The Portable Mark Twain Read Online Free PDF

when, after the boys return to town to attend their own funeral, he grabs the hand of a shyly retreating Huck and exclaims, “Aunt Polly, it ain’t fair. Somebody’s got to be glad to see Huck.”
    Perhaps it was at that moment that Twain recognized Huckleberry Finn was a fundamentally interesting creation. Originally, Twain wrote a concluding chapter for Tom Sawyer describing Huck’s cramped life at the Widow Douglas’s but eventually removed it from the manuscript. The opening chapter of Huckleberry Finn may in fact be a rewriting of that chapter told from Huck’s point of view. What is more certain, at any rate, is that at some time Twain saw that Huck had his own story to tell and that only he could tell it. In the summer of 1876, apparently as an idle amusement (“more to be at work than anything else,” he claimed), he began to write what he called in a letter to Howells “Huck Finn’s Autobiography.” He wrote several hundred manuscript pages that summer but abruptly stopped midway through Chapter 18. “I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got,” he reported, “and may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done.” He did pigeonhole the work from time to time, only to return to it periodically and to increase the number and significance of Huck’s adventures. By 1883 Twain was personally proud of the result but uncertain of public reception: “I expect to complete it in a month or six weeks or two months more,” he told Howells. “And I shall like it, whether anybody else does or not.”
    When Twain adopted Huck’s point of view, he created a lens through which to view life along the river in the antebellum South, to survey its manners and customs, recreate its superstitions, sentimentality, and vainglorious gestures, its sloth, venality, and violence. Because Huck was not, and did not care to be, part of the social world he so effectively renders in his own distinctive and ungrammatical idiom, he perforce became the author’s satirical instrument. But Huck is a great deal more as well. He admires, or attempts to admire, all manner of affectation, from chalk fruit to Tom Sawyer’s “style” to “The Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots, Dec’d,” because he automatically assumes the existing order is somehow incontestably right. And precisely to the degree that he is excluded from that world, his earnest but failed attempts to appreciate or understand it create in the adult reader a solid contempt for sham, deception, pretense, and the like.
    Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an experimental novel, but with a difference. It is an improvisational affair, full of narrative inconsistencies or improbabilities; and a glance at Twain’s working notes for the novel indicate that the selection of episodes to dramatize was almost an arbitrary consideration for him. In that sense, his prefatory “Notice” for the book, that “persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot,” might be taken seriously. In any event, Huckleberry Finn is a masterpiece almost in spite of itself. Far from being motivated by a Melvillean devotion to the “great Art of Telling the Truth” or a Jamesean artistic ambition to face the “beautiful difficulty” of dramatic rendering, or even a Poundian desire to “Make It New,” Twain seems to have begun the book as a sport. In the end, Twain did indeed tell a great many truths (“covertly and by snatches,” as Melville said Shakespeare did), and he exhibited a technical mastery over his material that, were he ever disposed to do so, even Henry James might admire. And the book was new in the way Ezra Pound thought modern literature should be. The testimony of a host of American and English writers (Somerset Maugham, H. L. Mencken, Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Bernard Shaw, John