Citizen Journalist: In a literary mystery, a local Realtor finds an elegant reality

by Mike Martin

December 29,2007

We all know folks who have both a passion and a day job. 
   
The police officer who's a gourmet chef and the lawyer who's a playwright. The insurance agent (Tom Clancy) who became a best-selling author.
   
And in Ashland, Mo., the Realtor who's a literary scholar.
   
Hannibal native / University of Missouri-Columbia honors graduate / Boone County Planning & Zoning commissioner / House of Brokers agent Carl Freiling probably knows southern Boone real estate better than anyone else.
   
He also knows Mark Twain—so well, in fact, that he inspired me to devour two biographies and read many of Twain's lesser-known books.
   
Nearly every corner of this vast land can claim America's most celebrated author. Investor, traveler, inventor, bankrupt millionaire and the world's first true celebrity, Mark Twain was an almost perfect embodiment of our country's love-hate relationship with success, failure and fame.
   
Twain was nothing if not hard to figure, and for the St. Louis Journalism Review, I wrote about a theory Freiling published as a young English major that answered some longstanding questions about Twain's work. It's elegant and simple but also raises "many other big questions," Duke University literature professor and Mark Twain scholar Louis Budd told me.
One Book 
   
"All modern American literature," Ernest Hemingway wrote, "comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. "There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since."
   
Nothing as good that is as flawed, either.
   
"In form and style, Huckleberry Finn is an almost perfect work," wrote literary critic Lionel Trilling. "Only one mistake has ever been charged against it—that it concludes with Tom Sawyer's too-elaborate game of Jim's escape."
   
To correct that mistake, University of Massachusetts classics professor Vincent Cleary assigned his students a radical task. "The class agreed that Huckleberry Finn was a classic with a flawed ending," Cleary said. So he had them rewrite the last chapters.
   
Why Twain misfired as he wrapped his magnum opus is an "urgent and meaningful question that critics would like to answer," MU literature professor Thomas Quirk told me. 
   
The answer, Carl Freiling says, lies in a fateful trip.
Losing St. Petersburg
   
In the middle of writing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Life on the Mississippi, Twain visited Hannibal, Mo., and the Mississippi Valley for the first time since his childhood.
   
Instead of his romanticized memories, he saw squalor and ignorance.
   
"The 1882 visit to the Great Valley was the equivalent of the paddlewheels crushing Huck and Jim's raft," Freiling wrote in How St. Petersburg Came to Be Lost, his titular take on the Hannibal of Twain's memory, aka St. Petersburg. "It burst Twain's mythical bubble, and changed him from loving humorist to grumpy satirist." 
   
Twain's trip, which he took at age 47, dried up what Freiling calls an "idyllic well spring" of ideas, affecting the author's two greatest works—Huck and Life —about halfway through each.
   
"You need no great insight to recognize which parts were written before the 1882 visit and which came after," Freiling explained.
   
Life on the Mississippi, "one of the most moving, affirmative and uncomplicated expressions of the glory of young America ever penned, devolves into nothing more than a glorified travel log," he wrote. 
   
Huckleberry Finn begins as American literature's profoundest statement on racism and ends as an elaborate farce. 
  
"The 1882 trip was the watershed moment in Twain's literary career and a major turning point in American literature," Freiling told me. Having seen "the present reality," Twain "would never again be able to conjure the glory of his memories."
Critical Acrobatics
   
If Freiling's recognition of the power of a trip has resolved one of literature's greatest mysteries, it may be because he studied historical records other scholars missed or ignored. 
   
Only released within the past few decades, those records included letters from Twain to his wife Livy and to his publisher-confidante, William Dean Howells. 
   
The letters had critical clues.
   
"During my three days' stay in Hannibal, I woke up every morning with the impression that I was a boy—for in my dreams the faces were all young again," Twain wrote to Livy. "But I went to bed a hundred years old, every night—for meantime I had been seeing those faces as they are now."
   
In 41 years between 1950 and 1991, literary scholars published about two takes a year—80 total—on Huckleberry Finn's flawed end. 
   
"Sadly, only a handful of those critics cited, much less actively engaged with, any of the more recent biographical and primary materials published during the same period," MU's Quirk—widely regarded as one of the world's leading experts on Huckleberry Finn—wrote in the academic journal American Literary Scholarship. 
   
Oddly, Quirk told me, literary scholars may not want to resolve the controversy. "It's a recurring opportunity to show off one's critical acrobatics," he said. 
   
The truth, mainly
   
You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the name of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. 
   
"Reading Twain here, effortlessly breathing out perfect American vernacular, is like watching Willie Mays track a fly ball or Miles Davis playing horn," Salon magazine executive editor Gary Kamiya wrote about Huckleberry Finn's first words. 
   
That Huck's words would ultimately highlight Twain's decline is keenly poignant to Carl Freiling, who sees the master as the quintessential American Everyman. 
   
"Mark Twain was a great, wonderful, complicated and contradictory man," Freiling said. "But most of all, he was us."

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