken of and referred to as possibilities.”
The dream which Twain dreamed, at any rate, did not include such possibilities; and his memories of the past, at least, were duly expurgated, though just once in Tom Sawyer his censorship relaxes. For a single moment, we see Becky caught out peeking at the dirty picture in the teacher’s anatomy book, and for that moment we are reminded of the living flesh beneath the pinafores and roundabouts. But it does not finally matter; since Twain will not let his protagonists over the borderline of adolescence, playing such games with their ages that the reader cannot tell from page to page whether they are barely out of kindegarten (in Tom Sawyer, Tom is just losing his baby teeth) or on the verge of manhood (in Huckleberry Finn, one summer later, Huck, Tom’s apparent coeval, is fourteen). Yet Twain’s dream of boyhood begins with a dream of love in a sexless world; and, indeed, the “Boy’s Manuscript,” which he wrote in 1870, and which is the seed of all the later books about Huck and Tom, is an account of a love affair between eight- or nine-year-olds—involving flirtation, jealousy, and reconciliation, though not, of course, passion.
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Demoted year by year, love in the United States comes to sit at last in the kindergarten, final refuge of innocence. Yet for all its sexual purity, Tom’s childhood world is intimately acquainted with death. Violence is omnipresent, yet somehow is never considered to impugn innocence, so long as it does not involve concupiscence. The plan of Injun Joe in Tom Sawyer to take revenge on the Widow Douglas was apparently based on an actual case involving the threat of rape, which Twain bowdlerized to a mere slitting of the nostrils and notching of the ears—thus apparently making it suitable for child readers.
There is the sense everywhere in Twain that violence doesn’t count, the muting of sensitivity which is always demanded by slapstick and the more brutal forms of farce; and it is this which the earliest review of Huckleberry Finn applauded as “a total absence of morbidness in the book,” a proof that “the mal du siècle has not reached Arkansas.” But this is scarcely the whole story; for concurrent with such acceptance of terror in Twain, is a guilt-ridden obsession with it, an inability to let it alone. Twain’s attitude toward violence is finally as complicated, subtle, and deliberately ambiguous as his attitude toward sex is naive, sentimentalized, and hopelessly evasive. He is not only the creator of childhood idylls but a great poet of violence; and, indeed, his very humor depends upon a world in which there is neither a stable order nor civil peace.
His hope for order and peace he invested in the genteel Atlantic seaboard society into which he married, after years of drifting from job to job through West and East and South, looking for these qualities especially in his wife, whom he drafted as a super-ego, a living conscience. “I would . . . quit wearing socks if she thought them immoral,” he said of his Livy. The society which had made him the untidy boor he always felt, he recalled as a world of violence and horror. Missouri he remembered as a slothful sub-frontier, in which the fathers no longer had any authority, and the mothers sought in vain to assert certain simple-minded standards of piety and decorum. Certainly, his own father had died in Twain’s childhood, crying despairingly, “Let me die!”; while his mother, in fact, had pleaded with him at the deathbed, “Only promise me to be a better boy. Promise not to break my heart.”
Yet to Twain, Missouri was also a world of innocence and freedom and joy, a world in which he, at least, had been innocent and free and joyous, a naked boy, swimming and fishing and smoking on Jackson’s Island. To the idyllic era of his childhood, Twain’s mature mind reverted over and over, only to discover there certain nightmare images of violence: the dead man he had discovered after breaking into his father’s office; the vagabond shot down in the street and gasping for breath beneath the heavy Bible laid on his chest; the hellish storm that had broken the night Injun Joe died, and had left Twain whimpering for the salvation of his soul; the tramp who had burned himself to death in the local jail, setting himself on fire (perhaps!) with matches the boy Twain had smuggled to him. Each terror brought with it the shadow of guilt: he should not have been sneaking into his father’s office after dark; he should have been good enough to regard the crash of thunder with equanimity; he should have protested against laying so heavy and pious a burden on a dying man’s chest; he should not have passed contraband through the bars.
