Huckleberry Fiend (12 page)

What was this? Had I criticized Mark Twain and got away with it? Anyway, lightning hadn’t struck me, and Dan Dupart hadn’t kicked my teeth in. “Not really,” I ventured.

Dupart seemed to be thinking. “Maybe that’s what Justin Kaplan meant.”

“Twain’s biographer?”

“You know Twain criticized Conan Doyle for what he called ‘cheap and ineffectual ingenuities.’ And Kaplan said he was envious.”

Vindication of sorts! And from no less a scholar than Twain’s biographer. I relaxed a little, even venturing to drift into a conversation about Olivia Langdon, Clemens’s wife, his “dear little gravity,” who had censored and emasculated him, transforming him from adventurer to petit bourgeois. The only problem was, I was way out of my depth, according to Professor Marcia Dunlap, a hundred-and-one pounds of fun who seemed to have packed several libraries under the brandy-colored mop on her head.

“Perhaps you recall,” she prompted, “that Clemens fell in love with her image— a picture he saw six months before he ever met her. That’s the important thing to remember about the relationship.”

“He didn’t
marry
a picture.”

“But it’s hardly as if he fell under the spell of
la belle dame sans merci
. On the contrary, he camped on her doorstep till she gave in.”

“Still, she made him take the temperance pledge and become a Christian.”

“Thereby setting himself up beautifully to spend the rest of his life playing the role of the henpecked husband. He enjoyed it, Paul, you see? It was another way of saying, ‘It didn’t happen on my shift.’ Despite his carryings-on, he actually had most things his way. In fact, Livy ended up drinking beer every night and becoming an unbeliever. While he not only never became a Christian in any true sense, but continued drinking most enthusiastically.”

“You can’t get around the fact that she censored his work.”

“If ever a man begged to be ‘censored,’ it was our Mr. Clemens. At his behest, Bret Harte ‘censored’ him, and so did William Dean Howells, and so did Mary Fairbanks before he even met Livy. Later on, so did his publisher, so did Paine (who did considerably more than edit) and so did De Voto. Charles Neider’s my favorite. He simply took it upon himself to reorganize Twain’s
Autobiography
, after casually dismissing the author’s notion of stream-of-consciousness as ‘an extraordinary idea.’ For that matter, any editor ‘censors’ any writer.”

Cheered by her mention of Bernard De Voto, who was no admirer of Livy’s, I remembered another scholar, Van Wyck Brooks, who agreed with De Voto on Mrs. Clemens but on virtually nothing else. “Oh, come now, Marcia— about the only thing most Twain scholars actually
agree
on is the stifling influence of her Victorian ideas.”

“I’m afraid, Paul, you’re a little out of date. Today, we’re taking Twain’s own portrayal of Livy— as suppressor of his artistic genius— for the self-serving drivel it was. As a humorist, he himself was extremely careful to choose ‘safe’ subjects that wouldn’t offend— from the pious pilgrims of
The Innocents Abroad
to slavery in
Huckleberry Finn
. Yet he persisted in portraying himself as the sensitive and suppressed artist. Perhaps you recall what he told Paine on his seventy-third birthday.”

“I can’t say that I do.”

“He said his best book was
Joan of Arc
.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Joan of Arc.”

This was embarrassing. “I didn’t even know he wrote a book by that title.”

Dunlap folded her arms and lowered her chin in a gesture of utter complacency. “I rest my case.”

“Well, you might fill me in on what it is.”

“There’s a reason you never heard of
Joan of Arc
. It has about as much life to it as the telephone book. The point being that Twain was a terrible judge of his own work. After Livy died, he published the books she’d forbidden. Maybe you remember
What Is Man?”

“Afraid not.”

“How about
Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven
?”

“Vaguely, maybe.”

“In the preface to
What Is Man?
, he said the ideas in it had been thought by millions who never dared to express them, and that he himself hadn’t dared up till then.”

“My God, what’s it about?”

She shrugged. “Nothing very exciting. Man’s helpless position, I guess— pretty straightforward determinism. That was the great censored material.”

