Lighting Out for the Territory

My Book Pages--Summer 2025

There is a fabulous moment in Huckleberry Finn, which I re-read this summer. Huck and Jim are on the raft, floating down the majestic river. It’s a grand trip, but Huck is feeling guilty. He has enabled the escape of Miss Watson’s “nigger” Jim. He has stolen her property. And now Jim is talking “wild talk.” When they get to a free state, he wants to get a job and raise the money to free his wife and then liberate their children. Huck frets: “Here was this nigger which I had as good as helped to run away, coming out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know, a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.”

Huck vows to take the canoe, paddle ashore and “tell” the authorities that he has an escaped slave on board. But it’s a tough call. Jim’s now saying, “Jim won’t ever forgit you, Huck; you’s de bes’ frien’ Jim’s ever had.” And Jim is the best friend Huck’s ever had, a combination of father and older brother, the opposite of Huck’s own selfish, drunken, violent father. Then again, Miss Watson was always kind to him, almost like a mother. (His mother died when he was young; he’s next thing to an orphan.)

Huck sets out for shore and almost immediately comes across two white slave-catchers, hard men with guns who make their living off the sale of human flesh. They’re out searching for five recently escaped blacks. They spot the raft in the distance and ask Huck if anyone’s on it.

“Only one, sir.”

“…Is your man white or black?”

I didn’t answer up prompt. I tried to, but the words wouldn’t come. I tried for a second or two, to brace up and out with it, but I wasn’t man enough—hadn’t the spunk of a rabbit. I see I was weakening; so I just give up trying and up and says—

“He’s white…”

The action takes place before the Civil War, but the book was written decades later—at a moment when unspeakable violence was being done to former slaves in the south, at a moment when even many northerners were wondering whether they’d done the right thing to free the slaves. The question of black equality was far from settled. I imagine Huck’s inner debate was similar to many among average (white) Americans during those years. He’s a classic “low information” voter, a member of his tribe—he accepts the prevailing notion of slaves as property— but uncomfortable in it. He’s an archetype, the American rambling boy, struggling with the fundamental American sin, of two minds about whether to rat on Jim.

But the American Dream has always been about the possibility of transcending your tribe.

And he does…

“He’s white.”

Blacks wouldn’t be truly liberated until the 1960s and, for some—those who were paralyzed by an inherited, crippling sociology, and the persistence of white bigotry—not even to this day. But Mark Twain, a white southerner, writing in arguably the greatest American novel, has made it plain: blacks and whites are equal. It seems an inevitable moral truth in retrospect, as inevitable as the Mississippi flows into the Gulf of Mexico; equality would be the only possible spiritual result of our national journey, even if there would be many bends and breaks to get there.

Another thing—a metaphor Twain may or not have intended—Huck Finn is a different character after that. He is no longer a boy. The act of choosing morality—and, let’s face it, self-interest (he’s not going to survive the river without Jim)—instead of his tribe is a coming of age ritual. He can no longer be the same old happy-go-lucky Huck; he has the power to change the rules, to make new ones. Which caused a plot problem for Twain: How does this story end? The last hundred pages of Huckleberry Finn have the subject of literary debate for 150 years. They are a bit clumsy and silly and controversial, like adolescence itself. Tom Sawyer, the clever prankster, the eternal sprite, shows up…and he wants to play games with Jim’s freedom. Huck is reluctant, but goes along: Tom has been the leader of the pack back home, Huck’s anchor in a perilous world. But Tom is still a boy; his games will cost Jim his freedom, for a time. In the end, Twain seems to throw up his hands and produces the requisite 19th century happy ending.

With a twist. Huck doesn’t go home. And he never makes it downriver to New Orleans. He doesn’t settle down. He never grows up, all the way. He “lights out for the Territory,” the American west. This is an impulse at the heart of the country—jaunty, clever, adventurous, creative, not entirely formed, still evolving. For a very long time, and for an awful lot of young men, to be an American was to be like Huck—to leave, to grow, to take a chance. (Everyone from Daniel Boone to Woody Guthrie comes to mind.)

It was certainly still true in 1918 when Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone and the naturalist John Burroughs took one of the first automotive road trips. Actually, they took a few—to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s grave in New England, and through the Great Smoky Mountains in Appalachia. These were exuberant, delightful excursions and they are described with graceful care in the book American Journey by Wes Davis. These are four geniuses who have lit out for the territory. The vehicles are rickety, but the master engineer—Ford—is happy to fix them (and happier still if a solution offers a new path for one of his products); he’s always experimenting. They sleep in tents, most nights. They are eternally curious about their surroundings. Ford and Edison have to check out every factory and mill, even abandoned ones; Burroughs—nickname John O’Birds—is a voracious collector and describer of wildlife. They are celebrities in every small town and city they visit; there is an unconquerable gladness to the journey, to cite a hymn. One of my favorite moments is a photograph of Edison and Burroughs on their knees inspecting a rock, which has a seam of potash—a mineral Edison needs for a new invention. Everything is fascinating to them. Abandoned water wheels are fascinating. Ford and Firestone are obsessed with water power, to run their factories and provide the electric power Edison needs for his inventions. They pass the time by calculating how much electricity can be generated by how much wheel. The book is all about energy and optimism, and the next bend in the road. The four geniuses are wildly creative and informal, so joyous—so American.

