The Spooky Art (39 page)

S
omewhere around the turn of the century, we have Chekhov visiting Tolstoy. He takes the train to the nearest station. Let’s say it’s wintertime. He rents two horses and a sled, and drives out through the snow to Yasnya Polyana. Tolstoy’s pretty old by now, big, strong, severe, of course, and sits him right down and they talk. They drink tea and they talk. Tolstoy says: “Chekhov, you are a very good writer. You are excellent. Some of your short stories are so good I would have been pleased to have written them myself. But, Chekhov, I must tell you: You are a
terrible
playwright! You are awful! You are even worse than Shakespeare!”

Afterward, Chekhov drives back to the railroad station through the snow. In his journal he will write: “I whipped the horses. To the moon I shouted, ‘I am even
worse
than Shakespeare!’ ”

It’s a fine story, but if it’s true, why did Tolstoy dislike Shakespeare
so? I expect the answer is that Tolstoy was always searching for subtle but precise moral judgment. That required a detailed sense of any sequence of events which had produced a dramatic or tragic event. You had to know how to assess the blame. For that, you needed to know exactly when and why things happened.

But there, very much in the way, was Shakespeare, the greatest movie writer who ever existed—centuries before cinema had a silver screen. For Shakespeare was not interested in making careful connections with his characters. Shakespeare was looking to get the most dynamic actors together under any circumstance available, no matter how contrived (King Lear can be the first example). He was looking for superb exchanges of dialogue and fantastic moments, vertiginous possibilities for the English language, whereas Tolstoy looked for sobriety of moral judgment. So he considered Shakespeare a monster who paid no attention to causality except when it was useful to him. Will’s people did incredible things, fell in love or murdered, the latter with a minimum of preparation—Macbeth—and then had exceptional speeches that seared an audience’s consciousness. To Tolstoy, this was monstrous, and must have been equal to the way some of us look these days upon advertising campaigns that are stuffed with manipulation and little else.

But why Tolstoy would compare Chekhov to Shakespeare is another question. I don’t know that anyone is prepared to answer.

If there is a reason, I suspect it was for a different set of faults. Tolstoy may have felt that Chekhov was a prelude to someone yet to arrive, someone like Beckett. In his plays, Chekhov’s people were simply not doing what they ought to be doing. What had to irritate Tolstoy immensely was that Anton’s play-actors sat in their own spiritual excrement and made sweet speeches and moaned a little and sighed and groaned and never got out of their situation. To Tolstoy, this was a cardinal sin. One should not live with the given when it is vapid and vaguely immoral. That was one of Tolstoy’s most basic notions. You may have to endure a dreary given as a discipline, but you do not accept your condition as eternal, as the meaning of life. He could not permit that. Could not accept how Chekhov made so much of the essential inanition of the Russian middle class.

I
s there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In nineteenth-century Russia,
Anna Karenina
was received with the following: “Vronsky’s passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna” … “Sentimental rubbish” … “Show me one page,” says
The Odessa Courier
, “that contains an idea.”
Moby-Dick
was incinerated: “Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met before in marine literature” … “Sheer moonstruck lunacy” … “Sad stuff. Mr. Melville’s Quakers are wretched dolts and scrivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.”

By this measure,
Huckleberry Finn
gets off lightly.
The Springfield Republican
judged it to be no worse than “a gross trifling with every fine feeling.… Mr. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,” and the public library in Concord, Massachusetts, was confident enough to ban it: “the veriest trash.”
The Boston Transcript
reported that “other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.”

All the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded. There were no large critical hurrahs, but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. A good tale, went the consensus. There was
no sense that a great novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. S. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway’s encomiums fifty years later. In the preface to the English edition, Eliot would speak of “a masterpiece … Twain’s genius is completely realized,” and Ernest went further. In
Green Hills of Africa
, after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne, and Thoreau, and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called
Huckleberry Finn.
 … 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.”

Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect
vin de pays
for an ineluctable afternoon, was more like other novelists in one dire respect: He was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments. Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author’s rule of thumb: If I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously,
Huckleberry Finn
has passed the test.

A suspicion immediately arises. Mark Twain is doing the kind of writing only Hemingway can do better. Evidently, we must take a look. May I say it helps to have read
Huckleberry Finn
so long ago that it feels brand-new on picking it up again. Perhaps I was eleven when I saw it last, maybe thirteen, but now I only remember that I came to it after
Tom Sawyer
and was disappointed. I couldn’t really follow
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
The character of Tom Sawyer, whom I had liked so much in the first book, was altered, and did not seem nice anymore. Huckleberry Finn was altogether beyond me. Later, I recollect being surprised by the high regard nearly everyone who taught American Lit lavished upon the text, but that didn’t bring me back to it. Obviously, I was waiting for an assignment from
The New York Times.

