11 | April | 2024 | Thornfield Hall

I first read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in tenth grade, with sighs and much boredom. I disliked American literature and anyway as a child had read Twain. I was an Anglophile devoted to Jane Austen, Lynne Reid Banks, John Fowles, Doris Lessing, and D. H. Lawrence. “Oh, God, this is in dialect,” I whispered.

“And there is rafting,” my friend said.

We were not athletic.

So many classics are really intended for mature adults. We did not appreciate the brilliant rhetorical devices in Twain’s sentences at that difficult age. Check out the comic repetition of the phrases “didn’t rightly know” and “a good deal of instinct” in the following passage,. This use of repetition and inversion is chiasmus, an ABBA sequence of words.

I didn’t rightly know what to say, because I didn’t know rightly whether the boat would be coming up or down. But I go a good deal on instinct; and my instinct said she would be coming down- from down toward New Orleans.

Readers change. I fell in love with Huckleberry Finn when I reread it at age 20. I was so enthusiastic that I babbled to my Greek professor about a creation myth in Huckleberry Finn and the chiasmus. I urged my friends to read it. Not all had read it in high school, but that was the place where almost everybody lost interest in it.

Many years later, I read it for a book group. By that time it had somehow or other become a controversial text, and some Black women in the suburbs were protesting its inclusion in the curriculum, objecting to the image of Jim and the “n” word.

There is a long history of censure and censorship of Huckleberry Finn, according to PBS American Experience. It was banned for the first time “shortly after its publication in 1885, white librarians in Concord, Massachusetts deemed it ‘trash’ and ‘suitable only for the slums.'”

Twain is, of course, using historically accurate dialect when he uses the word “nigger,” reflecting the language used in Missouri in the 19th century. In “Explanatory,” at the beginning of the book, he writes,

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary ‘Pike-County’ dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.

The use of dialect is one of the most striking aspects of Twain’s narrative. It bursts with archaic “I reckon”s and double negatives : “I don’t take no stock in dead people.” And it can be beautiful as well as irresistibly funny: “Well, we swarmed along down the river road, just carrying on like wild cats; and to make it more scary, the sky was darking up…”

The women in my book group were adamant about the necessity of reading The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school. It was a tradition… it must be done. As for the image of Jim, one woman claimed that he was a Christ figure.

I love Jim, but do not interpret his character in that way.

I do not know whether it is taught in the schools now. These book-banning battles are waged all over the country now.

All I can say is that white girls aren’t necessarily ready to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in high school, either.

Before online shopping, there was a plethora of subscription book clubs.

There were The Book of the Month, The Literary Guild, The Classics Book Club, and The Quality Paperback Book Club. A pamphlet arrived each month, and if you did not want the main selection, you checked the NO box and chose one of the alternatives.

The Quality Paperback Book club was our favorite. The books really were of high quality. and there were fabulous selections: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, an omnibus edition of Anna Kavan, an omnibus of Christopher Isherwood, and an advance copy of Robert Fitzgerald’s translation of the Aeneid.

I am especially fond of a QPB boxed set of South American literature. Of course it includes the work of famous Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, but there is also a little-known Brazilian novel, Dora, Doralina, by Rachel de Queiroz (1910-2003), who wrote novels, plays, TV scripts, and children’s books. The translator is Dorothy Scott Loos.

I thoroughly enjoyed Dora, Doralina, the story of the narrator’s escape from the hell of a miserable girlhood to a life in a traveling theater.

Life itself is theater; her rise as an actress in a repertory company provides opportunities for reinvention. The members of the company are eccentric but, with a few exceptions, charming, kind, and generous. And they become family to her.

The theatrical components of her life begin early, though, long before she performs in a theater; : she sketches these scenes in the opening pages, cutting back and forth in time as if it to lessen the pain of memory. In the first sentence, her beloved second husband, the Captain, says, “It’s natural to be in pain.”

Doralina had a sad childhood and a painful first marriage. Her cold mother disliked being called Mother and insisted that Doralina call her Senhora, as the servants did.

And since Doralina is an heiress, money complicates her marriage. The estate, Soledade, belongs wholly to her, which seems to be the reason her cruel first husband, Laurindo, marries her and not her mother. But the sly Senhora has an affair with Laurindo, and though Doralina never confronts them, she is appalled to hear them laughing about how they drug her so she will not wake up when they make love.

Their betrayal a hurts her but she recognizes them for the sociopaths they are. Fortunately, Laurindo, a sadistic man who kills his neighbor’s pet birds and then dines on them, dies of an “accident” with a gun, and that is when Doralina makes her escape to town where she meets a theater director and his wife at a rooming house.

The Dickensian owner of the repertory company, Seu Brandini, is charming and persuasive, and soon has the inexperienced Doralina acting and singing on stage. She is a terrible singer, but learns that it is all about presentation. And even though Seu Brandini is often sued for plagiarism – he does little besides change the names of the characters in the plays he “writes”– the company, often strapped for money, trusts and loves him, and he pays them whenever he comes into money.

The passage below captures Seu Brandini’s joyful personality.

The second play of the theater, Darling of My Love, was Seu Brandini’s favorite. It took place on the pampas. Seu Brandini said he wrote it; at least he signed it. The authorship notwithstanding, it seemed tailored for him; he adored that role, especially the number, “The Andorhina,”which he sang. He would then open up his thundering voice (he explained that he was a baritone) and I can only say that the audience went wild and asked for encore after encore.

This charming picaresque novel, published in 1975, reminds me faintly of Colette’s The Vagabond, another novel about a traveling repertory company, though Queiroz’s style is more straightforward, less lyrical. Like Renee in The Vagabond, Doralina falls in love with a charming man, the Captain, who is a vagabond himself. But Renee is ambivalent, while Doralina is enchanted.

The style is certainly nor what one would call fluid or graceful, but I admired this touching novel.

Thoroughly enjoyable, and if you like the theater, you will be entertained by this sad, funny, ultimately triumphant story of a woman’s rise from pain.