by Larry Doyle
“They’re not even laughing at the jokes anymore. They’re laughing at the punctuation.”
“Your punctuation is funny.”
“So many people. Such long names.”
“You’re lucky it’s not a memoir,” Alison says. “They’d tear you apart.” Poor choice of words, I think, considering this very stadium held the last reading of James Frey, somewhat ironically torn into only eighty-seven little pieces.
Ree-ding!… Ree-ding!!… Ree-ding!!!
I hoist out what used to be my writing hand. “It’s dead,” I pronounce.
“Marty,” Alison says.
Dr. Marty, the tour physician, shuffles over. He lays my bloated corpse of a paw across his lap. He pokes it. “Boy’s right,” the doc says in his syrupy Staten Island drawl. “This thing’s about to fall off.”
“If I wanted your medical opinion, I would have asked for it,” Alison snaps.
The good doctor nods and reaches into his bag, removing his fixings. He pops the syringe into the vial, pulls back on the plunger, and slowly withdraws a potent cocktail of vitamin B, morphine, and Major League Baseball–grade steroids. He taps my wrist twice and plunges the needle in. I don’t even feel it.
“This got Updike through the Couples tour,” Dr. Marty says. “You think it’s bad now. Back then they not only bought the books, they read them.”
Outside, the crowd has gone into an undulating roar. They are doing the wave, apparently.
“We better get you in there,” Alison says. “We don’t want another San Antonio.” The Last Symbol fiasco. Dan Brown’s flight was delayed. Before he could be helicoptered in, eight people were dead and posed ritualistically.
As I climb into the golf cart, I notice something on Fox News. People. Anger. Flames.
They’re all throwing my book into the fire. I could tell because of the distinctive cover.
I had said a stupid thing. The reporter showed me one of the full-page ads my publisher had taken out in newspapers across the country, quoting some blogger calling my novel “the greatest book ever written.” Surely, the reporter asked, I didn’t think my book was better than the Bible.
“It’s funnier than the Bible,” I said.
And I believe that. The Bible isn’t funny at all, except in a broad conceptual way. But I shouldn’t have said it, probably.
There are bonfires going in twenty-six cities, Megyn Kelly says, and on a couple of cruise ships. I stare at the screen. My words, on fire. My lovely books, thousands of them, turning to ash.
I chuckle. They didn’t even get a volume discount.
The cart comes out of the tunnel into what was once center field. The crowd roars and squeals in equal measure. They have come for the word. And I’m going to read it to them.
Huck of Darkness
Last fall in an attic in Hollywood, two sisters rifling through their grandfather’s things came upon an item their ancestor had borrowed from the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library more than a century before. It was perhaps the most infamous overdue book of all time: the first half of Mark Twain’s original manuscript for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 665 handwritten pages containing many passages omitted from the final version and thought to be lost forever. Because of the inherent literary, cultural, and historic value of the manuscript, the sisters immediately asked Sotheby’s in New York to sell it for as much as possible. The library, in turn, hired a powerful phalanx of big-city lawyers, demanding immediate return of the manuscript and payment of fines exceeding one million dollars (fifteen cents per day, compounded at 6 percent annually). It may be years before the matter is resolved.
Nevertheless, Sire magazine has managed to obtain, at great expense (and, we hasten to add, well outside the borders of the United States), a highresolution facsimile copy of the manuscript. While a number of pages appear to have been eaten by the fax machine, what came through intact is a literary find indeed. As the magazine which first published Huckleberry Finn in serial form, beginning in the fall of 1876 (under the unfortunate title A Boy and His Boy), we are proud to present to our readers never-before-seen excerpts from this satiric masterpiece. Critical commentary and annotation have been provided by Sire literary editor Laurence Doyle, who has read much of Mr. Twain’s work and considers himself a great fan.
