Refining Huck Finn

Halfway through the writing of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” Mark Twain -- who was not a modest man -- confided to friends in an 1876 letter that he liked the story “only tolerably well” and might, in fact, burn his handwritten manuscript when he was through. Instead, that summer and beyond, Twain put himself through a ruthless rewrite, fine-tuning the rhythm of Huck’s speech and other nuances in his original prose.

Now, 118 years after “Huck Finn” was published in the U.S., two major projects piece together an unprecedented look at the way Twain shaped his great American novel. Both projects cultivated one of the greatest literary discoveries of the last century -- the missing first half of the original manuscript, which turned up in a Hollywood attic in October 1990.

On Monday, UC Press will publish a 1,164-page, critical edition of “Huck Finn” by the Mark Twain Project at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. The edition offers the first complete look at Twain’s exacting turn-by-turn editing decisions.

In a separate effort, a consortium of three New York institutions has released a searchable “Huck Finn” CD-ROM that also breaks down Twain’s creative process.

Both projects include re-edited full texts of “Huck Finn,” based on the original manuscript. “Huck Finn” aficionados finally will have the opportunity to scrutinize all of Twain’s scribbled notes in the margins and to see what he crossed out and rewrote, as if “you’re looking over his shoulder,” said Thomas Reigstad, a Buffalo State College English professor specializing in Mark Twain studies. “The discovery of the first half of the handwritten manuscript, I think, turned scholarship upside-down. It’s an astounding rush of information about him as a writer.”

“Huck Finn” is a classic that probes issues of race, morality and violence, and a grand adventure tale told with what appears to be effortless verve. But the complete manuscript underscores how hard Twain worked to nail Huck’s voice, along with other details, big and small, that make the narrative sing.

Consider an excerpt from Chapter 8 in which Huck spends a lonely night on an island after fleeing from his abusive father.

Twain’s original prose: “ ... I had about made up my mind to stay there all night, when I heard horses.”

His revised version: “ ... I had about made up my mind I would stay there all night, when I hear a plunkety-plunk, plunkety-plunk, and says to myself, horses coming.”

The critical edition was researched by editors at the Mark Twain Project, which holds the largest collection of Twain’s papers in the world. The new volume includes a list of each revision that Twain is known to have made, along with a record of variations between his manuscript and the first American edition of “Huck Finn,” published in 1885.

Studied as a whole, the revisions contradict Twain’s enduring public image as a happy-go-lucky raconteur, said Victor Fischer, an editor of the critical edition, along with Lin Salamo and the late Walter Blair.

“What you see, in fact, is something very different,” Fischer said. “What you see is an artist at work in the most painstaking way.... You realize it didn’t flow. He’s not just grandstanding with his own natural genius.”

The Berkeley edition also includes background material related to “Huck Finn”: the sales pitches made by door-to-door salesmen who sold copies of the first edition on speculation; the letters Twain wrote at the time, including the one about his half-finished manuscript; and reproductions of his working notes.

Twain, a prolific writer, worked on “Huck Finn” on and off for seven years and sometimes wasn’t able to keep his own characters straight. Three times in his notes, for instance, he wonders whether the first name of Tom Sawyer’s sweetheart, Becky Thatcher, is Bessie.

The critical edition is an expanded version of the Berkeley team’s previous “Huck Finn” for general readers. In 2001, that edition featured the most dramatic finds related to the recovery of the manuscript’s first half, including a ghost story told by Huck’s buddy Jim, a runaway slave. The ghost story was the single longest passage that Twain cut from the first edition.

For the new edition, “It’s not simply that we tried to get the text right,” Fischer said. “It’s that on the way to doing that, by asking such detailed questions as, Who had the manuscript? How was it copied? What were the habits of the typists? ... suddenly, you realize that you have a whole new story of how the book was written.”

Twain, whose real name was Samuel L. Clemens, began work on “Huck Finn” as a 40-year-old father of two small girls; at the time, he had just started to review proofs for “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.” That story didn’t delve as deeply into Twain’s “anger at cruelty and injustice” on issues such as slavery, which “Huck Finn” went on to do, the Berkeley editors wrote.

