Huckleberry Fiend

by Julie Smith

  Dunlap folded her arms and lowered her chin in a gesture of utter complacency. “I rest my case.”

  “Well, you might fill me in on what it is.”

  “There’s a reason you never heard of Joan of Arc. It has about as much life to it as the telephone book. The point being that Twain was a terrible judge of his own work. After Livy died, he published the books she’d forbidden. Maybe you remember What Is Man?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “How about Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven?”

  “Vaguely, maybe.”

  “In the preface to What Is Man?, he said the ideas in it had been thought by millions who never dared to express them, and that he himself hadn’t dared up till then.”

  “My God, what’s it about?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing very exciting. Man’s helpless position, I guess— pretty straightforward determinism. That was the great censored material.”

  “Please, Marcia.” I wasn’t going to be daunted by a mere dazzling display. “He read to Livy every night. She ‘edited’ as they went.”

  “Did you know that the idea for The Gilded Age came from Livy and Susan Warner? It’s certainly no genteel work of self-congratulatory Christianity.”

  Ha! Now I could give her back some of her own. “It’s not exactly Twain’s best book, either.”

  “As Huck would say, you are the beatin’est man! Very well, then.” She now had the look of a boxer beginning to circle. “After Livy, Howells, Livy’s mother, and Livy’s aunt all had read Tom Sawyer, Clemens wasn’t satisfied. When Huck complained about life at the Widow Douglas’s, he remarked, if you recall, ‘They comb me all to thunder’.”

  I didn’t, but I nodded, anyway. “Sounds like Huck.”

  “Well, Clemens originally wrote, ‘all to hell.’ He changed it himself.”

  I was a broken man. Feebly, I summoned the tiny bit of breath I still had. “Professor,” I gasped, “as the old man himself might have said, you’re too many for me.” I made my way towards the genteel and self-congratulatory blush wine.

  Whew! I remembered Linda’s description of the talk she was going to give— the biggie. Did that mean the Livy Question? Was I going to have to listen to the whole thing all over again? It had been a long time since my Cal days, but I felt suddenly thrown back to the old life of faculty parties and discussions like the one-sided one I had just had with Professor Dunlap. As I recalled, I’d been able to hold my own a little better, but perhaps I was misremembering. I figured I’d better keep my opinions about “The Mysterious Stranger” to myself. In truth, I liked Paine’s pastiche better than Twain’s “No. 44,” but wild horses couldn’t have dragged it out of me.

  I tried to figure out the best way of doing what I’d come there for, but after a few half-hearted attempts finally gave up trying to meet and question everyone there. Not only was Dunlap too many for me, so were the Fiends— there must have been twenty-five of them, and I hadn’t a prayer. I’d have to make a general appeal. I barely had time to find Linda and tell her I’d changed my mind before someone rapped for order.

  It was a sixtyish woman, the lady of the house and apparently the head Fiend. “Our speaker tonight is Linda McCormick, on a topic that so far all of us have managed to avoid. It’s a brave person who would take on such a task, but she has graciously agreed to tackle it— it being, of course, The Ending.”

  Whistles, catcalls, loud applause. You’d have thought she was about to perform The Royal Nonesuch. I cursed myself for an idiot— the biggie, of course, was the controversial ending of Huckleberry Finn.

  Linda looked nonplussed. “Really, I don’t deserve all that. Let me just say up front that I don’t have the answer. I’m just going to run through a few thoughts on the subject. Actually, it’s kind of a grim joke around the office. Whenever anyone says ‘Ending,’ we’ve gotten so we cringe. After you’ve heard fifty thousand explanations, they tend to cancel each other out. But I’m going to talk about it, and also about the last ten chapters, when the book turns from so-called serious intent to burlesque.

