The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" (Mark Twain)

Next book on my adult fiction bookshelf for the Daily Book Excerpt:

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Published in 1884, Huckleberry Finn takes place (as the author states beneath the title of the book:) in the "early nineteenth century". More so than Tom Sawyer (excerpt here), Twain addresses the larger cultural and social issues of that time - the free states, slave states, trying to get to the free states, the Mississippi slicing up through the nation like some kind of divining rod, the issues of Jim's wife and kids and how he wanted to get some abolitionists to kidnap them out of slavery ... all of those everyday things that a slave would experience at that time - and Twain does so in a way that is not didactic, or preachy - which is one of the reasons the book is controversial. You can't point to it and say, "HERE is what Mark Twain was SAYING" definitively because you can always find that the opposite sentiment is also true in the book. It's not a pamphlet or a sermon, much to the dismay of the literalists in our midst. It's a BOOK, with flawed human beings as the lead characters - as opposed to neat symbols they can line up behind and approve of. (Damn these people and their fucking "approval".). The book is controversial now because, obviously, it's not politically correct enough (even though if it were as politically correct as the times dictate now - it wouldn't be historically accurate - it also would be a big fat bore). But it was controversial from the moment it appeared. Huck Finn has always been a troublemaker of a book, and I love him dearly for that. I love books that piss people off. I love books that certain types of people think that none of us should be allowed to read. I love them on principle. I love books that make people tremble about "the children" and what will happen if "the children (tm)" read it? You want to make me read a book? Have some self-righteous nitwad pontificate about why I "shouldn't" read it. Book sold. "This book is not for children(tm)!!" (Or, not to mention the morons who disapprove of Madeleine L'Engle because her books aren't Christian enough. Or ... they can tell it's Christian ... but they don't underestand all of it and people like that HATE not understanding something!!! Therefore, Madeleine L'Engle must be up to no good!) Now I know we should pity these people, it must be pretty awful to BE them, but I don't pity them because they have a vested interest in controlling what is available to be read, and no, I don't take that lightly. I remember I went off on "challenged books" once and some self-proclaimed member of the "religious right" said, "I am troubled by your intemperate response." Now. This guy had been reading me for a couple of years. Okay? And he's just figuring out NOW that I'm intemperate? Looks like you need to work on your reading comprehension, bub. Don't look for "temperance" here when we're talking about literature and unimaginative fearful morons who want to decide what the rest of us get to read. Damn straight I'm "intemperate". Strangely enough, he doesn't comment anymore. Huh. Wonder why.

Well, I was a kid, and I read Huckleberry Finn on my own (I later had to read it in high school, and believe me - I felt like the biggest expert in the world because I had already read it so many times) - and I loved it. I was not corrupted. I didn't suddenly start running around thinking it was okay to say "nigger" and dreaming of a return of the antebellum south, or whatever the hell it is that people are so worried about. I loved Jim. I wanted him to be free. It was obvious to me even as a child (tm) that everyone in the book - EVERYONE - speaks in their own dialect. It's kind of like Dickens' books - where you really can hear the conversation, because Dickens almost spells it out phonetically. This is just how those people talked back then. I don't know, I was a kid and I knew it was a story! Will wonders never cease! I was caught up completely in its plot (although, as Twain says in a note before the book begins that anyone attempting to find a plot in the book "will be shot" - ha!) - I was on that raft with Jim and Huck, I lived their adventures with them, I wanted Jim to be free, I knew he couldn't go back - he just couldn't! - and I loved all of the adventures they had along the way. It's a great book! You can read it as an adult and see a lot more in it - but it's great fun for a kid as well. It's a fantasy: Huck and Jim on their raft, free man and slave ... sailing on the Mississippi - and while they are on their raft, all is possible. They WILL make it. They are equals. To even say that is condescending. It is what it is. They are friends. It is when they are forced to pull the raft over to one side of the river or the other, and step out onto the land, that they get into trouble. That is when the larger forces at work in the society start to catch up with them. As long as they are in motion, out on the water, they have a chance. And to those who say, in an apologetic tone, that Huckleberry Finn reflects some of the racist attitudes of his day, I reply: OF COURSE HE DOES. Because he lived THEN and not NOW, you morons. Bah.

I read it because I had read Tom Sawyer as a kid and was totally intrigued by the glimpses I got of Huckleberry's character and so I needed to read on. From the first sentence of Huckleberry Finn I was hooked:

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.