“Please, Marcia.” I wasn’t going to be daunted by a mere dazzling display. “He read to Livy every night. She ‘edited’ as they went.”

“Did you know that the idea for
The Gilded Age
came from Livy and Susan Warner? It’s certainly no genteel work of self-congratulatory Christianity.”

Ha! Now I could give her back some of her own. “It’s not exactly Twain’s best book, either.”

“As Huck would say, you are the
beatin’est
man! Very well, then.” She now had the look of a boxer beginning to circle. “After Livy, Howells, Livy’s mother, and Livy’s aunt all had read
Tom Sawyer
, Clemens wasn’t satisfied. When Huck complained about life at the Widow Douglas’s, he remarked, if you recall, ‘They comb me all to thunder’.”

I didn’t, but I nodded, anyway. “Sounds like Huck.”

“Well, Clemens originally wrote, ‘all to hell.’ He changed it himself.”

I was a broken man. Feebly, I summoned the tiny bit of breath I still had. “Professor,” I gasped, “as the old man himself might have said, you’re too many for me.” I made my way towards the genteel and self-congratulatory blush wine.

Whew! I remembered Linda’s description of the talk she was going to give— the biggie. Did that mean the Livy Question? Was I going to have to listen to the whole thing all over again? It had been a long time since my Cal days, but I felt suddenly thrown back to the old life of faculty parties and discussions like the one-sided one I had just had with Professor Dunlap. As I recalled, I’d been able to hold my own a little better, but perhaps I was misremembering. I figured I’d better keep my opinions about “The Mysterious Stranger” to myself. In truth, I liked Paine’s pastiche better than Twain’s “No. 44,” but wild horses couldn’t have dragged it out of me.

I tried to figure out the best way of doing what I’d come there for, but after a few half-hearted attempts finally gave up trying to meet and question everyone there. Not only was Dunlap too many for me, so were the Fiends— there must have been twenty-five of them, and I hadn’t a prayer. I’d have to make a general appeal. I barely had time to find Linda and tell her I’d changed my mind before someone rapped for order.

It was a sixtyish woman, the lady of the house and apparently the head Fiend. “Our speaker tonight is Linda McCormick, on a topic that so far all of us have managed to avoid. It’s a brave person who would take on such a task, but she has graciously agreed to tackle it— it being, of course, The Ending.”

Whistles, catcalls, loud applause. You’d have thought she was about to perform The Royal Nonesuch. I cursed myself for an idiot— the biggie, of course, was the controversial ending of
Huckleberry Finn
.

Linda looked nonplussed. “Really, I don’t deserve all that. Let me just say up front that I don’t have the answer. I’m just going to run through a few thoughts on the subject. Actually, it’s kind of a grim joke around the office. Whenever anyone says ‘Ending,’ we’ve gotten so we cringe. After you’ve heard fifty thousand explanations, they tend to cancel each other out. But I’m going to talk about it, and also about the last ten chapters, when the book turns from so-called serious intent to burlesque.

“To begin with, even so great an admirer of Huck as Ernest Hemingway said, ‘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.’ The plain fact is that it reads as if Twain simply wrote himself into a corner. As Huck himself asked, Why would a runaway slave run South? Twain was an improviser. And so he found himself in a situation where he had a comic setup, but he needed a serious ending. However, given the political and social circumstances of the day, there was no reasonable way for Jim, having run South, to get free. Thus the author relied on the ancient and, some would say, cheap device of a
deus ex machina
: It was simple; Jim was free all along. And to get to that point, Twain chose to introduce Tom Sawyer and to descend into what De Voto called ‘a trivial extravaganza on a theme he had exhausted years before. In the whole history of the English novel,’ De Voto said, ‘there is no more chilling descent.’

“In his boyish quest for what he calls ‘adventure,’ Tom is horribly cruel to Jim, making him wait weeks for his freedom, in the prison of a cabin infested with the rats, snakes, caterpillars, frogs, and spiders Tom insists are essential in a good escape story. Huck stands by and lets it happen, not only abdicating responsibility, but disapproving of Tom for what he believes to be a compromise of his character in doing so antisocial a thing as freeing a slave.”

