Could some kind of Mark Twain revival be afoot in this, the 175th-anniversary year of Harper’s Magazine, a periodical that more consistently than any other provided a home for Twain’s writing during the half-century-long major phase of his career? The signs are come unto us. The writer Percival Everett’s 2024 novel James, in which Everett reimagines the story of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s raft mate on the Mississippi, the self-emancipated Jim, took home last year’s National Book Award for Fiction. Only two months ago, we got a major new book by the Stanford professor Shelley Fisher Fishkin, who in the long history of scholarship on Mark Twain has written some of the best of it. Jim is the title, and subject, of Fishkin’s latest. So, we have James and Jim, barely a year apart. Meanwhile, the annual Mark Twain Prize for American Humor has taken on new significance as a sort of dissenter’s pulpit. This year’s winner, the comedian and talk-show host Conan O’Brien, seized the moment of his acceptance speech, delivered in March onstage at the Kennedy Center in Washington—where the previous month, the board of trustees had been ousted by President Trump and replaced with a shock brigade of his sort of people, among them the country singer Lee Greenwood, of “Proud to Be an American” fame, all in the interest of ushering in a new “Golden Age in Arts and Culture,” with Trump himself at the head, as chair, lobbing brain-damaged non sequiturs about this one time he saw Cats—and used it, O’Brien did, to speak out not-so-subtly against the regime. “Twain hated bullies,” O’Brien told the crowd, a statement largely true (although Tom Sawyer was a bully at times, and a manipulative narcissist at all times). O’Brien said that Twain hated racism too, and it is true that Twain came to hate racism, although he had been a racist earlier in his life and even farcically fought for the Confederacy for a couple of weeks. But this is pedantry on my part. (...)
I grew up so hopelessly steeped in the cult of Twain that I have to perform a mental adjustment to understand how a Twain revival could be possible. How does one revive what is ever-present and oppressively urgent? My sportswriter father, who died when I was in my mid-twenties, worshipped Twain, to the extent of wearing, every year on specific occasions, a tailored white suit. With the shaggy hair and Twainish mustache that he maintained year-round, the object of the homage was unmistakable. I was raised in New Albany, Indiana, across the Ohio River from Louisville, Kentucky, and in the late Seventies, when I was a boy, some of the last of the old-time steamboat races were held there. One of my earliest memories is of being taken down to the riverfront at the age of four to watch that spectacle. Twain’s face was everywhere. It was on TV, in a disturbing Claymation film called The Adventures of Mark Twain, which, I have since learned from the internet, gave bad dreams not just to me but to my whole microgeneration. Every Christmas until I was a teenager, I would find waiting under the tree a fine hardback copy of one or another Twain novel, sometimes one of the editions that had those marvelous N. C. Wyeth illustrations. These gifts would then stress me out for the rest of the year. They were given in love, but with a certain expectation or pressure, as well—they were a form of cultural proselytizing—and somehow I never felt that I read or loved them well enough. My father would quiz me on the stories. Hadn’t I loved the part when such and such happened? When Huck decided he’d rather go to hell than hand over Jim to be reenslaved? No, more than that, more than any “rather,” did I grasp the fact that Huck actually believed he would go to hell for this loyalty to Jim, and chose it regardless? My answers, no matter how much forced enthusiasm I tried to pump in behind them, always left him a little crestfallen, a little chagrined. In his smoke-filled basement office, he would play his recordings of Hal Holbrook doing Twain. When I was cast in the role of Joe Harper, in our seventh-grade production of Tom Sawyer, he grew briefly delighted, and suggested I revisit the novel for character insights, but the show bombed. We had too little talent for too many parts. I remember our Injun Joe, a kid named Kevin. Bless him, he had one line, and the line consisted of a single word—“Bah!”—and somehow he kept fucking it up. It required a kind of genius to fuck up this line, but he did it every time, in a different way. The director would clutch the top of her head and scrunch up a fistful of hair and say, “Oh, Kevin!” I may be tidying the timeline somewhat here, but I’m pretty sure that the school play marked the end of my father’s efforts to inspire me with his devotion. He had already inflicted on me, though, some guilty shadow of it. (...)
