In its hundredth year of publication, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is more controversial than ever, a strange fate for a “children’s book.” At the moment, the controversy involves the theatre, another unexpected turn—but perhaps not so unexpected, considering the studiedly diabolical theatricality of the author and the abiding desire among so many to bring both Mr. Twain and his irresistibly dramatic writing to the stage and screen.
The cry is again abroad in the land to remove that lowlife scamp and his embarrassingly dark companion from classroom and library shelves—and, for heaven’s sake, keep that raft off the boards. Dr. John H. Wallace, a Chicago-area educator, has devoted much energy to this crusade. Recently on ABC’s “Nightline,” he told host Ted Koppel that the novel is the “most grotesque example of racist trash ever written.” To The New York Times he declared, “If ever there was a book that was a candidate for being burned, that is definitely it.”
The immediate occasion for his utterances was a production at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre of a version of the classic originally adapted by the Organic Theater Company. Unlike so many attempts to bring this work into the theatre, this one does not try to gloss over the problematic relationship between the white boy and the runaway black slave Jim. If anything, it goes out of its way to make the conflict between Huck’s socially instilled conscience (which tells him to return old widow Watson’s escaped property) and his natively decent heart (which says he should help free his friend, even if he must go to hell to do it) the unmistakable center of the drama.
If the Goodman imagines that its focus on this element both honors Twain’s original intent to flush out racist attitudes in American society and demonstrates that these attitudes are hardly limited to the pre-Civil War South, Wallace disagrees. He is too appalled by the free use of the word “nigger” and a rural dialect which he feels demeans blacks and portrays them as ignorant, even sub-human. Still more fuel for the controversey will undoubtedly come when Big River: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens on Broadway this month under the direction of Des McAnuff. The latter adaption, with a book by William Hauptman and music and lyrics by country music bard Roger Miller, has been seen in earlier incarnations at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge and La Jolla Playhouse in California.
No appeal to Twain’s irony, to the authority of subsequent expert interpretations, to a universally high regard such as that of Ernest Hemingway (who judged the novel to be the fountainhead of modern American literature) dissuades Wallace and his followers from believing that to read it hurts black children and makes them feel bad about themselves. He has even gone so far as to create his own version of the book, one which expurgates the offending material, making the classic “fit” for youthful consumption.
Wallace may seem like an easy target—another in the depressing parade of abysmally unsubtle minds that gravitate toward education, politics and the military and do mischief wherever they land. But in considering the debate, I read the book again and, as much as I laughed, oh the pain! Oh the pain!
Whatever his intentions, and I assume they are good, Wallace is wrong—but his hurt comes from a very real place. What a pity that he seems incapable of understanding that it was Twain’s hurt, too, and that it extends even beyond the issues of race and slavery, as overpowering as they are, to encompass the suffering of a wound which at once splits and joins a whole continent, like a great river—a national habit of self-deception and escapism.
It is now impossible to talk seriously about Twain or any other significant American writer of the formative 19th century without taking into account Leslie A. Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel. The cultural drama that he so profoundly and provocatively discovered for us with that work seems, in this current controversy over Huckleberry Finn, to be playing itself out in yet one more episode. Indeed, the seed for Fiedler’s whole monumental study is an essay on the novel called, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey.”
In the essay and the subsequent book, he develops the thesis that the history of American literature, and therefore the history of American culture, is a long flight from “civilization,” which is to say from the “confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall of sex, marriage and responsibility.” To prove his theory, Fiedler explicates such masterpieces as The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick and, of course, the quintessential tale of escape from the domesticating control of women into an endless adolescent adventure, Huckleberry Finn. Naturally, a thesis that insists the creations which best reflect our culture are based on the stifling of heterosexuality in favor of a covert, unrealized homosexuality has had its detractors. Matters are not helped when Fiedler goes on to insist that the homosexuality is miscegenational: not only Huck and Nigger Jim, but Ishmael and Queequeg, Natty Bumpo and Ching-achgook; and the list continues.
What some have seen as a perniciously sensational expose of American fiction is really a profound explication of a culture which fled from the old terrors of Europe, not into the innocent pre-sexual paradise of an edenic wilderness, but a primitive world tormented by “new and special guilts associated with the rape of nature and the exploitation of dark-skinned people.” What that culture has produced is “bewilderingly and embarrassingly, a gothic fiction, non-realistic and negative, sadist and melodramatic—a literature of darkness and the grotesque in a land of light and affirmation.”
Paradoxically growing up alongside this painful literature has been a strange effort to conceal its pain, not only by scholars whose prudery might be somewhat expected, but by the authors themselves. Twain is probably the best example of this evasion, with his warnings that anyone who finds significance in his work will be prosecuted, banished or shot. The result, according to Fiedler, is that “our classic literature is a literature of horror for boys.” The most brilliant, complex, dreadful statements of who we are are consigned to the children’s shelf in the library.
This long, persistent habit of concealment continues today, which brings us back to Wallace and his bowdlerized Huckleberry Finn. He is attempting no more or less than what thousands of others have tried before him and continued to try: to erase, sugarcoat, defuse, lie about, ignore and censor those difficult, not always fun things about our lives both as a nation and as human beings. That is the program of most so-called children’s theatre, surely—those sanitary spaces where neat little Hucks play around in their Stay-Soft jeans. But isn’t it also the creeping credo of most other theatre—and of politics as well culture in a country where missiles are called “peacemakers”?
Wallace is concerned about the pain that Twain’s novel causes black children. I wonder about the pain of whites who discover that the funny, poetic, high-spirited rite of youthful passage is also a voyage of innocence through an America populated by fools and rogues capable of all manner of acts of betrayal and violence. It is a trip deeper and deeper into the terrors of racism, which so taint every corner of life that even the mildest, most generous citizens can, completely in good conscience, carry on the following conversation:
“We blowed out a cylinder head.”
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.”
Wallace, evidently, cannot hear any of the truth behind this exchange, arguably the most brilliant indictment of American racism ever as written. His hearing is blocked by a thundering pain, and it is almost forgivable that he wants to protect the young people of his race from such horror. But by protecting them, isn’t he, and the many who act as he does, betraying them, selling their intelligence short, leaving them uneducated and ultimately uneducable? And aren’t the rest of us—who are so willing to relegate such great documents of who we are to the innocuous safety of the kiddy corner, refusing to confront what they arereally about—cheating ourselves, not to speak of our children?
