THE TERM “meteoric” is applied to many writers whose genius burns brightly for a short time and then goes out. In which sense, at least, it could not describe the career of Mark Twain, who will be 100 years dead in April, and who grew steadily more famous while he lived. But in another sense, a literal one, the description “meteoric” is uniquely apt in his case.
Twain was born on November 30th, 1835, exactly 20 days after Halley’s Comet, reached perihelion: the closest its great elliptical orbit takes it to the sun. In recent centuries, the comet’s orbit has averaged 75 or 76 years, so it was due again on the Earth’s horizons in 1910: by which time Twain’s reputation was at an all-time high and still rising, although his days were drawing to a close.
In 1909, he foresaw the impending coincidence. “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835,” he said, “. . . and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t . . .” Sure enough, with almost impeccable timing, he died on April 21st, 1910, the day after the comet again passed closest to the sun.
But April is not the only major Twain milestone this year. Today it is exactly 125 years since the US publication of his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And therein hangs a tale. For the book was supposed to have been published two months earlier, in time for the Christmas market of 1884, before an unfortunate incident intervened to delay it.
In fact, publication went ahead as planned outside the US, meaning that what was soon being called “the great American novel” appeared first in Britain and Canada. This is because the unfortunate incident was limited to the New York publishing house of Charles L Webster (Twain’s nephew by marriage). It centred on one of the book’s line-drawn illustrations.
Illustrations were vital to the novel, the author believed. To which end he had commissioned EW Kemble, an artist whose work he had seen in Lifemagazine. Twain's hands-on approach to the project was such that when he saw the first drafts, he asked Kemble to make Huck look less "ugly" and less "Irishy" (it's unclear whether he considered these two attributes synonymous).
The required changes were made and 30,000 copies of the book printed, when disaster struck. With 250 advance copies already released to salesmen, it was noticed that a prankster in the printing room had made a small but lewd alteration to the drawing on page 283. The result was that Uncle Silas, mild-mannered husband of Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Sally, was depicted exposing himself in what one commentator called “a flagrant act of indecency”.
It was a “blood-curdling” discovery for the publishers, and an expensive one. They had to cut out and replace the offending page in all the unreleased copies, as well as recalling the ones that had already gone out. They also promptly offered a $500 reward for anyone who could identify the rogue printer. But in the event, guilt could be narrowed down only to the publishers’ press room, where 50 people worked. So, unlike Uncle Silas, the culprit was never uncovered.
Twain himself had a fairly ribald sense of humour, which may or may not have helped when he saw the drawing. In fact, even without the unplanned obscenity, his book was considered too risqué for some. The Concord Library in Massachusetts banned it as the “veriest trash”, with one committee member, Louisa May Alcott – author of Little Women – commenting: “If Mr Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses he had best stop writing for them.”
Twain affected a warm welcome for the library’s recommendation, predicting it would “sell 25,000 copies for us sure”. But all jokes aside, had the notorious page 283 made it into general circulation, the book could have ruined his reputation, at least in the short term, instead of making it. In fact, only a very small number of the originals escaped recall and they must be worth small fortunes today. Even a first edition with the re-edited drawing can fetch several thousand dollars.
The Concord Library’s review was by no means the only panning given to the book. Contemporary critics in general were unimpressed, although they soon came round. It was called the “great American novel” as early as 1891 and that opinion, later echoed by Hemingway and others, was already becoming established by the time Twain died.
The book has since outlasted another full orbit of Halley’s Comet, towards the end of which it had become controversial for a whole new reason.
In 1976, Huckleberry Finnwas again being banned in some US libraries, this time because of its prolific use of the word "nigger". This was the least of the book's obscenity problems when it first appeared, and it's anybody's guess what new turn public tastes may have taken when Twain's celestial harbinger comes this way again in 2061. But one thing seems reasonably sure: people will still be reading his greatest book.