Mark Twain: A Life

by Ron Powers

  Still another genre send-up, “Lucretia Smith’s Soldier,” nailed the syrupy prose of the “sentimental” novels popular during the war years. The heroine (middle name “Borgia”) has realized her wish: her lover has been colorfully maimed in battle. She poses at his side at the hospital for days until

  the surgeon…told her that at last her Whittaker had recovered sufficiently to admit of the removal of the bandages from his head, and she was now waiting with feverish impatience for the doctor to come and disclose the loved features to her view…One bandage was removed, then another, and another, and lo! the poor wounded face was revealed to the light of day…

  “O confound my cats if I haven’t gone and fooled away three mortal weeks here, snuffling and slobbering over the wrong soldier!”…

  Such is life, and the trail of the serpent is over us all.23

  NEVADA JOINED the Union on October 31, 1864, a week before the national elections that returned Abraham Lincoln to the White House. Orion Clemens was regarded as a strong choice to be renominated and elected to the secretarial post. But on the cusp of triumph, the long-bearded dreamer was seized with what Sam called “a spasm of virtue” that sank his hopes. On the day of the nominating caucus, without prompting, he declared that he was opposed to the consumption of alcohol—this in a part of the world where liquor formed one of the basic food groups. He came in second in the balloting—receiving not a single vote—and would never again hold elective office.

  Sam might have continued writing bright, frivolous pieces for Bret Harte and his bohemian paper indefinitely, had it not become propitious for him to absquatulate again.

  Technically speaking, he seconded the absquatulation of Steve Gillis, whose fiancée had broken their engagement. Late in November, as he passed “the saloon of ‘Big Jim’ Casey, on Howard Street,” Gillis, an enthusiastic barroom fighter, spotted the barkeeper beginning to push another patron around. Gillis thought to equalize the situation. The beer pitcher that Gillis shattered over his skull put the bartender at death’s door in a city hospital. The man recovered, but not before Gillis was arrested, posted bail (with Clemens’s help), and then decided to avoid a potential manslaughter charge. He left town for Virginia City. There, he got Joe Goodman to rehire him onto the Enterprise as a typesetter, and spent most of the rest of his life as a news editor in the mountainside town.

  Sam Clemens followed Gillis out of town, arriving at Jackass Hill on December 4, having signed a $500 bond for his friend, which he could not come close to covering. With $300 in his pocket—probably earned from the sale of a share of Hale & Norcross stock—Sam dropped out of sight for twelve weeks. He returned to San Francisco on February 26 with several tall tales in his notebook, one of them about a frog. American literature as it had been understood roughly from the mythmaking age of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper through the great Anglican-influenced flowering of Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, and Thoreau, was about to be changed, changed utterly.

  SAM JOINED Steve’s brother Jim Gillis on a hundred-mile trek east to Jim’s stone-and-wood mining cabin atop the hill bearing the charming name of Jackass, in Tuolumne County. Jim Gillis lived there with his younger brother, Billy, and their mining partner Dick Stoker, who had built the shack in 1850, when the terrain harbored the southern tip of the Mother Lode. Angel’s Camp, center of the excitement, lay about seven miles northwest, in Calaveras County. Now the region was a moor, its soil diluted into mud by winter rains. The few miners who still hung on were gaunt and solitary men, remnants of the three thousand who had swarmed the area in the rush of ’49. They mostly scavenged for stray nuggets: They “pocket-mined,” homing in by triangulation on the source of gold traces washed down the mountain slopes. Sam’s mood seems to have been as somber as the terrain and the weather. He had turned twenty-nine just a few days earlier, an age when most men had married, started families, settled into their life’s pursuits. Sam was back where he’d started when he arrived in the West with Orion three years earlier. Yet he was with his kind of people. Sam admired the Gillis men, a clan of transplanted Mississippians. The patriarch, Angus Gillis, was said to have fought with the adventurer William Walker in Walker’s attempt to conquer the Mexican state of Sonora in 1853, where he took a bullet through the eye for his trouble, and through the remaining one saw a son fighting next to him killed.* Jim Gillis was a talkative cuss, as witty as Steve was pugnacious. He knew Latin and Greek, and had taken a degree in medicine in Memphis before joining his father in the Gold Rush. What inspired such a cosmopolitan soul to live in a lonely cabin in a spent mining region is not clear. He kept himself stimulated by hitting San Francisco regularly, and by turning the little hovel into a kind of jackleg salon. Dan De Quille called it “the headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains.” Its influence on American literature was almost eerie: one night in 1855, Bret Harte had found his way to Jim Gillis’s door. The speaker in Harte’s world-famous poem of 1870, “The Heathen Chinee,” was thought to be modeled on Gillis.24

