SERIALIZATION OF “REBEL WITH A CAUSE: MARK TWAIN’S HIDDEN MEMOIRS” -- CHAPTER 56 (of 78)
“The Veriest Trash” (A Rattling Tiptop Puff) (1885)
Chapter 56
“The Veriest Trash” (A Rattling Tiptop Puff) (1885)
Those weeks on the river researching Life on the Mississippi, and those reminiscences of my former life on it and along the banks of it, had dredged up all manner of memories. That got me to reflecting deeply on what life was like for those living in those bygone days. Not just for me and mine, but for all those who inhabited the region, including the slaves and slavers, the abolitionists, and the common folk. For the children as well as the adults.
I had long been working on a sequel to the book about Tom Sawyer’s adventures, featuring his companion Huckleberry Finn, but this return to the scenes of my youth had given impetus to finally finishing it. I had begun the book about Huck before I had even completed the one about Tom, but had pigeonholed it several times for months or even years, and sometimes wondered whether I would ever finish it. I had even come close to destroying the manuscript on at least one occasion. But over the years, the desire to bring Huck’s book to completion gradually grew and sprouted and spread throughout my brain and heart.
I finally completed it in 1884, and it was published early in 1885. It was actually published in the United Kingdom before the United States, in December of 1884. Then two months later, it came out in the United States.
I did not have to wait long for a reaction to it. “Huck” was banned by the Concord, Massachusetts library as unfit for human consumption. Those wise heads weighed it and found it wanting, even referring to it as “the veriest trash.” This, though, did not upset me. No, for I knew that that judgment on their part meant more money in my pocket. The ban would sell my books, due to the free publicity and curiosity that Huck’s expulsion provoked.
Other libraries followed suit. In order to read “Huck,” those who felt the need to discover for themselves why Huck had met with such disapprobation would need to purchase the book, rather than borrow a copy of it from their local library. I estimated another 25,000 sales would come as a result of that ban. If only every library in the nation would have banned and panned that wild child of my brain!
In earlier years, it was first Bret Harte who had helped me edit some of my works, mainly “The Innocents Abroad”; later Howells assisted me in stylistic matters. I had another editor, though, one with almost unlimited power to red-pencil whatever was found to be especially lacking in good taste—Livy.
I always read the daily output of my pen to her and the girls at day’s end. Livy would let me know if something I had written had been laid on too thick, or was too strong or coarse. It was always just those parts which Livy disapproved of which delighted our daughters the most—as evidenced by their joyful titterings. Livy, that pitiless executioner of deliciously vulgar statements, would forcefully scratch out these parts with her pencil.
Livy was right, though; her judgment was better than mine in such matters. Sometimes, though, I would play tricks on her by salting the manuscript with gems of the brazenest shockingness, which I of course knew she would hastily scribble out. I had no intention of leaving these in the manuscript in the first place, but reveled in the violent way she would heartlessly evict those passages from the fruits of my laborious toil.
On one or two occasions, though, you could have knocked me down with a feather when she let some things pass unexpurgated which I later quietly removed myself.
That reminds me of another occasion related to “Huck Finn.” Perhaps it doesn’t really belong here, but it shows how writing that book affected my life in that I myself derived pleasure from reading it.
You see, I don’t always remember what I have written, or whether I have written something down anywhere at all. And so, if I am to take up one of my books in later years, I might be surprised by what I find in it, and not only not remember writing it, but may not even remember much about the events that inspired a certain passage.
An advantage of these forgetfulnesses was that they sometimes afforded me unabashed and unashamed delight as I discovered delicious passages in certain of my works. Such was the case one day when I was sitting in a chair by an upstairs window reading from one of my books. Livy came up and caught me laughing uproariously over something on the page under my glance. She inquired which book it was that I had found such pleasure in. Shaken out of my reverie by this unwanted inquiry, and too embarrassed to admit that it was a book of my own, I averred that I did not know which book it was or who the author was, and that I had simply grabbed a volume from the shelf without looking at its title and opened to a random page.
Curious, she looked over my shoulder, only to discover that it was “Huck Finn” that I was reading. She told me that I should be ashamed of myself for this wanton display of self-congratulation.
EDITOR’S NOTES: In an 1885 letter to his publisher, Charles Webster, Twain wrote the following about the negative reaction to Huck Finn:
Dear Charley,
The Committee of the Public Library of Concord, Mass. have given us a rattling tiptop puff which will go into every paper in the country. They have expelled Huck from their library as “trash and suitable only for the slums.” That will sell 25,000 copies for us sure.
