The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Mark Twain (real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens) had a good deal of trouble writing Huckleberry Finn. It's doubtful that he knew, when he had finished, that it would turn out to be, along with Thoreau^ Walden [80], one of the two central and generative books of the American nineteenth century. In a way he wrote it out of his unconscious, through which the great river that had nourished his early imagination still rolled and flooded. Into it he put his youth—but also, perhaps with­out quite knowing it, the youth of the Republic. He did more. The division in Huck's mind between his natural social genius (for Huck is a genius as well as a boy; indeed this boy is a great man) and his distaste for "sivilization" mirrored a split in our national soul. We, too, as a people have been torn and are still being torn between a desire, based on our frontier heritage, to "light out for the territory," and our apparently stronger desire to convert that territory into one great productive mill. Furthermore, Huck reflects the racial tensions still vibrating in the national conscience; reread the chapter in which Huck debates whether or not he will turn in Jim, who is that criminal thing, an escaped slave, but who also happens to be a friend.

In this book there is no sentimentality. The preindustrial "natural" America it depicts is one of violence, murder, feuds, greed, and danger. The river is supremely wonderful but also, as this ex-pilot author knew, supremely treacherous and even sinister. Nevertheless, no grownup American who loves his country, its present no less than its past, can read Huckleberry Finn without a poignant sense that it is a kind of epic celebra- tion of a lost paradise. We ali feel, North and South, that with Appomattox a certain innocence, a certain fresh and youthful freedom left us forever. The sophisticated Periclean Greek, reading his Homer [2,3], must have felt somewhat the same way. Huckleberry Finn is our Odyssey.

Mark Twain, referring to the greatly inferior Tom Sawyer, called it "simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air." That is also true of Huckleberry Finn. It is a hymn to the strange, puzzled, disorderly, but still rather beautiful youth of our nation.

Hemingway implied ali this in his statement. But he also meant something more precise. He meant that Mark Twain was the first great American writer to use the vernacular (indeed a dozen vernaculars) creatively. Huckleberry Finn deliberately destroyed the conventional English literary sen- tence. It introduced a new rhythm that actually followed the twists and turns of our ordinary speech, without trying for phonographic accuracy. It showed us what can be done with a de-academicized language.

For ali his later worldliness and big-city culture, Mark Twain was one of those "powerful, uneducated persons" saluted by Walt Whitman [85]. This does not make him any the less a great writer. But it makes him a great writer who heads a tradition radically different from that headed by his contemporary Henry James [96]. They reflect two powerful forces in our literature and our thought. The first is native, humorous, and in the best sense, popular. The second is Anglo-European-American, deeply analytic, and in the best sense, aristocratic.

C.F.

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HENRY ADAMS

1838-1918

The Education of Henry Adams

Henry Adams was born with a complete set of sterling silver in his mouth. A scion of what is probably the first family of the United States, he was the great-grandson of John Adams, the grandson of John Quincy Adams, and the son of Charles Francis Adams, who represented us at the Court of St. James. The fascination of his life lies in the unexpectedness of what he did with his inheritance.

The family tradition of service virtually demanded that he grow up to wield high political power for his country's good. The presidency itself would not have been inconceivable. Henry Adams became a scholar, a major historian, an influen- tial teacher, a philosopher, a marvelous letter writer, a world traveler of genius, and the author of the finest of American autobiographies. He never became a leader. His influence has been profound, but it has been indirect. At one point he remarked, "So far as [I] had a function in life, it was as stable- companion to statesmen." Acquainted with everyone of impor- tance here and in England, he rarely departed from his role of ironic observer, the irony directed inward as well as outward.