MARK TWAIN FORUM BOOK REVIEWS: “Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father” by Yasuhiro Takeuchi
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Mark X: Who Killed Huck Finn’s Father?. By Yasuhiro Takeuchi. Routledge, 2018. Pp. 236. $155.00 Hardcover (2018). $39.95 Softcover (2019). $35.96 ebook. ISBN 978-1-138-61675-2 (hardcover). ISBN 978-0-367-24835-2
(softcover).
Is there room on the shelf for another book about Adventures of Huckleberry Finn? Hasn’t everything been said about Mark Twain’s masterpiece that can be said? And if anything is left to be explored, would answering the question of who killed Pap Finn be near the top of the list? Or even on that list? And yet, that is the book we have before us, and it reminds us that the answers to the first two questions are “yes” and “no,” and the answer to the second two questions is “no, but it should be.”
One of those books on the aforementioned shelf is a slender yellow volume by Franklin R. Rogers called Mark Twain’s Burlesque Patterns (1960), in which Rogers postulated the notion that Huckleberry Finn was first conceived as a “burlesque detective story,” or, more to the point, a murder-mystery centered on who killed Huck’s father. Rogers studied the early composition of Huckleberry Finn and demonstrated that in 1876 Twain
was focused on murder mysteries, including them not only in Huckleberry Finn, but in two shorter works he wrote about that same time, A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, and “Simon Wheeler, Detective” (which was both a play and an aborted novel).
Murder mysteries–fictional ones–can be entertaining. The mystery surrounding the death of Pap Finn is intriguing. He’s found naked in a house swept by flood waters into the Mississippi River, and the room is cluttered with sordid clues–some of them revealing and some not. But even if his murderer is discovered, where would that leave readers of the story? Besides, by the time Twain finished writing Huckleberry Finn, the mystery of who killed Pap Finn was no longer central to the action and was left unresolved. Forty-seven years after Rogers raised the question, Jon Clinch published a superb contrapuntal novel that shadows the action in Huckleberry Finn, solving that mystery and establishing Huck’s maternity. But that novel is Clinch’s fictional conception of the story, not Twain’s.
Takeuchi discusses the work of both Rogers and Clinch, among others, and offers a plausible resolution to the mystery by the end of his first chapter, but that’s not the end of Takeuchi’s enquiry; it’s just the beginning. For Takeuchi, there is the “larger mystery involving the novel’s author–why Twain, all his life, evaded writing about what he had experienced at the death of his own father” (vii). Takeuchi likens his investigation to studying a black hole, in which the black hole itself cannot be seen or directly observed, but can only be detected by studying the movement of nearby objects and distortions of light around it. We may never know exactly what young Sam Clemens saw of his father’s autopsy, or the full depth of his ambivalent feelings about his father, but his writings–both what he wrote and what he didn’t write–provide clues, and Takeuchi sorts them out.
The investigation begins at the murder scene in the floating house. Twain provides a detailed inventory of the contents of that room. Huck and Jim take careful note of what is there. Among the items present is a wooden leg, but they are unsuccessful in their search for its mate. More seriously, both Huck and Jim fail to notice that Pap’s boots are missing. Huck would have recognized them by the “X” nailed into one heel, the sign by which he’d known his father was back in town when he saw his footprint in the snow by a fence stile (a ladder or steps built into a fence). In fact, they also fail to notice that Pap Finn’s clothing seems to be missing; at least Huck does not recognize any of the clothing in the room as Pap’s. As Takeuchi points out, the critical clues are not what is present in the room, but what is absent. This observation sets the stage for some of what will follow in his study: the significance of footprints, crosses, and absences. Besides A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, and “Simon Wheeler, Detective,” Takeuchi traces these clues in other writings including a letter Twain wrote to his children as Santa Claus, and “The Stolen White Elephant.” He pieces together these clues and reveals Pap’s murderer. No spoilers here, but the murderer used Pap’s clothing as a disguise, and is exposed by Pap’s distinctive boot print.
At this point, those familiar with the tropes, metaphors, themes, and plot devices that have attracted the most attention from Twain scholars for decades will see where things might be headed–disguises, gender roles, crosses, twins, corpses, father-figures, crime and punishment, etc. In fact, those who have read two books that were published in 2019 alongside the paperback edition of Takeuchi’s book–Jarrod Roark’s Mark Twain at the Gallows: Crime and Justice in His Western Writing, 1861-1873, and Ben Griffin’s Mark Twain’s Civil War: “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed”– will find those studies helpful preparation for understanding Takeuchi’s sometimes complex arguments. Crime and justice are a recurring theme, and the final chapter of this book is on “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
Just as Roark explains Twain’s treatments of legal and extra-legal justice,Takeuchi notes that Twain does not always solve a murder by catching the murderer. In both Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, Detective, the corpse of the victim is identified at the end, but not the murderer. Crosses are crucial clues to identity in both stories, and so are footprints. In “The Stolen White Elephant,” the footprints being followed are of the dead elephant, not a murderer, and are still being followed after the corpse of the elephant has been found. In A Murder, a Mystery, and a Marriage, it is the absence of footprints in the snow around the unconscious body of the Frenchman that are a clue to a murder. Twain uses the word “clew” for “clue” implying the double-meaning of a ball of twine that can be used to trace a path (just like following footprints), a meaning that Twain makes explicit when a clew is used in the cave to mark a path.
Studies of twins and doubles in Twain’s fiction are exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting, but Takeuchi takes a new approach, and discusses what he calls “splitting”……..
…finish reading Kevin Mac Donnell’s review at the Mark Twain Forum.
