Huck You

Next, we airbrush out the cigars.

It’s probably no surprise that I’m allying myself with the camp that now decries (to and perhaps beyond the point of overkill) Alan Gribben’s new bowdlerized edition of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As you’ve probably heard, the professor, a hothouse flower if ever there was one, has removed the N-word from the text, replacing it with “slave,” and renaming Injun Joe as “Indian Joe.”* Gribben means well, surely: Twain’s use of currently offensive words is driving his novels off of library shelves (again — they’ve always been banned by someone or other) and diminishing his potential audience. But a chorus now thunders that Gribben’s approach is no remedy, and I chime in — but for reasons having everything to do with the power of an ugly word to shock a contemporary reader out of complacency. That’s what Twain wanted to do, and what we need.

How Not to Edit a Book

I do share Professor Gribben’s distaste for the N-word. Even as a boy, when the word was still in casual currency among white people (often without pejorative intent), including many white people I knew, I found it ugly. Since then, I’ve never once uttered the word except when quoting someone else, and I’m not going to start here; my purpose is not Twain’s, or even Gribben’s. As the descendant of slave-owners, I’m conscious that the word will remain off-limits to me forevermore. I must sound like a fool, prancing around and saying “N-word” instead, but so be it. And I daresay I’d have trouble teaching Huck Finn, too, because doing so would require me to repeat a word I find almost physically impossible to speak.

But the very ugliness of the word is like a gateway into the mindset of Twain’s times — and those even earlier times described in Huck Finn. In Twain’s day and for generations thereafter, readers were shocked and in some cases horrified by Huck’s friendship with the runaway slave Jim (which is how the book got banned to begin with), but nowadays it’s much harder to appreciate the extent of Jim’s oppression, or of Huck’s courage in helping him to find freedom.

Twain depicts a society in which his book’s noblest character is treated with the ugliest language and worse behavior. Jim has no rights, no power. As Americans, we forget that at our peril, and few documents serve as better reminders than Huckleberry Finn. For all that we see Jim’s predicament within the plot, the N-word keeps driving it home to a modern reader. “Slave” may reinforce the reminders of Jim’s status — there are weaker words Professor Gribben might have chosen, after all. But in ways that Twain couldn’t have predicted, the N-word is stronger and more effective now than it was in his own day.

The old boy would be thrilled by the amount of press coverage
he’s getting these days.

And what elevates Huck from the condition of mere protagonist to that of hero is precisely his willingness to oppose that society by doing what is right — even though he’s told by every authority figure in his society that he’s wrong. Rebellious though Huck may be, he’s grown up listening to teachers, politicians, and preachers defend slavery and rail against abolitionism, and when he declares, “All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” he really believes that will be his fate. That passage, which I’ve reprinted below, is an extraordinary “teachable moment,” as folks say now, though it carries with it a heavy responsibility: it must be taught, and not merely repeated.

It’s tough to put into context any work from another era. The director Anne Bogart once staged Bernstein’s On the Town on the deck of a battleship, to clarify what the show’s original audience could not possibly have ignored: that America was at war, nobody knew whether we’d win, and the “just one day” imperatives of the sailors are dictated not only by the terms of shore leave but by the very real possibility that they might die in combat. (A similar urgency drives Weill’s One Touch of Venus, especially the “Forty Minutes for Lunch” ballet, as well as other works from the period.)

There is no battleship in Huckleberry Finn to thrust the modern audience into the spirit of Jim’s times. But surely that nasty little word can help us to understand — and to remember, even while some folks celebrate Secession’s anniversary (as if it had nothing to do with wide-scale injustice), what things were really like.

We can’t replicate perfectly the original impact of any work. But we don’t do ourselves any good by chipping away at its materials, or by whitewashing over its uglier aspects. Professor Gribben’s blundering gesture toward political correctness has become its own kind of teachable moment, albeit surely not what he intended. (If anybody wonders why liberals have trouble persuading voters of the rightness of their causes, you may start by looking at the present case.) I urge you not to buy Gribben’s edition, but to go back and read Twain’s.

There, you will find passages such as this one:

I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but laid the paper down and set there thinking — thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time: in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I’d see him standing my watch on top of his’n, ’stead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping; and see him how glad he was when I come back out of the fog; and when I come to him again in the swamp, up there where the feud was; and suchlike times; and would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me, and how good he always was; and at last I struck the time I saved him by telling the men we had smallpox aboard, and he was so grateful, and said I was the best friend old Jim ever had in the world, and the only one he’s got now; and then I happened to look around and see that paper.

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:

“All right, then, I'll go to hell” — and tore it up.



*NOTE: As advanced as he was for his time on matters of race, Twain falls far behind when it comes to Native Americans. Some of his remarks are so nasty, you can’t believe you’re reading the same Mark Twain. I’m always surprised by this: how can someone who gets it right on other matters get it so wrong on this one? But there it is.

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Mark Twain in Bed

His favorite place to write.
(Et cetera.)