Twain began to feel after a while that he carried with him the infection of death out of the world he had left into the new world in which he sought peace. The death of his father, perhaps, and certainly that of his brother Henry (whom he pilloried later as Sid all the same), he felt as somehow his responsibility; but these at least belonged to the life he had led before meeting Livy. When his son died, however, after an act of carelessness on his part, his favorite daughter, Susy, while he was absent in Europe, “died where she had spent all her life till my crimes made her a pauper and an exile”; when his daughter Jean developed epilepsy, and his wife ailed, he was more than ever ridden by a guilt which he could not allay, except by trying to persuade himself that death was a final good. “She has found,” he said of Susy, “the richest gift the world can offer.” Yet the books in which he tried, toward the end of his own life, to express his dark despair are flat and unconvincing or shrill and sophomoric.
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His most profoundly sad books are the most mad and idyllic, his wisest those he wrote dreaming, not thinking: dreaming the golden dream that threatens momentarily to turn into nightmare: and the wisest and saddest of them all, as it is also the craziest and most euphoric, is, of course, Huckleberry Finn. Indeed, to turn from Huckleberry Finn to the rest of Twain’s work is disheartening; for there are only portions of other books which approach it; most of the first part of Life on the Mississippi, a good deal of Pudd’nhead Wilson; and to a lesser degree, The Innocents Abroad, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Tom Sawyer. Beyond this, there is much that is merely occasional, even trivial; much that is without passion or point; much that is highfalutin’ or absurdly noble; much that is terrifyingly unfunny and empty. After a while, the reader who has made the mistake of reading too much Twain begins to feel that even the books he has liked cannot possibly be as good as he has thought them; that what Twain has left behind is not so much a real oeuvre as a bag of tricks.
And then one reads Huckleberry Finn again, hears—intermittently at least—a voice which is neither Clemens’s nor Twain’s but genuinely Huck’s, which is to say, not the voice of a genteel sentimentalist or a clown in full make-up, but of a boy-Ishmael: “the juvenile pariah of the village . . . idle, and lawless, and vulgar, and bad. . . .” The phrase is out of Tom Sawyer, of course, and it is with that earlier book that any discussion of Huckleberry Finn must begin; for it is Tom who discovers Huck and discovering him discovers also a great mythic theme. That theme succeeds in time in overwhelming the love story of Tom and Becky, which was the first inspiration of the book, and even thrusts aside the kind of genre picture (“Whitewashing the Fence”—the illustrator’s dream!) which was its second. Of Tom Blankenship, the original of Huck, Twain writes in The Autobiography: “He was the only really independent person—boy or man—in the community . . .”; and in Tom Sawyer, adds that all the children “wished they dared be like him.” The memory of “all the boy” Twain was or dreamed himself afterward is Tom; the memory of all he was not and only wished he dared aspire to be is Huck; and it is fitting that they be companions, the books named after each, sequels.
“Mark Twain’s next book will bear the title of ‘Huckleberry Finn, A Sequel to Tom Sawyer,’” a puff in The Dial for February, 1884, announced; but Twain was unwilling to depend on advertising alone to make his point. “You don’t know about me,” the first sentence of the new novel reads, “without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. . . .” And it is well, for once, to take Twain at his word, though there intervened between the publication of the first book (in 1876) and the second eight years, nearly seven of which Twain spent bogged down and unable to write a line, once his first impetus had taken him through the fifteenth chapter of the book as it presently stands. The point was, though it took Twain seven years to find it out, that his new book had ceased to be a continuation of the old, developing a much more complex relationship to it than that of a mere sequel.
Though Huckleberry Finn begins in the same idyllic summer of which Tom Sawyer had already consumed more than the normal number of weeks, and comes to a close in the following year, both boys have grown older by perhaps five or six years. And the author, too, has matured, is only playing now at producing an entertainment for children. If Tom Sawyer was always a boy’s book, even when Twain thought he was writing for adults, Huckleberry Finn is on one of its levels at least, not merely an adult but a subversive novel.
