[N.B. The following review was authored by Carolyn Richey, on whose
behalf I am merely posting it. --T.R.]

BOOK REVIEW

     Evans, John D.  _A Tom Sawyer Companion: An Autobiographical Guided
     Tour with Mark Twain_.  Lanham, Maryland: University Press of
     America, 1993.  Pp. xiii + 113.  Cloth.  $37.50.  ISBN 0-8191-9059-4.
     Paper.  $14.95.  ISBN 0-8191-9060-8.

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     Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:

          Carolyn Leutzinger Richey <[log in to unmask]>
          San Diego State University
          San Diego, CA

     Copyright (c) 1997 Mark Twain Forum.  This review may not be
     published or redistributed in any medium without permission.

One of the things that first drew me to the study of Mark Twain was the
connection the author and I share.  This common connection is that we both
grew up in Missouri, not far from the Mississippi River; he grew up in
Hannibal, and I grew up in St. Louis.  I think this same desire to
establish a connection is what draws many to the study of Twain.  Perhaps,
for the reader of _Huck Finn_, the connection is a shared abhorrence of
the injustices one sees in society.  These can be the same injustices that
Mark Twain wrote about--inequality among the races or classes, despite the
separation of a century.

The readers of Twain's classic boy's tale _Tom Sawyer_ also look to make
connections.  With the young audience, the connection might be the similar
adventures of growing up; with the older audience, the connection might be
the nostalgic remembrance of those same adventures.  Whichever audience,
John D. Evans' _Tom Sawyer Companion_ makes and explains those connections
for all readers of _Tom Sawyer_.

When I first received and read this book, I was scheduled to speak on Mark
Twain in a local junior high English teacher's classes.  Her students, my
twelve-year-old daughter among them, were in the midst of reading _Tom
Sawyer_, some struggling to keep up with the nineteenth-century vernacular
dialect of Missouri, and others totally immersed in Tom, Joe, Becky, and
Huck's escapades.  From the beginning of my talk, I could tell which
students were in which of the two groups, because those from the latter
group eagerly raised their hands to ask questions about Twain and his
story.  They wanted to make connections between the story and the author
and themselves.  As I began to answer their questions and offer those
connections to them, the former group became involved.  They began to make
their own connections.

Now I can't say that I had all the answers to their questions.  But
without Evans' book, subtitled _An Autobiographical Guided Tour with Mark
Twain_, I would not as readily have been able to answer their questions or
make those connections.  Evans' book provides the link from the escapades
of Tom Sawyer to Sam Clemens' boyhood in Hannibal.  As Evans states in the
introduction to his book, his "focus is Twain, and [his book] is written
for anyone who has read _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_ and enjoys Mark
Twain as both a writer and a unique individual" (xii).  To achieve these
purposes, Evans divides his book into chapters that look at, one by one,
scenes from _Tom Sawyer_; each section is partitioned into three segments.
In the first segment, Evans offers in italics a brief summary of the
scene, then quotes in boldfaced type the referenced text from _Tom
Sawyer_, which he claims are "the events or experiences that have their
roots in reality" (xii).  Finally, in the third part of each section, he
gives, in plain type, an autobiographical account from Clemens' life that,
as he expresses it, "reveals those roots" (xiii).  Thus, Evans connects
the dots to give us a sketch of Sam Clemens the real man through Tom
Sawyer the fictional boy.

The body of this book comprises 47 chapters referring to the same number
of reality-based scenes from _Tom Sawyer_.  From the "opening scene of
_Tom Sawyer_ [where] Aunt Polly searches for Tom and finds him hiding in
a closet with the tell-tale evidence of jam on his face and hands" (1) to
"the end of [the] chronicle" (101) where Twain writes that "most of the
characters that perform in this book still live" (101), John Evans
amplifies Clemens' remembrance of his boyhood through _Tom Sawyer_ via
such scenes as this first distraction from punishment that Tom
successfully carries out.  Evans cites  Twain's autobiographical reference
to his thirteen-year-old daughter Susy's biography of him as verification
of the history of this particular incident.  He quotes and explains, "Susy
wrote: 'Clara and I are sure papa played the trick on Grandma about the
whipping, that is related in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_.'  Mark
Twain's terse comment was: 'Susy and Clara were quite right about
that'" (1).

