The Union editorials were not signed, but Clemens singled out James L. Laird, co-owner and editor of the newspaper, as the responsible party. In a letter of May 21, he demanded a public retraction. When Laird ludicrously replied that the Union author of the insults was not he but a printer on the paper, Clemens challenged Laird to a duel. Calling him a “cowardly sneak,” he wrote, “I now peremptorily demand of you the satisfaction due to a gentleman—without alternative.” This was followed up the very same day with a letter expressing Clemens’s astonishment that Laird would “endeavor to shield your craven carcass behind the person of an individual who in spite of your introduction is entirely unknown to me, and upon whose shoulders you cannot throw the whole responsibility.” On May 24 Clemens published the entire correspondence between himself and Laird, denouncing him for refusing to fight and calling him an “unmitigated liar.”8
Looking back on this episode in the life of Mark Twain, one cannot help but conjure up the absurdity of the Code Duello and its ramifications in the Grangerford and Sherburn-Boggs chapters of Huckleberry Finn, along with their implicit criticism of the rigid but romantic ideology of Sir Walter Scott. Whether Sam would have gone through with the challenge to Laird is not altogether clear. Steve Gillis, who was designated Sam’s second in the duel, later told Albert Bigelow Paine that Clemens and Laird actually met on the field of honor, but that Laird was scared off when Gillis shot the head off a bird and attributed the act to Clemens, who wasn’t known for his straight shooting. Yet in a helpful corrective to this myth, Henry Nash Smith theorizes that there was never even this much of a duel. Twain claimed in his autobiography that he and Gillis were fearful of a new Nevada law against dueling, which carried a penalty of two years in jail. But it was not a new law, and it was not strictly enforced in the “Wild West.” Joe Goodman himself had been involved in a duel with a Union editor a year earlier. The main threat Sam faced—in the words of Smith—“was the danger of being ridiculous and ridiculed.”9
Once again, as with Orion and his Hannibal newspaper, Sam had gotten a paper in trouble while the editor was away. But as in the case of “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” Goodman fully supported the hoaxer. Just what Orion thought of the incident has gone unrecorded, but soon thereafter Sam asked him for a loan of two hundred dollars to get out of town and thus avoid arrest for dueling in Nevada. By the end of the month, he and Steve Gillis had left for San Francisco. “I have never had anything to do with duels since,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I thoroughly disapprove of duels. I consider them unwise, and I know they are dangerous.” Mark Twain’s true weapon, of course, was humor, which nothing could ultimately withstand. His headstrong personality occasionally took him beyond his physical abilities. (Indeed, one wonders whether, in Life on the Mississippi, he exaggerated his pummeling of the pilot Brown.) His war service suggests that he could not abide the perils and discomforts of combat. As he wrote in “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” he had “entered the war, got just a taste of it, and then stepped out again permanently.” But it wasn’t the first time he had retreated in the face of danger. While living in St. Louis in 1854, he had joined a local militia to quell a riot in which members of the Know-Nothing Party were plundering the rooming houses of immigrants. In a private dress rehearsal for his conduct in the Civil War, he decided to opt out when violence actually threatened. Just before his company made contact with the rioters, he asked a fellow militiaman to hold his weapon, according to an account in chapter 51 of Life on the Mississippi, “while I dropped out and got a drink. Then I branched off and went home.”10 Prudence and comedy were the tactics he preferred.
