Roberto Bolaño - Between Parentheses - Essays, Articles and Speeches, 1998-2003

As I’m writing this I read in the paper that there’s a movie on TV today called Back to Hannibal: The Return of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn . The plot reflects the unbridled American desire for happiness, or in other words the happiness offered by Walt Disney, the movie’s producer, as well as the loneliness of us all. The listing in the paper describes it like this: Tom Sawyer has become a lawyer and Huck a reporter, and both return to Hannibal to help Jim, whose profession isn’t revealed but who is probably no longer a slave. Maybe Jim has become a faith healer or owns a small farm. It’s possible to see Tom Sawyer as a lawyer. In fact, very possible. But Huck a reporter? That’s a stretch.

Who was Mark Twain, which in Mississippi pilot lingo means two fathoms ? First he was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, his real name, and also Thomas Jefferson Snodgrass, a short-lived pseudonym, and he was born in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, although his childhood and adolescence were spent in Hannibal, a town on the banks of the Mississippi. From a very early age he worked at a printing press that belonged to his brother Orion, whose private secretary he would later become in Nevada, where Orion was in turn secretary to the governor, which paints Orion not only as an enterprising type but as a schemer, that is, a politician. Twain was a river pilot on the Mississippi until the beginning of the Civil War and from that period comes a book that owes something to its day but also transcends its times, a strange book, Old Times on the Mississippi , whose first paragraph can be read as the kind of statement of principles that Tom Sawyer might have made, though not Huckleberry Finn: “When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our village on the west bank of the Mississippi River. That was, to be a steamboatman. We had transient ambitions of other sorts, but they were only transient. When a circus came and went, it left us all burning to become clowns; the first negro minstrel show that came to our section left us all suffering to try that kind of life; now and then we had a hope that if we lived and were good, God would permit us to be pirates. These ambitions faded out, each in its turn; but the ambition to be a steamboatman always remained.”

The ambition to be a steamboatman turned into a passion for the Mississippi and for traveling: to the west, first Nevada, with his canny brother, and to California, from which he sailed to Hawaii, a singular trip in his day, although in fact all of Twain’s trips were singular, even those he took around New England as the new husband of Olivia Langdon, a pretty girl with money who never understood him and whom he, meanwhile, never made the least effort to understand, their marriage the kind that in those days was called odd (or singular, like his trips) and that these days is usually called disastrous, not to mention that it was touched by adversity, a kind of adversity that no other writer could have withstood and that Twain may not have withstood either. A more sensitive man would have killed himself, but Twain believed that suicide was redundant: his scorn for the human race grew into something like a shield, a protective shell, all kinds of bad things could happen and it wouldn’t trouble him, because he expected it and had predicted it and he lived like the gladiators whose motto was nec spe, nec metu (“without fear or hope”).

Writing about a photograph of Twain, Javier Marías says: “In nightshirt or shirt, he’s writing in bed, and unlike Mallarmé or Dickens it seems likely that he’s not even pretending but actually earnestly spelling out some word, because he wasn’t one to waste time. He must have known that his picture was being taken, but the impression he gives is that he doesn’t know or doesn’t care. The bed is tidy. It doesn’t look like a sickbed, which is always rumpled and sunken in the middle, the pillows flat. The viewer has therefore no choice but to wonder whether Mark Twain lived in bed.”

Marías’s fond description misses some important details. Twain really was sick. His mane (one can’t call that mop hair) is exactly the same as it was in his youth, just a different color, which says a lot about Twain’s self-image. And finally, the wrists, those enormous lumberjack wrists, out of all proportion to his relatively small hands, prodigious wrists, like a cartoon character’s. Writers write with their hands and their eyes. Twain, old and sick, skeptical of everything, even his own work, writes with his wrists and his eyes, as if all his strength as a perpetual traveler were centered in them.

But these aren’t Huckleberry Finn’s wrists, they’re Tom Sawyer’s. And that’s Mark Twain’s primary misfortune and also our delight, hypocritical readers, because it seems clear that if Twain had become Huck at some point in his eventful life, he would surely have written nothing or almost nothing, because boys and men like Huck don’t write, they’re too busy, satiated by life itself, a life in which one fishes not for whales but for catfish in the river that splits the United States in two, to the east the dawn, civilization, everything that strives desperately to be history and to be storied, and to the west the clarity of blindness and myth, everything that lies beyond books and history, everything that we fear in our innermost selves. To one side the land of Tom, who will settle down, who may even triumph, and who will surely have descendents, and on the other side the land of Huck, the wild man, the loafer, the son of an alcoholic and abusive father, in other words the ultimate orphan, who will never triumph, and who will disappear without leaving a trace, except in the memory of his friends, his comrades in misfortune, and in the ardent memory of Twain.