The forthcoming publication of Mark Twain’s autobiography, a century after his death, has generated a good deal of press in recent days. This is precisely as Mr. Clemens would have it, for he was a master of self-promotion. Thus far, the publicity promises more than the book itself will provide: most of the anticipated revelations (a sex scandal; a bitter, probably clinically depressed psyche; angry opinions on culture and politics far removed from the banks of the Mississippi) are already well known to anyone who has read even a few key texts, including the Library of America’s indispensable Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, Volume 1 and Volume 2. Scholars have been allowed to draw on the manuscript for their work, including three previous books billed as autobiographies. Presumably, however, the complete autobiography, in three volumes and half a million words, will give us more detail, and possibly more insight, than we had before.

Take the vibrating sex toy as an example.

Although the initial report turns out to be an exaggeration (the vibrating device in question was not a sex toy, after all -- see comments section below), we shouldn’t be surprised that Twain had a mistress and took a lively interest in sex. He’s the rare 19th-century author in English to make any sort of public statement approving the practice of masturbation (most notably, “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” an after-dinner speech from 1879). True, he was famously devoted to his wife, Olivia, but she was nearing death when he hired Isabel Van Kleek Lyon as his secretary; once Olivia was gone, Lyon stepped forward. A trifle too zealously, perhaps.

We’re allowed to be disappointed that Twain capped off his affair with Lyon by writing a 400-page assassination of her character.* But beginning with Twain’s own carefully engineered public image, most of us have grown up with an idea of him every bit as whitewashed as Tom Sawyer’s fence, and the true colors emerge immediately once we read his work.

Lyon & Twain
Unfortunately for her, breaking up by Post-It Note
had yet to be invented.

Consider that Twain is easily the most visually iconic writer in history. A picture of Shakespeare might just as easily be Philip Sidney or Edmund Spenser (or the Earl of Oxford, for that matter). We describe a certain windswept handsomeness as “Byronic,” and certainly Lord Byron exploited his visual appeal — but he tended to change outfits, whereas Twain’s linen suit was an immutable costume, theatrical and practically trademarked. By it, even today, schoolkids recognize him and draw his picture for their book reports.

The suit, the fluffy white hair, and the droopy moustache belong to Twain alone: others didn’t copy his look (as they did copy Byron’s, and, to a lesser degree in Twain’s own day, Oscar Wilde’s), not least because Twain wasn’t representing an artistic movement. He was representing himself.

His initial success derived from a semi-fictitious representation of himself, not only “Mark Twain” — who was not Samuel Langhorne Clemens — but also The Innocents Abroad (1869), his first and (in his lifetime) best-selling book, in which he depicts himself as a character in the story of the first American package tour to Europe and the Holy Land. The creation and exploitation of “Mark Twain” became increasingly important in the years that followed.

Although public readings were common in the 19th and early-20th centuries, and used by many writers to supplement their incomes, public appearances were for Twain an absolute necessity, his surest means to surmount his recurring financial difficulties. He strove to appeal to an audience even larger than that which bought his books. He had to be funnier in person, more lovable, more recognizable than he was in print: he had to become a market brand.

He succeeded brilliantly, and other celebrity writers who followed him owe a clear (and often conscious) debt to his example. While some might sex things up for 20th-century consumption, the template remained Twain’s. Yet that public image runs counter to most of what we find in the pages of his books. The real Mark Twain was a sophisticated traveler who could get by in languages other than English; his moral outrage and his interest in social justice didn’t begin and end with Miss Watson’s Jim, and they extended far beyond the U.S. borders.

Moreover, quite unlike the Disney-fied cartoon of him we may cherish, he was a randy old cuss. Consider this passage from Roughing It, and its account of Twain’s visit to “the Sandwich Islands”:

At noon I observed a bevy of nude native young ladies bathing in the sea, and went and sat down on their clothes to keep them from being stolen. I begged them to come out, for the sea was rising and I was satisfied that they were running some risk. But they were not afraid, and presently went on with their sport. They were finished swimmers and divers, and enjoyed themselves to the last degree.

This is not the work of a writer indifferent to feminine charms. Might he take a mistress? Yes.

Meet the Press: John and Yoko had nothing on Mark Twain.

Consider, too, his description of “the lascivious hula hula,” from the same book, where Twain enjoys looking at another group of pretty and scantily clad young women. Yet here he also signals his opposition to Christian missionaries, whose attempts to “save” the Hawaiians led, Twain suggests, to prostitution. At every turn, he’s much more complex than we are brought up to expect. (And his views of missionaries, religion, and God would only darken as he aged.) Most of his “Thoughts on the Science of Onanism” are invented quotations (and weak puns that he’d have disdained to use elsewhere), but consider these reflections:

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and to tell indelicate stories — and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. The results of this habit are: Loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness, loss of hopefulness, loss of character, and loss of progeny.

Satirizing (from the relative safety of France) the sorts of anti-masturbation propaganda that were then dominant in Britain and the U.S., Twain hints to the 21st-century reader that, yes, he might actually be able to think of a good use for a vibrating sex toy. (Had he ever seen one.)

By stipulating that his autobiography be withheld for a century, Twain knew exactly what he was doing. He was protecting his public image (not least from libel suits) and guaranteeing heightened interest in the new book. And if the autobiography should in some way tarnish our image of him, the scope of the damage will be limited — as Twain surely realized. It is clear, for example, that attendance at his public readings will not suffer in the slightest, no matter how the autobiography is received now.

