My fondness for the author of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn does not exceed my hatred for the electoral college, but it's a competition, so I think the number of Mark Twain blog posts should rise to reflect the tussle in my mind.
Loving Huck Finn for one's own reasons, it's natural to wonder what really smart people think of the book. I alluded here to Lionel Trilling's essay, a long except from which can be read online here. But the "Finn crit" that I know of and like the most is an essay by T. S. Eliot, who is of course most famous as the modernist poet who wrote "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," "The Waste Land," &c. Eliot's essay may be read here. I note, since it relates to my gripe with the obtuse crimes perpetrated against Huck Finn by mincing school boards, that Eliot, almost as an aside, observes at one point:
And the style of the book, which is the style of Huck, is what makes it a far more convincing indictment of slavery than the sensationalist propaganda of Uncle Tom's Cabin.
But what I like most about Eliot's essay is just that he seems an unlikely member of the fan club, and so distinguished as to ratify one's own enthusiasm. He and Mark Twain were both raised in Missouri and there the resemblance ends. Twain's father died when he was 11--an event that brought his childhood to an early, abrupt conclusion, for he almost immediately started working for money in order to help the family survive financially. It's frequently been remarked--frequently and probably justly--that in this respect Twain's biography explains the evident preoccupation with childhood joys and traumas that characterizes his two most famous (and best) books. The literature he invented is the first to use the American language in prose, for his predecessors--Melville, Hawthorne, Poe--wrote in a self-consciously literary style, as if they were Englishmen influenced by intellectuals on the European continent. And then Twain:
You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly--Tom's Aunt Polly, she is--and Mary, and the Widow Douglas, is all told about in that book--which is mostly a true book; with some stretchers, as I said before.
The book is all-American: the language, the vernacular speech, the setting, the subject matter, the humor, the Mississippi, the fraudsters who prefigure televangelists and, alas, our current president. Eliot, who grew up in St Louis, about a hundred miles downriver from Twain's boyhood home of Hannibal, is an opposite type. Maybe you catch a whiff of this in his explanation of why he came to Mark Twain only as an adult: his parents would not have set these "boys' books" before him out of fear that he'd acquire a premature taste for some of Huck's pleasures, like tobacco. We can be sure that Twain's childhood reading was unsupervised, and he certainly did not go to Harvard, which is where Eliot's parents sent him. He majored in philosophy and soon moved to Europe, studying on the continent and at Oxford before settling in London, where he became a director at the publishing firm of Faber & Faber. During the same years of his life, Mark Twain was prospecting for precious metals in the west, piloting a Mississippi River steamboat (after serving an apprenticeship), and working as an itinerant journalist specializing in humor and satire, sometimes a coarse strain. The poetry Eliot wrote, influenced by European symbolists and alluding copiously to everything in the humanities curriculum (as well as much that is too obscure to make it onto the syllabi), might but for chronology have provided some targets for Twain's satiric arrows.
And yet here is this accessible, admiring, learned essay, full of insight, from the hand of T. S. Eliot on Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, one Missourian on another but so different: must be a big state (and country).
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