One More Thing (13 page)

December 31st—So many parties going on tonight. On a Tuesday?! Not complaining, just saying.

January 1st—Woke up at sun-past-mountain with a headache. So much for the “dawn” thing. But I still feel good.

The Ghost of Mark Twain

It was a dreary day in midtown Manhattan.

A middle-school teacher had requested a meeting at the offices of an editor of Bantam Scholastic Classics politely and persistently for sixty consecutive days. The editor finally agreed to the meeting, even though the subject line in each email, “Regarding the Language in Huckleberry Finn,” gave him reason to assume the teacher’s agenda was to discuss what he considered to be the most tiresome topic in all of literature.

“Hi. How are you? Please, have a seat.”

“Thank you.”

“Water?”

“No thanks—actually, sure.”

Both men were white and in their early thirties, with messy brown hair, mildly rumpled clothing, and a barely-but-always-burning glint of trouble in their eyes, like a pilot light. The minor mischief of the A-minus student was recognizable in each to the other as the two men nodded, smiled, and crossed one foot at a right angle over the opposite knee with a similarly delicate masculine casualness.

“It’s about
Huckleberry Finn
.”

“Yes!” said the editor. “What about it?”

“First: it’s important for me to say that I truly believe
Huckleberry Finn
is an American classic.”

“Yes.”

“And I love it.”

“As do I.”

“Well, I’m here to propose you make some minor changes to the version you issue to schools. But first I want you to know that I’m no fan of censorship—”

“Oh, but what you propose—‘minor changes,’ as you just put it—is actually far more destructive to a text than censorship,” said the editor, looking to ambush the teacher’s argument before it could assume its proper form. “In the face of censorship, a reader could hold out the hope of coming across the unaltered text at another point, through another means, and to experience it then with unbiased eyes. But when you change the material, and publish that
as
the material, you’re making it so that the material, in its true form, no longer has a chance to exist in any minds at all.”

“That is a very compelling point,” replied the teacher. “Except there are circumstances in which a work has been made stronger by its evolution through the different cultural periods and forces, aren’t there? Take, for instance,
The Arabian Nights
, evolving through centuries of oral tradition. Or the works of Shakespeare: thanks to faulty memories, plagiarism, and regional preferences, we now have variations across numerous quartos and folios, and perhaps we’re the richer for it—who’s to say?”

The editor smiled. This teacher seemed smarter than the usual
Huck Finn
controversialists, and was certainly the first one he had encountered who might be entitled to more than the simplest “please/no” exchange. Usually, the editor found those who sought him out to talk about
Huckleberry Finn
were the
simplest-minded elitists who didn’t have the capacity to understand, let alone teach, historical context or irony—and yet who frowned sagaciously at him as though
he
were the literalist, the one who sadly just couldn’t
get
things like
sensitivity
and
racial tensions
and
the way the world is today
.

“In any case,” the teacher continued, “there is one word in the book that has a power today that it did not have in the time of the book’s publication, and, for that reason, this one word merits, in my opinion, special attention.”

“Are you talking about the word ‘nigger’?” said the editor, setting out again to shove his opponent off-balance by this blunt acknowledgment of the word his guest apparently considered so dangerous.

“That is
exactly
the word I’m here to talk about!” said the teacher. “Good, you saved us some time. Now, again I bring this up because I really do love the book, and I see it as my personal obligation to preserve the intention of Twain’s spirit for future generations—”

“As do I—”

“And I’m not even asking you to take this word out!” pleaded the teacher. “It’s the number of
times
the word is used in the book that feels so wrong to me. Did you know that this epithet is used in
Huckleberry Finn
two hundred and nineteen times?”

“Let me—please,” said the editor, pushing himself up from his chair to pace the room, upset at himself for having briefly gotten his hopes up for a less predictable discussion. “Let me end this conversation right now. There are uncomfortable words in
Huckleberry Finn
—no doubt. But it is our job to make sense of that. There is a well-earned cultural expectation that this book is not just a story of a boy and a raft but also a work that serves—in the way that only fiction can—as a truthful record, or at least a deeply truthful perspective, of the America of its time.”

“Yes, but times have changed—”

“Times always change! Our job is to make sense of this book in our own time. To try to wrestle with and understand the shades and meanings of its contrarianism, its ironies and ambiguities, its moral agenda and its amoral playfulness. For whatever reason they are there, the specific words of the text are inextricable from the spirit of the book, and my job,” announced the editor, surprised and a little moved to hear his purpose in life described in these terms, even by himself, “is to protect the spirit of Mark Twain. And so, while I am sorry that the word we are debating is such a tragic and loathsome and uncomfortable one, I refuse to publish an edition of
Huckleberry Finn
that takes the word out or even uses it any less.”