She paused a moment, lapsing into a more conversational tone. “Most professors seem to find that about 50 percent of their students aren’t offended. After all, Huck is used to cruelty. He’s seen lots of it by this point in the book and has even noted, when the King and Duke are ridden out of town on a rail, ‘Human beings can be awful cruel to each other.’ These students remember, I think, that Huck has always deferred to Tom. They may remember as well that both books— meaning
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
— are full of childish superstition. If Huck can believe a dead cat will cure warts, why shouldn’t he believe that, to make a successful escape, a prisoner has to have snakes, frogs, and a rope ladder? It’s enough for these readers that, when Huck says, ‘All right, then, I’ll
go
to hell!’ his sound heart, as Mark Twain called it, has triumphed over his deformed conscience.

“Yet for many readers— obviously De Voto among them— the ending is tremendously disappointing. I think myself that its success has been underestimated. No one has yet proposed a more successful one. Bear with me for a moment while I read you a passage from the book.” Her smeary eyes were mischievous. “Can you stand that?” (Mock boos and hisses— she knew her audience.)

“ ‘There was a nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had… And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could
vote
, when he was at home… It was ’lection day and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I wam’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote again… And to see the cool way of that nigger— why, he wouldn’t give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out of the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?— that’s what I want to know.’” She closed her book. “Does anyone know who the speaker is?”

“Pap,” someone piped.

“Exactly. Huck’s pap. It’s a mistake to forget that Huck is, after all, the son of Pap. No wonder he had a deformed conscience! Frankly, I think the reason people become so disappointed is that they expect too much of him. They want him to be a hero, to rise above his roots. In a way, he
is
a hero, of course— he believes he’s given up his immortal soul to save Jim from slavery. That’s pretty heroic, I think. But what Huck certainly isn’t is a little Berkeley liberal, and you can’t make him into one no matter how hard you try. He’s simply a person of sound heart.

“But perhaps we make too much of all this. In our work at the university, we have a rule of thumb— if Mark Twain says something happened, or is based on fact, it probably is. We usually take the tack that if we think it didn’t, we’re wrong. When we begin to go off into flights of fancy about the author’s intent— as we imagine it— or get angry at him for not writing a better book, or, worst of all, start thinking of ways
we
could have made it better, it’s probably best if we remember these words.” She picked up her copy of the book once again and turned to the notice at the front. “ ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’” (Thunderous applause.) But Linda had one more thing to say before she sat down: “The Huck stops here.” (Boos and hisses.)

When the tumult had died, Linda introduced me and turned over the floor. I said: “I’m doing some research on collectors and I’d like to ask for your help. Maybe there are some of you here tonight, or perhaps you know of some. But I’m not looking for your average collector. I’m looking for someone whose fanaticism surpasses even yours— not a mere Fiend, more like a Hound of Huck. The sort of person whose whole life is Mark Twain, who identifies with him so thoroughly he almost has no other identity and no other interests.”

“Pamela Temby,” said Dan Dupart, “would kill to get her hands on a manuscript she wanted.”

“Yes,” said the straight-haired woman, “but would she sell her mother down the river?”

Full-scale hilarity broke out again— why, I had no idea. I was reminded of the story about the prisoners who got tired of telling the same jokes all the time, so they assigned them numbers that cracked everyone up on utterance. (Later, I realized the remark had been an allusion to an incident in
Pudd’nhead Wilson
.)

When order was restored, and I’d thanked Dan for his lead, an old man spoke up, a bald old man with a cane and a spot on his tie— retired high school teacher was my guess. “Tom Sawyer’s who you want.”

Was he senile?

But then there was a chorus of finger-snappings and “of courses.” And once again I was in the dark.

“Tom Sayers, he used to be. Had his name legally changed. One of our founding members, left here about ten years ago. Before that he worked over at the Berkeley Public Library. Lived, slept, and ate Mark Twain. Uncle died or something, left him pots and pots of money, and you know what he did? Bought up every Twain document he could get his hands on and moved to Virginia City to open a museum.”