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An irksome puzzle has persisted through more than a century of Mark Twain scholarship. It has usually been avoided altogether, or at best it has been briefly touched upon by a handful of scholars. In her ground-breaking new study, Kerry Driscoll spells it out clearly: “While Twain’s view on blacks . . . [demonstrate] unequivocal growth away from the racism of his origins in the antebellum South, his representations of Indians do not follow a similarly redemptive arc. They are instead vexingly erratic and paradoxical, commingling antipathy and sympathy, fascination and visceral repugnance” (4). Driscoll credits scholars who have dealt briefly with Twain’s attitude toward America’s indigenous people–Ned Blackhawk, Louis J. Budd, Joseph Coulombe, Leslie Fiedler, Philip Foner, Max Geismer, Harold J. Kolb, and Jeffrey Steinbrink–and points out that they tend to fall into two camps that either idealize or vilify Native Americans. Both camps distort Twain’s own views by over-simplifying the issue. The truth is more complicated, and a book length study to explore these complications is long overdue.
Hardly a season passes without another Twain’t springing up from the fertile soil tilled so long ago by Mark Twain. His influence seems everlasting, and his writings, biography, and cultural iconography continue to inspire bountiful crops of works based upon his writings–borrowing characters, titles, or plots–or stories featuring Twain himself as a character. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn alone has inspired attempts to write sequels (beginning with Twain’s own efforts), modern day adaptations, pastiches, stage and musical and movie versions, and even comic books, graphic novels, and one robotic version. These Twain’ts (they ain’t Twain; hence they are Twain’ts) have sometimes taken successful innovative directions, like Jon Clinch’s masterful Finn (2007), that provided a startling dark counterpoint to the original novel, illuminating the character of Pap Finn and shedding light on Huck’s maternity, or Tim Champlin’s recent time-traveling romps for young readers that insert modern characters into reimagined adventures of Huck, Tom, and Becky. Some Twain’ts succeed and some fail, and the vast majority fall somewhere in between, so the arrival of a successful Twain’t is cause for notice.
Mark Twain was a man of the waters. His nom de plume signifies two fathoms–safe water when navigating out of the shallows–dangerous water under other circumstances. He spent his boyhood just a few blocks from a steamboat landing, dreamed of becoming a steamboat pilot (or else a pirate) and realized that dream for a time. He lost childhood friends to drownings and lost a beloved brother in a steamboat accident. His first piece of writing to be published in a nationally recognized publication was about a disaster at sea, his first best-selling book was the result of a four months voyage with stops on several continents, and his literary masterpiece takes place on the dangerous waters and shores of the Mississippi River. When his second daughter died (in water) and he was suffering from late stage congestive heart failure (edema), he lit out for the island of Bermuda for his last months of life, and when Paine was bringing him home to die he begged for a fatal dose of morphine to end his life while at sea.
Huck Finn’s name signifies an insignificant (huckleberry) Irish child (Finn). The stereotypical Irishman of the nineteenth century was a drunkard and thief, and Irish immigrants frequently were met by signs in shop windows reading “No Irish Need Apply.” Although Irish women could get jobs as housekeepers, Irish males were more often hired as day laborers and rarely hired as butlers or allowed to work in a home; African-American males were more often hired as house-servants than Irish-American males. If African-Americans occupied the bottom rung of the social ladder during and after slavery, Irish-Americans, who flooded into the country in the 1840s to escape the cruelties of British rule and forced starvation (not famine), were only one rung up the ladder – which bred resentment and racism. Huck was the son of Pap Finn, the town drunk, an Irishman who need not apply, nor should his son.
“It’s lovely to live on a raft” says Huck just a few paragraphs into chapter 19 of Mark Twain’s masterpiece. But what kind of raft is it lovely to live on, and does it even matter what kind of raft Huck lived on? Of course, everyone who has read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn knows that the raft that transported Huck and Jim into literary immortality was a tiny affair consisting of a few short logs tied together with barely enough room to hold the two of them. Proof of this can be found on the covers of many modern paperback editions of the book. But looking at more covers it becomes obvious that their tiny raft was made of logs with a plank deck on top, and a wigwam. Of course, anyone who has studied the one dozen illustrations in the first edition of the book (found in chapters 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 24, 29, and 40) knows that their raft was in fact made of planks and had a wigwam and a long steering oar, but nowhere in the book does an illustration depict the entire raft, so even a careful study of E. W. Kemble’s drawings does not tell the whole story. Finally, anyone who has read the text carefully, knows that Huck gives a fuller description of their raft, declaring that it measured twelve feet by fifteen or sixteen feet, and that it was made of pine planks that had broken off of a much larger lumber raft, and that it sat a good six or seven inches out of the water, and had one long oar. They also know that Jim had to fashion a second steering oar to control their not-so-tiny raft, make a raised platform of dirt upon which to build a fire, and build a wigwam large enough to accommodate that fire. They also know that the raft later had room for the Duke and the King. These astute readers think they know more than those readers who misplaced their trust in those modern paperback covers, but even astute readers don’t know the half of it.
There is a homeplace in nearly every American novel. Sometimes it’s the focus of the story; other times it’s in the background. But every protagonist has fled their homeplace, or fled and returned–or else never left at all. Those who flee take some of their homeplace with them. Homeplaces haunt, choke, nourish, comfort, and extinguish the spirit, often all at once. They are populated with family we did not choose, including some we’d never choose. They swarm with friends we didn’t choose either; we just grew up with them as they revealed their flaws a little at a time, and we adjusted and forgave along the way. Even the dead and the absent are alive in the homeplace, insisting on remembrance.