Between Parentheses: Essays, Articles, and Speeches, 1998-2003

  Survival. That’s one of the kinds of magic to be found here. The ability to survive. If the novel is read carefully and read at least ten times, some of this magic might come off the page and begin to flow through the veins of the person reading it.

  Then there’s the magic of friendship. When Huck, after playing a joke on Jim, discovers with regret that he’s offended him, or when each thinks back on the good things he left behind — Jim: his family; Huck: Tom Sawyer and little else — or when, more commonly, they spend their time lazing around the raft, sleeping or fishing or doing the chores necessary to keeep their craft shipshape, or when they experience moments of danger, what persists in the end is a lesson in friendship, friendship that is also a lesson in the civilization of two totally marginal beings who have only each other and who look after each other without gentle words or tenderness, as outlaws or those outside the bounds of respectability look after each other, because the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn isn’t a novel for respectable people, quite the contrary, which is odd, because the success of Twain’s book among respectable people, who are after all the primary purchasers and consumers of fiction, was huge, and the novel sold (and still sells) in astronomical quantities, which says a lot about the secret urges of respectable or middle-class people, the kind of people we’ll all be someday, as Borges dreamed, and without a doubt was little read in the circles most frequented by Huck, that is among adolescent children of alcoholic and abusive parents, runaways, swindlers and miscreants, or in black American circles, although according to Chester Himes the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn doesn’t fare too badly in the prison libraries of the United States.

  As I’m writing this I read in the paper that there’s a movie on TV today called Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. The plot reflects the unbridled American desire for happiness, or in other words the happiness offered by Walt Disney, the movie’s producer, as well as the loneliness of us all. The listing in the paper describes it like this: Tom Sawyer has become a lawyer and Huck a reporter, and both return to Hannibal to help Jim, whose profession isn’t revealed but who is probably no longer a slave. Maybe Jim has become a faith healer or owns a small farm. It’s possible to see Tom Sawyer as a lawyer. In fact, very possible. But Huck a reporter? That’s a stretch.

  Who was Mark Twain, which in Mississippi pilot lingo means two fathoms? First he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, his real name, and also Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, a short-lived pseudonym, and he was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, although his childhood and adolescence were spent in Hannibal, a town on the banks of the Mississippi. From a very early age he worked at a printing press that belonged to his brother Orion, whose private secretary he would later become in Nevada, where Orion was in turn secretary to the governor, which paints Orion not only as an enterprising type but as a schemer, that is, a politician. Twain was a river pilot on the Mississippi until the beginning of the Civil War and from that period comes a book that owes something to its day but also transcends its times, a strange book, Old Times on the Mississippi, whose first paragraph can be read as the kind of statement of principles that Tom Sawyer might have made, though not Huckleberry Finn: “When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”

  The ambition to be a steamboatman turned into a passion for the Mississippi and for traveling: to the west, first Nevada, with his canny brother, and to California, from which he sailed to Hawaii, a singular trip in his day, although in fact all of Twain’s trips were singular, even those he took around New England as the new husband of Olivia Langdon, a pretty girl with money who never understood him and whom he, meanwhile, never made the least effort to understand, their marriage the kind that in those days was called odd (or singular, like his trips) and that these days is usually called disastrous, not to mention that it was touched by adversity, a kind of adversity that no other writer could have withstood and that Twain may not have withstood either. A more sensitive man would have killed himself, but Twain believed that suicide was redundant: his scorn for the human race grew into something like a shield, a protective shell, all kinds of bad things could happen and it wouldn’t trouble him, because he expected it and had predicted it and he lived like the gladiators whose motto was nec spe, nec metu (“without fear or hope”).

  Writing about a photograph of Twain, Javier Marías says: “In nightshirt or shirt, he’s writing in bed, and unlike Mallarmé or Dickens it seems likely that he’s not even pretending but actually earnestly spelling out some word, because he wasn’t one to waste time. He must have known that his picture was being taken, but the impression he gives is that he doesn’t know or doesn’t care. The bed is tidy. It doesn’t look like a sickbed, which is always rumpled and sunken in the middle, the pillows flat. The viewer has therefore no choice but to wonder whether Mark Twain lived in bed.”

