Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Alan Gribben

favorite books because, Twain declared in Life on the Mississippi, Cervantes’s work “swept the world’s admiration for the mediaeval chivalry-silliness out of existence.” A principal target of the Tom-and-Huck exchanges was the idealized fiction and poetry of English Romanticism that still in some respects overshadowed the American realistic movement of which Twain was a stalwart champion. Huck Finn’s habit of noting gross particulars, even while absorbing a sublime sight, constitutes a vote against the earlier view that literature should primarily ennoble human perceptions. A single sentence in Huckleberry Finn aptly captures the gist of what Twain sought to accomplish in revolutionizing the outlook of fiction. Huck interrupts (in Chapter 19) his tribute to the beauty of dawn along the river’s forested shoreline with a jarringly frank acknowledgment: “The breeze . . . comes fanning you from over there, so cool and fresh and sweet to smell, on account of the woods and the flowers; but sometimes not that way, because they’ve left dead fish laying around, gars, and such, and they do get pretty rank.” Few if any authors before Mark Twain (other than Walt Whitman) would have included in this context such an unsavory detail as the pungent odor of rotting fish.

      Ernest Hemingway and Huckleberry Finn

      In a semi fictional work, Green Hills of Africa (1935), Ernest Hemingway’s narrator made an astute and widely quoted pronouncement about Huckleberry Finn. The key element in this opinion was the word “modern”: “All modern American literature,” Hemingway’s character declared, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before” (italics added). Hemingway had noticed a momentous difference between Twain’s novel and its literary precursors. In “modern” literature, as opposed to much British and American fiction of the nineteenth century, the reader is no longer coached regarding what to think of the characters and their actions. This prior type of moral guidance had typically been threaded obliquely throughout the paragraphs of a novel, or else summarized overtly at the end of a chapter or a short story.

      In contrast to this previous view of the author’s role as both narrator and interpreter, Twain devised a narrator so young and inexperienced that he often cannot quite figure out what he is describing. That is the case, for instance, in Chapter 22 when Huck sneaks into a circus and relates how an intoxicated man staggers out of the audience and demands a chance to ride one of the performers’ horses. The crowd hoots and jeers at the drunk’s interruption of the show, until the ring-master reluctantly gives in and allows the man to mount one of the animals. At first Huck is fearful for the man’s safety as the trained horse races around the ring at faster and faster gaits, with the helpless man “hanging onto his neck, and his heels flying up in the air.” Then Huck (along with the crowd) is astonished when this “sot” suddenly stands up on the galloping steed, sheds layers of clothing “so thick they kind of clogged up the air,” and reveals himself to be “slim and handsome” in an acrobatic costume that was “the gaudiest and prettiest you ever saw.” Immediately he “lit into that horse with his whip and made him fairly hum.”

      What is Huckleberry Finn’s response to this obviously well-rehearsed circus act? Huck erroneously perceives it as a clever prank played by a stunt-rider on the ring-master. “The ring-master he see how he had been fooled, and he was the sickest ring-master you ever see, I reckon. Why, it was one of his own men! He had got up that joke all out of his own head, and never let on to nobody. . . . I wouldn’t a been in that ring-master’s place, not for a thousand dollars.” As with Hemingway’s minimalist short stories and clipped vignettes in In Our Time (1925), the reader rather than the author must undertake the interpretation. The author simply sketches a situation, in Twain’s book through Huck’s naive eyes, and then compels the reader to carry out the task of construing its meaning. This is the breakthrough feat that Hemingway recognized Twain had achieved for later American writers.

      Underestimating Huckleberry Finn

      It is possible to suppose that the main point of Huckleberry Finn is how its title character ultimately learns to view Jim as a fellow human being with valid feelings about his family and his future. That way of reading the novel is a principal reason why the boys’ ridiculous antics at the Phelps farm upset so many critics; Huck seems to fall back from the progress he had made in affirming Jim’s humanity and friendship. But we make a large mistake in merely settling for Huck’s discovery that his fellow passenger on the raft is sensitive and caring. What Twain presents is a far more complex proposition—that it is conformist and cowardly of us to take it for granted that prevailing laws and customs, no matter how solidly established, are too sacred to be skeptically examined and intellectually tested by each of us as individuals. And this truly subversive slant to the novel challenges readers to ponder whether or not they themselves might be succumbing to social pressures by participating in practices that are in vogue and yet tremendously wrong. Twain was able to write about this sort of blindness so convincingly because he recalled how he himself had gone along with the institution of slavery through his adolescence and beyond, blithely overlooking manifold signs of its ethical and spiritual immorality.

      Mark Twain wrote and published another boy book, The Prince and the Pauper: A Tale for Young People of All Ages (1881), in the interval between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (note that Twain dropped the definite article “The” from the title page of the latter book, presumably to better fit Huck’s vernacular narrative). That middle novel, The Prince and the Pauper, though certainly worth reading, largely relied on Twain’s research in English history books and lacks the sense of “lived” experience that animates his pictures in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn of the Mississippi River, its villages, and its vessels. There are no other American books in the last half of the nineteenth century that offer a reader the pleasures of Twain’s two companion boy books with their ingenuity of plot and characterization, slice-of-life sharpness, penetrating irony, and sweepingly panoramic display of an entire sector of society.

      The Raftsmen Episode in Huckleberry Finn

      One other editorial choice had to be determined. Scholars have vigorously debated whether a lengthy passage in the manuscript of Huckleberry Finn that Twain first published in Chapter 3 of Life on the Mississippi (1883) to illustrate the rawness of early river days should be reinserted into the novel from which it was extracted. In this adventure Huck swims to a large raft and listens while “a mighty rough looking lot” of raftsmen drink, argue, sing, dance, and swap yarns. The men discover Huck in his hiding place, threaten to “paint him a sky blue all over from head to heel,” but let him go with a stern warning. Mark Twain agreed to delete the episode from Huckleberry Finn for fear that the public might think he was duplicating “old matter” (Twain’s words) in his new book (since he had used it previously in Life on the Mississippi) and because the publisher pointed out that Huckleberry Finn was longer than Tom Sawyer, damaging the impression that they were companion volumes.

      The author yielded to his publisher’s suggestion on April 22, 1884 so obligingly (“Yes, I think the raft chapter can be left wholly out”) that most subsequent editions of the novel have followed suit. The NewSouth Edition incorporates the raftsmen passage into Chapter 16 as Twain initially wrote it in his manuscript and published it in the American edition of Life on the Mississippi. That episode, with its strutting, pugnacious braggarts and its chilling ghost tale about a child’s murder, contains some of Mark Twain’s best writing. Its inclusion enables readers to savor more of Twain contributions to the then-reigning “Local Color” school of fiction that prized vivid descriptions of an area’s vocations and peculiarities.

      Textual Emendations

      With the exception of the changes in racial denotations (and in four archaic references to skin color) and the insertion of the raftsmen passage, the text of the novel otherwise follows the wording of the first American edition. Issues about questionable punctuation were resolved by consulting a facsimiles of Twain’s manuscript. The editor has silently modernized certain eccentricities of nineteenth-century punctuation and spelling, and has given American spellings preference over British spellings. Obvious typographical errors introduced by the printers and inconsistent spellings have been corrected.

      Alternative Editions

      It goes without saying that textual purists object strenuously to these editorial alterations