An Irishman's Diary

Hands up those of you who ever read the introductions to classic novels? Hmm, just as I thought. I used to avoid them too, as a rule. There are so many classics and so little time, after all, and the sense of obligation that drives you to start reading them is often not enough fuel to complete the journey. If the introduction was anyway long, I used to fear it would sap my will before reaching the actual novel.

It wasn't until I re-read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a few years ago that - confident of the book's attractions - I risked the lengthy introduction in my old Penguin paperback. But the experience was so rewarding, I have since lost the ability to ignore publishers' preambles and go straight to the text. Huckleberry Finn may be a special case, of course, in that it became what it is almost in spite of the author: a fact that also explains why it has one of the weakest endings of any great book.

If Mark Twain had followed his original plan, it would not have been a raft novel, for one thing. The book ran away with him, in a sense. As he first envisaged it, Huck and Jim were to drift down the Mississippi, from Hannibal in slave-holding Missouri only as far as Cairo, where the great river meets the Ohio. There they would switch waterways and travel up-river, into the "free" states, where Jim would be delivered from slavery.

Twain dashed off the first 16 chapters effortlessly in 1876, taking the heroes past Cairo, which they overshoot during the night before losing their raft. There is now no logical alternative for them but to turn around (presumably in a rowing boat).

But, as Peter Coveney's introduction explains, Twain got stuck at this point, and stayed stuck for years. American literature had reached a crossroads, or at any rate a junction of two rivers, and the former riverboat pilot didn't know where to go.

"In getting rid of the raft," says Coveney, "he had got rid of his novel." The problem was not confined to river geography. Twain had started the book immediately after The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and saw it as a "kind-of companion" to that likeable but slight work. "Another boy's book" was his original prescription for the novel whose hero would later be placed (by T.S. Eliot) alongside "Ulysses, Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan [ and] Hamlet". For the moment, it was caught somewhere between these extremes and Twain left it there.

It was only when he allowed Huck and Jim to recover the raft and continue downstream, further into the south and danger, that the book acquired its depth. The growing distance from Hannibal, focus of Twain's nostalgia for an idealised past, probably helped free the author's imagination. But so did his disreputable character. Whereas Tom Sawyer was a respectable scamp, Huck was the motherless son of a drunk. The further Twain went in the company of this outsider with a moral dilemma over what to do about "the nigger", the clearer his own voice became.

Hiding behind the naïve vernacular of his hero was a writer seriously torn between belief in the progress of the US north-east - where he had gone to live - and regret for the wildness and innocence his country had lost. Like Huck, Twain railed against attempts to "sivilise" him and in the civilisation of the riverbank communities they find plenty to rebel against together. In the novel's acclaimed middle section, according to Coveney, "the accumulated indictment of human depravity almost overwhelms the balance of the work".

The book is about much more than slavery. Even so, the story reaches its climax in that great passage when Huck briefly makes peace with himself by deciding to betray Jim in a letter to his owner, the pious Miss Watson. By the terms of the only civilisation he has experienced, this is the right thing to do: "I felt good and all washed clean of sin for the first time I had ever felt so in my life, and I knowed I could pray now".

But his peace doesn't last long. He starts thinking about his friendship with Jim again and tears up the letter, hands trembling at the finality of his decision. "All right then, I'll go to hell [ he declared]. It was awful thoughts and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming."

Twain finished the book in another burst in 1883. Yet even then, he didn't know what he had. In fact, when Huck and Jim reach their revised destination - Phelps's farm in Arkansas, where they are reunited with Tom Sawyer - the author inexcusably allows his inferior creation to take over, dominating for the remainder of the story.

Huck's heroism is devalued by a plot twist and, as Coveney complains, "the moral heart of the novel leaks away in all those contrived adventures of Tom Sawyer to 'free' the already, as it transpires, free nigger Jim". Even Hemingway, who loved the book, called the conclusion "cheating". Another critic suggested there was "no more chilling descent in the whole range of the English novel." For Coveney, it just showed how "Twain's uneven talent ran towards failure much of the time; how very nearly, in fact, he came to writing a 'kind of companion to Tom Sawyer'."

You can enjoy The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn without reading any introduction. While you may wonder about the change of tone in the final chapters, you probably won't notice the divide at the end of Chapter 16 where Twain got stuck for so long.

But it helps to know something of the context in which it was written. If nothing else, it adds to the drama of the great American novel when you realise that it only got there by the skin of its teeth.