  There wasn’t much to do on Jackass Hill except drink whiskey, subsist on beans and bad coffee, and talk. It rained constantly. Sam, the Gillis brothers, and Stoker amused one another by telling tales. Sam had arrived in a funk, but as the nights went on he paid more and more attention to Jim Gillis and his stories. Mark Twain recalled how, when Gillis had an inspiration, he “would stand up before the great log fire, with his back to it and his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elaborate impromptu lie…with Dick Stoker as the hero of it, as a general thing.”25 Gillis had the makings of genius, Mark Twain believed.

  The cabin. The night. The great fire roaring in the fireplace. The listeners rapt as the storyteller, gifted but obscure, builds the tale. Uncle Dan’l, beside the fireplace in his cabin on the Florida farm a quarter-century earlier, had cast a similar spell on Sammy. Now Sam’s personal gloom shifted, and the artist’s ear grew alert. The others noticed that he had begun to scribble into a notebook.26 The shack on the godforsaken hill transformed itself into a “dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise”;27 or rather, it was words that did the transforming.

  Gillis told a comic story of a cat named Tom Quartz, who developed a prejudice against quartz mining after he was blown sky-high by a dynamite blast; and another about a profane blue jay dropping acorn after acorn down a knothole in a cabin roof. He told about a man who crawled around naked in front of audiences as the Royal Nonesuch. Sam noted the absolute solemnity of Gillis’s delivery, his insistence that he was telling God’s truth.

  The group escaped the cabin a time or two, because on the first evening of the new year, Sam wrote in his notebook:

  New Years night—dream of Jim Townsend—“I could take this *** book & *** every *** in California, from San Francisco to the mountains.28

  Sam had heard about James W. E. Townsend, known also as “Lying Jim,” in some nearby mine diggings. Townsend was a journalist and tale-teller who had worked at the Enterprise and the Golden Era. In 1853, while at the Sonora Herald, he had printed a tale about a frog that was entered in a jumping contest and then covertly weighted down with shot. (The tale had its origins in the mists of American folklore; traces of it turned up in the strangest places. Sammy may have heard a variation on it from John Quarles back in Florida, Missouri.) By January 22, the weather had cleared up enough that the men could free themselves from the cabin and try some prospecting. Sam and Jim Gillis headed up to Angel’s Camp. Around January 25, at the Angel’s Camp hotel bar, Sam “[m]et Ben Coon, III river pilot here.”29 As fellow pilots, Clemens and Coon had something in common. Coon was known as the region’s best teller of the frog tale.

  Stoker caught up with them after a week or so, and they took their picks and shovels into the fields when the rain stopped. Sam’s mining skills had not improved in the two-year hiatus. Over three weeks, he came up with nary a nugget. He later recalled

  the one gleam of jollity that shot across our dismal sojourn in the rain & mud of Angel’s Camp�
�I mean that day we sat around the tavern stove & heard that chap tell about the frog & how they filled him with shot…. I jotted the story down in my notebook that day, & would have been glad to get ten or fifteen dollars for it—I was just that blind. But then we were so hard up.30

  On February 6, his notebook jotting reads:

  Coleman with his jumping frog—bet stranger $50—stranger had no frog, & C got him one—in the meantime stranger filled C’s frog full of shot & he couldn’t jump—the stranger’s frog won.31

  “Coleman” is likely Mark Twain’s original name-choice for the backwoods hero of the story that he was by then working up to publish somewhere. He loved telling the story as much as he looked forward to writing it. “And you remember how we quoted from the yarn & laughed over it, out there on the hillside while you & dear old Stoker panned & washed,32 he wrote to Gillis five years later. After four decades, Mark Twain could still relive his first hearing, and the natural deadpan of the storyteller. “He was a dull person,” Mark Twain wrote, “…he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts…he saw no humor in his tale…in my time I have not attended a more solemn conference.”33

  An entry in Sam’s notebook dated just a week earlier, February 1:

  Saw L. Mark Wrigh Write in a dream ce matin-ce [this morning]—in carriage—said good bye & shook hands.34

  Laura Wright had made another nighttime visit, which he recorded in a kind of code.

