probably shouldn’t have been reading. The more I read about Twain’s life, the more amazed I was by his almost instinctive hatred of slavery.
“The next time I teach
Huck Finn,
I will assign more autobiographical material,” I said. I had become obsessed by Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” I had always been intrigued by this magical interaction, the curious and constant interplay of fiction and reality, their affinities and rivalries.
“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery,” Twain reminisced late in life. “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”
His childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity and depravity. In 1904, years after the publication of
Huck Finn,
he wrote in his notebook, “The skin of every human being contains a slave.” The impact of his childhood experiences grew as he himself grew older and took up other causes: defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo, workers and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary; already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not “My country right or wrong” but “My country—when it is right.”
Witnessing the mistreatment by a German hotel manager of an Indian servant who accepted his punishment without protest, Twain writes that the incident “carried me instantly back to my boyhood and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the
usual way
of explaining one’s desire to a slave.” He remembered his own father’s regular cuffing of their slave boy and the accidental murder of a slave by his master, confessing that as a child he had accepted such treatment as natural, although he also felt “sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”
Twain felt it was not enough to condemn slavery; he felt he had to investigate as a writer its effects on the lives of individuals. In Notebook 35, he wrote: “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you
want
it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”
Huckleberry Finn
is in this respect a bitter indictment of our social conscience, “the unerring monitor,” as he called it. It looks at how ordinary and decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity
“The next time I teach
Huck Finn,
I will assign more autobiographical material,” I said. I had become obsessed by Virginia Woolf’s assertion that “fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners.” I had always been intrigued by this magical interaction, the curious and constant interplay of fiction and reality, their affinities and rivalries.
“In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery,” Twain reminisced late in life. “I was not aware that there was anything wrong about it. No one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind—and then the texts were read aloud to us to make the matter sure; if the slaves themselves had an aversion to slavery they were wise and said nothing.”
His childhood memories left such a mark on him that slavery became to his mind a universal symbol of man’s cruelty, stupidity and depravity. In 1904, years after the publication of
Huck Finn,
he wrote in his notebook, “The skin of every human being contains a slave.” The impact of his childhood experiences grew as he himself grew older and took up other causes: defending the Jews, women, the people of the Congo, workers and all of the oppressed; claiming to be a revolutionary; already predicting the ideological wars to come when he declared not “My country right or wrong” but “My country—when it is right.”
Witnessing the mistreatment by a German hotel manager of an Indian servant who accepted his punishment without protest, Twain writes that the incident “carried me instantly back to my boyhood and flashed upon me the forgotten fact that this was the
usual way
of explaining one’s desire to a slave.” He remembered his own father’s regular cuffing of their slave boy and the accidental murder of a slave by his master, confessing that as a child he had accepted such treatment as natural, although he also felt “sorry for the victim and ashamed for the punisher.”
Twain felt it was not enough to condemn slavery; he felt he had to investigate as a writer its effects on the lives of individuals. In Notebook 35, he wrote: “In those old slave-holding days the whole community was agreed as to one thing—the awful sacredness of slave property. To help steal a horse or a cow was a low crime, but to help a hunted slave, or feed him or shelter him, or hide him, or comfort him, in his troubles, his terrors, his despair, or hesitate to promptly betray him to the slave-catcher when opportunity offered was a much baser crime, & carried with it a stain, a moral smirch which nothing could wipe away. That this sentiment should exist among slave-owners is comprehensible—there were good commercial reasons for it—but that it should exist & did exist among the paupers, the loafers the tag-rag & bobtail of the community, & in a passionate & uncompromising form, is not in our remote day realizable. It seemed natural enough to me then; natural enough that Huck & his father the worthless loafer should feel it & approve it, though it seems now absurd. It shows that that strange thing, the conscience—that unerring monitor—can be trained to approve any wild thing you
want
it to approve if you begin its education early & stick to it.”
Huckleberry Finn
is in this respect a bitter indictment of our social conscience, “the unerring monitor,” as he called it. It looks at how ordinary and decent people, or outcasts like Huck and Pap, could abandon their hearts and take the easy road, embracing ugly thoughts and prejudices when they are sanctioned by society. Could such horrors as slavery or the Holocaust happen without the complicity
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