Mailer, Democracy and Huckleberry Finn

Norman Mailer’s The Spooky Art (2003) is a rattlebag of memoir, criticism and testosterone-fuelled opinion (sensitive readers might wish to skip his piece on Last Tango in Paris), one of the highlights of which is the essay ‘Huckleberry Finn – Alive at 100’, which concludes like this:

What else is greatness but the indestructible wealth it leaves in the mind’s recollection after hope has soured and our passions are spent? It is always the hope of democracy that our wealth will be there to spend again, and the ongoing treasure of Huckleberry Finn is that it frees us to think of democracy and its sublime, terrifying premise: Let the passions and cupidities and dreams and kinks and ideals and greed and hopes and foul corruptions of all men and women have their day and the world will still be better off, for there is more good than bad in the sum of us and our workings. Mark Twain, whole embodiment of that democratic human, understood the premise in every turn of his pen, and how he tested it, how he twisted and tantalized and tested it until we are weak all over again with our love for the idea. – Norman Mailer, The Spooky Art