Mark Twain is doing the kind of writing only Hemingway can do better. Assessing the writing of others, he used the working author's rule of thumb: if I give this book a good mark, does it help appreciation of my work? Obviously, ''Huckleberry Finn'' has passed the test.Ī SUSPICION immediately arises. Hemingway, with his nonpareil gift for nosing out the perfect vin du pays for an ineluctable afternoon, was nonetheless more like other novelists in one dire respect: he was never at a loss to advance himself with his literary judgments. In ''Green Hills of Africa,'' after disposing of Emerson, Hawthorne and Thoreau, and paying off Henry James and Stephen Crane with a friendly nod, he proceeded to declare, ''All modern American literture comes from one book by Mark Twain called 'Huckleberry Finn.'. Twain's genius is completely realized,'' and Ernest went further. In the preface to an English edition, Eliot would speak of ''a master piece. Eliot and Ernest Hemingway's encomiums 50 years later. The critical climate could hardly anticipate T. There was no sense that a great American novel had landed on the literary world of 1885. There were no large critical hurrahs but the reviews were, on the whole, friendly. Clemens has no reliable sense of propriety,'' and the public library in Concord, Mass., was confident enough to ban it: ''the veriest trash.'' The Boston Transcript reported that ''other members of the Library Committee characterize the work as rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.''Īll the same, the novel was not too unpleasantly regarded.
The Springfield Republican judged it to be no worse than ''a gross trifling with every fine feeling. Melville's Quakers are wretched dolts and drivellers and his mad captain is a monstrous bore.''īy this measure, ''Huckleberry Finn'' (published 100 years ago this week in London and two months later in America) gets off lightly. ''Show me one page,'' says The Odessa Courier, ''that contains an idea.'' ''Moby-Dick'' was incinerated: ''Graphic descriptions of a dreariness such as we do not remember to have met with before in marine literature''. Is there a sweeter tonic for the doldrums than old reviews of great novels? In 19th-century Russia, ''Anna Karenina'' was received with the following: ''Vronsky's passion for his horse runs parallel to his passion for Anna''.
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