by Mark Twain
The comic percolations of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” “Jim Blaine and His Grandfather’s Old Ram,” “Buck Fanshawe’s Funeral,” or “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn” exhibit in print the rich vein of humor Twain had mined in storytelling communities on the River or the Pacific slope, but they retain, as well, the felt quality of the human voice speaking at its pleasure. Jim Blaine, in a state of “serene” and “symmetrical” drunkenness, begins his story of the old ram with,
“I don’t reckon them times will ever come again. There never was a more bullier old ram than what he was. Grandfather fetched him from Illinois—got him off a man by the name of Yates—Bill Yates—maybe you might have heard of him; his father was a deacon—Baptist—and he was a rustler, too; a man had to get up ruther early to get the start of old Thankful Yates.”
Of course those times do come again with each rereading of the yarn. We will never find out about the old ram or know why, precisely, Bill Yates is thankful. The stiff and formal narrator who introduces the tale may feel he has been “sold,” but readers are more likely to feel that they have been tricked into an awfully good time.
This ambulatory style that winds down as the author’s own interest wanes is only one of Twain’s many signatures, however. He could speak succinctly and pointedly when he chose:
Truth is the most valuable thing we have. Let us economize it.
Pity is for the living, envy is for the dead.
Adam and Eve had many advantages, but the principal one was that they escaped teething.
There are two times in a man’s life when he should not speculate: when he can’t afford it and when he can.
In some ways Twain’s comic genius appears at its best advantage in the aphorism and the maxim, and for that reason we have included in this edition “Pudd‘nhead Wilson’s Calendar” and “Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.” Even when Twain chooses to be epigrammatic or merely witty (forms of humor, he once remarked, that made one “want to renounce joking and lead a better life”), there remains something lavish and unexpected in him. Who else could have formulated such a maxim as this?: “She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
But Twain was known as well as a commentator on the national scene; his remarks upon all sorts of injustices and cruelties had the force of conviction and the potential to reform opinion. “A Dog’s Tale,” for example, was first published in Harper’s Monthly in 1903 and was reissued as a pamphlet by the National Anti-Vivisection Society in London a few months later. Particularly in his later years, the fierceness of Twain’s anti-imperialist convictions disturbed and dismayed those who regarded him as the archetypal American citizen who had somehow turned upon Americanism itself. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” was reprinted as a pamphlet by the Anti-Imperialist League, which distributed well over 100,000 copies. Twain’s angry indictment in this essay as elsewhere is unrelenting; he would have as the new flag for the Philippine Province “just our usual flag, with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.” But for all his forthrightness he remained something of a curiosity, nevertheless, even for those who without reservation claimed him as somehow theirs. What was to be made, for example, of the creator of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer complaining in an interview in 1907 that we are educating our children to be patriots instead of citizens?
This turn to serious invective should never have been a surprise, of course. Even in the first published volume of his tales and sketches in 1867, Clemens’s friend Charles Henry Webb introduced the collection with the observation that Mark Twain is principally known as “The Moralist of the Main” and only secondarily as “The Wild Humorist of the Pacific Slope.” Nearly forty years later, Twain himself reaffirmed the distinction: “I have always preached.... If the humor came of its own accord and uninvited, I have allowed it a place in my sermon, but I was not writing the sermon for the sake of the humor. I should have written the sermon just the same, whether any humor applied for admission or not.” Maybe so. But Samuel Clemens was too shrewd a man to think that his popular appeal resided in his earnestness alone. His reputation depended upon his wit, not his wisdom.
One is rather more tempted to believe that, more often than not, these competing tendencies worked in concert. In 1907, Twain announced that “Every man is in his own person the whole human race, with not a detail lacking. I am the whole human race without a detail lacking; I have studied the human race with diligence and strong interest all these years in my own person; in myself I find in big or little proportion every quality and every defect that is findable in the mass of the race.” However, he repeatedly insisted in such essays as “James Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” or “What Paul Bourget Thinks of Us” that the chief interest and duty of a writer is observation, not introspection. If Twain cherished his role as advocate, he made a point of serving as court stenographer as well. This insistence upon minute and keen attention cuts against the grain of abstract principle and philosophic credo. The literary critic Kenneth Burke, who had some gifts for humor and satire himself, once remarked upon his own paradoxical role as observer and analyst:
I speak in my role as Wandering Scholar,
which is to say:
half experimental animal,
half control group.
I am mine own disease.
The terms of this implicit contradiction appear in Twain in many forms, and at times his desire for independence and his troubled awareness of his complicity in a social order he often despised constituted his own special disease. However much he played the role of rambunctious outcast, Twain never—or hardly ever—denied his membership in a community whose attitudes, laws, and policies he might repudiate but whose responsibilities and guilt he shared. Twain might invoke dreams of drift and absolute freedom from constraint, but he typically carried a portion of his troubled conscience along with him in the flight. As often as not, he made himself the butt of his own joke and thereby spared the reader the full force of his complaint. He might satirize all manner of hypocrisy, sham, and cruelty and yet sound some quiet note of forgiveness. For all his anger, invective, and simple cantankerousness, Twain rarely allows his satire to degenerate into the merely sanctimonious or self-righteous.
