I'm continuing my slow enjoyment of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. This chapter is best savored slowly. Twain explains the triumphs and sorrows of a boy. I suspect he remembered much of this from his own childhood...with appropriate embellishment. I'm sure that I appreciate his description much more now than I did when I was a kid. We get to see Tom as a martyr, or when he believes himself to be a martyr.
Chapter 3 follows Tom's immediate success in the field of graft and corruption (completing the whitewash job). He presents himself to Polly. As one might suspect, she is skeptical...and very surprised. She is so surprised at his successful completion of the task that she gives him a choice apple, and a lecture on the added value of a treat earned through virtuous effort. Tom steals a doughnut as Polly ends the lecture. As he makes his escape, Tom pelts Sid with a hail of dirt clods for getting him in trouble the night before.
He is off. We have a final triumph to witness before a crucial event in Tom's life.
Tom finds his friend Joe Harper, the opposing general, in the public square. Each of the two has an army of boys that they pit against one another. Tom's force wins the victory after a hard-fought battle, and they agree upon the terms for the next disagreement. Tom heads toward home, flush with a day of victories. Pride goeth before a fall.
A lovely little blue-eyed creature with yellow hair, wearing a summer frock, fells him without firing a shot. He immediately forgets the girl with whom he had imagined that he was in love. He begins his courtship by absurd boyish stunts, including sorts of gymnastics. They don't exchange words, or even a direct glance, but she tosses a flower over the fence. Tom works his way around, balancing a straw upon his nose, until he can pick up the flower with his toes. Once out of sight, he places the flower inside his shirt before returning to hang around the fence "showing off" until nightfall.
Back at home, nothing bothers Tom, not even a rap across the knuckles from Polly when he tries to steal sugar. It is only when Sid breaks the sugar bowl, and Polly smacks Tom for it, that he sulks. I can't help but wonder if Jean Shepherd wasn't influenced in his A Christmas Story's description of Ralphie (dreaming of his parents' sorrow for blinding him by making him hold soap in his mouth) by Twain's description of Tom sulking as the martyr. Tom "exalted in his woes. He knew that in her heart his aunt was on her knees to him, and he was morosely gratified by the consciousness of it." He pictured himself sick and dying, his aunt looking for a single word of forgiveness, and he turning away to die. He continued to dwell upon the thought, picturing himself brought home from the river dead, a poor wet corpse, his suffering over. He so enjoyed this "petting of his sorrows" that he left when his cousin Mary came in full of joy and sunshine.
Tom wanders. He remembers the flower and gets it out. "[I]t mightily increased his dismal felicity." He begins to wonder if "she" would pity and comfort him if she knew. Finally, he wanders to her house and lies beneath a second story window where he can see a lit candle. He lies there, nursing his woe like Achilles in his tent...until a maid-servant opens the window and drenches him with water.
Back home, Tom turned in "without the vexation of prayers."
Perhaps even more well-known than the opening lines of the novel, is Tom's grand tour de force with the whitewash.
Chapter 2 of TATS (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer) begins with a description of a cheerful, dreamy, Saturday morning. Twain juxtaposes that pleasant atmosphere with Tom and his bucket of whitewash; Tom is in deep melancholy. He faces 30 yards of 9 feet tall fence. (Not unlike a writer's blank page, or screen, waiting to be filled with words).
After a couple swipes with the whitewash, Tom sits down, discouraged (Writer's block?). Soon Jim comes along on his way to fill the water bucket. Tom, after a series of bribes, culminating with a look at his sore big toe, convinces Jim to let him take the bucket for water while Jim works on the whitewash. Aunt Polly, armed with a slipper, sends Jim on his way for the water. Tom is back to whitewashing.
Tom thinks of his friends and the activities that he had planned. He grows sadder as he contemplates how they will make sport of him. Examining his boyish wealth of toys, marbles, and trash, he realizes that he doesn't have enough goods to bribe his friends into even a half-hour of work for him. Just as Tom is about to fall deeper into melancholy, inspiration strikes.
Tom takes up the work with vigor. Ben Rodgers appears, pretending to be a steamboat, the Big Missouri. Ben makes quite an elaborate show of maneuvering the steamboat, acting not only as captain, but as the boat itself, both calling out orders and executing them, voicing the bells, and using his hands to simulate the great paddle wheels of the craft. Tom pretends to be oblivious to Ben's artful display; he is engrossed in his work.
Ben leads into a taunt, asking Tom he if wishes he couldn't go swimming like him instead of having to do that work. Now we see Tom begin to display his preeminence.
“What do you call work?”
“Why, ain’t that work?”
Tom resumed his whitewashing, and answered carelessly:
“Well, maybe it is, and maybe it ain’t. All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer.”
“Oh come, now, you don’t mean to let on that you like it?”