The language of Huck is a function of Twain’s understanding of his character and role, and varies in authenticity with the author’s sense of what both he and his character are doing. In all three Tom Sawyer stories, Huck is Tom’s Noble Savage, a sentimentalized id-figure representing the Good Bad Boy’s dream of how bully life might be without parents, clothing, or school; and in those books, Huck is more condescended to than admired. In Huckleberry Finn, however, Huck does the condescending toward Tom, who represents his misguided ego-ideal, the embodiment of a “literary” style which he cannot really afford. When he is truest to himself, Huck respects, in the teeth of all he has been taught, Nigger Jim, which is to say, an even more ultimate id-figure; in his weaker moments, he joins Tom in relegating the surrogate for the instinctive life to the world of make-believe, which is also a prison.
In general, the two boys represent to each other the writer’s conception of “experience” and the nonreader’s conception of “art.” It would be pleasant to say that they fuse finally into a single figure: but in Twain, and in American life as a whole, the two are notoriously disjoined: the artist and the naïf, the man who has made it and the man who never knew it was there to be made. It is all very well to tell us that Huck’s original ended as “a good citizen and greatly respected.” This, we know, is not true of the fictional Huck, who is finally lost to Tom and respectability alike, though in boyhood, Mark-Tom and Tom-Huck (surely, the inversion of the names is a deliberate joke!) were permitted to play hooky together; it is clear that once Mark-Tom decides to be good, to marry Livy, he will never again answer Tom-Huck’s meow. Only in fantasy will he slide down the lightning rod again; but even his fantasy will end on a note of separation, not really belied by the desperate attempts, published and unpublished, to continue beyond Huckleberry Finn his childhood alliance with the village pariah.
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If we think of the two books not as sequels but as alternative versions of the same themes, those themes will reveal themselves in their mythic significance. Stripped of incidental ornaments, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn are seen as the same dream dreamed twice over, the second time as nightmare; though the terror of the second dream is already at work in the first, whose euphoria persists strangely into the second. In both books, there is a pretended,, quasi-ritual death to the community and its moral codes; though in Tom Sawyer that “death” is a lark, undertaken in childish pique, while in Huckleberry Finn it is a last desperate evasion, an act of self-defense. In both, there is a consequent spying on the community from cover to watch the effects of that death, the aftermath of regret: the childish dream of the suicide, who longs to be present at his own discovery, come true. In the one case, however, the spying is a prelude to a triumphant return, in the other, to further concealment.
In both, there is an escape to an island. But in one case, the natural Eden is a boys’ paradise, from which one returns as from a picnic; in the other, it is an asylum not only from “sivilization” but from pursuit, enslavement, and death; and leaving it, the refugee plunges into further flight. The good companions, in the one case, are other boys, homesick almost from the start; in the other, the sole companion is a runaway slave, whose home is nowhere. In both, there is a night journey across the river back into the abandoned world of obligations and restraints, a scouting foray into what has become enemy country; but in the one case, the scouting prepares for a return, in the other, a more desperate withdrawal.
In both, the escapee and presumed ghost watches from a place of concealment (how much in both books is peeked at, witnessed, overheard!) a sentimental Pietà, the sorrow of the “mother” over her mischievous and presumably lost boy. But how different is Huck’s witnessing of Aunt Sally’s tears, which are not even shed for him, from Tom’s watching Aunt Polly cry. Tom is already prepared for his reconciliation with the offended mother while Huck is already incubating his great refusal. In Tom’s pocket all the time is the message, “We ain’t dead—we are only off being pirates”; while Huck is preparing inwardly for the moment when he will declare: “But I reckon I got to light out for the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and civilize me, and I can’t stand it.”
