The Portable Mark Twain
Page 17
That was the residence of the principal citizen, all the way from the suburbs of New Orleans to the edge of St. Louis.
ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN ( 1885)
Mark Twain began writing Huckleberry Finn sometime in July, 1876; he would not finish the book until seven years later. Though he may have worked on the manuscript intermittently throughout this period, the novel was written in three principal stints of composition. That first burst of composition in 1876 took Huck to the point in Chapter 18 where Huck asks Buck Grangerford, “What’s a feud?” For whatever reasons, Twain pigeonholed the manuscript and did no significant writing on it until sometime in late 1879 or early 1880. At that time, he resumed the story where he had left off, with the Grangerford- Sheperdson feud, and developed his story to the end of Chapter 21 when the mob is resolved to lynch Colonel Sherburn for the murder of Boggs. The final stint of composition occurred June- September 1883. He resumed the confrontation between Sherburn and the town, though contrary to expectation Sherburn faces down his adversaries, and in an energetic burst of composition Twain brought the book to its narrative conclusion. During this final phase of the composition, he also interpolated into the novel the Walter Scott episode and the argument between Huck and Jim about “King Sollermun” (Chapters 12½-14 from that point in Chapter 12 where Huck and Jim spot the grounded riverboat, the Walter Scott, through to the end of Chapter 14).
Quite apart from the segmented course of composition, apparently there were also significant shifts in interest and authorial intention during these seven years. When he began the book, Twain’s initial interest was one of idle amusement, though the episodes increase in seriousness and satirical significance soon enough. When he is first introduced, the slave Jim does not seem destined to play an important role in the story, but by Chapter 11, the fortunes of Huck and Jim are sufficiently linked for Huck to return to Jackson’s Island, after learning that there is a $300 reward for Jim’s capture, and to shout, “There ain’t a minute to lose. They’re after us.” Of course, “they” are not after Huck at all, for it is generally supposed that he has been murdered, perhaps by Jim himself. The picture of Huck and Jim floating down the Mississippi River on a raft has become a familiar image of idle and peaceful drift, but that raft was launched into the river on a note of fearful urgency.
From then on, if not before, Twain began to see proliferating comic and satiric opportunities. He could survey the manner of life along the river and describe it as would be perceived by a slightly quizzical, slightly perplexed, and wholly literal-minded boy and told in his distinctive voice. Twain’s hatred of aristocratic privilege, his distrust of the mob, his suspiciousness of con men and hucksters and his mocking amusement of those gullible enough to be their prey, all of these mature convictions might be expressed effectively by having Huck describe a world in which these things disturb but do not outrage him. Because Huck does not quite understand the sloth, sentimentality, double-dealing, boastfulness, or cruelty he sees, he is, almost by definition, a satirical device. In order to dramatically satirize the object of his contempt, all Twain had to do was to have Huck try to admire it, as in his failed attempts to admire Emmeline Grangerford’s poetry and drawings. But Huck’s perceptions can also be refreshingly new and alive. In order to recapture the flavor of river talk, the beauty of sunrise on the river, or the majestically innocent speculations on the origins of stars, Twain has Huck report it, without judgment or explanation and without any attempt at rhetorical effect. In order to make his readers feel the force of the shamefulness of slavery, Twain has Huck, who is after all a mere boy, agonize over his moral predicament of helping Jim to freedom. In a word, by resolving to tell an extended narrative from Huckleberry Finn’s point of view, Twain automatically created a multitude of imaginative possibilities, though he would necessarily have to develop the stylistic and technical means to develop them. He did this through painstaking revision and by setting aside his temptation to speak through Huck, so that an unlettered, unsophisticated boy might speak plainly and for himself. This required more artistic restraint than the opinionated Twain was accustomed to, but he rose to the challenge.