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, above all else, a classic coming-of-age story about a young boy’s search for his identity.1 It is also, according to the critic Leslie Fiedler, a sort of literary “fairy tale” celebrating “the mutual love of a white man and a colored.”2 But the recent discovery of the first half of Twain’s handwritten manuscript3 indicates that Finn, in its original form, is in fact something else again: a veritable treasure trove of zany “lost episodes”4 to be enjoyed and analyzed by scholars and casual readers alike.5
Three such episodes are presented on the following pages. In order to place these passages in their proper context, readers are encouraged to cut them out and paste them, in the appropriate places, into their own copies of Huck Finn,6 and then reread the entire book from start to finish.
EPISODE ONE: PAP GOES THE WEASEL
As described in the opening chapters of the novel, Huck’s relationship with his father is a troubled one. A typical father-son interaction cycle between Huck and his “pap”7 involves: Pap bullying Huck for money to buy liquor; Pap getting drunk; Pap going to jail; Pap getting out of jail; and, finally, Pap beating the tar out of Huck, often leaving him “all over welts.”8 While such behavior is now easily recognized as symptomatic of an extremely dysfunctional codependency, at the time it was merely considered a form of child abuse, to be frowned upon rather than understood in terms of how it might affect both parties. Clearly, Twain meant to satirize this simplistic notion and wanted to say more about the nature of Huck’s relationship with his father; and in fact he did.
Near the end of chapter VI, there is a curious omission from the classic “delirium tremens” episode in which Pap, intoxicated,9 believes himself covered with snakes and demons and then attacks Huck. The passage speaks for itself. (Excised material appears in bold type.)
He chased me round and round the place, with a clasp-knife, calling me the Angel of Death and saying he would kill me and then I couldn’t come for him no more. I begged, and told him I was only Huck, but he laughed such a screechy laugh, it sent an awful scare through me and I froze up long enough that he could catch me and shove me down on the ground.
My face was in the dirt then and he lay atop me, pressing with all his weight and with his liquory breath burning wet on the back of my neck. I figgered I was guv up for ghost for sure then. But pap he just flopped on me for awhile, all fagged out, and I got to hoping maybe he had forgot what he was there for. But he didn’t. By and by, he got himself up on his knees, straddling my hindparts, but swaying uneasy, and made out how he would cut off my angel wings to show as a warning to other angels that might come after him. Before I could figure on a good plan to stop him, I began crying like a babe, uncontrollable:
“I hain’t a angel, Pappy! I hain’t no angel! I’m only your own flesh and blood, Huck Finn, your son!”
I don’t know if it was me bawling or pap not finding no wings to cut off me, but he stopped poking at my back with the knife and rolled me over front to have a look at me. He kept squatting on my chest, though, and pinned my arms under his knees, in case of if I was one of those deceiving angels, he said. He stared hard at me for the longest while, and when he smiled I thought maybe the spell had gone off him. But then he started talking all crazy again, sing-songy:
“M’boy-M’boy-M’boy. My sweetscented dandy boy, ain’t you now? Why, y’got your mama’s mouth, y’kno’that? Yes, y’got her perty dirty li’l’ mouth.”
He began fumbling with his belt then, and I knew what that meant: I was in for a licking. But I thought quick and bellowed in the darkest, devilest voice I had in me:
“Haw! I am the Angel of Death, you foolish ol’ man! and now I
’m gone drag you into the Eternal Fires of Hell!”
Well, pap’s eyeballs went black as new moons and he just yanked himself up by his britches, and fell over in a tumble. He roared and cussed, got to his feet and kept on chasing me up.
It is unclear why Twain chose to drop this episode, although it is likely that Olivia Clemens, Twain’s wife and editrix, would have objected to the use of the word “hell” in the penultimate graph and deleted the curse.10 Perhaps Twain felt the passage would not work without it.
