The proposer began with a brief
introduction to the life of Samuel Clemens, whose pen name was Mark Twain.
("Mark Twain" was a Mississippi River term: the second mark on the
line used to measure safe depth for a steamboat.)
He was born in 1835, and grew up in
Missouri beside the Mississippi River.
The two books are set in the period of his own childhood, before the American
Civil War. A particularly relevant
biographical detail in relation to Huckleberry Finn is that he studied and worked for four
years as a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi River.
As a child, the proposer had received a
copy of Tom Sawyer as
a birthday present (at this point another member of the group brandished his
copy adorned with a school prize label – apparently in those days it was
considered suitable reading for an eight year old!). The proposer wanted to see if the books conjured up the
excitement he experienced reading them as a boy. (By contrast, another reader referred to his resistance to
Mark Twain and also Dickens as a youngster, when they were pushed at him by a
well-meaning literary aunt. He
thought however that a big part of the problem lay in the small type of the
editions current at the time.)
The proposer also wanted to test our
response to the view that ‘Tom Sawyer is great fun, Huckleberry Finn is great literature’.
In support of the second assertion, he
drew attention to the various significant American writers, including
Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, and Scott Fitzgerald, who have praised Huckleberry
Finn very highly. Hemingway accorded it seminal influence:
“All modern American literature comes from one book
by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' If you read it you must stop where the
Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just
cheating. But it's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from
that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since." --
from Ernest Hemingway, The Green Hills of Africa (1934)
The first member of the
group to offer an opinion after this introduction swooped like a vulture to a
fresh kill. He had found it a huge
struggle to get through Huckleberry
Finn and thought the storyline was ‘silly’. Having got this off his chest, he
folded his wings and stuck out his beak defiantly.
Another reader timorously
proposed the opinion that the books were so different that they could have been
written by different authors.
Someone said how much they
had enjoyed the descriptive writing about the river and natural events such as
thunderstorms. He also opined that
the river in this book had no real symbolic significance, and no-one challenged
this. (Another member of the group
suggested that interesting comparisons might be made with other books about
river journeys, such as Heart of Darkness).
He commented further that It was a picaresque novel, but
whereas most picaresque heroes end up by returning home – perhaps wiser than
they set out – in the case of Huck he has no real home, and intends to set out
into ‘Injun’ territory at the end of the story. To some degree, the arrival of Tom Sawyer in the latter part
of the story represents ‘coming home’ for Huck.
There was a consensus that
Huck’s characterization was convincing and sympathetic. It was pointed out that although he
reveals a good heart he does not have the independence of thought to challenge
the moral foundation of slavery, or the concept that ‘niggers’ are
subhuman. In this respect however
Huck’s attitude is simply typical of the time, and in no way extreme.
It was pointed out too that
Huck himself stood in the position of slave to his father, and that a judge
confirmed that he was the property of his father, irrespective of his
welfare. Like Jim, Huck is
imprisoned in a cabin, but his escape is masterfully pragmatic, unlike the
elaborate nonsense invented later by Tom Sawyer to free Jim. Tom is in fact a character who doesn’t
live in the real world, whereas Huck is very down-to-earth and lives in the
moment. Huck however doesn’t
question the superiority assumed by Tom, or query the absurdity of his ideas.
There was general agreement
that the last part of Huckleberry Finn greatly overplayed the joke of the
elaborate fantasy woven by Tom, and became merely tiresome. Like Hemingway, most thought that the
novel should have ended earlier.
It was noted that there was a three year hiatus in Mark Twain”s writing
process, before the ending was written, and we wondered about whether an
effective editor would have let the latter part of the novel pass unchallenged.
The preponderance of
dialogue in Huckleberry Finn was noted, and its apparent authenticity admired. It was remarked that the authorial
voice in the two books was different: in Tom Sawyer it is Mark Twain who
addresses us, in Huckleberry Finn it is Huck.
We kept returning to the
characterization of Huck. His
story doesn’t come to a conclusion.
He refers repeatedly to a wish to die, and to his lonesomeness. He has low self-esteem. He has no home, he is just running
away, and at the end he is still running.
The world outside him keeps encroaching (for example in the persons of
the duke and the king, or the attempts of Widow Douglas and Miss Watson to
‘civilize’ him). And yet he
embodies the qualities of boldness, adaptability and quick-wittedness that make
up the archetypal ‘frontier spirit’.
We didn’t spend as long on
the character of Tom Sawyer.
Essentially a fantasist, the main quality he shares with Huck is that
they are both prodigiously accomplished liars.
The violence of Huckleberry
Finn was
remarked upon, and it was suggested that it provided some historical context
for the casual violence and addiction to guns that characterize some elements
of society in the USA today.
Another reader admired how
both books provided a compendium of contemporary superstitions and ritual
behaviours. (As an example, Huck
Finn: “I’ve always reckoned that looking at the new moon over your left
shoulder is one of the carelessest and foolishest things a body can do.”) Both the ‘nigger’ Jim and the boys are
full of these beliefs, and it was suggested that for these uneducated
characters this network of superstitions filled the place that religion held
for some of the white adult characters.
A member of the group
interested in the visual arts proposed that Tom Sawyer was like representational
art, and Huckleberry Finn was like abstract art– playing with ideas and language
rather than too concerned with plot and structure. There was a general feeling that from a structural point of
view, Tom Sawyer was the more satisfying achievement, yet Huckleberry Finn was the more ambitious and
stimulating work.
What then of the initial
assertion that ‘Tom Sawyer is great fun, Huckleberry Finn is great literature’?
Well, there was more or less unanimity of
agreement on the first point, but a degree of dissension on the second. It was
felt that Huckleberry Finn had historical importance in its influence on American literature, and
was in many respects a very fine piece of writing, but that it lacked the
sophistication of the best European novels of the period. Of course the phrase ‘great literature’
has no precise definition, so this comparison should not be taken as excluding
Mark Twain from any pantheon of great writers.
Our conversation began now
to wander like the great Mississippi itself around various mudbanks and
shoals. We observed that many
aphorisms were attributed to Mark Twain; that his autobiography and other
writings showed him in general an astute commentator on American life; that he
was lionized in his lifetime and received various honorary degrees.
The games in Tom Sawyer reminded us of our own
childhood activities – spud guns, swapping cigarette cards, marbles.
We speculated about
colloquial expressions related to the books – being an ‘Aunt Sally’, or being
‘sold down the river’.
We talked about modern
versions of slavery, and the rights and wrongs of buying cheap clothing in
western countries that might have been produced using child labour or
near-slave labour.
We discovered from the
vulture, who turned out to have read on the sly Mark Twain’s autobiography,
that Twain at first wrote right-handed, and then because of rheumatism, changed
to left-handed and finally to dictation.
This led to conjecture about
the intellectual and creative significance of left-handedness, and a straw poll
in the group that revealed that two out of the nine people present were
left-handed, approximately in line with the average for the population at
large.
It now dawned on us that we
were following a deceptive tributary of our chosen river, or, to use a popular
colloquialism, we were up a certain creek without a paddle. So we closed our dusty school-prize
tomes, switched off our i-pads and kindles, and slunk off into the night.
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