Q&A with Jon Clinch, author of Finn
By Kristen Switzer, Handseller editor

Handseller: Have you always been a Mark Twain fan?
Jon Clinch: Absolutely. I believe that what appealed to me first about him was his obvious love for language. Whether writing in his own unmistakable voice or carrying out the incomparable act of multiple ventriloquism that is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Twain's romance with language in all of its forms is both vivid and contagious. I'm also an admirer of his iconoclasm, which may be at the root of my willingness to take his great and unassailable icon--Huckleberry Finn--and turn him into something of my own.

H: How did the idea for Finn come about? Is Huck's father the most intriguing aspect of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for you?
JC: Finn took root from chapter nine of The Adventures, with the house that Huck and Jim found afloat on the Mississippi, bearing a corpse whose identity would remain a mystery until the end of the book. I'd never forgotten the scene. And when I returned to it as an adult, it seemed to have grown even creepier and more evocative than I'd remembered. The walls, covered all over with words and pictures in charcoal. The men's and women's clothing. The wooden leg. The two black masks made of cloth. What on earth, I asked myself, did Twain mean by leaving these clues behind? What did he want to suggest to us about the life and death of Huck's brutal, alcoholic, racist father? One conventional reading is that Finn died in a brothel, but I wanted more. I wanted to understand what kind of life a man might lead that would cause him to die precisely here, in this unmoored two-story house, surrounded by this particular collection of dreadful artifacts. My respect and admiration for Twain--as a novelist, as a craftsman, as a moralist of the highest order--would not permit me to dismiss these details as mere meaningless throwaways. And so I began.

For me, Finn himself was definitely the most intriguing aspect of The Adventures. When I first read the book as a child, he leapt from the pages as completely at variance with an individual I knew in real life. In some sense he was my introduction to racism, alcoholism, and child abuse--things I didn't get at home.

H: In Finn, Huck's mother is black, and, eventually, Finn makes Huck believe that she was only his nanny. This new revelation will be quite a shock to most readers. You state in your notes that Twain “most certainly and consciously built this boy hero out of materials whose blackness goes far deeper than mere dialect.” Care to elaborate?
JC: Finn has Twain scholars talking, and their opinion seems to be that although my revelations won't satisfy everyone, they do provide some important and convincing answers to questions posed by Twain's book. This gratifies me, but not because I set out to please the academics or to advance some kind of scholarly agenda. On the contrary. I set out to write a book that was true to its raw materials and true to its deepest impulses and true to my own worldview--particularly to my understanding of how human nature functions at points of extremity.

Which leads me back to the question of Huck's blackness. As Shelley Fisher Fishkin demonstrates in her monograph, Was Huck Black?, Twain's worldview was much influenced by the black children with whom he grew up. Their manner of speech--their manner of thought, comes to that, since language both reflects and influences cognition--was enormously important in shaping his own modes of expression, particularly his taste for satire and irony, without which we wouldn't have much in the way of a Mark Twain at all. With Fishkin, I believe that there is most certainly a whole black culture at work behind the character of Huck Finn, regardless of the particulars of his pigmentation.

H: Can you tell us more about the signifying speech that dominates much of the dialogue in the book? Why is Finn's favorite phrase, “I know it”?
JC: I set out with two clear aims for way that Finn, the novel, would sound. First, I wanted an archaic and mythic kind of narrative voice. That meant calling on the language and cadences of some large and imposing models: the King James Bible, for one, and the work of American masters like William Faulkner and Herman Melville. My second goal was to honor Twain's grand use of dialect in The Adventures, without attempting to mimic it in any way. By stripping the speech of characters like Finn and Bliss down to its barest essence, I was able to create a contrast between narrative and dialogue that conveys the impression of dialect without giving in to specifics.

As for Finn's “I know it,” I hear this vocal tic as a statement of mingled assent and defensiveness and one-upmanship--as if he believes that merely agreeing with another person is too passive and undignified an act. With this little formula he simultaneously assents and defends his independence and declares his awareness of any knowledge possessed by whatever person he's speaking with. Plus I love how the Homeric quality of repeated, formulaic expression--coupled with the naming conventions in the book, where certain characters are identified only by their roles and Finn himself has no known first name--works to advance the novel's mythic scope.

H: Finn is incredibly racist toward the black community in the book, yet he loves--perhaps too strong a word--and lives with Mary, Huck's mother, for years. How difficult was it to write about this contradiction and to understand it? Is it ever resolved?
JC: Finn's relationship with black people--and hence his deeply conflicted union with Mary--came to me directly from Twain. Pap Finn was the unrepentant voice of racism in The Adventures, and as I sought out the roots of that racism I kept coming back to one of the secrets of many deeply felt human emotions: ambivalence. That impulse led me to trace Finn's troubles with race both upstream, to his father, and downstream, to his son.

H: Do you have any plans to continue Huck's story? Or Tom's? Or Jim's? What are you working on now?
JC: I've given Huckleberry Finn's further story a good bit of thought, particularly because the close of my novel leaves things unresolved between Huck and his grandfather. There's definitely a story there. There's another story about Finn kicking around in my head, too--a small one, which would obviously take place before he meets his grievous end. We'll see.

My current project involves a topic familiar to readers of Finn: fathers and sons.

H: Handseller is all about books. Who are you reading now? What are a few of the books that have a special meaning for you?
JC: Right now I'm reading Charles Frazier's Thirteen Moons. I'm enjoying it even more than I did Cold Mountain, which is saying something.

One of the books that influenced me most is Grendel, in which the great John Gardner retold Beowulf from the monster's point of view. And a sophisticated, woeful, existentialist monster he was, as only Gardner could have created him.

I've always been a great admirer of William Faulkner and a huge fan of the dizzingly inventive Italo Calvino. And oh, yes, one more thing worth noting: Mark Helprin cannot write a bad sentence any more than E. B. White could. I hate the both of them.