“The Launch of the Steamer Capital” (“‘Mark Twain’ on the Launch of the Steamer ‘Capital,’ ” Californian, November 18, 1865) is another exercise in digression, but by now, as the original title indicates, “Mark Twain” carried immediate name recognition, at least on the West Coast. Indeed, Webb took many of his texts for the 1867 book from reprints in the prestigious Californian, which by now under Bret Harte’s editorship counted Clemens as an important commodity. After a hand-to-mouth existence in San Francisco following his return from Jackass Hill and his pocket-mining buddies, he was starting to see the vistas in his literary landscape. That terrain widened significantly following the publication of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”—also on November 18, but on the opposite coast. It made its debut in the famed and newly revived New York Saturday Press, edited by Henry Clapp, one of Whitman’s drinking companions at Pfaff’s on Broadway and the first publisher, back in 1859, of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”
Yet, not long after the Jumping Frog sketch had been hailed as remarkable and widely reprinted, Clemens told his mother and sister Pamela: “To think that after writing many an article a man might be excused for thinking tolerably good, those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!” He dismissed it as “a squib that would never have been written but to please Artemus Ward.”12 Ward and Clemens had been friends since Ward’s visit to Virginia City two years earlier. The humorist had written Twain in November 1864 inviting him to contribute one of his sketches to what in 1865 became Artemus Ward: His Travels. When he finally sent the jumping frog sketch in October, however, it was too late for the book. Ward’s publisher gave it to Clapp, who needed material to rejuvenate his journal.
Mark Twain’s low opinion of the sketch would change as compliments poured in from all across the country, including one from James Russell Lowell, who allegedly called it “the finest piece of humorous writing ever produced in America.”13 At the time, Lowell was America’s leading humorist, but his material now is dated and resonates almost solely in the context of the antiwar sentiment of many of the country’s northeastern intellectuals during the Mexican War.
In writing the sketch, Twain was actually trying to work up a humorous description of his experiences in the California mining camps. The original draft, which he started about September 1, 1865, and didn’t complete until the third week of October, was called “The Only Reliable Account of the Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, Together with Some Reference to the Decaying City of Boomerang. . . .” Boomerang was his name for Angels Camp, and the first two parts of the sketch, never published in Twain’s lifetime, discuss the largely abandoned mining town and its constable named Bilgewater, a favorite name that would later perform a greater literary service to the author in Huckleberry Finn. Besides offering a brief demonstration of the digressive narrator, the material is largely without merit. Only when he gets to Simon Wheeler does the narrative congeal into the frog story.
The story was not original with Twain; only his “account” was, as he acknowledged in his initial title. The tale had first appeared as “The Toad Story” in the Sonora Herald in 1853 and again in a slightly different version in the San Andreas Independent in 1858. Although it did not single-handedly launch Twain’s career as America’s greatest humorist (a number of his writings of this era were hitting their mark in western publications recopied in the East), it does give us one of the earliest important glimpses of his use of the stranger who upsets normal expectations, a theme that one way or another increasingly, or at least ultimately, characterizes the fiction of Mark Twain all the way to “The Mysterious Stranger” manuscripts. In the Jumping Frog tale, however, the stranger is not in any way sinister, but merely a better hustler—a stock figure in the Bret Harte tradition—who can take advantage of Jim Smiley’s addiction to gambling. Smiley’s willingness to bet on anything, even on the death of a minister’s wife, provides one of the funniest and most grotesque passages in the story.
If there was a dog-fight he’d bet on it; if there was a cat-fight, he bet on it; if there was a chicken-fight, he’d bet on it; why if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first . . . it never made no difference to him— he would bet on anything. . . . Parson Walker’s wife laid very sick, once, for a good while, and it seemed as if they warn’t going to save her; but one morning he come in and Smiley asked him how she was, and he said she was considerable better—thank the Lord for his inf’nit mercy—and coming on so smart that with the blessing of Providence she’d get well yet—and Smiley, before he thought, says, “Well, I’ll resk two-and-a-half that she don’t, anyway.”14
Jim Smiley’s helplessness in the face of temptation will always be funny because it goes to the heart of human darkness in a world that Darwin had recently explained. Smiley, we learn in the climax of the tale, bets on “rat-terriers, and chicken cocks, and tom-cats.” One day he catches a frog, which he “learns” to jump farther than any other frog. “You never see a frog so modest and straightfor’ard as he was, for all he was so gifted,” Simon Wheeler, the interior narrator of this frame story, observes. The frog is no prouder than Smiley himself, who is now set up for a confidence man, a stranger in town, who doesn’t “see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.” Smiley bets the stranger forty dollars and leaves to find the stranger a frog with which to race “Dan’l Webster.” While he “slopped around in the mud,” the stranger fills Smiley’s frog with quail shot. Clemens wrote the tale in his own words after hearing it in a barroom. It captures the local color of California mining camps of that day, and Twain’s version is particularly full of precious comic stuff, such as the image of the adulterated frog, now filled with lead, trying to jump but succeeding only in hoisting its shoulders “like a Frenchman.”
