Context Matters

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I have enjoyed reading as long as I can remember.

My mother encouraged it, first by reading stories to my brother and me, then by urging us to read on our own as we developed that skill. As I say, it has been a lifelong passion for me, and two of my favorite books are Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" and Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." I have read them both several times.

I can't remember now, but I believe I read both books for the first time in school. I know they were required reading when I was in high school, but I can't remember if that was the first time I ever read them. It may not have been, but I know it was the first time for many of my classmates.

Unfortunately, those books — and others — are no longer required reading in Duluth, Minn., schools because they contain the N–word. This is not new. It has happened before.

What is new, I suppose, is that Duluth won't be taking these books off the shelves entirely. The schools just won't require the students to read them.

Thus I assume there will be no book burnings in Duluth.

I understand the reasoning behind this move — but I believe it is faulty and dangerous.

School districts feel they are showing sensitivity by not requiring students to read words they may find offensive.

But I think they are doing more harm than good.

You can't protect people from things that are offensive. The world is a messy place. And if kids are anything like they were when I was in high school, it's too late to protect them. They've been exposed to far worse than the N–word already.

Besides, you have to keep in mind the context in which the offensive word was used.

Twain wrote about 19th–century America. My grandparents were born in 19th–century America, and they used that word as an adjective, no different for them than describing the color of someone's hair. When I read "Huckleberry Finn" — and I have read it several times and plan to do so again soon — I can see and hear my grandparents.

Twenty–first–century readers see a racial slur, a noun, when they see the word nigger, and that is consistent with their times and conditioning. But people of the 19th century frequently used it as an adjective, a modifier — which was consistent with their times and conditioning.

And I'm certain they would have been appalled if anyone had suggested that they were racists. The N–word was simply a word that was in common use in the world in which they grew up.

I grew up in a different world. And in hindsight, by modern standards, perhaps my grandparents were racists.

But if they were, they were products of the world in which they were raised. I believe it is wrong to hold people from a different time to modern standards — and isn't that what school districts are doing when they take this kind of step?

As for Harper Lee's book — she wrote about the American South in the '30s. She told an important story that couldn't be told without that word. The people who used it in the book were, without a doubt, racists, but the book taught a valuable lesson and is regarded as perhaps the finest example of 20th–century American literature. If you scrub it clean of the N–word, you rob it of its impact.

I believe writers use words for specific purposes. In this case, the N–word provided insight into the reality of times and places the reader would never see. But I think it also was used by these writers — and others — to make readers feel a little uncomfortable. Before any significant change of any kind can come, people must feel uncomfortable.

I have heard of at least one publisher that has published an alternative version of "Huckleberry Finn" in which the N–word was replaced by the word slave. But if the issue is racism, that substitution is meaningless. Anyone can be a slave. Historically, it is not a condition that has been defined by race.

So let's stop tap dancing around the real issue. Let's have a long overdue conversation about race in this country. Let's be blunt and talk about the things that we have avoided talking about. Let's face facts, however unpleasant those facts may be. I'm not an advocate of rewriting history — and I am certainly not in favor of rewriting Twain (as if anyone could).

I love history for many reasons, but one of the most important is summed up in the words of philosopher George Santayana: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

Twain and Lee and similar writers help us remember our messy past so we don't have to make the same mistakes.

Don't Fixate on One Word: 'Huck Finn' Was Mark Twain's Best Work

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"You don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth."

Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

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Sometime in February of 1885, Mark Twain published The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are those who will tell you that it was published 130 years ago today — but I haven't been able to confirm the exact date, only the month and year.

I admit, I got around to reading it a lot later than I should have. I've tried to make up for lost time by re–reading it several times, though, and I believe it really is the fabled great American novel (although, interestingly, it was first published in England in December 1884). I've read a lot of Twain's writing in my life — I admire his work as only another writer can, and much of his best work can be found in the pages of Huckleberry Finn.

(I would be tempted to drop the "much of" portion of that preceding statement — except there are just too many excellent books and articles that Twain wrote in his lifetime to be that absolute.)