Twain might delightfully ridicule political rhetoric in such early sketches as “Barnum’s First Speech in Congress” or “Cannibalism in the Cars,” but his contempt was for the sin, not the sinner. In Twain’s depiction, P. T. Barnum is a lovable fraud, after all, and Barnum’s decision to run for Congress in 1867 automatically suggested the possibilities of conflating shameless and crass self-promotion with political bombast. “Cannibalism in the Cars” is far more grotesque and was likely based on his recollection of a group of Illinois legislators who were snowbound in 1855 and who ate dogs to survive. Still, the nervous laughter provoked by the recollection of several acts of cannibalism conducted according to democratic procedure is ultimately diluted by our sympathies when we learn that we have been listening to the “harmless vagaries of a madman, instead of the genuine experiences of a bloodthirsty cannibal.”
The crude detachment of a Western humorist looking as if for the first time at ancient and historically sponsored institutions provided its own sort of comedy. This was the essential joke of the highly episodic travel narrative The Innocents Abroad (1869), though Twain insisted in his preface upon a certain representative perspective—that his reader, too, would be likely to see Europe and the East in the same way if “he looked at them with his own eyes instead of the eyes of those who traveled in those countries before him.” Even a casual glance at “The Tomb of Adam,” however, discloses the nearly insurmountable gap between Twain’s democratic sympathies and the individuality of his expression. His comic adventures in the Holy Land may cleanse the vision of the large burden of history or the timid attachment to pious sentimentality, but the wonderful b
ifocal illogic of his reactions and phrasing is apt to bind us just as forcibly to his genial narrative presence. At his best Twain not only speaks for us but phrases our thoughts in ways that, quite improbably, we instinctively feel are available to us, as though the language as well as the sentiment were our own.
If one reads, say, Henry James or Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner or Ernest Hemingway, for any length of time, the cadences, repetitions, and circumlocutions infect one’s thoughts and impart their idiom. No matter how long one reads Twain, however, one cannot acquire his peculiar and antic way of looking at the world or his verbal facility in rendering that world. Twain, as Howells once observed, wrote as though English were a “primitive and not a derivative language, without Gothic or Latin or Greek behind it, or German and French beside it.” This linguistic freedom of view is partly the source of his unpredictable vitality; it also helps to explain why Twain, in many fundamental ways a derivative and unexceptionable writer, has outlasted so many of his contemporaries.
But this same commitment to vernacular expression and oral tradition is also the source of a value: the unamazed recognition that people from every region and social condition have the verbal resources to speak for themselves. For much of Twain’s genius derives from the simple transcription of voices. Sometimes this talent results in a delightful comedy of misunderstanding, as in the sketch “Buck Fanshawe’s Funeral”; at other times the narrator displays an affectionate and engrossed attention to the cadence and poetry of dialect itself. This is certainly the case with two notable sketches told largely in African-American dialect and included in this volume: “Sociable Jimmy” (“I took down what he had to say, just as he said it”) and “A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It.” Twain may have played the part of vernacular ventriloquist at times, but in “A True Story,” at least, there is a sudden seriousness to events that catches the narrator off guard, for it is “Misto C—”, not Aunt Rachel, who is the dummy in this tale.
Clearly, the device of the innocent observer or the new man in the Old World he had employed in The Innocents Abroad worked in reverse as well. The persona of the tenderfoot, as he represented himself in Roughing It (1872), provided Twain with a dramatic frame for some his most hilarious sketches (represented in this collection by “The Story of the Old Ram” and “Buck Fanshawe’s Funeral”). When his personal indignation and cynicism outstripped his ability to satirize sanctioned custom or received opinion, however, the persona that was “Mark Twain” provided no defense against the world or the irascible sensibility that was Samuel Clemens. He expressed this sort of incapacity to W. D. Howells when he was struggling with his account of his travels in Europe, A Tramp Abroad (1880): “I wish I could give those sharp satires on European life which you mention, but of course a man can’t write successful satire except he be in a calm, judicial good-humor—whereas I hate travel, & I hate hotels, & I hate the opera, & I hate the Old Masters—in truth I don’t ever seem to be in a good enough humor with ANYthing to satirize it; no, I want to stand up before it & curse it, & foam at the mouth,—or take a club & pound it to rags and pulp.” Such moods were temporary, however, and he eventually hit upon the joke that permitted him to satirize European custom and coordinate his episodic adventures abroad. It should be remembered, as well, that “Jim Baker’s Blue Jay Yarn” came out of this same period of composition.
