The unbelieving author of Huckleberry Finn had a bloodhound’s nose for the scent of hypocrisy.
In the centennial year of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Daniel Pawley offers observations on the man and his masterpiece.
One hundred years ago, Mark Twain dispatched a scruffy kid and renegade slave down a swirling, timeless river. In the century since its publication, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has stirred its share of controversy—including the persistent charge of racism that recently surfaced again in Illinois. “Racist trash” an influential Chicago educator called it.
With the help of a few Twain scholars, I have come to view this book not as racist trash, but as a specimen of the religious tension in American literature. Especially in Twain, blasphemy and belief sit uneasily side by side and squabble. (See box.)
A Cynical Nature
The provincial theology of Hannibal, Missouri, fueled the already cynical nature of young Samuel Clemens (Twain’s real name). Raised a Presbyterian, he learned early about “the sins that flocked down to tear at his sensitive heart.” He took his Calvinistic training wrapped in the ideology of slavery.
Twain describes the religious defense of slavery: “The local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure.”
He knew that a truer case could have been made to attack slavery biblically, but he never heard it. He was outraged that his mother had fallen under the delusion of such Scripture twisting in the absence of her husband, who died when Sam was 12.
“When slavery perished, my mother had been in daily touch with it for sixty years,” he reflected. “Yet, kind-hearted and compassionate as she was, I think she was not conscious that slavery was a bald, grotesque, and unwarrantable usurpation. She had never heard it assailed in any pulpit but had heard it defended and sanctified in a thousand; her ears were familiar with Bible texts that approved it …; as far as her experience went, the wise and the good and the holy were unanimous in the conviction that slavery was right, righteous, sacred, the peculiar pet of the Deity and a condition which the slave himself ought to be daily and nightly thankful for.”
Off-Center Gospel
Thus, Twain grew up under the influence of individuals who accepted and administered an off-center gospel—a mix of theology and self-interest. Although Twain loved his mother, he felt sorry for her and associated her naïveté with the half-truths she had absorbed from the pulpit.
Twain could never tolerate the mixing of Christian words with questionable secular values. He had a bloodhound’s instinct for sniffing the trails of hypocrites and Pharisees.
The combination of opportunistic business practice with outward Christian piety stuck in his craw. “Our public motto is ‘In God we trust,’ ” he once pointed out, “and when we see those gracious words on the trade dollar they always seem to whimper with pious emotion. That is our public motto. It transpires that our private one is, ‘When the Anglo-Saxon wants a thing he just takes it.’ ”
Twain’s pessimistic vision matured into bitter ruminations about the human race in general. Consistent with his ambivalence, such ruminations remained always one part religious and one part infidel. He once asked his friend William Dean Howells, “Why was the human race created? Or at least why wasn’t something creditable created in place of it?” Then, characteristically, he added: “God had his opportunity. He could have made a reputation. But no, he must commit this grotesque folly—a lark of which must have cost him a regret or two when he came to think it over and observe effects.”
Man On The Run
Twain’s spiritual revulsion kindled a constant desire to escape—just as his child-hero Huck Finn had.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn develops this theme—escape from civilization—by portraying middle western life as inhibiting and corrupting, and by painting Huck and Jim, the runaway slave, as naturally kind and generous. Church-related piety, superficial formal education, and vacant displays of middle-class manners are touchstones in a social system that plays havoc with an honest spirit.
At the beginning of the book, for instance, the infamous Widow Douglas and her sister, Miss Watson, try to “civilize” the barefoot waif, Huck. They dress him in new “cramped” clothes, forbid him to smoke and sit comfortably, read to him from the Old Testament, and inform him about the differences between people who go to heaven and those who go to hell.
Huck’s use of ungrammatical language epitomizes his rejection of civilizing influences. His is a language unaffected by dishonesty: a tongue connected directly to the heart.
The naturally tender camaraderie between Huck and Jim provides the substance of the book. As they leave society and inhabit the moral vacuum of the raft, a special fellowship develops between them.
