The first time I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, it was a simple story about a boy’s adventures in pre-Civil War America. Each time I’ve read it since then, and I’ve read it lots, it has become another tale altogether.
Author and educator Andrew Levy has written a remarkable companion piece to Mark Twain’s Great American Novel. Huck Finn’s America takes you back to 1885, to examine how Twain’s contemporaries responded at that time to the themes of race and childhood that twist among the famous narrative like kudzu. “Mark twain” was riverboat jargon for water depth barely safe to sail in. Mark Twain’s novel is still tricky sailing in the 21st Century.
Weld: Though The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published 130 years ago, your new effort suggests that Huck Finn’s America is surprisingly similar to our own.
Andrew Levy: Right, and there are two foci in the book in that regard. One is about children, of course. I think there’s been a tradition to say that [Huck Finn] is about a time when childhood was innocent and free, but actually Twain was writing in a time when there were virtually the same arguments about children and popular culture, children and violence, children and standardized and compulsory education that we’re having today. Children’s studies experts are aware of this phenomenon, that the argument about how to raise our children has been remarkably static. So, instead of teaching the book as an example of that, how we have this persistent argument, we teach the book as how it was innocent back then, and every kid had a fishing pole and walked around barefoot. Now, every kid’s inside with their video games. Back then, they were worried about every kid and their dime novels.
On the issue of race, the key for me was reading all those newspapers I read as a component of researching what it was like when Mark Twain was composing and publishing and promoting the book, just seeing all these remarkable and persistent patterns in terms of images of blackness, in terms of structural patterns involving incarceration rates, involving privatized prisons that are run for money, in terms of removing the rights of felons. Structurally speaking, the Jim Crow justice system is still in place.
Huck Finn is about all this. Huck Finn is about the persistence of patterns of inequality, and about how hard it is to really fight for freedom — for your own or anyone else’s — and at the end of the book, they really kind of end up where they started. I won’t quite call it a pessimistic vision, but I think it’s a challenge, and for a long time we’ve not taught it that way. It became the great novel to teach in the late 1940s and 1950s, and it was held up as a model of racial outreach during the 1950s and 1960s. You were really being encouraged to be like Huck, if you were white, and reach out across the color line to do what you can.
But Huck doesn’t really succeed. He has a great symbolic gesture, where he reaches out and says he’ll go to Hell for Jim [the runaway slave], but then everything after that indicates that it was just a private gesture. The book is much more about the divide between the symbolic gesture and creating true structural change, but people treated it like the symbolic gesture was enough. That was, I think, the failure of reading Huck Finn from around 1950 to the present, and, understandably, many people reading the book reacted to the book as not just not a model of racial equality, but actually racist. This was in large part due to the presence of the racial slurs and stereotypes, but if you read people’s responses carefully, you’ll find a lot of people are not so much annoyed with the book as they are with the book being held up as a model for how to do things.
Weld: In your research, you found that Huck Finn’s America was troubled by a culture of out-of-control youth who were practically enemies of the state.
AL: Yeah, and you’ll still find that today: youth as threat. You pick up that newspaper in 1884…first, you’d be shocked by the number of stories about African-American crime, and secondly, you’d be shocked by the number of stories about youth — youth crime, youth gangs. From 1870 to 1875 [America] really regarded itself as having a crisis. That sense of crisis did dissipate by the turn of the century, but they really thought they were under siege.
Weld: I’d always thought that Huckleberry Finn was based on the experiences of the young Sam Clemens in Missouri, but you’ve found evidence that the story is also informed by his experience raising children of his own in New England.
AL: Yeah, I’m proud of that part, to be honest with you. Twain was taking a lot from his childhood, but at the same time, he has three children of his own he’s raising the whole time he’s writing Huck Finn. The two older girls, when he publishes Huck Finn, they’re roughly the same age as Tom and Huck. But we don’t go there, because we think of boys and girls separately, and likewise Tom and Huck were considered to be rough-and-tumble lads, and girls were, theoretically, prim and Victorian.