  “To begin with, even so great an admirer of Huck as Ernest Hemingway said, ‘If you read it you must stop where the Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating.’ The plain fact is that it reads as if Twain simply wrote himself into a corner. As Huck himself asked, Why would a runaway slave run South? Twain was an improviser. And so he found himself in a situation where he had a comic setup, but he needed a serious ending. However, given the political and social circumstances of the day, there was no reasonable way for Jim, having run South, to get free. Thus the author relied on the ancient and, some would say, cheap device of a deus ex machina: It was simple; Jim was free all along. And to get to that point, Twain chose to introduce Tom Sawyer and to descend into what De Voto called ‘a trivial extravaganza on a theme he had exhausted years before. In the whole history of the English novel,’ De Voto said, ‘there is no more chilling descent.’

  “In his boyish quest for what he calls ‘adventure,’ Tom is horribly cruel to Jim, making him wait weeks for his freedom, in the prison of a cabin infested with the rats, snakes, caterpillars, frogs, and spiders Tom insists are essential in a good escape story. Huck stands by and lets it happen, not only abdicating responsibility, but disapproving of Tom for what he believes to be a compromise of his character in doing so antisocial a thing as freeing a slave.”

  She paused a moment, lapsing into a more conversational tone. “Most professors seem to find that about 50 percent of their students aren’t offended. After all, Huck is used to cruelty. He’s seen lots of it by this point in the book and has even noted, when the King and Duke are ridden out of town on a rail, ‘Human beings can be awful cruel to each other.’ These students remember, I think, that Huck has always deferred to Tom. They may remember as well that both books— meaning Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn— are full of childish superstition. If Huck can believe a dead cat will cure warts, why shouldn’t he believe that, to make a successful escape, a prisoner has to have snakes, frogs, and a rope ladder? It’s enough for these readers that, when Huck says, ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell!’ his sound heart, as Mark Twain called it, has triumphed over his deformed conscience.

  “Yet for many readers— obviously De Voto among them— the ending is tremendously disappointing. I think myself that its success has been underestimated. No one has yet proposed a more successful one. Bear with me for a moment while I read you a passage from the book.” Her smeary eyes were mischievous. “Can you stand that?” (Mock boos and hisses— she knew her audience.)

  “ ‘There was a nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had… And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home… It was ’lection day and I was just about to go and vote, myself, if I wam’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote again… And to see the cool way of that nigger— why, he wouldn’t give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out of the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?— that’s what I want to know.’” She closed her book. “Does anyone know who the speaker is?”

  “Pap,” someone piped.

  “Exactly. Huck’s pap. It’s a mistake to forget that Huck is, after all, the son of Pap. No wonder he had a deformed conscience! Frankly, I think the reason people become so disappointed is that they expect too much of him. They want him to be a hero, to rise above his roots. In a way, he is a hero, of course— he believes he’s given up his immortal soul to save Jim from slavery. That’s pretty heroic, I think. But what Huck certainly isn’t is a little Berkeley libera
l, and you can’t make him into one no matter how hard you try. He’s simply a person of sound heart.

  “But perhaps we make too much of all this. In our work at the university, we have a rule of thumb— if Mark Twain says something happened, or is based on fact, it probably is. We usually take the tack that if we think it didn’t, we’re wrong. When we begin to go off into flights of fancy about the author’s intent— as we imagine it— or get angry at him for not writing a better book, or, worst of all, start thinking of ways we could have made it better, it’s probably best if we remember these words.” She picked up her copy of the book once again and turned to the notice at the front. “ ‘Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.’” (Thunderous applause.) But Linda had one more thing to say before she sat down: “The Huck stops here.” (Boos and hisses.)

  When the tumult had died, Linda introduced me and turned over the floor. I said: “I’m doing some research on collectors and I’d like to ask for your help. Maybe there are some of you here tonight, or perhaps you know of some. But I’m not looking for your average collector. I’m looking for someone whose fanaticism surpasses even yours— not a mere Fiend, more like a Hound of Huck. The sort of person whose whole life is Mark Twain, who identifies with him so thoroughly he almost has no other identity and no other interests.”