Moral Vacuum
An even greater story unfolds, however, in the subtle, hairsplitting irony between what society has taught Huck about slavery and what he must accept as his moral responsibility: to remain true to Jim and help the runaway slave to freedom. Huck sees Jim’s fundamental decency, but he believes he is committing unpardonable sins by aiding Jim’s flight—an action that defies a social doctrine propounded from the pulpit.
The book’s climax rests in a few paragraphs that bring this irony into high relief. Huck, tormented by his conscience, tries to pray but feels he cannot because of his sin. He decides that the only way to purify his conscience and escape eternal damnation is to forsake his fondness for Jim and turn him in to the authorities. Huck writes a confession to Miss Watson, Jim’s owner, and later admits:
“I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now. But I didn’t do it straight off, but … set there thinking … how near I come to being lost and going to hell.”
Huck goes on thinking about Jim, the black man’s kindness and their friendship. Then Huck notices the confession he’s written.
“I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
“ ‘All right, then, I’ll go to hell’—and tore it up.
“It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming.”
Here, in one of the most famous passages in literature, one sees Twain’s purpose. By allowing Huck to tear up the letter and discard what he has been taught about morality, Huck makes a truly moral decision. Yet he has done so, says one scholar, “not by doing right [according to society] but by doing wrong.” Thus Twain returns to his original theme: that civilization, with its empty rules, vacant prejudices, gross inequalities, and phony pieties, can be a lie. It furnishes a person with a false morality: an artificial conscience that can make him think he is acting morally when he is not. Only by renouncing civilization’s morality can the individual begin to live a truly moral life.
The book was subversive. It undermined the social system of Twain’s time, shattering the concept of blind allegiance to rules and customs. Also, since such rules and customs came packaged and delivered through the pulpit, the book undermined institutional Christianity. Louisa May Alcott typified public reaction: “If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had better stop writing for them.”
Defenders
We might feel sympathy for Alcott and company, yet Twain has had his staunch defenders. In T. S. Eliot’s introduction to one edition of the classic, he called it “a much greater book than Twain could have known he was writing.” Behind its justified disparagement of temporal values, Eliot interpreted the river as being symbolic of God: a vital, controlling force without beginning or end. And “without some kind of God,” Eliot wrote, “man is not even very interesting.”
More a reader than a scholar, I am uncertain about the book’s symbolism. However, as one who reads theologically, I both agree and disagree with themes found in Huckleberry Finn.
I applaud the book’s disparagement of hypocrisy and the crippling influences of society, especially when they are wrapped in teachings from the pulpit. If a doctrine as fundamentally corrupt as slavery can find its mouthpiece “in a thousand pulpits,” it deserves subversion. I cheer any book that brings such issues to the surface, and I wonder what subtle ideologies have found their way into the pulpit today.
On the other hand, I challenge the book’s suggestion that moral rightness can arise in a vacuum. Perhaps when we see Huck willing to “go to hell” in order not to betray his friend, we hear faint echoes of the apostle Paul, who would willingly have chosen hell in exchange for the salvation of his beloved Jews (Rom. 9:3). Huck and Jim seem “good” because they are honest and without pretension. But our appreciation cannot negate the truth that human nature is sinful and that salvation must come from outside.
Shackled
This brings us back to Twain himself, who wanted to be a free thinker, unshackled by religion and society. However, because he could never divorce himself from his Christian upbringing, and because he daily inhaled the faith from his wife and closest friends, he found his free thinking always threatened by pangs of conscience.
A biographer asks: “What would he have become … if he had been raised in an atmosphere of free thought and science, instead of being surrounded by church influences and the constant pious ministrations of an orthodox mother?” One could as well ask what Twain would have become had he looked past the “religiosity” of his day, lived faithfully for Christ, and used his artistic gifts to point toward solutions to societal woes. (This is the great flaw in American literature: It is long on uprooting a multitude of sins, but short on pointing to solutions.)
Instead, Twain camped in the no man’s land between faith and doubt. “He threw out the Bible,” writes one biographer, “but it seemed to be attached to a rubber band, and was likely to bounce back into his lap at any time. The mythology of Christianity engrossed his imagination. He satirized it, to be sure, but that showed that it was always in his thinking.”
