ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN holds the distinction of being the American novel that has been censured for the longest period of time, for the greatest number of reasons, by the widest range of political, religious, and literary factions. Before it was even available to the public, 3,000 advance sales copies were quickly withdrawn when it was discovered that someone along the chain of production had altered one of the illustrations. For Chapter 32, artist E. W. Kemble had drawn Uncle Silas standing with his shoulders drawn back and his pelvis thrust forward, with young Huck Finn posed before him, apparently gazing at the man’s proffered crotch. Some wag had scratched into the inked plate something that appeared to have been missing from Kemble’s drawing: Uncle Silas now sported a very exposed and very erect penis. The offending books were recalled, and page 283 was sliced out and a replacement illustration tipped in. The few copies that escaped this surgery are now collector’s items.
When the book was released to the public, it was met with savage reviews. One newspaper called it “a gross trifling with every fine feeling.” It was banned by the Concord Free Public Library (Mass.) as “the veriest trash … rough, coarse, and inelegant, the whole book being more suited to the slums than to intelligent, respectable people.” Over the years, Huckleberry Finn has been criticized for its crude language, its irreverent treatment of religion, and its casual depictions of child abuse, domestic violence, racism, and murder. It has been castigated both for its empathetic portrayal of enslaved African Americans and for its liberal use of the N-word. The scene of Huck and Jim—a white boy and a black man—lying naked side-by-side on the raft as it floats lazily down the Mississippi has induced atrial fibrillation among racists and among pedophiles. But were it not for a last-minute editorial decision by Mark Twain himself, we might be criticizing the book for yet another reason: bottom-shaming.
The event in question occurs in Chapter 23. Huck and Jim have met up with two traveling con men who introduce themselves as the Duke of Bridgewater and the Dauphin of France (later the King).
Twain’s contemporary readers would expect here a variation of the old Gyascutus Hoax, a bit of Western humor in which hucksters advertise the appearance of a rare ferocious beast known as the Gyascutus. As the gullible townspeople pay their admission and take their seats, they begin to hear fearful roars and stomping coming from behind the curtain. In some versions of the story, the curtain has been partially raised, just enough so that they can see the paws of the creature as it weaves back and forth across the stage (one of the actors has wrapped his wrists and ankles in fur, and stalks on all fours). When the hall is full, the audience suddenly hears crashes and bangs and blood-curdling screams from behind the curtain. The Master of Ceremonies rushes onto the stage and hollers: “The Gyascutus has broken loose! Run for your lives!” Men, women, and children rush to the exits in a panic, and the players slip out through a rear door of the hall, with the box office receipts.
But what Twain has his players offer to the townsfolk in Arkansas is not the ferocious Gyascutus. For one thing, the audience is specifically restricted to men only. There will be no women and children to run screaming from the hall. Instead, each man will be leering up at the stage, eager for a low comedy—or something “ruther worse.” What the farmers and store clerks and furtive town elders are expecting is a live sex act of the type provided in some brothels of the period, something highly inappropriate for their wives and children to view. In Twain’s promised sex show there will be nudity—but of a very different type.
“When the place couldn’t hold no more, the duke he quit tending door and went around the back way and come onto the stage and stood up before the curtain, and made a little speech … and at last when he’d got everybody’s expectations up high enough, he rolled up the curtain, and the next minute the king come a-prancing out on all fours, naked, and he was painted, all over, ring-streaked-and-striped, all sorts of colors, as splendid as a rain-bow.” (This appearance of the Pride flag avant la lettre is a coincidence, of course, but it queers the story nicely.) As the narrator of the novel, Huck has for the last 22 chapters slowly rolled out a convoluted tale rich in detail and atmosphere, but for the first time he hesitates and abruptly pulls back: “And—but never mind the rest of his outfit, it was just wild, but it was awful funny.” The manuscript of the novel shows that Twain toned down his original description of the bawdy performance: he had initially written that the king was “stark” naked but then crossed that out. He first described his outfit as “scandalous,” then changed it to “outrageous,” and then finally settled on “just wild.” In a sentence he later deleted, he wrote that the naked actor “judged he could caper [sic] to their base instincts.”
