The Literary Offenses of Mark Twain, Finis

“Do I know you? I know you clear through...you're afraid...you'll be found out to be what you are--cowards..." 

Did we know Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens? Did Mark Twain know himself?

You don't have to read far before you get your wits assaulted with Twain's slapdash writing in Huckleberry Finn. On the twelfth page of text Twain gives the essential character traits of Huck: a moral blank slate, a barely educated, semi-literate twelve year-old who "could spell, and read, and write just a little, and could say the multiplication table up to six times seven is thirty-five" (24). Twain forgets he gave Huck those characteristics. He has Huck reading books he and Jim take from a wreck (88), reading well enough that he could read the books to Jim; reading books from the Grangerford's library (113) and then, recalling himself, has Huck unable to read Miss Sophie Grangerford's love note to him because it is not in "coarse-hand", apparently all capital block print (122-3). Twain forgot the names he had given to characters (48); Huck forgets the names he has given himself as aliases (66, 69, 111-12). Twain forgot the character he had given Tom Sawyer, who is a different creature in Huckleberry Finn. 

Huck escapes his father to Jackson's Island in a canoe. It's the perfect hiding place, it's difficult for anything larger than a canoe to find anchorage, "...nobody ever comes there...Jackson's Island is the place." (44) Then a search party lands--on horseback.

"We better camp here, if we can find a good place; the horses is about beat out. Let's look around." (51)

"This passage, like several others, may be a fragment from a plot sequence which was deleted before the novel was published." (end note 12) 

On a previous reading: "?!" around end note.

Mark Twain wrote the first 106 pages, stopped in mid-thought, put the book away in 1876 and didn't take it up again until 1879. When he does he grafts on the absurd Grangerford digression. 

This is from the first paragraph of the Introduction to the book written by Professor John Seelye for the Penguin edition.

 "...the author began writing the novel with one purpose and plot in mind, discarded that plot partway through, set the book aside for years, and at one point threatened to destroy the manuscript. This information is not very reassuring for critics..., for it suggests that not even the author himself was very sure of what he was doing--or was attempting to do...Mark Twain kept no notebooks, save the most rudimentary kind...And these brief notations themselves reveal the author's wavering purpose--at one point an elephant was to play a crucial part in the denouement of Huckleberry Finn."

These are crimes against literature. The preposterous two-story house with a dead man inside that floats by that Huck and Jim plunder is another of many, and it occurs in the first half of the book. They looted,

...two old calico dresses, and a sun-bonnet, and some women's under-clothes,...and some men's clothing too. We put the lot into the canoe...There was a boy's speckled straw hat on the floor; I took that too...We got an old tin lantern, and a butcher knife without any handle, and a bran-new Barlow knife,...and a lot of tallow candles, and a tin candlestick, and a gourd, and a tin cup, and a ratty old bed-quilt,...and a reticule with needles and pins and beeswax and buttons and thread and all such truck in it, and a hatchet and some nails, and 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, and a horse-shoe, and some vials of medicine...and just as we was leaving I found a tolerable good curry-comb, and Jim he found a ratty old fiddle-bow, and a wooden leg...

And so, take it all around, we made a good haul...I made Jim lay down in the canoe and cover up with the quilt...I paddled...(60-1)

That’s a lot of booty in a CANOE occupied by a full-grown man and a boy. That’s a heavy load for a twelve year-old to row by himself. That's not realism.

Odd haul, no? Women's clothing and underclothing, and oh, "some men's clothing too." Hmm. Do we know Mark Twain? Samuel Clemens? There is identity confusion in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as there is Hemingway's The Garden of Eden. In Huckleberry Finn the identity confusion is primarily nominal. Samuel Clemens-Mark Twain. Huck introduces himself to the Phelps' as Tom Sawyer. When the real Tom shows up, he says he's Tom's brother Sid. In Garden the identity confusion is primarily gender. David and Catherine switch sexual roles. Garden also has nominal confusion secondarily. David and Catherine adopt different names. Huckleberry Finn has gender confusion secondarily. Twain had Huck dress in disguise as a girl when he leaves Jim to nosy about in a town (64-73). Huck forgets his girl's name: First, it's Sarah Williams, then it's Mary Williams. Clemens-Twain had Huck Finn living in a state of nature where "we was always naked, day and night, whenever the mosquitoes would let us" (130) Twain-Clemens set The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a floating...Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve are naked until they taste the forbidden fruit. It's Jim, a full-grown man, married with two children, finding himself joined as one with a twelve year-old white boy, it's Jim who first suggests that Huck go into town dressed like a girl. Girls, boys at twelve, they can pull off dressing as the other...Hemingway. The Garden of Eden. Where a woman dresses as a man, as Hemingway's mother dressed him when a boy. Hemingway's The Garden of Eden, where the woman anally penetrates the man, "Now you can't tell who is who can you?" "No.". 

Huck and Jim got quite a haul off the wreck of the "Walter Scott",* too…boots, and blankets, and clothes...and a lot of books, and a spyglass, and three boxes of seegars (88), which again only two people, one of them a child, load onto a SKIFF.

