Did the journalist in Sam Clemens foil the novelist in Mark Twain?

Martin, Mike

All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.' There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."

Nothing as good, and perhaps nothing as good that is as flawed.

"In form and style 'Huckleberry Finn' is an almost perfect work," wrote literary critic Lionel Trilling. "Only one mistake has ever been charged against it--that it concludes with Tom Sawyer's too elaborate game of Jim's escape."

Why Twain may--or may not--have misfired with his literary magnum opus remains a question scholars have tackled for years but never resolved.

"This question is an urgent and meaningful one that critics would like to answer," said University of Missouri-Columbia literature professor Thomas Quirk, a nationally known Mark Twain expert.

Twain historian Carl Freiling from Ashland, Missouri, may have the answer. With an elegant and simple theory, Freiling also raises "many big questions," said Duke University literature professor and Twain scholar Louis Budd.

At the heart of Freiling's theory lies a fateful trip that had an immediate and lasting effect on Twain and his work.

In the middle of writing both "Huck Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi", Twain visited boyhood haunts Hannibal, Missouri, and the Mississippi Valley for the first time since becoming an adult.

During the 1882 trip, former journalist Sam Clemens turned his reporter's eye for detail to present-day reality.

Clemens saw real-life conditions--squalor, poverty, and ignorance--that conflicted with the fictional situations in the two books his alter ego, Twain, was penning at the time.

"The 1882 visit to the Great Valley was the equivalent of the paddlewheels crushing Huck and Jim's raft," Freiling writes in a new paper. "It burst Twain's 'mythical bubble' and changed him from loving humorist to grumpy satirist."

The return of the native

Twain--who started his full-time writing career with Virginia City, Nevada's Territorial Enterprise newspaper--wrote fiction entirely from his romanticized memories, Freiling claims in "How St. Petersburg Came To Be Lost," referring to Twain's mythical incarnation of his boyhood home, Hannibal.

From this well of idylls sprang The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the first one-third parts of The Adventures of "Huckleberry Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi"--"the most moving, affirmative and uncomplicated expressions of the glory of young America ever penned," Freiling writes.

The second two-thirds of "Huck" and "Life," however,--written after Twain's 1882 visit--depart dramatically from their original uplifting course.

"Huckleberry Finn" becomes what some critics have labeled "an elaborate farce" while "the rich and powerful imagery of Life on the Mississippi devolves into a travel log," Freiling told SJR.

Twain reflects on his life-changing journey back to Hannibal in "notes that became parts of Life on the Mississippi and especially in the letters he sent to his wife, Livy, and (author and Atlantic Monthly editor) William Dean Howells," Freiling writes.

"During my three days' stay in the town, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy--for in my dreams the faces were all young again and looked as they had looked in the old times," Twain wrote to his wife. "But I went to bed a hundred years old, every night--for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now."

For Hannibal native Freiling, Twain's notes and letters provide ample evidence that his attitudes and opinions changed dramatically after his hometown sojourn.

"The 1882 trip was the watershed moment in Twain's literary career and a major turning point in American literature," Freiling said.

Journalist Clemens had seen "the present reality," and novelist Twain "would never again be able to conjure the glory of his memories," Freiling explained. "The myth he had created in his literature was erased from his mind."

"Mark Twain's experience in journalism clearly influenced his fictional writing in later years," said Nicola Roland and Louise Carr, who maintain the University of Wyoming Mark Twain: In Journalism and On Journalism Web site. "As a journalist he was used to probing below the surface. He may, in fact, have developed the skill of writing in the local dialect, as used in Adventures of 'Huckleberry Finn,' while he was working as a journalist."

After his visit to the Great Valley, Mark Twain returned east and completed Life on the Mississippi.

"You need no great insight to recognize which parts were written before the 1882 visit and which came after," Freiling explained.

Always needing money, Twain also "hit upon a means of wrapping up his troublesome tale" "Huck Finn," which he had shelved in 1880.

Reconstructing Twain

Many critics say the complicated climax may be a sly commentary on the failures of post-Civil War reconstruction--a Northern construct many historians claim hampered slavery's demise.

University at Buffalo--New York Twain scholar Victor Doyno "took Tom Sawyer's coming from the North, making up all sorts of rules to keep Jim imprisoned, all the while knowing Jim was free, as bearing a striking resemblance to American history in the South between 1865 and the time the book was written," said Mark Twain Museum curator Henry Sweets from Hannibal.

