Word: huck
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...thinks people suspect him of knowing a lot about how Mitch Miller (the subject of a novel Author Masters published in 1920) got killed, Kit O'Brien leaves Petersburg, 111., with two of his friends. Hungry, they steal apple pie. His friends get caught, but Kit proceeds, Huck Finn fashion, down the Illinois River into the Mississippi. There on a houseboat he finds Miss Siddons, an impoverished ac tress with a disfigured face, living with a madman. When Kit dis covers that she too is an outcast from Petersburg, he obligingly takes her back there. Expecting to be arrested...
...Neither of their fathers paid much attention to Tom White and Huck Anderson. Their mothers gave them such "raising" as they got, which accounts for some of the differences between Tom and Huck now. Tom's mother was a college graduate and he was her firstborn. Huck's was a village girl (fictionized into a beautiful Italienne) who bore seven "brats" and drudged...
...Huck's book is offered as fiction, Tom's as an essay, but the contrast between them is broader than that. For while Huck Anderson is trying to make a work of art, still he is one of the most self-obtrusive of artists and in propounding his way of life he trespasses on sociology; and while Tom is trying to point a social moral (in effect: "Behold, we do, and should, serve youth far more nobly than youth was served yesterday!"), still he implicitly adorns a tale (in effect: "What a wonder that I turned...
...Huck Anderson, at 50, finds it "charming" (and so it is) to remember when little Tar Moorehead (so called to pacify Anderson relatives) discovered the great impersonal world of horses, rats, cows, sheep, and tried to join it by eating grass. He has never lost the sense of curiosity, wonder and cosmic humor experienced by little Tar when he saw the bald drug clerk and his lean wife cutting privy antics. He recalls Tar's first frights, shames, loves, possessions, just writing them down and then looking at them as Tar used to, stupidly perhaps but quite happily, saying...
...What may redeem Tom is his own first sentence, the generalization: "All men are blowhards." But how far removed from Huck's amiable unmorality is all this Tom-talk of moral credit. How strange that two products of like environments should see things so differently in retrospect. How odd that Huck the outcast should write with such contentment while Tom the respected citizen has loathing in his memory and joy, strident because vicarious, only in perfections yet to be. Both the books are written for middle-aging people. Who shall say which is wiser...