  “Pamela Temby,” said Dan Dupart, “would kill to get her hands on a manuscript she wanted.”

  “Yes,” said the straight-haired woman, “but would she sell her mother down the river?”

  Full-scale hilarity broke out again— why, I had no idea. I was reminded of the story about the prisoners who got tired of telling the same jokes all the time, so they assigned them numbers that cracked everyone up on utterance. (Later, I realized the remark had been an allusion to an incident in Pudd’nhead Wilson.)

  When order was restored, and I’d thanked Dan for his lead, an old man spoke up, a bald old man with a cane and a spot on his tie— retired high school teacher was my guess. “Tom Sawyer’s who you want.”

  Was he senile?

  But then there was a chorus of finger-snappings and “of courses.” And once again I was in the dark.

  “Tom Sayers, he used to be. Had his name legally changed. One of our founding members, left here about ten years ago. Before that he worked over at the Berkeley Public Library. Lived, slept, and ate Mark Twain. Uncle died or something, left him pots and pots of money, and you know what he did? Bought up every Twain document he could get his hands on and moved to Virginia City to open a museum.”

  “A Mark Twain museum in Virginia City— there’s a novel idea.” Laughter again, and again that left-out feeling.

  But no matter. A man who had had his name legally changed to Tom Sawyer! I was still reeling from that. “He certainly sounds likely. Is anyone in touch with him? Is he still collecting?”

  Marcia Dunlap spoke up. “Oh, yes. I’m a collector and I’ve corresponded with him from time to time. He’s fanatical.”

  “So I gather. I don’t know how you can top that, but are there any other biggies I should know about?”

  The bald old man tapped his cane on the floor. “Tom Sawyer’s your man.”

  Linda wanted to go for a drink, but I didn’t trust myself. The time had arrived to come clean. “Sorry. I’ve got to get home. I’m expected.”

  “You’re married? I should have known.”

  “Just involved. But—”

  “Stop! You’re about to say it.”

  “About to say what?”

  “Arrgh. ‘Let’s be friends’.”

  I was taken aback. “You mean we can’t? I thought you liked me for myself.”

  “Oh, sure we can— I do like you. I’m sick of those three words, that’s all. I wish just once someone would come along and say, ‘Let’s run away together’.”

  There’s a lot of free-floating passion in the academic world— probably because of all those healthy young bodies.

  It was too bad about Linda, but I really didn’t want to blow things with Sardis. I’d gone through more personal anguish for her than I ever had for any woman— at least, I called it anguish; her name for it was “growing up”— and so far we were only co-property owners. I had too big an investment to split my attention now. She was a terrific woman and I was going to concentrate on her. Period.

  I was so moved by my own resolve and virtue that I popped into the all-night Safeway to get her some flowers. Home again, I saw her car parked in front and her lights on, but due to circumstances completely within my control, I didn’t have a key to the damned door, so I was forced to phone first. Her machine answered. That meant she didn’t want to be disturbed, of course, but I couldn’t see how it could possibly apply to me. Nothing to do but ring the doorbell.

  She was dressed as if to go out, in white pants and one of those fancy women’s T-shirts that cost fifty bucks or so. Her makeup was fresh and her hair newly blow-dried. I dropped to one knee and proffered the flowers. “Want to go out for a drink?”

  “How sweet. They’re lovely. But, listen, I can’t go, I— oh, there he is now.”

  Feeling like the first jerk of June, I got to my feet.

  “Hi, Steve. Paul, I— this is my…”

  I’d left my own door open and I ducked into it, fast, not waiting around for any goddam introductions. In case you’ve never thought about how it feels to be kneeling to a damsel when her date shows up, try it now. Go ahead. And please send your secret if you can do it without the sure and certain feeling that the top of your head is about to go speeding into the ozone.