  Marías’s fond description misses some important details. Twain really was sick. His mane (one can’t call that mop hair) is exactly the same as it was in his youth, just a different color, which says a lot about Twain’s self-image. And finally, the wrists, those enormous lumberjack wrists, out of all proportion to his relatively small hands, prodigious wrists, like a cartoon character’s. Writers write with their hands and their eyes. Twain, old and sick, skeptical of everything, even his own work, writes with his wrists and his eyes, as if all his strength as a perpetual traveler were centered in them.

  But these aren’t Huckleberry Finn’s wrists, they’re Tom Sawyer’s. And that’s Mark Twain’s primary misfortune and also our delight, hypocritical readers, because it seems clear that if Twain had become Huck at some point in his eventful life, he would surely have written nothing or almost nothing, because boys and men like Huck don’t write, they’re too busy, satiated by life itself, a life in which one fishes not for whales but for catfish in the river that splits the United States in two, to the east the dawn, civilization, everything that strives desperately to be history and to be storied, and to the west the clarity of blindness and myth, everything that lies beyond books and history, everything that we fear in our innermost selves. To one side the land of Tom, who will settle down, who may even triumph, and who will surely have descendents, and on the other side the land of Huck, the wild man, the loafer, the son of an alcoholic and abusive father, in other words the ultimate orphan, who will never triumph, and who will disappear without leaving a trace, except in the memory of his friends, his comrades in misfortune, and in the ardent memory of Twain.

  No, Mark Twain didn’t have much regard for the rest of mankind. There’s a passage from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that should be inscribed in golden letters on the wall of every bar (and school) in the world. This passage foreshadows half the complete works of Faulkner and half the complete works of Hemingway, and it foreshadows especially what both of them, Faulkner and Hemingway, wanted to be. The passage is simple. It describes a duel and its consequences. It begins with a drunk who likes to go around cursing and threatening people. One morning he goes to challe
nge the town’s storekeeper.

  Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down so he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells:

  “Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you’ve swindled. You’re the houn’ I’m after, and I’m a-gwyne to have you, too!”

  And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and going on. By and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five — and he was a heap the best dressed man in that town, too — steps out of the store, and the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, mighty ca’m and slow — he says:

  “I’m tired of this, but I’ll endure it till one o’clock. Till one o’clock, mind — no longer. If you open your mouth against me only once after that time you can’t travel so far but I will find you.”

  Then Sherburn, who’s a colonel, old Colonel Sherburn, as we’ve just been informed, goes back into his store and Boggs rides around town cursing him at the top of his lungs. People aren’t laughing anymore. When Boggs goes back to the store (where he no longer needs to bend his head down to see whether Sherburn is inside), he continues his tirade. Some people try to make him be quiet. They warn him that it’s a quarter to one. But Boggs ignores them. Earlier he’s seen Huck Finn and asked him: “Whar’d you come f’m, boy? You prepared to die?” Huck doesn’t answer. And now some people try to convince the drunk man to go home, but Boggs “throwed his hat down in the mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went a-raging down the street again, with his gray hair a-flying,” a description that while perfectly vulgar, as the situation merits, also soars to epic heights, because Twain knows that all epics are vulgar and that the only thing that can somewhat relieve the immense sadness of all epics is humor. And so Boggs keeps slandering Sherburn up and down the street, with no one able to get him to dismount or shut up, until someone remembers his daughter, the only person who might be able to reason with him, and they go off in search of her and then Boggs disappears for a few minutes and when Huck sees him again he has dismounted and he’s on foot, not striding along but stumbling a bit, and two friends have him by the arms: “He was quiet, and looked uneasy; and he warn’t hanging back any, but was doing some of the hurrying himself.” Then a voice is heard shouting Boggs’s name and everyone turns and it’s Colonel Sherburn, and Twain describes him standing motionless in the middle of the street, a pistol raised in his right hand, a pistol that he doesn’t aim at anyone but at the sky, like a classic duelist, and then Boggs’s daughter appears at the other end of the street, but Boggs and the men with him don’t see her, they’ve turned around, and the only thing they see is Sherburn with his pistol raised, a pistol “with both barrels cocked,” that is a duelist’s pistol, with just two bullets, and the men with Boggs jump to one side and only then is Sherburn’s pistol lowered and aimed at the unfortunate drunk and the latter manages to raise both hands in a gesture more of entreaty than of surrender, saying “Oh Lord, don’t shoot,” and then, without transition, the shot is heard and Boggs stumbles backward, “clawing at the air” and then Sherburn shoots again and Boggs “tumbles backwards on to the ground.” Now chaos reigns, Boggs’s daughter cries, the crowd swarms around the dying man, Sherburn has tossed his pistol down and gone, Boggs is carried into a drugstore and set down on the floor with a Bible under his head and another Bible open on his chest, and then he dies. And when Boggs dies people start to talk, mulling over the killing, telling what they saw, and after a while someone, an anonymous voice in the crowd, says they should lynch Sherburn, and almost immediately they’re all in agreement, the whole town is in agreement, and they head for Sherburn’s house “mad and yelling, and snatching down every clothes-line they come to to do the hanging with.”