But Twain was taking notes all the time. There’s a wonderful moment in 1876 when he starts writing Huck Finn for a few weeks in the summer, and he puts it down. Pretty much the moment he sets it down he starts another book, a record of the “small foolishnesses” of his kids. He takes notes about them, exact dialogue, their religious beliefs, their education, their response to corporal punishment — really detailed, almost like an anthropologist. If you read that side by side with Huck Finn, I think it’s unmistakable that his own kids are in Huck and Tom, too.
Weld: Huck Finn was published at a time when the rights of former slaves were being rolled back by the white political establishment. You suggest that as he finished the manuscript for publication, “Mark Twain was clearly rehearsing a fact-based alternative to the riot of mistruths and exaggerations offered by newspapers and politicians.”
AL: Yeah, I do. He’s way too sly to put the word “conscience” there. He read the newspapers obsessively. He hated the way they structured political debate. His best friend [Louisiana writer George Washington] Cable was much more public about it and Cable was the guy he wanted out there by his side when he sold Huckleberry Finn. A lot of [Twain’s] private letters support the idea that he was trying to create some kind of reparation or response.
At the same time, there was a burgeoning folklore movement, and he was much more involved in that than people talk about. He was a founding member of the American Folklore Society in that very decade. What those folks were doing was going into obscure parts of the country, the marginalized parts, and they were taking down the stories of slaves, the songs, as well as American Indians. They were saving a civilization that was about to disappear. There’s something profoundly paternalistic about this, in retrospect, and I don’t think we should lose sight of that, but, at the same time, as opposed to what the newspapers were doing, Twain was out with the people who were trying to create almost a kind of scholarly, fact-based alternative to the portrayal of, for instance, African-Americans.
Weld: Could you determine whether Mark Twain’s agenda was creating mischief or fomenting sedition?
AL: [laughs] I’ll go with “A.” The thing about him, and I write this elsewhere in the book — he would poke and poke and if he saw you turning on him, he would back off. He called himself a coward over and over and over again, and there is a big difference between what he said in private and what he said in public.
A point I want to make in the book is that, near the end of his life, I think a lot of that disappeared, but I got Cable in this book to make the point that Huckleberry Finn was not this massive profile in racial courage, that it was a sly, conflicted book, that it was playing with stereotypes. The closer you look at the conditions and contexts of the time, you can see the satire. You can see in [Twain’s] revisions what strikes me as unmistakable circumstantial evidence. But going on record? Going out in public and saying that the prison system was completely unequal? That was for Cable. Going out on the record and saying, I think blacks and whites should share public spaces together? That was Cable. That was not Twain.
By around 1895, 1900, Twain is putting stuff out. King Leopold’s Soliloquy, this amazing screed against the genocide in the Belgian Congo, was everything you could want in political courage. No one would publish it. He had to publish it himself, and he did. So he got there. The point I make in the book someplace is that I think on children, [Huck Finn] is kind of a high point, politically, but on race, the book is more a halfway-there moment. I think we kind of reverse them.
Weld: Twain and Cable went out together speaking on a giant nationwide lecture tour to hype the sales of Huckleberry Finn, an event equivalent in our time to a superstar music concert or a standup comedy extravaganza. They billed themselves as “The Twins of Genius.” Do you think George Cable and Mark Twain were indeed twins of genius?
AL: Twain could have traveled with anyone he wanted on that tour, and that tour meant a lot to Twain. Cable was the guy. Twain admired Cable for what Cable was doing and saying.
Weld: But it would have been a completely different event had Twain gone on tour with someone like Joel Chandler Harris [the popular author of the Uncle Remus stories].
AL: Right, or anyone else. Harris didn’t have much of a political agenda, either, but Harris refused to ever read his Uncle Remus stories aloud. He refused to do what Twain was willing to do, which was to put on an African-American dialect. If they had gone out together, they would have told slave stories and that would have been that. Everyone would have laughed and thought it was great.