13 The Jumping Frog
Sam Clemens’s permanent removal to San Francisco in 1864 marked an important stage in his career as Mark Twain, for he began to publish sketches, hundreds of them, that would not only lead to but also enhance his initial fame as the author of the Jumping Frog story in 1865. Most were written after he made his last move to the Bay City, and twenty-six of them went essentially unchanged (the editing in most cases amounting to selective cutting) into his first book along with “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” retitled “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” His first job in San Francisco was on the Morning Call, but he also wrote sketches for the Californian and, starting about mid-1865, sent letters to the Enterprise back in Virginia City. He probably landed the Call job through Joe Goodman, who had worked in San Francisco before he conducted the Enterprise and was respected as a journalist there. Sam worked at the Call from June to October, but the job didn’t allow him the artistic freedom or leisure he had enjoyed at the Enterprise. His starting salary was reasonably good at forty dollars a week, but the work was “killingly monotonous” with its daily sessions in police court and a beat that included reporting on the endless squabbles involving either the city’s Irish or Chinese residents, the latter brutalized by the police and not even counted in the official census. The “fearful drudgery” of this tedious routine persuaded Clemens to take a twenty-dollar pay cut during his final month on the paper in return for a shorter workday.
He got discouraged about his situation and about the progress of his career as a writer, restricted as it was to the world of journalism. Forty years later he still remembered feeling his “deep shame in being situated as I was—slave of such a journal as the Morning Call.”1 Although the job required straight reporting, he was occasionally allowed the editorial freedom to engage his imagination. In “No Earthquake,” published on August 23, he reflected the edginess of the city that, only a generation or two later, would experience its big bang of 1906. “In consequence of the warm, close atmosphere, . . .” he wrote, “everybody expected to be shaken out of their boots by an earthquake before night, but up to the hour of our going to press the supernatural boot-jack had not arrived yet.” Aside from these flights of wit, however, his heart simply wasn’t in the job of gathering the news. He was, as it was tactfully put, willingly “retired” by his employer, George E. Barnes, that fall.2
Clemens also wrote occasionally for the Golden Era and the Californian, where he met at least three contributors who would play a part in his future: Bret Harte, Charles Henry Webb, and Charles Warren Stoddard. Harte was working for the San Francisco Mint and contributing to the Californian, which he would later edit for a time with Webb. Webb, an established humorist who would edit and publish Clemens’s first book in 1867, was the founding editor of the Californian. And Stoddard, a minor essayist, poet, and closeted homosexual who would soon be writing exotic letters from Hawaii to Walt Whitman, became Sam’s private secretary when he lived and lectured in London in 1872 and 1873.3 Another associate, with whom he had a more distant relationship, was Ambrose Bierce, who also contributed to the Golden Era.
He continued living with Steve Gillis in a succession of rooming houses following their brief residence in the lavish Occidental Hotel (“Heaven on the half shell”) and surviving (barely) on the commissions he got from the Californian, Golden Era, and Enterprise. His residence in San Francisco was abruptly suspended in late 1864 when his roommate got into a barroom brawl with a bully who was a friend of the police chief. Steve had knocked his adversary unconscious with a beer pitcher. As another of the Gillis boys, Billy, remembered the episode, it became “the fight that made Mark Twain famous.”4 Steve was arrested and later bailed out by Sam on a “straw bond” (fifty dollars on a five-hundred-dollar bond). When Steve promptly jumped bail and returned to his printer’s job in Virginia City, Sam was in danger of arrest himself by the angry police chief, because he would immediately owe the entire amount of the bond once Steve turned up missing in court. Sam would have to flee himself. At this point, Jim Gillis, yet another of the Gillis brood from Mississippi, intervened to invite Sam to hide out at his cabin in the Tuolumne Hills until the trouble cleared. Arriving at the Gillis mining shack on Jackass Hill near Tuttleton and Sonora on December 4, Mark Twain came upon his opportunity for fame that Steve had effectively
ordained in that barroom brawl in San Francisco.5 For it was during the subsequent three-month sojourn near the Mother Lode that he first heard the story of the Jumping Frog and subsequently wrote it up in his own fashion, thus securing American humor as a key component of American literature.
Before turning to the toad named Daniel Webster, however, it is useful to glance at some of the stories that led up to the success of the Jumping Frog, earlier sketches that helped make up the other twenty-six pieces in The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches. These stories are representative of the countless ones he wrote during his sudden climb to fame in the 1860s. They also represent, to some extent, those he considered most worth preserving and reprinting, in 1867 and again in 1875, with Sketches New and Old.
