BOOKS

The Missing Huck and Jim

IN 1990 THE FIRST 665 ORIGINAL manuscript pages of Mark Twain’s great river novel were found wrapped up inside a steamer trunk in California, ninety-three years after they had disappeared. Twain had given them to a collector, James Fraser Gluck, and the rediscovery of these pages by Gluck’s granddaughter provoked a seventeen-month court battle over ownership.

The recovered bundle contained some scenes deleted from the printed version; on the first page, Twain’s opening evolves in his clear hand from “You will not know about me” to “You do not know” before settling on the line familiar to generations of readers: “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.” Such manuscript changes made to a mediocre novel would be of little interest, of course; the real purpose of this edition (which carries the original line illustrations) is to freshen the reader’s appreciation for Twain’s classic, which he began in 1876.

“Tearing along on a new book,” he wrote that summer. “It is Huck Finn’s autobiography.”

Huck’s raft partner, the escaped slave Jim, belonged in the original draft to the Widow Douglas, not to the nasty Miss Watson of the printed version; the change made the consequences of Jim’s capture more frightening. In this manuscript Jim delivers a long, unsettling monologue on visiting a cadaver—one of Twain’s better ghost stories. The episode was excised, as was the famous bragging “raftsman’s passage” (“Cast your eye on me, gentlemen!—and lay low, and hold your breath, for I’m about to turn myself loose!”), which, transplanted to Life on the Mississippi, became one of that book’s best-known sections. It may have been cut by Twain simply to keep Huckleberry Finn short enough to sell in a set with Tom Sawyer. Here is the artist at work, refining his separate dialects, even changing Huck’s line about hating school “like sin” because, as the Twain scholar Victor Doyno suggests in his fine notes, “sin” is not hateable for Huck. School is much worse than that.

Headline Entertainment

THE IMPLAUSIBLY LONG-LIVED New York Post dates to 1801, the year its founder, Alexander Hamilton, helped defeat Aaron Burr’s presidential hopes and three years before Burr, in turn, killed Hamilton in a duel. Not everyone would see a direct line between Hamilton’s political passions and headlines like 500-POUND SEX MONSTER GOES FREE, but Stephen Cuozzo, the Post’s current executive editor, makes a lucid and entertaining case in this oldfashioned newspapering memoir. He credits the Post with capturing the energy of the city it covers and creating a national trend toward tabloidization in news generally, a movement whose vigor he finds healthy overall. Along the way he tells his own story of climbing the masthead in twenty years, from copy boy on Dorothy Schiffs liberal Post to executive editor of today’s conservative paper. He blames elitism and a lack of cheery advertising appeal, more than suburbanization or television, for the decline of tabloids in the sixties. But he’s better when he’s telling about the characters he apprenticed under at the Post’s South Street headquarters, where he acquired the touch for the paper’s famously hyperbolic headlines: “Mel taught me well. We had a story about weirdo cultists who kept a dead body in an apartment. The stink drew the neighbors’ attention. I came up with DOWN THE HALL, SOMETHING EERIE.‘That’s niiiiice,’ Mel said.”

Cuozzo lived through the newspaper wars of the late seventies, beginning with the tabloid one-upmanship over the 1977 Son of Sam murder case and continued the next year when the Daily News launched its own, competing afternoon , edition, “Tonight.” The endangered Post prevailed and even gained readers. The book ends with the exhilarating days of 1993, when would-be owners vied for the Post before a bankruptcy judge —and rogue editors and press operators kept the paper going even after it had been legally closed down. The cast includes the Post’s strange gallery of owners, from the Australian billionaire Rupert Murdoch to the “parking garage king” Abe Hirschfeld, known for publicly spitting on his enemies. It’s Alive! is a tough, affectionate book.

Feeding George Washington

IN THE LATE SIXTIES A CHILDREN’S BOOK appeared about a boy’s struggle to know what his hero George Washington ate for breakfast. At the book’s end, the boy’s family sits down to a hearty and evocative morning meal, but they do so with nothing like the culinary precision set forth in this family-recipe book, owned for fifty years by Martha Washington and passed down through the generations.

