When Mark Twain Met Tom Sawyer

Smithsonian magazine offers a profile of Tom Sawyer, volunteer firefighter, saloon owner, and civil servant, whom Mark Twain—then still plain Samuel Clemens, aspiring journalist—met in the early 1860s in San Francisco.

Most of the article appears to be based on interviews with Sawyer in the 1890s, after Twain had become a famous author, in large part based on The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. At that time, Sawyer was telling people how he used to share anecdotes of his childhood with his drinking buddy Sam, and thus inspired the famous character.

How much can we rely on Sawyer’s memories and claims? A passage from Roughing It indicates that Twain did know someone named Sawyer in San Francisco. However, it also says the young writer met that Sawyer for the first time just before his first speaking engagement, and that doesn’t match the timeline that the real Tom Sawyer recalled.

Sawyer claimed Clemens had told him that he was ready to write a story about boys in 1864. But at that time Twain seems to have wanted to write a serious novel, not humor, and he didn’t start on Tom Sawyer until 1873.

Furthermore, Twain later denied naming the character Tom Sawyer after anyone. His 1923 biographer Alfred Bigelow Paine listed three people as inspirations for the character, one of them the author himself. Tom’s home town is based on Hannibal, Missouri, while Sawyer the San Franciscan had grown up in Brooklyn, New York. Tom’s house, as I wrote here, is clearly based on the Clemens house.

On the other hand, Twain never appears to have objected to Sawyer’s interviews and claims, which were published and reprinted in his lifetime.

What are we to make of all this? I suspect Mark Twain borrowed Tom Sawyer’s name as a rhythmic stand-in for this own Sam Clemens, but little else. Well, perhaps the braggadocio that’s so much part of Tom’s personality. And perhaps Twain felt a little guilty about that authorial appropriation, preferring not to mention it. Meanwhile, out in San Francisco, the saloon-owning Tom Sawyer’s stories got better and more detailed over the years. And now they’ve resurfaced in Smithsonian.

Chabon Feeling Torn on Twain

At The Atlantic, novelist Michael Chabon clocks in on the new, worst-epithets-free edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. As he notes, he’s criticized that volume for all the applaudable reasons.

Yet when reading Twain aloud to his own kids, Chabon found himself changing the text just like Prof. Alan Gribben:

Reading Tom Sawyer occupied the entire summer, and during that time I don't remember wrestling at all with the question of what to say, out loud, with my actual lips and tongue, when my eyes arrived at that strange little word. A cursory search of Google Books suggests that it makes a total of only 10 appearances in the entire book, which is, after all, not told by a backcountry boy in his own dialect but narrated, with a great deal of mock-decorum, in the third person. Ten is probably fairly close to the number of times that I have said "nigger" in my life, never once without some kind of ironizing or sterilizing quotation marks of tone fitted carefully around it, and, somewhat humiliatingly given the choice made by Professor Gribben of Auburn, which I heartily and firmly, piling on, condemn for its cowardice, mealy-mouthedness, and all-consuming fallaciousness, I recall that in those fleeting spots where I encountered the word I would substitute, without missing a beat or losing any literal meaning, "slave." It was no big thing. The kids had no idea that a switcheroo had been run on them.

But then comes Huckleberry Finn, because the kids want to hear more about those characters (and Tom Sawyer Abroad is, let’s face it, no substitute).

Chabon faced this awkward situation in a most comfortable setting: with his own kids well before their teens, in a bohemian-bourgeois coastal bedroom, without listeners who might be personally affected by the epithets. (Okay, there’s at least one more comfortable setting to consider the matter: my own, right now, with no big-eyed kids looking up at me and wondering why I haven’t started reading.)

Would the Chabon family stick with Huck Finn as Twain depicted him? Or would they find, like Prof. Gribben, some open compromise with the work? Read the rest of Chabon’s essay for the resolution they found. But don’t miss:

"Hey, Dad," the little guy asked me at one point. "How come if you can't say you-know-what, when you were reading Tom Sawyer you kept saying INJUN Joe, because that's offensive, too."

