Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (47 page)

I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half
done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably
well, as far as I have got & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the
MS when it is done.

—Mark Twain, from a letter to William Dean Howells, August 9, 1876

Twain’s lyrical use of dialect and evocative descriptions of landscapes in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
have provided material for several adaptations to the musical comedy form. On November 11, 1902, Klaw and Erlanger’s production
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn
opened in Hartford, Connecticut. The play included scenes from both
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn,
as well as original material—including a show tune called “I Want to Be a Drummer in the Band”—created by Lee Arthur, who adapted the novel for the stage. Despite its title, this production had little to do with Mark Twain or his work. It was the only musical adaptation to appear during Twain’s lifetime.

When he died in 1950, German-American composer Kurt Weill, perhaps best known for his
Three-Penny Opera,
was creating a musical work based on the novel, with book and lyrics by Maxwell Anderson. The five completed songs—“River Chanty,” “Catfish Song,” “Come In, Mornin‘,” “This Time Next Year,” and “Apple Jack”—are sometimes sung in concert performances and can be heard on several CD collections of Weill’s work.

Big River,
a musical adaptation of
Huckleberry Finn
by Roger Miller and William Hauptman, opened on Broadway on April 25, 1985, featuring John Goodman as Huck’s father. It won seven Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Book, Best Score, and Best Scenic Design, and ran for more than 1,000 performances. Miller’s musical numbers drew from gospel, soul, and honky-tonk.

On May 27, 1926, in Mark Twain’s childhood hometown of Hannibal, Missouri, a bronze sculpture of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn was unveiled. The figures embody the spirit of adventure: Huck sports his famous straw hat, pushes a walking stick into the ground, and looks up to his hero Tom Sawyer, who gazes forward confidently in mid-step. The monument, created by Frederick Hibbard, stands at the base of Cardiff Hill in the town that was the model for the setting of Twain’s two famous novels of boyhood. The unveiling was attended by ninety-year-old Laura Frazer, who inspired the character Becky Thatcher in
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Shortly after the novel was published, a committee of the public library of Concord, Massachusetts, called
Huckleberry Finn
“trash” and banned the book from its shelves in the belief that it corrupted youth and the English language itself. In response, Twain wrote this letter, published in the
Hartford Courant,
to the library directors:

Nonetheless, in 1957 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People claimed that
Huckleberry Finn
was racist. Within the context of the burgeoning civil rights movement, this charge was enough for the New York City school system to remove the book from its curriculum. The book continues to be widely banned from schools today, and the American Library Association ranked
Huckleberry Finn
number 5 on their list of the 100 most-challenged books between 1990 and 1999.

In this section, we aim to provide the reader with an array of perspectives on the text, as well as questions that challenge those perspectives. The commentary has been culled from sources as diverse as reviews contemporaneous with the work, letters written by the author, literary criticism of later generations, and appreciations written throughout the history of the book. Following the commentary, a series of questions seeks to filter Mark Twain’s Adventures
of Huckleberry Finn
through a variety of points of view and bring about a richer understanding of this enduring work.

 

I
shall
like
it, whether anybody else does or not.

—from a letter to William Dean Howells, July 20, 1883

 

 

In his latest story,
Huckleberry Finn
(Tom Sawyer’s Comrade), by Mark Twain, Mr. Clemens has made a very distinct literary advance over
Tom Sawyer,
as an interpreter of human nature and a contributor to our stock of original pictures of American life. Still adhering to his plan of narrating the adventures of boys, with a primeval and Robin Hood freshness, he has broadened his canvas and given us a picture of a people, of a geographical region, of a life that is new in the world. The scene of his romance is the Mississippi River. Mr. Clemens has written of this river before specifically, but he has not before presented it to the imagination so distinctly nor so powerfully. Huck Finn’s voyage down the Mississippi with the runaway nigger Jim, and with occasionally other companions, is an adventure fascinating in itself as any of the classic outlaw stories, but in order that the reader may know what the author has done for him, let him notice the impression left on his mind of this lawless, mysterious, wonderful Mississippi, when he has closed the book. But it is not alone the river that is indelibly impressed upon the mind, the life that went up and down it and went on along its banks are projected with extraordinary power. Incidentally, and with a true artistic instinct, the villages, the cabins, the people of this river become star tlingly real. The beauty of this is that it is apparently done without effort. Huck floating down the river happens to see these things and to encounter the people and the characters that made the river famous forty years ago—that is all. They do not have the air of being invented, but of being found. And the dialects of the people, white and black—what a study are they; and yet nobody talks for the sake of exhibiting a dialect. It is not necessary to believe the surprising adventures that Huck engages in, but no one will have a moment’s doubt of the reality of the country and the people he meets.

Another thing to be marked in the story is its dramatic power. Take the story of the Southern Vendetta—a marvelous piece of work in a purely literary point of view—and the episode of the duke and the king, with its pictures of Mississippi communities, both of which our readers probably saw in the
Century
magazine. They are equaled in dramatic force by nothing recently in literature.