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In both books, there is a terrorized flight from a threatening Satanic figure, also outside of the community from which the boy-protagonist tries to escape in earnest or in play; and in each case, the outlaw figure represents a grotesque travesty of the boy himself, his innocence distorted into an image of guilt. Tom plays the robber, the pirate, which Injun Joe is in fact; Huck yearns in Widow Douglas’s house for the life of ignorance and sloth, which his Pap actually lives. But in Tom Sawyer, the shadow of the protagonist is represented as utterly alien, a melodramatic half-breed out of a dime novel; in Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s shadow is his own father: no creature of melodrama, but the town drunk—a vision of what he himself may well become!
In both books, the shadow figure controls or threatens a treasure which can be possessed in peace only after he has died; and in both, the plot involves a simultaneous revelation of that death and the protagonist’s deliverance: his coming for the first time or again, into a fortune. In both cases, the death of the demonic guardian of the hoard is rendered with special horror: Injun Joe at the cave’s stony sill, a broken case-knife in his hand and the gnawed claws of bats beside him; Pap, naked and stabbed in the back, in the floating house of death, its walls scribbled with obscenities. But only in Huckleberry Finn is the full Oedipal significance of their deaths revealed, the terrible secret that the innocent treasure can be won only by destroying the Bad Father!
In both books, there is a good angel, too, a redemptive anima figure, contrasted with the threatening shadow. In Tom Sawyer, that figure appears in the form of Becky Thatcher, juvenile version of the snow maiden: “a lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair plaited in two long tails, white summer frock.” She is called, Tom’s “new angel,” and, for all her peeping at the forbidden picture in the teacher’s book, will obviously grow up to be just such a good woman as Twain himself married. Meanwhile, she scarcely knows which she admires more in the Good Bad Boy Tom, his badness (“Oh, you bad thing!”), which it will give her pleasure to subdue, or his goodness (“Tom, how could you be so noble!”), which she calls forth and will sustain. It is of marriage with her that Tom dreams; for, as he explains to Huck, she is a “girl” not a “gal”! But marriage, to Huck, means only domestic strife and the abandonment of the world in which he is at home. Wistfully and a little jealously, he remarks, “Only if you get married I’ll be more lone-somer than ever.”
Yet Huck has his good angel, too, appropriately enough as black as Becky Thatcher is white: not a future good woman but a runaway slave, who represents his aspiration toward a deeper level of the primitive, even as Becky represents Tom’s yearning for a “higher” level of civilization. Miss Watson’s Jim is the Becky Thatcher of Huckleberry Finn. They cannot be present in the same book; Jim does not appear in Tom Sawyer; and when he enters the sequel she withdraws, making even her brief farewell bow under the name of Bessie Thatcher. With Jim, of course, Huck does not dream of any sexual relation, any more than Tom does with Becky; nor does he think of their union in terms of a marriage. Yet they pet and sustain each other in mutual love and trust; make on their raft an anti-family of two, with neither past nor future, only a transitory, perilous present of peace and joy.
Like Tom and Becky, Huck and Jim triumph over the petty pride that threatens to separate them in the midst of horror and pursuit, declare their affection without shame or fear of ridicule in the face of death; yet, like Tom and Becky, they seem to be already drifting apart after their moment of deliverance. For Huck and Jim, there is no possibility of a continuing love; Jim has a family, which will presumably claim him, and Huck must follow the centrifugal impulse which has made and will keep him the “only independent person . . . in the community.” Moreover, he and Jim are separated not by the schoolyard code which forbids the fraternizing of boys and girls, but by the profound social gulf between black and white in ante-bellum Missouri. Huck knows that the talk of another lark involving Jim, the outing to the Indian Territory, will not really materialize. The prospect of “howling adventures amongst the Injuns” is merely another of Tom’s artistic lies, a forecast as vain as his assurance in the earlier book that Huck will come and live with him after he and Becky are married.
