Secret Life of Books

Huckleberry Finn: but wait, maybe THIS is the great American novel?

• Sophie Gee and Jonty Claypole • Season 1 • Episode 19

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What makes a trip down the Mississippi river so famous - and so notorious? Why did it need to be rewritten in the 2024 novel James by Percival Everett? Is Huck Finn the most famous character in world literature? 

We’ve gone on record saying that The Great Gatsby is #1 Great American Novel - but this week we may have to eat our words. Is it actually The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the book Mark Twain published in 1884 but set in America before the civil war. Released on the day of the Harris-Trump Presidential election, this episode is all about why Huck Finn remains what it has always been, a novel of division. 

Sophie and Jonty talk about why Huck Finn is a novel of divisions and polarizations. A novel for our times. The divisions are between North and South, between slave states and free, between confederates and unionists, between white and Black, between enslaved and emancipated. These are just some of the tensions that Twain took on and even though it’s nearly 150 years old, its themes and ideas are more relevant than ever. But is this book now racist to be readable? Or is it a vision of what America really is, a wake-up call that we must pay attention to? 

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-- The Secret Life of Books invites listeners to join The Conversation, a chance to interact directly with Sophie and Jonty about episode content and to make the case for books we should cover: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

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Further Reading:

Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, (Norton Critical Edition, 4th Edition, 2021)

Jerome Loving, Mark Twain: The Adventures of Samuel L. Clemens (University of California Press, 2010)

William Dean Howells,  My Mark Twain (Dover, 1997, reprint of 1910 edition)

Rachel Cohen, A Chance Meeting, ( NYRB reprints, 2024)

Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands - The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford, 2017)

There’s a great forthcoming biography of Mark Twain by the celebrated Ron Chernow, publishing May 2025.

Percival Everett, James (Doubleday 2024)


Speaker:

Every book has two stories. The one it tells. And the one it hides.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to The Secret Life of Books.

Speaker:

I'm Sophie Gee, academic and writer.

Speaker 2:

And I'm Jonty Claypole, broadcaster and producer.

Speaker:

In this podcast, we tell the story behind the story of the literary classics everybody wants to read, feels they should read, or has already read and loved.

Speaker 2:

Today, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Speaker:

We've started hearing back from our listeners, early fans of The Secret Life of Books, and it's very exciting to get that early listener feedback. We heard from a listener in the US just a couple of days ago who said, I binged four episodes yesterday alone. Each one is like going to your favorite class taught by your favorite professors who bring such consistent humor. Insight, context, revelation, and, for lack of a better word, vibes.

Speaker 2:

We're all about the vibes here. We're all about the vibes. We also heard from Australian listener and writer, Steph Wood, who produces the wonderful Vamp newsletter. So we want to give that a shout out. She said she adored the episodes she's listened to, and she's requested an episode on Bleak House. And we're happy to say that a Dickens series is coming, starting with Oliver Twist in just a few weeks.

Speaker:

So what we're asking listeners to do is to jump on our X feed, which is at slob podcast or on our website, secret Life of books.org. And tell us about the books that you love, the books you'd like to hear about. Anything you wanna ask us about classic literature. We're gonna have a q and a moment on the podcast where listener feedback goes live to air.

Speaker 2:

So today's episode is the first of a two parter on the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Percival Everett James. If you're listening to Huck Finn on the day it is released it means you're listening on November the 5th, the presidential election. And the week after we'll be doing Percival Everett James on the day that the Booker Prize is announced, for which James is shortlisted. So, Tense, exciting stuff. We are at one of the great division moments in American democracy and so to return to this novel of division and togetherness set on the mighty Mississippi feels very pertinent.

Speaker:

Yes, So Huck Finn is, has to be one of the most famous characters in all of American literature, probably all of world literature. The novel was published to instant notoriety in 1884 by the already quite well known writer Mark Twain. Most people associate Huck Finn with a river trip. possibly could even name the river in question, which is the mighty Mississippi.

Speaker 2:

But can they spell it?

Speaker:

That's a tough one. I was struggling with that when I was writing the script. Until Percival Everett published James early this year, However, maybe not so many people would remember that Huck's river trip through Missouri is taken with an escaped enslaved man whose name is Jim. So the stakes of the rafting trip that people think of as a light hearted romp are literally life and death, particularly for Jim. So it's a novel about freedom, but crucially, it's also a novel about the impossibility of freedom as we learn that even the theoretically free states in the antebellum U. S., Jim, would not actually be free if he were to escape into them. The river divides geography it cuts a line down the middle of the U. S. It's also the unstated historical barrier marked by the Civil War, which divides the time that the novel is set from the time that Twain is writing it. It's always been celebrated as an anthem to abolition, civil rights, and the protection of American freedoms, but reading it in 2024, right before the US election, it actually feels much less virtuous than this makes it sound. And to be fair, the racism and profanity have always been a problem from the outset, and this is probably part of Twain's intention. The novel contains 219 uses of the n word, which makes it very difficult to read now. It makes it very difficult to read aloud. And the relentless depiction of Jim's black vernacular and Huck's poor white speech patterns are aggressive satire on Twain's part, that in many ways now don't leave us with a full sense of Huck's or Jim's humanity. But at the same time, Mark Twain was an early brilliant critic of the founding fathers and the myth of American exceptionalism, and he set out deliberately to do something completely new in American writing. One of the things we're going to find out in this episode is that he was pushing back on the biggest writers of the day, who are still today the most famous writers in American literature. Jonty, can you give us a feel for what Huck Finn the novel sounds like?

Speaker 2:

Oh yes, here we go. To be or not to be. That is the bare bodkin that makes calamity of so long life. For who would Fardel's bear till Burnham Wood do come to Dunizane? But that the fear of something after death murders the innocent sleep. Great nature's second course and makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune than fly to others that we know not of. There's the respect must give us pause. Wake Duncan with thy knocking. But soft Jew the fair, Ophelia. Hope not vi ponderous and marble jaws, but get the to a nunnery. Go.

Speaker:

Wait a second.

Speaker 2:

That is, that sounded like

Speaker:

Shakespeare.