  Sam left Angel’s Camp for the cabin on Jackass Hill on February 20, and while the others picked away at their mining claims, he began writing the jumping frog tale. Billy Gillis, twenty-three at the time, later recalled Sam’s remark that “[i]f I can write that story the way Ben Coon told it, that frog will jump around the world.”35 Three days later, he started back for San Francisco, and arrived at the Occidental on the 26th. Charles Henry Webb, briefly taking over from Bret Harte, welcomed him back as a regular contributor to the Californian. But it was a small packet of letters more than three months old that carried the most tantalizing portent. The letters, held for him at the hotel, were from Artemus Ward back in New York, inviting Sam to contribute a sketch for Ward’s forthcoming book about the Nevada Territory. Sam pitched the jumping frog tale. Back came the reply—as Mark Twain recalled it to his biographer Paine:—“Write it…There is still time to get it into my volume of sketches. Send it to Carleton, my publisher in New York.”36

  Sam didn’t send anything right away. He resumed his freelance work with a new burst of energy and savoir-faire. He churned out robust, inventive weekly pieces of up to three thousand words for the Californian. His submissions to the Enterprise, 80 percent of which have not been recovered, must have been of equal weight and intensity: Goodman claimed in December 1900 that they were “the best work he ever did.”37 (He would soon be writing these on a daily basis, six days a week.) His wit and range of topics began to distinguish him as a social critic as well as a “phunny phellow”; they were reprinted and praised in San Francisco and many other California and Nevada newspapers. Someone, probably Webb, had given him a new honorific: the Moralist of the Main.

  He was out of the Californian for the month of April; the paper had run into money problems and could not pay for his submissions. This was an especially newsy period; it included Robert E. Lee’s surrender to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, and, five days later, the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, yet nothing in his surviving work of the period alludes to these events. Instead, returning in May, he took up what would become a favorite topic, the hypocrisy and overreaching of powerful church clerics, in this case an Episcopalian minister named Kip, while identifying himself as a “sort of a Presbyterian in a general way.”38 At the helm of the paper’s “Answers to Correspondents” column over a summer stretch, he twitted letter writers and played at the boundaries of absurdist response to the terminally earnest in ways that foreshadow James Thurber. (Asked for a description and opinion of the city’s Independence Arch by a reader, he replied: “My friend, I have seen arch-traitors and arch-deacons and architects, and archæologists, and archetypes, and arch-bishops, and, in fact, nearly all kinds of arches, but…I never saw an arch like this before.”)39

  He found time in June to toss off a couple of pieces for the San Francisco Youth’s Companion, the second of which ranks among his best-known short sketches: “Advice for Good Little Boys” (“If you unthinkingly set up a tack in another boy’s seat, you ought never to laugh when he sits down on it—unless you can’t ‘hold in’ ”), and “Advice for Good Little Girls” (“If at any time you find it necessary to correct your brother, do not correct him with mud—never on any account throw mud at him, because it will soil his clothes. It is better to scald him a little…”).40 Through all this, the frog story remained unwritten. Mark Twain’s initial confidence had given way to doubts and confusion about the story’s structure. In the late summer, Artemus Ward sent Mark Twain a letter or two urging him to get it done.

  On August 4, 1865, William Moffett died at forty-nine in St. Louis, leaving Pamela a widow at age thirty-eight. What condolences Sam may have sent are unrecovered. Pamela continued living in the rented house on Chestnut Street with Jane and her children Annie, thirteen, and Samuel Erasmus, not yet five. Sam, who had been sending money to Jane intermittently, would now be obliged to help support this household—and, as time went on, the struggling Orion and Mollie Clemens as well.

  Mark Twain wrote at least two unsuccessful (and incomplete) jumping frog drafts sometime between early September to mid-October. Each drew on elements of the frame story. He developed the gentlemanly narrator and his backwoods interlocutor. As usual, he riffed easily on their respective voices, but he could not find a plot.