Like Kafka when he went to see the aeroplanes at Brescia, did I not come to Percival Everett’s James with a kind of hostility? And if the answer is yes, what was the source of it? Certainly not any sense that a sacred cow of some kind had been violated, although the way I wrote “certainly” there makes me wonder if, in fact, it was that. Yes, there may have been some childish instinct to defend Twain. But Mr. Everett, you must realize that Twain himself saw Jim as fully human, and in the context of the time . . . Hilarious. Everett knows this as well as anyone. Twain’s “humor and humanity,” he acknowledges in the acknowledgments, “affected me long before I became a writer.” No, this hostility was more an expectation that the “brilliance” of the concept—Jim becomes James, the runaway becomes the self-emancipated, the boy (in the racist sense) becomes a man, and the whole polarity of the narrative, in which Huck’s choices matter, while Jim’s are incidental, has been reversed—would prove greater than the novel could possibly prove good, and that the story, as a result, would amount more or less to an extended skit, throughout the interminable course of which you would have to keep reminding yourself how brilliant the idea was, to make your hand turn the actual pages. The worst kind of book, the kind we are assailed by in this era, the kind of book people tell you they “loved,” and you think to yourself, They cannot possibly have read the book I tried to read. And often if you ask probing questions you find that they have not done so, or that they, like you, tried and failed, but came away loving the book nonetheless, or feeling a need to say as much, and after a while, when you have been burned enough times, it can feel like this is what books have become, things not to read but to love.
You know the story about Hemingway and Joyce’s Ulysses? A “most goddamn wonderful book,” he called it, but when Hemingway died and they examined his copy, a third of the pages were “uncut”—they had never been read. Or even seen! Well, obviously there is a place for books like that in the world.
Hemingway also said, or had the character of himself, “Papa” (!), say, in one of his books, Green Hills of Africa, which is classified as non-fiction but contains many scenes that read not quite plausibly as such, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But then Papa adds,
Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. Jim is not stolen from “the boys.” Tom is not there when it happens. Nor is Jim “stolen.” Huck does not own him. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner, when he finds out that Jim has been caught, in order to conceal their true relationship: Jim is his friend, and Huck is helping him escape. It is not possible for Jim to be “stolen” from the boys, or even from Huck. And don’t say, “Oh, you know what he means . . .” No, it was the wrongest possible word Papa could have used.
Those details aside, what on earth does Hemingway mean when he says, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”? People have wondered, psychoanalyzed. Hemingway could be so fantastically full of shit. There was nothing before? But there were Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe and . . . There had been “nothing as good since,” i.e., between 1885 and 1935, when Hemingway published those sentences? But there had been Henry James and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Speaking of Faulkner, what did he mean, twenty years later, when he called Twain “the father of American literature”?
If we could get under and behind this tradition of hyperbole, figure out what motivates it, we might learn something not only about Hemingway and Faulkner but about ourselves and this country. Why has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion? Presumably the answer involves some variant of whatever instinct prompted Everett to subvert (and thereby affirm the power of) the very book that gave rise to this glorification.
James is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Everett accomplished the task that was necessary to make this so: not to criticize Twain and his novel (though he does that often enough and subtly enough) but to provide the element most sorely missing from those original Adventures, namely, the interior life of Jim. The first sentence made me burst out laughing: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Or rather I burst out laughing ten sentences later when it is revealed that those little bastards are Huck and Tom. Much further into the story, the choice of insult will provide the matter for a deeper joke, one that may even transcend the status of a joke.
The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd, in a way. Jim becomes not just James but a heroic scholar-in-exile, of the kind that one might occasionally have encountered not among the enslaved or formerly enslaved, as a rule, but in the free black communities of the South, the social context that produced a writer like David Walker (of Walker’s Appeal). By drafting James as a man born enslaved who rose to this level of cultural sophistication by reading books in the library of his owner, Everett has situated James’s backstory among an infinitesimally tiny group of historical destinies. One is meant to think, perhaps, of Toussaint Louverture in his Haitian cabin, reading the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. All but unique, in other words, and therefore—one could argue—a flawed lens through which to view James’s full humanity. But these passages, and the cluster of authorial decisions behind them, are redeemed by, of all things, laughter. At least, I’m pretty sure that I can hear Everett laughing behind them, or smiling, anyway. He hears the thing in me (and, I have to assume, in many other readers) that starts to rise up and protest, “Hey, come on, did you have to make him an intellectual?,” and the writer in him laughs. I see you little bastards hiding out there in the tall grass. James and I will decide what he dreams about. (...)
Like Kafka when he went to see the aeroplanes at Brescia, did I not come to Percival Everett’s James with a kind of hostility? And if the answer is yes, what was the source of it? Certainly not any sense that a sacred cow of some kind had been violated, although the way I wrote “certainly” there makes me wonder if, in fact, it was that. Yes, there may have been some childish instinct to defend Twain. But Mr. Everett, you must realize that Twain himself saw Jim as fully human, and in the context of the time . . . Hilarious. Everett knows this as well as anyone. Twain’s “humor and humanity,” he acknowledges in the acknowledgments, “affected me long before I became a writer.” No, this hostility was more an expectation that the “brilliance” of the concept—Jim becomes James, the runaway becomes the self-emancipated, the boy (in the racist sense) becomes a man, and the whole polarity of the narrative, in which Huck’s choices matter, while Jim’s are incidental, has been reversed—would prove greater than the novel could possibly prove good, and that the story, as a result, would amount more or less to an extended skit, throughout the interminable course of which you would have to keep reminding yourself how brilliant the idea was, to make your hand turn the actual pages. The worst kind of book, the kind we are assailed by in this era, the kind of book people tell you they “loved,” and you think to yourself, They cannot possibly have read the book I tried to read. And often if you ask probing questions you find that they have not done so, or that they, like you, tried and failed, but came away loving the book nonetheless, or feeling a need to say as much, and after a while, when you have been burned enough times, it can feel like this is what books have become, things not to read but to love.