Twain spent much of his energy poking fun at the Bible. But Twain’s querulousness flowed from his pen with generous measures of humor. And he embodied many fine qualities. His oldest daughter wrote: “[Papa] is a very good man and a very funny man. He has got a temper, but we all of us have in this family. He is the loveliest man I ever hope to see.”
An American Tragedy
Ultimately, Twain was the iconoclast, and when a tidal wave of personal tragedy rolled over him late in life, his lighthearted satires turned cynical and morose. In a short interval, his wife and two of his daughters died from sudden illnesses. His infant son had died some years earlier, and his remaining daughter had moved to Europe.
In his autobiography, he wrote movingly about these losses: “How poor I am, who was once so rich.… I sit here—writing, busying myself, to keep my heart from breaking.”
Twain, who died four months later, wanted this passage to be the final chapter in his autobiography. But the last chapter in his final work of fiction expressed a different tone. In The Mysterious Stranger, published six years after his death, his infidel side railed again about “a God who could make good children as easily as bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave his angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body.…”
The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, by Michael Patrick Hearn, records Twain’s intention of writing a sequel to Huckleberry Finn. The month is March; the year 1891. Twain, approaching 60, writes in his notebook: “Huck comes back, 60 years old, from nobody knows where—and crazy. Thinks he is a boy again, and scans always every face for Tom [Sawyer] and Becky [Thatcher], etc. Tom comes at last from … wandering the world and tends Huck, and together they talk the old times, both are desolate, life has been a failure, all that was lovable, all that was beautiful is under the mold. They die together.”
Twain never got around to writing this story. Perhaps he anticipated that the idea bore the too-real pain of his own experience.
Daniel Pawley is an assignment writer living in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Blasphemy and Belief
Mark Twain grew up in a Christian home, rebelled, and spent the major portion of his life trying to reconcile belief and unbelief. Twain was a believer, suggests one biographer, in that he carried his Christian theology “like a ball and chain.” Yet he was an infidel in that he not only denied God, but he cursed him for allowing human suffering and folly.
Twain the believer freely acknowledged his Creator: “I believe in God the Almighty.… I think the goodness, the justice and the mercy of God are manifested in his works; I perceive that they are manifested toward me in this life; the logical conclusion is that they will be manifested toward me in the life to come.”
Twain the infidel, however, could switch tracks and rail against God, as he did one day to his friend, the Reverend Joseph Twichell: “I don’t believe in your religion at all. I’ve been living a lie right along when ever I pretended to. For a moment sometimes I have been almost a believer, but it immediately drifts away from me again. I don’t believe that one word of your Bible was inspired by God any more than any other book. I believe it is entirely the work of man from beginning to end, atonement and all.”
Twain the believer could suddenly soften, as when romantic love touched him at age 35. He wrote to his fiancée: “I bless you, and give honest gratitude to God that it is so. How easy it was to pray, when your letter came—for the heart naturally looks upward for something to thank When a great generous wave of gratitude sweeps over its parched and thirsty deserts.… I prayed at last you might come to love me freely and fully, and that he would prepare me to be worthy of it—which could only be in utter completeness, through my investment of his spirit.”
Twain the infidel could transform his praises into curses: “If God has a place prepared for us, and really wanted us to know it, he could have found some better way than a book so liable to alterations, and misinterpretations. God has had no trouble to prove to man the laws of the constellations and the construction of the world, … none of which agree with his so-called book. As to a hereafter, we have not the slightest evidence that there is any.”
Twain the believer could hope in God: “We shall never be separated on earth … and let us pray that we may not be in heaven,” he told his deeply spiritual wife. “I … shall try so hard to walk as you do, in the light and love of God.… Turn toward the Cross and be comforted—I turn with you—What would you more? The peace of God shall rest upon us, and all will be well.”
But, finally, Twain the infidel seemed to claim victory: “There seems to be nothing connected with the atonement that is rational. If Christ was God, he is in the attitude of one whose anger against Adam has grown so uncontrollable in the course of the ages that nothing but the sacrifice of life can appease it, and so without noticing how illogical the act is going to be, God condemns himself to death—commits suicide on the Cross, and in this ingenious way wipes off that old score.”