Call me a sucker, but I resolve to read the whole shebang. One of my greatest pleasures as a reader has been that, the more of Twain’s work I read, the more I feel that he evolves along with me. When I was a boy, I needed him as the kindly yarn-spinner of Tom Sawyer and “The Celebrated Jumping Frog”; later, I hailed him as a champion of social causes, a kind of American Zola (which Twain did want to be).

And now that I am more mature, I can accept him as a bitter, godless, outraged, horny, needy, snobbish, peevish, vindictive, depressed, insecure, money-grubbing, sometimes bigoted**, sometimes cruel, always complex old man.

Indeed, I welcome him.


*NOTE: Laura Trombley, in her book Mark Twain’s Other Woman, suggests that Twain was effectively blackmailing Lyon: as if to say, “If you don’t keep quiet about my daughter Clara’s adulterous affair, I’ll publish this — and ruin you.” Whether Lyon would have blabbed is unclear, but in the end, she kept her mouth shut.

**While Twain was famously ahead of his time in his attitudes towards blacks, both in America and in Africa, and towards the aforementioned Hawaiian Islanders, he showed little such enlightenment in his attitudes toward Native Americans (and, for that matter, Mormons, so frequently a target of his barbs that one quickly detects outright hostility). It strikes me as just that Injun Joe is usually portrayed by white actors, since he is ultimately a white man’s idea of an Indian.

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April Fish

Here in France, the symbol of April Fool’s is a fish, to the point of shouting out, “Poisson d’avril!” when you play a trick on someone. You’re also expected to give fish to people. This explains the presence of chocolate fish in French candy shops (including, bien sûr, Denise Acabo’s), alongside the chocolate Easter bunnies and eggs more readily recognizable to Americans.

In the spirit of the season, I recently completed Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style, the short, simple story of an encounter on a Parisian bus, recounted 99 different ways. Many of these are amusing, all of them are clever, but it must be said that a single variation more and I’d have thrown the book out the window. Style is one thing, but on occasion one wants substance.

Happily, Queneau provided just that in a real novel, Zazie dans le Métro. In it, a 10-year-old girl wreaks havoc during a weekend in Paris. It’s laugh-out-loud funny, surreal, anarchic, brilliant — and prophetic. Because the book was published in 1959, it takes only simple math to realize that the hellion Zazie was exactly the right age to be a student rioter in 1968. Queneau did try to warn us, but the French are still recovering from May 1968 and its many Zazies, and the fortieth anniversary is the headline on almost every French magazine right now.

Hell hath no fury like a 10-year-old French girl:
Catherine Mongeot, star of Louis Malle’s Zazie film

To honor the season further, I am writing this several days after April 1. But more urgently, perhaps, I note that April also marks tax season — perhaps the biggest and most durable April Fool anybody ever played. And it’s the subject of the happy discovery I made while perusing Mark Twain last night.

Income taxes are not something I’d have expected Twain to know much about, yet his experience of them — in 1870 — turns out to be exhaustive and authoritative. Further proof that Twain is very much our contemporary. In his sketch, “A Mysterious Visit” (which can be found in Volume I of the Library of America’s indispensable collection of short pieces by Twain), he recounts his attempts to impress a stranger. According to Twain, “impress” usually means “exaggerate,” and he inflates his financial worth to figures that are eye-catching even today. Never mind that the guy introduced himself as an agent of the Internal Revenue Service — whatever that is.

“We talked, and talked, and talked — at least I did. And we laughed, and laughed, and laughed — at least he did,” Twain recalls. “Then the gentleman got up to go. It came over me most uncomfortably that maybe I had made my revelations for nothing, besides being flattered into stretching them considerably by the stranger’s astonished exclamations. But no; at the last moment the gentleman handed me a large envelope and said it contained his advertisement; and that I would find out all about his business in it; and that he would be happy to have my custom — would in fact be proud to have the custom of a man of such prodigious income; and that he used to think there were several wealthy men in Buffalo, but when they came to trade with him he discovered that they barely hard enough to live on; and that in truth it had been such a weary, weary age since he had seen a rich man face to face, and talked with him, and touched him with his hands, that he could hardly refrain from embracing me — in fact, would esteem it a great favor if I would let him embrace me.”

Tax Expert: Mark Twain,
a.k.a. Samuel “Long Form” Clemens

The “advertisement” turns out, of course, to be “nothing in the world but a wicked tax return — a string of impertinent questions about my private affairs occupying the best part of four foolscap pages of fine print — questions, I may remark, gotten up with such marvelous ingenuity that the oldest man in the world couldn’t understand what the most of them were driving at — questions, too, that were calculated to make a man report about four times his actual income to keep from swearing a lie.”

How Twain wiggles his way out of this mess is something I urge you to read for yourself — although with equal force I urge you not to follow his example.

Happy April, everybody.

Note: For unknown reasons, Amazon appears to be aware of the existence only of Volume II of LOA’s collection of Twain sketches. To get both volumes, one must go to the source — or to the bookstore.

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