Twain was already nationally known both for the frog story when the book appeared and for several sketches that had earlier been reprinted from the Californian in the East. As the New York Times and other reviewers of the 1867 collection noted, several in the volume “were nearly equal to it in merit.” They were probably not referring to the earliest one included, “Curing a Cold,” which had first appeared as “How to Cure a Cold” in the Golden Era of September 20, 1863, or to “Information for the Million,” first published as “Washoe—‘Information Wanted,’ ” in the Enterprise in early May (issue not extant) and reprinted in the Golden Era on May 22, 1864. The first was a spoof on home remedies, and the second satirized the shameless land-promotion schemes in Nevada, usually for worthless mines. But a third, originally called “Whereas” in the Californian of October 22, 1864, probably struck as much literary gold in terms of this humorist’s development as “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.”
For the book it was retitled “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” and it is still hilarious today, whereas one needs to know something about the traditions of American humor to fully appreciate the lead story in Twain’s first book. With “Aurelia’s Unfortunate Young Man,” whose public readings (Twain later told William Dean Howells) convulsed audiences with laughter, we don’t need any history to appreciate its humor.6 The first half of the original sketch mimicked classical writers such as Goldsmith and Irving on the travails of love. In Twain’s version, this “Palace of Cupid,” as the editors of the Early Tales note, is now called “Love’s Bakery.” It proves to be “peculiarly fitting” as an introduction to a story as riotously laughable as the fantasies of Emmeline Grangerford in Huckleberry Finn.
Aurelia Maria has written the author of a self-help column about a particularly troublesome fiancé whose clumsiness causes him to lose body parts. (Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man That Was Used Up” may have given Twain the basic idea for his plot.) Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers of New Jersey first becomes infected with smallpox, “and when he recovered from his illness, his face was pitted like a waffle-mould.” Not long after Aurelia has accepted these facial distortions, Mr. Caruthers, “watching the flight of a balloon,” walks—like Stephen Dowling Bots of Emmeline Grangeford’s sentimental poem—into a well and fractures one of his legs, which has to be amputated at the knee. “Again,” Twain writes, “Aurelia was moved to break off the engagement, but again love triumphed,” and she resolved to give him “another chance to reform.” Caruthers then suffers the loss of an arm “by the premature discharge of a Fourth-of-July cannon” and soon afterward the accidental loss of the other. “Deeply grieved to see her lover passing from her by piecemeal,” she nevertheless resigns herself to remain faithful at least a little longer. But “shortly before the time set for the nuptials,” and loss of an eye and the other leg, the final disaster occurs: “There was but one man scalped by the Owens River Indians last year. That man was Williamson Breckinridge Caruthers, of New-Jersey.”
Sam Clemens had been mocking sentimentality at least since his days in the graveyards of Philadelphia and New Orleans. The perfect dupe or butt of the humor, of course, was conveniently a Yankee from New Jersey, somebody whose pretentious trinomial suggests that he should know enough to come in out of the rain. American humor began by making fun of the British gentleman in all his puffery; then, as it emerged in the American South, the target became the stranger from the North, or the Yankee, and then finally the stranger from anywhere. The columnist’s final advice to poor Aurelia is to reconstruct this Yankee fool, who by now consists of only two-thirds of himself:
How would it do to build him? If Aurelia can afford the expense, let her furnish her mutilated lover with wooden arms and wooden legs, and a glass eye and a wig, and give him another show; give him ninety days, without grace, and if he does not break his neck in the meantime, marry him and take chances. 7
Twain would eventually make an even better joke with a wooden leg in Huckleberry Finn.
