A Companion to the American Short Story

by Alfred Bendixen

  pressibles ” are down around his ankles) merge amid frontier scenes of lively hunting

  action. The Bear is elevated to the level of natural symbol, made a mystery by his

  continuous escapes from the hunters, and well he should be, according to the talker,

  considering that the events happened “ in Arkansaw: where else could it have happened

  but in the creation State, the fi nishing - up country – a State where the sile runs down

  to the center of the ‘ arth, and government gives you a title to every inch of it? Then

  its airs – just breathe them, and they will make you snort like a horse. It ’ s a State

  without a fault, it is ” (Cohen and Dillingham 338). The statement by itself is a dec-

  laration of independence from the conventions of literary formulas and cultural

  restraint. Its emphatic power comes from the elements Mitford, Haliburton, Burton,

  and others, saw quite clearly: local language, energy and vitality, newness to the liter-

  ary scene, abandonment of convention, natural and earthy experience expressing the

  new world frontier culture, a character acting and expressing all those tendencies in

  unexpected settings and in unexpected ways. All of these characteristics would be

  brought to their climax in Mark Twain.

  Southwestern humor, as a genre, has been fortunate in the scholarly research it has

  attracted, chiefl y

  Hennig Cohen and William Dillingham

  ’

  s

  The Humor of the Old

  Southwest . Walter Blair ’ s Native American Humor also contains an excellent array of

  short stories and authors representing the Old Southwest, as in his selections and

  lengthy discussions of “ The Beginnings, ” “ Down East Humor, ” and “ The Literary

  Comedians. ”

  Blair identifi es George Washington Harris

  ’

  s Sut Lovingood as the

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  David E. E. Sloane

  highest achievement of antebellum humor in the South. Sut is coarse and earthy well

  beyond anything seen in the other regions. His low opinion of “ human natur ’ ” and

  “ nat ’ ral born durn ’ d fools, ” of which he knows he is the chief, is justifi ed by the vulgar

  stories he tells in low dialect. “ Sut Lovingood ’ s Daddy, Acting Horse, ” in the Cohen

  and Dillingham anthology, shows Sut ’ s Dad stripping buff naked to plow his fi elds

  like the family horse but overdoing the thing by pretending to run away over a bluff

  into a creek:

  Thars nara hoss ever foaldid durn fool enuf to lope over eny sich place; a cussed muel

  mout a done hit, but dad warn ’ t actin muel, tho ’ he orter tuck the karacter; hit adzactly

  sooted tu his dispersition, all but not breedin. I crept up tu the aidge, an ’ peep ’ d over.

  Thar wer dad ’ s bald hed fur all the yeath like a peeled inyin, a bobbin up an ’ down an ’

  aroun, an ’ the ho ’ nets sailing roun tuckey buzzard fashun, an ’ every onst in a while one,

  an ’ sum times ten, wud take a dip at dad ’ s bald head. He kep ’ up a rite peart dodgin

  onder, sumtimes afore they hit im, an ’ sumtimes arterard, an ’ the warter wer kivered

  wif drownded ball ho ’ nets. Tu look at hit from the top ove the bluff, hit wer pow ’ ful

  inturestin, an ’ sorter funny; I wer on the bluff myse ’ f, mine yu. (Cohen and Dillingham

  205)

  Sut himself has a characteristic view of the action, and the action is low enough to

  justify him. In “ Blown up with Soda, ” Sut is cured of his puppy - love for Sicily Burns

  when she slips him a powerful emetic and falls down laughing as his stomach acts

  like a “ thrashin - meersheen with fi ghtin bull - dorgs. ” He gets his revenge in “ Sicily

  Burns ’ s Wedding, ” which Twain borrowed later for a scene in Personal Recollections of

  Joan of Arc . He destroys the wedding with wild bulls and stinging bees. She says to

  him fl atly, “ Yu go tu hell! ” (224 – 5) – strong language. The way is open for the wildest

  variety of effects, languages, and emotions. “ Rare Ripe Garden - Seed ” is a folksy story

  of the Appalachians where a man is bamboozled to think his bride ’ s new baby comes

  four - and - a - half months after the wedding because of the effects of highly fertilized

  agricultural seed. The story is still alive in Vance Randolph ’ s collection of Appalachian

  risqu é stories, Pissin ’ in the Snow .