Tom and Huck had, in fact, already stood alone at the close of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn; for each book tries to end with a pact in which the Good Bad Boy and the juvenile pariah come to terms: the juvenile pariah agreeing to accept an adoptive mother, and the Good Bad Boy agreeing in return to accept the pariah into his world of make-believe—the robber gang or the expedition to the territory. Both the integration into the family and the playing of terror in the place of living it stand for a surrender of independence, since Tom, who thinks he wants to be like Huck, secretly wants Huck to be like him. In Tom Sawyer, the melancholy happy ending works; but Huckleberry Finn, which begins with the collapse of that first happy ending, closes with the hint it will not hold the second time either.
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All of which means, finally, that Huckleberry Finn is a true book, Tom Sawyer only “mostly a true book” with “some stretchers,” one of which is its ending. Huck can tell the truth about Tom, for though he lies by preference almost always, he knows when he is lying; but Tom is incapable of telling the truth about Huck, because he does not ever know when he is lying. From time to time, Huck sees quite clearly what Tom is like: “So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school.” Toward the end of this book, however, when he has become Tom, Huck seems to lose this insight, and submits himself to the hoax of trying to steal Jim in fiction as he has already tried in fact; but at this point the book has become Tom’s, not his.
By and large, it is possible to say that Tom Sawyer is a fable of lost boyhood written by Tom, while Huckleberry Finn is that same fable transcribed by Huck. Somewhat misleadingly, Tom’s version does not appear in the first-person, though Twain considered telling it that way. But its third-person narrative is finally even more right; for Tom is always an actor in a fiction of his own making. One of the chief functions of its style is to make the events it describes seem less real. The reality of the emotions it evokes is deliberately called into question by overwriting which verges on burlesque: “Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden” or “He thought he loved her to distraction, he regarded his passion as adoration; and behold it was only a poor little innocent partiality.” The characters described so solemnly are eight- and nine-year-old kids!
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Toward the book as a whole, Twain adopts the same ironical tone, closing it with the words: “So endeth this chronicle. It being the history of a boy, it . . . could not go much further without becoming the history of a man.” “So endeth this chronicle. . . .” It is at once a confession of falseness and an attempt to evade it, utterly different from the conclusion of Huckleberry Finn: “so there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it. . . .” Tom Sawyer is the first of a long line of books intended to be read by a boy with his-father looking over his shoulder, and thus to perpetuate for a new generation the legend of an older one. From it descends a tradition, which passes via Booth Tarkington to the creators of Henry Aldrich and the Good Bad Boys of contemporary comics: the praise of good-badness as the true Americanism.
Huckleberry Finn, however, is not the progenitor of anything, because it is written neither by Tom nor Mark Twain, but by the evoked Huckleberry himself, who makes it quite clear at the end that he intends to write no more: “and if I’d ‘a’ knowed what trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t ‘a’ tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more.” Nor could Twain himself make him change his mind, though he tried to call him up over and over for an encore. Only once did Huck really possess his presumable author, speak through him in his authentic voice. In the book called by his name, Huckleberry Finn exists, dictates his own style, his own moral judgments, his own meanings, which neither Twain nor the reader has to understand to experience. Tom Sawyer notoriously enters the book before it is finished, not letting Huck speak for himself again until the very last pages; but though he can counterfeit Huck’s style, he cannot make him live, only move woodenly through the howling farce—which reveals the poverty of Tom’s values and imagination, and exposes the falsity of his role.
Tom Sawyer’s imagination, whose compass spans only what is in Twain’s everyday power, takes over at precisely the point where Huck’s sense of reality can no longer function, where “life” yields to art, strategy to style. Though both are liars, Huck lies to stay alive, while Tom lies for the glory of it; the modest dream of Huck is survival, the less modest vision of Tom heroism. That is why Tom Sawyer is a book about glory, in which even Huck is persuaded to play ineptly a heroic role, while Huckleberry Finn is an account of staying alive, which Tom cannot be persuaded to take seriously. Even as the bullet enters him, crossing the border between his world of idyllic make-believe and the adult world of slaveholding reality, he is already planning to wear that bullet on a string around his neck, swagger with it down the main street of Hannibal.
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