We are not in this notice telling the story or quoting from a book that nearly everybody is sure to read, but it is proper to say that Mr. Clemens strikes in a very amusing way certain psychological problems. What, for instance, in the case of Huck, the son of the town drunkard, perverted from the time of his birth, is conscience, and how does it work? Most amusing is the struggle Huck has with his conscience in regard to slavery. His conscience tells him, the way it has been instructed, that to help the runaway nigger Jim to escape—to aid in stealing the property of Miss Watson, who has never injured him, is an enormous offense that will no doubt carry him to the bad place; but his affection for Jim finally induces him to violate his conscience and risk eternal punishment in helping Jim to escape. The whole study of Huck’s moral nature is as serious as it is amusing, his confusion of wrong as right and his abnormal mendacity, traceable to his training from infancy, is a singular contribution to the investigation of human nature.

These contradictions, however, do not interfere with the fun of the story, which has all the comicality, all the odd way of looking at life, all the whimsical turns of thought and expression that have given the author his wide fame and made him
sui generis.
The story is so interesting, so full of life and dramatic force, that the reader will be carried along irresistibly, and the time he loses in laughing he will make up in diligence to hurry along and find out how things come out.

—February 20, 1885

 

 

It is little wonder that Mr. Samuel Clemens, otherwise Mark Twain, resorted to real or mock lawsuits, as may be, to restrain some real or imaginary selling of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a means of advertising that extraordinarily senseless publication. Before the work is disposed of, Mr. Mark Twain will probably have to resort to law to compel some to sell it by any sort of bribery or corruption. It is doubtful if the edition could be disposed of to people of average intellect at anything short of the point of the bayonet. This publication rejoices in two frontispieces, of which the one is supposed to be a faithful portrait of Huckleberry Finn, and the other an engraving of the classic features of Mr. Mark Twain as seen in the bust made by Karl Gerhardt. The taste of this gratuitous presentation is as bad as is the book itself, which is an extreme statement. Mr. Clemens has contributed some humorous literature that is excellent and will hold its place, but his Huckleberry Finn appears to be singularly flat, stale and unprofitable. The book is sold by subscription.—March 5, 1885

—March 5, 1885

 

 

A very deplorable fact is that the great body of literary criticism is mainly perfunctory. This is not due to a lack of ability or to a lack of knowledge. It is due to the fact that most of it is from the pens of newspaper writers who have no time to elaborate their ideas. They are in a hurry, and what they write is hurried. Under these circumstances it is not unnatural that they should take their cues from inadequate sources and give to the public opinions that are either conventional or that have no reasonable basis.

All this is the outcome of the conditions and circumstances of American life. There is no demand for sound criticism any more than there is a demand for great poetry. We have a leisure class, but its tastes run towards horses, yachting and athletic sports, in imitation of the English young men who occasionally honor these shores with their presence. The imitation, after all, is a limping one. The young Englishman of leisure is not only fond of outdoor sports, but of books. He has culture and taste, and patronizes literature with as much enthusiasm as he does physical amusements. If our leisure class is to imitate the English, it would be better if the imitation extended somewhat in the direction of culture.

The American leisure class—the class that might be expected to patronize good literature and to create a demand for sound, conservative criticism—is not only fond of horses, but is decidedly horsey. It is coarse and uncultivated. It has no taste in either literature or art. It reads few books and buys its pictures in Europe by the yard.

We are led to these remarks by the wholly inadequate verdict that has recently been given in some of the most prominent newspapers as to the merits of Mark Twain’s new book, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” The critics seem to have gotten their cue in this instance from the action of the Concord library, the directors of which refused the book a place on their shelves. This action, as was afterwards explained, was based on the fact that the book was a work of fiction, and not because of the humorous characteristics that are popularly supposed to attach to the writings of Mr. Clemens. But the critics had got their cue before the explanation was made, and they straightway proceeded to inform the reading public that the book was gratuitously coarse, its humor unnecessarily broad, and its purpose crude and inartistic.

Now, nothing could be more misleading than such a criticism as this. It is difficult to believe that the critics who have condemned the book as coarse, vulgar and inartistic can have read it. Taken in connection with “The Prince and the Pauper,” it marks a clear and distinct advance in Mr. Clemens’s literary methods. It presents an almost artistically perfect picture of the life and character in the southwest, and it will be equally valuable to the historian and to the student of sociology. Its humor, which is genuine and never-failing, is relieved by little pathetic touches here and there that vouch for its literary value.

It is the story of a half illiterate, high-spirited boy whose adventures are related by himself. The art with which this conception is dealt with is perfect in all its details. The boy’s point of view is never for a moment lost sight of, and the moral of the whole is that this half illiterate boy can be made to present, with perfect consistency, not only the characters of the people whom he meets, but an accurate picture of their social life. From the artistic point of view, there is not a coarse nor vulgar suggestion from the beginning to the end of the book. Whatever is coarse and crude is in the life that is pictured, and the picture is perfect. It may be said that the humor is sometimes excessive, but it is genuine humor—and the moral of the book, though it is not scrawled across every page, teaches the necessity of manliness and self-sacrifice.

—May 26, 1885

 

 

What is the origin of the prejudice against humor? Why is it so dangerous, if you would keep the public confidence, to make the public laugh?