  Augustus Baldwin Longstreet provided many of the best early Southwestern stories:

  “ Georgia Theatrics, ” “ The Drill, ” “ The Fight, ” and “ The Shooting Match ” offer a

  panorama of backwoods behavior of the ring - tailed roarer, half - horse, half - alligator

  frontier types throughout the region. Oliver Hillhouse Prince ’ s “ The Militia Drill ”

  was an inclusion in his Georgia Scenes , which was republished in American comic

  papers and later was taken into a European book on the Napoleonic wars, where

  Thomas Hardy found it, liked it, and plagiarized it in The Trumpet Major , creating a

  literary puzzle that took years to solve. This humor could travel if the dialect was

  altered and the scene masked.

  Other Southwestern authors contribute their own characteristic stories to the genre.

  Johnson Jones Hooper ’ s Simon Suggs, whose motto is “ It ’ s good to be shifty in a new

  country, ” fl eeces a camp meeting in a sequence linked to the camp meeting scene in

  Adventures of Huckleberry Finn . Joseph G. Baldwin, John S. Robb, William Tappan

  Mark

  Twain

  85

  Thompson – particularly in his character Major Jones – and Henry Clay Lewis, the

  Louisiana swamp doctor, all expanded dimensions of the genre.

  Twain built his technique out of a vast array of such cultural materials available

  as reprints in newspapers, as books reprinted by fi rms like T. B. Peterson in Phila-

  delphia, and as word - of - mouth stories. He honed his style for fi fteen years before his

  notorious frog jumped to national prominence as a throw

  -

  away newspaper piece,

  where it was published after failing to arrive East in time to go into Artemus Ward ’ s

  Travels Among the Mormons , a fortunate accident which made the story and Twain ’ s

  authorship stand alone. Ward had burst on the national scene as a burlesque

  old showman modeled on P. T. Barnum, as colored by the fi ctional hick town,

  Baldinsville, Indiana. Ward traveled, interviewed celebrities, including the Prince of

  Wales and Abe Lincoln, upbraided political and social radicals, and spoke in the

  curdled voice of ignorant democracy, the worst fear of old Whigs burst into fantastic

  fl ower, as unabashedly entrepreneurial, idealistic, and go - getter money - grubbing as

  Barnum himself. Ward created the na ï ve, deadpan sarcastic voice that Twain made

  into the world ’ s conscience at the turn of the century with such short pieces as “ To

  the Person Sitting in Darkness ” and “ King Leopold ’ s Soliloquy. ” Twain ’ s management

  of irony and sarcasm owes Ward more than just a passing debt.

  In “ How to Tell a Story, ” Twain laid out four parameters of the short story for

  vocal telling, attributing three of them to Ward. Elizabeth Oakes Smith (Mrs. Seba

  Smith) had covered the same territory in an earlier “ How to Tell a Story ” in Graham ’ s

  Magazin
e (22, 33 – 5) in January 1843 (rpt. in Sloane, LHUNE 132 – 7). Stories must

  be offered in the right setting, she suggested, unhurried, and aimed at psychological

  involvement. She then offered a hunting story with a long lead into a quickly delivered

  line that was somewhat parallel to Twain ’ s technique of pause and surprise. Under-

  standing how storytelling was practiced in America was an ongoing interest. The

  brilliant but na ï ve digressive progress of the action became one of its outstanding

  features. Varied social and human ironies were drawn into events and descriptions,

  seemingly unintended, but central to the humor of the piece. Twain ’ s later brief essay

  needs to be taken cautiously, tempting though the title may be to explain Twain ’ s

  craft. It is actually a vehicle to carry his beloved “ The Golden Arm. ” Twain embar-

  rassed his daughter by telling it to her friends, but he needed more scaffolding to

  present it to a general public. His four rules of storytelling provide that. Also, of

  course, they are oriented toward vocal telling. Nevertheless, three out of the four

  criteria derived from Artemus Ward were the na ï f as narrator, the deadpan, and the

  pause. The story lulls the reader until the sudden surprise ending.

