BOOK REVIEW

_Huckleberry Finn: Antidote to Hate_, Nicholas Wolfson. Xlibris
Corporation, 2003. Pp. 138. Hardcover, 6"x9". $27.89. ISBN 1-4134-0436-7.

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Reviewed for the Mark Twain Forum by:
Barbara Schmidt

Copyright (c) 2003 Mark Twain Forum. This review may not be published or
redistributed in any medium without permission.

_Huckleberry Finn: Antidote to Hate_ begins with an emphatically
presumptuous title. We could only wish it were true. Previous books written
by Nicholas Wolfson, a retired professor at University of Connecticut
School of Law, include _Hate Speech, Sex Speech, Free Speech_ (Praeger,
1997). Wolfson's current book can best be described as his own personal
reactions to and defense of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ against a
variety of criticisms.

According to the jacket copy, Wolfson wrote _Huckleberry Finn: Antidote to
Hate_ to address those critics who have condemned Twain's book as a bigoted
and racist tract. Wolfson writes, "I want to take the book, almost episode
by episode, and share with my readers my interpretations of the famous
tale" (p. 11). He concedes, "I venture, with trepidation, into an area
where learned scholars of literature have mined meaning and substance for
decades" (p. 12).

Wolfson's book consists of an introduction, conclusion and three short
chapters titled: "We Are Introduced to Huck Finn and Jim--They Light Out in
Search of Freedom," "The Feud--The Duke and the Dauphin Take Over the Raft"
and "Tom Sawyer Returns--Some Concluding Reflections on the Ending and the
Book."

Wolfson assumes that his readers already have a good basic knowledge of
_Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_. He begins his introduction by comparing
the amount of critical commentary generated by Twain's book to the amount
of judicial interpretation that has been accorded to the Constitution of
the United States. In recounting various episodes of _Huckleberry Finn_,
Wolfson often writes in short staccato sentences that would lend themselves
better to oral presentation where a pause carries weight: "Miss Watson
tells Huck to pray every day. He tries it out. He prays, but it doesn't
work. He gets a fish line, but no hooks. He prays three or four days. It is
no use. The fish hooks do not appear" (p. 18). In further describing Huck,
Wolfson writes: "Huck is an abused child. His mom is dead. She could not
read or write. His father is also illiterate. He tells Huck that he will
beat him if he continues with school" (p. 26).

When it comes to defending Twain's plots and storylines, Wolfson's prose
hits a smoother stride.  In answering critics who complain about Twain
letting Huck and Jim continue south down the Mississippi River rather than
north to free territory, Wolfson writes that Twain "...is out for bigger
game than plot plausibility. His goal is to skewer a racist society. His
method is to bring Jim and Huck south down the Mississippi and stop at one
miserable town after town, and expose the entrails of a rotten culture" (p.
52).

To answer criticism that Huck never generalizes from his love of Jim to the
evils of slavery, Wolfson counters, "The fact that he conquers the demons
of racism in his relationship with Jim is an enormous step. Any move by the
fourteen [-year]-old-boy toward a coherent wider vision would smack of a
kind of crude Soviet-era-cookbook political correctness" (p. 53).

In discussing the use of the "N" word, Wolfson writes, "Mark Twain's use of
the word is an essential method to critically highlight the obnoxious use
of this word, and in the course of the book, to make illegitimate its
usage. As Jim and Huck develop their special relationship, and as the
corrupt society is ridiculed, the use of the word acts to harshly portray
the diseased culture" (p. 82). Wolfson deftly defers his readers to Jocelyn
Chadwick's _The Jim Dilemma_ for further analysis.

Responding to Twain critics who condemned the "evasion" chapters, Wolfson
writes, "Mark Twain may have used crude burlesque and jokes in the ending
to underline, with bitter humor, the pain and rage he felt about the misery
of the damned human race...At some level, perhaps not conscious, he wants
in the ending to make the readers squirm and the critics wince as if
hearing a nail scratched against a blackboard" (p. 93, 117).

Running throughout Wolfson's commentary is a bit of name dropping for
writers and entertainers he feels exhibit traces of a Mark Twain
influence--names such as Fred Allen, Jack Benny, Groucho Marx, Lenny Bruce,
Steve Martin, Mel Brooks, Bob Hope, Woody Allen, Monty Python, and Jerry
Seinfeld and his cohorts. In describing Twain's chapter about the "Camp
Meeting," Wolfson writes, "Today, Twain would have made a fortune at
Dreamworks" (p. 63). Writing about the duke and king and their bawdy
performance in the "Royal Nonesuch," Wolfson observes, "Perhaps, today the
two con artists would have made it as TV producers" (p. 69).

Wolfson is obviously familiar with a broad range of Twain scholarship and
he uses it with ease in his arsenal of defenses for Mark Twain and
_Huckleberry Finn_. Wolfson's book does not contain a formal bibliography
and it has only a minimal index. However, the slim volume contains
citations and footnotes to many well-known Twain scholars. Wolfson's
citations include Andrew Lang, who wrote a review of _Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn_ in 1891; William Dean Howells; Van Wyck Brooks, Bernard
DeVoto; Henry Nash Smith; Walter Blair; Victor Doyno; Nat Henthoff; Randall
Kennedy; Terry Oggel; Bruce Michelson; Richard Hill; Laura
Skandera-Trombley; Tom Quirk; and Lin Salamo and Victor Fischer who edited
the current University of California edition of _Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn_.

Wolfson's book is a product of Xlibris, a vanity publication firm. The book
suffers from inherent pitfalls involved in self-publishing when
professional publishers, editors, typesetters and proofreaders are not
involved in the production process. The printed pages do not have uniform
margins; space allotted for footnotes and the font size of footnotes vary;
and punctuation is in need of fine tuning. Such flaws give the book a
"do-it-yourself" look and feel.

Wolfson presents no primary research in this volume and gives no evidence
that the study or reading of _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ changes
attitudes or cures hate.  As to his emphatically presumptuous title--we
could only wish it were true.