Adventures of Tom Sawyer (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (5 page)

Without the novel’s longer development, Tom’s extraordinary capacity for self-absorption—his “vicious vanity” (p. 112)—might well remain for us his defining characteristic. Aunt Polly is not wrong when she calls attention to Tom’s supreme “selfishness” (p. 116). And, as readers, we are frequently witnesses to his maudlin self- pity. Furthermore, we know what a habitual and self-interested liar he is. Tom lies so steadily and successfully, and in so many different human situations, that his relation to the reader risks destabilization. In the moment, we never quite know whether he is telling the truth or not.

But as the plot unfolds, we are able to sort this matter out (through a series of revelations), and in doing so we learn that, for the most part, Tom’s deceptions have been harmless or even motivated by good intentions; they fall into the category of what Aunt Polly calls the “blessed, blessed lie” (p. 117). Judge Thatcher, after all, declares that Tom’s taking the blame for Becky’s transgression at school is “a noble, a generous, a magnanimous lie” (p. 200). Even so, there is no escaping the fact that Tom often exhibits an instinctive aversion to the truth, and that he takes enormous pleasure in his lies—a function, in part, of his romantic imagination and his gift at wordplay. (His role as a kind of fabulist suggests another area of kinship with his creator Mark Twain.) But, again, the novel itself, in its larger rationalization and ordering of Tom’s actions, creates a benign context for his lies.

Just as the form of the novel can be said to validate Tom’s character, it also validated Mark Twain’s role as a man of letters. The first full-scale novel he had completed,
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(though it was not enthusiastically received when first published in 1876) brought him into the company of writers like his friend William Dean Howells. In this work, Twain demonstrated his capacity to weave the longer tapestries of fiction, and to elaborate them with his richest materials of memory, humor, and social criticism. Though an immature and experimental work, flawed by divided purposes,
Tom Sawyer
nevertheless contains all the elements of the writer’s genius. Generations of readers have been content to ignore the flaws, and have given over their imaginations to Mark Twain’s “hymn” to childhood.

 

H. Daniel Peck is John Guy Vassar Professor of English at Vassar College, where he has served as Director of the American Culture Program and the Environmental Studies Program. He is the author of
Thoreau‘s Morning Work
(1990) and
A World by Itself: The Pastoral Moment in Cooper’s Fiction
(1977), both published by Yale University Press. Professor Peck is the editor of the
The Green American Tradition
(1989) and
New Essays
on
“The Last of the Mohicans”
(1993), as well as the Penguin Classics editions
A Year in Thoreau’s Journal: 1851
and Thoreau’s
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
He is also editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Cooper’s
The Deerslayer.
A past chairman of the Modern Language Association’s Division on Nineteenth-Century American Literature, Professor Peck is a contributor to the
Columbia Literary History of the United States
and the
Heath Anthology of American Literature.
He has been the recipient of two senior research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities and a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies. For the National Endowment, he has directed two Summer Institutes for College and University Faculty, and a national conference on “American Studies and the Undergraduate Humanities Curriculum.” Recently he was a fellow at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he was working on a developing study of landscape in American literary and visual art. Professor Peck lives in Poughkeepsie, New York, with his wife Patricia B. Wallace.

 

Acknowledgments. Professor Peck’s research assistant, Matthew Saks, who graduated from Vassar College in 2003 as recipient of the Alice D. Snyder Prize for overall excellence in English, assisted in developing the explanatory notes for this volume; he also helped Professor Peck think through the issues raised in the introduction. Patricia B. Wallace, Professor of English at Vassar College, provided an illuminating and extremely helpful reading of the introduction.

1
Twain had earlier coauthored, with Charles Dudley Warner,
The Gilded Age
(1873), a fictional social critique of the post-Civil War era in America.

2
Twain’s Hartford home, which he moved into in 1874 when the structure was still unfinished, was designed by Edward T. Potter. Twain and his family lived in this house from this point until 1891. His marriage to Olivia Langdon, of Elmira, New York, took place in 1870, and his daughters Susy and Clara were born, respectively, in 1872 and 1874.

3
This work was later included in Twain’s
Life on the Mississippi
(1883).

4
In a letter of 1887, Twain wrote, “Tom Sawyer is simply a hymn, put into prose form to give it a worldly air” (
Mark Twain’s Letters,
edited by Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper and Bros., 1917), p. 477.

5
“Foreword” to
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. xiii. This authoritative scholarly edition of the novel contains important information about its composition, and has explanatory notes that were useful in developing the notes for this volume.

6
The word “harvested” is Matthews‘s, but it appears to describe accurately the process that Twain was recounting to him. See Brander Matthews,
The Tocsin of Revolt and Other Essays
(New York: Scribner’s, 1922), p. 265. In 1870, just after Twain’s marriage, he had an exchange of letters with a childhood friend, Will Bowen, to whom he wrote: “The fountains of my great deep are broken up & I have rained reminiscences for four & twenty hours.” Many of these “reminiscences,” as Charles A. Norton has pointed out, can be found reconfigured as episodes of Tom Sawyer, and they clearly were a generative force in the novel’s composition. See Charles A. Norton,
Writing “Tom Sawyer”: The Adventures of a Classic
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1983), pp. 49-51.