  These Yankee traits do much to explain how the shock ending and change of mood

  works, but they do little to explain the social ideals lying at the base of the action

  and the surprises explaining the achievement of Charles Farrar Browne, and, even

  more important, how Twain rose above him. Crucial to Ward ’ s writing, as in his brief

  letters in Artemus Ward in London (1867), was the addition of a sense of history, as in

  the case of Prince Albert or Prince Napoleon. In London, at the Tower of London, he

  observes that traitors are an unfortunate class of people because they failed to bust a

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  David E. E. Sloane

  country, and so are not heroes. The irony depends on the “ snapper, ” which is, for the

  literary comedians, the equivalent of the pause in importance. For a brief second the

  reader ’ s intellectual wheels churn while the confl icting ideas are untangled, and then

  the laugh comes. Twain was a master at developing snapper lines and then topping

  snapper lines with even more snapper lines, developing more power than Ward. He

  took over the “ Is he dead? ” joke in The Innocents Abroad from a brief Ward story and

  makes not only a rebuttal of Columbus, Michelangelo, and European guides at the

  hands of American vandals, but also transmutes it into a sarcastic theme of practical

  incredulity that runs all the way to the Capuchin Convent mortuary in Rome. He

  builds out by extending the snapper into a motif. In doing this, he creates a persona

  that can tell stories as both experience and imagination at the same time. This quality

  rises above Maine or Arkansas. He is free to bring a moral dimension within his

  persona and make it believable as an intellectual fact. Some of those traits are Yankee

  greenhorn traits, some are Southwestern frontier behavior, but the leap is to the level

  of intellectual puzzle that each story represents – the realism that makes us accept

  the premises of the most unlikely stories almost from the fi rst word. Vulgar voice and

  regional

  –

  local tendency, even in his broader pieces, are mixed on an intellectual

  palette which can roam across varied themes, national boundaries, ethical issues,

  egregious entrepreneurialism, national pride, democratic politics, and, ultimately, the

  standing in the world of the two key issues in all his work: humanity and moral

  responsibility.

  The English noted the “ lawlessness ” of Twain ’ s humor, and Twain perfected this

  quality in the American humorous short story. The quality we have just identifi ed is

  what makes the English respond as they do. Everything mixes together like Huck

  Finn ’ s chowder pot, elements from vulgar to universal, from physical to conceptual,

  from beast to man and back again. The Bible and other literary works, euphemism,

  swear - words and camp language resonate against each other in the voices in which

  the stories are told and in the mouths of their characters. Jokes and one - liners, slap-

  stick, and moral fable rub together in story after story. Blackwood ’ s Magazine fl atly

  labeled Twain for this quality: “ Mark Twain is a bull in the china - shop of ideas ”

  (Sloane, MTH 183). Blackwood ’ s sneered that the hilarity of Twain ’ s humor and its

  incongruities would quickly fade away. They were wrong. His fusion had jumped the

  divide between popular writing and great writing.