Looking back, I would say that what hooked me in was the voice. The "voice" of Huckleberry Finn represents (in my view) a huge leap forward in American literature. It still feels contemporary now. Holden Caulfield sounds like Huckleberry Finn. The first-person narration means there is no distance between us, the reader, and Huckleberry, our guide. Where he goes, we go. Where he makes a mistake, we stroll right into the thick of it with him. We don't have anyone else to take us on the way - it's him. And I don't know: I just loved hanging out with him. I love him still. I love that character. One of the greatest characters in our pantheon.

I know I've mentioned before my fantasy as a kid of being an orphan, thrown upon the world with no support, and I would have to make my way on my own. Huckleberry Finn (although he does have a father - loser loser loser) is one of the best examples of how my fantasies operated as a kid. Adrift with no "adults"? Having to deal with conmen, dangerous barking dogs, being chased? Sleeping under the stars? Sign me up!

Huck Finn's famous statement at the end of the book ("All right then, I'll go to hell") speaks to his essential decency, his innate inability to NOT see his fellow man as ... human beings. It was that that captivated me, and really made me kind of swoon for Huck a little bit.

And that's what made his ridiculously funny stopover at the Grangerford house one of my favorite parts of the book. Unlike Tom Sawyer, who is kind of a grade school lothario, Huckleberry Finn doesn't really have any interest in girls. Girls do not factor into his life at all. Becky Thatcher is a big character in Tom Sawyer but there really are no "girls" in Huckleberry Finn, just grim humorless female authority figures - and who's going to feel romantically about them?? But here at the Grangerford house, on the run, flying by the seat of his pants, using another name (which causes a humorous moment) - he meets Emmeline Grangerford - or, he doesn't really, because she's dead - but the house is full of her unfinished paintings and bad poetry and Huck kind of becomes a bit obsessed with Emmeline. He wonders about her. He thinks about her. He even prays for her soul. It's kind of an extraordinary little section and really shows Huckleberry's compassion - and not just that - but his ability to SEE.

Now there are some things he can't see - like how bad Emmeline's poetry actually is, and how her paintings sound ATROCIOUS (that's one of the funny things in the scene - Twain just blatantly telling us what Emmeline painted, letting the awfulness speak for itself - only Huckleberry, who has no taste in art or literature, thinks everything he encounters is AMAZING) ... so no, he doesn't look at the paintings and poetry and think: "Man. This work sucks." NO. He looks at it and wonders about a person who would do such paintings, who was she, did anyone love her like she obviously loved people? Was she okay where she was now?

He really cares for her.

This quality will come up again and again in Huckleberry Finn - his intuitive ability to see people - and yes, sometimes it comes too late ... but it's quite a gift, and it was a gift to me as a kid reading it. Because ... it taught me how to see. I mean, I was always going to be a sensitive little thing - I am convinced I was born that way ... but Huckleberry's ability to see really struck me, and made me want to be more like him. He reads her AWFUL poem ("stomach troubles laid him low" ... In a poem?? hahaha) and feels sad that she obviously cared so much that she would write a poem, and he wondered who cared about her, and who would write a poem for her. So he tries. Poor illiterate Huck Finn tries to write her - a girl he had never met - a poem. I don't know, it really touched me as a kid - and it still does.

So while the Grangerford section and the paintings of Emmeline may not be the most famous part of the book, that's the excerpt I knew I wanted to post today - because they had such power for me as a youngun. And even though I first encountered Emmeline's horrible unfinished painting when I was 10 years old, years and years and years ago - yikes - I still, to this day, remember exactly what the painting was - and what parts were unfinished - and the multiple pairs of arms, etc. To me, the book has great staying power (obviously).

One of my all-time faves.

EXCERPT FROM Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

Cold corn-pone, cold corn-beef, butter and buttermilk -- that is what they had for me down there, and there ain't nothing better that ever I've come across yet. Buck and his ma and all of them smoked cob pipes, except the nigger woman, which was gone, and the two young women. They all smoked and talked, and I eat and talked. The young women had quilts around them, and their hair down their backs. They all asked me questions, and I told them how pap and me and all the family was living on a little farm down at the bottom of Arkansaw, and my sister Mary Ann run off and got married and never was heard of no more, and Bill went to hunt them and he warn't heard of no more, and Tom and Mort died, and then there warn't nobody but just me and pap left, and he was just trimmed down to nothing, on account of his troubles; so when he died I took what there was left, because the farm didn't belong to us, and started up the river, deck passage, and fell overboard; and that was how I come to be here. So they said I could have a home there as long as I wanted it. Then it was most daylight and everybody went to bed, and I went to bed with Buck, and when I waked up in the morning, drat it all, I had forgot what my name was. So I laid there about an hour trying to think, and when Buck waked up I says:

"Can you spell, Buck?"

