Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (3 page)

Indeed, the America reflected in
The Gilded Age
—an America of greed, corruption, and materialism—may have driven Twain back imaginatively to what seemed to him a simpler time—to “those old simple days” (p. 199), as he refers to them in the concluding chapter of
Tom Sawyer.
The first significant sign of such a return in his publications was his nostalgic essay “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which appeared in 1875.
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
published the following year, belongs to this return to antebellum America, and to the scene of Twain’s growing up—Hannibal, Missouri. That the author was able to draw upon his deepest reserves of childhood imagination in this work certainly accounts for much of its appeal. A decade after its publication, he referred to the novel as a “hymn” to a forgotten era,
⁴
and while this characterization oversimplifies
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
it also points to key aspects of its composition and literary character.

In the novel, Twain renames Hannibal as St. Petersburg, thus suggesting, as John C. Gerber has said, St. Peter’s place, or heaven.
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But heaven, as Twain depicts it, is a real place. Many of the sites and topographical features are identifiable. Cardiff Hill, so important in the novel as a setting for children’s games such as Robin Hood, is Holliday’s Hill of Hannibal. Jackson’s Island, the scene of the boys’ life as “pirates,” is recognizable as Glasscock’s Island. And McDougal’s Cave, so central to the closing movement of the novel, has a real-life reference in McDowell’s cave. Human structures, like Aunt Polly’s house, as well as the schoolhouse and the church, were similarly modeled after identifiable buildings in Hannibal.

The autobiographical origins of the novel are also evident in the characters. In the preface, Twain says that “Huck Finn is drawn from life” (in part from a childhood friend named Tom Blankenship), and “Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew.” Schoolmates John Briggs and Will Bowen probably were two of the three boys after whom Tom was modeled, and a good bet for the third is young Sam Clemens himself. Many of Tom’s qualities resemble Twain’s descriptions of his young self, and several of Tom’s experiences—such as being forced by Aunt Polly to take the Painkiller and sitz baths—reflect the author’s own. Aunt Polly herself has several characteristics that link her to Sam Clemens’s mother, Jane Clemens. And scholars have found Hannibal counterparts for many of the other characters, including Becky Thatcher, Joe Harper, and Ben Rogers, as well as the widow Douglas and the town’s minister, schoolteacher, and doctor.

But these reference points in the local history of Hannibal are just the surface aspects of the novel’s autobiographical dimension. In 1890 Twain reported to his friend Brander Matthews that the writing of Tom Sawyer had been accompanied for him by a series of vivid memories from his youth in rural Missouri. These memories, Twain said, became a force in the composition of the novel as he “harvested” them, and brought them into his developing narrative.
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Indeed, the highly episodic character of the novel suggests a stringing together of remembrances. Some of the book’s most evocative scenes clearly draw their power from childhood, which Twain filters through a vision of youth and nature reminiscent of Rousseau or even Wordsworth. For example, chapter 16, set on Jackson’s Island, begins with Tom, Joe, and Huck in a scene of summer reverie:

Twain’s whole career, up to this point, had been characterized by his ability to turn scenes of romantic sensibility abruptly into burlesque. He follows this pattern at many points in
Tom Sawyer,
but not here. Instead, he allows the moment to stand, unqualified and undiminished. There is perhaps no better instance in the novel of its sources in childhood reverie. The episode testifies to the fact that Mark Twain discovered childhood, during the writing of
Tom Sawyer,
as a particularly rich source of imaginative power. This power informs not just his “children‘s” books, like
Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn,
but all his works—such as
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
(1889) and
Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc
(1896)—that depend on a perspective of innocence in their central characters.

Yet, while we recognize a fundamental source of the novel’s power in Twain’s remembrance and recreation of childhood—and can find much of young Sam Clemens in Tom Sawyer—one of the most interesting things about the book’s composition is how long the author remained uncertain of its proper audience. (This uncertainty is especially notable when we consider that
Tom Sawyer
has long been regarded a classic of children’s literature.) As late as the summer of 1875, when Twain was completing a full draft of the manuscript, he wrote to his friend William Dean Howells, “It is
not
a boy’s book, at all. It will only be read by adults. It is only written for adults.”
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If Twain was, even at this late stage, imagining
Tom Sawyer
as a book for adults, then what kind of book did he have in mind? The answer is in the novel itself—in those scenes, especially, where the credulity, ignorance, hypocrisy, and class consciousness of the people of St. Petersburg are exposed. These scenes, were they to be excerpted and isolated from the narrative, would read as pure satire or social critique. In other words, they would have much in common with Twain’s earlier works such as
The Innocents Abroad
and
The Gilded Age.

Mark Twain’s agent for exposing the shortcomings, and shortsight edness, of St. Petersburg’s adult population is of course Tom, who consistently subverts the social order. His release during the church service of the pinch-bug whose bite sends the poodle “sailing up the aisle” (p. 39) is a literal disruption of that order, and his hilarious (to the reader) volunteering of David and Goliath as the first two disciples makes a mockery of Bible study. Tom disorders the society of St. Petersburg most dramatically by craftily organizing the public ridicule of one of its most austere members. The “severe” schoolmaster—whose wig is lifted from him, exposing his “gilded” head, in chapter 21—comes in for an uproarious put-down. This chapter is a good example of the way in which Tom Sawyer and Mark Twain are twinned protagonists, for here the narrator joins Tom in the fun. He cannot resist an extended autho rial send-up of mid-nineteenth-century sentimentality, as expressed in the declamatory “compositions” performed by St. Petersburg’s young people on Examination Evening:

One can sense Samuel Clemens himself “squirming” over “the glaring insincerity of these sermons” (p. 126), and, as if to vent himself of their influence, he concludes this chapter by quoting verbatim several “compositions” taken from an actual volume of nineteenth-century sentimental literature.