Earlier in the story we learn of Smiley’s “small bull pup” whose main advantage in a fight was his ability to seize his opponent’s hind legs “and freeze to it—not chaw, you understand, but only jest grip and hang on till they throwed up the sponge, if it was a year.” Smiley always won with him “till he harnessed a dog once that didn’t have no hind legs, because they’d been sawed off in a circular saw.” Afterward, his dog “gave Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn’t no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece, and laid down and died.” In the cases of both the debased frog and frustrated dog, Twain gives these animals human aspects that reflect the hubris of their owner, whose ego is inflated beyond all sense of reality. The story’s humor is miraculously amplified when it is read aloud in Twain’s accent (southerners have the advantage here).
In 1906, looking over a pirated edition of his anthology of humorists of the past forty years (Mark Twain’s Library of Humor), Twain called the book a cemetery. “In this mortuary volume I find Nasby, Artemus Ward, Yawcob Strauss, Derby, Burdette, Eli Perkins, the ‘Danbury News Man,’ Orpheus C. Kerr, Smith O’Brien, Josh Billings, and a score of others, maybe two score, whose writings . . . are now heard of no more and are no longer mentioned.” “A number of these names,” he wrote, “were as familiar as George Ade and Dooley today”—excluding Twain’s, names of famous writers at the turn of the nineteenth century that have long vanished from the public memory of our day.15 He credited his own survival to the fact that humor was only a part of the “sermon”—a mere fragrance coming from something eternally relevant to readers in every age. The other part, however, contained the pathos embedded in every lasting joke. “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” lives on today, not merely because of its service to the national literature in 1865 or the fact that it was written by Mark Twain. It survives because it touches upon the springs of humor, which is surely pathos.
INSERT Illustrations
Clockwise from top left: Figure 1. Jane Lampton Clemens, Sam’s mother, 1870. Courtesy of t
he Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library. Figure 2. Orion Clemens, Sam’s brother, early 1860s. Nevada Historical Society. Figure 3. Mary E. (“Mollie”) Clemens, Orion’s wife, 1866. Nevada Historical Society.
Figure 4. O Olivia (“Livy ”) Langdon Clemens, Sam’s wife, 1895, Melbourne, Australia. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 5, left. Daughter Olivia Susan (“Susy ”) Clemens, Florence, Italy, 1892. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library. Figure 6, right. Daughter Jean Clemens, 1909. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 7. Bret Harte. Gary Scharnhorst.
Figure 8. The Hartford house. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 9. Elisha Bliss, president of the American Publishing Company. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 10. Mary Ann Cord (“A True Story”). Special Collections, University of Maryland Libraries.
Figure 11. Charles L. Webster, 1884. Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries. Figure 12. Annie Moffett Webster, early 1870s. Special Collections, Vassar College Libraries.
Figure 13. Nina Gabrilowitsch, Sam’s only grandchild, 1930. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 14. Virginia City, Nevada, 1860s. Nevada Historical Society.
Figure 15. Twain on his thirty-ninth birthday. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 16. Normandy Hotel, Paris, France, 1879. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 17. Henry Raymond (“Colonel Sellers”) and Twain, 1875. Kevin Mac Donnell.
Figure 18. Twain and George Washington Cable, 1884. Kevin Mac Donnell.
Figure 19. Twain in a series of four poses about the time of Huckleberry Finn. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 20. The “Uncle Silas” prank in Huckleberry Finn. University of Virginia Library.
Figure 21. The Paige Compositor, 1880s. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 22. Left: Roxy, 1894. Right: Roxy, 1899. Both images, University of Virginia Library.
Figure 23. Mark Twain during the overland part of his world tour, 1895. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 24. Clara, Livy, and Twain at Dollis Hill estate outside London, 1900. The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 25. Mark Twain, London, October 1899, by Henry Walter Barnett. Kevin Mac Donnell.
Figure 26, top. Twain and Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1908. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library. Figure 27, bottom. Albert Bigelow Paine and Twain playing billiards, 1908. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 28. Isabel V. Lyon, Ralph Ashcroft, and Twain at Stormfield in 1908. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 29. Twain sitting on the terrace at Stormfield, 1908. Kevin Mac Donnell.
Figure 30. Stormfield. Kevin Mac Donnell.
Figure 31. Twain and “Angel-fish” Irene Gerken, Bermuda, 1908. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 32. William Dean Howells and Twain, 1909. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 33. Wedding of Clara and Ossip Gabrilowitsch, October 6, 1909. (Right to left: MT, Jervis Langdon II, Jean Clemens, Gabrilowitsch, Clara, and the Reverend Joseph Twichell.) The Mark Twain House & Museum, Hartford, CT.
Figure 34. Mark Twain returning from Bermuda, 1910. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 35. Funeral cortege, April 24, 1910. Courtesy of the Mark Twain Papers, The Bancroft Library.
Figure 36. Mark Twain as icon on Ogden’s Guinea Gold Cigarettes. Kevin Mac Donnell.