Sentimentality, or any kind of posed emotion or nostalgia, was always the target of Twain’s satire. In “A Touching Story of George Washington’s Boyhood,” the next sketch he wrote that went into his book (Californian, October 29, 1864), the narrator doesn’t get to his point until the very end of the tale, but by then he has already forgotten his subject, the lie about the president who could never tell one. Mark Twain would put this national myth to better use in the conclusion of Tom Sawyer, where Judge Thatcher lugubriously insists that Tom’s lie to save the magistrate’s daughter Becky from a whipping by the schoolmaster “was worthy to hold up its head and march down through history breast to breast with George Washington’s lauded Truth about the hatchet.” The story also anticipates “The Story of the Old Ram” in chapter 53 of Roughing It, in which a drunken narrator goes through one compulsive digression after another, never getting to the point of his story. Twain was earning only twelve dollars or so for these early pieces, but it was ideal on-the-job training for what he would soon become.8
In “The Killing of Julius Caesar ‘Localized’” (Californian, November 12, 1864), he made fun of the kind of sensational news stories he had been encouraged to write for the Call. Interestingly, in “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” (Californian, December 3, 1864) his target was again the news media, but this time he aimed at their maudlin stories about the war (the one that was still raging then in Grant’s final campaign against the Southern capital of Richmond). It didn’t seem to matter that he himself was arguably a fugitive from the war, probably because so many like him were hiding out in Nevada Territory. Harper’s Weekly was known for its melodramatic war stories, or tales about the home front in which young women refuse to marry their boyfriends unless they help them “make a sacrifice” for their country by enlisting. “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier” was Twain’s version of one of those “sickly war stories.” Lucretia sits at the bedside of her wounded lover, who is wrapped in bandages covering most of his face, only to discover when the dressing is removed that she has been “slobbering over the wrong soldier!”9
The best that can be said for “Literature in the Dry Diggings” (originally “An Unbiased Criticism,” Californian, March 18, 1865) is that it is another feat of elaborate digressing that mentions Ben Coon, the real-life person who first told the Jumping Frog story to Sam and his friends at Angels Camp, not far from the Gillis cabin. Ben Coon became the loquacious Simon Wheeler in Twain’s frog story, but not before making his debut as the author of “He Done His Level Best” in the Californian on June 17, 1865 (made part of “Answers to Correspondents” in his book, which melded together several installments of “Answers”).
By the summer and fall of 1865, Sam Clemens was placing items wherever he could merely to stay afloat—among them “Advice for Good Little Girls” in the San Francisco Youth’s Companion and the fourth installment of “Answers to Correspondents” in the Californian, both initially published on June 24, before they were spliced into the book. Each was largely magazine filler, but in the second he pokes fun at motherhood and those women who declare that a “baby is a thing of beauty and a joy forever!” Much later, H. L. Mencken, one of the earliest champions of Huckleberry Finn as great literature, may have been inspire
d by this sketch to ghost-write a baby book for a Baltimore pediatrician which argued that a “mother should not make a slave of herself waiting on the child, but clothe it in some comfortable manner and let it fight out its own troubles.”10
In “An Item Which the Editor Himself Could Not Understand,” part of “The Facts,” first published in the Californian of August 26, we have more of the discursive narrative that would culminate in “The Story of the Old Ram” in Roughing It. Sam must have felt, with well more than a hundred sketches to his credit, that he was going somewhere as a literary person, certainly as a humorist. That fall he told Orion and Mollie that he had “a ‘call’ to literature, of a low order.” That his readers thought he wrote exclusively in this “low order” would never cease to bother him, but for now it was enough to sustain his ego. He warned his brother to burn his letter to them to avoid the publication of any “literary remains” until after he was “planted,” a caveat he would have to issue several times during his career as his fame grew. Also that fall, the San Francisco Dramatic Chronicle had compared his literary style favorably with that of John Phoenix.11 A day earlier the same journal issued his “Earthquake Almanac,” which made its way into the book as “A Page from a California Almanac.” Like “No Earthquake” in the Call, it made fun of weather reports indicating the possibility of the big one.
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