by Norman Podhoretz

Mr. Podhoretz, a New York editor and fiction critic, first read Mark Twain at the age of 8 or 9, when the works arrived at his home, a volume at a time, as a bonus for a newspaper subscription.

“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted,” wrote Mark Twain in a notice at the head of ”The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”; “persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” This month marks the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of ”Huckleberry Finn,” and by now the number of candidates for prosecution, banishment and shooting must be very large indeed - far greater than Mark Twain could ever have anticipated. No other American novel (with the possible exception of ”Moby Dick”) has been so thoroughly ransacked for motives and morals, so lovingly examined, so jealously claimed as an ally in so many different polemical campaigns.

. . .”Huckleberry Finn” is now read as a key to the very essence of the American imagination, a central document of our most primitive impulses. . .contemporary critics. . . have spoken of Huck as an archetype or a mythic figure who embodies the nostalgia for innocence and the fantasy of flight from maturity that are said to be so characteristic of the American soul.

Sooner or later, it seems, all discussions of “Huckleberry Finn” turn into discussions of America—and with good reason. Mark Twain was the quintessential American writer, quintessential because he was more or less untutored— “a natural,” as Wright Morris puts it, “who learned to write the way a river pilot learns the feel of a channel.” And Richard Chase, in his remarkable book on the American novel, observes that “Huckleberry Finn” is constantly engaged in an “exorcism of false forms” through parody and burlesque, and that the chief exorcism performed by the novel is done upon “European culture itself.”

Why did Mark Twain find it necessary to exorcise European culture? Partly, of course, in order to liberate himself from the grip of an approved literary style that bore no relation to living American speech, but also, in my opinion, because what he had to say about life could not have been said by a writer whose attitudes had been molded by the European sense of things.

. . .Lionel Trilling, in his brilliant introduction to ”Huckleberry Finn,”. . .recognizes that the novel is built on an opposition between nature and society, but he cautions us against thinking of that opposition as absolute. Huck, he tells us, “is involved in civilization up to his ears,” and his flight from society “is but his way of reaching what society ideally dreams of for itself.” This interpretation, I should say, is itself in need of exorcism, for it is an attempt to assimilate ”Huckleberry Finn” into what I have characterized as the European sense of things.

. . .No more devastating comment has ever been made on the fraudulent pretensions of civilization than the great scene in which Huck struggles with himself over the question of whether to turn Jim back to Miss Watson. Huck, of course, is not consciously a rebel against the values of his society, and he never doubts that he has done wrong in helping a runaway slave to escape. After he discovers that the Duke and the King have sold Jim back into captivity, he decides that the hand of Providence has slapped him in the face, “letting me know my wickedness was being watched all the time from up there in heaven, whilst I was stealing a poor old woman’s nigger that hadn’t ever done me no harm.” He tries to console himself with the reflection that “I was brung up wicked, and so I warn’t so much to blame,” but he is too honest to accept this as an adequate excuse, and finally he scrawls a note to Miss Watson telling her where she can find Jim.

The passage that follows the note is one of the supreme moments in all of literature: “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 laid the paper down and set there thinking—thinking how good it was all this happened so, and how near I come to being lost and going to hell. And went on thinking. And got to thinking over our trip down the river; and I see Jim before me all the time; in the day and in the night-time, sometimes moonlight, sometimes storms, and we a-floating along, talking and singing and laughing. But somehow I couldn’t seem to strike no places to harden me against him, but only the other kind.”

And he goes on remembering details of their voyage down the river together, until his glance falls on the note he has just written to Miss Watson. “It was a close place, I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. 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.”

We must not be misled by the humor of the concluding lines into supposing that Huck’s belief in his own damnation is perfunctory or insincere. Mark Twain is using the device of comic exaggeration—reaching all the way down into hell—in order to make the contrast between the “civilized” values and Huck’s natural feelings as stark as he possibly can.

The contempt for civilization that breathes through every page of “Huckleberry Finn"—both the particular civilization Mark Twain was writing about and civilization in general—is only matched in intensity by the reverence for nature embodied in the character of Huck and in the image of the river. The Mississippi, as Mr. Trilling rightly observes, is a god in this novel, and those who attune themselves to its ways are able to share in its power, its vitality and its beauty. There is also danger in the river and destruction and loneliness, for the god has his sullen moods and refuses to be placated. But though the river can maim and kill, it cannot do what society invariably does; it cannot warp a man’s feelings into ugly and unnatural shapes, and it cannot distort the clarity of his vision of the truth.

Now that I have succeeded in adding myself to the violators of Mark Twain’s ordinance against finding motives in “Huckleberry Finn,” I might as well follow Huck’s example and go the whole hog in wickedness by looking for a moral, too. The moral, I think, will be obvious to anyone who feels the sharpness of the opposition Mark Twain set up between nature and society. “Huckleberry Finn” is a celebration of the instinctive promptings of the individual against the conditioned self, and a refutation of the heretical idea that reality can be equated with any given set of historical circumstances. This heresy has become even more powerful today than it was seventy-five years ago, and there can be no better protection against the morality of “adjustment” than Mark Twain’s uncompromising, hard-headed insistence on the distinction between nature and society.

For that matter, it might be a good idea to pass a law requiring social workers, guidance counselors and all the members of certain schools of psychoanalysis to read ”Huckleberry Finn” at least once a year. There is no telling what might happen if the proponents of adjustment were forced into periodic contemplation of a character who is more civilized than his mentors and more mature than his elders precisely by virtue of his refusal to submit to their notion of what is necessary, “natural” and real.

[Podhoretz is referring to the Life Adjustment Curriculum, which was a school “reform” movement that began after World War II. It was founded on the belief that more than half of students were incapable of learning much. “According to Charles Prosser, the father of Life Adjustment, only 20 percent of American young people could master academic content; another 20 percent were capable of doing vocational subjects; and the remaining 60 percent needed courses in subjects like health and PE, effective use of leisure time, driver training, and knowledge of such “problems of American democracy” as dating, buying on credit, and renting an apartment.” (Barney Brawer - Education Next)]