Huck Finn, All-world Boy

December 03, 1985|By Andy Rooney.

It hardly seems necessary to have a 150th anniversary celebration of Mark Twain this year, because when he wrote ``Tom Sawyer`` and ``Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,`` Mark Twain erected an unforgettable memorial for himself that can still be seen around the world.

Because of the celebration, I`ve been rereading ``Huck Finn.`` Gee, it`s good.

The theme of the book is the pleasure and excitement of escape from civilization, which we all dream of doing once in a while. Huck didn`t just dream about escaping. He did something about it, and his raft trip down the river with his black slave friend, Jim, is the best escapist literature ever written.

Experts have analyzed Mark Twain to death, and he knew they would. He even tried to stop them. I`d forgotten the admonition he wrote at the beginning of the Huck Finn book: ``Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot will be shot.``

There`s no doubt Mark Twain was a lot more complicated than the simple picture we have of him as a beloved, white-haired sage and humorist.

One expert on his work has suggested that the Mississippi River is an allegorical God, but that seems highly unlikely if you know anything about the author. He didn`t write a lot of fuzzy stuff with deep meaning, like Herman Melville did in ``Moby Dick.`` Mark Twain filled his books with real incidents, genuine little adventures and people we can all understand even when what is happening to them has never happened to us.

It`s an American conceit that Huck Finn is the all-American 13-year-old boy. Huck is an all-world boy; the book has been translated into 55 languages. In its first year it was done in Danish, Dutch and German; two years later it was translated into Russian.

The other thing that`s so attractive about the book is the great friendship between Huck and the escaped slave, Jim. It makes you feel good reading it, quite aside from all the adventures happening to them. Jim is referred to a lot as ``nigger`` by Mark Twain and a lot of people have decided it was racist. Mark Twain was about as much a racist as Abe Lincoln.

No one could read what Mark Twain said about his mother 20 years after the Civil War and still believe he was a racist. ``When slavery perished, my mother had been in daily touch with it for 60 years,`` he said, ``yet, kind-hearted and compassionate though she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque and unwarrantable usurpation.``

Toward the end of the book, Huck Finn begins to wonder about what he`s done. Helping a slave escape was a sin in the eyes of the white man`s God, according to everything he`d learned growing up--and sinners weren`t allowed to pray.

Huck decides that to purge his soul, he has to turn Jim in. After writing a note to the authorities, Huck says, ``I felt good and washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn`t do it straight off but . . . set there thinking how near I come to being lost to hell.``

Huck turns to thinking how much he loves Jim.

``I studied a minute,`` he says, ``sort of holding my breath and then says to myself, `All right then, I`ll go to hell` . . . and tore up the note.``

If you haven`t read ``Adventures of Huckleberry Finn`` lately, you ought to. It`s not a classic for no reason.