The NewSouth edition of Twain has already dealt with that issue.

Chabon’s essay reminded me of a story I heard about fifteen years ago at a PEN New England forum from an author whose name I’ve tried and failed to recall. Her mother was Native American, her father European-American, and one of her favorite bedtime readalouds was Peter Pan. Her father insisted that she not read that book on her own; she had to wait until he could read it aloud—the book was that special.

Only after this author had grown did she realize that her father was silently editing J. M. Barrie’s passages about the Indians to sand down the offensive stereotypes.

(Photo above courtesy of Judy Baxter, via Flicker under a Creative Commons license.)

A Modest Technological Solution for Offensive Language

Several years ago, a fellow member of the CW email list wrote about her idea for a book inspired by (as I recall) a Little League teammate of her son who did a lot of swearing. So much as to embarrass other young teen boys—which must really have been a lot.

This aspiring author foresaw a big challenge for a book about that situation, however. How could she convey a character’s foul language powerfully without using foul words? If she used those words, wouldn’t that undercut her message about the costs of using coarse language, and the ability to express oneself without it? On the other hand, if she used euphemisms, wouldn’t the book come across as namby-pamby and lose readers’ respect?

Polite people and craven mass media have long used:

• watered-down terms that sound quaint: “Darn!” “Gosh!” “Jiminy Cricket!”
• oaths that no real person says: “Golly gee!” “Holy chicken feathers, Batman!”
• transparent substitutes that don’t fool anyone: “friggin’,” “bleeping”

But those don’t have the power of real profanity.

It’s easier in fantasy, where writers can come up with horrible curses for one society that carry no connotations for ours: “Hippakaloric!” “Grife!” “Belgium!” And of course comics have developed a symbolic language. But those solutions wouldn’t work for this writer.

Her remarks made me imagine and describe an electronic book that includes two texts: expurgated and unexpurgated. Readers might not see the fully profane language, either because of their choice or because of a parent or teacher’s choice. But they would know that that language exists, floating in some aether just below the words they see, only one access code away. Such a book would, I posited, be more powerful than a watered-down text alone.

The same technology could address Huckleberry Finn’s “nigger” problem. Mark Twain’s original text could exist alongside a version that doesn’t put that insulting word in readers’ eyes 200 times. Readers could choose which text to read, teachers which to read aloud or analyze in class—but the original text would still be part of the package.

How difficult would it be to create a two-level electronic book compatible with existing standards? I don’t know. But I see that the Nerdy Teacher reports there’s already an iPad edition of Huckleberry Finn with the original illustrations, for full historical context.

(Incidentally, now that I think of it, one of those illustrations had to be altered during printing because an engraver had rendered it obscene. That could be something else to put behind the access code.)

Standing Up for the Public Domain

As we consider the current kerfuffle over an edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Americans are united on several points:

Opposing censorship is a Good Thing. Preserving our history (even of Bad Things) is a Good Thing. Preserving our culture (especially the Great American Novels) is a Good Thing.

But standing up for the public domain is also a Good Thing.

All the books that Mark Twain published in his lifetime are in the public domain. (Canny author-publisher that he was, he managed to figure out how to generate new copyrights and new publicity.) That makes changing Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn different from demanding changes to, or restricting access to, a book still under copyright with limited availability.

For one thing, such censorship won’t work. With Project Gutenberg, Google Books, more cheap “classic” paperback editions than you can swing a dead cat at, and millions of copies already printed, there’s no way the original texts of Twain’s best novels will disappear.

One edited edition of Huck Finn from one small press doesn’t erase all the other books on the market. It doesn’t stop bookstores, libraries, and schools from using unexpurgated versions if they decide those are more desirable. I can’t imagine a credible scenario in which this edition pushes out the original text.

Furthermore, because Huckleberry Finn is in the public domain, Prof. Alan Gribben has every right to do whatever he wants with the text. He chose to remove the word “nigger” and insert the chapter from Life on the Mississippi that Twain himself edited out, and in his introduction (PDF download) he explains why.