  “ The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County ” (1865) is a local California

  gold nugget that formed the base of Mark Twain ’ s literary fortune. By the standards

  set forth by Miss Mitford and Judge Haliburton, it offers all the characteristics of the

  true American comic story. The dialect and character are preeminently “ local. ” Jim

  Smiley takes over the storytelling after a very brief framing comment by the author

  tying the story to Artemus Ward in the East. We are quickly prepared for a long

  digressive amble through local history as it buzzes through the brain of a garrulous

  drunkard in a country store. Bows are made to the national political scene in the

  naming of the fi ghting bulldog Andrew Jackson and the Frog, Dan ’ l Webster. Edgar

  Branch has documented an immense number of references to local fi gures around San

  Mark

  Twain

  87

  Francisco, and to some readers the story was even more local than it appears now. All

  America greeted the story, William Dean Howells reported, with “ universal joy. ”

  Americans loved it because it is them: eager as puppydogs, egregiously enthusiastic,

  na ï ve, and democratic. If any piece must be chosen as representative, therefore, of the

  American comic short story, “ Jumping Frog ” should be the fi rst nominee. Indeed,

  Twain played with the motif many times throughout the rest of his career, and it

  served him well in identifying him with the West, as a new “ voice, ” willing and able

  to perform in local voice and setting and with characteristic American events, in this

  case a classic American swindle, worthy of both Yankee sharpers and the Southern

  horse - swap, a truly representative piece.

  The tag - line is the refrain, “ I don ’ t see no p ’ ints about that frog, that ’ s any better ’ n

  any other frog. ” The sentence is the ultimate democratic statement in vernacular

  language. In a democracy, virtue is elected from the ranks, as we already knew from

  the fate of the “ 20 Minute Nag ” and the bull - pup Andrew Jackson. Smiley ’ s jumping

  frog is not able to produce results that win. He retains his status as a great comic

  fi gure because he loses it at the polls of performance. Henry Nash Smith characterizes

  the language and values as vernacular, and we might narrow this to vulgar, regionally

  dialectal, and local. This piece is typical of Twain ’ s brilliant mastery of words and

  phrases with unique sounds advancing a statement of foolish entrepreneurialism gone

  awry. Angel ’ s Camp becomes immortal, and the piece takes on that air of classic

  literature which is both rooted in the immediate fact but also refl ecti
ve of universal

  lines, dare I say, of beauty, and Smiley becomes, as Keats describes in “ Ode on a

  Grecian Urn, ” that still - unravished bride of garrulousness, forever chasing and being

  chased by the skeptical stranger and his lost bet. The story is full of echoes of earlier

  stories in the tradition, from the race, to the tricky stranger, to the long - winded vulgar

  story in local language. Even the frog - catching theme as a scam had been recounted

  in Henry Finn ’ s “ The Frog Catcher ” (Burton 80). But Twain ’ s piece is unique. Setting

  and language correspond in a local American setting. Damage from a bar - room bet

  is minor, 40 dollars; in a low - class vulgar setting, a na ï f gets his comeuppance, but

  no more than that. Pain is minimized, not exaggerated. The story is the thing. Smiley

  merges the mysteriousness of the big bear and the entrepreneurialism of the universal

  Yankee and makes both into an illusion.

  “ Cannibalism in the Cars ” is a second, seemingly very different, Twain piece that

  adds an important dimension to understanding the American comic story. The British

  recognized it at once; its original publication was in London ’ s Broadway Journal , but

  Twain had published three or four newspaper pieces in St. Louis with the same style

  in 1867. The satire on democratic institutions is woven into nature seemingly fl aw-

  lessly, as “ Nature must yield ” the fl oor of the snow - bound railroad car to the parlia-

  mentary determinations of starving passengers deciding who will be eaten fi rst to

  serve the greater good. Discussing human body and character traits as culinary edibles

  is a brilliant comic exercise manipulated to exaggerate parliamentary quirks and

  euphemisms. It is a slapstick story of literary comedy in which the jokes are intel-

  lectual and verbal rather than realistic. The fun of the reading is to see how Twain

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  David E. E. Sloane

  continues to expand what is, after all, a metaphor for egocentrism to bring it to a

  climax which refl ects American political experience. Although some unsophisticated

  readers take the story seriously, the fanciful railroad story packs a sarcastic political

  message that is pure intellectual fantasy.

  “ Scotty Biggs and the Parson ” demonstrates a third mode of blending comic story

  traditions that occurs in Twain ’ s work. It could be considered somewhat like the