The brush continued to move.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”
Now Ben sees the matter in an entirely different light. He wants to paint, just a little. Tom acts as if he wants to let Ben give it a try, but does not; Aunt Polly is awful particular. He increases Ben's desire to take up the whitewashing by professing that there isn't one boy in a thousand, or two thousand, who can do it properly. Tom refuses to allow Ben to trade his apple core for a turn at whitewashing. At last, reluctantly, Tom surrenders his brush to Ben in return for Ben's entire apple.
Other boys came to jeer, but stayed to whitewash, giving some of their treasure to Tom in exchange. I found the most interesting bit of treasure to be a dead rat which included the string by which to swing it. Other treasures included a kitten with only one eye, a dog collar but no dog, a knife handle, and four pieces of orange-peel. While he was able to idle away his time collecting treasure, the fence received 3 coats of whitewash. The only thing that prevented him from bankrupting the youth of the town was the fact that he ran out of whitewash.
Twain shares Tom's new-found wisdom:
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
We watched Tom in chapter 1 interact with Polly, Sid, and the over dressed boy. We saw him spare with his wits against Polly, and with his fists against the boy in the earlier chapter. Here, we see the classic Tom Sawyer. Here, we see why he is the boy of boys. He will be the leader of any group of boys of which he is a part; he is a master at manipulation.
“TOM!”
No answer.
“TOM!” No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
Those are the opening lines of one of the most famous of American novels--Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I was recently reminded, while boasting of the superiority of Huckleberry Finn over that earlier work, that it had been many years since I had last read that great American classic about the young Monsieur Sawyer. Having just finished my latest free book from Amazon Prime, it seemed like a good time to read some real literature.
Although I remain singularly unqualified to review great literature--I've never read any critical treatment or even Cliff Notes on Tom Sawyer, have no relevant advanced degree or recognition, and I am woefully deficient in my stock of keen insights and witty observations--I've never let that stop me before. I do know what I like; I like Mark Twain's writings. (In the last year or two, I read for the first time Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and found it an absolutely delightful contender with Huckleberry Finn for Twain's best work). Additionally, the protagonist in my nearly completed novel, Smoke, uses a few quotes from Mr. Clements' works (as well as from other authors) for his own inspirational purposes. I seem to have forgotten where I was going with this...except for the bit of self-promotion for my upcoming book...so I'll just get back to the story.
The person doing the hollering for Tom is Aunt Polly. (When I was a kid, my dad once pointed out to me that every Tom Sawyer movie that he has ever seen starts with Polly's hollering. I doubt that my dad ever read the book; if he had, he would know why the movies start that way). If I remember correctly, we'll follow Tom himself through most of the book, but here we are introduced to him through the viewpoint of Aunt Polly. She loves the boy, but is frustrated with him, and with herself for not disciplining him more severely--so she suffers for both Tom's sins and her own. Perhaps her view is flawed. Twain describes her spectacles as being "built for style, not service." Twain claims that "she could have seen through a pair of stove-lids just as well." That seems to be a pretty strong indication that Polly's myopic view is inaccurate at best.
Polly finds Tom, his mouth full of the fruits of his latest crime--he has been sampling the jam. She's about to take a switch to the boy. He directs her attention to something behind her...and makes his escape. She resolves to make Tom work tomorrow, Saturday, to make up for his dodging of discipline.
At dinner, Polly resolves to make Tom reveal that he played hookey. Tom outmaneuvers her on that point, only to have his grand evasion scuttled by his hated half-brother Sid. Tom flees the scene once more. He forgets his troubles in remembering, and practicing, his newly acquired skill of whistling.
All is well until Tom meets a well dressed boy. The prelude to the fight is fairly lengthy. The boys engage in an elaborate series of taunts and dares, including the threat of imaginary big brothers. At last the point of no return is reached when Tom says that for two cents he would lick the over dressed boy, and the boy proffers the two cents. Tom thrashes the boy, and chases him home. He waits there until the boy's mother orders him away, calling him a "bad, vicious, vulgar child."
Tom finally returns home quite late. He uncovers an "ambuscade" in the form of Aunt Polly as he slips through the bedroom window. I like that word "ambuscade." I thought that I had first seen it in chapter 3 of Huckleberry Finn, but here it is right at the end of chapter one of this earlier novel.
At the end of the first short chapter, we have met Tom, and understand that he is a rascal--the free spirit of the aptly titled song by Rush. We see Aunt Polly as well-meaning, but apparently ill suited to deal with her dead sister's son. We also meet Sid, the hated (by Tom), quiet boy without adventurous, troublesome ways. Sid is the half-brother, and antithesis of Tom. Tom is a fighter, he detests boys who dress well (especially during the week), and possesses an inveterate hatred of work.
I believe the next chapter will address that move made famous in The Karate Kid, but first performed by Tom Sawyer, known as "paint the fence."