We all have the same right. For very little money I can put out an electronic edition with the word “nigger” replaced with “n!gger” and that extra chapter pulled out. White supremacists could issue an edition that replaces the word “nigger” with “naturally ignorant nigger.” Less stupid authors could rewrite the book to make Jim less childish, or substitute a better plot in the last third. People can write sequels, and fanfiction. The public domain makes all that possible. Then it’s up to the reading public to choose which uses have value.

Yesterday I noticed that several blog posts about this controversy are illustrated with the cover of the Troll Illustrated Classic edition, shown above. Perhaps that’s an ironic commentary on watering down the book to a childish level, but I suspect it’s because that edition has a big, iconic illustration of Huck and Jim on their appropriated raft.

That Troll edition clocks in at 48 pages. Obviously it’s been abridged for younger readers, another possibility made cheap and easy by the public domain. I’ll bet that a lot of Twain’s words were taken out of that book, and that “nigger” was one of the first to go. Nobody seems to have objected.

I can imagine a philosophical argument for barring people from making any changes to a reproducible work of art that its creator didn’t approve. But the cultural cost of such a restriction would far outweigh the benefits.

As long as no one misrepresents a changed edition of Twain as the original, then it’s up to readers which to choose. Gribben is quite explicit in his Tom Sawyer/Huck Finn edition about what he changed—probably more explicit than the folks at Troll Illustrated Classics.

TOMORROW: A modest technological solution.

Cutting Through the Huck Finn Weeds

The edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that I wrote about on Monday hit the national news today, with boringly predictable results: lots of complaints about “political correctness,” censorship, how other people are simple-mindedly misreading the book. I made up a few rules for myself for sorting through the noise.

1) If you say that it’s appropriate to use the “n word” in classrooms, but completely avoid using it in your own essay, then you lose a point. And for that reason, I’m going to use offensive terms with scare-quotes instead of euphemisms. Internet filtering programs, beware.

2) If you’re personally affected by the use of the terms “nigger” and “Injun,” then I’m more interested in your opinion than if you’re (like me) a white person for whom the issue is more abstract. Those words aren’t generically offensive—they’re particularly offensive because they derogate particular people.

Thus, I’ve sought out responses from African-American writers like Jamelle Bouie at The Atlantic and Elon James White at Salon, and from folks with African-American family members like Ann Freeman at Upside My Head. (But Freeman loses a point under rule #1. [REFEREES’ RULING: Freeman supports the use of the unedited Huckleberry Finn in the classroom, but opposes teachers’ or students’ use of the word in classroom discussions. So is that worth a point or not? It’s unexpected nuances like these that can make the issue so thought-provoking.])

3) If you’re a teacher who’s used Huckleberry Finn in the classroom recently, then I’m more interested. Some examples I’ve found include Sara Goodman as Sara*ndipity; David Ulin at the LA Times’s Jacket Copy; and Biblioklept before news of this edition broke. (But Goodman loses a point under rule #1.) Jinx as a former classroom teacher and a black woman gets double points.

Students and parents do sometimes object to Huckleberry Finn because of its language, as this news item from Seattle in 2003 explores. Teachers do sometimes choose not to use it, as described in this article from Multicultural Education in 2006. It’s more valuable to see how educators and students address the book’s challenges than to see an outsider loftily insist that they should.

I’d especially like to see some professionals address not just how to draw useful lessons from Twain’s use of “Injun” and “nigger,” but also how to do so in an environment increasingly concerned with preparing kids for standardized tests. Is there enough time in the school day? Does the book work better in certain schools, or certain grades?

4) If you use this incident to complain about “political correctness” on the left, I simply laugh at you. Not just because of the tired cliché, but because you’ve made a foolish assumption. The editor, Prof. Alan Gribben of Auburn, presented himself as a victim of the radical left in a political-academic controversy at the University of Texas back in the 1990s. For details, see Julius G. Getman’s In the Company of Scholars: The Struggle for the Soul of Higher Education, John K. Wilson’s The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education, and Gribben’s own version of events.