7
Mark Twain-Howells Letters:
The Correspondence of Samuel L. Clemens and William D. Howells, 1872-1910,
2 vols., edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), vol. 1, p. 91.

8
The manuscript of the novel is preserved in the Riggs Memorial Library of Georgetown University. A facsimile version, published in 1982, is accompanied by an illuminating introduction by Paul Baender:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer: A Facsimile of the Author’s Holograph Manuscript
(Frederick, MD: University Publications of America), 1982.

9
Mark Twain’s Letters
, pp. 258-259.

10
Mark Twain-Howells Letters,
vol. 1, p. 110.

11
Twain wrote this letter in June 1876. See Mark
Twain-Howells Letters,
vol. 1, pp. 87-88.

Most of the adventures recorded in this book really occurred; one or two were experiences of my own, the rest those of boys who were schoolmates of mine. Huck Finn is drawn from life; Tom Sawyer also, but not from an individual—he is a combination of the characteristics of three boys whom I knew, and therefore belongs to the composite order of architecture.

The odd superstitions touched upon were all prevalent among children and slaves in the West
¹
at the period of this story—that is to say, thirty or forty years ago.

Although my book is intended mainly for the entertainment of boys and girls, I hope it will not be shunned by men and women on that account, for part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in.

THE AUTHOR
Hartford, 1876

TOM!“

No answer.

”TOM!“

No answer.

“What’s wrong with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”

No answer.

The old lady pulled her spectacles down and looked over them about the room; then she put them up and looked out under them. She seldom or never looked
through
them for so small a thing as a boy; they were her state pair, the pride of her heart, and were built for “style,” not service—she could have seen through a pair of stove lids just as well. She looked perplexed for a moment, and then said, not fiercely, but still loud enough for the furniture to hear:

“Well, I lay if I get hold of you I‘ll—”

She did not finish, for by this time she was bending down and punching under the bed with the broom, and so she needed breath to punctuate the punches with. She resurrected nothing but the cat.

“I never did see the beat of that boy!”

She went to the open door and stood in it and looked out among the tomato vines and “Jimpson” weeds that constituted the garden. No Tom. So she lifted up her voice at an angle calculated for distance and shouted:

“Y-o-u-u
Tom!”

There was a slight noise behind her and she turned just in time to seize a small boy by the slack of his roundabout
^a
and arrest his flight.

“There! I might ‘a’ thought of that closet. What you been doing in there?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing! Look at your hands. And look at your mouth. What is that truck?”

“
I
don’t know, aunt.”

“Well, I know It’s jam—that’s what it is. Forty times I’ve said if you didn’t let that jam alone I’d skin you. Hand me that switch.”

The switch hovered in the air—the peril was desperate—

“My! Look behind you, aunt!”

The old lady whirled round, and snatched her skirts out of danger. The lad fled, on the instant, scrambled up the high board fence, and disappeared over it.

His aunt Polly stood surprised a moment, and then broke into a gentle laugh.

“Hang the boy, can’t I never learn anything? Ain’t he played me tricks enough like that for me to be looking out for him by this time? But old fools is the biggest fools there is. Can’t learn an old dog new tricks, as the saying is. But my goodness, he never plays them alike, two days, and how is a body to know what’s coming? He ‘pears to know just how long he can torment me before I get my dander up, and he knows if he can make out to put me off for a minute or make me laugh, it’s all down again and I can’t hit him a lick. I ain’t doing my duty by that boy, and that’s the Lord’s truth, goodness knows. Spare the rod and spile the child, as the Good Book says. I’m a-laying up sin and suffering for us both, I know. He’s full of the Old Scratch,
^b
but laws-a-me! he’s my own dead sister’s boy, poor thing, and I ain’t got the heart to lash him, somehow. Every time I let him off, my conscience does hurt me so, and every time I hit him my old heart most breaks. Well-a-well, man that is born of woman is of few days and full of trouble, as the Scripture says, and I reckon it’s so. He’ll play hooky this evening, and I’ll just be obleeged to make him work, tomorrow, to punish him. It’s mighty hard to make him work Saturdays, when all the boys is having holiday, but he hates work more than he hates anything else, and I’ve got to do some of my duty by him, or I’ll be the ruination of the child.“

Tom did play hooky, and he had a very good time. He got back home barely in season to help Jim, the small colored boy, saw next day’s wood and split the kindlings before supper—at least he was there in time to tell his adventures to Jim while Jim did three-fourths of the work. Tom’s younger brother (or rather half brother) Sid was already through with his part of the work (picking up chips), for he was a quiet boy, and had no adventurous, troublesome ways.