It tells what the first President might have had for lunch, dinner, and even high tea. The handed-down “family manuscript” was Martha’s from 1749 to 1799, from the time of her original marriage, to Daniel Custis, until after George Washington’s presidential farewell. Its unspecified authors explain in good eighteenth-century prose such operations as how “To make a codling tarte eyther to Looke clear or greene,” how “To bake muton in blood,” and how “To make Little frying cakes wth ye pulpe of apples.” The culinary historian Karen Hess has treated these cookbooks as the lively historical texts they are, but she doesn’t ignore the food. The book also serves as a kind of chart showing New World game, vegetables, and fruits entering and improving old English recipes.

The Booke of Sweetmeats section would have had wider practical use for its original readers than the Booke of Cookery, since it included medicinal recipes, instructions on dozens of ways to store fruit, and directions for clarifying sugar and for bringing it to “Manus Christi Height.” Read without Hess’s fine explanatory notes, some of the recipes have a mysterious, poetical ring: “To Make Nimblesses: Lay gum dragon in steep in rosewater, then strayn it thorough a cloth, & beat it in a stone morter with ye white of an egg till it looks very white, then beat & searse double refined sugar & beat it into your gum & egg by degrees, till it is soe stiff yt you can take it forth of yr morter.” Originally published fifteen years ago, this is the Booke’s first appearance in a paperback, kitchen edition.

Life in Bondage

DESPITE GENERATIONS OF SCHOLARSHIP, the record of everyday life under slavery remains frustratingly thin next to that of plantation-owning families. How the slave children lived is especially hard to reconstruct, even though they made up over half the U.S. slave population by the eve of the Civil War. It is debatable, in fact, whether young people born into this system knew any kind of childhood at all. That is the subject of Wilma King’s book. “If childhood was a special time for enslaved children, it was because their parents made it so,” King writes. “The purpose of this study is modest. Its aim is to extricate enslaved children and youth from the amorphous mass of bond servants.” She reviews children’s games like “In The Well” and “All Hid,” and compares black and white versions of nineteenth-century girls’ songs. In the chapters “Temporal and Spiritual Education,” “Traumas and Tragedies,” and “Play and Leisure,” she draws on dozens of studies, memoirs, and WPA interviews with former slaves to patch together as full a picture as possible of childhood without freedom. “When necessary, they donned the mask of compliance to hide their will to resist. As the children of slaves matured and became the parents of free boys and girls, they would realize that their role was no different from that of their parents . . . to provide the salve, kindle hope, and maintain the love to insure that their children survived.”

RECORDINGS

Rhapsody in Jazz

ONE THING RHAPSODY IN BLUE HAS never been is jazz—until now. Marcus Roberts, the pianist long associated with Wynton Marsalis, has adopted the Gershwin orchestral masterpiece the way generations before him have taken on individual Gershwin songs like “I Got Rhythm” or “Liza”—as a basis for improvisation that finds new depths and heights in the music. A quizzical, quiet little banjo riff starts it off, as if to nod toward where Gershwin’s inspiration had its source, and then the familiar opening clarinet solo comes in swinging and sassing, and Gershwin leaves the ground. The piece’s usual sixteen minutes or so swell to just under half an hour of fifty-piece big-band swing, bebop saxophone riffs, bravura trumpet passages, cool fifties ballad sounds, and brilliant piano solos from Roberts himself. The very idea of the piece is audacious; what is more amazing is that Roberts carries it off wonderfully, creating a joyously wide-ranging work whose intensity never lets up—and that never loses touch with the original. After this you won’t think of Rhapsody in Blue the same way again, or of jazz improvisation as limited to one song at a time. The CD continues with Roberts’s similarly imaginative enlargements of Yamekraw, a 1927 piano and orchestra rhapsody by the jazz composer James P. Johnson and Gershwin’s own Variations on “I Got Rhythm. ”