Ernest Hemingway wrote that the American novels begins and ends with Huckleberry Finn. Google won’t tell me exactly when and where he said it, but I’ll accept that he did. As many people know, the character of Huckleberry Finn first appeared in an earlier Twain work—The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The earlier book doesn’t rank nearly as high as its sequel—my impression is that it’s considered a kind of sentimental work perhaps more suited for the “young adult” demographic. Sort of like Treasure Island, but not so scary. I was fairly sure I’d never read Tom Sawyer.
Of course, anyone who wants to know a little bit about Tom Sawyer should probably be reading the relevant Wikipedia entry, or just googling for a more authoritative source, because the chances of me having anything original to say about this book are pretty slim. Reading a book like this is sort of like visiting a museum, or watching Casablanca for the eighth time. You might have something to say about your subjective experience of the thing, but you’d have to be pretty presumptuous to think you could tell the world anything new about it.
So with that, here are some things that I noticed. Tom Sawyer doesn’t really tell you much about what it would have been like to live at what was then the far western extreme of the United States in the 1830s—except insomuch as it tells you a bit about what some people might have been like in that time and place. In the first few chapters, the focus is on character sketches: Tom, his strict but fond Aunt Polly, his pesky younger brother Sid, his sweetheart Becky Thatcher, and his semi-homless friend Huck Finn. Tom is presented as an essentially good person who has a pretty fair idea of what the adults expect of him and would just as soon not oblige. I’m not thinking so much about how he cons some of the local yokels into painting his fence for him—it’s more when he absconds with a couple of friends to an island in the Mississippi for long enough for the people in the town to assume they’ve all drowned. Tom sneaks back into town one night and discovers that he is presumed dead, but instead of correcting this assumption he makes plans to stay away until the funeral and only then to reveal himself. The fact that I find this rather cold of Tom might indicate that I should have read this book when I was younger.
Whether by design or happenstance, the latter part of the book becomes more plot-driven, with a bona fide villain (the mixed-race Injun Joe) and an episode where Tom and Becky are trapped in a cave for a number of days. Injun Joe—a “hapless half-breed”—is kind of a frontier Shylock—he feels his outsider status as an injury, and is determined to pay it back double. Unlike Shylock, he is rendered without dignity or eloquence. But Twain does do himself proud in describing Injun Joe’s death from starvation in the same cave from which Tom and Becky were lucky enough to escape:
When the cave door was unlocked, a sorrowful sign presented itself in the dim twilight of the place. Injun Joe lay stretched upon the ground, dead, with his face close to the crack of the door, as if his longing eyes had been fixed, to the latest moment, upon the light and the cheer of the free world outside.
We read that he gnawed candle stubs before he died, and drank the water that dripped ever so slowly from a stalactite.
Has everything a purpose and a mission? Did this drop fall patiently during five thousand years to be ready for this flitting human insect’s need? And has it another important object to accomplish ten thousand years to come?
For some reason this puts me in mind of the sham eulogy that King Kong’s exploiter, Carl Denham, delivers at the end of that movie: “It was beauty killed the beast.” It might be more moving, Carl, if you’d shown an ounce of kindness or sympathy for the big guy before this. Too bad he didn’t land on you.
So we leave Tom and his townfolk, none the worse for wear in the restored purity of their town. Here’s how Twain ties it up:
Most of the characters that perform in this book still live, and are prosperous and happy. Some day it may seem worthwhile to take up the story of the younger ones again and see what sort of men and women they turned out to be; therefore it will be wisest not to reveal any of that part of their lives at present.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a charming book, and it holds up reasonably well, but it feels like a rather minor thing in the end. As though its author sat down to write one morning and proceeded to try out a few different kinds of things until he pulled it all together with some melodrama at the end. For me, it’s just a bit of preparation for re-reading Life on the Mississippi and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, two books that I’ve read before and for which I have much higher expectations.
