A New Read on ‘Huck Finn’s’ Distinctive Voice

Huck Finn, it turns out, didn’t always sound so distinctively Huckish.

At first, the character who became the teenage hero of Mark Twain’s classic novel sounded almost literary. He said “as if” instead of “like,” “wasn’t” and not “warn’t,” and described a night sky “sprinkled”--not “speckled”--with stars.

In a new edition of the “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” released this summer, researchers at UC Berkeley have drawn on the book’s complete original manuscript to show how Twain slowly, laboriously coaxed Huck’s voice out and onto the page.

The Berkeley editors relied on the handwritten manuscript--including the long-missing first half found in a Hollywood attic in 1990--and evidence from Twain’s letters and other sources to produce what many scholars are hailing as the most authoritative version of “Huckleberry Finn.” It contains extensive editors’ notes, side-by-side comparisons of Twain’s various revisions and the book’s original illustrations.

“It’s like filling in the genome” for the book, said noted Twain scholar Louis J. Budd, professor emeritus at Duke University. “Maybe nothing is ever the last word, especially on Twain, but this seems like it.”

A Tiny Project Struggles to Keep Going

The story of the classic, controversial tale’s latest edition is one of painstaking literary detective work by researchers at Berkeley’s venerable Mark Twain Papers & Project, now in its 39th year.

But it is also the saga of the tiny project’s struggles to keep going, amid growing impatience over the pace of its publishing effort and the use of millions of dollars in public funds to support it.

At a time of increasingly limited funding for and interest in the humanities, some critics question whether more time and money should be committed to a literary project that already has spanned four decades and, according to its staff, has many more letters and works to publish.

“Is it going to take another 40 years to get it finished?” asked Ralph H. Orth, who has helped evaluate the project for the National Endowment for the Humanities, its principal patron.

The Twain project is “sitting on a certain amount of money, year after year, generation after generation,” said Orth, emeritus professor of English at the University of Vermont and onetime editor of a rival literary project. “It’s a problem for everyone else” seeking support.

Orth and other critics cite the law of diminishing returns, noting that there are at least 30 editions of “Huckleberry Finn” in print and the latest makes relatively minor changes in wording and grammar.

Others argue passionately that the nuances in the text of one of the nation’s greatest literary works are worthy of continued exploration and debate.

The new book “allows Twain’s voice, and Huck’s, to come through even more vividly than before,” said Fred Kaplan, an English professor at City University of New York who is writing a biography of Twain. “It’s just a terrific piece of work.”

To the casual reader, the text changes between the new edition and earlier ones, including a 1996 version by Random House, may be almost imperceptible. There are about 100 word changes and 1,100 adjustments in spelling, punctuation and grammar, as the editors compared the handwritten manuscript and the first edition to fix errors made by long-dead typists and proofreaders.

“They may not seem so important but you put all these together and they start to matter,” said Victor Fischer, who co-edited the book along with his longtime colleague Lin Salamo. “We feel it’s incredibly important to get it the way Mark Twain wanted.”

The impurities that crept into his works clearly infuriated the irascible Twain, who often complained about the shortcomings of proofreaders, most famously in this 1889 letter to a friend:

“Yesterday, Mr. Hall wrote that the printer’s proof-reader was improving my punctuation for me,” he wrote to William Dean Howells, “and I telegraphed orders to have him shot without giving him time to pray.”

Through lengthy editor’s notes, the new version also sheds light on mysteries that have long surrounded the novel, from how Twain developed his characters and language to when he took breaks--twice for periods of three years--in the writing.

Comparing the types of stationery and inks Twain used--from black to purple to blue--the Berkeley researchers were able to pinpoint when he put “Huck” down and turned to other projects, including “The Prince and the Pauper.”

A trove of letters collected by the project helps explain why. “He’d say that the tank had run dry,” Fischer said. “At first it worried him but then he realized that if he set the project aside, the tank would fill up again in some mysterious way. He called it ‘unconscious cerebration.’ ”

Examples of Twain’s Rewrites

The knowledge that even such a towering figure of American literature had to work at his craft--and that the muse sometimes deserted him--is likely to hearten a slew of struggling writers.

“He’s such a seductively casual writer, so breezy and seemingly so natural at it,” said Bruce Michelson, a Twain scholar at the University of Illinois. “Isn’t it nice to know that he had to work at it too?”

For example, Twain rewrote the book’s famous first sentence at least three times, from “You will not know about me . . .” to “You do not know about me . . .” and finally, “You don’t know about me, without you have read a book. . . .”

In another passage, Twain at first had Huck describing sunrise on the Mississippi as “perfectly still--just as if the whole world was dead asleep.”

In the final version, Huck says that dawn over the river was “just like the whole world was asleep, only sometimes the bull-frogs a-cluttering, maybe.”

