The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books (9 page)

In
Huckleberry Finn,
from the very first page the reader feels that something is not quite right in those prim and proper homes, that there lurks an unspeakable menace in their hidden nooks and crannies. We gradually realize that Huck’s use of the word “smothery” is not merely a figure of speech. For him, life in his native town leads to “a-wishing you was dead all the time.” Rejecting the kind of respectability that inevitably accompanies stability and security, Huck sets out on his own in pursuit of another American dream: freedom.

In the second paragraph of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
Huck informs us that the Widow Douglas had decided to take him up and “sivilize” him. But, he writes, “it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out.” The story ends not with his return or his discovery of the pleasures of a new home, but in a circular way, with another escape when another pious and well-meaning woman, Aunt Sally, offers, as he puts it, to “adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.” So, he declares, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest.” The two leave-takings, at the start and end of the book, mirror each other just as the first eight chapters reflect the last ten. “Sivilize” is the operative word. Twain will make it his own, subverting not just the respectable view of the world, but his readers’ expectations, following John Locke’s maxim that all authority is error.

The first chapter begins innocently enough with the same complaints that Huck expressed in
Tom Sawyer
about living with the pious Widow Douglas. But unlike
Tom Sawyer,
this story is no longer about the kinds of restrictions that any “healthy” boy would try to escape from: waking up on time, going to school, brushing his teeth, saying his prayers before each meal or attending the obligatory Sunday school. Unlike the cheery atmosphere of
Tom Sawyer,
a dark mood pervades this quite ordinary world that is far more sinister and menacing than the uncertain wilderness in which Huck will take refuge.

Huck describes a hilarious conversation with the stern Miss Watson, Widow Douglas’s sister. When Miss Watson preaches about the rewards of going to heaven (where she is headed) and the punishments of hell (Tom Sawyer’s future abode), Huck informs her that he wouldn’t want to go to heaven without Tom Sawyer. He then goes on to tell us that “Miss Watson kept pecking at me, and it got tiresome and lonesome,” until finally they all went to bed.

So far we have a humorous scene, but then the trapdoor opens beneath our feet as Huck goes on to describe how he sat in a chair in his room and “tried to think of something cheerful, but it warn’t no use. I felt so lonesome I most wished I was dead. The stars were shining, and the leaves rustled in the woods ever so mournful; and I heard an owl, away off, who-whooing about somebody that was dead, and a whippowill and a dog crying about somebody that was going to die; and the wind was trying to whisper something to me, and I couldn’t make out what it was, and so it made the cold shivers run over me. . . . I got so down-hearted and scared I did wish I had some company.” All of this happens in the second page of the first chapter, where the words “dead” and “die” occur three times in one paragraph that also mentions a ghost feeling restless in its grave.

While preparing for my class, I got into the habit of reading the relevant passages aloud, almost acting them out, an exercise that I carried over to the class itself, where, during our discussions, I would ask my students to volunteer reading certain passages from the book. It was amazing how the varying moods and emotions leaped off the pages and took on a life of their own. When H. L. Mencken compared Twain to Shakespeare and Cervantes, he did have a point—in
Huck Finn
Twain created a new language from scratch and, along with it, a new world.

In that opening scene, nature, the leaves, the stars, the whip-poor-will, the dog and the wind all are mournful and fearsome, unlike the wilderness Huck will later take refuge in, where even danger is a “healthy” part of life. For Tom Sawyer, living in a “dismal regular” house might be a nuisance, but it is the other side of the coin to his wild fantasies and imaginary adventures. Whereas for Huck to be “regular,” to submit to someone else’s rules, was literally akin to death.

When I read those passages to Farah, she said they made her feel as if that boy were living in a coffin. “It’s enough to make you wish you were a-dying,” she said. “We forget Huck was just a small, lonely boy.”

In the second chapter, Huck and Tom, on their way to their secret game of “robbers,” run across the Widow Douglas’s slave, Jim. Against Huck’s protests, Tom plays a trick on Jim: while he is sleeping, Tom takes off his hat and hangs it from a branch, a foreshadowing of a far crueler trick he will engineer at the end of the story, with more serious consequences.

Tom and Huck meet up with other boys, members of Tom’s band of robbers, and pretend to loot and murder people, committing all these acts in “style,” like highwaymen, and as it’s done “in the books.” Their victims must be killed because, as Tom explains, “some authorities think different, but mostly it’s considered best to kill them.” From the start, the reader can see that Tom is Huck’s best friend only superficially. His language is a variant of the language used by the “respectable” Miss Watson. Like her, he goes by the book, regardless of the cost to real people. We know to which world Tom really belongs, thanks to his choice of language. When one of the boys objects to his plans, Tom says, “Now, Ben Rogers, do you want to do things regular, or don’t you?” Then he goes on to say, “Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do? Do you reckon
you
can learn ’em anything? . . . No, sir, we’ll just go on and ransom them in the regular way.” Language is the key to character. All the words that frighten Huck and drive him away from the widow’s smothery home are used by Tom: “regular,” “it’s considered best,” “the correct thing to do.”