This excision notwithstanding, Twain did leave several other clues to Pap’s nontraditional sexuality in his final draft, particularly in the scene in which Nigger11 Jim and Huck find Pap dead and “Yes, indeedy; naked, too” (emphasis mine) in a house floating down the river. Jim warns Huck “doan’ look at his face—it’s too gashly,” to which Huck responds, “I didn’t look at him at all… I didn’t want to see him.” Huck does, however, take an almost fetishistic interest in the contents of the house:
There was … a couple of masks made out of black cloth … two old dirty calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women’s under-clothes … a fish-line as thick as my little finger with some monstrous hooks on it, and a roll of buckskin, and a leather dog collar…
Huck takes all these items with him. They will later play “a very important part in the plot of the novel Huckleberry Finn, which is really about Huck’s search for his identity.”12
EPISODE TWO: HUCKLEBERRY PIE
Certainly no one factor is more important in Huck’s coming of age than his relationship with Nigger Jim. It is Jim who encourages Huck to explore all sides of his burgeoning identity; for example, in chapter X, when Huck wants to sneak across the river after dark to catch up on gossip, Huck relates:
Jim liked that notion; … he studied it over and said, couldn’t I put on some of them old things and dress up like a girl?
Huck enthusiastically complies, and while such transvestism is quite common and normal among teenage boys,13 Huck appears genuinely concerned about getting accurately in touch with his feminine side:
I practiced around all day to get the hang of the things, and by and by I could do pretty well in them, only Jim said I didn’t walk like a girl… I took notice, and done better.
Of course, all Huck’s prancing goes for nought; the woman he visits quickly sees “Sarah Williams” for the confused young boy he is (Huck doesn’t “throw like a girl”). In the published novel, the episode ends here, a mere burlesque; but as the manuscript makes clear, Twain fully intended Huck’s “walk on the wild side” to have more psychosexual import.14
In the manuscript, the woman’s husband arrives home before Huck can make his escape. Despite Huck’s and the woman’s protestations, the man insists on escorting “Sarah” home “on account of he said he wouldn’t be able to sleep knowing such an innocent thing as me was wandering in them dark evil woods un-protected.” In the passage that follows, Huck learns an important lesson about gender bending and indeed about life.
We walked into the woods a ways and he kept trying to talk me up: where’d I get the perty dress? did I have a beau? did I have any older brothers? But I didn’t answer exactly, just tittered and giggled, so as to not be discovered again.
About a half mile in, I turned to the man and I says, all girlish:
“Thank you very kindly, sir, I can make my own way from here. You’ve taken me far enough already.”
“Yep,” the man said, looking round.
“Reckon we is gone far enough, alrighty.”
Then the man, as casual as can be, plucked off his hat and dropped it to the ground. He says:
“Sarah Williams, would y’bend over an’ pick up my hat fer me, like a good girl? I hain’t got the back for it.”
I smelt a lie, but I saw he had a gun, and so I bent over, as womanlike as I could.
I can’t rightly say what happened next, or leastwise I won’t. But I will say this man weren’t near as clever as his missus: a lucky thing, too, seeing as he would’ve killed me if he figured out I warn’t no girl. But he didn’t, maybe since I squawked and carried on just like a girl would, though that weren’t hard on account of it hurt so much. It made me wonder, though, why do womenfolk have any business to do with us men atall? I know if I was ever a girl it’d take a good sight more than some old gold band to get me to cleave unto my husband, no matter what any Good Book had to say about the thing.
Well, the man finished up his cleaving soon enough, and left me there to find my own way home. He weren’t worried about my innocence no more, I reckon.
Again, it is unclear why Twain allowed this passage to be dropped from the final publication.15 But whatever the reason, it is unfortunate, as this episode proves to be an important turning point in Huck’s life: it is the moment Huck realizes he must throw off the girlish frills of his youth and become a man.
EPISODE THREE: HUCK’S “DREAM”
Much has been made previously of the “Raftsmen’s Passage,”16 a fifteen-page episode which appears in the 1876 Finn manuscript (between the second and third paragraphs of chapter XVI), but which was deleted prior to final publication after being used to pad out Life on the Mississippi, a book written to cover Twain’s losses from an ill-considered attempt to mount “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” as an “All-Singin’, All Jumpin’” traveling minstrel show. But while it can be argued that this Raftsmen’s Passage, in which Huck observes some raftsmen, is an insignificant event in Huck’s development, as well as tedious in the extreme, the same certainly cannot be said of the recently discovered “Dream Sequence,” deleted from the previous chapter (chapter XV) for quite different reasons.