He wrote the “Huck Finn” manuscript on pieces of stationery and other loose sheets of paper, usually in bold, loopy strokes, using purple, black or blue ink.

When he finished writing the book, Twain declared that “modesty compels me to say it’s a rattling good one,” though the critical and public reception was mixed. Critics at the time attacked the book’s irreverence, vulgar language and the moral failings of its characters. Others praised “Huck Finn” for its realism and applauded Huck’s struggle with the issue of slavery.

According to Berkeley’s team, nine months after the book’s publication, Twain received a letter from James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer and curator for what now is the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. Gluck asked if Twain might send any of his manuscripts to his library for preservation. Twain, who once lived in Buffalo, wrote back that he would send the second half of the “Huck Finn” manuscript, which was all he could find.

More than a year later, Twain apparently found the first half and asked his lawyer to forward the papers to Buffalo. It is unclear what happened next; scholars had assumed the papers were lost until news reports arose in early 1991 of a stunning development.

One of Gluck’s granddaughters, Barbara Gluck Testa, then a Hollywood librarian, had discovered the 665 missing manuscript pages in an old family trunk. After a long legal battle, the Gluck family heirs agreed to turn the papers over to the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, in exchange for a share of any proceeds from publication. (The UC Press and the Mark Twain Project worked out an agreement giving them the authority to re-edit and publish the new “Huck Finn” text.)

Last month, the Buffalo library and its independent foundation unveiled a “Huck Finn” CD-ROM, produced in collaboration with scholars at the State University of New York, Buffalo. The multimedia edition also compares Twain’s original manuscript with the first-edition text, and provides a social, cultural and historical context for “Huck Finn.”

SUNY-Buffalo English professor Victor Doyno, a Twain expert who worked on the CD-ROM, was struck by “just how astonishingly careful [Twain] was, particularly on dialect. I would say there was a whole revision of the manuscript in pencil that was 90 or 95% dialect or sound [changes].... In those days, you see, a lot of people couldn’t read, and books were expensive, so a lot of the tradition was that, if you had a family, to sit around the main room, and a father or a grandfather would read it aloud.”

Doyno, author of the 1991 book “Writing Huck Finn: Mark Twain’s Creative Process,” is one of a handful of scholars who have handled every page of the original manuscript. Doyno tried to pick out the spots where Twain was on a roll as he wrote, “episode by episode, without really knowing how it’s going to end.” In those ink-smeared sections, Twain scribbled so furiously and intensely that the words ran together in a continuous script. “The pen never left the page,” Doyno said.

The CD-ROM, along with Berkeley’s latest work, is part of a slew of new Twain-related material, noted Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of English and director of American Studies at Stanford University. Fishkin, in fact, recently uncovered a forgotten Twain play in Berkeley’s archives. In October, UC Press will publish the three-act comedy “Is He Dead?” with explanatory material by Fishkin.

“I have learned to never underestimate the new directions in which Mark Twain can take us,” said Fishkin, editor of the 29-volume “Oxford Mark Twain.” “He always proved himself to be ahead of the curve in terms of where the culture’s interests are heading.”

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Twain’s tweaks focused on voice

Mark Twain worked hard to perfect Huck Finn’s young, breezy voice. With the discovery in 1990 of the long-lost first half of Twain’s original manuscript, UC Berkeley editors and the editors at the Mark Twain Project have been able to track parts of his rewriting process for the first time. The following example provided by the Mark Twain Project is excerpted from Chapter 19:

Twain’s first handwritten draft with his revisions:

Lordly, Lordy, its it is lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all sprinkled thick with stars, & we used to lay on our backs & look up at them, & discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened -- Jim he allowed they was made, a purpose but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could have laid them .... We used to watch the falling stars, too, & see them streak down the sky & trail their sparky tails behind them. Jim reckoned they had got spoiled & was flung out of the nest.

Twain’s final version:

Lordy, it is It’s lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all sprinkled thick speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened -- Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could have a laid them .... We used to watch the falling stars, stars that fell, too, and see them streak down the sky and trail their sparky tails behind them. down. Jim reckoned they had allowed they’d got spoiled and was flung hove out of the nest.

For more information: https://bancroft.berkeley.edu/MTP/ or

https://www.buffalolib.org/.