“It has always seemed to me that the two most influential things which can occur in the life of a boy just on the cusp of puberty are to have his father die or to have his father live. In either event, it forces the young man to choose the path of his identity or lack thereof in the inevitable downriver progress of his life.” If this quotation sounds to you like the words of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, I’ll accept that compliment and move happily along, for to sound like Twain is a consummation devoutly to be wished by any American writer.

We writers are all about voice and giving voices to our narrators and characters. But, in whose voice do they speak? Is it ours or their own? That was the question to which Twain gave a unique and a uniquely American answer. Because of his father’s death when Sam was 11, young Clemens left formal education behind in fifth grade. One can only wonder how the youngster felt as he left those school doors behind. Later he made it clear that he never let his schooling interfere with his education, but at the time such a voracious reader, who would come to exemplify both American wit and the tradition of American autodidacts which included Franklin, Lincoln, and Edison, must have felt a great loss.

Had his father, the judge John Marshall Clemens, not succumbed to pneumonia, Twain presumably would have stayed in school and successfully unlearned much of his inherent understanding of life and language. We can assume that even had he gone on to write Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Judge Thatcher would not have been depicted as quite so noble, decent, and distant a pater familias, and his daughter Becky perhaps not so sweet. Fortuitously for readers if not for his family, the elder Clemens did die and leave the family in need; at 12, Samuel, was off to work and determined to find and create his own character, identity, and future.

Part of our good fortune is that Twain never learned to read in silence. Silent reading is the enemy of good writing. Language exists to be heard, preferably with appropriate paralinguistic accompaniment: tone, gesture, posture, and the like. Words should be given life, made “histrionic, to use a descriptor from Huckleberry Finn. Although he belittled poetry in general and mocked funereal poetry in Huckleberry Finn, Twain wrote well over a hundred poems. He also loved the stage, not only treading the boards himself as an internationally renowned speaker but also writing numerous, if forgettable, plays. Clearly, he knew that voices were to be heard and seen and acted. To celebrate the voices of his work and the poetry of his language is to understand something which those of us who learn to read in silence, to whisper in libraries, to shush our children when they speak, struggle to appreciate, that the voicing of language is its greatest sweetness. Perhaps that inherent unschooled understanding helped make Twain, as William Faulkner said, “the father of American literature.”

Twain was quintessentially American. Even though he travelled widely and was read and his lectures attended in other nations, Samuel Clemens was always focused on his roots in Hannibal, Missouri—a “border state” that did ultimately join the Confederacy—his self-identification with the Mississippi River, and his search for identity in the territories well outside of the reach of the Civil War which he had fled. That search brings us to one of the great controversies of Huckleberry Finn, the comment made by Earnest Hemingway in Green Hills of Africa:

All modern literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ If you read it you must stop where the (sic) Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.

The denouement which occurs in chapter thirty-one totally changes the nature of Huck Finn. From the lollygagging, scalawagging, rip-roaring if dark fun that has preceded, the story suddenly turns inward to soul-searching and an exploration of the author’s attitudes towards slavery and race. Is that change “cheating?” Does it represent Twain’s failure to come up with a more acceptable, reasonable denouement as Hemingway implies, or is it the entire point of the story? Does Twain begin this book for the specific purpose of trying to come to terms, both personally and as a quintessential American, with what Alexis de Tocqueville called “the great American dilemma?”

We must stop here to remember although the family had fallen on hard times before the war, Twain’s father had owned slaves. At the beginning of the war, Twain had enlisted in the Confederate cause. We should also remember that his enlistment, as a lieutenant, had lasted not two weeks before he deserted and taken off with his brother for the territories. It is perhaps a psychological aphorism, but the father’s orphaned son must necessarily discover who he is. For Twain that voyage of discovery was a life’s work and included time as a riverboat pilot and in the territories as well as his career as a writer.

