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129th book of 2020.

It All Starts Here

Hemingway famously said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn, It's the best book we've had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before.�� It is not Hemingway’s best quote in my opinion, that, unrelatedly, goes to, “I drink to make other people more interesting.�� But that’s beside the point �� but does lead us into the beginning of Huckleberry Finn with his escape from his alcoholic father.

Though it is not my favourite quote of Hemingway, it could, quite possibly, be true. In Twain’s words I saw a number of other writers: Kerouac, Passos, Steinbeck, indeed, Hemingway himself. The book is American. In my annotated version it gives me information sourced from a letter of Twain’s to a friend, stating that Huckleberry Finn was imagined at 14 years old. So, instead of a young boy and a 450 pound Bengal tiger on a boat, we have a 14 year old American bohemian boy with “slave-runaway��, Jim. Race is the biggest theme in the novel, one that doesn’t ebb and flow, but one that pulses throughout, in every scene. I’ve seen people call this novel racist: they are wrong. Huck is, with lack of better word, a free-spirit �� but being a young boy, his social understanding is that of his world (this world being 19th century Illinois), a world that is rightly scorned now. And despite having to balk often at the pages with the excessive use of derogatory terminology for Jim and the other slaves, there is a surprising amount of heart in the novel. Huck’s emotional journey, alongside his physical odyssey with Jim, is that of greater understanding and empathy. It is clear to see that he cares for Jim; even if he does so self-consciously, he is a product of his time �� we can scorn that now, but we cannot understand what it is like to be brought up in 19th century Illinois. Tom Sawyer’s philosophies are slightly less pure. Huck’s opinions on Jim are centred around his mental journey and discussion into good and evil, right and wrong. One of the few poignant moments in the novel (without spoiling too much) is when Huck is given the chance to give up Jim’s position for a reward, and he chooses not to; his actions bring him inner conflict: They went off, and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right. In the end he decides on this:

Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on - s'pose you'd a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, then, says I, what's the use you learning to do right, when it's troublesome to do right and ain't no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn't answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn't bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.

Later in the novel Huck reflects, Human beings can be awful cruel to one another. Lift the shroud of race and what’s hidden beneath, quite simply, is the beauty of friendship and good.

Not Waving, But Drowning

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was a true adventure story �� pranks, good-humour, boys living free and happy, and famously, gate-crashing their own funeral. My review descended into reminiscing of my years in the Scouts (Memory-Heavy Review Here), for that is where the novel took me. Though I expected the same from Huckleberry Finn’s tale �� I was wrong. Twain was a humourist, which is ironically a funny term in itself. When reading this, one can remind themselves of that and smile, while they can. In fact, this novel echoed in my head to another brilliant American novel, Catch-22. Similarly to Heller’s satire on war, this tale made one laugh, before it made one stop. The most fitting example is the family Huck stays with briefly when he is separated from Jim. The family explain that they are in a feud with another family, though when it started and why have been long forgotten. As a boy I heard similar stories about countries, or old tribes, fighting but they couldn’t remember why �� there’s something oddly funny about the idea of fighting about something you cannot remember. It is only funny for so long; a boy in the family explains that that year, two had died, one being a fourteen-year-old boy (Huck’s age, we now know) being shot off of his horse. The episode descends further into darkness. There were a surprising amount of murders and deaths in the novel, which made me realise that Tom Sawyer’s tale is for the young, and Huckleberry’s Finn’s tale is for the young who are rising from their youth.

Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn?

Tom is full of adventure; he is rash, arrogant (the way a child can be, without realising), well-read and brought up well too (in this sense, into a good family, with plenty of slaves and a more nurtured view compared to Huck’s). Is Twain saying, then, that it is by our nurture that defines our beliefs? We quite readily accept that in today’s world. In Golding’s world, boys are left long enough that they kill one another �� and in Twain’s world, a boy is left long enough with a runaway slave that he starts to look closer.

When I waked up, just at day-break, he [Jim] was setting there with his head betwixt his knees, moaning and mourning to himself. I didn’t take notice, nor let on. I knowed what it was about. He was thinking about his wife and his children, away up yonder, and he was low and homesick; because he hadn’t ever been away from home before in his life; and I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks does for their’n.

A moment of empathy strikes Huck. And though some of the things Huck says seem hypocritical, with the word choice especially, one must remember how normal it was to speak so �� and that Huck’s views were actually breaking through that.

Huck’s tale is filled with disgust for the world. There are murderers, thieves, frauds�� And there’s Huck and Jim on their raft, drifting through the ether, caught in the middle of Twain’s wildly humorous but terrifying America. Like the old saying, “We laugh so we don’t cry.�� In this sense, Huck’s journey echoes again, to Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. And I start to sense the novels coming out of Huckleberry Finn like branches from a tree �� and from those branches, even more: from Lee’s novel, another branch spawns with Tartt’s The Little Friend, from Catch-22 comes Vonnegut novels like Slaughterhouse-Five. And as I have said, even Hemingway himself, Nick Adams bursting from the tree, like a modern Huckleberry Finn (which is to say, is it, that Hemingway is like a modern Huckleberry Finn?). I start to wonder. Could it honestly be that American fiction has bloomed from this novel? That they all stand on the shoulders of this fourteen-year-old boy, lying on his back on the raft, smoking or snoozing, thinking how You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft. That the whole of American literature is sat on that raft with him �� and Huckleberry Finn adores it.