Mark Twain’s White Fence
The most famous white fence in literature requires a new bookshelf.
New Orleans 2015
Desk Notes explores writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
Chapter two of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer introduces the most famous white fence in literature:
Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden.
Even though it is Saturday, and there are streets to roam and trouble to cause and fights to start, Tom is supposed to deal with this ridiculous fence. What happens, however, is that another boy appears, and Tom straightens his shoulders and puts on his acting mask, all in service of pretending to enjoy what he loathes.
“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence everyday?”
And here is where Tom begins to discern the nuances of persuasion. There is, in fact, a method to tricking this other boy into desiring Tom’s chore. Eventually, the boy—overcome by curiosity, interest, rejection—demands a turn at whitewashing the fence, Tom pretends to relent, and a succession of new boys appear, all anxious to perform Tom’s chore.
He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it—namely, that in order to make a man or boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make that thing difficult to obtain.
And with these pages about a white fence in 1876 many readers ring a bell, as this is where a new bookshelf begins. We are still in the English section, still surrounded by centuries upon centuries of poems and plays and budding novels, but somewhere along the way we need to start a separate section for American literature. One rather commonplace solution is by date: you have a new country, you have a new section. Although there’s something rather peculiar about the assumption that landing on a different rock catapults writers into a new category. Most American books written in the early 19th Century were simply British books written far from home. At a certain moment, however, there’s a rupture between the English books written in Britain and the English books written in America, where the traditions, styles, and histories have diverged enough to require a separate shelf. Many readers consider this white fence a reasonable barrier between the two traditions. Of course the divide is akin to the thin, rather gray, distinction between a dialect and a new language; an isolated population can stretch the language quite far before we begin to deem their speech a new language. Thus Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, both from a quarter century earlier, certainly belong on the American side of Twain’s white fence.
Explore writing, travel, and literature—with a new issue every Friday.
Why is a new shelf required? This is a reasonable question, especially when considering the universal appeal of any work of literature worth rereading; perhaps it comes from the simple need to catalogue, to sort, to justify through difference. A more resolute reply comes from the conclusion that The Adventures of Tom Sawyer couldn’t have been written from anywhere else—in its narrative voice, by its setting, with its themes—and this distinction begins to approach the category of difference.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—which Twain published eight years later—is certainly the better and more important novel, but, in these two novels together, we have the bookend to a new shelf. Ernest Hemingway, speaking in his usual definitive way, judged Huckleberry Finn as the foundation for every subsequent sentence.
It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.
One hundred years after Huckleberry Finn’s publication, Norman Mailer reviewed the book as a contemporary novel—as a new book published in 1984, and in a direct line with every American classic of the 20th Century and flawed only by its modern vernacular. For a book set in 19th Century, he wrote with tongue firmly in cheek, the writing is too contemporary to believe.
Thus we need a new shelf because we’re marking the beginning of an explosion—one strong enough to tear away what came before, one strong enough to reverberate into everything that comes after. But the reverberations begin rather quickly. We don’t need to wait one hundred years to evaluate the escalation inherent to all good literature. Good novels also enlarge as you read—the latter chapters incorporate what comes before. What’s acquired redounds, which is exactly what Tom does with his knowledge about human nature just a few chapters later.
Now Tom began to scrawl something on the slate, hiding the words from the girl. But she was not backward this time. She begged to see. Tom said:
“Oh, it ain’t anything.”
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it ain’t. You don’t want to see.”
“Yes, I do, indeed I do. Please let me.”
“You’ll tell.”
“No, I won’t—‘deed and ‘deed and double ‘deed I won’t.”
“You won’t tell anybody. Now let me.”
“Oh, you don’t want to see!”
“Now that you dream me so, I will see.” And she put her small hand upon his and a little scuffle ensued, Tom pretending to resist in earnest but letting his hand slip by degrees till these words were reveals: “I love you.”
“Oh, you bad thing!” And she hit his hand a smart rap, but reddened and looked pleased, nevertheless.
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