literary schemes and now, in the early weeks of the summer, with
rry Finn
Huckleberry Finn waiting to complete itself, he turned his hot
energy upon several of these sorry projects, the completion of which
gave him as much sense of satisfying productivity as did his eventual
absorption in Huckleberry Finn.
When at last Hucklebe"y Finn was completed and published and
I
widely loved, Mark Twain became somewhat aware of what he had
N 1876 Mark Twain published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
accomplished with the book that had been begun as journeywork
and in the same year began what he called "another boys'
and depreciated, postponed, threatened with destruction. It is his
book." He set little store by the new venture and said that he
masterpiece, and perhaps he learned to know that. But he could
had undertaken it "more to be at work than anything else." His
scarcely have estimated it for what it is, one of the world's great
heart was not in it-"I like it only tolerably well as far as I have
books and one of the central documents of American culture.
got," he said, "and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when
Wherein does its greatness lie? Primarily in its power of telling
it is done." He pigeonholed it long before it was done and for as
the truth. An awareness of this quality as it exists in Tom Sawyer
much as four years. In 1880 he took it out and carried it forward a
once led Mark Twain to say of the earlier work that "it is not a
little, only to abandon it again. He had a theory of unconscious
boys' book at all. It will be read only by adults. It is written only for
composition and believed that a book must write itself; the book
adults." But this was only a manner of speaking, Mark Twain's way
which he referred to as "Huck Finn's Autobiography" refused to
of asserting, with a discernible touch of irritation, the degree of
do the job of its own creation and he would not coerce it.
truth he had achieved. It does not represent his usual view either of
But then in the summer of 1887 Mark Twain was possessed by a
boys' books or of boys. No one, as he well knew, sets a higher value
charge of literary energy which, as he wrote to Howells, was more
on truth than a boy. Truth is the whole of a boy's conscious demand
intense than any he had experienced for many years. He worked all
upon the world of adults. He is likely to believe that the adult world
day and every day, and periodically he so fatigued himself that he
is in a conspiracy to lie to him, and it is this belief, by no means unhad to recruit his strength by a day or two of smoking and reading founded, that arouses Tom and Huck and all boys to their moral
in bed. It is impossible not to suppose that this great creative drive
sensitivity, their everlasting concern with justice, which they calls
was connected with-was perhaps the direct result of-che visit to
fairness. At the same time it often makes them skillful and pro-:z:
the Mississippi he had made earlier in the year, the trip which forms
found liars in their own defense, yet they do not tell the ultimate lie..,_.
the matter of the second part of Life on the Mississippi. His boyof adults: they do not lie to themselves. That is why Mark Twain-.1
hood and youth on the river he so profoundly loved had been at
felt that it was impossible to carry Tom Sawyer beyond boyhood-i1to
once the happiest and most significant part of Mark Twain's life;
maturity "he would lie just like all the other one-horse men of litera§s
his return to it in middle age stirred memories which revived and re-
ture and the reader would conceive a hearty contempt for him."
--
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102
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Huckleberry Finn
103
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Certainly one element in the greatness of Huckleberry Finn, as
Huckleberry Finn is a great book because it is about a god-about,
that is, a power which seems to have a mind and will of its own,
a boy's book. One can read it at ten and then annually ever after,
and which to men of moral imagination appears to embody a great
and each year find that it is as fresh as the year before, that it has
moral idea.
changed only in becoming somewhat larger. To read it young is like
Huck himself is the servant of the river-god, and he comes very
planting a tree young-each year adds a new growth ring of meanclose to being aware of the divine nature of the being he serves. The ing, and the book is as little likely as the tree to become dull. So, we
world he inhabits is perfectly equipped to accommodate a deity, for
may imagine, an Athenian boy grew up together with the Odyssey.
it is full of presences and meanings which it conveys by natural
There are few other books which we can know so young and love so
signs and also by preternatural omens and taboos: to look at the
long.
moon over the left shoulder, to shake the tablecloth after sundown,
The truth of Huckleberry Finn is of a different kind from that of
to handle a snakeskin, are ways of offending the obscure and prev
Tom Sawyer. It is a more intense truth, fiercer and more complex.
alent spirits. Huck is at odds, on moral and aesthetic grounds,
Tom Sawyer has the truth of honesty-what it says about things
with the only form of established religion he knows, and his very
and feelings is never false and always both adequate and beautiful.
