Jim and Huck--a dangerous association. |
Note:
I have been getting my
self prescribed annual inoculation of Mark Twain re-reading his Autobiography on the new Kindle I got for Christmas. By turns hilarious and touching, a deep moral
outrage barely suppressed for the sake of polite society. And this in a book he intended his
contemporaries to read. His beloved
surviving daughter was so shocked at her father’s apostasy that she restricted
the posthumous release of his late work, which has been issued slowly, at 25
year intervals since the author’s death.
The last will be published this year.
You can bet I will be ready to read.
In the mean time, I am presenting one of my favorite posts, one of which
I am unashamedly proud for the uptight assholes it will offend.
On February 18, 1885 American readers got their first exposure
to The Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Some were delighted. Some were perplexed. Some were outraged. The outrage was particularly intense in the
tonier precincts of Boston and its
satellite Concord where
those who thought they held the exclusive contract on American literature were
deeply shocked.
The Public Library Committee in
Concord, the epicenter of Transcendentalism and the New England Literary Renaissance viewed
itself as the rightful guardian of both public morals and proper respect. The committee voted unanimously not to add Huckleberry Finn to its collection. The Boston Evening Transcript reported
that committee members felt the book “…coarse, and inelegant, dealing with a series of
experiences not elevating, the whole book being more suited to the slums than
to intelligent, respectable people.”
One
of Concord’s most famous daughters, Louisa May Alcott who
was the most successful and admired writer of juvenile fiction in the country,
entirely agreed. She publicly scolded
Twain and wrote that if he could not “…think of something better to tell our
pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them.”
Twain,
of course, was amused by the whoopty-do.
We wrote his editor with delight, “Apparently, the Concord library has
condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us
another five thousand copies for sure!”
What
those genteel readers were objecting to was the novel’s breakthrough use of
vernacular speech and the use of an illiterate adolescent as a narrator. Others had used dialect before, but never
pitched a whole novel in it. Worse from
their standpoint, Twain did not use either an omnipotent narrator to deliver
moral judgment on the action, or put high minded sentiments in the mouths of
his characters. Hardly a soul objected
to the use of the word Nigger—which
I myself will use unvarnished through the balance of these musings—that term
was in currency by all classes, North and South and its use was considered
quite unremarkable. They were more
offended by general “coarseness” as in the phrase, “not only itched but
scratched” which was cited as obscene by the Brooklyn (New York) Library twenty years later.
Southern
critics, however, recognized a deeper threat.
The run away slave Jim was
not only portrayed sympathetically in the book, in many ways he was the true
protagonist. They were aghast that
eventually Huck, despite all of his internalized cultural training, sees Jim as
an equal. They wailed that a White boy, however degraded, was left
alone on the raft with a Black hinting sometimes at the dreadful consequences
of fraternization. The portrayal of the
lynch mob as a cowardly rabble easily turned aside by one determined, moral
man, and the general lampooning of the cherished images of ante-bellum plantation gentry were all a slap in the face.
All as
Twain intended. This book was to be much
more than a comic sequel to his most popular novel to date, The
Adventures of Tom Sawyer. But it
had its origins as just that. Samuel Clemens (AKA Twain) contracted
for just such a book and began work on it in 1876. He envisioned a book to be called the Autobiography
of Huckleberry Finn which could take the young character into adulthood
in a series of comic misadventures. But
Twain rapidly grew tired of the concept.
And his maturing views informed by the Reconstruction period including a growing revulsion at racism led
him to deeper territory. He laid his
first attempt aside for a while.
After
Twain picked it up again, he struggled to find a voice for Huck Finn. It took three handwritten drafts to come up
with Huck’s clear voice. He then wasted
no time in establishing it in the very first sentence of the new book, “You
don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer…’
By the literary conventions of
the day, Twain knew that Huck Finn would be viewed as a “child of nature,” a
true innocent. And Huck is innocent—but
not uncontaminated by the racial attitudes that he has absorbed through his
whole life, a lesson stronger than any attempts by Aunt Polly to stamp a Christian
veneer on him. Only Huck’s own
personal experience on his odyssey down river finally liberates him from the
original sin of racism, but not to the extent that he doesn’t feel guilty for
having betrayed his understanding of morality.
Of course Mark Twain would beat me to death with Huck’s raft pole for
engaging in such analysis. He would
rather the reader absorb it unaware of the tricks employed to make the point.
Twain finished his final draft
and had a copy transcribed by typewriter for his London publisher, Chatto
& Windus. They issued the book in Britain
and Canada in December, 1884. The
American Edition, was released the following February with illustrations by E.
W. Kemble.
By the early 20th Century the local
color movement had made the dialect and voice more acceptable in literary
circles. By the time Clemens died in
1910 he was the most revered writer in the country and Huckleberry Finn was widely regarded as his masterpiece. Ernest Hemmingway would later famously
proclaim that, “All modern
American literature comes from a book named Huckleberry
Finn.” By the 1950’s it was a
staple, outside of the Deep South,
of American high school curricula.
The backlash against the book began building in the 1960’s when some Black leaders denounced it as racist
both for its frequent use of the word Nigger and because they believed that Jim
was characterized as a “minstrel show”
stereotype. Calls for its removal from
both school curricula and library shelves became both routine and too often
successful. The American Library Association routinely reports that Huckleberry Finn is in the top five
“banned books” in the nation.
Just last year Twain scholar Alan Gribben edited a new edition of
the classic book published by NewSouth Books. This expurgated version substituted the word
“Slave” for each of the 219
instances of Nigger in the original. It
also transformed in an accompanying edition of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer Injun
Joe to Indian Joe and half-breed to the hardly less offensive
half-blood. Facing a storm of outrage
and criticism, Gribben defended the book by saying that he hoped they would
stem the “pre-emptive censorship” which was removing them from library and
classroom shelves.
Count me as one with unbridled scorn for this crap. To me, the best way to come to grips with
racism is to face it fearlessly, not to cower in the corner wringing our hands
and babbling about the N-word. Mark Twain wrote one of the greatest works
of anti-racism ever to come from the pen of White man. And I will take it like I take my bourbon—straight.
I have not gone crazy and I am not shouting at you. For some reason Blogger keeps taking random portions of this post and making them all caps. I have spent hours in two different bouts trying to fix it. But all that happens is that different sections go all cap. I give up. Read it this way. And I hope this is not a new trend.
ReplyDeleteOpen up a text file (*.txt), paste in the offending section, fix it, and then copy and paste it back into your post. (Helps if you compose with NoteTPro.)
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