Samuel Clemens didn’t believe in the secessionist cause. And, he didn’t think that cause to be about economics or slavery. He considered its roots to be a fantastical belief system based more in literary make-believe than economic reality. He considered “the Great Cause” to be fanciful Southern thinking as reflected in the latter section of Huckleberry Finn: Tom Sawyer shows up with “outlandish” notions of chivalry and heroism that drive the action forward—potentially down the rapids and onto the rocks, especially for Jim but potentially for Huck and himself as well. Making Tom’s decision to rescue Jim “by the books” even more ludicrous is the fact that he knows Jim has already been freed. Be that as it may, Tom’s intent on carrying out the “proper escape” reflects his understanding of all those “heroic” tales written by the likes of Walter Scott. One of Twain’s goals is making fun of Scott and by doing so driving home his indictment that Scott and his ilk were major culprits in bringing about the War Between the States. In chapter forty-six of Life on the Mississippi, Twain writes:

Then comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the silliness and emptiness, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.

With those words, Twain dismissed ‘the Noble Cause” and the superiority of the Confederacy and reckons that the bone-headed Southern character underlying Tom’s at-best partially educated reading of novels is a childish and disastrous flaw. However, he never fully rejects the racism and the assumption of racial superiority that was built not only into slavery but into the very warp and woof of the United States.

In Huckleberry Finn, Tom refers to the escape he has planned for Jim, Huck and himself as an “evasion.” Perhaps what he is evading is coming down firmly on the question of race. Throughout both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Jim and other Blacks are portrayed as simple, gullible, and kind-hearted. Even when they see the negatives ahead, as Jim clearly does in dealing with snakes, rats, and spiders being placed in his cell, they can be conned by any white man, even as feckless a white as Tom, into “going along.”

At the end of the novel, although Jim is free, the reader anticipates he’ll need the help of the decent whites if he’s ever to free his wife and children and have a life. The impression is clear; Jim will end up in service, perhaps back with the Widow Douglas or with Judge Thatcher—that honest and decent replacement for Twain’s own father—who has husbanded Huck’s money. It’s noteworthy that in keeping with the blatant assumption of Black ineptitude, Huck, who has learned he’s still rich and who cares not a whit for money, thinks $40 sufficient payment to Jim for the risks and pain he has endured. It is assumed that whatever money Jim is given will be gulled from him by the first conman, white of Black, to come along. Nor do Huck or Tom offer to buy Jim’s wife and children from bondage. Presumably that would be to interfere with the natural order of things.

If there’s one thing we learn from Twain’s writing, it’s that character does not change. Goodness, no matter how uneducated as in Huck’s case, will out. Rapscallion Tom will go on to new mischief. Jim will need a boss to tell him what to do. And, of course, Huck will eventually light out again to escape the confinements and chains of “sivilisation.”

The implication of that predetermination by character for America is not the achievement of greatness or the accomplishment of true equality but rather the shared sentimental humanity built from common experience, the inheritance of prejudice, and unquestionably the gullibility which allowed not only Huck and Tom to lie their way through their adventures but which also reminds us, in a quote often misattributed to Twain’s contemporary P.T. Barnum, “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Twain’s great skill as a story teller is that he can con his readers as easily and with better results than the King and Duke can con the rubes in the river towns they visit, more successfully than Tom Sawyer getting the neighborhood boys to whitewash Aunt Polly’s fence, and with far more grace than Huck can get around Aunt Sally. Yes, indeed, he does smooth-talk us into the big tent of his circus.

In the end, Huckleberry Finn is the kind of story we want to believe. It suckers us in because we want to see Huck’s decency; we want him to recognize Jim’s humanity; and most assuredly we want to see the back of him as, having told his tall-tales, he heads down the road, his hobo bundle over his shoulder—his dead pappy well-disappeared down the Mississippi—and a smile on our faces, at least those faces that are white. Ah yes, we Americans have kept our sense of humor.

– Kenneth Weene