The men in the audience, their base instincts appealed to, at first enjoy the ribald show—they “most killed themselves laughing”—but when they learn that a single nude man is all they’re going to see, they become angry and protest that they’ve been “sold.” They’re about to attack the duke and the king when a member of the audience halts the incipient riot, pointing out that if word gets around that they all paid good money to see a naked man, they will be “the laughing-stock of this whole town.” No, instead they should convince all the other men in town to come to the second performance, so they all will have been equally duped, and then everyone will be too humiliated ever to speak of it. The second performance goes off much like the first, but on the third and final evening, seeing that the audience this time has brought “sickly eggs by the barrel, and rotten cabbages, and such things,” the duke and the king make a strategic exit from the town, pocketing the proceeds.
The incident in the novel that has come to be referred to as “The Royal Nonesuch” is ultimately unsatisfying. It is uneven and truncated, starting out in one direction, then veering off and ending abruptly. The reason for the choppiness became clear when Twain’s manuscript was available for study. We now know that until the very last moment, until the galleys were being prepared for printing, the play presented by the king and the duke was not “The Royal Nonesuch” but instead “The Burning Shame”—a burlesque too raunchy even for men eager for low comedy. In his autobiography, Twain wrote of the king’s nude performance: “I had to modify it considerably to make it proper for print, and this was a great damage. … How mild it is in the book, and how pale; how extravagant and how gorgeous in its unprintable form!”
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The story of Mark Twain’s encounter with the ultimately unprintable story of “The Burning Shame” goes back nearly two decades before Huckleberry Finn was published, to a pitcher of beer that changed the course of American literature. It all began (as interesting things in San Francisco so often do) in a bar South of Market. In 1864, Twain (still known to his friends as Sam Clemens) was living in San Francisco, sharing a room with Steve Gillis, a man who had worked as a compositor for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise when Clemens was a reporter for the Nevada paper.
One evening, Gillis was passing by “Big Jim” Casey’s bar on Howard Street when he saw Casey mercilessly beating up one of his customers. Gillis rushed in to intervene, and when Casey pivoted to attack him in turn, Gillis grabbed the nearest weapon—a pitcher of beer—and whacked the bar owner on the side of the head, knocking him out. When the police came, Casey was taken to the hospital and Gillis was taken to jail. That night, Sam Clemens was rousted out of bed to post bond for his roommate—$500 he didn’t have, and for which he needed to sign a promissory note instead. The next morning, the men got word that Casey was in critical condition and that Gillis would certainly be charged with assault, and perhaps manslaughter. He chose to skip bail and hightail it back to Virginia City. That would mean Sam would be on the hook for $500 that he couldn’t possibly pay, so it was decided that he too would leave town, and that he would hide out for a while in a mining cabin on Jackass Hill in Tuolumne County that was owned by Gillis’ brother Jim.
During his three months in hiding in Tuolumne and in adjacent Calaveras County, Mark Twain listened to the tall tales told by the miners, and he began to write them down. When one of the stories—about a frog jumping contest—was published in an Eastern newspaper, the critics and the public alike hailed the arrival of a uniquely American literary voice. The dead hand of European literature had at last been cast off.
In his memoir Roughing It (1872), Twain writes about the sparsely populated enclaves he found nestled among the forested hills of Tuolumne County, locales that had once been raucous, roaring mining camps but were now home to a handful of men who had seen the region flourish and then decline as the gold petered out. “With it their hopes had died, and their zest of life. They had long ago resigned themselves to their exile, and ceased to correspond with their distant friends or turn longing eyes toward their early homes. They had accepted banishment, forgotten the world and been forgotten by the world … outcast from brotherhood with their kind.” When the wave of prosperity washed over the region and then receded, these outcasts chose to remain behind, forming a brotherhood of their own built around mining, whiskey, and oral entertainment.
