Literary Revelation or Misplaced Obsession?

Question: What do the new edition of “Huckleberry Finn,” the top-selling recording in the country and the director’s cut of “Pulp Fiction” have in common?

Answer: They all reflect America’s growing obsession with outtakes.

These days, it’s not enough to enjoy a work of great art, whether it be a landmark American novel, an anthology of Beatles tunes or a smash-hit Hollywood film.

The real kick is in outtakes: Those rough snippets of prose, music or footage that somehow wind up on the cutting room floor--never to see the light of day--until some shrewd entrepreneur or ambitious scholar decides it’s time to dust them off for media consumption.

Never mind that a few artists might cringe at the thought of their long-suppressed works in progress coming under a microscope. It matters little, if at all, because the American public’s hunger for these rare glimpses into the creative process has become insatiable.

How else to explain the remarkable sales of “Anthology,” certainly not the Beatles’ best work, but a revealing look at how masterpieces like “Strawberry Fields” and other songs evolved in the studio? Similarly, there’s a huge and growing home market for videos that package the original movie plus rough takes on scenes and previously unscreened footage.

Nowadays, Broadway aficionados scoop up recordings of songs deleted from Stephen Sondheim and Cole Porter musicals, and die-hard fans of “The Honeymooners” TV series buy thousands of copies of the so-called lost episodes that never aired on regular network broadcasts.

It’s good business and the trend shows no signs of diminishing. But Outtake Culture also generates some troubling artistic questions--and the newly published, so-called unexpurgated edition of “Huckleberry Finn” (Random House) is a good example.

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For years, Americans have read an authorized edition of Mark Twain’s 1884 novel, long recognized as one of the greatest works in American literature. Unlike other 19th century relics, the epic story of Huck and Jim has continued to spark controversy in our own time. Indeed, critics suggest that the book’s frequent use of the word “nigger” has made it unfit for use in education, and school boards across America have banned the novel more often than any other. Meanwhile, defenders argue that Twain was an ardent foe of racism, insisting that his language only reflected the age in which he lived.

With that debate still unresolved, yet another controversy erupted in 1990, when some of Twain’s descendants in Hollywood discovered a handwritten draft of “Huckleberry Finn” in an attic trunk. The manuscript, which represented the first half of a handwritten first version, caused a sensation around the world, and scholars have called it a stupendous literary find.

That, however, is where the agreement ends.

When the New Yorker published a lengthy excerpt from the new material in 1995, some experts said that the missing manuscript offered important new clues into Twain’s state of mind and that it should be integrated into a new edition of the novel. Yet others believed that Twain had wisely deleted the original material and that it would be presumptuous to disregard his wishes.

Those disagreements will only grow with the publication last week of the new Random House edition of “Huckleberry Finn.” Although editors have set the new material off from the original--using different typeface--experts still disagree whether these Twain outtakes are a literary revelation or an overblown mishmash of what the author really intended.

“When you have a writer as iconic as Mark Twain, anything he does relating to a major work is of great interest,” says Justin Kaplan, who won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his biography of the author and wrote the introduction to the new edition.

“This is a voyeuristic age,” he adds, “and we all want to see the artist at work. . . . Mark Twain would react with outrage, but invasion of privacy is so common, it’s beside the point.”

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Banking on that interest, Random House held a major bash in New York last week for the new edition, joining forces with hotel magnate Jonathan Tisch and columnist Liz Smith to promote the book and boost the fortunes of Literacy Partners, a nationwide group.

During brief remarks, Publisher Harold Evans held aloft a copy and made it clear where he stood on the issue: “This is the first time in 100 years that anybody has been able to hold up the unexpurgated version of ‘Huckleberry Finn,’ ” he noted. “This is it.”

Hogwash, answers Robert Hirst, general director of the Mark Twain project, based at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. By stitching together the rough first draft with the author’s final version, he contends, Random House has confused and misled the reading public.

“Calling this the unexpurgated version is good stuff for Madison Avenue,” Hirst says, “but it’s just not accurate. . . . Mark Twain deleted this new material for sound reasons, and to put it into a new authorized version now is to mix up two levels of textual reality.”

Before your eyes glaze over, Hirst offers an example: In one passage, Jim, a runaway slave, muses on his fear of dead bodies. The writing is crisp, Hirst says, but Twain realized it slowed the narrative. Also, it was too much of a joke on Jim, who is a sympathetic character. So Twain left it out.

Should these outtakes be ignored? That would be a crime, says Victor Doyno, a Twain expert at the State University of New York in Buffalo whose commentary on the new material is included in the Random House edition. The first draft, he adds, gives us a riveting insight into Twain the man.

In a key passage, the author delivers a scathing commentary on the money-raising scams used by religious hustlers at revival meetings. The material was sure to cause controversy with readers, Doyno says, especially the section where a slave woman misunderstands a preacher’s words and believes that her liberation is at hand. Overcome, she wants to hug the white people standing near her in an act of Christian forgiveness. They, however, are appalled.

“This material was way over the top for its time and Twain knew that,” Doyno says. “Most white people didn’t believe that blacks had souls, so they wouldn’t be at such a meeting in the first place. Twain took it out, but it shows us his strength as a critic and a comic.”

Then as now, we want more than the artist gave us. And who knows, maybe there are other literary discoveries to be made . . . new outtakes on the hidden relationship between Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher. What really happened in the cave? Coming soon to a bookstore near you.