It is also a great glimpse into 19th–century America told by a man who lived in that century. Twain was a gifted writer, and his descriptions of people and places Conversations were written in the regional dialect of eastern Missouri where Twain grew up. The dialogue of the black characters was in the race–specific dialect — much of which survives to this day.

To an extent, I suppose, that was responsible for some of the attempts over the years to ban Huckleberry Finn from school libraries and such. But, mostly, the objection has been to the use of the word nigger, which is used frequently in the book — but, strange as this may sound, it wasn't intended in a racist way. It was a descriptive word, not a slur — unless it was preceded by words that were more specific accusations, and that definitely would change the context of the use of that word.

Fact is, Abraham Lincoln used the word nigger in conversation — and I think we all would agree that Lincoln was not a racist. Language has struggled in the last century or so to find an acceptable descriptive word for that segment of the population. When nigger came to be seen as a slur by most, the word colored came into favor, then the word black was preferred.

I believe that books that are about particular times and places should use, as much as possible, the language that was used in that place in that time, just as the characters should dress as the people of that time did and see the things those people saw — especially if the writer lived in those times.

And make no mistake — Twain definitely was writing from memory. The world he described in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn had ceased to exist a couple of decades before that book was published.

Not so long ago, there was a movement to sanitize Huck Finn by inserting a politically correct term every time nigger appeared in the book, but I have never felt right about that. It isn't used maliciously in the book, and by inserting a 21st–century word, you're forcing 19th–century characters to live by linguistic rules that were not of their time. There is no need to subject them to that just because we in the 21st century struggle with that issue. It changes the writer's work. You may not think it is much of a change, but I do. Writing is a form of self–expression. It is an art form and such external editing changes it, no matter how subtle you may think the change is. It reminds me of several years ago when there was a movement to "colorize" black–and–white movies. I tried to watch a colorized movie once, and it was like watching someone paint a mustache on the Mona Lisa.

Only the artist should change an artist's work.

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"We said there warn't no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don't. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft."

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Twain had a great memory, though. He was nearly 50 when he wrote Huckleberry Finn — and, in spite of what Huck said in those first sentences, maybe he did make up a lot of it, but his memory was sharper than that, and I think the world and the people he described really were those of the antebellum South. It is almost a time capsule, a glimpse at a world that existed nearly two centuries ago. Warts and all.

A point that those who complain about the use of the word nigger always seem to miss is that Huckleberry Finn was intended as a satire — and a scathing satire it was, too, on the attitudes of the time, particularly racist attitudes. In the story, Huck Finn was about 13 or 14 so, if Twain was using himself at that age as the model for the character and the time he was that age, the times he described were probably more than a decade before the start of the Civil War.

Huckleberry Finn is an entertaining history lesson that must never be allowed to vanish. I have the same copy on my shelf that I have had since I was in college. It's a bit ragged and dog–eared now, but I wouldn't part with it for anything.

As one who often laments the absence of knowledge of history in young Americans, I believe young people should be encouraged to read Huckleberry Finn, not discouraged. At the very least, it should not be banned from libraries — for libraries are supposed to contain knowledge for generations to come, to enlighten those who walk through their doors.

Colorizing Twain

I am second to no one in my admiration for Mark Twain.

There was a reason why, as I observed in 2009, William Faulkner called him "the father of American literature."

On that occasion, I also pointed out that his works had "fallen victim to 20th century political correctness."

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," I wrote — also regarded by many, if not most, literary scholars as the definitive "great American novel" — was under assault "because of its frequent use of the word 'nigger,' which was commonly used in the 19th century."

In this matter, I have a new abomination to report — and you can thank, of all people, an English professor, who undoubtedly must have spent much time in college studying the great writers and their works.

He doesn't seem to have learned much from that experience.

This professor (Alan Gribben of Auburn University), Julie Bosman for the New York Times reports, approached the publisher (NewSouth Books) last summer with the idea of publishing "Huck Finn" with slave replacing nigger. The publisher will publish the edited version next month.