  And that’s the end of Chapter XXI, in which the reader has the sense of being in the presence of something completely real, not literary, or in other words deeply literary, a high point of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Chapter XXII begins where the previous chapter leaves off, with Twain going on to speak eloquently about bravery and crowds, as if the day before he’d read Canetti’s Crowds and Power, and in the same chapter he also talks about loneliness and the most desperate pride in the world, and he cross-dresses as Captain Ahab.

  It’s a spare scene, though set in the middle of the chaos of a lynching. The mob reaches Sherburn’s house. There’s a small yard. The mob sets up camp, shouting (“you couldn’t hear yourself think for the noise”) from the other side of the fence. There’s a call to tear down the fence. “Then there was a racket of ripping and tearing and smashing, and down she goes, and the front wall of the crowd begins to roll in like a wave.” Only then does Sherburn appear. He’s on the porch roof and he’s carrying a double-barrelled rifle and he’s “perfectly ca’m and deliberate,” watching as his fence is torn down, and when the crowd sees him up above, they in turn stop and stare. For a while nothing happens. The stillness is perfect. The mob below and Colonel Sherburn above, watching. At last Sherburn laughs and says:

  “The idea of you lynching anybody! It’s amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! Because you’re brave enough to tar and feather poor friendless cast-out women that come along here, did that make you think you had grit enough to lay your hands on a man? Why, a man’s safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind — as long as it’s daytime and you’re not behind him.

  “Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I’ve lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man’s a coward. In the North he lets anybody walk over him that wants to, and goes home and prays for a humble spirit to bear it. In the South one man all by himself, has stopped a stage full of men in the daytime, and robbed the lot. Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people — whereas you’re just as brave, and no braver. Why don’t your juries hang murderers? Because they’re afraid the man’s friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark — and it’s just what they would do.

  “So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn’t bring a man with you; that’s one mistake, and the other is that you didn’t come in the dark and fetch your masks. You brought part of a man — Buck Harkness, there — and if you hadn’t had him to start you, you’d a taken it out in blowing.

  “You didn’t want to come. The average man don’t like trouble and danger. You don’t like trouble and danger. But if only half a man — like Buck Harkness, there — shouts ‘Lynch him! lynch him!’ you’re afraid to back down — afraid you’ll be found out to be what you are — cowards — and so you raise a yell, and hang yourselves on to that half-a-man’s coat-tail, and come raging up here, swearing what big things you’re going to do. The pitifulest thing out is a mob; that’s what an army is — a mob; they don’t fight with courage that’s born in them, but with courage that’s borrowed from their mass, and from their officers. But a mob without any man at the head of it is beneath pitifulness. Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching’s going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they’ll bring their masks, and fetch a man along. Now leave — and take your half-a-man with you” — tossing his gun up across his left arm and cocking it when he says this.

  Th
e crowd washed back sudden, and then broke all apart, and went tearing off every which way.

  There’s no question that Mark Twain had little regard for people’s bravery. He knew a coward when he saw one. He held a similarly low opinion of other writers, in whom he scented imposture. Colonel Sherburn, who is a patient man, is also a cool killer, someone who doesn’t hesitate to shoot a foolish drunk who even raises his hands at the crucial moment (“Oh Lord, don’t shoot”) as if it had all been a joke, a stage play spun out of control. Sherburn is afflicted with a kind of inflexibility that today we would consider politically incorrect. But he’s a man and he behaves like one, while everyone else behaves like a mob or like actors, the former including the townspeople who intend to lynch him and the latter including the unfortunate Boggs, who’s ready to recite his lines but not to keep his word, the same Boggs who, without getting off his horse, asks Huck, “Whar’d you come f’m, boy? You prepared to die?”

  Twain was always prepared to die. That’s the only way to understand his humor.