America was a big new country, initially inhabited chiefly by people who came from a small old one. As they penetrated America’s vastness and discovered something about its amazing characteristics, they began to relate and embroider what they had seen, for each other and for those who had not gotten quite so far. They did so sitting around campfires and primitive stoves in tents, wooden cabins, and the stores that served instead of the inns and coffeehouses of their country of origin. They had genuine tales to tell which became taller in the telling and retelling, and the relish of these tales lay not so much in their veracity and verisimilitude but in the audacity with which they were told, and the gravitas and sincerity of the tellers. It was a new art form, or rather a revival of the ancient art of the sagas and Nibelungenlied the Germans and Nordic races had created before they became literate. But it was a revival with a difference, because it grew up alongside or on the frontiers of a sophisticated, literate, modern society, and it called for a modern Homer to set it down. Twain was that man.
Twain was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal in the same state, on the immense, complex, muddy river that provided so much material for the tales he heard as a boy.3 He became in time a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a volunteer soldier, a miner in the Nevada silver rush, and eventually a journalist. These activities took him all over the American midwest and west, where pioneering was still the norm and the moving frontier a fact of life. In much of this semi-tamed country there was nothing to do at night, so the storyteller was king. In his childhood by the Mississippi, his adolescence, and his early manhood, Twain was exposed to the art of rustic or pioneering narrators and yearned to emulate them, just as he longed to be a river pilot (as he tells us in Life on the Mississippi). And, just as he eventually became a pilot, so he became, by stages, a master storyteller, and remained one for the rest of his life.
Twain not only heard stories and told them in turn but also thought deeply on the matter. In time, he wrote an essay, “How to Tell a Story,” the lead item in a collection he published in 1896. It begins:
I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert storytellers for many years.
He adds that only one kind of story is difficult, the humorous story; and that the humorous story is American, the comic story is English, and the witty story is French. Crime stories and witty stories depend for their effect on the matter. But the humorous story succeeds or fails by the manner of its telling.4
Here we begin to come close to the essence of Mark Twain, and the hub of his creativity. He learned how to tell a story by listening to verbal masters of the art, around campfires, in wooden huts, and in stores and bars. Then he transformed this knowledge into print. Twain was not, strictly speaking, a novelist, philosopher, seer, or travel writer, though he was a bit of all of these. Essentially he was a teller of stories. And he was a great storyteller—a teller of genius—because he was ruthless. Twain grasped, even as a child, the essential immorality of storytelling. A man telling a tale is not under oath. He may insist, indeed he must insist, that his story is true. But this does not mean that it is true, or that it needs to be. The storyteller’s audience may expect him to proclaim his veracity because that is one of the conventions of the art. But what the readers or listeners actually want from him is not verisimilitude or authenticity but entertainment and laughter. They know it. He knows it. When he says, “What I am going to tell you is strictly true,” he is merely pronouncing a formula of the genre like “Once upon a time.” A storyteller is a licensed liar, though he must never say so. When Twain was presented with Thomas Carlyle’s assertion: “The truth will always out at last,” he replied: “That’s because he did not know how to lie properly.” The word “properly” is important. There are conventions in the lying of storytelling. Twain was sensitive on the point. Indeed that is why he adopted a pseudonym. As Sam Clemens he was bound to the truth by his conscience, like every other well-brought-up American who believed (or pretended to believe) the story about Washington and the cherry tree—which itself was a lie, invented by Parson Weems (who was himself not a parson but a Bible salesman). But as Mark Twain he was a licensed storyteller, and so could lie in the cause of art. Actually, there was a double dishonesty in the pseudonym. The river call “Mark Twain,” meaning a depth of two fathoms, was not the invented nom de plume of Sam Clemens. He pinched it from another former pilot turned writer called Isaiah Sellers, who had used it in the New Orleans Picayune. Clemens savaged this man so severely in a rival paper, the New Orleans True Delta, that Sellers gave up writing in disgust, and Clemens took over his moniker.5