"Yes," he says.

"I bet you can't spell my name," says I.

"I bet you what you dare I can," says he.

"All right," says I, "go ahead."

"G-e-o-r-g-e J-a-x-o-n -- there now," he says.

"Well," says I, "you done it, but I didn't think you could. It ain't no slouch of a name to spell -- right off without studying."

I set it down, private, because somebody might want ME to spell it next, and so I wanted to be handy with it and rattle it off like I was used to it.

It was a mighty nice family, and a mighty nice house, too. I hadn't seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style. It didn't have an iron latch on the front door, nor a wooden one with a buckskin string, but a brass knob to turn, the same as houses in town. There warn't no bed in the parlor, nor a sign of a bed; but heaps of parlors in towns has beds in them. There was a big fireplace that was bricked on the bottom, and the bricks was kept clean and red by pouring water on them and scrubbing them with another brick; sometimes they wash them over with red water-paint that they call Spanish-brown, same as they do in town. They had big brass dog-irons that could hold up a sawlog. There was a clock on the middle of the mantelpiece, with a picture of a town painted on the bottom half of the glass front, and a round place in the middle of it for the sun, and you could see the pendulum swinging behind it. It was beautiful to hear that clock tick; and sometimes when one of these peddlers had been along and scoured her up and got her in good shape, she would start in and strike a hundred and fifty before she got tuckered out. They wouldn't took any money for her.

Well, there was a big outlandish parrot on each side of the clock, made out of something like chalk, and painted up gaudy. By one of the parrots was a cat made of crockery, and a crockery dog by the other; and when you pressed down on them they squeaked, but didn't open their mouths nor look different nor interested. They squeaked through underneath. There was a couple of big wild-turkey-wing fans spread out behind those things. On the table in the middle of the room was a kind of a lovely crockery basket that bad apples and oranges and peaches and grapes piled up in it, which was much redder and yellower and prettier than real ones is, but they warn't real because you could see where pieces had got chipped off and showed the white chalk, or whatever it was, underneath.

This table had a cover made out of beautiful oilcloth, with a red and blue spread-eagle painted on it, and a painted border all around. It come all the way from Philadelphia, they said. There was some books, too, piled up perfectly exact, on each corner of the table. One was a big family Bible full of pictures. One was Pilgrim's Progress, about a man that left his family, it didn't say why. I read considerable in it now and then. The statements was interesting, but tough. Another was Friendship's Offering, full of beautiful stuff and poetry; but I didn't read the poetry. Another was Henry Clay's Speeches, and another was Dr. Gunn's Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead. There was a hymn book, and a lot of other books. And there was nice split-bottom chairs, and perfectly sound, too -- not bagged down in the middle and busted, like an old basket.

They had pictures hung on the walls -- mainly Washingtons and Lafayettes, and battles, and Highland Marys, and one called "Signing the Declaration." There was some that they called crayons, which one of the daughters which was dead made her own self when she was only fifteen years old. They was different from any pictures I ever see before -- blacker, mostly, than is common. One was a woman in a slim black dress, belted small under the armpits, with bulges like a cabbage in the middle of the sleeves, and a large black scoop-shovel bonnet with a black veil, and white slim ankles crossed about with black tape, and very wee black slippers, like a chisel, and she was leaning pensive on a tombstone on her right elbow, under a weeping willow, and her other hand hanging down her side holding a white handkerchief and a reticule, and underneath the picture it said "Shall I Never See Thee More Alas." Another one was a young lady with her hair all combed up straight to the top of her head, and knotted there in front of a comb like a chair-back, and she was crying into a handkerchief and had a dead bird laying on its back in her other hand with its heels up, and underneath the picture it said "I Shall Never Hear Thy Sweet Chirrup More Alas." There was one where a young lady was at a window looking up at the moon, and tears running down her cheeks; and she had an open letter in one hand with black sealing wax showing on one edge of it, and she was mashing a locket with a chain to it against her mouth, and underneath the picture it said "And Art Thou Gone Yes Thou Art Gone Alas." These was all nice pictures, I reckon, but I didn't somehow seem to take to them, because if ever I was down a little they always give me the fan-tods. Everybody was sorry she died, because she had laid out a lot more of these pictures to do, and a body could see by what she had done what they had lost. But I reckoned that with her disposition she was having a better time in the graveyard. She was at work on what they said was her greatest picture when she took sick, and every day and every night it was her prayer to be allowed to live till she got it done, but she never got the chance. It was a picture of a young woman in a long white gown, standing on the rail of a bridge all ready to jump off, with her hair all down her back, and looking up to the moon, with the tears running down her face, and she had two arms folded across her breast, and two arms stretched out in front, and two more reaching up towards the moon -- and the idea was to see which pair would look best, and then scratch out all the other arms; but, as I was saying, she died before she got her mind made up, and now they kept this picture over the head of the bed in her room, and every time her birthday come they hung flowers on it. Other times it was hid with a little curtain. The young woman in the picture had a kind of a nice sweet face, but there was so many arms it made her look too spidery, seemed to me.

