THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN by John See/ye. 339 pages. Northwestern University. $7.50.
John Seelye has pulled off one of the best literary stunts in a long while. He has substantially altered The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in a puckish attempt to satisfy those critics who have found Mark Twain's masterpiece either artless, craftless, sexless, a gutless accommodation with commercialism or an overstuffed moral copout.
In doing so, Seelye, a 39-year-old associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has not only produced a lively, ribald narrative. He has also created a unique work of what can best be described as picaresque criticism. As Seelye's Huck Finn says in the introduction to his "true" adventures, "I want you to understand that this is a different book from the one Mr. Mark Twain wrote. It may look like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at first sight, but that don't mean a thing. Most of the parts was good ones, and I could use them. But Mark Twain's book is for children and such, whilst this one here is for crickits. And now that they've got their book, maybe they'll leave the other one alone."
Mark Twain anticipated the "crickit" problem when he first published Huckleberry Finn in 1884. In a prefatory notice he warned that persons attempting to find either motive, moral or plot in the novel would be respectively prosecuted, banished or shot. It was like a carrot farmer putting up a no-trespass sign for rabbits. The book was pounced on immediately by the upholders of the well-made novel and 19th century gentility. Most critics found it shapeless, and vulgar. "If Mr. Clemens cannot think of something better to tell our pure-minded lads and lasses," said Louisa May Alcott, "he had best stop writing for them." Such scoldings came despite Mark Twain's prepublication agreement to eliminate references to blasphemy, bad odors, dead cats, and to change the phrase "in a sweat" to "worrying."
John Seelye puts that sort of stuff back in, with additions that will surely get Huck Finn an X rating at the local library. The "true" Huck not only commands all the four-letter words but has sex fantasies and responds to adolescent needs without Alexander Portnoy's after effects. Seelye himself answers Critic Leslie Fiedler's interpretation of Huck and Nigger Jim's relationship as homosexual by casually casting the bogus King as a dirty old man. Jim's only contribution to vice is to introduce Huck to the pleasures of hemp smoking.