intense moral life may be said to derive almost wholly from his love
Huckleberry Finn has this kind of truth, too, but it has also the
of the river. He lives in a perpetual adoration of the Mississippi's
truth of moral passion; it deals directly with the virtue and depower and charm. Huck, of course, always expresses himself better pravity of man's heart.
than he can know, but nothing draws upon his gift of speech like
Perhaps the best clue to the greatness of Huckleberry Finn has
his response to his deity. After every sally into the social life of the
been given to us by a writer who is as different from Mark Twain
shore, he returns to the river with relief and thanksgiving; and at
as it is possible for one Missourian to be from another. T. S. Eliot's
each return, regular and explicit as a chorus in a Greek tragedy,
poem, "The Dry Salvages," the third of his Four Quartets, begins
there is a hymn of praise to the god's beauty, mystery, and strength,
with a meditation on the Mississippi, which Mr. Eliot knew in his
and to his noble grandeur in contrast with the pettiness of men.
St. Louis boyhood:
Generally the god is benign, a being of long sunny days and spacious nights. But, like any god, he is also dangerous and deceptive.
I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river
He generates fogs which bewilder, and contrives echoes and false
Is a strong brow
n god ...
distances which confuse. His sand bars can ground and his hidden
And the meditation goes on to speak of the god as
snags can mortally wound a great steamboat. He can cut away the
solid earth from under a man's feet and take his house with it. The
almost forgotten
sense of the danger of the river is what saves the book from any
By the dwellers in cities-ever, however, implacable,
Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder of
touch of the sentimentality and moral ineptitude of most works
What men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated
which contrast the life of nature with the life of society.
By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. 1
The river itself is only divine; it is not ethical and good. But its
nature seems to foster the goodness of those who love it and try to
1 Copyright, 1943, by T. S. Eliot, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.
fit themselves to its ways. And we must observe that we cannot
.
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THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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105
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make-that Mark Twain does not make-an absolute opposition beand the stars over us was sparkling ever so fine; and down by the tween the river and human society. To Huck much of the charm of
village was the river, a whole mile broad, and awful still and grand."
the river life is human: it is the raft and the wigwam and Jim. He
The identification of the lights as the lamps of sick-watches defines
has not run away from Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas and
Huck's character.
his brutal father to a completely individualistic liberty, for in Jim he
His sympathy is quick and immediate. When the circus audience
finds his true father, very much as Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce's
laughs at the supposedly drunken man who tries to ride the horse,
Ulysses finds his true father in Leopold Bloom.2 The boy and the
Huck is only miserable: "It wasn't funny to me ... ; I was all of a
Negro slave form a family, a primitive community-and it is a
tremble to see his danger." When he imprisons the intending murcommunity of saints.
derers on the wrecked steamboat, his first thought is of how to get
Huck's intense and even complex moral quality may possibly not
someone to rescue them, for he considers "how dreadful it was, even
appear on a first reading, for one may be caught and convince
.
� by h�s
for murderers, to be in. such a fix. I says to myself, there ain't no
own estimate of himself, by his brags about his lazy hedomsm, his
telling but I might come to be a murderer myself yet, and then how
avowed preference for being alone, his dislike of civilization. The
would I like it." But his sympathy is never sentimental. When at
fact is, of course, that he is involved in civilization up to his ears.
last he knows that the murderers are beyond help, he has no inclina
His escape from society is but his way of reaching what society
tion to false pathos. "I felt a little bit heavy-hearted about the gang,
ideally dreams of for itself. Responsibility is the very essence of his
but not much, for I reckoned that if they could stand it I could." His
character, and it is perhaps to the point that the original of Huck, a
will is genuinely good and he has no need to torture himself with
boyhood companion of Mark Twain's named Tom Blenkenship,
guilty second thoughts.
did, like Huck, "light out for the Territory," only to become a
Not the least remarkable thing about Huck's feeling for people
justice of the peace in Montana, "a good citizen and greatly re-
is that his tenderness goes along with the assumption that his fellow
spected."