You know the story about Hemingway and Joyce’s Ulysses? A “most goddamn wonderful book,” he called it, but when Hemingway died and they examined his copy, a third of the pages were “uncut”—they had never been read. Or even seen! Well, obviously there is a place for books like that in the world.
Hemingway also said, or had the character of himself, “Papa” (!), say, in one of his books, Green Hills of Africa, which is classified as non-fiction but contains many scenes that read not quite plausibly as such, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” But then Papa adds,
If you read it you must stop where Nigger Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.So many things about this oft-quoted statement are hard to understand. It’s the best American novel, but we should not read the last twelve chapters? That’s the final almost one hundred pages of the book. Ordinarily that would constitute a significant knock on a novel’s quality. Hemingway means that there is something deep and intrinsic in the good parts, qualities so important that they outweigh otherwise fatal formal defects. Hemingway is, by the way, technically correct to suggest the cut, in the sense that a good editor, the best editor, might have made the same suggestion to Twain. The chapter that Hemingway recommends be the last chapter is the aforementioned crucial chapter, the one in which Huck decides to go to hell rather than betray Jim. It is also the chapter in which Huck learns that Jim has been kidnapped and temporarily sold back into slavery by a confidence man. The novel would thus end in existential tragedy, with Huck making his moral choice and losing Jim anyway. Huck: bereft. Jim: reenslaved. Tom: who gives a shit. We are reminded (I am reminded, by a piece that Greil Marcus wrote for the Los Angeles Times twenty-eight years ago, on the occasion of the last Twain revival) that the critic Leslie Fiedler, in his 1960 book Love and Death in the American Novel, called Huck “the first Existentialist hero”:
He is the product of no metaphysics, but of a terrible breakthrough of the undermind of America itself. In him, the obsessive American theme of loneliness reaches an ultimate level of expression, being accepted at last not as a blessing to be sought or a curse to be flaunted or fled, but quite simply as a man’s fate. There are mythic qualities in Ahab and even Dimmesdale; but Huck is a myth: not invented but discovered by one close enough to the popular mind to let it; this once at least, speak through him. Twain sometimes merely pandered to that popular mind, played the buffoon for it, but he was unalienated from it; and when he let it possess him, instead of pretending to condescend to it, he and the American people dreamed Huck—dreamed, that is to say, the anti-American American dream.We dreamed it together . . . how lovely.
Hemingway says that “Nigger Jim” (Twain never used that epithet) is “stolen from the boys.” That last part is wrong in two ways. Jim is not stolen from “the boys.” Tom is not there when it happens. Nor is Jim “stolen.” Huck does not own him. Huck pretends to be Jim’s owner, when he finds out that Jim has been caught, in order to conceal their true relationship: Jim is his friend, and Huck is helping him escape. It is not possible for Jim to be “stolen” from the boys, or even from Huck. And don’t say, “Oh, you know what he means . . .” No, it was the wrongest possible word Papa could have used.
Those details aside, what on earth does Hemingway mean when he says, “All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since”? People have wondered, psychoanalyzed. Hemingway could be so fantastically full of shit. There was nothing before? But there were Melville and Dickinson and Hawthorne and Whitman and Poe and . . . There had been “nothing as good since,” i.e., between 1885 and 1935, when Hemingway published those sentences? But there had been Henry James and Edith Wharton and Willa Cather and William Faulkner. Speaking of Faulkner, what did he mean, twenty years later, when he called Twain “the father of American literature”?
If we could get under and behind this tradition of hyperbole, figure out what motivates it, we might learn something not only about Hemingway and Faulkner but about ourselves and this country. Why has it so often seemed necessary to claim Twain in this fashion? Presumably the answer involves some variant of whatever instinct prompted Everett to subvert (and thereby affirm the power of) the very book that gave rise to this glorification.
James is a good novel and not just a clever idea. Everett accomplished the task that was necessary to make this so: not to criticize Twain and his novel (though he does that often enough and subtly enough) but to provide the element most sorely missing from those original Adventures, namely, the interior life of Jim. The first sentence made me burst out laughing: “Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.” Or rather I burst out laughing ten sentences later when it is revealed that those little bastards are Huck and Tom. Much further into the story, the choice of insult will provide the matter for a deeper joke, one that may even transcend the status of a joke.
