A New Tale For Huck And Jim

The New Yorker magazine this week is publishing - with great fanfare - a never-before-seen story that Mark Twain dropped from his 1885 masterpiece, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” But if it’s so good, why did Twain cut it? And does it deserve to be published in a future edition of “Huck Finn”?

“Jim and the Dead Man,” a recently discovered episode Twain dropped from his novel, appears in the June 26 and July 3 double fiction issue of the magazine, on newsstands this week (with some appreciations of “Huck” by Bobbie Ann Mason, Roger Angell, E.L. Doctorow, William Styron and David Bradley). Twain fans, scholars and readers everywhere will welcome the chance to read the 1,600-word episode, a morbidly comic tale in which the escaped slave, Jim, recalls a frightening night he spent with medical school cadavers, which, he decides, are not dead enough for him.

The story is an outtake, plucked from a newly rediscovered manuscript of the novel. Its next stop, after The New Yorker, will be in a new Random House “reader’s edition” of “Huck Finn” with other changes and passages from the reclaimed manuscript - set off by brackets or some other device. Publication is set for early next year.

Scholars are tickled to have the new material on “Huck,” but not everyone is thrilled with the story or by the idea that a story Twain tossed out is, in a way, being put back into his greatest work.

“I think he (Twain) was wise to cut out the so-called ghost story,” says Louis Budd, the James B. Duke professor emeritus of English at Duke University in Durham, N.C., and a leading Twain scholar. “The New Yorker hype about this is laughable - that it’s a little masterpiece. I think it’s embarrassingly bad.”

While Budd thinks it’s a bit of over-the top racial stereotyping, fellow Twain scholar Victor Doyno admires it and thinks a racist reading is a modern distortion.

“I like it. It’s a good, suspenseful story; it plays with Huck’s emotions,” says Doyno, a professor of English and American literature at the State University of New York at Buffalo who has written extensively about the writing of “Huck Finn.” He adds that he understands why Twain took it out - but Doyno would rather not share his understanding with a newspaper reporter because he is writing his own article on the subject.

The source for the story may well have been Twain’s uncle, James Lampton, a physician. Robert Hirst, general editor of the Mark Twain Project at the University of California in Berkeley, Calif., says journal entries suggest that Lampton had told Twain the story and that Twain was trying it out early in his writing of “Huck Finn,” which was begun in 1876, shelved for three years and then worked on sporadically through 1883.

“I think there are good reasons for him to cut it out,” says Hirst, referring to the minstrel-show quality of the story.

The chapter, as published in the book, begins with Jim and Huck ducking from a storm on Jackson’s Island in the Mississippi River. (In the manuscript, Huck asks for a ghost story and Jim tells his tale.) The chapter is dominated, however, by a scene in which Huck and Jim come alongside a house that is floating down the river. The dead man in the house turns out to be Huck’s father - Pap.

John Boyer, executive director of Hartford’s Mark Twain House, says that the story in The New Yorker and the Random House project will give the world a richer appreciation of “Huck Finn,” but that average readers must be discerning, because the new information also complicates our view of the book.

“We will never have Mark Twain around to ask him why he took out what he did and why he left in what he did,” Boyer said.

The story is but one of several revelations included in a manuscript found in 1990 in an attic trunk in Hollywood, according to Doyno, who was one of the first scholars to see the manuscript. “It (the rediscovered manuscript) means we now have a good history of one of our major cultural documents,” he says. Overall, he says, knowing what was changed and deleted enhances our understanding of the book.

Twain originally sent the manuscript to New York’s Buffalo and Erie County Public Library in 1887; he had donated the second part of the manuscript two years earlier and mailed the first part when he found it. (The first part included the excised episode and other elements that were dropped or changed.)

Part one was among the possessions of James Fraser Gluck, a lawyer for the library, who died in 1897. (Gluck apparently had taken it home to have it bound.)

Gluck’s widow moved to California, and his granddaughters stumbled upon the document in a trunk there in 1990. They were prepared to sell it at auction, when the Buffalo library (which already had the second part of the manuscript) asserted its ownership claim, and the New York-based Mark Twain Foundation, which owns the right to Twain’s unpublished works, also stepped in.

The three parties negotiated a settlement in which the Gluck sisters received a payment (reported to be in the low six figures), the library got the manuscript, and all three parties will share royalties from publication.

Doyno has been an adviser to Random House and supports the idea of a new edition with the changes highlighted but interwoven with the text in some way.

But Budd is wary of this approach and says he would prefer to have the manuscript changes in an appendix.

Shelley Fisher Fishkin, professor of American Studies at the University of Texas and author of “Was Huck Black?” says bracketed or highlighted passages inserted into the text threaten “to turn ‘Huck Finn’ into a choose-your-own-adventure book.”

“Huck Finn” has been amended before.

Beginning in 1942, some editors began including a section of Chapter 16 that Twain had cut. Called the “raft chapter,” Twain agreed to cut it after his publisher wanted to reduce the physical size of the book (so he could sell “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” as a matched set).

Editors have subsequently decided that exclusion of the passage was an act of censorship, and it is now included in what has become the standard text: the Twain Project edition, published by the University of California Press. But there is no evidence that anyone forced Twain to make other changes, such as dropping “Jim and the Dead Man.”