Speaker 2:

That is the Duke's take on Hamlet soliloquy. The Duke is a conman who appears halfway through the book, who, goes around towns setting up. kind of fake shows to make money and, can't really remember any Shakespeare. So strings together as many Shakespearean phrases into what he describes as Hamlet's soliloquy. And in terms of what you were saying, Sophie, about Mark Twain deliberately taking on the great revered figures of literature, nothing embodies that spirit so well as that extract where Shakespeare is Utterly mangled in the context of a Mississippi town in the 19th century.

Speaker:

Like everything Twain does, it's putting its finger something on something really true about the history of English literature. Namely that it is a bit of a mash up in people's minds and it's ripe for a kind of interruption and intervention. And so that's what Twain was really trying to do with Huck Finn.

Speaker 2:

reading it, Soph?

Speaker:

Well, I was reading it very much with the fact in mind that the American election is happening so I was thinking about it as a novel of division. It's wrestling with America's past, including its past as an English colony. I think that's also in the mix with the, with the mangling of Shakespeare. It's a sort of reckoning with the fact that America starts as a, as an English colony. You Know, America, of course, is founded famously on these democratic principles that turn out not to be democratic principles that include everyone. They don't include the enslaved. They don't include women. They don't include children. I think Twain's asking us to think about that. what does it mean to give voice to the people and what does it mean to take voices away from people? it's set in Missouri, which was a slave state before the Civil War. And. It gives us a sense of just how immovable and unchanging racial injustice is in America. the poverty and violence that we see in this book, are the poverty and violence of America today. And all of this is resurfacing in the lead up to this election, this, this massive, massive Reckoning moment in American society. So Twain is using the metaphor and the literal presence of a river to think about how on the one hand, change is continuous. It's happening all the time. It's happening everywhere. And on the other hand, there's this continuity, this sort of strange stasis, even in the midst of continual transformation.

Speaker 2:

What about you? What came up for you? Well, I hadn't read it before. I'd read Tom Sawyer, but I hadn't read Huck Finn, and it is breathtakingly brilliant. That was, when I started reading it, the, the energy of the prose and the characters and the originality. It's the sort of book that the only words that feel appropriate to describe are words like vim and brio and zest, ridiculous words, but they kind of feel proper. pertinent in that context. But then as you read on, it just becomes increasingly troubling. And as you say, that use of the n word throughout the casual racism just becomes really overwhelming. And Mark Twain was an abolitionist. He, he didn't consider himself a racist, but a Of course he, he was, and I think for me the big problem is that on one hand there is a abolitionist spirit to this book, but on the other it's a book about adventurism first and foremost, and it's called The Adventures of Huck Finn. At the end, Tom Sawyer's final words are, I just want the adventure of it, and that desire and love for adventure overshadows the abolitionist spirit in a way that is very problematic as we'll find out in more in more detail. So, I kind of came to the conclusion that it's an evil twin of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which we did as our first episode in this podcast. You know, Alice in Wonderland, published in the 1860s, Lewis Carroll famously said, there is no moral to this story, there is no point. Mark Twain, interestingly, said almost exactly the same about Huckleberry Finn in a famous notice he wrote of this book. He said anyone who looks for a moral, who looks for a plot, or a motive should be shot. So he's saying the same thing but because his subject is slavery and the Mississippi and what was happening in America at the time, that amorality is really problematic. You want Twain to come down with a harder view on slavery, on, um, Abolitionism. And he doesn't quite do it. I think

Speaker:

that's fascinating. I'm not going to try to summarize this book because that ends up just being this kind of very long laundry list. And one of the things that Twain is doing in Huck Finn is setting up this purposefully episodic narrative very much as a river itself drifts from one town to another and he lets the river dictate the shape of this narrative. So as I said, it starts in Missouri, cross river from the free state of Illinois. So, early on in the novel, Huck is actually taken by his father into Illinois, out of Missouri. The novel ends in Arkansas. on the, on the border of, of the state of Mississippi. And during the course of the novel, Huck and Jim passed through St. Louis, and of Memphis, Tennessee, and countless small towns in the American South. We open the novel with Huck Finn living with his guardian, the Widow Douglas, and her sister, the rather severe and unsympathetic Miss Watson. And we're reminded that in a previous adventure. Narrative, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck and his friend Tom found gold, 6, 000, and the money is in trust, giving Huck an interest payment Huck's violent alcoholic father, who he hopes he's got rid of in his life, returns really menacingly and tries to get his hands on the money. In that effort, Pap, as he's called, kidnaps Huck and is violently abusive to him systematically as he also tries to drink himself to death. Huck, in an effort to get free of his father, fakes his own death and escapes. on a canoe onto, one of the islands in the Mississippi River. Meanwhile, one of Miss Watson's slaves, Jim, also runs away because he's heard that he's going to be sold down river into a much more brutal system of enslavement. And he and Huck meet up on Jackson Island in the middle of the river and plan their escape to the free north. So the book consists of their long trip down the river, in which they're trying to get onto a tributary in order to start going north, but every plan that they make goes awry. And Jim's life, at least, is often in danger, sometimes because of Huck's carelessness towards him. De Huyck and Jim encounter a constant parade of outlaws, eccentrics, and rogues, including two really very unpleasant con men called the Duke and the Dauphin, or the King. They claim to be exiled European aristocrats, but it's very obvious that they're just American outlaws, and they end up selling Jim back into slavery in one of the most troubling and disturbing moments in the novel. At the end, order is restored. Jim learns that he has actually been freed by Miss Watson on her death, which turns out to have happened two months previously, and Huck himself learns that he is liberated from his father. And in a famous closing sequence tells the reader, I reckon I got a light out from the territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally, she's going to adopt me and civilize me. And I can't stand it. I've been there before.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I didn't know that phrase light out for the territory came from Huckleberry Finn, nor did I know that the phrase down the river to be sold down the river, Um, that means to sell slaves back from the North down to the enslaved South. So,

Speaker:

why is it a classic for you, Janti?