Twain later expounded on the personal benefits to him of this banning:
It will deter other libraries from buying the book and you are doubtless aware that one book in a public library prevents the sale of a sure ten and a possible hundred of its mates. And secondly it will cause the purchasers of the book to read it, out of curiosity, instead of merely intending to do so after the usual way of the world and library committees; and then they will discover, to my great advantage and their own indignant disappointment, that there is nothing objectionable in the book, after all.
Explaining the reason behind their action, one member of the Concord library committee wrote of “Huck Finn”:
It deals with a series of adventures of a very low grade of morality, … and all through its pages there is a systematic use of bad grammar and an employment of rough, coarse, inelegant expressions …The whole book is of a class that is more profitable for the slums than it is for respectable people, and it is trash of the veriest sort.
The New York World’s headline was, “‘Humor’ of a Very Low Order—Wit and Literary Ability Wasted on a Pitiable Exhibition of Irreverence and Vulgarity”
Although the verdict of the Concord library committee and some newspaper reviewers may have been good for Twain and his company book-sales-wise, the author doubtless also enjoyed receiving positive reviews, such as this one from Joel Chandler Harris (“Uncle Remus”):
I know that some of the professional critics will not agree with me, but there is not in our fictive literature a more wholesome book than ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ It is history, it is romance, it is life. Here we behold human character stripped of all tiresome details; we see people growing and living; we laugh at their humor, share their griefs; and, in the midst of it all, behold we are taught the lesson of honesty, justice and mercy.
The San Francisco Chronicle’s review of “Huck Finn” in March of 1885 was also positive:
Mark Twain may be called the Edison of our literature. There is no limit to his inventive genius, and the best proof of its range and originality is found in this book.
H. L. Mencken called it “a truly stupendous piece of work, perhaps the greatest novel ever written in English” and opined that Twain was “the true father of our national literature, the first genuinely American artist. He was, by great odds, the most noble figure America has ever given to English literature.”
Much later, Ernest Hemingway also famously said of “Huck Finn” (in 1935, on the book’s golden anniversary): “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
As previously noted, at the time of publication, though, Huck was not popular with everyone by any means. One magazine described it as being full of “blood-curdling humor” and “coarse and dreary fun” and judged its “gutter realism” as being unsuitable for young people.
Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women, even went so far as to scold the author: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses, he had best stop writing for them.”
Lionel Trilling’s book The Liberal Imagination says: “Huckleberry Finn was once barred from certain libraries and schools for its alleged subversions of morality. The authorities had in mind the book’s endemic lingo, the petty thefts, the denigrations of respectability and religion, the bad language and the bad grammar.”
In 1949, the slimy screwball Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy jumped late onto the banning bandwagon.
As far as today’s view of “Huck Finn” goes, it is most often criticized for its use of the “N-Word.” But those who criticize it for this reason fail to take into account the context (of the text and the times) and perhaps have not even read the book. And if they have indeed read it, the question should be raised as to whether they understood it; understood its point and theme, that is.
Critics should note what prominent African-Americans of the time thought of Twain. Frederick Douglass, who penned an account of his early life entitled Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave, and who had been assisted in escaping from slavery by Twain’s future in-laws in 1838, was a friend. So was Booker T. Washington, one of the founders of Tuskegee Institute and author of Up From Slavery, who wrote of Huckleberry Finn’s friend Jim:
One cannot fail to observe that in some way or other the author, without making any comment and without going out of his way, has somehow succeeded in making his readers feel a genuine respect for ‘Jim,’ in spite of the ignorance he displays. I cannot help feeling that in this character Mark Twain has, perhaps unconsciously, exhibited his sympathy and interest in the masses of the negro people.
It is exceedingly unlikely that Twain’s success along these lines was unconscious. In fact, Twain once said to an interviewer: “Everything I have ever written has had a serious philosophy or truth as its basis. I would not write a humorous work merely to be funny.”
More recently, in Mark Twain’s America, Bernard DeVoto wrote:
Sam Clemens grew up among Negroes: the fact is important for Mark Twain. . . . In his books the Negroe is consistently a noble character.
Of even more recent vintage is the following quote from the late Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Toni Morrison, who deemed the banning of Huck Finn “elitist censorship designed to appease adults rather than educate children.”
In the preface to his book Huck Finn’s America: Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped His Masterpiece, Andrew Levy posited the provocative question: “Is the book racist, or a textbook illustration of the antiracist uses of racism?” The fact that Twain refused to allow the “N-Word” to be used in his presence in most situations should provide a good clue as to how we should reply to Levy’s rhetorical question.
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Blackbird Crow Raven’s “Rebel With A Cause: Mark Twain’s Hidden Memoirs” is being serialized in this space on substack every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday; it is also available in its entirety from here.