  And then, all of a sudden—but let Mark Twain tell it, as he did in conversation late in his life.

  Then one dismal afternoon as I lay on my hotel bed, completely nonplussed and about determined to inform Artemus that I had nothing appropriate for his collection, a still small voice began to make itself heard.

  “Try me! Try me! Oh, please try me! Please do!”

  It was the poor little jumping frog…that old Ben Coon had described! Because of the insistence of its pleading and for want of a better subject, I immediately got up and wrote out the tale…[I]f it hadn’t been for the little fellow’s apparition in this strange fashion, I never would have written about him—at least not at that time.41

  One can spend some entertaining moments imagining the Twainian drawl cranked up into a froggy falsetto. This is the kind of semidivine intervention that Mark Twain loved to ascribe to decisive moments in his life—the scrap of text from the Joan of Arc book he came upon in Hannibal, the fifty-dollar bill that he discovered in Keokuk. Popular Victorian literature is practically founded on such shapely coincidences. The resulting sketch was printed in the November 18 edition of the Saturday Press in New York, under the title, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” launching Mark Twain into the vapor of national fame. He had mailed the piece to Ward, hoping that it would reach New York in time to be included in Ward’s Nevada travel book. The book was just reaching the stores by then; but its publisher, George W. Carleton, forwarded Mark Twain’s submission to Henry Clapp, bohemian editor of the Saturday Press.

  The sketch scored a direct hit upon the American postwar funny bone. Its impact, as it got reprinted up and down the East Coast, and then westward into the interior, was rapid, and stunning. It seems to have had everyone who read it doubled over, gasping for breath, pounding fist against leg. All New York was “in a roar,” the San Francisco Alta California reported. Bret Harte reprinted it in the Californian. Suddenly Mark Twain was being toasted as the best of all the California humorists. “To think that…those New York people should single out a villainous backwoods sketch to compliment me on!” he wrote to his mother with transparently false modesty.42

  BUT WHAT, exactly, was so funny about it?

  “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,�
� as he retitled it in the Californian reprinting that December, is among the most recognizable of all titles from the pen of Mark Twain. The central story is straightforward: the narrator visits a mining camp looking for information about a Leonidas W. Smiley, and runs into a talkative old man named Simon Wheeler. Wheeler doesn’t recall any Leonidas Smiley, but he does know a Jim Smiley who used to live there. His yarn about Smiley fills up the rest of the 2,600-word sketch. He details Smiley’s love of gambling, and a frog of his named Dan’l Webster, whom he has taught to jump high and far enough to win bets. Smiley meets a stranger who wants to bet against the frog, but has none of his own. Smiley offers to find one for him. The stranger waits for “a good while,” and then “he got the frog out and prized his mouth open and took a teaspoon and filled him full of quail shot…pretty near up to his chin—and set him on the floor.”43

  At Smiley’s command, “One—two—three—

  jump!” the new frog hops off, but Daniel only “hysted up his shoulders—so—like a Frenchman, but…he couldn’t budge; he was planted as solid as an anvil.” As the stranger leaves with his earnings, he jerks his thumb and utters the line that had them in convulsions from California to Maine: “Well, I don’t see no p’ints about that frog that’s any better’n any other frog.”44

  The humor of “The Jumping Frog” sometimes eludes contemporary readers. Those lucky enough to hear it declaimed by an accomplished reader are more likely to enjoy it in the way of 19th-century Americans, who recognized in it a familiar American archetype: the deadpan vernacular narrator. “The humorous story is told gravely,” wrote Mark Twain himself, who considered the form a work of “high and delicate art.” “[T]he teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects there is anything funny about it…”45 The vernacular the serenely innocent Simon Wheeler uses is that called “Pike County”—the same evocative Missouri regional dialect that Mark Twain would later put to transcendent use in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In this story, the dialect speaker is breaking tradition: unlike Simon Suggs, Sut Lovingood, and the rest of that violent prewar cadre, Simon speaks benignly. His guileless sincerity invites the hearer’s (and reader’s) charmed affection, instead of scorn. At the close of the Civil War, Americans were ready for a good cleansing laugh, untethered to bitter political argument. Simon and the frog gave it to them.