In the pantheon of Southern literature, the names of Twain and Faulkner stand matched for first place. Thanks to an enjoyable high school experience with As I Lay Dying and an excellent honors seminar on Faulkner as an undergrad, I have a pretty decent familiarity with that Southern luminary. Having less first-hand experience with Twain, I’ve tended to consider his works less “serious.” Faulkner, I thought, was the Michelangelo of The Last Judgment, while Twain was more akin to Norman Rockwell.
The comparison isn’t entirely wrong, but maturity and a greater familiarity with Twain have suggested a better one: If Faulkner is Beethoven in full “Sturm und Drang” mode, then Twain is like late Haydn: more interested in wit and keen observation than in grand effects. Tom Sawyer bears this comparison out nicely. Like many readers, I suspect, I read Tom Sawyer primarily because I knew that it preceded (in a narrative sense) Huckleberry Finn. I felt a bit sorry for poor Tom, living eternally in the shadow of his sequel. So, having acquired the Library of America volume, Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, I began at the beginning.
In Tom Sawyer, Twain engages in some intentional nostalgia. In his preface, he states that, “part of my plan has been to try to pleasantly remind adults of what they once were themselves.” Twain was not very successful in identifying the more universal traits of childhood. As a Southerner born in the late 20th century, the childhood of Tom and his friends is scarcely recognizable and couldn’t be more different from my own if they were situated in Ghana. My fantasies were of Star Wars, not pirates, and they were safely played out using little plastic “action figures.” (These cost my parents a bit of money, but saved them much of the anxiety that plagued poor Aunt Polly.) I don’t think it ever occurred to me to physically run away and become an X-wing pilot. Both Tom and I were obsessed with media-generated fantasies; it’s just that his seemed close enough to reality to cause greater confusion. My own childhood was strikingly lacking in adventure. As far as I know, my classmates and I made it through without witnessing any murders, but, alas, also without finding any buried treasure.
Tom’s own adventure, while not precisely piratical, is tremendously entertaining. Twain is very good at creating suspenseful situations, and is an excellent storyteller. As in Huckleberry Finn, there are strong mythic elements in the story. Tom is very much an adventure hero, although not always the sort that he sets out to be. He wins a fair maiden, rescues her from danger, and even one-ups Jesus by returning from the dead twice.
The book is fun read and deserves its place among the classics, and not just as a prequel to Huckleberry Finn.