by Mark Twain (1884 AD)
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The following essay was first published in September 2022 under the title “Hemingway on Twain: Reviewing a Review” as part of the eBook collection The Everything Fox, and Miscellanea. It is currently available as part of The Early Prose.
“All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. If you read it, you must stop where Jim is stolen from the boys. That is the real end. The rest is just cheating. But it’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
The above assessment, which was published by Ernest Hemingway in 1933, is a rather perfect example of what the ancients called a “hullom.” By this term, those who came before meant that which begins and ends correctly, though with a wrong middle, and the term was often applied humorously, such as, for instance, in the case of a student who rightly records a problem, likewise reaches a right answer, but whose marks of work show obvious errors. As far as etymology, the term appears to have been formed from the conjunction of the words “hull” and “bottom,” and this would explain the most archaic of its definitions, which referred to that which was built to support but, instead, doomed downward. The word first definitively appears in the works of Shakespeare, but it does not seem to have lasted long past that immortal’s time, which is a shame because it is rather useful.
As for Hemingway’s assessment itself, an accusation of the hullomic applies because, firstly, the opening and closing statements could not be more obviously correct, and secondly, the middle statements could not be more oddly incorrect. No reader, one assumes, would require evidence to support the bookending aspects of Hemingway’s assessment, but regarding the wrong middles, only a few words will need to be said in order to dispel any uncertainty, and it will shortly be seen, through only a handful of quotes, just how wrong Hemingway was.
To firmly establish Hemingway’s meaning, which is, after all, a necessary first step toward his refutation, we must determine what actual place in the text is meant by the words “you must stop where Jim is stolen from the boys.” At first interpretation, Hemingway would seem to mean one of the several places in the novel where Jim and Huck become separated, but the plural “boys” indicates that Hemingway’s complaint actually begins at the start of Chapter Thirty-Three, at which time the character of Tom Sawyer suddenly reappears in the narrative. This reading seems to be the most arguable, particularly when considering the fact that the chapter marks an intentional shift within the novel, and it would, therefore, seem that Hemingway, not grasping this purpose, railed against it.
Before, however, we investigate the change to the novel’s end that is caused by the reappearance of Tom, it is necessary to consider the effect that this character had on the early sections of the narrative, before Jim and Huck’s running away, and this analysis of the novel’s early parts will show what Twain was setting up in its end. Of great interest to us is a conversation between Tom and Huck that occurs in Chapter Two.
At the time of this early chapter, Huck has not yet been kidnapped by his father, and Tom and he, along with a few other neighborhood boys, have snuck out of their beds in the night in order to play a make-believe game of their being a robber gang. The game was, of course, Tom’s idea, and while the boys discuss what it actually is that a robber gang does, he provides his fanciful theories of waylaying travelers and ransoming prisoners. None of the boys, including Tom, have any true idea as to the grisly nature of these terms, but Tom, knowing of the words from what he has read, is undeterred.
“I’ve seen [ransoming] in books,” he argues, “and so of course that’s what we’ve got to do.”
He later continues: “Do you want to go to doing different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?”
“Don’t you reckon that the people that made the books knows what’s the correct thing to do?” he ultimately concludes. “Do you reckon you can learn ‘em anything?”
Not long following this chapter, the novel’s plot necessitates Tom’s slipping from view; however, from merely the above quotes, it is clear that Twain intended an important part for the character, and Tom’s purpose is to provide a counter of unreality to the budding realism that was the novel’s very intention. Twain, in other words, intended to write a new type of novel, and the character of Tom was the author’s way of showing the new’s emergence out of the old.
If we now make our advance to the area of Hemingway’s issue, we find that the novel does, indeed, as the critic complains, experience an alteration with the very first words of Chapter Thirty-Three. This change, which is represented in the novel’s plot by the reintroduction of Tom, brings an end to Jim and Huck’s travels down the Mississippi River, and the remainder of the novel concerns Tom and Huck’s playful contrivances regarding freeing Jim from his confinement. In the pages that follow, Tom, who has been so long absent, features prominently, and his return takes the form of a takeover; further, it is worthwhile to note that the chapter prior—that is, Chapter Thirty-Two—featured a hint to this change in the form of Huck’s being mistaken for and then actually impersonating Tom, and this would seem to have been Twain’s way of indicating that the novel was about to step back into that which it had, back in Chapter Two, previously stood within.
We are now rather close to an understanding of Hemingway’s error; however, before arriving at our goal, there is an issue within the error that must be addressed, and this is Hemingway’s use of the word “cheated.” If we remember that Hemingway was himself a fiction writer, this indictment against Twain must be regarded as most telling; for it indicates that Hemingway meant his accusation to be most damning, and by the word “cheated,” he wished to express that Twain had taken the easy way out in ending his novel in a manner both formulaic and archaic. What seems to have been missed by Hemingway is that the character of Tom had his very purpose in the carrying of such contrivance, and Twain proved this interpretation by way of having the feature enter and exit the book with the character.
If we return to Chapter Two one more time, we can see that Tom as a figure of contrivance was present even then. The three quotes already provided testify to this point, and in them, we see Twain’s parody of a commitment to tradition by way of showing the same to literary formula; further, this same sentiment reenters the novel in Chapter Thirty-Two, in step with the reappearance of Tom. As a character, Tom represents the literary tradition of old, and his disappearance from the middle portions of the novel represents modernity’s emergence from that tradition, though it does, in the end, revert to its old form.
The novel as a whole, therefore, forms a long, discernible arc; further, this arc is that which, in its beginnings, stretches back to Twain’s earlier novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is, of course, the sequel to. In the earlier novel, Twain wrote in a way that he would later condemn in the latter—the most dramatic aspect of this split is in the switch from third-person perspective in the first novel to first-person in the sequel—and the earlier novel was written in the literary style that Twain considered old while the latter was written in the style that Twain considered to be emerging. The character of Tom, in short, represents Tom Sawyer while the character of Huck represents Huckleberry Finn.
Now that we have a proper picture—or frame, at least—of Huck Finn, we can make our final return to Hemingway’s complaint against the novel. The formulaic ending that Hemingway derides was, in fact, intentional on Twain’s part, and there was, indeed, no other way for the novel to end; for Twain wished to pessimistically show the way in which new emerges from old before, in the end, choosing a return to the former. Just as the character of Tom represents Tom Sawyer, he also represents that which could be called Romanticism, and just as the character of Huck represents Huck Finn, he also represents that which could be called Realism; accordingly, the relationship between the two characters represents the interplay between the two artistic movements, and Twain, through the simplicity of two children, perfectly displays the way in which society at-large wavers between the gritty and the grand, favoring tradition in the morning, innovation in the afternoon, and then, in the evening, tradition’s waiting arms are returned to.
In conclusion, Hemingway was wrong in his complaints against Huck Finn, and an understanding of the novel at a fundamental level is all that is required for such conclusion. If we remember to consider that Hemingway was himself a fiction writer then he may, perhaps, be forgiven his error due to the fact that, while writing about Twain, he was not, after all, writing about himself; however, if we consider that Hemingway’s opinion remains, to this day, the novel’s most prevailing among the public then, for the rest of us, this loophole does not apply, and we are left to wonder how everyone can be so wrong about that which is written in plain English. The quick and, perhaps, correct assessment is that Hemingway’s error was that of incorrectness while that of the rest of us is that of ignorance, and, in ultimate conclusion, one is left to wonder just how many Americans have actually read the Great American Novel.