HUCK FINN'S AMERICA, By Andrew Levy
"When Huckleberry Finn and the runaway slave Jim float down the Mississippi in Mark Twain’s novel, they engage in a long, comic dialogue about “ole King Sollermun” and his million wives. A million wives would be excessive, says Jim, leading Huck to realize that his companion on the raft has “an uncommon head” for an ignorant man. To Jim, the wise king’s judgment in the case of the two quarreling women makes eminent sense. Any man “dat’s got ’bout five million chillen ’round de house,” Jim says, just “as soon chop a chile in two as a cat. Dey’s plenty mo’.”
This dialogue, Andrew Levy writes in “Huck Finn’s America,” is straight out of the minstrel shows of the time, which Twain had first witnessed in his Missouri boyhood. That he enjoyed their broad humor and found places in his work for the kind of banter these entertainments featured is no great surprise.
Twain was not a delicate humorist, or an especially discriminating one. In “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” as in almost everything Twain wrote, he used whatever came to hand and never seemed to wonder much about his “influences” one way or another. In his lively and far-ranging study, Mr. Levy does a commendable job of fixing Twain in his time and place, with an emphasis on the social conditions under which the novel was written and the source material they offered. Abe Lincoln and Walt Whitman, he tells us, liked minstrel shows, too."When “Huckleberry Finn” was released in 1885, critics found little of note in its author’s attitudes about race. What interested them was Twain’s raw, unsentimental and unsettling view of boyhood. The novel was written over a period of years in which many educated Americans seemed to be far more troubled by the criminality of young white males than by racial injustice. This was a time in when a serious academic debate over educational reform was taking place and publishers were producing books intended to improve the morals of the nation’s wayward youth.
Twain clearly found these tracts amusing, and “Huck Finn” appears, at least in part, to be his mocking response to their well-meaning efforts. But it was not his first such riposte. Twenty years before “Huck Finn,” Twain offered his own “Advice for Good Little Boys” in Youth’s Companion magazine. “You ought never to take anything that don’t belong to you—if you can’t carry it off,” he counseled.
Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World in its review found “Huck Finn” “cheap and pernicious stuff,” the opposite of other books aiming at uplift; Twain’s protagonist, it reported, was a “wretchedly low, vulgar, sneaking and lying Southern country boy.” The San Francisco Evening Bulletin described the novel’s possible influence on children as “not altogether desirable, nor is it one that most parents who want a future of promise for their young folks would select without some hesitation.”
What readers today regard as the novel’s Everest—its point of greatest psychological subtlety and moral insight—went largely unnoticed by critics in Twain’s day. It looms into sight when Huck, tormented by his earlier decision to help Jim escape from slavery, chooses to persist in his scheme and accept the proper punishment for depriving the blameless Widow Douglas of her property—that is, Jim. “All right then,” Huck decides, “I’ll go to hell.”
This is a bold declaration, and we cheer Huck for it. We are thus especially disheartened when toward the end of the book, under Tom Sawyer’s influence, Huck agrees to participate in a needless, convoluted and outright cruel plot to recapture Jim—just so the two boys can help him escape yet again, except this time more dramatically. To the disappointment of generations of readers, Mr. Levy writes, Huck “swore to go to hell for Jim, but can’t stand up to Tom Sawyer.”
But this painful episode—less an indictment of Huck as a character than of Twain as a novelist—seems to have troubled contemporary reviewers not at all. Nor did they notice anywhere in the novel a theme of racial reconciliation. “Virtually no surviving review of the book, and there are dozens, talks about the novel as if it were bringing anything new to the story of black and white in America,” Mr. Levy writes. “And those few references thought what Twain said on the subject was funny.” The Hartford Courant found “the struggle Huck has with his conscience over slavery” to be “most amusing.”
It is not completely inconceivable that Huck’s creator found Huck’s worries comical, too. Twain evidently loved the ending that so many readers today deplore. When he went on a lecture tour to promote “Huck Finn,” he called those passages “the biggest card I’ve got in my whole repertoire.” All this is strong evidence, Mr. Levy argues, that we have deluded ourselves into considering the novel a heartwarming story of racial harmony—when in fact it is something much more complicated.
Just because we can familiarize ourselves with the historical context in which Twain wrote the book, including its reception among critics, does not mean that it cannot be read for what it says to us now. It is possible that contemporary reviewers, oblivious to what Twain had to say on slavery, were as puzzled as we are about this haunting, at times troubling, story and what it “really” means. That “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is not about any one thing is part of its greatness. We can enjoy Huck and his adventures at one stage of our lives and enjoy them for altogether different reasons at another—and understand the book today differently from the readers of another time. Such protean qualities, after all, are what make it a classic.
—Mr. Crawford is the author of “Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson.”