Speaker 2:

Well, at the time it was recognized that Huckleberry Finn had just opened a window into a world, a society, a dialect that people knew nothing about and nobody had captured before. and in doing so Twain really created a voice for the American novel. Up until that point, American fiction had been very closely modeled on European fiction. And Twain deliberately wanted to create a uniquely American voice. And so by the 1910s 30s, that was what writers like, Ernest Hemingway and T. S. Eliot were, by that point, saying about, Huckleberry Finn. that it created the American novel. So it's a classic for all those reasons, but it also invents a new genre, which is the river journey. And when I was reading it, I was like, Oh, this is where heart of darkness comes from. This is where apocalypse now and deliverance come from. They all come from this story of, these two men floating down river, having episodic adventures as they, they go along. So The river journey is now a rich genre in literature and film, and it all comes from Huck Finn.

Speaker:

Yeah, I love that, and because I also think that Twain himself is purposefully reclaiming the body of water from the classical epic, the Mediterranean Sea. He's taking us away from oceans, and he's putting us back in the ocean. He's putting us in rivers and he's sort of saying rivers are the iconic American landscape feature. This is what it means to be writing a great American novel is to be on a river where you're aware of the mode of transportation. You're aware of the relationship between North and South. You're aware of these townships that have sprung up along this kind of artery of transportation and change in North America., so Huckleberry, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was the great American novel for a long time. I guess it was the great American novel until The Great Gatsby sort of stole the spot, which we've also talked about. I

Speaker 2:

did read, you know, as we were preparing for this episode, I was reading that Huckleberry Finn is the great American novel. And I had a, Oh my God, I thought The Great Gatsby was the great American novel. We just a few weeks ago. And now it turns out we were wrong. It is Huckleberry Finn. It's

Speaker:

Huckleberry Finn.

Speaker 2:

Sophie, what's the secret of this book?

Speaker:

One of the big secrets of this novel we've only found out because Percival Everett wrote James, the response to Huckleberry Finn, and that is the secret of Jim or James's interior life. I think that you can quite easily read Huckleberry Finn without noticing that we don't know really go into the inner life of his companion Jim. and so one of the secrets of this novel is the dirty secret of realism, which is that it behaves as though it gives access to people's inner lives. Novels behave as though they give access to people's inner lives in a democratic or equal way. I think that's one of the big claims of the American novel, is that it democratizes interior life, but actually it turns out that realism strongly favors forms of inwardness that match the rules of English and European realism. And so the, so the secret of what's going on in Jim's head is one of the best kept secrets of Huck Finn.

Speaker 2:

Yeah. What

Speaker:

about you?

Speaker 2:

I was reading the biography on Mark Twain. The story that really stuck out for me is one which implies that Huckleberry Finn is really rewriting a great wrong that Mark Twain had seen and experienced as a child, a traumatic event. So, so when he was a kid, Growing up in, Hannibal in Missouri, which is the model for St. Petersburg and Huck Finn. And there was an Island like Jackson Island and Mark Twain, with some friends, went to this island where they discovered the body of a dead slave, a runaway slave. And it turned out that this slave had run away and had been looked after by a boy who was the elder brother of the model for Huck Finn. And what happened was that, the, the white authorities had caught up with him and lynched him, and it was Mark Twain and his friends who discovered the body. So this is a terrible story, and it was deeply traumatic for these young boys. I mean, they were exposed already to the horrors of slavery and, and the brutality, and some of that was normalized, but I think One of the things that's apparent in this book is that nobody ever quite becomes normalized to it. I think what Mark Twain is doing in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is he takes that real person, that character, and brings them back to life and lets him escape from Jackson Island and lets them head off downriver and become freed. So, I think I think that event must have really traumatized the young Mark Twain and Huck Finn is a piece of wish fulfillment of, of turning that incident into a more positive, outcome.

Speaker:

It really does. And one of the things I just want to pick up on from what you said then, that's, really convincing, is the way in which Twain is thinking in this novel about how the institution of slavery corrupts white, white people how kind of white life in the United States has been distorted and deranged by the presence of the violence and trauma of slavery. And so you see that in Hark and other characters, sort of distorted and often almost incoherent speech patterns. You see it in the sort of level of criminality and vagrancy throughout the American South. You see it in the decayed aristocratic families who have been plantation owners. Everywhere are these signs of the devastating effect that enslavement has had, of course, on African Americans and also on the white families and the white institutions that have propagated it.

Speaker 2:

Yeah.

Speaker:

One of the things that I always forget about Mark Twain because he wrote books like A Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court, is that he's not from the East, he's, he's from the middle part of the country.

Speaker 2:

He's from Missouri. And Sam Clemens. which is the original name of Mark Twain, his father, Marshall Clemens, kind of leads his family through a series of increasingly irrelevant, Missouri towns on the shores of the Mississippi because his business enterprises keep, keep on failing. He was a very severe character. he only really paid attention to his eldest son, Orion. A nice detail is that the evening entertainment in the Clemens household was Marshall Clemens reading poetry to his family in a monotonous deadpan voice. So you can see why Mark Twain developed such an irreverent attitude to the, to the classics.

Speaker:

Yes, constantly poking fun of them.

Speaker 2:

His family kept slaves. So this was part of. part of his life., his uncle, who had a farm in Missouri, owned a slave called Daniel, who was the model for Jim. And Mark Twain later wrote about Daniel.

Speaker:

Yes, there's a very memorable quote from Twain about what Daniel was like. He says a middle aged slave whose sympathies were wide and warm and whose heart was honest and simple and knew no guile. It was on the farm that I got my strong liking for his race and my appreciation of certain of its fine qualities. So that's Twain thinking of himself as a, as a race activist.

Speaker 2:

And Twain describes in his, autobiography and essays, a lot of the things he saw as a child. He, he recalls at one time seeing slave women and children chained up in the streets, waiting to be shipped off down south and how, you know, upsetting this was. and he describes as well the way that the church had become completely complicit in slavery in these states and so preachers in the church. We're preaching that slavery was God's way that I mean, it's awful.

