EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews The Adventures of Huckleberry Finnby Mark Twain
RACISM AND SLAVERY are major themes in this definitive, timeless comic picaresque, the tale of a lively young boy none too keen on an elderly widow’s attempts to civilise him.
Huck Finn is one of literature’s immortals, half-anarchic innocent, half wised-up abused son of a vicious drunkard. Equally remarkable is the boy’s companion for much of his journey, Jim, Miss Watson’s runaway black slave. Jim has his superstitions and why not? He is also a dreamer, possessed of true compassion, who tells himself that as soon as he gets to a Free State and earns some money, he will buy his wife and then together they will work to buy their children.
It is a tremendously funny book and is as truthful and as deliberate as anything Dickens wrote. In fact there are many echoes of Dickens in both the pace and the vivid characterisation, not forgetting that neither Dickens nor Twain harboured any delusions about humankind.
Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens came from Southern stock that had moved from Virginia, to the slave-holding lands of the Louisiana Purchase and on to Hannibal, Missouri, where he grew up. His father died when he was 12 and he was apprenticed to a printer.
Twain was an open-eyed realist, immune to all the romanticised cant about southern chivalry. He had served briefly in the southern army and knew what living in the south meant for anyone born black. Nigger is used freely throughout the narrative by both black and white because the word was a fact of life and no amount of politically correct hindsight can, or should, alter that. Twain was sharp and shrewd, having a strong moral sense, comic flair and timing in abundance – plus a well-developed commercial instinct. Huckleberry Finn was the sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer which had appeared nine years earlier.
Twain’s pioneering classic shares Walt Whitman’s celebration of the American vernacular, admittedly in a most specific way. Twain prefaced the story with an explanatory note explaining the number of dialects he had used as he did not wish readers supposing “that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.”
Huck’s comic language and individual world view are spectacularly well served by a dialect which charges the narrative with an energy and pace which is sustained throughout a sequence of burlesque encounters and happenings. When caught out by Aunt Sally he memorably reports “My heart fell down amongst my lungs and livers and things, and a hard piece of corn-crust started down my throat after it. . .”
And yes, like many a hero, Huck is an inventive liar who has been influenced by Tom Sawyer, himself shaped by the romantic adventures he has feasted upon. Huck is aware that he is not as “well brung up” as Tom.
Twain allows Huck moments of insight such as when debating the matter of helping Jim escape, the boy is aware that he is stealing a commodity – Jim is Miss Watson’s property. But Huck is equally conscious that Jim is a human being. When faced with either informing Miss Watson of Jim’s intended flight or of assisting him, Huck decides to help: “All right, then, I’ll go to hell.” Elsewhere, when watching thieves who are preparing to rob the Wilks family, a disgusted Huck recalls, “It was enough to make a body ashamed of the human race.” He thwarts the criminals. Twain, however, ensures our hero is no goodie goody. Set in the Mississippi Valley some years before the Civil War, Twain presents the pastoral innocence of the riverbank confronted by the growing corruption threatening the nation’s mighty north-south turnpike. Drifting down the mythic river on their raft enables Huck and Jim to form a convincing, unsentimentalised bond. Despite the claims of Melville’s magnificent, though strongly European, Moby Dick (1851) here is the first great American novel. “If I’d knowed what a trouble it was to make a book, I wouldn’t a tackled it,” announces Huck. Thankfully he did.
This is a weekly series in which Eileen Battersby revisits titles from the literary canon