Open Writing

Once upon a time in 1905, a New York librarian named Asa Don Dickinson wrote to Mark Twain seeking advice. Dickinson worked for the Brooklyn Public Library, where the staff learned that copies of "Tom Sawyer" and "Huckleberry Finn" were shelved with the children's books. The head of the children's division "was greatly shocked to hear this and at once ordered that they be transferred to the adult department."

Dickinson defended them, for his favorite book was "Huckleberry Finn," and as librarian to the blind, he'd read it aloud to his patrons, "and the amount of innocent enjoyment it gave them has never been equaled by anything I have since read."

A follow-up librarians' meeting on the matter was scheduled, and he wrote Twain asking him "to give a word or two to say in witness of his (Huckleberry's) good character."

This happened twenty years after "Huckleberry" was published and originally kicked up a stink. The Concord, Massachusetts Public Library was the first library to ban it, and while others followed suit, the Concord library became the national laughing stock. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, wrote, "The directors of the Concord Public Library have joined in the general scheme to advertise Mark Twain's new book, 'Huckleberry Finn.' They have placed it on the 'Index Expurgatorius,' and this will compel every citizen of Concord to read the book in order to see why the guardians of his morals prohibited it."

Racism certainly played its ugly part early on, but publicly the banners objected to Twain using dialects and bad grammar in his writing, and, as Dickinson reported, "the prevailing opinion of Huck is that he was a deceitful boy who said 'sweat' when he should have said 'perspiration.'" Your grammar word for the week is "dysphemism," the insertion of a more objectionable word in place of one less offensive.

Some writers use this tool clumsily. Not Mr. Twain. Lionel Trilling, a leading American literary critic, said, "In form and style Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect work" that "established for written prose the virtues of American colloquial speech. This has nothing to do with pronunciation or grammar. It has something to do with ease and freedom in the use of the language. Most of all it has something to do with the structure of the sentence, which is simple, direct, and fluent, maintaining the rhythm of the word-groups of speech and the intonations of the speaking voice."

Responding to Dickinson, Twain wrote "I am troubled by what you say. I wrote Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn for adults exclusively, and it always distresses me when I find that boys and girls have been allowed access to them. The mind that becomes soiled in youth can never again be washed clean; I know this by my own experience, and to this day I cherish an unappeasable bitterness against the unfaithful guardians of my young life, who not only permitted but compelled me to read an unexpurgated Bible through before I was 15 … Most honestly do I wish I could say a softening word or two in defense of Huck's character … but really in my opinion it is no better than those of Solomon, David, Satan, and the rest of the sacred brotherhood."

Dickinson and Twain agreed to keep their correspondence private, but the letters are included in the three-volume, 500,000 word "Autobiography of Mark Twain," published by the University of California Press. Twain forbade publishing this unexpurgated memoir for 100 years following his death, saying "all sound and sane expressions of opinion must be left out ... There might be a market for that kind of wares a century from now."

Twain also reveals in his Autobiography that the model for Huck was a classmate from Hannibal, MO named Tom Blankenship. Tom's father was the town drunk, like Huck's, and, Twain wrote, "He was ignorant, unwashed, insufficiently fed; but he had as good a heart as any boy ever had … and as his society was forbidden us by our parents, the prohibition trebled and quadrupled its value, and therefore we sought and got more of his society than any other boy's."

Banning anything does that.

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