  Actually, five minutes and a glass of wine later, I was calm as a Yogi. Due to Linda and the flowers and all, I’d just overreacted. I realized I should have shaken hands like a gent. The realization sent me back to the depths.

  CHAPTER 11

  I can act pretty childish sometimes, but this was a new low. Maybe another glass of wine.

  The more I drank and sat, the more I felt the same way— insecure about Sardis. That was new, too. I used to worry about her crowding me. This business about the separate apartments must have gotten me more than I’d thought. She was right about the matter of the Fiends— it had been taking her for granted to stand her up when she’d asked me to dinner. When you got down to it, it had been downright churlish. I’d have to buy her some flowers to make up for it.

  But then I remembered I already had. So what to do now? My sorrows wouldn’t drown; indeed, they seemed to thrive on Glen Ellen red. Work. That was it. What next on the Huck hunt? Well, simple. See Tom Sawyer. It was a long drive, but…

  I had a brainstorm. You could probably get to Carson City in an hour if you flew, and I had a friend who lived for flying the way Sawyer apparently lived for Mark Twain. I got Crusher Wilcox on the phone.

  “Crusher? Paul. I have to go to Virginia City on business. Feel like flying to Carson tomorrow?”

  “That’s funny. Virginia was still a ghost town, last I heard.”

  “Not your kind of business.” Crusher, who works for a multinational corporation, thinks Geneva is the sort of place you go on business. “I’ve got to interview a guy.”

  “Why didn’t you say so? I’ve got a meeting at three— can we be back by then?”

  “Why not?”

  “See you at seven.”

  That was how easy it was to get Crusher to take you anywhere a Cessna could go. I was sorry I couldn’t offer him a scarifying storm or a hair-raising landing opportunity— that would have really got his juices flowing— but it didn’t matter, in the end. He was a wild-blue-yonder junkie and didn’t care where he went so long as he didn’t do it on land. He’d once told me his nickname had something to do with his driving record, but I wasn’t sure how much that had to do with anything. All I knew was, he was obsessed.

  So obsessed, in fact, that flying was his only adventure. Whenever I asked
to be flown somewhere, he’d let me off at the airport and pick me up at some appointed time, pursuing aerial amusement in the meanwhile.

  Before we landed in Carson, we flew over Virginia, which, in Mark Twain’s words, “roosted royally midway up the steep side of Mount Davidson, seven thousand two hundred feet above the level of the sea, and in the clear Nevada atmosphere was visible from a distance of fifty miles.”

  I was up on all that because, fretting over Sardis, I hadn’t been able to sleep the night before and had ended up boning up with Roughing It. Seeing Virginia hours later, I almost convinced myself I’d seen a photograph of it, so vividly had the master described it: “The mountain side was so steep that the entire town had a slant to it like a roof. Each street was a terrace, and from each to the next street below the descent was forty or fifty feet… From Virginia’s airy situation one could look over a vast, far-reaching panorama of mountain ranges and deserts… Over your head Mount Davidson lifted its gray dome and before and below you a rugged canyon clove the battlemented hills, making a sombre gateway through which a soft-tinted desert was glimpsed…” How eloquently he had written of Virginia’s heyday, the “flush times,” as he called them. In truth, I could see how a person like Tom Sawyer would pick the romantic old place as his home. It was synonymous with Mark Twain at his most adventurous, and it was also important for another reason— it was the first place he’d ever used his celebrated pseudonym, in a real sense the birthplace of Mark Twain the writer.

  He’d gone there at a low point in his seven-year sojourn in the West, but not, for once, in the outright search for metallic riches. Though the opulent Comstock lode was producing ton upon ton of rich silver ore, he’d been invited to work on that most colorful of frontier papers, the Territorial Enterprise, for twenty-five dollars a week. The job came about after he’d amused himself writing letters to the Enterprise, professing later always to have been surprised when they were printed. “My good opinion of the editors,” he wrote modestly, “had steadily declined” as a result.