And afterwards we would watch the lonesomeness of the river, and kind of lazy along and by-and-by, lazy off to sleep. Wake up, by-and-by, and look to see what done it, and may be see a steamboat, coughing along upstream, so far off towards the other side you couldn’t tell nothing about her only whether she was sternwheel or side wheel; then for about an hour there wouldn’t be nothing to hear nor nothing to see—just solid lonesomeness. Once there was a thick fog, and the rafts and things that went by was beating tin pans so the steam boats wouldn’t run over them. A scow or a raft went by so close we could hear them talking and cussing and laughing—heard them plain; but we couldn’t see no sign of them; it made you feel crawly, it was like spirits carrying on that way in the air. Jim said he believed it was spirits; but I says, “No, spirits wouldn’t say ‘dern this dem fog’.”
(Note the word “way” in this passage; it is a key nostalgic word in the American vocabulary, vaguely vernacular and burdened with the associations of the half-articulate. It is a favourite Hemingway word, of course: “I feel that way”—not the how or what he feels of the educated man.)
The theme of Huckleberry Finn is the rebellion against civilisation and especially against its traditions:
I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can’t stand it. I been there before.
Huck isn’t interested in “Moses and the Bulrushers” because Huck “don’t take no stock of dead people”. He garbles European history when he is discussing Kings with Jim, the negro. Whether Huck is the kind of boy who will grow up to build a new civilisation is doubtful; Tom Sawyer obviously will because he is imaginative. Huck never imagines anything except fears. Huck is “low down plain ornery”, always in trouble because of the way he was brought up with “Pap”. He is a natural anarchist and bum. He can live without civilisation, depending on shrewd affections and loyalty to friends. He is the first of those typical American portraits of the underdog, which have culminated in the poor white literature and in Charlie Chaplin—an underdog who gets along on horse sense, so to speak. Romanticism, ideas, ideals are repugnant to Huck; he “reckons” he “guesses”, but he doesn’t think. In this he is the opposite of his hero, Tom Sawyer. Tom had been telling “stretchers” about arabs, elephants and Aladdin’s lamp. Huck goes at once “into a brood”.
I thought all this over for two or three days, and then I reckoned I would see if there was anything in it. I got an old tin lamp and an irony ring and went out into the woods and rubbed it till I sweat like an Injun, calculating to build a palace and sell it; but it wasn’t no use, none of the genies came. So then I judged that all that stuff was only just one of Tom Sawyer’s lies. I reckoned he believed in the A-rabs and elephants, but as for me I think different. It has all the marks of a Sunday school.
That is, of American Puritan civilisation, the only civilisation he knew.
“Ornery”, broody, superstitious, with a taste for horrors, ingenious, courageous without knowing it, natural, sound-hearted, philosophical in a homely way—those are the attributes of the gorgeous, garrulous Huck and they give a cruelly extravagant narrative its humanity. He obliges you to accept the boy as the devastating norm. Without him the violence of the book would be stark reporting of low life. For if Huckleberry Finn is a great comic book it is also a book of terror and brutality. Think of the scenes: Pap with d.t.’s chasing Huck round the cabin with a knife; Huck sitting up all night with a gun preparing to shoot the old man; Huck’s early familiarity with corpses; the pig-killing scene; the sight of the frame house (evidently some sort of brothel) floating down the Mississippi with a murdered man in it; the fantastic events at the Southern house where two families shoot each other down in a vendetta; the drunken Boggs who comes into town to pick a quarrel and is eventually coolly shot dead before the eyes of his screaming young daughter by the man he has insulted. The “Duke” and “the King”, those cynical rascals whose adventures liven up the second half of the story are sharpers, twisters and crooks of the lowest kind. Yet a child is relating all this with a child’s detachment and with a touch of morbidity. Marvellous as the tale is, as a collection of picaresque episodes and as a description of the mess of frontier life, it is strong meat. Sometimes we wonder how Twain’s public stomached such illusionless reporting. The farce and the important fact that in this one book Mark Twain never forced a point nor overwrote—in the Dickens way for example—are of course the transfiguring and beguiling qualities. His corpse and coffin humour is a dry wine which raises the animal spirits. Old Jim not only looked like a dead man after the “King” had painted him blue, but like one “who had been dead a considerable time”.