This young girl kept a scrap-book when she was alive, and used to paste obituaries and accidents and cases of patient suffering in it out of the Presbyterian Observer, and write poetry after them out of her own head. It was very good poetry. This is what she wrote about a boy by the name of Stephen Dowling Bots that fell down a well and was drownded:

ODE TO STEPHEN DOWLING BOTS, DEC'D

And did young Stephen sicken,
And did young Stephen die?
And did the sad hearts thicken,
And did the mourners cry?

No; such was not the fate of
Young Stephen Dowling Bots;
Though sad hearts round him thickened,
'Twas not from sickness' shots.

No whooping-cough did rack his frame,
Nor measles drear with spots;
Not these impaired the sacred name
Of Stephen Dowling Bots.

Despised love struck not with woe
That head of curly knots,
Nor stomach troubles laid him low,
Young Stephen Dowling Bots.

O no. Then list with tearful eye,
Whilst I his fate do tell.
His soul did from this cold world fly
By falling down a well.

They got him out and emptied him;
Alas it was too late;
His spirit was gone for to sport aloft
In the realms of the good and great.

If Emmeline Grangerford could make poetry like that before she was fourteen, there ain't no telling what she could a done by and by. Buck said she could rattle off poetry like nothing. She didn't ever have to stop to think. He said she would slap down a line, and if she couldn't find anything to rhyme with it would just scratch it out and slap down another one, and go ahead. She warn't particular; she could write about anything you choose to give her to write about just so it was sadful. Every time a man died, or a woman died, or a child died, she would be on hand with her "tribute" before he was cold. She called them tributes. The neighbors said it was the doctor first, then Emmeline, then the undertaker -- the undertaker never got in ahead of Emmeline but once, and then she hung fire on a rhyme for the dead person's name, which was Whistler. She warn't ever the same after that; she never complained, but she kinder pined away and did not live long. Poor thing, many's the time I made myself go up to the little room that used to be hers and get out her poor old scrap-book and read in it when her pictures had been aggravating me and I had soured on her a little. I liked all that family, dead ones and all, and warn't going to let anything come between us. Poor Emmeline made poetry about all the dead people when she was alive, and it didn't seem right that there warn't nobody to make some about her now she was gone; so I tried to sweat out a verse or two myself, but I couldn't seem to make it go somehow. They kept Emmeline's room trim and nice, and all the things fixed in it just the way she liked to have them when she was alive, and nobody ever slept there. The old lady took care of the room herself, though there was plenty of niggers, and she sewed there a good deal and read her Bible there mostly.

Well, as I was saying about the parlor, there was beautiful curtains on the windows: white, with pictures painted on them of castles with vines all down the walls, and cattle coming down to drink. There was a little old piano, too, that had tin pans in it, I reckon, and nothing was ever so lovely as to hear the young ladies sing "The Last Link is Broken" and play "The Battle of Prague" on it. The walls of all the rooms was plastered, and most had carpets on the floors, and the whole house was whitewashed on the outside.

It was a double house, and the big open place betwixt them was roofed and floored, and sometimes the table was set there in the middle of the day, and it was a cool, comfortable place. Nothing couldn't be better. And warn't the cooking good, and just bushels of it too!

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