Let me offer assurances. It may have been worth the wait. I suppose I am the ten millionth reader to say that
Huckleberry Finn
is an extraordinary work. Indeed, for all I know, it is a great novel. Flawed, quirky, uneven, not above taking cheap shots and cashing far too many checks (it is rarely above milking its humor)—all the same, what a book we have here! I had the most curious sense of excitement. After a while, I understood my peculiar frame of attention. The book was so up-to-date! I was not
reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of those rare letters that say, “We won’t make this claim often, but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out.” So it was like reading
From Here to Eternity
in galleys, back in 1950, or
Lie Down in Darkness, Catch-22
, or
The World According to Garp
(which reads like a fabulous first novel). You kept being alternately delighted, surprised, annoyed, competitive, critical, and, finally, excited. A new writer had moved onto the block. He could be a potential friend or enemy, but he most certainly was talented.

That was how it felt to read
Huckleberry Finn
a second time. I kept resisting the context until I finally surrendered. One always does surrender sooner or later to a book with a strong magnetic field. I felt as if I held the work of a young writer about thirty or thirty-five, a prodigiously talented fellow from the Midwest, from Missouri probably, who had had the audacity to write a historical novel about the Mississippi as it might have been a century and a half ago, and this young writer had managed to give us a circus of fictional virtuosities. In nearly every chapter new and remarkable characters bounded out from the printed page as if it were a tarmac on which they could perform their leaps. The author’s confidence seemed so complete that he could deal with every kind of man or woman God ever gave to the middle of America. Jail-house drunks like Huck Finn’s father take their bow, full of the raunchy violence that even gets into the smell of clothing. Gentlemen and river rats, young, attractive girls full of grit and “sand,” and strong old ladies with aphorisms clicking like knitting needles, fools and confidence men—what a cornucopia of rabble and gentry inhabit the author’s river banks.

It would be superb stuff if only the writer did not keep giving away the fact that he was a modern young American working in 1984. His anachronisms were not so much in the historical facts—those seemed accurate enough—but the point of view was too contemporary. The scenes might succeed—say it again, this young writer was talented!—but he kept betraying his literary influences. The author of
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
had obviously been taught a lot by such major writers as Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos, and John Steinbeck; he had certainly lifted from Faulkner and the mad tone Faulkner could achieve
when writing about maniacal men feuding in deep swamps; he had also absorbed much of what Vonnegut and Heller could teach about the resilience of irony. If he had a surer feel for the picaresque than Saul Bellow in
Augie March
, still he felt derivative of that work. In places one could swear he had memorized
The Catcher in the Rye
, and he probably dipped into
Deliverance
and
Why Are We in Vietnam?
He might even have studied the mannerisms of movie stars. You could feel traces of John Wayne, Victor McLaglen, and Burt Reynolds in his pages. The author had doubtless digested many a Hollywood comedy on smalltown life. His instinct for life in hamlets on the Mississippi before the Civil War was as sharp as it was farcical, and couldn’t be more commercial.

No matter. With a talent as large as this, one could forgive the obvious eye for success. Many a large talent has to go through large borrowings in order to find his own style, and a lust for popular success, while dangerous to serious writing, is not necessarily fatal. Yes, one could accept the pilferings from other writers, given the scope of his work, the brilliance of the concept—to catch rural America by a trip on a raft down a great river! One could even marvel uneasily at the depth of the instinct for fiction in the author. With the boy Huckleberry Finn, this new novelist had managed to give us a character of no comfortable, measurable dimension. It is easy for characters in modern novels to seem more vivid than figures in the classics but, even so, Huckleberry Finn appeared to be more alive than Don Quixote and Julien Sorel, as naturally near to his own mind as we are to ours. But how often does a hero who is so absolutely natural on the page also succeed in acquiring convincing moral stature as his adventures develop?

It is to be repeated. In the attractive grip of this talent, one is ready to forgive the author of
Huckleberry Finn
for every influence he has so promiscuously absorbed. He has made such fertile use of his borrowings. One could even cheer his appearance on our jaded literary scene if not for the single transgression that goes too far. These are passages that do more than borrow an author’s style—they copy it! Influence is mental, but theft is physical. Who can declare to a certainty that a large part of the prose in
Huckleberry Finn
is not lifted directly from Hemingway? We know that we are not reading Ernest only because the author, obviously fearful that his tone is getting too near, is careful
to sprinkle his text with “a-clutterings” and “warn’ts” and “anywheres” and “t’others.” But we have read Hemingway—and so we see through it—we know we are reading pure Hemingway disguised:

Up to now I have conveyed, I expect, the pleasure of reading this book today. It is the finest compliment I can offer. We use an unspoken standard of relative judgment on picking up a classic. Secretly, we expect less reward from it than from a good contemporary novel. The average intelligent modern reader would probably, under torture, admit that
Heartburn
was more fun to read, minute for minute, than
Madame Bovary
, and maybe one even learned more. That is not to say that the first will be superior to the second a hundred years from now but that a classic novel is like a fine horse carrying an exorbitant impost. Classics suffer by their distance from our day-to-day gossip. The mark of how good
Huckleberry Finn
has to be is that one can compare it to a number of our best modern American novels and it stands up page for page, awkward here, sensational there—absolutely the equal of one of those rare incredible first novels that come along once or twice in a decade. So I have spoken of it as kin to a first novel because it is so young and so fresh and so all-out silly in some of the chances it takes and even wins. A wiser old novelist would never play that far out when the work was already well along and so neatly in hand, but Twain does.