In the last phase of composition, however, Twain approached his material with mixed motives. He had acquired his own publishing house, and issuing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn would be a commercial as well as an artistic venture. He seems to have written those concluding chapters with an eye toward a popular readership who had certain established expectations of a literary comedian. In any event, many regret the reappearance of Tom Sawyer at the Phelps farm and have found the last chapters to contain altogether too much burlesque and too little serious moral reflection. And the character of Jim, who had become in the middle chapters a fully developed human being, dignified, sympathetic, and intelligent, appears in the end to be cast in the role of a comic figure, and not much more. Perhaps Hemingway was right in saying that the concluding chapters were just plain “cheating.” That is a question individual readers will decide. It is more certain, however, that, even if there is a falling off at the end, Twain had created in Huckleberry Finn something quite distinctive and memorable.
NOTE: Twain published the “raftsmen” portion of the novel in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi and had originally intended to include it in the finished manuscript of the novel. However, when it was thought that Huckleberry Finn might be published as a companion volume to Tom Sawyer, Charles Webster, Clemens’s business manager and titular publisher for the book, convinced the author to remove the episode. He argued that the relative lengths of the two books were disproportionate and, besides, readers were already familiar with that episode. As it happened, the two books were not published as companion volumes but the raftsmen passage was not included in the first edition or in any subsequent edition published during Clemens’s lifetime. In this edition, as in the authoritative version edited by The Mark Twain Project, this episode is restored to the narrative (pages 211-223) and set off by brackets.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
NOTICE.
Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR
PER G. G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE.
EXPLANATORY.
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a hap-hazard fashion, or by guess-work; but pains-takingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
THE AUTHOR.
CHAPTER I
You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly—Tom’s Aunt Polly, she is—and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book—which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.
Now the way that the book winds up, is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece—all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher, he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece, all the year round—more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas, she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the wi
dow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn’t stand it no longer, I lit out. I got into my old rags, and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer, he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.
The widow she cried over me, and called me a poor lost lamb, and she called me a lot of other names, too, but she never meant no harm by it. She put me in them new clothes again, and I couldn’t do nothing but sweat and sweat, and feel all cramped up. Well, then, the old thing commenced again. The widow rung a bell for supper, and you had to come to time. When you got to the table you couldn’t go right to eating, but you had to wait for the widow to tuck down her head and grumble a little over the victuals, though there warn’t really anything the matter with them. That is, nothing only everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends it is different; things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.
After supper she got out her book and learned me about Moses and the Bulrushers; and I was in a sweat to find out all about him; but by-and-by she let it out that Moses had been dead a considerable long time; so then I didn’t care no more about him; because I don’t take no stock in dead people.
Pretty soon I wanted to smoke, and asked the widow to let me. But she wouldn’t. She said it was a mean practice and wasn’t clean, and I must try to not to do it any more. That is just the way with some people. They get down on a thing when they don’t know nothing about it. Here she was a bothering about Moses, which was no kin to her, and no use to anybody, being gone, you see, yet finding a power of fault with me for doing a thing that had some good in it. And she took snuff too; of course that was all right, because she done it herself.
Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now, with a spelling-book. She worked me middling hard for about an hour, and then the widow made her ease up. I couldn’t stood it much longer. Then for an hour it was deadly dull, and I was fidgety. Miss Watson would say, “Dont put your feet up there, Huckleberry;” and “dont scrunch up like that, Huckleberry—set up straight;” and pretty soon she would say, “Don’t gap and stretch like that, Huckleberry—why don’t you try to behave?” Then she told me all about that bad place, and I said I wished I was there. She got mad, then, but I didn’t mean no harm. All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn’t particular. She said it was wicked to say what I said; said she wouldn’t say it for the whole world; she was going to live so as to go to the good place. Well, I couldn’t see no advantage in going where she was going, so I made up my mind I wouldn’t try for it. But I never said so, because it would only make trouble, and wouldn’t do no good.
Now she had got a start, and she went on and told me all about the good place. She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever. So I didn’t think much of it. But I never said so. I asked her if she reckoned Tom Sawyer would go there, and, she said, not by a considerable sight. I was glad about that, because I wanted him and me to be together.