POSTED RESPONSE TO AN EDITORIAL IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
I have long held a minority position on Huckleberry Finn.
Many years ago I chose certain books to read aloud to children, and one of them was Huckleberry.
The more than two hundred repetitions of that ugly word became a serious embarrassment.
I can only imagine the problem in a classroom of black or partly black children.
I understand the accepted reason for Twain's writing this way - that the word would lose its explosive power - but I think that the idea is just plain wrong.
Words like that one do not lose their sting with repetition.
The American black comedian, Dick Gregory, wrote a small book decades ago with that same word as its title. His stated purpose was the same one claimed for Huckleberry.
Well, it did not work, Gregory’s book is forgotten, and that word remains deeply offensive, and just so Twain’s use of the word.
Twain himself, people either forget or do not know, was a very rough character, and he used that kind of language in his daily life just as Harry Truman did decades later, a native of the same state.
Twain was also a cantankerous and often a very angry man, as we see with blinding clarity in the biographical materials just recently published after a hundred-year moratorium.
I am not totally convinced Twain’s intention was even what is claimed as his purpose, but regardless, passages of the book are excruciatingly embarrassing and counterproductive.
The very fact that there has always been this sentimental aura around Huckleberry in America is actually evidence of a great deal of institutionalized insensitivity.
The publisher of the new edition of Huckleberry has done absolutely the wrong thing: censorship is never acceptable. Huckleberry should be retired from public school curricula, retaining a place on library shelves for those who want to read it.
The idea of a boy and a runaway slave rafting down the Mississippi is a very appealing one, full of symbolism, but I do not agree with Hemingway that the book was the beginning of American literature. Moby Dick is a far more worthy candidate.