“That passage is so beautiful and so celebrated, but writing it clearly wasn’t like falling off a log,” Salamo said.

The book restores 174 illustrations included in the first edition. And it explains the derivation of some of the sketches. One that depicts the runaway slave Jim kneeling, for instance, has long been considered demeaning. But the editors show that it was virtually identical to a well-known graphic that at the time was a symbol of the campaign to end slavery.

The slavery issue remains controversial. Critics condemn Twain’s frequent use of the word “nigger.” But the project’s editors say their material shows Twain was a strong foe of racism; his language merely reflected his time.

Those “angry with Twain’s realistic language and impatient with his ironic condemnation of racism . . . [are] confusing the messenger with the message,” the editors write in their introduction.

Though scholars long had studied the second half of the manuscript, the first half was missing and considered lost for good until 1990. Then, a Hollywood librarian named Barbara Gluck Testa discovered it in a box in her attic. Her grandfather had solicited the manuscript from Twain in 1885 for a Buffalo, N.Y., library. Twain sent the second half right away and the rest some months later, but the first half somehow was misplaced.

Housed in a string of tiny offices on the top floor of the university’s Bancroft Library, the Berkeley project holds the world’s largest collection of Twain’s personal papers. Its shelves are crammed with books from Twain’s own library and first editions of his writings. Its cabinets are filled with memorabilia: a daguerreotype image of the author at 15; love letters to his wife, Olivia; a pencil drawing by someone who saw him walking down a New York street.

The basic core of the material was deposited at Berkeley by Twain’s daughter Clara in 1949 and later bequeathed to the university in her will. The collection has grown substantially since. Twain was such a tireless writer that more material--typically letters--shows up nearly every month, Hirst said.

“It’s the mother lode of Twain material,” said author and filmmaker Dayton Duncan, who with collaborator Ken Burns is relying on material gathered there for a Twain documentary to air in January.

The project’s five full-time editors, all but one of whom have spent more than 20 years steeped in Twain minutiae, “carry in their brains the largest bank of knowledge about Mark Twain that currently exists,” Kaplan said.

Many Documents Yet to Be Published

Since 1962, the team has produced 36 books, including scholarly and popular versions of Twain’s major works and several volumes of his letters. But they say that to edit--and do justice--to the material still in the huge archive could take years, or even decades, longer.

“We had hoped to do a total of about 75 volumes,” said general editor Robert Hirst, who has headed the project since 1980. “But who knows if the world will be patient enough to allow us to do that?”

Among the documents yet to be published, for instance, is Twain’s massive autobiography, dictated to a secretary over a period of years. It sits in file drawers in Hirst’s crowded office.

And that’s the problem, critics--and even many fans--say: a snail’s pace of publishing that translates to fewer than a single book a year, each one lovingly, exhaustively annotated.

“They certainly haven’t broken any speed records,” said Louis Budd, author of several books on Twain. “They do great work” but projects of other author’s works get through their material much faster, he said.

Orth, the former chief editor of the Ralph Waldo Emerson publishing project at Harvard, said he suggested at one point that the Twain project should streamline its annotation and get more of the still-unpublished Twain into print.

“But they’re very committed to producing the whole thing, the full monty, if you will,” he said. “And meanwhile, the wider public never gets to see a lot of wonderful stuff.”

Since its inception, the project has received about $12 million in public money, about half from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and half from the University of California. But an increasing portion of the federal share is now in matching funds, forcing Hirst to spend more and more of his time fund-raising.

Michael Hall, who monitors the Twain project in his role as senior program officer for the National Endowment, said there is no lessening of support in his office for the project, which he called “exemplary.”

Hall acknowledged, though, that reviewers often express concern about the project’s pace, and that such worries have grown in recent years as Congress has reduced the endowment’s budget, which funds a wide array of humanities research and other programs.

Hirst and others fear that the increased grumbling may ultimately threaten the project’s funding, or force it either to scale back or radically change its approach.

Already, Hirst said, the endowment’s grant offer last month will force the editors to shift gears, marking their clearly reluctant entry into the Electronic Age. The two-year direct grant for $160,000--not including a matching grant offer of an additional $75,000--may be used only to fund putting Twain’s unpublished letters, with minimal annotation, online.

Hirst and his colleagues are wary. Many people won’t be able to understand the letters and their context without the editors’ notes, they say. “This isn’t something you can just shovel onto the Net,” Hirst said.

Mainly, though, Hirst said he worries that releasing the letters, and, eventually, perhaps other Twain material will inevitably make it harder to find funding for the project’s specialty--its slow, thorough editing and annotation.

That would be a terrible mistake, several scholars said.

“What they’re doing there is compiling a basic building block of our history at the turn of the century,” filmmaker Duncan said. “And all through the eyes of this great, colorful, loquacious character. Don’t we want that?”