.
men are likely to be dangerous and wicked. He travels incognito,
Huck does indeed have all the capacities for simple happiness he
never telling the truth about himself and never twice telling the
says he has, but circumstances and his own moral nature make �im
same lie, for he trusts no one and the lie comforts him even when it
the least carefree of boys-he is always "in a sweat" over the predicais not necessary. He instinctively knows that the best way to keep a ment of someone else. He has a great sense of the sadness of human
party of men away from Jim on the raft is to beg them to come
life, and although he likes to be alone, the words "lonely" and "loneaboard to help his family stricken with smallpox. And if he had not liness" are frequent with him. The note of his special sensibility is
already had the knowledge of human weakness and stupidity and
struck early in the story: "Well, when Tom and me got to the edge
cowardice, he would soon have acquired it, for all his encounters
of the hilltop we looked away down into the village and could see
forcibly teach it to him-the insensate feud of the Graingerfords and
three or four lights twinkling where there were sick folks, maybe;
Shepherdsons, the invasion of the raft by the Duke and the King,
2 In Joyce's Finnegans Wake both Mark Twain
the murder of Boggs, the lynching party, and the speech of Colonel
. and Huckleberry Finn appea,r
frequently. The theme of rivers is, o� course, dominant m the book; and I-luck s
Sherburn. Yet his profound and bitter knowledge of human dename suits Joyce's purpose, for Finn 1s one of the many names of his hero. Mar�
Twain's love of and gift for the spoken language make another reason for Joyce s
pravity never prevents him from being a friend to man.
.
interest in him.
No personal pride interferes with his well-doing. H.e knows what
.
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106
THE LIBERAL IMAGINATION
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Huckleberry Finn
-··-·-·-··-·-··-··-.. -·---··-·--··-·--··--·-··-··-·-·-··
status is and on the whole he respects it-he is really a very re
out �id work, en wid de callin' for you, en went to sleep, my heart wuz
spectable person and inclines to like "quality folks"-but he himself
mos broke bekase you wuz los', en I didn' k'yer no mo' what became
er m
is unaffected by it. He himself has never had status, he has always
; en de raf'. En when I wake up en fine you back agin, all safe en
soun, de tears come, en I could a got down on my knees en kiss yo'
been the lowest of the low, and the considerable fortune he had
,
foot, I s so thankful. �n all
acquired in The Adventures of Tom Saw
. you wuz thinkin' 'bout wuz how you could
yer is never real to him.
make a fool uv ole Jim w1d a lie. Dat truck dah is trash· en trash is
When the Duke suggests that Huck and Jim render him the perwhat people is dat puts dirt on de head er dey fren's e� makes 'em sonal service that accords with his rank, Huck's only comment is,
ashamed."
Then he got up slow and walked to the wigwam, and went in there
"Well, that was easy so we done it." He is injured in every possible
without saying anything hut that.
way by the Duke and the King, used and exploited and manipulated, yet when he hears that they are in danger from a mob, his na
The pride of human affection has been touched, one of the few
tural impulse is to warm them. And when he fails of his purpose
prides that has any true dignity. And at its utterance, Huck's one
and the two men are tarred and feathered and ridden on a rail, his
last dim vestige of pride of status, his sense of his position as a white
only thought is, "Well, it made me sick to see it; and I was sorry
man, wholly vanishes: "It was fifteen minutes before I could work
for them poor pitiful rascals, it seemed like I couldn't ever feel any
myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and
hardness against them any more in the world."
I warn't sorry for it afterwards either."
And if Huck and Jim on the raft do indeed make a community of
This in�ident is the beginning of the moral testing and developsaints, it is because they do not have an ounce of pride between ment which a character so morally sensitive as Huck's must inthem. Yet this is not perfectly true, for the one disagreement they evitably undergo. And it becomes an heroic character when, on the
ever have is over a matter of pride. It is on the occasion when Jim
urging of affection, Huck discards the moral code he has always
and Huck have been separated by the fog. Jim has mourned Huck
taken for granted and resolves to help Jim in his escape from slavery.
as dead, and then, exhausted, has fallen asleep. When he awakes and
The intensity of his struggle over the act suggests how deeply he is
finds that Huck has returned, he is overjoyed; but Huck convinces
involved in the society which he rejects. The satiric brilliance of the
him that he has only dreamed the incident, that there has been no
episode lies, of course, in Huck's solving his problem not by doing
fog, no separation, no chase, no reunion, and then allows him to
"right" b�t by doing "wrong." He has only to consult his conscience,
make an elaborate "interpretation" of the dream he now believes he
the consCJence of a Southern boy in the middle of the last century, to