Any reader of Mark Twain will recall his frequent references to cats and
will also realize that Clemens loved cats.  But Evans, in chapter 29, "The
Cat and the Painkiller," also clarifies Jane Clemens' own befriending of
animals.  In this section, Evans first summarizes chapter 12 of _Tom
Sawyer_, in which "Tom professes to like painkiller and requests it so
often that Aunt Polly allows him to take it unsupervised," and eventually
administers an overdose of the painkiller to his cat (61).  Evans goes on
to quote Aunt Polly (the character whom he has already explained is based
on Sam's mother Jane Clemens), when she "raised him up by the usual
handle--his ear--and cracked his head soundly with her thimble.  'Now,
sir, what did you want to treat that poor dumb beast so, for?'" (61).
Evans completes this link from Tom to Sam by quoting Twain's
_Autobiography_:

     That sort of interference in behalf of abused animals was a common
     thing with her [Jane Clemens'] life. . . . All the race of dumb
     animals had a friend in her. . . . We had nineteen cats at one time,
     in 1845. . . . They were a burden to us all--including my mother--but
     they were out of luck, and that was enough; they had to stay. . . .
     An imprisoned creature was out of the question--my mother would not
     have allowed a rat to be restrained of its liberty. (61)

Weaving them throughout _A Tom Sawyer Companion_, Evans makes abundant
connections between the author and his character.  Some are obvious; some
are more obscure.  But Evans effectively offers the reader a detailed road
map of Clemens' young life in Hannibal, even to the famous cave.  In
chapter 41, "Caves," Evans offers a photograph of the real "McDowell's
Cave" and makes the connection to the fictional "McDougal's Cave" in which
the children get lost and Injun Joe perishes.  The legendary cave
described in _Tom Sawyer_ as "a vast labyrinth of crooked aisles that ran
into each other and out again and led nowhere" (89) was virtually "an
uncanny place, for it contained a corpse--the corpse of a young girl of
fourteen" (89).  In this passage from the _Autobiography_, Evans
corroborates the legend of Dr. McDowell and his "experiment to see if a
human body would petrify" (89).  On my own recent pilgrimage to Hannibal
and tour of the cave, the guide related--almost verbatim from the
_Autobiography_--Dr. McDowell's experiment and the childish games the
local spelunkers played at the expense of his poor deceased daughter's
body.

Throughout the book, Evans furnishes even more connections to Twain by
providing 22 photographs that allude to many of these same scenes and
characters from Clemens' life.  In chapter 12, for example, Evans displays
an 1874 photograph of Clemens that "reveals his 'dense ruck of short
curls,'" which in chapter 4 of _Tom Sawyer_ "filled [Tom's] own life with
bitterness" (22-23).  Evans includes other pictorial links, including the
Boyhood Home, the School House, the Steamboat Philadelphia, and the home
of Tom Blankenship.  Evans explains the significance of Blankenship in
chapter 18, "The Homeless Outcast."  Again he quotes both _Tom Sawyer_ and
the _Autobiography_.  In the fictional tale, Huck is described as "the
pariah of the village . . . [who was] idle and lawless and vulgar and
bad--and . . . all [the] children admired him so," while the
_Autobiography_ reveals that

     'Huckleberry Finn' was Tom Blankenship.  Tom's father was at one time
     Town Drunkard, an exceedingly well-defined and unofficial office of
     those days. . . . He was the only really independent person--man or
     boy--in the community, and by consequence he was envied by all the
     rest of us . . . and therefore we sought and got more of his society
     than that of any other boy's." (35)

Again, another connection is made, not only between _Tom Sawyer_ and
Clemens' life, but also between Twain's quintessential American novel
_Huckleberry Finn_ and the author's life.

Evans concludes his enlightening saga of Twain's fictionalized
autobiography with a letter Sam wrote to his wife Livy from Quincy,
Illinois, on 17 May 1882: "I have spent three delightful days in Hannibal,
loitering around all day long, examining the old localities and talking
with the greyheads who were boys and girls with me 30 or 40 years ago.  It
has been a moving time. . . . That world which I knew in its blossoming
youth is old and bowed and melancholy now.  Its soft cheeks are leathery
and wrinkled.  The fire is gone out in its eyes and the spring from its
step.  It will be dust and ashes when I come again" (101).  Through this
and the myriad of other explanations and links, the readers of _Tom
Sawyer_ and _A Tom Sawyer Companion_ are allowed the same "delightful days
in Hannibal."