Speaker:

It's making me think a lot about To Kill a Mockingbird, actually, and the way in which for Harper Lee, who was, who was writing To Kill a Mockingbird during the civil rights era during the 1950s, it was published in the early 60s, she's looking back on the extreme anti black racism of her childhood in, also in the deep South. They're both figures, you know, white, white writers,, for whom the sort of spectacle of enslavement indelibly imprinted itself on their minds. And while their writings now read to us as very, as problematic in a lot of ways, they're also completely shaped as writers by, by wanting and feeling that it is their mission to depict the reality of slavery.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, as, as Twain grows up, he, he develops a strong sense of adventurism and A really important thing to know about Twain and his life and his vision is he, he is obsessed by the spirit of adventure. And of course, the books are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huck Finn. But for him, adventurism is more than just a narrative. ploy. Adventurism becomes a sort of moral code to Mark Twain. Adventure excuses everything in his view. Uh, at 17, he legs it from

Speaker 3:

Um, Hannibal, which is the town where he spent the latter part of his childhood, the tiny town. And he goes on one of the most ambitious, gap years in history. He travels off to the East Coast. He works at various newspapers. He travels all around America at a time when it's quite difficult as a 17 year old to do that. When he's 20, he apprentices himself to a steamboat captain on the Mississippi, because he wrote that the most glamorous thing you could be was a Mississippi captain. And he, over four years, does 120 trips up and down river latterly as a captain of his own steamboat as well. This is very dangerous work, by the way. Steamboats were continuously bursting into flames or exploding. Yes. And actually Mark Twain's much adored younger brother, Henry, who Twain encouraged to come into the steamboat business like himself, came to a tragic end when the steamboat he was working on blew up and he was burnt to death And this really disturbed Mark Twain. He never forgave himself for encouraging this brother, Henry, to To go into such a dangerous trade.

Speaker 4:

Again, that's one of the aspects of the novel that I'd completely forgotten from when I read it earlier on is, the dangers of river work. And, uh, it's, it's kind of like Titanic, but on the Mississippi River, like the boats are in constant peril of, perishing in various ways, including blowing up or, getting becalmed on a shoal or, they're always passing sort of ruined steamboats.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, being a steamboat captain was the sexy, dangerous job of the age. It was like being the, air pilot in the first world war. Which is funny because

Speaker 4:

you think of steamboats as these, hodling, yeah, slowly moving craft, very stable.

Speaker 3:

I know, but just a very slow moving hand grenade that can go off at any point. Yeah, I've

Speaker 4:

got cement truck in my, another very dangerous vehicle.

Speaker 3:

Twain stopped on the steamboats because of the Civil War and he briefly joined a confederate militia. Yes. He joined the wrong side. That's a troubling

Speaker 4:

figure, a troubling fact about Mark Twain. So for

Speaker 3:

all of his later, virtue signaling about abolitionism. Yes. He did briefly join the wrong side. Yeah,

Speaker 4:

it's really interesting. And he ended up being actually lifelong friends with Ulysses grant., but he had this confederate period.

Speaker 3:

but his heart wasn't in it and he ran off to California to sit out the war. And in California, he began working as a writer for, for newspapers. So, This spirit of adventure never goes away. It informs many of his great books. The Innocence Abroad, which is a kind of trip to Europe and the Holy Land. His later book, Life on the Mississippi. He's also an inventor, right? So he's obsessed by innovation. One of his best friends is Nikola Tesla, and he Did he

Speaker 4:

invent the Tesla?

Speaker 3:

No, he didn't. That was a man called Elon Musk. But Tesla was big in electricity, and I think why Musk chose the name Tesla, I would have thought. Yes. Okay. And Twain himself, in fact, patented a couple of inventions. he invented a type of suspender. So if you wanted to stop your stockings falling down, Twain would be a good person to talk to. He was your

Speaker 4:

man.

Speaker 3:

He invented a history trivia game. So again, if you're a fan of Trivial Pursuits, Twain would have been. And he invented a sort of self pasting scrapbook.

Speaker 4:

Fascinating.

Speaker 3:

So, and his approach to literature and writing is that of an inventor.

Speaker 4:

If he's not

Speaker 3:

doing something new, he's not. He's not interesting. And

Speaker 4:

I think that spirit of adventure, that spirit, as you say, of sort of, slightly quirky,, inventiveness actually drives the evolution of Twain's creative voice as well, doesn't it, as a, as a writer. So the big question for American literature in the period is, is what did an American voice sound like? How could you have an, a, a, a, a local American idiom, a local American set of literary texts that were, were distinctive to this new nation? so, you know, one of the things about Mark Twain that, is sort of, often lost, is that he is an exact contemporary of the so called Transcendentalists, the movement led by Ralph Waldo Emerson, the great East Coast essayist, the great sort of philosophical, theological writer of the period. And they're thinking about this idea that the American literary spirit is going to emerge out of looking inward and looking to, nature for inspiration. And so Twain is kind of in conversation with East Coast transcendentalism. But he's always looking back toward the South. He's always looking back to a kind of Southern humor, which has a sort of satirical, bawdy, grotesque strain to it. And he partly sees himself as a journalist as much as he sees himself as a kind of great man of letters. So there's always this sort of back and forth in Twain's sense of himself as a literary persona.

Speaker 3:

And it's in the Californian journalism scene that he finds his voice. So this is in the 1860s, coming out the back of the Civil War. And California at the time, there was a big pioneer spirit to it. And a new type of journalism was emerging there. And actually, it's that Hunter S. Thompson, kind of gonzo journalistic voice that matures 100 years later.

Speaker 4:

I love that. And actually, so you've got the I want you to get the points for this one, because it's so great is so Mark Twain is a pseudonym. His real name was Sam Clemens. He

Speaker 3:

tries out all sorts of pseudonyms first, and they're wonderful. so he writes articles, by Rambler, he calls himself. He calls himself Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass. And then my favorite is W. Epaminondas. Adrastis Blab. That's a really good one. That's a great one. Though I can see

Speaker 4:

why he didn't stick with it.

Speaker 3:

Um, and then he finally settles on Mark Twain, which interestingly is the Ledsman's Cry. So, so in steamboats, when you're trying to check the depth of the water to make sure the steamboat can pass safely, because the Mississippi was actually very shallow. Yes. you had to be able to drop a lead 12 feet. And the cry for when there was 12 feet, which meant go ahead, was Mark Twain. Oh, really? So, so that's a pub fact.