The professor told the Times that he wanted "to get us away from obsessing about this one word and just let the stories stand alone."

Sounds like a good intention. But you know what they say about good intentions, don't you?

Twain himself said, "Half of the results of a good intention are evil; half the results of an evil intention are good."

Personally, I think all of the results of this particular good intention are, if not exactly evil, certainly influenced by it.

A book like "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" is a priceless window into history. It tells of an America in another century on the brink of unprecedented advancement. A gifted writer like Twain can describe the clothes people wore, the houses they lived in, the people they knew, the language they used, and the reader will come away with a clear understanding of what life was like in those times.

Gribben protests that "I'm by no means sanitizing Mark Twain. The sharp social critiques are in there. The humor is intact."

Maybe so, but to change even a single word from the way people spoke in the late 19th century in order to conform to some sort of 21st century notion of political correctness is just wrong.

(Incidentally, the word injun was replaced with Indian.)

"Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" has been getting people worked up for more than 125 years. It's interesting, as Hillel Italie writes for Associated Press, that "[w]hen first published, 'Huckleberry Finn' was criticized for advocating bad behavior, for being a 'coarse book not likely to set a good example for the young,' says Justin Kaplan, author of a Pulitzer Prize–winning Twain biography."

As time went by, Italie observes, "values changed, (and) so did the objections."

Now the objections center on the language of another time, the context of another era, because the values of today are uncomfortable with the values of yesterday. Well, that isn't enough for me.

First of all, it is ridiculous, as I wrote in 2009, even to imply that Twain was a racist because a racist word appears in one of his novels. It's like saying that Carroll O'Connor was a bigot because he played one on television.

But, beyond that, I believe it is wrong to tinker with a writer's words. You may not like them, but that is not enough justification, in a free society, to censor them. A writer is an artist. If you're going to change an artist's work, you'd better have some damn good reasons.

The possibility that someone might be offended simply isn't good enough.

To me, it's like that period some 20 years or so ago when it was popular to "colorize" films that were made in black and white. I objected to that then for much the same reason that I object to this unnecessary deletion of an expletive. It is an alteration of an artist's work.

Besides, I'm not so sure that, by removing a word like "nigger" from the book, you remove the tension and the misunderstanding of its application by earlier generations. Obviously, in the 21st century, that word has some very ugly history, but much of that history hadn't happened by the time "Huck Finn" was published in 1885.

It's worth remembering that, even if "nigger" (and "injun," for that matter) is stricken from the book, it will still contain references to homicides, child abuse, substance abuse and other behaviors that most parents probably would prefer their children didn't emulate.

(If bad behavior becomes the basis for criticism, I guess that will mean we have come full circle.)

In his own defense, Twain recommended that those who desire more guidance on those subjects should consult "an unexpurgated Bible" — which never uses the word "nigger" but does discuss murders, fraud, theft and alcohol consumption (if not abuse) at length.

Paying the Fiddler

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"This would be a great world to dance in if we didn't have to pay the fiddler."

Will Rogers

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It was three–quarters of a century ago today that America lost one of its most beloved humorists, Will Rogers.

Deaths are often described as tragic. That seems like a bit of an exaggeration to me. Most deaths are regrettable. And some rise to the level of tragic.

Rogers' death really was tragic. He and pilot Wiley Post died when their plane crashed in Alaska. Rogers was 55 years old.

(I guess it is both ironic and tragic that former Sen. Ted Stevens perished in a plane crash in Alaska earlier this week. Stevens was in his 80s — and, while it is seldom a shock when someone in that age group dies, the circumstances must be seen as tragic. The ironic part, I suppose, is the fact that a well–known person died in a plane crash in Alaska only a few days before the 75th anniversary of Rogers' death.

(It is of little or no consolation to those who lost loved ones on Tuesday, but this is a reminder that technological advancements have not conquered all things.

(To put this into perspective, I suppose, Stevens would have been 11 years old when Rogers' plane went down. But he wasn't living in Alaska at that time in his life. He was born in Indiana, where he lived until sometime in his teens. He did not come to Alaska until he was an adult.)

