Deliriously Happy (12 page)

—
New York Times

Where am I? The Vegas Book Show? San Diego Litcon? Have I made it to the end, to Powell's, at long last?

“You're in Cleveland,” Alison says. “Barnes & Noble Arena.”

Cleveland?
How can I be in Cleveland? Wasn't I just in St. Louis?

“We had to move a couple things around to get out of Collin's way.” The
Mockingjay
tour, in its sixieth week. Two dozen singing, dancing, battling teens. Why can't she just read the damn book, like the rest of us?

“Drink me,” I say, only half alluding. Alison pours us two Absolut Writinis (8 oz. Absolut in a coffee mug with an Altoid chaser), courtesy of our tour sponsor. I fish my right hand out of the bucket and reach for my medicine. “
Back in the bucket
,” Alison says, all marm, pressing the mug into my left. I return my right to the ice water, where it now lives. It's not even my hand anymore; it's ballooned into a monstrous cartoon of a hand, Homer Simpson's mitt. It lies quietly on the bottom like a strange aquatic animal. (Not bad. I'll have to use that.)

The chanting. Rhythmic, primal, it begins:

REE-ding… REE-ding… REE-ding!

“Al,” I say, finishing my drink. “I don't think I can do this tonight.”

She sighs. Alison's a seasoned tour pro and has heard this before, from me, from DeLillo, from all the chicks with lits. “You've got twenty thousand people out there, some paid scalpers three hundred bucks to come hear you read,” she preaches from the playbook. “Not to mention what they spent on T-shirts, and readings CDs, and giant foam bookmarks…”

“They're not even laughing at the jokes anymore. They're laughing at the punctuation.”

“Your punctuation
is
funny.”

“So many people. Such long names.”

“You're lucky it's not a memoir,” Alison says. “They'd tear you apart.” Poor choice of words, I think, considering this very stadium held the last reading of James Frey, somewhat ironically torn into only eighty-seven little pieces.

Ree-ding!… Ree-ding!!… Ree-ding!!!

I hoist out what used to be my writing hand. “It's dead,” I pronounce.

“Marty,” Alison says.

Dr. Marty, the tour physician, shuffles over. He lays my bloated corpse of a paw across his lap. He pokes it. “Boy's right,” the doc says in his syrupy Staten Island drawl. “This thing's about to fall off.”

“If I wanted your medical opinion, I would have asked for it,” Alison snaps.

The good doctor nods and reaches into his bag, removing his fixings. He pops the syringe into the vial, pulls back on the plunger, and slowly withdraws a potent cocktail of vitamin B, morphine, and Major League Baseball–grade steroids. He taps my wrist twice and plunges the needle in. I don't even feel it.

“This got Updike through the
Couples
tour,” Dr. Marty says. “You think it's bad now. Back then they not only bought the books, they
read
them.”

Outside, the crowd has gone into an undulating roar. They are doing the wave, apparently.

“We better get you in there,” Alison says. “We don't want another San Antonio.”
The Last Symbol
fiasco. Dan Brown's flight was delayed. Before he could be helicoptered in, eight people were dead and posed ritualistically.

As I climb into the golf cart, I notice something on Fox News. People. Anger. Flames.

They're all throwing my book into the fire. I could tell because of the distinctive cover.

I had said a stupid thing. The reporter showed me one of the full-page ads my publisher had taken out in newspapers across the country, quoting some blogger calling my novel “the greatest book ever written.” Surely, the reporter asked, I didn't think my book was
better than the Bible
.

“It's funnier than the Bible,” I said.

And I believe that. The Bible isn't funny at all, except in a broad conceptual way. But I shouldn't have said it, probably.

There are bonfires going in twenty-six cities, Megyn Kelly says, and on a couple of cruise ships. I stare at the screen. My words, on fire. My lovely books, thousands of them, turning to ash.

I chuckle. They didn't even get a volume discount.

The cart comes out of the tunnel into what was once center field. The crowd roars and squeals in equal measure. They have come for the word. And I'm going to read it to them.

Last fall in an attic in Hollywood, two sisters rifling through their grandfather's things came upon an item their ancestor had borrowed from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library more than a century before. It was perhaps the most infamous overdue book of all time: the first half of Mark Twain's original manuscript for
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
665 handwritten pages containing many passages omitted from the final version and thought to be lost forever. Because of the inherent literary, cultural, and historic value of the manuscript, the sisters immediately asked Sotheby's in New York to sell it for as much as possible. The library, in turn, hired a powerful phalanx of big-city lawyers, demanding immediate return of the manuscript and payment of fines exceeding one million dollars (fifteen cents per day, compounded at 6 percent annually). It may be years before the matter is resolved
.

Nevertheless
, Sire
magazine has managed to obtain, at great expense (and, we hasten to add, well outside the borders of the United States), a highresolution facsimile copy of the manuscript. While a number of pages appear to have been eaten by the fax machine, what came through intact is a literary find indeed. As the magazine which first published
Huckleberry Finn
in serial form, beginning in the fall of 1876 (under the unfortunate title
A Boy and His Boy),
we are proud to present to our readers never-before-seen excerpts from this satiric masterpiece. Critical commentary and annotation have been provided by
Sire
literary editor Laurence Doyle, who has read much of Mr. Twain's work and considers himself a great fan
.