Speaker 4:

So one of the things about Mark Twain, which I think we've already sort of suggested, is he was very much in the absolute epicenter of American letters. He knew all the great writers of the period, including Emerson, um, including Longfellow, including, actually Louisa May Alcott, who wrote, Little Women. you know, all those kinds of people, but he was wonderfully rude about them. in one of his letters to William Dean Howells. Howells was sort of lamenting the fact that he wasn't a more successful writer, and Twain said, no, you're great. He says that, Hals's writing, quote, makes all the motives and feelings perfectly clear without analyzing the guts out of them the way George Eliot does. I can't stand George Eliot and Hawthorne and those people. I see what they're at a hundred years before they get to it and they just tire me to death. And as for the Bostonians, which is one of Henry James's novels. I would rather be damned to John Bunyan's heaven than read that.

Speaker 3:

Yeah, take that George Eliot, you woman. How dare you? How dare you write?

Speaker 4:

I know, but take that Henry James. He's standing up to the man.

Speaker 3:

But then we're not reading William Dean Howells these days, are we?

Speaker 4:

No, we're not. Poor old Howells. But he was a great figure at the time.

Speaker 3:

So Twain having settled on his name, he's in California, 1860s, and in 1865 he achieves national fame through a very famous story called The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calvary, County, which is a piece of gonzo journalism.

Speaker 4:

He's got a genius for a title, Mark Twain. He does, yeah.

Speaker 3:

And he's got his voice by that point, this very playful, vernacular voice. And he follows that with The Innocents Abroad, which is the account of a kind of luxury cruise essentially from America to the Holy Land.

Speaker 4:

So it's sort of like the White Lotus of the late 19th century?

Speaker 3:

Yeah, except all the other passengers are Plymouth Brethren, so you just have to imagine a season of White Lotus in which all the characters are evangelical Christians. A pilgrims. A pilgrim.

Speaker 4:

that got left behind in the pitching process.

Speaker 3:

Mind you, you know, they need new ideas for season three or season four. So Mike White, if you're listening, Plymouth Brethren, on a cruise.

Speaker 4:

Innocence Abroad,

Speaker 3:

season 17. White Lotus. anyway, getting quickly to Huck Finn. Publishes The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876, which is the prequel. This is where Huck first appears as a character. It's also a classic. He very quickly starts work on a sequel, The Adventures of Huck Finn. he Thinks he's gonna knock it out quite quickly. And he, in 1876, writes the first part of the book, which is Huck and Jim coming together and leaving Jackson Island. And then he stops. And my theory about this is that he realizes he's got bitten off something bigger than he can chew. He's followed the stories of his childhood through to this traumatic experience of finding the body of a lynch slave. And he's embarked on a story which is actually about the American soul and abolitionism. And he at that point is unable to continue with it. It takes him a couple more years. He comes back in 1880 and writes the whole middle section about the king and the duke.

Speaker 4:

It's really interesting that he comes back and puts the king and the duke in, once he's realized the full implication of the story that he's telling. Because the king and the duke I think in some ways are the most disturbing characters in this novel. They are. They're really unpleasant.

Speaker 3:

They're, they're really unpleasant. And then having done that, he then leaves it again until 1882. He goes back to the Mississippi for five weeks and he hasn't been back to the territory of his childhood for decades. It's the first time he goes back home and everything has changed. The steamboats are dying out because of the rise of the railway. Saint Louis, which was this scrappy little town, has now filled with electricity and become a large city. So, Huck Finn becomes an homage to a disappearing world, it's an homage to his childhoods, and enables him to finish the book, to drive through, and so it's filled with a nostalgia and a portentousness which it didn't have when he had started it eight years before.

Speaker 4:

That's really interesting about the steamboats being on the way out because as we've said a few times now there's this lacuna or gap or punctuation mark, whatever you want to call it, between the America of Twain's childhood and the America of his adulthood, and that gap is the Civil War. And everything changes about America in that time. So in some ways, Huck Finn is deliberately and purposefully, as he says in that letter to Howells, a period piece about the lost world of the river. But the other thing I think we're constantly aware of when we revisit Huck Finn is that it's always completely modern and contemporary because it's about racial violence.

Speaker 3:

Yeah. Okay, Sophie, take us into the book itself.

Speaker 4:

Yes, so the way we're going to do this, John T., is we're not going to go blow by blow through this narrative, because as we've said, it's highly, highly episodic. But what I want us to think about is the way in which Twain has structured his narrative. Huckabee Finn as a series of adventures. And I want us to think about the fact that Huck loves the adventurousness and that Jim does not like the adventurousness of it. Each of the adventures or episodes in the novel is structured as a crisis, which imperils Huck and Jim and is then resolved. So an adventure is a crisis. The book is basically using the American geography of the Mississippi River to shape American narrative. And I think that's one of the answers to the question, how has this become the great American novel? So let's just go through some of the key moments in the story. We start off and Jim and Huck are both living with the widow, Douglas, and her sister, Miss Watson, who is Jim's owner. And the crisis moment that comes early in the novel is that Huck's alcoholic father, Pap, returns to try and get his hands on the money. And, you know, I think what Twain is doing in this opening is locating us in childhood. But making childhood a scene of volatility, of dangerous domesticity, of home as a site of violence rather than security. And it's a site of violence obviously for Huck as well as for Jim. you know, one of the things I think we're learning in these early stages of Huck Finn is that it's a coming of age novel. So it's tapping into some of the great coming of age stories, especially male coming of age stories in English literature. We see Twain learning from Henry Fielding, for example, one of the great Picker esque writers of the English literary tradition, Picker esque being a series of adventures that move through geography as a way of structuring stories. I think Twain's also very much going to to Charles Dickens. he's thinking about David Copperfield. He's thinking about great expectations, these Dickensian narratives about orphaned young men who have to kind of find their way in life. So childhood is a place of trauma, violence, and dislocation for Twain. And that's one of the the big claims that he's making here. let's read a bit from the early part of the book. I thought we might read that strange scene where Huck and Tom, who he's hanging out with, play a kind of trick on Jim. the enslaved man while he's sleeping and it's the first time we see Jim.