Along with Mark Twain, I guess Rogers is my favorite humorist of all time.

And let me be clear about something here. I differentiate between humorists and comedians.

When I think of a humorist, I think of a writer, first and foremost — and it ought to be clear to anyone who reads my blogs that I have a special reverence for writers. Twain was a writer, noted for his newspaper and novel writing. Rogers was a writer, too. He did other things, among them entertaining people in vaudeville and in the movies, but he was a writer. In fact, he wrote his newspaper column while he and Post were flying across Alaska in the summer of 1935.

I like a good comedian, too, but I think of comedians as people who tell jokes on a stage. They can be more than that — my absolute favorite comedian of all time, George Carlin, was more than just a joke teller. He was also an author in his later years.

But Carlin made his reputation with his stage comedy. His "Seven Words You Can't Say on Television" shtick will still be a classic decades from now — even if, as seems likely, it becomes routine for all seven words to be uttered on television (which, undoubtedly, will render that once–scandalous routine quaint, and wouldn't that amuse Carlin?).

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In the summer of 1994, the year before my mother died,
my parents paid a visit to the Will Rogers Memorial
in Claremore, Okla., where the humorist is entombed.

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Will Rogers was a humorist, perhaps the last true humorist this country has had (well, maybe that's an exaggeration in a country that has produced the likes of Mike Royko and Erma Bombeck since Rogers' death). And, no matter which side of the political fence his readers occupied, they all loved him. Maybe that is why he said, "I never met a man I didn't like."

(To give you an idea of just how open–minded Rogers was, he said that about Leon Trotsky.)

Maybe it was a mutual admiration thing. Everyone liked him so he liked everybody.

I can't help feeling that there is a certain amount of harmony at work here on the 75th anniversary of Rogers' untimely death. It kind of appeals to my sense of order.

In my hometown tomorrow, a memorial service will be held for my friend Phyllis, who died on August 5 (which happens to be the anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's death — an ironic note, given that Phyllis was an old movie buff). I've been writing a lot about Phyllis at my Freedom Writing blog since she died, and I expect to write about her from time to time in the future. She had that kind of influence on me.

She brought a lot of love and a lot of laughter into the lives of everyone who knew her. I think just about all her friends would agree that she, like Rogers, never met anyone she didn't like.

And just about everyone liked her, too.

She was human, of course, and, therefore, must have rubbed a few people the wrong way in her life, but their number must be few.

As I think about my friendship with Phyllis, I remember many laughs, and I recall that we spoke about many things. But I don't remember talking much about humorists and comedians.

Oh, we talked about funny performers we both enjoyed watching in movies, like Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon and Peter Sellers, and we talked about the TV sitcoms we liked. But I don't remember talking about Will Rogers, and I do regret that.

Especially now that she, like Rogers, has paid the fiddler.

My time for that will come as well. And, if the afterlife exists, I am sure I will see her again.

But I will always be sorry that we never discussed Rogers and Twain in this life.

I really doubt the subject will come up in the next world.

A Literary Double Reverse

I have written of my admiration for Mark Twain at my Freedom Writing blog.

Actually, my fondness for Twain's works goes back a long way. Among my readers are people with whom I grew up, and most of them certainly could tell you of times when I urged them to read Twain.

I read a lot of Twain when I was in high school and college. Sometimes it was an assignment. Sometimes it was something I did on my own. But, whether I was assigned to do it or I did it on my own initiative, I can't think of anything I ever read by Twain that I haven't (a) quoted directly, (b) mentioned generally in a conversation, (c) recommended to people, (d) cited in an article or term paper or (e) some or all of the above.

One book that I continue to recommend to people many years after reading it for the first time — even though, in recent years, it has been sacrificed in many places to the gods of political correctness — is "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn."

If you're a writer, you have probably dreamed of writing the Great American Novel. In my experience, the Great American Novel almost never comes along. But "Huckleberry Finn" is an exception to that rule. It has been called the Great American Novel by many people — and with good reason.