Tom’s language is what Huck instinctively finds wrong with him when, after a month, he resigns from the gang of robbers. Tom Sawyer, Huck tells us, “called the hogs ‘ingots,’ and he called the turnips and stuff ‘julery,’” while a blazing stick was a “slogan.” When Huck objects to Tom’s foolish pranks, he is called ignorant. But unlike Tom and Miss Watson, Huck is a thinking person. He thinks over Tom’s claims for three days. It is only then that he decides that it was “only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies,” and at the end of the chapter he declares, “I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and the elephants, but as for me I think different. It had all the marks of a Sunday-school.” What the “marks of a Sunday-school” look like in real life we will discover at the end of the book.

As Huck tries to adjust to life at the Widow Douglas’s home, his tramp of a father appears on the scene. Greedy for the gold Huck found, he steals his own son, beats him to the point of death and locks him in a shed. Pap is perhaps the most repulsively portrayed character in the story, and it is not incidental that the quality most emphasized is his whiteness. “There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white . . . a white to make a body’s flesh crawl—a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white.” Pap’s physical repulsiveness matches his character, reflected in his rant against the government for doing nothing to rein in the free black man from Ohio he sees in town, who has the “whitest shirt,” the “shiniest hat,” a “gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane” and is also a “p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything”—and, worst of all, he could vote in his own state. This makes Pap furious. He threatens to never vote again, asking, “What is the country a-coming to?” It’s a comment reminiscent of more recent rants by pundits and politicians.

As with the Widow Douglas, Huck tries to adjust to his situation with Pap. But there is something restless in him, an urge to question authority. The questioning leads to solitary reflections—“long thinks,” he calls them—that precede all the momentous decisions he makes throughout the story. Huck begins to get used to his routine with his Pap, until something jolts him and makes him run: his Pap tells him that the judge is trying to get him back to the Widow Douglas’s, where Huck envisions himself again becoming “so cramped up and sivilized.” Pap tells him that if the judge decides in her favor, he will hide Huck somewhere no one can find him, leading to Huck’s decision to go so far away that neither “the old man nor the widow couldn’t ever find me any more.”

“The secret source of Humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” Twain wrote in his journal. This constant interplay of humor and sorrow becomes a structural part of the novel, shaping its characters, scenes and, most important, its language. When Huck is sent by Sophia, the lovelorn girl in the Grangerford household, to return to church and fetch her “Testament,” which she’s left behind, Huck finds that no one is in the church, except “maybe a hog or two,” who might have gotten in because there was no lock on the door and in summer, hogs like cool places. Then he adds, “If you notice, most folks don’t go to church only when they’ve got to; but a hog is different.” This casual comment is as effectively comic as another understated statement is tragic: when Huck witnesses, from up in a tree, as two warring clans, the Shepherdsons and the Grangerfords, massacre one another and he says, “I ain’t a-going to tell
all
that
happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them.”

It was a beautiful day, and I was walking toward the West End Library to check out a book. There was some shouting behind me, and I turned around to see Farah, in her bicycle helmet and gear, calling me “kiddo” and laughing. She wanted to join me later to have coffee and talk about Huck. At this point, I was thinking of subtitling my book “
Huck Finn’s Mongrels
.”

It was what she called one of her “good days,” and she was in a feisty mood when she joined me an hour later at the Soho coffee shop, on P Street and Twenty-second, one of the few independently owned coffee places in town. I wanted Farah to see it: I told her it reminded me of the coffee shops we’d frequented in Berkeley during our student days—shabby and colorful furniture and cushions, the ponytailed proprietor always present behind the counter. Good coffee, real mugs.

We got my cappuccino, her green tea and a scone to share and moved to a table at the farthest corner of the room.

“What’s up?” she said.

“What’s up with
you
?” I said back.

She smiled and told me her friend Bahram had said she should do two things for him: “Dye your hair and don’t die.” “So,” Farah said with her most inscrutable smile, “I dyed my hair!” She said it had been difficult for him to articulate his feelings, and the way he had done so had touched her a lot. And then she said again, “So what’s up?”

I told her I had started reading a biography of Mark Twain. Our exchanges over the previous few months had diverted me toward a whole pile of books that I probably shouldn’t have been reading. The more I read about Twain’s life, the more amazed I was by his almost instinctive hatred of slavery.

“The next time I teach
Huck Finn,
I will assign more autobiographical material,” I said. I had become obsessed by Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” I had always been intrigued by this magical interaction, the curious and constant interplay of fiction and reality, their affinities and rivalries.

“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery,” Twain reminisced late in life. “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”

His childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity and depravity. In 1904, years after the publication of
Huck Finn,
he wrote in his notebook, “The skin of every human being contains a slave.” The impact of his childhood experiences grew as he himself grew older and took up other causes: defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo, workers and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary; already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not “My country right or wrong” but “My country—when it is right.”

Witnessing the mistreatment by a German hotel manager of an Indian servant who accepted his punishment without protest, Twain writes that the incident “carried me instantly back to my boyhood and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the
usual way
of explaining one’s desire to a slave.” He remembered his own father’s regular cuffing of their slave boy and the accidental murder of a slave by his master, confessing that as a child he had accepted such treatment as natural, although he also felt “sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”

Twain felt it was not enough to condemn slavery; he felt he had to investigate as a writer its effects on the lives of individuals. In Notebook 35, he wrote: “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you
want
it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”