Speaker 3:

That's right and we'll see in the next episode of Secret Life of Books how Percival Everett, will take this scene and flip it over. But in Twain's version it goes as follows. As soon as Tom was back we cut along the path around the garden fence and by and by fetched up on the steep top of the hill the other side of the house. Tom said he slipped Jim's hat off his head and hung it on a limb right over him, and Jim stirred a little, but he didn't wake. Afterwards Jim said the witches bewitched him and put him in a trance and rode him all over the state and then set him under the trees again and hung his hat on a limb to show whodunit. And next time Jim told it, he said they rode him down to New Orleans. And after that, every time he told it, he spread it more and more. Till, by and by, he said they rode him all over the world. And tired him most to death. And his back was all over saddleboils. Jim was monstrous proud about it.

Speaker 4:

I mean, it's a, it's a strange passage and it's an interesting choice on Twain's part for how to introduce the figure of Jim., two white boys playing a magic trick on this sleeping enslaved man. But it's also sort of a reminder that there's a lot of folklore in the American South during the period of enslavement about Africans and the kind of magical powers that they carried with them and their sort of capacity to channel, enchantment and,, mystery.

Speaker 3:

And then the story, as you say, suddenly takes on a menacing quality when Huck's pap, his father comes, he knows that Huck has, found 6, 000 and he wants the money. And he, he basically kidnaps Huck and takes them off and to a cabin. And he's a very. Prescient character, Pap. He does a lot of ranting about big governments, and how big government doesn't do anything, and the swamp needs to be cleared.

Speaker 4:

He's he's a Trump supporter. Yeah, sure.

Speaker 3:

And he's a drunk, which works to Huck's advantage in the end, because it eventually enables Huck to escape. He goes and hides out on Jackson Island in the middle of the Mississippi. And there he sees Jim again, because Jim has overheard someone saying that he's going to be sold down. the river to, down to one of the southern states. And so Jim has run away to escape that fate. And he's

Speaker 4:

left, Jim has left his family. He has two children and a wife, and he's run from them, hoping to secure his freedom and then bring them into freedom as well. you know, speaking of Twain tracking his novel along the history of English literature, One of the ways that, Huck Finn gets going is that it starts with a Robinson Crusoe moment. It starts with this retreat to an island just as in Robinson Crusoe. There's Crusoe and Friday. Huck and Jim find themselves on this island where they have a somewhat idealized existence until there's a giant storm and the island becomes flooded. but I just wanted to read a bit, where the storm is blowing through and Huck and Jim are kind of having their Crusoe moment. Huck says, a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they were just wild. And next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest, it was as bright as glory. You'd have a little glimpse of treetops are plunging about way off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before. Dark as sin again in a second, and now you'd hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the underside of the world like rolling empty barrels down stairs jim, this is nice, I says. I wouldn't want to be nowhere else but here. Pass me along another hunk of fish and some hot cornbread. Listeners are going to be completely appalled by my accent. I like

Speaker 3:

the way it began in your normal accent, but then became American as it went along. You just can't resist

Speaker 4:

it. I mean,

Speaker 3:

You were turning up the 11 as it went on. Well,

Speaker 4:

you gotta, you gotta put the R's in when you're doing American, but, I love this passage because it shows Twain really feeling the landscape that he's writing from. And it also shows, I think, this distinction between Huck's experience of the adventure, Jim, this is nice, pass me a hunk of fish and some cornbread, and Jim's experience of the adventure, which is probably a sense of constant precarity and horror as he tries to make his escape.

Speaker 3:

And it's at this moment that Twain's prose really reaches its full mastery because remember he sailed up and down that river a hundred and twenty times. And Twain's descriptions of the Mississippi and the attention to detail of are really extraordinary. And Huck and Jim, from this point on, they're in a state of nature essentially. And it becomes apparent at a certain point that they're naked most of the time as well. Yes. Huck, Huck suddenly sort of throws in at one point, he says, Oh, we were naked all the time. So it's like the storms all almost blown their clothes off and now they're just floating down the river exposed to everything that comes along. It's a really extraordinary image. And for, a supposedly Christian society, 19th century, it would have been a very striking idea. The idea of these two men, an enslaved man and a white man floating naked down river together. Yes.

Speaker 4:

And from pretty early on, critics started picking up on the idea that, that Twain is getting at the possibility of sort of a homoerotic bond between Jim and Huck. the great African American writer, Ralph Ellison, who wrote Invisible Man, later said that the critical fear of the deep attraction and bond between Huck Finn and, and Jim, that the fear of that is a sort of fear of miscegenation, a fear of interracial breeding, that Twain is kind of hinting at in this novel.

Speaker 6:

We should talk about Jim for a moment as a character and how he's, how he's presented by Mark Twain. Jim speaks in this dialect. I mean, Huck speaks in a dialect as well, but it's easier to understand. Mark Twain writes everything Jim says in his understanding of black enslaved dialect, and he claimed that he took lots of notes, he probably did, but it's actually quite hard to read everything Jim says because of the way Twain has done it, so, I mean, just to give you a flavor of that, Jim says at one point, I'd made up my mind about what Isaac Gwynne I'm just going to do it in an English accent because that's how I have to do it in my head. But I'd made up And also I don't want to start imitating what Twain thought an enslaved black person might sound like. Yes, that's fair. But I've made up my mind about what I's a'gwin to do. You see, if I kip on trying to get a foot, dee dogs a'd track me. If I stole a skift to cross over, dey'd miss daft skift, you see. It goes on like this, and one unfortunate effect about this approach is that it's quite hard to understand. It's therefore alienating and it's therefore dehumanizing as well. And you find yourself skimming over, Jim's. And I

Speaker 5:

noticed that we avoided reading bits from Jim when we were putting this episode together, and it's because it's so uncomfortable to read that now.

