“Cutting Mark Twain is like cutting the tips off your lover’s fingers. You can’t find anything to cut because it’s not good writing. You can’t find anything that doesn’t add to the story.” That’s what local author Anna Kirwan told me. Though I’m a bit unsettled by the notion of Samuel Langhorne Clemens and his enormous moustache in any sort of boudoir situation, Kirwan’s is a sentiment with which I agree wholeheartedly.
I recently spoke to her after receiving notice of a reading from Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn as condensed by Kirwan, who has also written historical novels for kids. It prompted some big questions: How can you take the sprawling, quintessentially American prose of a true master—and Twain was certainly that—and whittle it down for easier consumption? Perhaps more importantly, should you do that to Twain?
When I told Kirwan I was unsure, maybe even skeptical of the endeavor, it quickly became clear that, as a childhood reader of Twain herself, she shared my sentiment. “I know exactly what you mean,” she said. “It’s kind of repellent that people don’t think of Mark Twain as a children’s writer anymore.”
So why, I wondered, did she take on such a project? Turns out that the main intent behind it apparently wasn’t that kids be offered a milquetoast Twain, though that’s a part of the mix. Publisher Real Reads is British, and the series, which includes retold works by authors like Jane Austen and the Brontes, is aimed at new speakers of English in places like Turkey, India and China, not just kids.
“The idea,” Kirwan says, “is to make them accessible to readers who can’t make their way through 400 pages of Mark Twain dialogue.”
The Real Reads website puts it this way: “For many readers, Real Reads will develop a confidence and enthusiasm to address the original, something we try to nurture in the ‘Taking Things Further’ section of every Real Read. For others, who might never have tackled the originals, Real Reads make accessible great stories, great characters and important moral debates which they might otherwise never have encountered.”
It’s easy to imagine that, as Kirwan also said, a bankteller in Ankara would stumble a bit over unreformed Twain. Twain’s genius and inscrutability to foreigners can be illustrated with almost any sentence plucked from Huck Finn: “Her sister, Miss Watson, a tolerable slim old maid, with goggles on, had just come to live with her, and took a set at me now with a spelling-book.”
That seems like a sentence so idiosyncratic it would resist all attempts to be shortened without losing its dinstinctive flavors. Kirwan’s task was clearly not easy. She chose to offer just the gist of the plot via narration rather than wrestling with the omnipresent issue of Huck’s strange grammar and spicy diction, which also seems to have motivated moving the narration of the novel from first person to third. That approach transformed the above sentence to something with far fewer fireworks: “The widow’s sister moved in.”
That kind of plot summarizing seems to be the hardest part of retelling, the part that demands the most ruthless editing and the place where Twain’s voice suffers the most.
Huck’s voice, as well as that of other characters, is preserved in large part when it comes to dialogue. When the slave Jim speaks in the retold tale, Twain’s intentional misspellings to evoke dialect remain. There are fewer total lines, but the flavor stays.
Other changes are even subtler, explains Kirwan. “In the original [Tom Sawyer], when Becky thinks Tom has drowned, she says, ‘I’ll never, never, never see him again.’ I said, ‘never, never.'”
When she talks about the process, you can tell Kirwan really cares about keeping Twain as Twain-like as possible, which must have made the task even harder.
Twain, she reckons, wouldn’t mind the undertaking of an effort that would bring more readers to his work. “I felt him almost looking over my shoulder while I wrote. He struggled financially continually, and he approved of adaptations of his work for theatrical presentation and so on. …I felt like I had to figure out how he would feel about it. Say one out of 20 kids or one out of 20 bank tellers in India reads the short version and then goes and reads the longer version. I think he would be gratified.”
Despite my initial skepticism, that argument seemed to hold water. I remembered my love for a childhood copy of Moby Dick that I later learned was a condensed version of the real thing. I promptly procured the real Melville.
Kirwan followed that argument with a second winner: “The author pitch is, ‘Go read the real book.'”
And indeed, if more people discover the work of an American treasure like Twain, condensing him can’t be all bad. Maybe with a goal like that in mind, it’s enough to just look the other way while the whittling of Huck commences. If someone has to do it, Kirwan, with her clear love for the originals, seems to be just the woman for the job.
Kirwan reads from the retold Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn Jan. 16, 1:00 p.m., Meekins Library, 2 Main St., Williamsburg, (413) 268-7473.