Mark Twain and Human Nature

Chapter Three. 1880–1884

C h a p t e r T h r e e 1 8 8 0 – 1 8 8 4 I The first explicit mention of Huckleberry Finn occurs in a letter to W. D. Howells dated August 9, 1876: I . . . began another boys’ book—more to be at work than anything else. I have written 400 pages on it—therefore it is very nearly half done. It is Huck Finn’s Autobiography. I like it only tolerably well, as far as I have got, & may possibly pigeonhole or burn the MS when it is done. (MTHL, 1:144)1 Not long after this date, Twain stopped writing Huck’s “Autobiography,” and at a curious point in the narrative. The manuscript discloses that on the manuscript page 446, or halfway into chapter 18, Twain stopped at that point in the novel where Huck asks Buck Grangerford: 1. In two separate letters previous to the one sent to Howells—one to Moncure Conway dated August 1, 1876, and the other to Mary Mason Fairbanks dated August 4, 1876—Twain mentioned his progress on a “new book,” and this was almost certainly Huckleberry Finn. 1 0 4 “What’s a feud?” “Why where was you raised? Don’t you know what a feud is?” “Never heard of it before—tell me about it.” (HF, 146) Twain’s decision to quit writing at this point is perplexing because the author knew perfectly well what a feud is. His hesitation probably derived in part from the vagueness of his memory of the Darnell-Watson feud he had heard about when he was on the river,2 and it may have had something to do with a certain unsureness about how he meant to satirize this primitive and barbarous tradition. Huck’s dismay about the feud is consistent with his character and his upbringing, since notions of revenge, honor, and aristocracy (misguided or otherwise) are essentially foreign to his experience. But Huck’s confusion about the folkways of the well-todo could provide the author with an entering wedge for a satiric means to condemn the practice, as it already had in his satire of Emmeline Grangerford’s “crayons” and poetry. Huck of course is ignorant of feuds and feuders, but Twain may have also felt that he himself did not yet fully comprehend the crude and vengeful aristocratic mentality that fostered and perpetuated a violent institution so obviously self-destructive, possibly even insane. What is there in human nature that would permit, even encourage, people to embark on and to sustain such hurtful practices? Curious, too, in this letter to Howells is Twain’s description of his work in progress as something of an idle amusement (“more to be at work than anything else”) and the declaration that he might in any event burn or pigeonhole the manuscript when he was done. There is no reason to dispute this claim, however. Because Adventures of Huckleberry Finn looms so large in Twain’s corpus, there is the tendency and temptation to see those works that precede it as somehow tributary influences to his masterpiece. This is a perfectly legitimate line of inquiry, and one I mean to follow in the next chapter. The novel’s genesis, however, suggests that, for the author, in the early going this narrative had neither commercial nor especially artistic possibilities. If he finished it at all, the novel was destined for the file cabinet or the fireplace, but not for the public. For the moment, it is worthwhile to take Twain at his word that his work on Huck’s “Autobiography” filled his time in an agreeable way. His statements to Moncure Conway that he was “booming along” and to Mary Ma2 . The most instructive analysis of the feud chapters is The Grangerford-Shepherdson Feud by Edgar Marquess Branch and Robert Hirst (Berkeley: Friends of the Bancroft Library, University of California, 1985). 1 8 8 0 – 1 8 8 4 1 0 5 son Fairbanks that he was “tearing along” in the writing of the book indicate both Twain’s happy involvement in the project and that the work was stimulating to him, but they do not predict his masterpiece or even indicate a deep commitment to this work in progress.3 Perhaps a carefree attitude toward his material, or at least a happy indifference to prevailing taste and the requirements of publication and marketing, cultivated in the author...