Speaker 6:

But the flip side is Twain also does really engage with Jim as a human being at a time in America when not many people other than Harriet Beecher Stowe were really taking black characters seriously and so You know, at this point in the book, Jim really starts to emerge as a very human, compassionate character. There's a moment where they get separated and Huck finds his way back and Jim's asleep. And Huck plays a trick where he pretends that he'd been sitting there the whole time. And Jim, is so delighted that Huck is not dead and Huck is just sticking to this ridiculous roleplay. He's created And Jim sort of berates him and says when I woke up and found He says this all in that appalling dialect But effectively he says when I woke up and found you back again all safe and sound I cried And I wanted to get down on my knees I was so grateful and all you could think about was how you were going to make a fool of me It's a really striking moment and then shortly afterwards there's also this moment where Huck describes the way that Jim doesn't sleep much. and he knows what Jim is doing, that Jim is quote, thinking about his wife and children a way up yonder, and he was low and homesick because he hadn't ever been away from home before in his life. And I do believe he cared just as much for his people as white folks do for theirs. it's, it's very difficult to know where you stand morally with this book.

Speaker 5:

I mean, part of what it shows, I suppose, is Twain's own ambivalence toward the black experience and his white experience of blackness growing up in the 19th Yeah, one of the really pivotal moments where we get to know Jim's character is, when Twain has his kind of literary experiment with gothic narrative. There's this episode when the river's still in flood, when a kind of floating house comes down the Mississippi River, presumably a house that has been, flooded by the waters and taken into the current. And, and. Jim and Huck tie their boat up to the house and they go in intending to loot it, which, which actually they do, But the kind of horrifying gothic element is that there's a dead man in the house, a dead white man. And Jim sees this man and as we later discover, he sees who the, who the dead man is. He, he recognizes him and he won't let Huck see this figure. He protects Huck from it. And it establishes this basic, dynamic between Huck and Jim, of Jim as a sort of protecting father figure to Huck, someone who cares for him and thinks of him as an innocent in a way that he has not been thought of at any other moment in his life. And Huck, one of the great things about Twain's novel is that is that Huck doesn't recognize this aspect of Jim.

Speaker 6:

He thinks he's looking after Jim. It's very brilliantly done. It's very brilliantly done. All the time Jim is actually looking after Huck.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. So we've talked about Huck. We've talked about Jim. We've talked a little bit about the, King and the Duke, these very sinister Cornman characters who show up. The other character I think we need to talk about. You're going to say

Speaker 6:

the river, aren't you? I'm going to say the river. It's like the moors in the Bronte novels. Yes. When you introduce landscape as a character. Yes. My old friend, river.

Speaker 5:

Absolutely. The River systems are interconnected and it's actually the hope of Jim and Huck that they will connect with the Ohio River that's the plan. It doesn't come off because they miss the mouth of the Ohio River in a fog. But the fog itself is really quite brilliantly done because we don't realize as readers that that is what is happening in that moment, that the fog is going to prevent them from seeing where they're going and being able to escape into freedom. So there's this famous passage in chapter 19 of the novel after they have Missed the turn off to the Ohio River. And Huck really settles into the trip at this point. He's kind of enjoying himself. Um. naked with Jim. they float by night and they hide by day. They rest by day. And there's this seat, there's this passage where Huck describes the beauty and the magnificence of this character, the character of the river. It was a monstrous big river down there, sometimes a mile and a half wide. We run nights and laid up and hid daytimes. Soon as night was most gone, we stopped navigating and tied up, nearly always in the dead water under a towhead, and then cut young cottonwoods and willows and hid the raft with them. Then we set out the lines. Next we slid into the river and had a swim. It's always to freshen up and cool off. Then we sat down on the sandy bottom where the river was about a knee deep and watched the daylight come. Not a sound anywhere, it's perfectly still. Just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bullfrogs are cluttering. Maybe.

Speaker 6:

Twain's prose is so amazing. It is amazing. Once he's on the river, you know that he spent a large part of his life on that river and

Speaker 5:

But there's this constant heartbeat of the contrast between Huck's sense of safety, being on the river, being able to enjoy its pleasures, being watched over in effect by Jim, and Jim's sense of precarity and fear as they go ever further south. They come into contact with these highly eccentric, basically insane southern white families who are at war with one another and who end up shooting each other to death. and they have these long, overly long sequences with the king and the duke, who stage sort of amateur theatricals. And all of this culminates in Jim being sold once again into enslavement. and so the novel comes to a head at the end when Hark, by this time reunited with Tom Sawyer, recapture Jim at Tom's uncle and aunt's farm, the Phelps farm, at the end of the novel. and I don't think we need to go through all the detail because it's sort of more of the same. It's more of what we've already seen, but the things I suppose to pay attention to are the, very large number of outlaws of eccentrics, of, criminals, of con men in this novel. It's as though, the America that Twain wants us to pay attention to is a very, unauthorized America. It's, this is not Henry James's America. This is not Emerson's America. This is, an America that is existing at the margins of legality. always teetering into criminality. And that in a way is what democracy is for Twain.

Speaker 6:

Yeah. So two things happen in this last section of the book, and one of them is completely brilliant and the other is Utterly awful. So this is how Twain ends the book, which is Jim gets sold by the king and the duke, these fraudsters, into the Phelps farm. Fortunately, the king and duke do have their comeuppance. They get tarred and feathered by the townspeople. So that's good. And, Huck has a moment where he decides he's going to write to Miss Watson and say, Jim is actually down here on the Phelps's farm and he's yours. he starts to write this letter. And then there's this beautiful moment when Huck says that I got to thinking over our trip down the river and I see Jim before me. All the time, in the day and in the night time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we are floating along talking and singing and laughing, but somehow I couldn't seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind. I'd see him standing my watch on top of his instead of calling me, so I could go on sleeping. And see how glad he was when I came back out of the fog. and such like times. And how he would always call me honey, and pet me, and do everything he could think of for me. And how good he always was. It's this beautiful description of how, how close he's come to Jim. And then in this moment, Wonderful moment. He tears up the letter he's been writing to Miss Watson and says to myself, all right, then I'll go to hell. and decides that if it means going to hell, protecting a slave, then he's going to do that.

Speaker 5:

And protecting a friendship too. And in fact, the person who has sort of become a father figure, a surrogate father to him.