Central to Twain scholarship or not, associating "Huck Finn" with Reconstruction is "utter nonsense," said Freiling, who added that Twain "was not enough of a planner to have constructed such a complex social commentary."

Unlike novelists such as Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, Mark Twain "did not deliberately set out to go from point A to point B in his novels. He wrote entirely from the heart, not the mind," Freiling said. "Twain was a terrible critical thinker, as clearly evidenced by his many financial failings, most of which were unplanned investments in inventions that he failed to properly evaluate."

Most importantly, however, "'Huckleberry Finn' is absolutely not a novel about the South," Freiling said. "It is set in middle America and cannot be considered an example of Southern literature as, say, works by Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, or William Faulkner. You simply can't equate Missouri and the Mississippi Valley in 'Huck Finn' to the South."

Two Twains: Published and private

Freiling may have resolved some of the thorny critical issues in Life and Huck because he studied historical records literary scholars have often missed or ignored.

Only released to scholars within the last 30 or so years, these documents include previously unpublished notes, letters, and journal entries that Twain left beside his novels and other published works.

Thomas Quirk--whom Louis Budd says, "speaks more wisely about Huckleberry Finn than any other person around"--has examined these striking critical omissions.

"Between 1950 and 1991 there were 80 publications defending the ending of the novel," Quirk wrote in the 1993 edition of American Literary Scholarship.

"Sadly, only a handful of those critics cited, much less actively engaged with, any of the more recent biographical and primary materials published during the same period; nor did they demonstrate acquaintance with or much interest in Twain's compositional habits or his creative limitations," Quirk added.

Critics may be ignoring information critical to an understanding of Mark Twain the man simply because they enjoy debating an unending controversy.

"I don't think things have changed all that much since I first wrote about the issue in 1993," Quirk told SJR. "Of the 35-to-50 commentaries on the issue of Huck Finn's ending I've read, only about six to eight even looked at the primary historical record," he added. "I don't mean to be cynical, but I have often thought that many literary scholars don't really want this issue resolved. It may merely be a conundrum that provides a recurring opportunity to show off one's own critical acrobatics."

Twain's twilight

By examining the historical record, Freiling has made another discovery at odds with generally accepted Twain scholarship.

Most critics peg Mark Twain's decline as a writer to his later years, after family and financial crises had sapped his once ebullient and optimistic spirit.

Freiling pegs it much earlier--during some of the author's most productive years, from 1882 onward, while Twain was in his early 40s.

"The decline of Mark Twain as a great writer came in his middle years, before any of the personal tragedies--which have often been cited as the cause of his decline--had occurred," Freiling writes. "Twain was at his personal pinnacle--fame, fortune, and happy family life."

"Huck Finn" and "Life on the Mississippi" offer the rarest of historical glimpses: almost the exact moment that Twain's twilight began.

After the 1882 visit, "Hannibal and the river had joined the Gilded Age, and Twain could not personally sustain his powerful, positive portrayal of a pastoral idyll in the face of the reality he had seen," Freiling writes.

"The clear and single dramatic change in his creative achievement lies in the loss of his belief in his own myth," Freiling continues. "When St. Petersburg became Hannibal to Mark Twain, he lost his great well-spring of affirmation, and his work diminished."

You don't know about me ...

"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."

Here lies language "with all the litrature boiled out of it, language that moves with the sly grace of an alley cat," writes Salon magazine executive editor Gary Kamiya.

"That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There were things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied, one time or another ..."

"Reading Twain here, at the height of his powers, effortlessly breathing out perfect American vernacular," Kamiya said, "is like watching Willie Mays track a fly ball or Miles Davis playing horn."

As Twain's powers ebbed, his books may have become tiresome, but his life became a moveable feast and an embodiment of America's national complexity.

The essential American, Twain the man of letters reinvented himself to become Twain the speculator, world traveler, inventor, millionaire, debtor, and the world's first real celebrity.

"The change that diminished Twain's art elevated his persona," Freiling writes. "He was a great, wonderful, complicated and contradictory man, but most of all, he was us."

Michael Martin is a science, technology, law and business writer for such publications as UPI and NewsFactor. He is a member of the National Press Club and maintains a site devoted to science news, www.sciencenewsweek.com.