“I spent three months in the log-cabin home of Jim Gillis and his ‘pard,’ Dick Stoker,” Twain later wrote, describing Jackass Hill as “that serene and reposeful and dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise.” But his recollections of the place were no doubt gilded by his memories of long evenings spent drinking and talking in Gillis and Stoker’s home:
Every now and then Jim would have an inspiration and he would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie—a fairy tale, an extravagant romance—with Dick Stoker as the hero of it as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly history, veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest.
Gillis and Stoker’s cabin was described by a contemporary as “the headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains.” It was a backwoods salon of sorts, a makeshift gathering place for the artistic and literary types among the miners, and the partners welcomed many guests, including Jim’s brothers Steve and Billy. In the notebook he kept during his weeks in the mountains, Twain jotted down a description of the cabin’s rough but cozy interior: “No planking on the floor; old bunks. Pans & traps of all kinds—Byron, Shakespeare, Bacon[,] Dickens, & every kinds of only first class Literature.” In Roughing It Dick Stoker appears as Dick Baker, and Twain writes of him: “He was forty-six, gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light.” Jim Gillis was better educated than his partner, better than most of the men on Jackass Hill. He knew Latin and Greek, and had earned a medical degree in Memphis before heading west. “I think Jim Gillis was a much more remarkable person than his family and his intimates ever suspected,” Twain wrote of his friend. “He had a bright and smart imagination and it was of the kind that turns out impromptu work and does well, does it with easy facility and without previous preparation, just builds a story as it goes along.” He was a natural storyteller who “would have been a star performer if he had been discovered.”
Jim Gillis did have one eccentricity. “About once a year he would come down to San Francisco,” Twain remembered, “discard his rough mining costume, buy a fifteen-dollar suit of ready-made slops, and stride up and down Montgomery Street with his hat tipped over one ear and looking as satisfied as a king. The sarcastic stares which the drifting stream of elegant fashion cast upon him did not trouble him; he seemed quite unaware.” Once when Gillis did overhear a snide comment about his cheap store-bought clothes made by one of the city’s better-tailored dandies, he immediately challenged the man to a duel: “Double-barreled shotguns loaded with slugs; distance, thirty feet.” The dandy backed down. “He instituted no quarrels himself but whenever a quarrel was put upon him he was on deck and steady.”
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It was Jim Gillis in the cabin on Jackass Hill, his back to the fireplace and his hands folded behind him, who first delivered “The Burning Shame” for Mark Twain’s amusement, but the story had a long history. Englishman Francis Grose in his Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (1785) defined the slang expression: “A lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman.” Literary scholars, evidently unaware of Grose’s Dictionary, sensed that there was something sexual going on in the “Burning Shame” story that Twain felt compelled to suppress, but—blinded by heterosexual presumption—guessed that it was a “phallic dance” that the naked king had performed. They suggested that after painting himself with all the colors of the rainbow, the king donned an enormous phallus to wave in the faces of his all-male audience. “No one acquainted with fraternity initiations and other gatherings where Greek phallic comedy survives has ever been in doubt as to the sort of show the King provided,” one writer asserted with confidence. (However, Twain specifies that the king was not strutting around the stage waving his cock, but had “come a-prancing out on all fours, naked.”)
It was not until 1968 that a more likely scenario was suggested by Twain scholar Wallace Graves. He related a story he heard in the early 1930s about a scam that had supposedly taken place some years earlier in Sweden, a story that revealed a familiarity with the original meaning of the slang expression. There, “two destitute traveling actors” had presented an impromptu performance before an all-male audience.
One man collected money while the audience filed in, then came around and appeared before the curtain announcing that a great dramatic play called “The Burning Shame” was about to be shown. The curtain was then raised, and his partner, naked, came out on his hands and knees. The other said: “And now, gentlemen, you are about to see The Tragedy of the Burning Shame.” He inserted a candle in the naked man’s posterior, and lit it. When nothing further happened, the audience shouted for something more; the man said the performance was over; the viewers shouted: “You mean, that’s all?” “Yes,” the man said, “have you ever seen a better example of a ‘Burning Shame’?” Then the two dashed out of town, the audience in hot pursuit.