Cable was the one who put a spine in this whole thing. Something I underplay slightly in the book is that a lot of Cable’s moments in 1884, where he’s getting up in front of graduating classes and historical societies and giving some extremely courageous speeches — Twain is booking the whole “Twins of Genius” tour the whole time. He’s not backing off, and it’s highly unlikely Twain would not have been following all that. Twain’s attitude in 1884 toward Cable was basically, you go, and I’m going to put you right by my side. Then 1885 turns, and it is a very complicated moment when the two have their falling out. In the end, I think Cable’s narrative, in any context, became too much for Twain to handle.
Weld: Or was it the fact that Cable was getting more respect for his opinions from people Twain wanted respect from?
AL: Well, we have this fight about Huck Finn now, and one of the justifications we have for saying it should be in classrooms is because it’s this great book about race, which takes a moral stand. You go back to 1885 — the guy standing next to Twain is the one making the moral stand, and the guy getting attention from African-Americans as the man making the moral stand is standing next to Twain. It is not Twain. I think that kind of locks down a certain case. I really don’t think you can go with Huck Finn as a profile in moral courage at that point. I think you can still say it’s a great and important American novel. I think you can still teach it, but I think the story’s elsewhere. …
I want people to understand that Huck Finn, the book, is just part of this big multi-media entertainment that Twain planned, so when we read the book now, we lose a lot. It’s what I imagine reading the text of Stephen Colbert’s TV show would be like; just flat. Or just reading the lyrics of an Elvis Presley song.
Weld: Perhaps the contradictions in the novel make it a great one because it reflects the contradictions of American culture.
AL: Right. There’s a difference between looking for a novel, looking for a moral lesson which is simple and clean, and reading a novel because it’s amazingly complicated and capacious and brings in all the contradictions and challenges. I think Huck Finn, on that second level, is still overwhelming. I think on the first level, where it’s a simple moral exemplar book, I’ve got no questions about that.
Weld: So after all this research, all this immersion in the topic, are you able to determine who really wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Was it Samuel Clemens or Mark Twain?
AL: [laughs] Gosh, I don’t know. What would the difference be? I know a lot of people have thought about that distinction, but I haven’t thought about it that much.
Weld: I think there’s the same distinction between Stephen Colbert and “Stephen Colbert.”
AL: Then I think it’s Mark Twain. Especially toward the end [of composing the manuscript], he’s writing it, he’s thinking about how it’s going to sound up on stage more and more, but the thing about it is, he wrote it over eight or nine years. I think maybe the better answer is that it starts closer to Clemens and it ends up closer to Twain.
Weld: Is it even possible to imagine what would have become of Huck and Tom if they’d grown up?
AL: That’s a toughie. I think that the verdict tends to be that Tom Sawyer’s heading toward the Establishment; a judge, a banker. I think Huck’s in play. I admire the fluidity of Huck Finn at the end of that book. I don’t see how he’s ever going to get to banker. He could have lit out for the West. Twain did. Twain had his four weeks in the Civil War, and then he ditched for Nevada and California. I could see Huck Finn in Nevada or California. And who knows what would happen to him then?
Huck’s not a really ambitious guy, I think being left alone to enjoy life, that’s still fundamentally what he wants. Yet I think probably he’s never going to get it, because he gets lonely when that happens. I think he’s probably constantly stuck with this unending synthesis: always needing and wanting a place where he can withdraw from society, and then throwing himself into society, but in a kind of subservient position. So I could see this back and forth, where he’s sort of pushing himself across the frontier, finding jobs, losing jobs, being in interesting places near the action and then jumping out of the action, almost in perpetuity. Which is a fair description of Mark Twain, by the way.
Huck Finn’s America is a fascinating place to visit, listing for a mere $25 in hardcover from Simon & Schuster.