14 Vandal Abroad
Mark Twain’s next adventure in the West would be a sojourn to the Sandwich Islands. Of the six sketches published after the Saturday Press issue of the Jumping Frog story but before his Hawaii sketches, and also printed in The Celebrated Jumping Frog, probably only one is significant for his development as a writer. This was “The Story of the Bad Little Boy That Bore a Charmed Life,” which appeared in the Californian on December 23, 1865. Its title in Jumping Frog became “The Story of the Bad Little Boy Who Didn’t Come to Grief.”1 It marks both the first time Twain took up the theme of the bad little boy before writing The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and the first clear foreshadowing of his late-life satires on heaven. Interestingly, the bad little boy’s name is Jim, but it could have just as easily been Tom, as both are favorite names of boys in Twain’s world. “Most bad boys in the Sunday books are named James,” he wrote, “and have sick mothers, who teach them to say, ‘Now I lay me down,’ etc., and sing them to sleep with sweet plaintive voices, and then kiss them good-night, and kneel down by the bedside and weep. But it was different with this fellow.”
Contrary to the teachings of the Good Book, bad behavior is not always punished. Indeed, it is often rewarded. Sam himself, as legend has it, was a “bad boy” like Huck and Tom Sawyer. His brother Henry was the good boy in the family; he died young. Having been brought up in the Calvinist tradition of hellfire and brimstone as the “reward” for the sinner, Sam Clemens was beginning to see that humor had a wider range than he supposed. But it still couldn’t wander into profanity and off-color stories. That kind of writing disappeared, almost without exception, from his public repertoire after a very early sketch that punned on “bony part” for Bonaparte. Twain was hailed in all his obituaries as a “clean” humorist. In fact, traditional religious belief was also off-limits as a subject for humor during the entirety of the nineteenth century. Novels in the Victorian age were supposed to support moral and conventional behavior. Those that did not—such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening or Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, both appearing at the very end of the century—paid the price of bad reviews and suppression in the marketplace.
The bad boy who never comes to grief eats all the jam and refills the container with tar. He steals the teacher’s penknife and plants it on one of the good little boys. He steals his father’s gun and goes hunting on Sunday. Even murder can’t get him arrested. In the still rippling wake of the violence of “A Bloody Massacre near Carson,” Jim raises a large family “and brain[s] them all with an ax one night.” When we last see this villain, he “is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature.” But Jim is clearly fiction because this is American humor, not American realism. It’s all just a joke and is not important in the scheme of things. Such was the fate of the humorist as well. But we get ahead of our story.
After “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” struck the national funny bone in the fall of 1865, the attention prompted the Sacramento Union to send its author, also respected for his letters back to the Enterprise in 1865 and 1866, to the Sandwich Islands in the winter of 1866—to “write up the sugar interest,” as he later remembered the assignment. The series turned out to be much more than promoting sugar, for during the stint, Twain became a full-fledged travel writer blissfully ignorant of Emerson’s caveat that “traveling is a fool’s paradise.” The beautiful Hawaiian Islands were indeed a paradise, at least until American missionaries, as he wrote, made the natives “permanently miserable by telling them how beautiful and how blissful a place heaven is, and how nearly impossible it is to get there.”2 He sailed from San Francisco on the Ajax on March 6 for what was supposed to be a month’s visit during which he would write “twenty or thirty” letters back to the Union. As it turned out, the trip lasted five months and produced twenty-five letters. Essentially, they became Mark Twain’s first travel book, a trial run for The Innocents Abroad.
Twain used four of the pieces he wrote about Hawaii in his Jumping Frog book. “Honored as a Curiosity in Honolulu” came from his fifth letter to the Union, published on April 20, 1866, and given the subheading “Etiquette.” Here he made fun of the excessive use of titles in Honolulu, including captains, reverends, and “First Gentleman of the Bed
chamber.” “The Steed ‘Oahu’” came from letter six, where it appeared under the same title (a subheading), published on April 21. Its comical description of Clemens’s rental of a horse that tries to “climb over a stone wall five or six feet high” and leaves its rider “literally dripping with perspiration and profanity” would be repeated in Roughing It, where he reused some of these Hawaiian sketches in the later chapters.
“A Strange Dream” in the book was first published under the same title in the New York Saturday Press of June 2, where he had placed “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog” the previous November. It allegedly describes a dream the author experienced while visiting the Volcano House, located on the crater of Kilauea on the big island of Hawaii. It was his first experiment with the fiction of dreams that culminated at the end of his career with “Which Was the Dream?” In the latter, the narrator can’t tell whether or not the dream is the reality. Here he is satisfied to conclude that “you can not bet any thing on dreams.” “Short and Singular Rations” was first published as “The Last Ration!” a subheading in letter fifteen to the Sacramento Union, published on July 19, 1866. This letter was devoted to the sinking of the clipper Hornet and the forty-three-day ordeal of its survivors, who reached Oahu in an open boat while Twain was there. Three others that went into the 1867 book were published after his return to California.3 These are largely insignificant, especially when one considers veins of superior material in the Union letters.
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