Mark Twain's
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
is, above all else, a classic coming-of-age story about a young boy's search for his identity.
¹
It is also, according to the critic Leslie Fiedler, a sort of literary “fairy tale” celebrating “the mutual love
of a white man and a colored
.”
²
But the recent discovery of the first half of Twain's handwritten manuscript
³
indicates that
Finn
, in its original form, is in fact something else again: a veritable treasure trove of zany “lost episodes”
⁴
to be enjoyed and analyzed by scholars and casual readers alike.
⁵

Three such episodes are presented on the following pages. In order to place these passages in their proper context, readers are encouraged to cut them out and paste them, in the appropriate places, into their own copies of
Huck Finn
,
⁶
and then reread the entire book from start to finish.

EPISODE ONE: PAP GOES THE WEASEL

As described in the opening chapters of the novel, Huck's relationship with his father is a troubled one. A typical father-son interaction cycle between Huck and his “pap”
⁷
involves: Pap bullying Huck for money to buy liquor; Pap getting drunk; Pap going to jail; Pap getting out of jail; and, finally, Pap beating the tar out of Huck, often leaving him “all over welts.”
⁸
While such behavior is now easily recognized as symptomatic of an extremely dysfunctional codependency, at the time it was merely considered a form of child abuse, to be frowned upon rather than understood in terms of how it might affect both parties. Clearly, Twain meant to satirize this simplistic notion and wanted to say more about the nature of Huck's relationship with his father; and in fact he did.

Near the end of chapter VI, there is a curious omission from the classic “delirium tremens” episode in which Pap, intoxicated,
⁹
believes himself covered with snakes and demons and then attacks Huck. The passage speaks for itself. (Excised material appears in bold type.)

He chased me round and round the place, with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me and then I couldn't come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck, but he laughed such a screechy laugh,
it sent an awful scare through me and I froze up long enough that he could catch me and shove me down on the ground
.

My face was in the dirt then and he lay atop me, pressing with all his weight and with his liquory breath burning wet on the back of my neck. I figgered I was guv up for ghost for sure then. But pap he just flopped on me for awhile, all fagged out, and I got to hoping maybe he had forgot what he was there for. But he didn't. By and by, he got himself up on his knees, straddling my hindparts, but swaying uneasy, and made out how he would cut off my angel wings to show as a warning to other angels that might come after him. Before I could figure on a good plan to stop him, I began crying like a babe, uncontrollable:

“I hain't a angel, Pappy! I hain't no angel! I'm only your own flesh and blood, Huck Finn, your son!”

I don't know if it was me bawling or pap not finding no wings to cut off me, but he stopped poking at my back with the knife and rolled me over front to have a look at me. He kept squatting on my chest, though, and pinned my arms under his knees, in case of if I was one of those deceiving angels, he said. He stared hard at me for the longest while, and when he smiled I thought maybe the spell had gone off him. But then he started talking all crazy again, sing-songy:

“M'boy-M'boy-M'boy. My sweetscented dandy boy, ain't you now? Why, y'got your mama's mouth, y'kno'that? Yes, y'got her perty dirty li'l' mouth.”

He began fumbling with his belt then, and I knew what that meant: I was in for a licking. But I thought quick and bellowed in the darkest, devilest voice I had in me:

“Haw! I am the Angel of Death, you foolish ol' man! and now I'm gone drag you into the Eternal Fires of Hell!”

Well, pap's eyeballs went black as new moons and he just yanked himself up by his britches, and fell over in a tumble. He
roared and cussed,
got to his feet
and kept on chasing me up.

It is unclear why Twain chose to drop this episode, although it is likely that Olivia Clemens, Twain's wife and editrix, would have objected to the use of the word “hell” in the penultimate graph and deleted the curse.
¹⁰
Perhaps Twain felt the passage would not work without it.

This excision notwithstanding, Twain did leave several other clues to Pap's nontraditional sexuality in his final draft, particularly in the scene in which Nigger
¹¹
Jim and Huck find Pap dead and “Yes, indeedy;
naked
, too” (emphasis mine) in a house floating down the river. Jim warns Huck “doan' look at his face—it's too gashly,” to which Huck responds, “I didn't look at him at all… I didn't want to see him.” Huck does, however, take an almost fetishistic interest in the contents of the house:

There was … a couple of masks made out of black cloth … two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women's under-clothes … a fish-line as thick as my little finger with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog collar…

Huck takes all these items with him. They will later play “a very important part in the plot of the novel
Huckleberry Finn
, which is really about Huck's search for his identity.”
¹²

EPISODE TWO: HUCKLEBERRY PIE

Certainly no one factor is more important in Huck's coming of age than his relationship with Nigger Jim. It is Jim who encourages Huck to explore all sides of his burgeoning identity; for example, in chapter X, when Huck wants to sneak across the river after dark to catch up on gossip, Huck relates:

Jim liked that notion; … he studied it over and said, couldn't I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl?

Huck enthusiastically complies, and while such transvestism is quite common and normal among teenage boys,
¹³
Huck appears genuinely concerned about getting accurately in touch with his feminine side: