Huckleberry Jam

THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by John See/ye. 339 pages. Northwestern University. $7.50.

John Seelye has pulled off one of the best literary stunts in a long while. He has substantially altered The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a puckish attempt to satisfy those critics who have found Mark Twain's masterpiece either artless, craftless, sexless, a gutless accommodation with commercialism or an overstuffed moral copout.

In doing so, Seelye, a 39-year-old associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has not only produced a lively, ribald narrative. He has also created a unique work of what can best be described as picaresque criticism. As Seelye's Huck Finn says in the introduction to his "true" adventures, "I want you to understand that this is a different book from the one Mr. Mark Twain wrote. It may look like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at first sight, but that don't mean a thing. Most of the parts was good ones, and I could use them. But Mark Twain's book is for children and such, whilst this one here is for crickits. And now that they've got their book, maybe they'll leave the other one alone."

Mark Twain anticipated the "crickit" problem when he first published Huckleberry Finn in 1884. In a prefatory notice he warned that persons attempting to find either motive, moral or plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott, "he had best stop writing for them." Such scoldings came despite Mark Twain's prepublication agreement to eliminate references to blasphemy, bad odors, dead cats, and to change the phrase "in a sweat" to "worrying."

John Seelye puts that sort of stuff back in, with additions that will surely get Huck Finn an X rating at the local library. The "true" Huck not only commands all the four-letter words but has sex fantasies and responds to adolescent needs without Alexander Portnoy's after effects. Seelye himself answers Critic Leslie Fiedler's interpretation of Huck and Nigger Jim's relationship as homosexual by casually casting the bogus King as a dirty old man. Jim's only contribution to vice is to introduce Huck to the pleasures of hemp smoking.

The True Adventures also does away with most of the original's minstrel-show banter and the historical references that some critics have felt were inappropriate--coming from the mouth of a 14-year-old school dropout. But Seelye does his largest alterations on Huckleberry Finn's ending, which, through the years, has caused the most serious critical harrumphing. In Mark Twain's original, the Duke and the King sell Jim out as a runaway slave for $40. Shortly afterward, Tom Sawyer makes a convenient entrance into the story, and he and Huck plan to free Jim and take off for more adventures on the river. After a good deal of rigmarole, however, Tom reveals that the escape plan is only a game because Jim's owner, Miss Watson, has died and willed the slave his freedom.

Even such an admirer of Huckleberry Finn as Ernest Hemingway, who viewed the book as the beginning of modern American fiction, thought the ending was a cheat. Less forgiving critics felt that Mark Twain contrived the upbeat conclusion as a piece of benign claptrap to solve the matter of Jim's freedom.

Seelye's revised ending is sympathetic to Hemingway, although it goes a bit farther. Jim drowns while trying to escape a band of bloodthirsty, reward-hungry rednecks, and Huck is so disgusted and depressed that he doesn't give a damn what happens next. Seelye not only repeals the theme of boyhood innocence in much the same way that J. D. Salinger did in Catcher in the Rye, he also dents the romantic American notion of limitless freedom on an endless frontier. The "true" Huck doesn't eagerly "light out for the Territory ahead of the rest," as Mark Twain concluded, he funks out in the Mississippi mud.

Seelye's ending is in keeping with Mark Twain's brand of easy cynicism. But to get lost in such critical preoccupations is to buck the refreshing main current of Seelye's book. For the professor was clearly out to have a little extracurricular fun--not the least of which was the excuse to reread the original Huck Finn.

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