We have lost that spirit. It has been manifest this summer. We are no longer joyous adventurers and inventors, masters of our fate; we are constricted in our dreams and language; we walk on eggshells. Which is the subject of a third book that meshes with Huckleberry Finn and American Journey. It is called The Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams.

The summer in question was 2020, a time of covid and and the murder of George Floyd—the cop with his fatal knee on Floyd’s neck could have been a slave-catcher in Huck Finn—and by national protests, and violence, and by a surge of left extremism, which was as much about restrictions as Huck Finn was about freedom.

Williams is black, way smart and way complicated. You may have seen his work in The Atlantic. He is infuriated by white racism—but also by the self-righteous myopia of the woke left. He writes:

If the purpose is to understand the political and moral disaster in which we now find ourselves—and not merely signal our enlightenment in relation to it—an unsentimental assessment of the social justice left, and the agenda-setting institutions that repeatedly caved and pandered to its excesses, is not only reasonable but obligatory. For that also has rendered for millions of Americans the disastrous illusion of Trump ever more plausible. And not just plausible but desirable, in the way that it is desirable in the mind of a gambler to seek his own ruin at the roulette wheel, after already having sustained irrecoverable losses.

In other words, Trump is a reaction to the eat-your-peas restrictions imposed by the left after the legal liberation of black people in the 1960s and the social justice movements—for women, gay people, Latino immigrants—that followed. Those movements were righteous, but excessive in latter years. The promotion of reparational policies based on identity was well-intentioned, but corrosive. The reign of the Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) enforcers was a straitjacket on the Huck Finn spirit of America, which was flawed but free. The fatuous ideology of Black Lives Matter suffused the summer of 2020: the only black lives that actually mattered were those taken by police officers, a fraction of those taken by black criminals. Anyone who didn’t use the stringent language of the academic left was disdained as less than fully civilized. Or cancelled.

A reaction was inevitable. It was, in part, a reaction against left-authoritarianism. Trump’s proud boorishness, his flagrant political incorrectness had elements of Huck Finn (and Jimmy Kimmel) to it—it was about freedom of speech, about liberation for the millions of people, mostly men, who had to be careful what they said or noticed in the workplace. (“Hey, you’re looking great today!”).

But Trump was about a lot more and a lot worse than that. His presidency is not about freedom, but retribution; not about freedom, but right-authoritarianism. How do we transcend that? There are no more territories to light out for, the frontier isn’t a physical entity any more. If there is a frontier—aside from the ever-thrilling possibilities of science—it is a traditional one: a step back from the rhetorical brutality, the mirrored censorship right and left…and then another step back to the innocent, questing humanity of Huck Finn. In the end, the essential American value is informality. We hate constraints. We need to be able to wander again.

My Book Pages—Summer Edition

I’ve already written about several books that made me think hard this summer—Michael Ansara’s memoir The Hard Work of Hope and William Galston’s brilliant rumination on the difficulty of optimism, Anger Fear and Domination: Dark Passions and Political Speech.

I also read a wonderful book, to be published next month, The Insider, an old-fashioned literary biography of the critic and editor Malcolm Cowley by Gerald Howard, a great editor in his own right. Cowley had a hand in the careers of everyone from Hart Crane to Hemingway to—crucially—Faulkner, to Jack Kerouac to…Ken Kesey. This is, in many ways, a history of 20th century American literature. And delightful in every way.

The Determined Spy by my old colleague Doug Waller is a rock-solid, no nonsense biography of Frank Wisner, the man who pretty much founded the CIA’s clandestine service. The ops were mostly disastrous, especially when they succeeded—in Iran and Guatemala. And Wisner’s life was a bipolar tragedy ending in suicide. Quite the story.

I also did some actual summer—light—reading:

Phantom Orbit by David Ignatius, who always provides a fun ride and—in this case—a valuable, page-turning lesson in satellite telemetry.

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky. This is a beautiful piece of what would have been a larger novel had the author not been murdered in a German concentration camp. Had she lived, Nemirovsky would have been, I believe, one of the great writers of the 20th century.

Shanghai by Joseph Kanon, a neat thriller that takes place in the Jewish community of Shanghai—yes, Shanghai—at the beginning of World War II

The Winner by Teddy Wayne. A smart working-class tennis pro at a ritzy New England summer community during Covid summer. What could possibly go right?

Our Country Friends by Gary Shteyngart. Again, covid summer—a group of intellectual friends demonstrating the limitations of friendship among intellectuals. A latter-day Chekhovian exercise and rather dark, but Shteyngart is a clever writer who, happily, gives his characters some soul.