Gribben is quite clear in his introduction to the new edition about why he feels it has value. I quoted that introduction on Monday (PDF download). Opponents should take his arguments into account before making any assumptions about the thinking behind this book.

5) If you make up ridiculous scenarios of what this editing might lead to, then I’m not interested in your opinion. This is about changing one word (or 236, depending on how we count) in Huckleberry Finn and two in Tom Sawyer. It doesn’t change the book’s plot, characters, or themes. It doesn’t affect any other editions or copies already on shelves.

And it’s not about just any offensive language. Novelist Walter Kirn joked, “Let's add offensive words to American novels that don't have enough of them. Little Women could use a few more 'shits.'” But “shit” doesn’t demean a particular class of people. If we want an equivalent, the joke would suggest renaming Little Women to “Little Cunts.” But who would say that (outside of the porn industry)?

TOMORROW: What the public domain means.

The Slave Jim and Indian Joe

The John F. Blair company is about to publish an edition of Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn that:

• refers to Huck’s companion as “the slave Jim,” leaving out the “n word,” since that has such a powerful negative effect on today’s readers.
• refers to Tom’s bête noire as “Indian Joe,” for a parallel reason.
• substitutes “half-blood” for “half-breed” when discussing Joe. The editor says the replacement term is “less disrespectful and has even taken on some panache since J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2005).”

Alan Gribben’s introduction (PDF download) explains:

This NewSouth Edition of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn is emphatically not designed for academic scholars studying Twain’s precise texts. I simply came to believe that a significant number of school teachers, college instructors, and general readers might welcome the option of an edition of Twain’s paired novels that spares the reader all contact with a word that never seems to lose its vitriol, despite the occasional efforts of rap and hip hop musicians to re-appropriate it and the well-meaning but usually futile (from my own personal experience) endeavors by classroom teachers to inoculate their students against the “n” word by using Huckleberry Finn as a springboard to discuss its etymology and cultural history.

Gribben points out that Twain himself was a commercial writer, keenly sensitive to his audience’s reactions (even if he didn’t always try to comfort them). And that there are plenty of other editions with the original language, should a reader or teacher wish that.

Indeed, I think the fate of this approach will be determined in the commercial marketplace. If people wish a slightly bowdlerized edition of these two novels, they can buy this book, and it will remain in print. If not enough people do, this text will fade away.

Gribben is to be commended for declaring and discussing his choice up front and giving us the choice. I’m happy with the editions I have—but the words being changed have never been applied to me.

(Thanks to Bookshelves of Doom and Book Haven.)

Tom Sawyer’s Window

One of the oldest and most resonant images in American children’s literature is Tom Sawyer sneaking out his bedroom window, here portrayed by Norman Rockwell.

I think this moment from Mark Twain’s novel is so well known that it’s become an archetype of how kids slip away from home, even though most American houses have at least two doors that are easier to exit.

About a decade and a half ago, I visited Mark Twain’s childhood home in Hannibal, Missouri, and came away with a new understanding of this scene. In that house, the stairway comes up from the ground floor into the parents’ bedroom. So the window was definitely young Sam Clemens’s best hope of getting out undetected.

To be sure, a character in Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins, published a year before Twain’s novel, describes climbing in and out of windows as a boy. But Tom Sawyer made that relatively rare activity part of the mythical all-American childhood.

Norman Rockwell and History Painting

NPR and Time have both run stories about a new exhibit/book from the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge that discusses the painter’s use of photographs in detail. Not that Rockwell hid the fact that he used photos as well as live models and his imagination.

NPR interviewed a photographer who occasionally worked with Rockwell but looked down on his method and results—specifically disliking “the tracing techniques and saccharine subject matter.” (And yet he kept working with the man.)

It’s clear from looking at the photos alongside Rockwell’s finished art that he didn’t just trace what he’d had photographed. He tweaked poses, fabrics, settings, poses, and facial features and expressions to produce the image he wanted—usually a much more dramatic one than what the cameras had recorded. He may have traced details, but he chose which details to trace.