Chapter XV begins:
We judged that three more nights would fetch us to Cairo, at the bottom of Illinois, where the Ohio River comes in, and that was what we was after. We would sell the raft and get on a steamboat and go way up the Ohio amongst the free States, and then be out of trouble.
Well, the second night…
Clearly something is missing here: namely, the first night. It must be remembered that Twain was being paid a then-astounding seventeen cents a word by Sire, and it was certainly not in his character to pass up an unnecessary narrative opportunity.17 And in point of fact, he did not:
There weren’t much to do in that first night but smoke and talk, which is what we was doing when Jim said why didn’t we make a party of it and suck on pap’s jug some? I said I didn’t think that was a good idea, on account of we wasn’t sick or pained, but Jim says:
“Wud’s de harm in it, Huck? A man doan’ need no caws t’be feelin’ good. Ain’t you a man like yo’ pap, Huck?”
I didn’t want to argue him none on that point, so I tipped the jug and swallered once. That was plenty. The stuff burnt so bad I thought maybe I had set it afire with my pipe by accident and that there was smoke apouring out of my ears and eyes. Jim decided this was the funniest sight he’d ever seen, and laughed so hard he fell over sideways; I would’ve cussed him out if I could’ve talked at all, but instead took another swig of my medicine, like a man.
Well, by and by it didn’t so much burn as make me feel all warm inside, and I got the sudden urge to lay back on the raft and look up at the sky. It was such a clear night and there was a sight more stars than usual, and friskier, too. This got me to thinking. I says:
“Jim, Jim—hey, Jim—do you think they’s niggers up in heaven?”
Jim puzzled over this for a moment, and then he said:
“I reck’n dey is, Huck, I do reck’n so. De man, wun’t he be wantin’ his nigger up dah wid him in hivven? or it wun’t right’ be hivven now, wud it?”
I said I reckoned he was correct about that, that was smart thinking. But then I thought: Jim being a runaway nigger, how was he ever going to get into heaven? Just the thought of being dead and not having Jim to talk to me made me so lonesome I wanted to cry, but I must of fell asleep instead.
I had this powerful horrible dream then.
I dreamed I had gone down to the bad place, and there was all over demons and witches and burnt runaway niggers, and I was crying on account I didn’t know what I had done to be there. Then I was in this tiny room, more like the inside of a stove than a room, and this demon come walking toward me. It was pap, red as the devil himself!
Pap was grabbing at this big spikey tail he had, and was swinging it over his head when, by witch magic, it turned into a terrible spitting snake. He was grinning just like he did that one night and kept coming at me, asking wouldn’t I like to touch his snake? I said, no thank you just the same.18 He said, my, didn’t I have the dandy manners, maybe he should learn me some other manners about respecting my elders and doing what they say, and he kept coming on, and just when his snake was about to bite me, I woke up in a thick sweat.
I felt sick. My heart was beating like a jackrabbit; my face was redhot and my body all ashiver, and I didn’t know what to do. I tried to sit up quick but something held me flat. I looked down, and there was ol’ Jim, bending over them parts of me that Judge Thatcher said was so private and sacred even I had no business with them, and all of a sudden it made final and horrible sense to me: Jim was a night vampyre coming to suck out my immortal soul!
I tried to escape his niggery fangs, but it was too late. I felt a jerking all down my back and an awful itch in my belly and my soul started shooting out of me like a steamboat whistle; the devil Jim was laughing like a banshee and sucking it all up! I felt my body go all tingly and then I reckon I must of passed out from the fright.
I didn’t wake up the next morning until near about
eight o’clock, and Jim was there sitting next to me, swabbing my brow with a soaked rag. He says:
“Easy dah, easy, chile. It’s jis’ dem bad whisky dreams is all. You be ’right en fine; I reck’n you gwyne get t’ likin’ it, too, you en’thin’ like yo’ pap. Y’suh; you is a man now, Huck.”