Judiciousness is carried to the comic limit. And then, Mark Twain is always getting the atmosphere, whether he picks up the exact words of loafers trying to borrow tobacco off one another or tells a tall story of an hysterical revival meeting.
Atmosphere is the decisive word. Huckleberry Finn reeks of its world. From a sensitive passage like:
When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind faint dronings of bugs and flies that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead….
to descriptions of the silly, dying girl’s ridiculous poetry, the sensibility draws a clear outline and is never blurred and turned into sentimentality. One is enormously moved by Huck’s view of the world he sees. It is the world not of Eden, but of the “old Adam”, not the golden age of the past, but the earthly world of a reality which (we feel with regret) we have let slip through our fingers too carelessly. Huck is only a crude boy, but luckily he was drawn by a man whose own mind was arrested, with disastrous results in his other books, at the schoolboy stage; here it is perfect. And a thousand times better than the self-conscious adventures of Stevenson’s Treasure Island and Kidnapped.
Is Huckleberry Finn one of the great works of picaresque literature? It is, granting the limits of a boy’s mind in the hero and the author, a comic masterpiece; but this limitation is important. It is not a book which grows spiritually, if we compare it to Quixote, Dead Souls or even Pickwick, and it is lacking in that civilised quality which you are bound to lose when you throw over civilisation—the quality of pity. One is left with the cruelty of American humour, a cruelty which is softened by the shrewd moralisings of the humorous philosophers—the Josh Billingses, the Artemus Wards, the Will Rogerses. And once Mark Twain passed this exquisite moment of his maturity, he went to bits in that morass of sentimentality, cynicism, melodrama and vulgarity which have damned him for the adult reader.
The Quaker Coquette
If there is not a novel in every man and woman we meet, there is at any rate a cautionary tale. “That ridiculous and excellent person, Mrs. Opie,” said Miss Mitford. “What a miserable hash she has made of her existence.” Somewhere in the world—so we may console ourselves when we feel ignored and forgotten—there is bound to be a Miss Mitford holding us up as an awful warning, using us as a frightful example of what can happen to a human being when he or she strays from the Mitford path. We have, of course, our bad moments and it must be agreed that Miss Mitford had caught the widow of Opie, the painter, at that point in middle age where so many women are clumsy with their cues and seem not to know in what play they are acting. After a life of triumphant gaiety in London and Paris, after writing a number of gaudy, guilty and improper books, the tantalising and beautiful widow had suddenly rejoined the Quaker circle in Norwich where she had passed her youth. She had put on the Quaker gown and bonnet, she had started writing very boring, didactic tales and went about thee-ing and thou-ing her embarrassed acquaintances with all the gush of a convert and all the bounce of a reformed sinner. Norwich raised its eyebrows. The good may cry Hallelujah when the lost soul repents and returns to the fold, but there is often a touch of disappointment not to mention suspicion in the cry, for where would the good be if there were no sinners left
to hearten them on their hard pilgrimage? At Earlham, the home of Elizabeth Fry and the Gurney family who thought they knew their Amelia so well, such doubts could not be concealed. A Quaker—but wasn’t Mrs. Opie still a friend of Lady Cork’s? Hadn’t she still got in her drawer the manuscript of an unfortunate novel? Could one credit the champion of Mary Wollstonecraft and Godwin with a change of heart? What prospect was there of “the inner light” shining for long in a mind bedizened with the memories of fashionable society, of “pink” parties for the gay and “blue” parties for the highbrow? Wasn’t Amelia Opie congenitally “shallow”? Her conversation might even be a leg pull, for she did seem to have what George Fox would have called (in the century before Quakerism became mellow), a “light and chaffy” nature. But neither the Quakers nor Miss Mitford could take the severe view of Mrs. Opie’s vivacious character for long. They loved her too well to regard her finally as the awful warning against worldliness. And the truth is that Amelia Opie had not so much the awfulness of a warning as the piquancy of a recurrent type. Born in 1769 and dying in 1853 she had fed on ideologies. She had lived through a revolution and a European war, and then had repented. Today her kind of character and repentance has become common if not yet modish. Mrs. Opie is a kind of heroine of our time.
