A Transcendentalist Poet Named Huckleberry Finn

NOTES A TRANSCENDENTALIST poet named HUCKLEBERRY FINN Roger Asselineau University of Paris—Sorbonne Mark Twain has often been regarded as an uncouth barbarian for daring to make fun of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , and Oliver Wendell Holmes in the after-dinner speech he delivered in Boston in 1877 for the seventieth birthday of John Greenleaf Whittier. William Dean Howells, who introduced him that night, was horrified and the listeners petrified. "There fell," he said, "a silence weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and blood-curdling laughter of a single guest."1 Poor Twain felt completely disgraced and, thirty years later, could still remember "Mr. Emerson supernaturally grave, unsmiling."2 Actually the reason why Emerson did not smile was that he was stone-deaf and could not hear one word of what was being said, as his daughter wrote to Mark Twain in answer to the letter of abject apology he sent a few days later.3 Twain felt all the more dejected as he had meant well and even had probably written his speech for the purpose of showing that he was familiar with the works of the New England poets.4 He quoted in particular a line from "Brahma," "I am the doubter and the doubt," and a passage from "Mithridates": Give me agates for my meat; Give me cantharides to eat; From air and ocean bring me foods, From all zones and latitudes. True, he did not only quote, he also irreverently parodied and did not even respect "Brahma," a passage from which became: They reckon ill who leave me out; They know not well the subtle ways I keep. ------- I pass, &C deal again! He similarly mistreated "Song of Nature": "I tire of globes and aces, Too long the game is played" replaced "I tire of globes and races, Too long the game is played." He wanted to prove that he was not an unlettered Westerner, a mere clown, that the intrepid rider on the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County5 had changed into a well-read New England gentleman. 218Roger Asselineau These were not unfounded claims. He had apparently read not only Emerson's6 and Longfellow's and Holmes' poems, but also Henry David Thoreau's books, which was not so common in those days. He referred in a letter to Howells to Thoreau's "happy narrative talent."7 He appreciated him because there was a kinship between them. They had the same mastery of concrete details and the same keen sense of observation. It is surprising and almost shocking that Ernest Hemingway did not put them side by side in his literary Pantheon when he talked literature in the green hills of Africa. One cannot help suspecting him of lying when he said that he had not read Thoreau yet. If he had not, he would not have devoted so much space to him.8 When he was interviewed for the Paris Review later, he was franker and fairer. This time he placed Thoreau in the list of his "literary forbears" together with Mark Twain.9 There is indeed the same idyllic quality in Waiden as in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and the way in which Huck lazily drifts down the Mississippi on his raft is not dissimilar from the way Thoreau and his brother spent a week on the Concord and Merrimack rivers. Twain, besides, was as much aware as any Transcendentalist of the presence of imponderable elements at the heart of things in nature. In his pilot days, he had frequent occasions of worshipping "nature's God" while sailing down the Mississippi: "The primeval wildness and awful loneliness of the sublime creations of nature, nature's God, excite feelings of unbounded admiration," he once wrote.10 In art, he could discern with keen insight "the subtle something," "the nameless something which differentiates real narrative from artificial narrative."11 He knew as well as Emerson that "the value of genius to us is in the veracity of its report. Talent may frolic and juggle; genius realizes and adds."12 In short, unknown to himself, he was in some ways a crypto...