This was in 1863, and two years later Twain (as he now was) published a sketch in the New York Saturday Press, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.” This tale (which became the lead item of Twain’s first book in 1867) was momentous in attracting nationwide attention to the teller, and thereafter Twain never lacked celebrity or an audience. “The Celebrated Jumping Frog” is the absolute essence of Twain as a writer and an operator—nothing else in his career is so quintessential. To begin with, he did not hear it, as he originally claimed, told by an old pioneer by a campfire in California. It was an old folktale (so he later said) with distant origins in ancient Greece, and had been around a long time even in the United States. Indeed, in California it had reached print at least as early as 1853, when Clemens was eighteen—and long before he got to the west coast. How he first really heard (or read) the tale is undiscoverable. He presumably invented the names of the frog, Dan’l Webster, and the frog’s owner, Jim Smiley. He later insisted that the episode occurred in Calaveras County in spring 1849, during the gold rush, Smiley being a “forty-niner.” He also insisted: “I heard the story told by a man who was not telling it to his hearers as a thing new to them, but as a thing they had witnessed and would remember.” This may be true. But Twain added: “The miner who told the story in my hearing that day in the fall of 1865…saw no humor in his tale, neither did his listeners; neither he nor they even smiled or laughed; in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference.” Twain said they were interested in only two facts: “One was the smartness of its hero, Jim Smiley, in taking the stranger in with a loaded frog; and the other was Smiley’s deep knowledge of a frog’s nature—for he knew (as the narrator asserted and the listener conceded) that a frog likes shot and is always ready to eat it.” Now here Twain is embarking on an inverted form of the story. Smiley did not take in the stranger. The stranger took in Smiley. And Smiley did not know the frog liked shot—the stranger fed it with shot. Indeed there is no evidence from the original story that frogs like shot; on the contrary, Dan’l Webster must have disliked shot intensely after his horrible experience of being unable to jump.6
The truth is, Twain was making his story serve a second, a third, and even a fourth turn. Having first sold the story several times in the 1860s, he tells it again in the 1890s, first giving the Greek version, “The Athenian and the Frog,” from Sidgwick’s Greek Prose Composition, then repeating the Californian version about Smiley, which he had invented or plagiarized. Then he has the nerve to give a third version, a retranslation of a French version translated from his own original text by “Madame Blanc” and published in Revue des Deux Mondes. As his retranslation was literal, it is very funny, and it gives Twain the opportunity to give the reader a lecture on the chaotic confusion of the French language. I suspect he did this trick with a German version too, for Twain was very critical of the German propensity to put together huge words, and got a lot of laughs on this score in his travel books. Later, Twain admitted that the Greek original of the story was an invention itself. Sidgwick, with Twain’s permission, had simply translated Twain’s Californian story into classical Greek, changing quail shot to stones, making Jim a Boethian, turning the stranger into an Athenian, and calling the result “The Athenian and the Frog.” So all Tw
ain’s huffing and puffing about the amazing coincidence was just showmanship.
What all this proves is that Twain was a canny professional humorist. He understood the economics of humor, and how, once you have a funny idea—a champion jumping frog that cannot move because it is loaded with shot—you can use it, with suitable variation, again and again. Twain told a version of the frog story in private conversation among admiring friends. And he often told it from the platform during his many lecture tours—for another of his professional gifts was his ability to recognize a story that could be told as well as read. And it is hard to say when this story is funniest: read or told, or in French, German, English, or Greek. In Twain’s written version the language is mining-camp Californian of the 1840s. But the tale can equally well be told in Mississippi “darky” or Missouri “Doric,” or, for that matter, New England demotic.7
With the frog story Twain stumbled, almost by chance, on what twentieth-century comedians called the running gag—that is, a joke which can be made to work again and again in the course of a long story, a book, or a lecture, and actually—if well told and well timed—gets funnier when repeated. Once he realized what a humorous treasure he had found, Twain used the device again and again. The classic example occurs in Roughing It, when he takes a dull anecdote about Horace Greeley riding a coach, which is told on a coach and repeated at intervals by everyone who joins the coach. There were a lot of anecdotes told about Greeley, and Twain, with his low cunning, killed them all dead, and in doing so gave himself an easy, funny chapter for his book—another example of the economics of humor.
Running gags are a feature of Twain’s first big success, The Innocents Abroad, which describes his first tour of Europe with a group of Americans. The first edition sold over 100,000 copies and made Twain rich. He subsequently lost most of his money in an ill-starred business manufacturing a patent typesetter, was declared bankrupt, and then redeemed his fortune by a world speaking tour. That tour was recorded in a reprise of The Innocents Abroad called Following the Equator, the profits from which allowed Twain to repay his creditors in full—another example of his mastery of the economics of writing, since the idea behind both books is essentially the same but the variations are sufficiently numerous and inventive to keep the readers happy.