What is the type? Amelia was a flirt, a highbrow flirt. She was the adored and adoring daughter of a Norwich doctor. Her mother had been an invalid for years and when she died the girl was still in her teens. She became her father’s hostess. When one goes into the question of her coquetry one comes immediately upon that so common decision of Nature that girls who have an inordinate devotion to their fathers shall deal coolly and indecisively with other men or shall prefer those who are much younger or much older than themselves. Add to this the intellectual tastes of Amelia’s father and one finds a young lady who coquettes with literature, politics and religion and calls them in to aid her in the more important business of catching men. Her susceptible nature—it was susceptible rather than passionate—made her into one of those women who, when they come into a room, shine with the certainty that they will succeed and the lightness of their feeling makes them do so. Later she was to harden into the vivacious snob and to fatten into the determined celebrity hunter who bosomed her way into the limelight with the infallible flair of the woman who knew her geniuses.
Being irresistible was not only an instinct but a business with Amelia Opie. She wrote frightful novels which made Sir Walter Scott weep, and awful verses which Sydney Smith quoted in his lectures—the bad taste of great men has a long history—but she had taken care, it might be observed, to get to know the great first. She asked Southey once to say a word to the reviewers. She was one of those women who, having addled a man’s judgment by making herself physically desirable, like an ice on a hot day, then change about and insist on being admired for their minds. She was quite candid about this technique in her last novel. She was irresistible, she says, because she was herself unable to resist—at first; she began resisting only when, by flattering them, she had made others think they had become irresistible themselves. No grand passions for her, she said, no durable affections. “My object is to amuse life away and a little love, just enough to give interest to scenes and places, is delightful…. My attachments are like gentle squeezes of the hand.” A great passion would destroy her “peace of mind”. No wonder the Norwich Quakers, plump, benevolent but trimly literal in matters of virtue, were a little dubious when the chatty best seller who knew all the celebrities of London and Paris, put on the Quaker bonnet. Was the accomplished actress just putting on another act? Of course she was. And yet, of course, she was not. Amelia had some of that stupidity in her nature which some call ingenuousness. It is the price a woman has to pay for being vain of her unconventionality. But Amelia is a delightful argument for the charm of an ill-adjusted life, for the attraction of being a bit of a fraud and for a dash of the prude in the wanton female character.
During the many years of her mother’s illness, Amelia’s childhood had been one of solitude and constraint. She was shut away, silenced, ignored. Imagination awakened. She quickly picked up a love of the sensational, the guilty and the morbid. The effect of the death of her mother was to release Amelia suddenly from a world of dark, dramatic and lugubrious brooding into a world of sociability and light. The late eighteenth century was made for escapades of the mind, and many of the English provincial towns had the intellectual liveliness of little capitals. In Norwich, Crome was painting. Holcroft, Godwin and the Radical leaders dined with the doctor. The ideas of the French Revolution were in the air and, as she listened to her father’s praise of Lafayette, the young hostess became a republican at a bound. Alone in her room, she began to write plays and poetry and when she had done a few pages she found that great men liked to be asked for their criticisms. At least, with young ingenuity, she thought that this was what interested them. Her mind (she was to tell Godwin and Holcroft as they looked with desire upon her person) was her chief preoccupation. It is a weakness of intellectuals to be interested in minds and Amelia’s fervid talk about hers was the ideal bait; ideal because it hooked the listener and yet kept him threshing away unavailingly at a safe distance, at the end of the line. With Godwin hooked, with Godwin jealous of her friends, begging her to rule her emotions by the light of Reason while he himself fell into an irrational condition because she would not kiss him, Amelia’s technique was established. Now she could deal with anyone, indeed preferably with several at a time. She sat down to write an anonymous book called The Dangers of Coquetry.