“Oh, I don’t want you to use the word ‘nigger’ less,” said the teacher. “I want you to use it
more
!”

“At this point—and you said it quite nicely yourself, in fact—there is a quote ‘well-earned cultural expectation’ surrounding
Huckleberry Finn
,” said the teacher, now beginning to pace the room himself.

“And because of this, leaving the present number of the word’s appearances alone risks dooming the book to permanent irrelevance! Let me tell you why. In the case of
Huckleberry Finn
, the controversy so precedes the material itself that students are now delivered a book that is preloaded with two notions: on the one hand, it’s the most controversial book they’ll ever read in school—but on the other hand, it may well be our nation’s greatest masterpiece. These dual preconceptions have become so inextricably linked in the public’s mind that at this point to diminish one is to diminish the other. And the controversy over this word has escalated each year for as long as we’ve
been alive—yet the number of times this word appears has not kept pace with the controversy! Therefore—to use a nautical metaphor we might both agree Sam Clemens would have smiled upon—the wake of expectations left by those who have rocked the boat has left us no choice but to add the word ‘nigger’ at least once or twice to every page.

“And imagine how that will improve the book! White students, African American students, foreign students new to this country—when they’re handed this book, they’re all expecting something explosive, something controversial, something they’ll want to talk about long into the night afterward, not because they are told to do so by a teacher, but because they
need
to, because their heart beats quicker or slower depending on whether or not their friends agree with what they think.
That’s
the impact of the book that stays with you, isn’t it? It was Twain, after all, who said something to the effect of ‘Don’t let schooling get in the way of your education.’ Yes?”

Yes, the editor indicated, nodding without moving his head.

“Well! I would contend that nothing would make the reading of this great book feel less like schooling and more like a damn education than for students to discover the most charged word of our lifetime plastered all over the pages of the book they are handed in a classroom, to a degree that shocks even—no, especially!—the teachers who have handed the book out! Take a moment and imagine
that
! And in plenty of cases, there may be honest and enlightened teachers who have already confessed to having been not particularly offended the first time they read the book. Can you imagine their shock and shame at then finding a book absolutely packed to the margins with our most explosive and controversial epithet—page after page after page? Can you imagine the looks on those teachers’ faces—these teachers who had just moments earlier confessed to them that as
they remembered it, the use of this word in this book
wasn’t that big a deal
? And, of course, the students will sense their teachers are off-balance—as students always have the uncanny ability to do—and will instinctively take that as their cue to lead the conversation—a conversation which rightfully belongs to them, wouldn’t you say?”

Each man stared at the other, trying to figure out to whom he was talking.

“I’m simply trying to protect the legacy of Mark Twain,” said the editor, scratching his face where a mustache would be.

“So am I,” said the visitor, tapping his lips where a pipe would be.

The Beautiful Girl in the Bookstore

She loved the kind of books you could buy in stores that also sold things.

Her favorite store, which was only two or three blocks away from where she and Sophie lived that year, depending on how you walked, was full of books, and it was also full of things.

Sometimes in the afternoon, when she and her boyfriend ran out of things to talk about, which was often enough, they went to the bookstore.

He looked at the books. She looked at everything.

Some of the things that the store had: oversize fashion magazines from the 1940s and ’50s; vintage maps from back when states were just scraggly lines, just guesses; railroad spikes that had been made into bottle openers. There was a magnifying glass built out of a knotted clunk of iron with a foggy lens that magically made even the most serious face, her boyfriend’s face, for example, evaporate into a vague and bloated and goofy smile that never failed to make her laugh.

Things like that.

“How good does this book smell,” she said, pulling a paperback from a shelf. “Like dust on a bottle of vanilla.” She
turned it to read the front. “Salinger! I love him. Four dollars. Perfect!”

She always thought how much better the store would look if they arranged the books at least a little bit by color. She only brought this up once, the first time she thought it, because he hated that idea, a lot. But sometimes when no one was looking, she would shuffle one or two books in that direction. And she was right, it did look better that way.

“You know what would make this store perfect?”

He said he didn’t.

“A photo booth!”

He smiled but said that he didn’t agree.

In the end, this one wasn’t for her. She waited until a morning fog of dishonesty settled over them one day, and she disappeared into it. She loved him, but she never quite got over the suspicion that she was just his favorite thing in the bookstore.

MONSTER: The Roller Coaster