Bill Kerwin's Reviews > Pudd'nhead Wilson

If you consider a man's “best” books to be the ones with the most consistent tone and the fewest flaws, then Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper are Mark Twain’s best works of fiction. If, however, “best” means the most interesting, the most resonant, even if the flaws are considerable and the results problematic, then that honor belongs to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court,” Huckleberry Finn, and—I would argue—The Tragedy of Puddin’head Wilson too.

The flaws and the problems of Twain’s fiction stem from the fact that the limited but parochial projects of Twain the humorist are often undermined and thwarted by the comprehensive soul of Twain the writer of fiction. In Connecticut Yankee, for example, as much as Twain admired Yankee know-how and despised the “jejune romanticism” of Sir Walter Scott, there was still a part of him that grudgingly admired Southern chivalry and was appalled by how Yankee know-how literally blew that chivalry apart on the great battlefields of the Civil War. For this reason, an essentially humorous book about a cunning modern inventor who outfoxes King Arthur’s finest ends with a bitter picture of modern warfare which considerably alters its tone. And the end of Huckleberry Finn exhibits similar problems in the comic—but essentially unfunny—return of Tom Sawyer to the narrative.

Puddin’head Wilson—a smaller but equally resonant work—is comparably problematic. It began as a novel with the title Those Extraordinary Twins, featuring a pair of conjoined twins based on a well known Italian pair, Giovanni and Giacomo Tocci. Twain wished to contrast their relatively happy life with the dark story of two little Missouri boys growing up in the small town of Dawson’s Landing in the years before the Civil War. The two boys look much alike, but Tom is to be the master of the house, and Chambers is to be his slave. The story of how they are made to switch places, together with tale of Puddin’head Wilson, a lawyer who eventually resolves the mystery—if not the resulting tragedy—through the newly emerging science of fingerprinting, is a fascinating one. Unfortunately, it completely overwhelmed the story of the Italian twins. Twain left them—unconjoined- to wander with little purpose through the story, a baffling vestige of his original comic conception.

Still, it is a powerful narrative, particularly in its account of how the institution of slavery molds the characters of both the false master and the false slave. Twain’s touch is not always sure—there are even moments when Twain appears to be saying that even a drop “black blood’ may be enough to taint the human character—but at its basis this is a profound tale of the fatal effect of nurture versus nature, and how two boys switched at birth can be changed irrevocably, particularly when one is slave and one is free.

The novel isn’t perfect, but it is also a rattling good mystery, with a lot of good stuff about fingerprints, an exciting courtroom scene, and a wickedly ironic conclusion to the fate of the faux master. It’s got problems, sure, but it is well worth a read.