Well, you see, in order to know that Jim, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer were in a hot air balloon you'd have to have read the little known, little read parody that Twain wrote, Tom Sawyer Abroad, which is kind of dreadful except as the parody that Twain clearly intended the book to be. Like all of Twain's humor, some of it is excellent for a line or two or even a whole sketch but it's very uneven. It's silly to think he could have sustained the same level of jokes through the length of a novel. I doubt anyone could do that. Some of what may have seemed quite amusing in the 1890s falls pretty flat today.
And there is that defect in writing a humorous novel, I don't think it's possible to write characters who are comic figures without making them funny page cartoons who are presented in a way that invites condescension. For some reason, thinking about that, I think of the character George Marvin Brush in Thornton Wilder's book Heaven's My Destination who, when I read the book, I think I'd have liked to meet in real life, you'd rather have had him for a next door neighbor than just about anyone else, but Wilder clearly intended him as such a figure. Like all of Wilder's things I know of, it kind of falls flat at the end. I think it's inevitable that those who grew up in affluence, or relative affluence or aspire to it, as most academics and pro-scribblers do, they will either have that attitude to any character of the lower class or they will treat them with an unavoidably condescending sentimentality. Which was Twain's other literary sin, to use his own term. Though mostly when he wrote women characters. It's hard to write sympathetically about a character without going overboard, I don't think I could do it, which is why I only write fiction for my own entertainment.
I think it's clear that he was tired of the characters since he put them into parody. As I said yesterday, it was clear from his description of how long he prepared and wrote Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (which is an historical novel, not a humor piece) during that same period, he wanted to do more than that. I imagine he read the better authors of his time and earlier and wished he could do more than he was allowed to do. It may have been enough for those who maintain some kind of sentimental image of him as "the Lincoln of our literature" but it clearly wasn't for him. "The Lincoln of our literature," which he may have been in liberating writers to consider the lives of poor people on something like their own terms - allowing Huckleberry Finn to narrate the books he appears in after Tom Sawyer, but it's pretty clear he wished he could write other things, too.
Apart from the old man with the big mustache in an ice cream suit that Hal Holbrook did so much to impose on him,* I look at that period and I see a man who wanted to do more than that. I think he probably found the sentimentalism, on one hand and the cynicism on the other side of his humor wore thin for him. I deeply admire his best work while refusing to be blind to the defects in the work but mostly in the stupid adulation of him based mostly in people never, ever really reading most of what he wrote.
Even more than that, I don't fault Twain for the use his best novel is put to in allowing a white man's invented Black man to carry the burden of so much of the consideration of the real lives of real Black People in American history. That wasn't Twain's fault it is the fault of the academic establishments that put the fictitious character to that use. The same could be said of the representation of Huck Finn for the children of the underclass who are mostly not as jolly and happy or spunky and independent as Huck Finn but live lives of pain and spiritual damage such as Thomas Hardy put adults through. I think it is sheer indifference and the cowardly laziness of too many academics and professional scribblers that they don't allow such people to speak for themselves, ironically using Mark Twain's fictitious characters so they don't have to listen to what such people would tell them if asked. That's not Twain's fault, that's the fault of those who use him to avoid the real voices of real Black People.
* I think that that depiction of him in Mark Twain Tonight, picking and filtering lines and passages from Twain mixed with things Twain never said, deceives people into thinking they are seeing Twain when what they're seeing is an invented character as much as Huck Finn or George Marvin Brush, a character invented to serve the purpose of its maker. I think that's especially true with Mark Twain who serves some pretty base purposes I have a feeling he, at least in his last years, may have not fit. Which is one of the reasons I've come to be very suspicious of the theatrical or dramatic or fictitious use of real people, something Twain did himself in presenting Joan. That he valued that book which the anti-religious fans of their twin disdain and despise is certainly a good indication that they have never gotten the full measure of the man.
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