The Swedish story as Graves relayed it parallels Twain’s truncated and censored “Royal Nonesuch” a bit too neatly; one suspects that someone in the 1930s had read Huckleberry Finn.
Despite Graves’ widely known theory that “The Burning Shame” involved sticking a lighted candle up a man’s rear end, subsequent writers were reluctant to concede that America’s favorite humorist might have been making an anal allusion. One suggested that “[t]he ‘tragedy’ of the ‘burning shame’ and the ‘royal nonesuch’ seem then to form a configuration that involves sexual incapacity and possibly some sort of phallic substitute … [and]very likely involved a male’s inability to sustain an erection,” the limp penis being hidden by “some kind of exaggerated phallus.” Another declared: “This ‘outfit’ is not a lighted candle but a gargantuan, artificial phallus attached to the king at its appropriate place.” The appropriate place for a penis substitute being, of course, in front.
Central to the story itself—and to the rejection of the very idea of a lighted candle as one of the stage props—is the assumption that there is nothing more degrading than a naked man on his hands and knees with something hard and cylindrical inserted into his posterior. Bottom shaming is integral to the story. No one is quite sure why Twain switched the title to “The Royal Nonesuch” at the last moment and cut short his description of the king’s performance, but he was probably concerned about offending his readership with something that pushed impropriety a bit too far. He knew that he was already on thin ice with the theme of a white boy helping a black man escape from slavery. Twain’s personal finances at the time were shaky, and he needed to sell as many copies of the novel as possible, so he couldn’t afford to offend too many readers. He even worried that the drawing of Huck Finn that the publisher had chosen for the cover might be problematic, complaining that “the boy’s mouth is a trifle more Irishy than necessary,” and presumably might have depressed sales to people who were anti-Catholic or anti-immigrant.
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In January 1870, Mark Twain sent a letter from Elmira, New York, to his old friend Jim Gillis back in California, a letter rich in nostalgia and gratitude for the months he spent hiding out in Gillis’ and Stoker’s mountain retreat. “It makes my heart ache yet to call to mind some of those days,” he wrote. The times were hard, but out of that hardscrabble existence came the stories that would make him rich and famous. “And wouldn’t I love to take old Stoker by the hand, and wouldn’t I love to see him in his great specialty, his wonderful rendition of ‘Rinaldo’ in the ‘Burning Shame’! Where is Dick and what is he doing? Give him my fervent love and warm old remembrances.” The mention of the performance is important, as it suggests that “The Burning Shame” as Twain first encountered it was not just a single risqué stunt but an extended storyline with at least one named character. We can picture Jim Gillis standing in front of the fireplace, his hands folded behind him, delivering that story with deadpan sincerity while his partner scampered around the cabin with a lighted candle—real or pantomimed—inserted in his rear end. For Twain it was a cherished memory, but one that he did not dare put down in print.
The occasion for this letter is significant: Twain was about to marry Olivia Langdon, the woman who would be the love of his life. As his own bachelor days were drawing to a close, he was thinking about the bachelors he had known in the isolated mining camps of California, and in particular Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker. He wished they could join in the wedding festivities. “You can’t come so far, Jim, but still I cordially invite you to come, anyhow—and I invite Dick, too. And if you two boys were to land here on that pleasant occasion, we would make you right royally welcome.” From their remote refuge in the mountains in 1864, the lives of the three men had taken divergent paths, but Mark Twain, now world famous, had not forgotten that he was once just Sam Clemens, fugitive from the San Francisco sheriff, rocking with laughter as Jim Gillis and Dick Stoker performed for him before the fireplace in their rough cabin on Jackass Hill.
References
Graves, Wallace. “Mark Twain’s ‘Burning Shame’,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 23, no. 1 (June 1968).
Twain, Mark. Mark Twain’s Notebooks & Journals. Edited by Frederick Anderson, et al. University of California Press, 1975.
Twain, Mark, Roughing It. American Publishing Co., 1872.