Twain took to public speaking, both for money and to publicize his books, early in his career as a writer, and his lectures quickly became a major source of income and fame. Indeed it is hard to say whether, in his lifetime, Twain was better known as a writer or a speaker—the two roles were inextricably mingled.8 His lectures were essentially humorous performances; they were dramatic, and he was acting. He came to this life on the coattails of Charles Dickens’s readings, which were attracting enormous audiences all over the United States in the late 1860s, just as Twain was getting going. Dickens read from his books, and so did Twain. But whereas Dickens aimed to draw tears (with his “Death of Little Nell”) or gasps of horror and excitement (with “The End of Bill Sykes”), Twain wanted laughs. He was essentially a stand-up comedian. Raising a laugh was at the heart of his art and his creativity. Twain liked money. He liked the good things in life. He lived well and built two expensive houses, one of which survives and is, in effect, a museum to his genius. But his real reward was laughs. He was a supreme egoist, as great a demander of attention and hero worship, in his own pseudo-modest way, as Victor Hugo or Richard Wagner. And the form of worship he found most congenial—it was the breath of life to him, in private company and in public performance—was the titter, rising to a continuous hooting roar of laughter and reaching a crescendo of uncontrolled mirth, with people “stomping their feet and throwing chairs about,” as he put it. Twain’s entrance, early on, went as follows. He would be behind a curtain, playing the piano. (He did this with some skill; and he was the originator of the western saloon joke, later purloined by Oscar Wilde during his American tour in the 1880s, “Please do not shoot the pianist. He is doing his best.”) When the curtain went up, Twain would be engrossed in his music; then, slowly, he would realize that an audience was awaiting his attention and would stand up and walk to the center of the stage. There would be a long pause, then he would begin to speak.9
Twain dressed the part, or his part, as did Dickens and Oscar Wilde. But whereas Dickens used the male evening attire of early Victorian England, suitably embellished, and Wilde the velvet pantaloons, golden buckles, and greenery-yallery of the aesthetic movement, Twain devised his own attire. His black tailcoat gave place to an all-white suit, of linen or wool, according to the season, with a white silk tie and white shoes. At the time he became a favorite on the lecture circuit, his flaming red hair turned grayish, then a glorious white, or rather the color of foaming champagne, as did his bushy mustache. This white appearance became celebrated, and Twain was recognized wherever he went, in Europe as well as the United States. He basked in this glory and wore his white outfit everywhere, not just onstage. For special occasions he acquired a new trick, after Oxford University, to his delight, awarded him an honorary doctorate. He loved the splendid full-length black gown, with gold lace trim and red silk hood, crowned with a mortarboard, that went with the degree. He sported this rig, especially at dinners given in his honor, and on any other formal occasion when he felt he owed it to his public to draw special attention to himself.
Being a performer, and a teller of humorous anecdotes, Twain realized that his act had to be varied by modulations in his voice, and that the best way to do this was to clothe his stories, when appropriate, in different accents. Now as we have seen, accents, as instruments of humor, go back at least (in the English language) as far as Chaucer, and were much used by Shakespeare. Dickens used accents to great effect and was a master of Cockney in its many Home Counties variations. But accents, especially in generating humor, are essentially a spoken device. The problem for a writer who uses them on the page is how to transliterate standard English into an accent both authentic and funny. It is not easy to do. Indeed it is very difficult to do. Dickens often succeeded, his accents being reinforced by a brilliant facility in misusing words and forming malapropisms; Mrs. Gamp is a prime example. But Dickens sometimes failed; Thackeray often failed; and even Kipling, who was superb at transcribing Indian accents on to the page, failed when it came to Irish, Yorkshire, and Cockney. Twain never failed. As a raconteur of genius, he could always get his accents right on stage; and he is the only writer I know who successfully transcribed them in his written work. The outstanding example of his skill is The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain says, in a note headed “Explanatory,” just before the table of contents in the original edition (1885):
In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri Negro dialect; the extreme form of the backwoods South-western dialect; the ordinary “Pike County” dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guess-work; but painstakingly and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech.
I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all those characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.
The dialect used in Huckleberry Finn is a virtuoso exercise for which there is no parallel in English literature, and is the greatest single charm in this book of many charms. But Twain’s accents are true and vivid throughout his work, and they were even better onstage or in the lecture hall, where he could introduce emphases and purely verbal descants which are impossible to reproduce in type.10
In the hall, telling a tale to a live audience, Twain could indulge in verbal acrobatics, like a violinist playing a cadenza. The outstanding example is “The Golden Arm,” one of his lecture-hall anecdotes, which he prints in “How to Tell a Story.” He calls this “a negro ghost story that had a pause before the snapper at the end.” The pause “was the most important thing in the whole story.” Like most professional stand-up comedians, he directed h
is attention to a particular person in the audience, depending on the story. For this one he needed an “impressionable girl.” He adds, “If I got [the pause] the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make [the girl] give a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat.” I give “The Golden Arm” in full, as there is no other means of showing what a shocking tale it is.
The Golden Arm
Once ’pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live ’way out in de prairie all ’lone by hisself, ’cep’n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm—all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow’ful mean—pow’ful; en dat night he couldn’t sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.
When it come midnight he couldn’t stan’ it no mo’; so he git up, he did, en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de golden arm; en he bent his head down ’gin de win’, en plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable pause here, and look startled, and take a listening attitude) en say: “My lan’, what’s dat?”
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