The place where Everett has left himself open to the most obvious criticism is in his decision to make James an intellectual. The man is not merely intelligent, in other words, in the way that any healthy, alert person might be. He is instead a highly literate and systematic thinker, who, when he dreams, is visited by John Locke and Voltaire. They discuss such topics as the nature of civic equality and natural rights and the real-world responsibilities of philosophers. It’s absurd, in a way. Jim becomes not just James but a heroic scholar-in-exile, of the kind that one might occasionally have encountered not among the enslaved or formerly enslaved, as a rule, but in the free black communities of the South, the social context that produced a writer like David Walker (of Walker’s Appeal). By drafting James as a man born enslaved who rose to this level of cultural sophistication by reading books in the library of his owner, Everett has situated James’s backstory among an infinitesimally tiny group of historical destinies. One is meant to think, perhaps, of Toussaint Louverture in his Haitian cabin, reading the Abbé Raynal’s Histoire des deux Indes. All but unique, in other words, and therefore—one could argue—a flawed lens through which to view James’s full humanity. But these passages, and the cluster of authorial decisions behind them, are redeemed by, of all things, laughter. At least, I’m pretty sure that I can hear Everett laughing behind them, or smiling, anyway. He hears the thing in me (and, I have to assume, in many other readers) that starts to rise up and protest, “Hey, come on, did you have to make him an intellectual?,” and the writer in him laughs. I see you little bastards hiding out there in the tall grass. James and I will decide what he dreams about. (...)
The pen name, Mark Twain, derives (as we used to learn in school) from a boatman’s call. “By the mark, twain!” meant that the water was two fathoms deep—or twelve feet, according to the leadsman’s weighted sounding rope—and by extension that it was safe to keep going: there was enough water for the boat to float through and not run aground. A hopeful cry, then.
Twain consistently lied about where he’d got the name from—the idea of using it, that is. He claimed that he had essentially stolen it, albeit in an act of homage, from an older riverboat pilot—one of the original Mississippi steamboat men—Isaiah Sellers, who (according to Twain) used to generate occasional on-the-spot reports of river conditions and send them to the Picayune in New Orleans, signing himself “Mark Twain.” These reports were said to be amusingly all-knowing in tone. “Hoary” would be the word, I suppose. Twain writes about them, and Sellers, in Life on the Mississippi, and even quotes one of the alleged reports: “My opinion is that the water will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June,” etc.
A fatal difficulty arises in that scholars have gone looking for these items, in the old newspapers, and they appear not to exist. Certainly there are none signed “Mark Twain.” Sellers existed—we can confirm that—but there is no evidence of his having published anything at all, much less under the famous pen name. An independent Twain scholar in Texas, named Kevin Mac Donnell, has recently discovered a far more likely source: a humor sketch, from a magazine published in 1861, that featured a character called Mark Twain. This would explain not only where the name came from but why Twain may have felt motivated to lie about it—he had basically plagiarized it, and not by way of honoring an obscure figure whom he felt bad about having lampooned, but from a popular source. Off the rack, as it were.
Twain consistently lied about where he’d got the name from—the idea of using it, that is. He claimed that he had essentially stolen it, albeit in an act of homage, from an older riverboat pilot—one of the original Mississippi steamboat men—Isaiah Sellers, who (according to Twain) used to generate occasional on-the-spot reports of river conditions and send them to the Picayune in New Orleans, signing himself “Mark Twain.” These reports were said to be amusingly all-knowing in tone. “Hoary” would be the word, I suppose. Twain writes about them, and Sellers, in Life on the Mississippi, and even quotes one of the alleged reports: “My opinion is that the water will be 4 feet deep in Canal Street before the first of next June,” etc.
A fatal difficulty arises in that scholars have gone looking for these items, in the old newspapers, and they appear not to exist. Certainly there are none signed “Mark Twain.” Sellers existed—we can confirm that—but there is no evidence of his having published anything at all, much less under the famous pen name. An independent Twain scholar in Texas, named Kevin Mac Donnell, has recently discovered a far more likely source: a humor sketch, from a magazine published in 1861, that featured a character called Mark Twain. This would explain not only where the name came from but why Twain may have felt motivated to lie about it—he had basically plagiarized it, and not by way of honoring an obscure figure whom he felt bad about having lampooned, but from a popular source. Off the rack, as it were.
by John Jeremiah Sullivan, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Mark Twain on the steps leading up to his study at Quarry Farm, New York, 1903, by T. E. Marr[ed. James is indeed a very good book, definitely worth it - even if you've forgotten most of Huckleberry Finn.]
