Tom Sawyer & Huckleberry Finn [antikvár]

INTRODUCTION Somewhere in William Dean Howells's book. My Mark Twain —surely one of the most winning and heartfelt records of friendship between men—Howells remarked that he never wearied of hearing Mark Twain tell episodes from the Arabian Nights story of his life. Howells described Mark sleepless in a hotel suite in New York, pacing from room to room in his long night-gown, tossing his great mane of grizzled red hair an recalling adventures on the Mississippi, mining camps in Nevada, travels as journeyman printer, the comedies of the tourist voyage with the Innocents Abroad. It is not hard to visualize the red-headed boy along the riverside wharves of Hannibal, Missouri ('St. Petersburg'), now a hundred years ago. Country boyhoods perhaps don't change as much as we imagine. What one wonders is: What might the young Sam Clemens have felt if he could have had some flash of foreknowledge ? If he could have guessed with what deadly accuracy all his wildest juvenile glamour-notions were to come true, his riotously quick spirit might well have been appalled. 'It warn't no trouble to him to throw in an amount of style that was suitable,' Huck Finn once said of Tom Sawyer. Mark himself, in all the roles he played, was never deficient in ' style' and in the artist's joy of the performance; but when he hankered for privacy and peace it was too late. The Arabian Nights story of that life is too familiar, or too accessible, to be repeated here. The important thing is that the best and happiest of it is in Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those two books have been strangely analysed by some critics who may, perhaps, have been less lucky in their own boyhoods than Mark was. The reader with a natural faculty for enjoyment will scarcely need the author's warning notice against looking for a motive, a moral, and a plot. He will see, of course, that the author includes many subtle indignations against human cruelty and stupidity. But what will concern and delight him most is that here is a panorama of happy memory. It goes back to what Mark Twain remembered from his youth; what he noticed as a child mostly made him happy, whereas what he noticed as a man made him furiously angry. One is vii