As for subjects, Rockwell worked for money and mass reproduction. He worried about being thought a mere “illustrator” instead of an artist. Of course, when he made paintings for Tom Sawyer, he was working as an illustrator. As was Leonardo da Vinci when he created his Last Supper or Henry Fuseli when he painted Titania Awakening, now at the Tate Gallery. They were all illustrating well known texts.

Rockwell’s best known paintings weren’t inspired by written stories, however. Rather, he used his composition and details, his titles, and his viewers’ knowledge to tell new stories in graphic form. And indeed he often aimed for emotional effects, even easy laughs and sugary uplift. But that’s what made Rockwell both popular and a chronicler of his nation’s values.

I think that part of Rockwell’s work has to be judged according to a standard the art world discarded in the late 1800s after it had had a long run at the very top of the heap—the history painting or genre painting.

Turning Books Inside-Out for Boys

In an article on single-sex schools, the Sydney Morning Herald quoted American physician and psychologist Leonard Sax as saying:

books that were considered to be more suited to girls, such as Jane Eyre, could be taught in a way that engaged boys.

"Start in the middle of the story and then work from the beginning," he said. Doing that created a sense of mystery and engaged readers and made them want to read on to find out more.

"Homer knew about it, Hollywood scriptwriters know about it," he said. "If you want to engage boys in any great book you start in the middle."

So let's check out that theory. Here's the start of Chapter 1 of A Little Princess, by Frances Hodgson Burnett:

Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.

She sat with her feet tucked under her, and leaned against her father, who held her in his arm, as she stared out of the window at the passing people with a queer old-fashioned thoughtfulness in her big eyes.

She was such a little girl that one did not expect to see such a look on her small face. It would have been an old look for a child of twelve, and Sara Crewe was only seven. The fact was, however, that she was always dreaming and thinking odd things and could not herself remember any time when she had not been thinking things about grown-up people and the world they belonged to. She felt as if she had lived a long, long time.

And the start of Chapter 8 (of 19):

The first night she spent in her attic was a thing Sara never forgot. During its passing she lived through a wild, unchildlike woe of which she never spoke to anyone about her. There was no one who would have understood. It was, indeed, well for her that as she lay awake in the darkness her mind was forcibly distracted, now and then, by the strangeness of her surroundings. It was, perhaps, well for her that she was reminded by her small body of material things. If this had not been so, the anguish of her young mind might have been too great for a child to bear. But, really, while the night was passing she scarcely knew that she had a body at all or remembered any other thing than one.

Of course, that's a novel from 1905. Shall we try the same test with a "boy's book" of the same approximate vintage? Chapter 1 of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer:

"Tom!"

No answer.

"Tom!"

No answer.

"What's gone with that boy, I wonder? You Tom!"

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked through them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for "style," not service--she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

"Well, I lay if I get hold of you I'll--"

That opening's all about mystery, humor, and suspense rather than, as in the Burnett extracts, mood. And just for completeness, here's Chapter 17 (of 35) of Tom Sawyer:

But there was no hilarity in the little town that same tranquil Saturday afternoon. The Harpers, and Aunt Polly's family, were being put into mourning, with great grief and many tears. An unusual quiet possessed the village, although it was ordinarily quiet enough, in all conscience. The villagers conducted their concerns with an absent air, and talked little; but they sighed often. The Saturday holiday seemed a burden to the children. They had no heart in their sports, and gradually gave them up.

In the afternoon Becky Thatcher found herself moping about the deserted schoolhouse yard, and feeling very melancholy. But she found nothing there to comfort her. She soliloquized:

"Oh, if I only had a brass andiron-knob again! But I haven't got anything now to remember him by." And she choked back a little sob.

Some boys might say that both those books would be improved if only you took out the girls entirely. That would make A Little Princess much shorter, to be sure, but we must make some sacrifices for the sake of education.

Of course, these days everyone who writes for children is told to get into the story as fast as possible, even if that means starting off in the middle of the action and doubling back with a flashback. It's a tough feat: too many explanatory flashbacks in an opening chapter prevents a book from building up any momentum.