Life mag’s unfinished Mark Twain novel

An unfinished novel by Mark Twain? That’s what the front cover of the old Life magazine blared when I discovered it beneath some papers on a tray at auction this week.

There was the writer himself, wild hair framing his face, his scraggly handle-bar moustache – the familiar photo that many of us have seen.

I pulled out the magazine and flipped to the pages. Inside were nine chapters of a book by the author whose given name was Samuel Clemens. They were printed on matte paper to distinguish them from the slickness of the rest of the pages.

The title was “Huck Finn & Tom Sawyer Among the Indians,” published Dec. 20, 1968. The front photo was a painting of Twain at age 55.

This unfinished novel was news to me. Intrigued, I Googled on my Droid. I had to know what this was all about.

I learned that Twain began the novel in 1885, not long after completing “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” It apparently was to be a sequel to that iconic and immensely popular work.

It was a story about Huck, Tom and Jim who decided to leave home to live “amongst the Injuns for a while, to see how it would be,” based on a notion the bored Tom had gotten into his head. Jim wasn’t so sure; in his mind, Indians were “powerful ornery.” Tom put that to rest with a long angry rant about them being noble, truthful, brave and generous.

The three met up with a white family who accompanied them to the land of the Sioux Indians, who later killed the parents and their boys and took off with the girls. Huck & company joined the sister Peggy’s fiance to go after them. As they neared the Indian’s encampment, the tale stopped on page 62 in the middle of a sentence.

Twain did many other stories and books, but apparently never came back to this one. Why didn’t he finish the novel?

The magazine offered two answers, this being its primary one: Twain did not want to write about how the Indians had raped Peggy. A very Victorian man who thought that pornography and sex should be spoken only among men, according to the magazine, he knew that he had to go there to be authentic. And Huck would’ve been the one to remark about it.

“… Twain would have found this repugnant, even though as a realist with strong feelings about Indians he could hardly leave out such a pronounced iniquity. It was clearly an impossible situation.”

Mark Twain wrote harshly about Native Americans in some of his early works, but he seemed to show some ambivalence in his later writings – depending on whom you read. This writer noted that while Twain denounced America’s policy against Native Americans, he never perceived them as being too far above barbarism. Another writer felt that Twain’s tone became more sympathetic.

The novel sat unfinished for more than 100 years before historian Lee Nelson finished it in 2003. You can read a portion of the book here.

Nelson wrote in the Author’s Note that he first read the story in Life magazine while getting a haircut at Brigham Young University in 1968. He was “enthralled,” he said, and wanted to know how the tale ended. He decided to explore the idea of completing it in 2002 after seeing a local PBS documentary on Twain.

In an interview on the web, Nelson said that he did not touch any of Twain’s prose, only used the author’s voice and style to complete a middle and end. The theme of the book, he said, is “not making judgments based on things we read in newspapers and book(s) when Huck finally realizes that ‘book Injuns and real Injuns ain’t the same.'”

“I have no idea how Twain intended to finish the story, and I reason that he didn’t know either, or he would have done it,” Nelson said in the Author’s Note.

Maybe it’s time to dust off Tom and Huck and Jim’s adventures, and read the rest of their story.