In this satiric (adult) strain of the book’s presentation,
Tom Sawyer
becomes the vehicle not only of childhood reverie and play, but also the vehicle of biting social criticism—and not just of Hannibal, Missouri, but of the whole of American rural life that it represents. In this sense,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
can be understood as a predecessor of early-twentieth-century works, such as Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio
(1919) and Sinclair Lewis’s
Main Street
(1920), that depict the narrowness of life in the provinces. Perhaps Anderson, who was indebted to Twain for his cultivation of American vernacular language, is the better example, because Anderson’s vision of small-town life is not solely critical.
Winesburg
, like
Tom Sawyer,
exhibits the author’s affection for the lost world that it recounts. But
Winesburg
is, in tone and structure, a far more unified literary presentation than is
Tom Sawyer,
and this fact returns us to the issue of Mark Twain’s divided agenda.

This divided agenda is reflected in Twain’s plans for composition. On the very first page of the manuscript of the novel, he had made the following notation:

Scholars can tell from the manuscript’s internal evidence that Twain made this note early in the novel’s composition—possibly at the very beginning of that composition, and certainly before it had advanced beyond the fifth chapter. From the start, then, Twain had imagined “growing” Tom into adulthood, having him travel abroad and return, in his forties (Twain’s own age when he was composing the novel), to St. Petersburg. Here, Tom would discover that his most enchanted objects of childhood memory had become disenchanted. Becky Thatcher, surely the “Adored Unknown,” would have become a “faded old maid & full of rasping, puritanical vinegar piety.”

In other words, Becky, and presumably every other aspect of village life that Tom had once valued, would be shown up for the disappointing things they really are. Or, from another perspective, this disenchantment of a once enchanted world would show how small-town American rural life inevitably stifled the human potential for growth and change. It appears that the Tom Sawyer of this version of the novel would have been one of Twain’s classic outsider figures, like Hank Morgan in
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
, whose status as an outsider is used to expose the failures of an established cultural order.

But we’ll never know precisely how Twain would have handled this return to St. Petersburg and what precise purposes of social criticism he would have made of it, because this is the book he didn’t write. The one he did write ended with Tom locked forever in childhood—a childhood that has lived timelessly in the American imagination for the past century and a quarter. Many readers have noted that Twain never discloses Tom’s exact age, thus leaving him always in a state bordering late childhood and early adolescence, but never advancing beyond that point. The novel, as we have it, thus stands in stark contrast to Twain’s early outline, where his hero voyages stage by stage (through an actual chronology of aging) on the river of life.

Whatever changed Mark Twain’s mind remains mysterious. But it seems clear that sometime between the fall of 1874 and the spring of 1875 he decided to conclude the novel with Tom’s childhood. (In the autumn of 1875, he confirmed the matter by writing to Howells, “I have finished the story and didn’t take the chap beyond boyhood.”)
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Even so, he continued to understand this story of a boy’s life as fundamentally a vehicle for adult satire. As noted earlier, Twain had sent the recently completed manuscript to Howells during the summer of 1875, insisting that the book “is written only for adults.” Howells, after reading the manuscript, told Twain that he felt that the novel’s satirical elements were too dominant, and he had some advice: “I think you should treat it explicitly as a boy’s story. Grown-ups will enjoy it just as much if you do; and if you should put it forth as a study of boy character from the grown-up point of view, you’d give the wrong key to it.”
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Howells, as America’s preeminent man of letters, had great influence on Twain, and his counsel—as well as that of Twain’s wife, Olivia, who agreed with Howells about making this a children’s book—must have weighed heavily on the author. Yet, while Twain made some changes toward greater propriety in the language of certain passages, he does not appear to have extensively revised the novel beyond this point. When published the following year, it continued to betray a striking division between satire and romance. This division can be described along an axis that forms between the scene of the boys frolicking on the shore at Jackson’s Island, and the devastating cultural critique of “‘Examination’ day” in chapter 21. Most chapters of the book contain both elements, in a sometimes uneasy relation to one another.

Twain’s divided purposes, and uncertainty about his audience, are reflected in the novel’s preface, where he attempted to reconcile its disparate elements and perspectives: “Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.”

In underestimating in his preface the satirical force of the novel, Twain attempted to soften the sharp division of elements that the book actually exhibits. (The preface thus represents a concession to Howells, at least in the way that Twain initially addresses his readers.) This division has led some critics to fault
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
for its apparent lack of narrative coherence. Part social critique, part boyhood reverie, the novel in this view never quite seems to know what it is or what it wants to say. Formally, according to this view, the division expresses itself in a randomness of selection and a highly episodic character. These qualities are certainly present in the first part of the novel (especially the first eight chapters), which contains some of the work’s most famous set pieces, including the fence whitewashing scene in chapter 2. Most of these early chapters seem to have been developed by Twain from previously written sketches, and the sketch, of course, is the form in which earlier he had honed his skills as a humorist, a lecturer, and a journalist.