A propos our earlier discussions of Huck Finn, the September 1 broadcast of the public radio program "Breakfast at Random House" included a roundtable on the book moderated by Harold Evans, president of the Random House trade group, with Daniel Menaker, editor of the new comprehensive edition of "Huckleberry Finn," Mark Twain scholar Victor Doino, John Kenneth Galbraith, Sister Souljah, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. For anyone interested, here's my rough transcription of some of the highlights: Arthur Schlesinger: "I can well understand why an angry *white* man would object to Huckleberry Finn. The great theme in the book is the contrast between the raft and the shore. The shore is populated mostly by white men. Mostly hese white men are murderers, lynchers, con men, hypocrites, liars, and so on. So I can see why angry white men would do everything they could do to suppress Mark Twain's obviously mordant picture of how slavery corrupted Southern society." Sister Souljah: "I don't think when you're writing a story you have to reach certain politically correct standards when you are creating a character. I think that characters are supposed to be a reflection of the same types of people that you see in real life. And I think that you saw the contradiction not only in Jim's character, but you saw the contradictions in so many of the characters who were white in the book as well. And I think that if we start to look at literature as something that characters have to be one particularly way, it loses its artistic and its creative value. "I thought that there were a lot of great things that were achieved in the book. I thought it was interesting the way [Twain] showed that Huckleberry Finn had a taste for adventure, while for Jim it was a matter of life and death. And a lot of times this is a theme that is still active today within the white political community. You have blacks who consider these issues to be very serious and very matter of life-and-death, and white liberals who get involved in these issues maybe as something for their resume, or a short-term involvement, or sometimes as an adventure . . . . "I thought it was interesting when Huckleberry was considering turning Jim in. Because he got along fine with him as long as the relationship was, 'I'm young Huck and you're Nigger Jim.' But when Nigger Jim started to show an inclination to want to be self-determined, and to want to be free and want to talk about his vision for his life and [his concern] for his wife and children, that became somewhat offensive to Huck, even though he didn't understand it within himself as a young person. And I think that as long as these race relations are one where they're paternalistic, a lot of times it's comfortable for white society. But when it becomes a thing where you want to control your own thoughts and your own culture, and your own money and your own education, then it becomes somewhat offensive. I think the good thing is that ultimately he does decide that it's in his best interest and in the best interest of morality to *not* betray Jim, because I think that that's a good lesson for other whites who want to do well, or who want to do justice, and feel that same sense of uncertainty about whether or not they should be all the way committed to the things that they know are right." Daniel Menaker: "I actually think it may be a slightly racist book, and that Twain probably was struggling with his own feelings about race. And so that's one of the exciting things, to me, about it -- to see a man of that day and age who's trying to come forward to a decent view of an issue that was so horrific, for so long, in this country. It was the beginning of white America's attempts to come to terms with what they'd done." Arthur Schlesinger: "He himself once described the book as 'a conflict between a sound heart and a deformed conscience.' By 'a deformed conscience' he meant the conventions of the day. I mean, this was a great struggle. When Huck Finn says, 'I'll *go* to hell, then,' it was a triumph of the sound heart over the deformed conscience. Underneath the humor, he was a man with a kind of desperate disillusion, disenchantment about the whole human race -- 'the damned human race,' as he called it." Sister Souljah: "You have to give any good author credit for being clever -- the ability to have and hold certain political beliefs, and express them through the characters you create. As an example, [Twain] shows how Huck will say, for instance, 'You know, the niggers are so superstitious,' and then he'll spend three or four pages showing how superstitious *Huck* actually is. And the person in the book who is actually the most ignorant and the most racist is Huck's father; but then he'll show how Huck's father is completely against education or any type of exposure to anything that's positive. So it's a commentary on what he sees in the actual society, and I think that it's something that is done intentionally, and not by coincidence." Daniel Menaker: "Jim is a much stronger, braver character [in the recently published comprehensive edition]. When Tom Sawyer is wounded, Jim comes right forth and says, 'Here, I'll help.' And that means he's going back into slavery. And if you know what that means in terms of physical punishment . . . . The people who catch slaves usually got a third of the slave's value, and they usually got to whip the slave, too. So you see, every society has sort of a job for psychopaths." Sister Souljah: "When you read 'Huckleberry Finn,' you have to be conscious of the fact that you have two characters who are both oppressed -- Huck as a child of an abusive, alcholic father and a dysfunctional family, and Jim as a runaway slave. And so I think what this book does is put forth some type of a vision that in times of mutual desperation there can be some point at which we can unify around some better and brighter goals and objectives." Victor Doino speculated about Mrs. Clemen's possible role in "censoring" the 1885 version: "Sam [Clemens] would read to his wife and children each day after he'd done some composition. And the story is that when things would be displeasing to her, the page would be turned down and then that would be taken out. It's not easy to know if this is true or not. There are parts of the book, particularly in the manuscript first half, that are darker, rougher, harsher social criticism than what survived in the finished first edition, published manuscript. But it's hard to know if Sam did it himself, or if he did it with Livy's coaching. But that was a fine marriage, and he relied on her a great deal -- because he was himself an outsider." John Kenneth Galbraith raised what he termed a "literary point" -- "To what extent do you have to enter a thought of reservation that Mark Twain, in some measure in this book, hides behind a juvenile speaker, and that this to some extent is a device for escaping the harder compulsions of English expression?" Prompting Arthur Schlesinger to respond, "Oh, I think not. I think it's a great challenge -- the resources he discovered in the American colloquial idiom, by which he could convey the sublest perceptions, the most wonderful aesthetic sense of the flow of the river. I mean, he showed the resources of the American language in an extraordinary way." Finally, host Harold Evans concluded by quoting a comment by critic Lionel Trilling on "Huck Finn": "One can read it annually, and each year find that it has changed only in becoming somewhat larger." Pete Salwen