No, Mark Twain didn’t have much regard for the rest of mankind. There’s a passage from the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that should be inscribed in golden letters on the wall of every bar (and school) in the world. This passage foreshadows half the complete works of Faulkner and half the complete works of Hemingway, and it foreshadows especially what both of them, Faulkner and Hemingway, wanted to be. The passage is simple. It describes a duel and its consequences. It begins with a drunk who likes to go around cursing and threatening people. One morning he goes to challenge the town’s storekeeper.

Boggs rode up before the biggest store in town, and bent his head down so he could see under the curtain of the awning and yells:

“Come out here, Sherburn! Come out and meet the man you’ve swindled. You’re the houn’ I’m after, and I’m a-gwyne to have you, too!”

And so he went on, calling Sherburn everything he could lay his tongue to, and the whole street packed with people listening and laughing and going on. By and by a proud-looking man about fifty-five — and he was a heap the best dressed man in that town, too — steps out of the store, and the crowd drops back on each side to let him come. He says to Boggs, mighty ca’m and slow — he says:

“I’m tired of this, but I’ll endure it till one o’clock. Till one o’clock, mind — no longer. If you open your mouth against me only once after that time you can’t travel so far but I will find you.”

Then Sherburn, who’s a colonel, old Colonel Sherburn, as we’ve just been informed, goes back into his store and Boggs rides around town cursing him at the top of his lungs. People aren’t laughing anymore. When Boggs goes back to the store (where he no longer needs to bend his head down to see whether Sherburn is inside), he continues his tirade. Some people try to make him be quiet. They warn him that it’s a quarter to one. But Boggs ignores them. Earlier he’s seen Huck Finn and asked him: “Whar’d you come f’m, boy? You prepared to die?” Huck doesn’t answer. And now some people try to convince the drunk man to go home, but Boggs “throwed his hat down in the mud and rode over it, and pretty soon away he went a-raging down the street again, with his gray hair a-flying,” a description that while perfectly vulgar, as the situation merits, also soars to epic heights, because Twain knows that all epics are vulgar and that the only thing that can somewhat relieve the immense sadness of all epics is humor. And so Boggs keeps slandering Sherburn up and down the street, with no one able to get him to dismount or shut up, until someone remembers his daughter, the only person who might be able to reason with him, and they go off in search of her and then Boggs disappears for a few minutes and when Huck sees him again he has dismounted and he’s on foot, not striding along but stumbling a bit, and two friends have him by the arms: “He was quiet, and looked uneasy; and he warn’t hanging back any, but was doing some of the hurrying himself.” Then a voice is heard shouting Boggs’s name and everyone turns and it’s Colonel Sherburn, and Twain describes him standing motionless in the middle of the street, a pistol raised in his right hand, a pistol that he doesn’t aim at anyone but at the sky, like a classic duelist, and then Boggs’s daughter appears at the other end of the street, but Boggs and the men with him don’t see her, they’ve turned around, and the only thing they see is Sherburn with his pistol raised, a pistol “with both barrels cocked,” that is a duelist’s pistol, with just two bullets, and the men with Boggs jump to one side and only then is Sherburn’s pistol lowered and aimed at the unfortunate drunk and the latter manages to raise both hands in a gesture more of entreaty than of surrender, saying “Oh Lord, don’t shoot,” and then, without transition, the shot is heard and Boggs stumbles backward, “clawing at the air” and then Sherburn shoots again and Boggs “tumbles backwards on to the ground.” Now chaos reigns, Boggs’s daughter cries, the crowd swarms around the dying man, Sherburn has tossed his pistol down and gone, Boggs is carried into a drugstore and set down on the floor with a Bible under his head and another Bible open on his chest, and then he dies. And when Boggs dies people start to talk, mulling over the killing, telling what they saw, and after a while someone, an anonymous voice in the crowd, says they should lynch Sherburn, and almost immediately they’re all in agreement, the whole town is in agreement, and they head for Sherburn’s house “mad and yelling, and snatching down every clothes-line they come to to do the hanging with.”