It may well be true, as some have suggested, that Twain was motivated to travel abroad by the profound resentment and shame he felt when the “Whittier Birthday Speech” he had given in 1877 appeared to offend rather than to please the literary worthies of New England. It may also be true that the blue jay yarn, interpolated into a book about those travels, was an indirect commentary on the humorlessness of Boston Brahmins who, like the incurious owl from Nova Scotia that ends the tale, are immune to the magnificent delights of anything western, either the tall tale or a redwood forest. If this tale is some form of muted revenge for earlier feelings of embarrassment, however, it seems equally true that the author was on the happiest terms with its composing and that he had acquired the “calm, judicial good-humor” that was the requirement of satire and the prerogative of the humorous yarn.
Clemens’s reaction to the apparent displeasure with the “Whittier Birthday Speech” was predictable enough, particularly so since he was known as a popular and delightful speech maker. A couple of years later he delivered his brief speech “The Babies” before some 600 Civil War verterans, and it was hugely successful, even though he gave it at three-thirty in the morning after several hours of wearying oratory. And on his seventieth birthday, it was Twain himself who was the literary figure to be celebrated. He delivered this birthday speech at Delmonico’s in New York before a considerable number of literary worthies who had turned out for the occasion. But the failure of the much earlier “Whittier Birthday Speech” probably rankled for other reasons as well. Twain had been more than a little tentative and self-conscious about his identity as a frontier humorist virtually from the beginning of his literary career, and he sometimes desperately wanted to be taken for a serious moralist instead of as the nation’s “phunny phellow.” He often vigorously pursued the approval or at least the recognition of those who were more apt to reject or ignore him than otherwise; for there was more than a little of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in Mark Twain himself.
Like Tom Sawyer, he was always tempted to transgress the stated limits of propriety or social usage and to offer up his own boyish good nature as bond for the crime. He had courted the daughter of a well-respected New York family with a sincerity and amiability that finally outweighed his future father-in-law’s objections to Clemens’s coarse origins and doubtful occupation. Many years later, Twain horrified Howells when he appeared before Congress to testify on behalf of an international copyright law wearing his familiar white serge suit out of season, though his serious testimony was influential nonetheless. In “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed,” ironically and quite deliberately published in the Century Magazine as part of its series on “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War,” Twain told the story of his desertion from the Marion Rangers in 1861. The memoir is only superficially an attempt at self-recrimination and extenuation, however; for he claims that he was not “rightfully equipped” for the awful business of war and that he deserted in order “to save some remnant of my self-respect.” In a word, he offered as excuse for his apparent cowardice nothing more substantial than a natural revulsion toward violence and his own blameless moral nature. Whether or not he actually possessed them himself, these were qualities Twain had attributed to one of the noblest of his fictional creations, Huckleberry Finn.
The antic mischief that was his genius was also cause for ready apology or extenuation—the half of him that was experimental animal reproved by the other half that was his internal control group. In a letter home written in January 1866, he described the jumping frog story as a “villainous backwoods sketch” and depreciated the artistic craft that had gone into it, describing it as a mere “squib.” Yet in 1894 he hilariously defended the story against French translators and its absorption into an alien European culture, while at the same time locating the origin of the tale in Boetia, a tale that was both old and new—“for it was original when it happened two thousand years ago, and was again original when it happened in California in our own time.”1 Again and again Twain burlesqued polite and genteel sensibility and the several literary forms it adopted, but he was very pleased when his work at last appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, for the Atlantic meant literary respectability. He publicly maintained that Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896) was his favorite creation, though privately he must have known that he had a greater emotional investment in Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer (1876).
This is but to say that Twain was tugged and pulled by competing forces within him: an impulse to escape, rebel, or condemn and a desire for recognition and approval; an impulse to delight and amuse and a desire to be recognized a
s an earnest moralist and responsible citizen. The emotional costs of this double bind were sometimes high. His comic dissection of the force and ironies of conscience in “The Facts Concerning the Recent Carnival of Crime in Connecticut,” for example, may serve as some form of comically grotesque sociological analysis. But it is also a record of the sufferings his own constitutionally tender conscience had exacted from him from early childhood on, for Twain was inclined toward self-accusation and apt to feel guilty about events over which he had little or no control.
He wished, as well, to belong to his own age and at times fancied himself something of an entrepreneur—a tendency that got him into more than a little financial trouble. Twain celebrated progress but yearned for the simplicity of an earlier time, and something of this deep ambivalence found its way into A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889). He was perpetually fascinated with inventions, such as the bicycle, the telephone, and the typewriter, and often lampooned his own awkward attempts to master them. If Twain detected in his own person every quality and defect that is “findable in the mass of the race,” the comic incongruities he discovered within himself were ready-made for humorous treatment. Much of his comedy, in fact, derives from a capacity, even an appetite, for self-parody, craftily combined with the sort of ignorance in his created persona that allows one to see the familiar in altogether new ways.
