Huckleberry Finn For 100 Years, This Great American Novel Has Woven Its Own Tale Of Controversy

February 25, 1985|by FRANK WHELAN, The Morning Call


By Order of the Author,

Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance

- Preface to "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

* * *

The tale of "Huckleberry Finn," first published in the United States 100 years ago this month, is so familiar it almost transcends its roots.

In this mythic vision of America, somewhere between the border of reality and the twilight of fantasy, a river flows to the horizon. On its waters, towering steamboats of immaculate white glide with the stately beauty of swans. Almost unnoticed beneath them, a humble raft drifts on aimless currents.

Its crew is two fugitives, a black man named Jim and a white boy, Huck Finn. They are fleeing a society of hypocrisy and oppression. As a runaway slave, the black man knows that at the end of his journey lies either freedom or the crack of the overseer's lash. For the white boy, fleeing from his brutal, alcoholic father, this river voyage is both adventure and rejection of a society that keeps trying to tame him.

Their trip takes them into an American South where romantic notions of chivalry lead to blood feuds of monumental violence. Con artists posing as royalty fleece beguiled yokels and then are themselves the targets of vigilantes. It is an appalling reconfirmation of the violence and hypocrisy in the world they are fleeing.

But life on the raft has a larger meaning. Among other things, it forces Huck Finn to see that the laws of slavery, although backed by the power of church and state, are wrong. With his vow to go to hell rather than betray Jim to the slave hunters, Huck's river journey turns from a mere voyage into an exploration of 19th-century America's racial consciousness.

Despite the place of honor "Huckleberry Finn" holds in American literature today, controversy about the book has been brisk since its birth. In the19th and early 20th century it was denounced as too vulgar for children. In our own time Twain's use of black dialect, and the repeated references to blacks as "niggers" by the major characters, has led to charges that "Huckleberry Finn" is a racist tract that stereotypes black people. Some have suggested it be dropped from required readings for high school students. This turn of events might have exasperated Mark Twain but it would not have surprised him.

The birth of "Huckleberry Finn" took place in 1875. Twain told critic William Dean Howells that year that he planned to "take a boy of twelve and run him through life (in the first person)." The author felt that his earlier creation, Tom Sawyer, "would not be a good character for it," so he set about to create someone new. About a month after his letter to Howells, Twain's imagination came up with "Huckleberry Finn." After writing furiously for about a year, Twain became dissatisfied with Huck and put the manuscript aside.

Seven years later, while working on the semi-autobiographical work, "Life on the Mississippi," Twain took up "Huckleberry Finn" again. Taking a trip down the Mississippi brought back to him his days as a boy in Hannibal, Mo. In the summer of 1883 he told his family that he felt he could complete in two months a book that he had not worked on for years. "This summer it is no more trouble to me to write than it is to lie," he wrote. In a letter to critic Howells at the same time, he announced that he was working six days a week and had completed 800-900 manuscript pages.

Twain turned the finished work over to his publisher and nephew-by- marriage Charles L. Webster and hoped to hit the Christmas 1884 market. But the publication was quickly postponed when it was discovered that someone had drawn an obscene object in one of the book's illustrations. The culprit was never found but the damage was already done. The English edition of "Huckleberry Finn," without the offending illustrations, appeared on December 10, 1884. American readers got to read three excerpts that appeared in the monthly Century magazine. But the first American edition was not published until February 18, 1885.

The book was an immediate hit with the general public. By May of 1885 51,000 copies had been sold and the publisher was quickly issuing more. Today it is estimated that about 20 million copies of the book, in just about every language, have been sold.

But the reviews were less then approving. What critic Gore Vidal calls "bookchat land" was not amused by "Huckleberry Finn." From its lofty perch, the Boston Transcript called the book "flat as well as coarse." A New York publication decided on the sarcastic approach. "A delicate piece of narration," wrote the prickly reviewer, "by Huck Finn, describing his venerable and dilapidated 'pap' afflicted with delerium tremens . . . is especially suited to amuse children on long rainy afternoons . . . "

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