Speaker 6:

And that is the moral climax of the story. At that point, what should happen is very quickly, Huck should bust Jim out of enslavement and they go off together. Yes. But instead, Mark Twain does a terrible thing. He has Tom Sawyer reappear. Yes. and Tom Sawyer and Huck decide they're going to bust James out of enslavement at the Phelps's, but Tom suddenly intervenes and says, this is too easy, right? And Tom then constructs, and this section of the book is called the evasion chapters, and Tom Sawyer and Huck for chapter after chapter, construct a very elaborate escape plan, which is completely unnecessary. They leave Jim enslaved for a month in these appalling circumstances. They send an anonymous letter to locals saying that Jim, the slave is about to be busted out by abolitionists. So they incite the locals to come and get involved all because Tom Sawyer wants to kind of raise the stakes. It's, it's almost completely catastrophic, but they do manage to get Jim out. And then Tom suddenly announces, having just come from the North, that actually Jim was freed two months before, when Miss Watson died. She freed him in her will. And in fact, there was no need for Jim to have been, chained up at all. There was no need for the escape plan. And when Tom is asked why he made this elaborate charade out of it, he says, Why I wanted the adventure of it. It's terrible that ending and it's become really problematic for people reading it.

Speaker 5:

Yes, it's really shocking and, hard to. think that Twain is not actually intending to satirize and critique adventure narrative as this kind of white institution that is fundamentally oppressive and sadistic, and violent. and yet when you're reading those chapters, you do feel that you're trapped in a perspective that Twain has very little control over himself.

Speaker 6:

And Twain in that famous notice, as we said earlier, who says anyone looking for a moral to this book or a motive should be shot. Yes. So he's, created this kind of moment of moral enlightenment and then just in this maverick way unpicked it. anyway, so

Speaker 5:

the book ends with Huck's famous declaration that he's going to light out for the territory. And on the one hand, it's an ending that gestures to freedom. It's a ending that gestures deliberation., Readers now, but I think also readers then, would have thought to themselves, this whole cycle is going to start again, that Huck is joining another version of the American South, with the eradication of Native American populations in the West, and the kind of European colonization of the western part of America. uh, It's a liberating ending and it's also a really troubling ending.

Speaker 6:

Yeah.

Speaker 5:

How was the book received, Jonty?

Speaker 6:

So it was published at the end of 1884, first in England and Canada, funnily enough, and it was fairly well received in England. Critics were very struck by the characters, by the world it was evoking. They loved Huck and Jim as a pair. They loved the vim and vigor and zest of Twain's prose. But then it's published in America in early 1885. everyone goes ballistic. So, the New York World says this is humor of a very low order, wit and literary ability wasted on a pitiable exhibition of irreverence and vulgarity. The Boston Advertiser complains of its coarseness and bad taste. It was banned by Concord Public veryest Trash. Concord

Speaker 5:

being significant because it's the town in New England where all the Transcendentalists lived. It's where Thoreau wrote Walden. It's where Louisa May Alcott wrote Concord. So it's the kind of ground zero of respectable American letters at the time.

Speaker 6:

But then it starts to, over the decades, it has a shift, it starts to be perceived differently.

Speaker 5:

So by the 1910s, the novel is seen as a classic, celebrated for capturing time and place and the vernacular American dialect. So this is what causes Ernest Hemingway to say that all modern American literature comes from Huck Finn and causes T. S. Elliott, who of course we remember is himself a Midwestern American, calls it a masterpiece. Since the 1950s, though, the evasion chapters have been seen as deeply problematic, and, scholars have sort of had to divide the novel into two versions of Jim. There's the suffering human Jim, the Jim who Huck is able to feel a deep empathetic connection to. but there's also this disturbingly comic Jim, who is a kind of parody of the minstrel figure. So, Jim himself has become kind of crux for critical debate and, anxiety around Mark Twain's novel. In 1957, the NAACP, one of the key organizations. involved in the civil rights movement, condemned Huckleberry Finn as racist. Um,

Speaker 6:

Yes. Okay, Sophie, worst bit and best bit for you?

Speaker 5:

Well, the worst bit for me are these horrible, sadistic parodies of Jim as a minstrel figure, who is escaping from slavery but is still basically treated as a slave. I found it very hard to read the book for that reason. And the best bits, I think, are these extraordinary descriptions of the Mississippi River as this place of freedom and also of a kind of isolation. on European American landscape, which I think Twain just does this brilliant job with.

Speaker 6:

Uh, yeah, I completely agree. The best bits for me are just those descriptions of the Mississippi, which are just so rooted in authenticity. And the worst bit is by far the awful evasion chapters at the end. And I don't just mean that in a kind of pious moralizing sort of way because of the racism. They're also just incredibly boring. Tom Sawyer is a very boring character. His, his love of japes and adventures and the way he just drags out this escape plan in a way that Mark Twain thinks is hilarious and it's just very boring as well as being morally reprehensible. He's a

Speaker 5:

very unappealing rogue.

Speaker 6:

I mean, of all the classics we've done, we've never done one which is Has such promise and such brilliance and has such a terrible last section as Huckleberry Finn.

Speaker 5:

Yeah. overrated or underrated?

Speaker 7:

Golly!

Speaker 5:

That's tricky.

Speaker 7:

That is tricky.

Speaker 5:

Because when I was reading it, I was thinking, Oh massively overrated. You know, the racism of this novel is so extreme that, it becomes almost unreadable. But then when I was researching the book for the episode, and I was thinking about how Twain was interrupting American literature and trying to do something completely new and uh. actually trying to do something progressive with the Jim character as much as it fails. I started to revise my opinion, but I am going to say that it's overrated.

Speaker 6:

I'm going to say overrated as well. it's brilliant, but it's also incredibly flawed. And since it's rating, so to speak, is the great American novel. Yes. This for me is not. The Great American Model. Yeah,

Speaker 5:

it can't stand, as Twain ended up writing it.

Speaker 6:

Sophie, it's time for us to light out for the territory ourselves. You've been listening to The Secret Life of Books.

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Jonty Claypole

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Sophie Gee

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