In the meantime she had made another conquest, one which lasted her lifetime and which did not spring from her engaging vanity but was directed by a warmer need of her nature. As a child Amelia had not known the geniality of normal family life. She needed a family and she conquered one. The Gurneys of Earlham were Quakers, a large family of children younger than herself and glad to admire and love the literary belle with her poems and her song. Quakerism had softened; music, painting and dancing were permitted to the younger Gurneys who turned to Amelia with all the love which the prim feel for the worldly. The young Gurneys were in revolt against their traditions, its politics, its culture. Where was there not revolt in that generation? There were Corresponding Societies—the English equivalent of the Jacobin Clubs—in Norwich, respectable “pinks” were being spied on and even tried for sedition, treason and revolutionary activity; even the religious faith of the younger Gurneys was lapsing. To Amelia who was “in the movement” and who had run into scandal because of her passion for Mary Wollstonecraft and her defence of Godwin’s marriage, they turned as to a goddess. The fact that she was known by now to be in love with a married man brought even brighter confidence to the agony of the young atheists. They were to get their own back later when time brought their repentance, and Amelia, the converter was to be reconverted by them. Elizabeth Fry was one of those children and Amelia, at her gayest and most “worldly”, in the midst of writing her “immoral” novels about seduced heroines, mad fathers and women ruined by “a false step”, always responded uncomfortably to criticism from Earlham.
But this quaint fruit of Amelia’s deep affection for the Gurneys was to ripen slowly. By the time she was 28 and still unmarried Norwich had begun to shake its head. It was all very well to be clever, beautiful, mysterious, the skilful heartbreaker (Norwich said), but the coquette who turns down one proposal too many ends on the shelf. And Amelia was in her first mess. “Mr. B.”, the married man, was only too well married and there was no way of getting him. It was a crisis of the heart; it was, even more, a crisis for her vanity with all Norwich watching, the Gurneys above all. The solution was—and how true to her type she was—to drown a scandal in a sensation. She did so. The elegant young provincial married Opie. Opie was a peasant with a strong Cornish accent, shocking table manners, a divorced wife. Amelia did not love him. But he was a fashionable painter and thoroughly in the limelight. His table manners made her hesitate—odd
things made her hesitate in her life: after Opie’s death she went all out for a peer with the idea of reforming him and turned him down in the end because “they both had enough to live on”—but in the end she plunged. She married Opie. She pushed him into society, saw to it that he got commissions. Now it was that she wrote. When her husband’s work went temporarily out of fashion she buckled to and wrote a best-seller. And when he died—for the marriage was a short interlude in her life—she fought to get him buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral and grieved so extravagantly, in so many poems, panegyrics, memoirs, and so loudly that her friends had to remind her that she was enjoying herself more than the onlookers.
The Gurneys were worried. They enjoyed being stirred up by the celebrity, though by this time Amelia’s claim to have a mind was mocked by reviewers. The Gurneys were older. They had returned to respectable opinions and even to their old religion. A reconquest of the Gurneys was necessary, a new disturbing of their godliness. To this period belongs her characteristic affair with Joseph John Gurney, a strict young Quaker, and with Haydon, the elderly reprobate of Bognor, who had had a notorious ménage à trois with his wife and his servant. To Joseph John she talked and wrote about “the world”, a subject which shocked and fascinated him; to Haydon, she talked about religion, which shocked and fascinated him. Haydon was old, Joseph John was young. He listened, he reproved, he lectured. Amelia loved it. She was delighted that he did not despair of bringing her back into the fold. It would have dismayed her to know that the prudent Quaker would succeed in recapturing her for the Lord, but would be careful to marry someone else.
The second mess, “the miserable hash” in fact, was the direct cause of her conversion. Sooner or later that amusing vanity, that too clever susceptibility, was certain to be snubbed. One does not suppose she loved Tom Alderson, her knowing young cousin, very deeply, but she was humiliated when he turned her down. The answer again was a new sensation: the Quaker bonnet. We need not agitate ourselves, as the Quakers did, about the sincerity of that conversion. At 60 when she broke out again and went to Paris on a celebrity hunt after Lafayette and to renew her revolutionary enthusiasms, D’Angers the sculptor called her a Janus, a two-faced syren who instinctively showed you the profile you did not ask for. Her misleading Puritanism, so perfectly chaste but with delusive promise of wantonness, delighted the Frenchman. But Miss Mitford cattily noted that Amelia ordered the silk for her Quaker gown from Paris; and Paris was astonished and enchanted by a celebrity who arrived in the disguise of the Meeting House. It was all in character. In her youth she had stood in court watching the trial of Holcroft for treason and had cried, Liberty in the streets; but she had insisted on meeting the aristocratic émigrés too.
In My Good Books Page 17