Chapter XVII is the first chapter of the 1879 writing, after an interregnum of three years. On an earlier reading I wrote above the roman numerals, "Hatfield-McCoy feud, next 2 ch's," and below "This, written later, doesn't flow @ all from the previous. Bizarre" Twain disappeared Jim till the end of the second Grangerford chapter--so that he could write the Grangerford-Shepherdson feud into the novel. Not for literary flow. Not for realism. The chapters come out of nowhere and Jim disappears nowhere. The feud is lifted lock, stock and detail from the Hatfield-McCoy feud including the detail of a beautiful young Grangerford running off and marrying a Shepherdson. That is not meritorious literary writing. That is balderdash.

Huck finds the Grangerfords, who take him in, aristocratic, as indeed any plantation owning family of the late 1840's, the period in which the book is set, would have been to a destitute, barefoot, barely clad twelve year-old boy. But Twain removes that realism by making the Grangerfords objectively aristocratic, Gilded Age (when Twain wrote the book) wealthy, beautiful, mannered, an offensively unrealistic gilding of the primitive real-life McCoys. In doing, Twain writes what his young rube interlocutor never saw, never said and never thought. Twain is an author showing off his mastery of descriptive writing. This is the beginning of chapter XVIII under which the undersigned wrote on a previous reading "This is completely different writing."

Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see...well born...very tall and very slim...darkish-paly complexion...clean-shaved every morning...thin face...the thinnest kind of lips...the thinnest kind of nostrils...a high nose...heavy eyebrows...the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep...His forehead was high...hair...black and straight, and hung to his shoulders...hands...long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it; and on Sundays he wore a blue tail-coat with brass buttons on  it. He carried a mahogany cane with a silver head (117)

Huck Finn did not notice all of that nuance to Col. Grangerford's aristocratic appearance. Twain, in his imagination, did.

On Col. Grangerford's sons:

Bob was the oldest, and Tom next. Tall, beautiful men with very broad shoulders and brown faces, and long black hair and black eyes. They dressed in white linen from head to foot...and wore broad Panama hats.  (118)

Huck Finn did not describe men as "beautiful." Twain did.

On the Hatfields in this feud:

There was another clan of aristocracy around there...mostly of the name of Shepherdson. They was as high-toned and well born and rich and grand, as the tribe of Grangerfords...

Pretty soon a splendid young man come galloping down the road...looking like a soldier. He had his gun across his pommel.

Huck Finn did not describe a "young man" as "splendid". Twain did.

This is not realism. It may be psychologically revealing but it is not literary realism. Hemingway loved it, whatever it was. But then…he would. At the end of that chapter, which also includes Huck finding Jim for a second time in the novel, the undersigned wrote on a previous occasion, "That was an absurd chapter."

The "raft story" was originally near the beginning of chapter XVI of Huckleberry Finn. However,

"Twain inserted it in Chapter III of Life on the Mississippi, but seems to have been unsure whether to allow it to remain as part of the novel, since he left it in the manuscript until the last moment."

Some of Twain's best writing came in the book refashioned as "adventure" in the second half. Boys joy is irrepressible.

Sometimes we'd have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark--which was a candle in a cabin window--and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two--on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened...We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. (131)

I laid outside--I didn't mind the rain, because it was warm, and the waves warn't running so high, now. About two they come up again, though, and Jim was going to call me, but he changed his mind because he reckoned they warn't high enough yet to do any harm; but he was mistaken about that, for pretty soon all of a sudden along comes a regular ripper, and washed me overboard. It most killed Jim a-laughing. (140)

The duke and the king--that's America, too. That shucksterism is pure America, and we have it still. 

Twain's description of Arkansas in the 1840's (151-2)is identical to Charles Dickens' description of Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1842. I half-seriously wonder if he didn't steal the description from Dickens.

Mark Twain had within his grasp an epic novel, the greatest ever written on these shores. It was the story of a child in the state of nature who was figuring out a moral code on his own, for himself, and fashioning it out of nothing save the example of his slave friend Jim; it was a moral code contrary to the doctrines that Huck had been forced to study fitfully and which he was fleeing. It was also the epic story, writ small, of his country, a Constitutional Convention of one, a child philosopher. Huck Finn developed the rudiments of pragmatism, the only home-grown American philosophy. 

The most unpardonable of Twain's crimes was cowardice. He could not hold greatness for his hands were shaking. He fled the writing for three years. When he came back to it Huckleberry Finn was now a boyhood "adventure", like Kim, that would have, Twain imagined, wider popular appeal. That too is the benighted story of America. 

Twain knew his sin. He is taunting himself in the words he puts in Col Sherburn's mouth in Arkansas when a mob comes after him:

Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward...You didn't want to come...You don't like trouble and danger. But if only half a man...shouts 'Lynch him, lynch him!' you're afraid to back down--afraid you'll be found out to be what you are--cowards...(158)

Do I know you, Mark Twain/Samuel Clemens? I know you clear through. Now. You were afraid you'd be found out to be what you were—a coward. You have been. Now.

*Walter Scott. The ballads of Walter Scott, the great Scottish writer, were the model for James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer books, America's first novels. Twain loathed Cooper. In Twain's opinion Cooper had made a "wreck" of Scott.