"Huckleberry Finn" was first published 125 years ago last month. But, as good as it is and as deserving of some attention, today I want to turn my attention to one of Twain's novels that was published a few years earlier, was decidedly not an American tale and may have been recreated in movies and recordings or served as the inspiration for other people's works as much as — if not more than — anything else Twain ever wrote.

I am speaking of "The Prince and the Pauper," which was, as nearly as I can tell, Twain's first foray into historical fiction. It dealt with two boys who were almost identical in spite of the fact that they had different parents. One of the boys was named Edward, and he happened to be the prince of Wales. The other boy was named Tom, and he was from a poor family.

The boys were born the same day but never knew of each other's existence until just before Edward's father, King Henry VIII, died, when fate brought them together. In the book, the two agreed to switch places temporarily, and, in the process, they discovered the pitfalls in each other's lives.

It was truly a daring subject for Twain to tackle in his first real attempt to write historical fiction. Much of the time, when one reads historical fiction, the characters are fictional, too. They may combine qualities of real people, but you seldom read historical novels in which a main character was a real person from history.

But that was what set "The Prince and the Pauper" apart from other works of historical fiction because this story dealt with an actual figure from more than three centuries earlier — Edward VI. And the historical record tells us that he became king of England on Jan. 28, 1547. His father had just died, and Edward was 9 years old. Nearly a month would pass before he was crowned at Westminster Abbey, which was not unusual, but, for all intents and purposes, he became king 463 years ago tomorrow.

Always a sickly boy, Edward died less than 6½ years after becoming king and was succeeded by his older sisters, Lady Jane Grey and Mary I. That is the historical record.

In the book, Twain wrote that Edward's experiences living in poverty and suffering at the hand of Tom's abusive father affected him. He pledged to govern wisely when restored to his rightful place, but that can be classified as literary speculation. Edward died before reaching the age of maturity; he was king in name, but in actual deed his reign was overseen by executors who had been named in his father's will.

We will never know if he would have ruled more mercifully than his predecessors, including his father, because — to my knowledge — he was never allowed to make any royal decisions.

Twain was always finding ways to work his real–world interests into his fictional works. He had a genuine fascination with science, and he combined that with his desire to write historical fiction when he wrote about time travel in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" several years later.

"The Prince and the Pauper" is a classic, and it has led to not only more than half a dozen film and TV adaptations but also countless stories that must have been inspired by Twain's original tale.

It seems like such an obvious theme, doesn't it? How many times have you seen a movie or an episode of a TV show where the story was based on the notion that two people looked alike? Perhaps someone wrote such a story before Twain came along, but I have to think he originated it. Even if the stories that served as the foundation for some movies or TV shows are said to have been inspired by something else, I still have to think that Twain played a role.

"The Parent Trap," for example, was based on a book that was published nearly 40 years after Twain died. In that story, the two people who looked the same were twins who went with a different biological parent when their parents divorced. I can't help wondering if Erich Kästner, the author of the book that inspired that movie, wasn't, in turn, influenced by Twain, who wrote "The Prince and the Pauper" nearly 20 years before Kästner was born.

Likewise, I wonder if Twain was at the heart of the inspiration for the movie "Dave," in which Kevin Kline plays both the president and a man who earns some money impersonating him. When the president is incapacitated, his unscrupulous chief of staff gets the impersonator to step in and pretend to be the president, giving the chief of staff the opportunity to wield the actual power from behind the scenes.

That story, it was said, was inspired by Anthony Hope's "The Prisoner of Zenda." Hope was closer to Twain's age. He was born about 28 years after Twain, and he wrote his book about 13 years after Twain wrote "The Prince and the Pauper."

It seems plausible to me that Hope's tale of a political decoy could have been inspired by Twain's story. But I have seen nothing to confirm that.

I don't know if either of those books were influenced by "The Prince and the Pauper." But it makes sense, doesn't it?

Even if the authors didn't realize it themselves, it makes sense.