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“My Voice is Still for Setchell”: A Background Study of “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Edgar M. Branch
Edgar M. Branch*
Affiliation:
Miami University, Oxford, Ohio
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Extract

For the past fifteen years scholars have examined many facets of Mark Twain's “Jumping Frog”: its narrative techniques and some of its textual history, its relation to folklore, American humor, and Clemens' theory of humorous gravity, and its political, regional, and cultural bearings. This article, by focussing on the personal background to the tale, tries to cast light on the imagination that created the famous yarn. It first relates some of the tale's narrative elements—episodes, characters, names—to Clemens' prior experience, especially to some activities reflected in newly discovered examples of his San Francisco journalism of 1864 and 1865. Then it relates the tale to strong emotional currents in his life during the fall of 1865. Finally the article proposes a date of composition for the “Jumping Frog” and a reading of the tale that emphasizes the level of personal meaning.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 82 , Issue 7 , December 1967 , pp. 591 - 601
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1967

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References

1 See Paul Baender, “The ‘Jumping Frog’ as a Comedian's First Virtue,” MP, lx (1963), 192–200; Walter Blair, “Introduction,” Selected Shorter Writings of Mark Twain (Boston, 1962), pp. xxii–xxiv; Hennig Cohen, “Twain's Jumping Frog: Folktale to Literature to Folktale,” WF, xxii (1963), 17–18; Rufus A. Coleman, “Mark Twain's Jumping Frog: Another Version of the Famed Story,” Montana Magazine of History, iii (Summer 1953), 29–30; Pascal Covici, Jr., Mark Twain's Humor (Dallas, Tex., 1962), pp. 48–52; James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor (Princeton, N. J., 1966), pp. 2433; Roger Penn Cuff, “Mark Twain's Use of California Folklore in His Jumping Frog Story,” JAF, lxv (1952), 155–158; John C. Gerber, “Mark Twain's Use of the Comic Pose,” PMLA, Lxxvii (1962), 297–304; Sydney J. Krause, “The Art and Satire of Twain's ‘Jumping Frog’ Story,” AQ, xvi (1964), 562–576; Kenneth S. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor (Boston, 1959), pp. 145–147; Paul Schmidt, “The Deadpan on Simon Wheeler,” Southwest Review, xli (1956), 270–277; Henry Nash Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), p. 11; J. Golden Taylor, introductory remarks to “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” American West, ii (Fall 1965), 73–76.

References to the “Jumping Frog” in this article are to the first printing, “Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog,” New York Saturday Press, 18 Nov. 1865, pp. 248–249.

2 TS of Notebook 3, p. 8, Mark Twain Papers, Berkeley, Calif.—hereafter cited as MTP; reprinted with changes in Mark Twain's Notebook, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York, 1935), p. 7.

3 In his “Private History of the ‘Jumping Frog’ Story,” North American Review, clviii (1894), 447, Clemens wrote of Coon and his audience of miners: “in his mouth this episode was … the gravest sort of history …; he was entirely serious, for he was dealing with what to him were austere facts, and … he saw no humor in his tale … none of the party was aware … that it was brimful of a quality whose presence they never suspected—humor.”

4 TS of Notebook 3, p. 5, MTP. Copyright © 196–by The Mark Twain Company.

5 TS of Notebook 3, p. 8, MTP. Copyright © 196–by The Mark Twain Company.

6 Californian, 18 Mar. 1865, p. 8; reprinted with some changes in Sketches of the Sixties, ed. John Howell (San Francisco, 1927), pp. 158–165.

7 See Clemens' emended version of “Private History …,” How to Tell a Story and Other Essays (Hartford, Conn., 1900), pp. 121–122; Mark Twain's Letters (New York, 1917), i, 170.

8 How to Tell a Story, p. 126; T. Edgar Pemberton, The Life of Bret Harte (London, 1903), pp. 73–75; “‘The Jumping Frog of Calaveras’ by Mark Twain With an Introductory and Explanatory Note by J. G. H.,” Overland Monthly, XL (Sept. 1902), 20–21; Letters, I, 170.

9 As recently as Oct. 1863 Clemens had written up the races at the first annual fair of the Washoe Agricultural, Mining and Mechanical Society held in Carson City. See Mark Twain of the Enterprise, ed. Henry Nash Smith with the assistance of Frederick Anderson (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1957), pp. 80–86. My article “Mark Twain Reports the Races in Sacramento,” to appear in HLQ, shows that Clemens undertook a week's racetrack assignment at the 1866 California State Fair for James Anthony of the Sacramento Union.

10 Call, 4 Sept. 1864, p. 1. Reports in other city papers name the winner as Strideover, nicknamed Sam. John Wilson was the proprietor of the circus at the Jackson Street Pavilion. Sam's “easy indifference of conscious superiority” is a phrase carrying almost the force of a signature. It marks the horse as one of Clemens' large class of self-assured characters who enjoy lording it over others because of superior skill or style or experience. For examples of Clemens' use of that phrase and its variants see: “San Francisco Correspondence,” Napa County Reporter, 11 Nov. 1865, p. 2; The Writings of Mark Twain, Definitive Edition (New York, 1922), xii, 46, and xiv, 317. Hereafter this edition will be cited as Writings.

11 Call, 10 Sept. 1864, p. 1. I have omitted the four concluding sentences that notice races to come. George N. Ferguson and Harris R. Covey were racetrack drivers. Wadsworth Porter owned a livery stable. Dr. George F. Woodward was the surgeon and physician of the United States Pension Bureau. Clemens' friend Lewis Leland was the proprietor of the Occidental Hotel and Clemens often joked him in print.

Clemens' comic use of “Christian” was routine, and he echoes his earlier review of “Mazeppa” in the phrase “fiery untamed Menkens” (Smith, Enterprise, pp. 78–80). Typical of his comic vision is the merging of discrete modes of being and the resulting implicit puns. Quality becomes commodity, as in the use of “break neck” and “break-neck.” A burst of speed necessarily indivisible in time is coolly partitioned and distributed among several races (economizing speed for economic gain). Moral young men and cocktails combine (in two ways) to constitute a crowd (animate and animated). The bold, offhand formula for stopping a cannonball and the casually aloof phrasing of “His head was split open a little” familiarly echo the magisterial dispenser of advice and remedies and the Washoe reporter of gory prize fights.

12 It is interesting that Conflict's awkward “double summerset” is a sign of a serious limitation by virtue of his lack of training in hurdle racing, whereas Dan'l Webster's graceful “one summerset, or maybe a couple,” is a sign of his free mastery of conditions through training. The fated dog Curney in Clemens' letter in the Keokuk Gate City, 6 Mar. 1862, turns “somersets” as he races over the desert. In Roughing It “the rawest dog,” probably modeled on the alkalied Curney, “threw double somersaults” in his frenzy (Writings, iii, 260).

13 For examples of Clemens' later use of turf imagery and terms relating to the Call pieces and to the “Jumping Frog” see: Writings, i, 32; iv, 99, 287; xiii, 372; xiii, 206; xiv, 119; xxvii, 176; Walter F. Frear, Mark Twain and Hawaii (Chicago, 1947), p. 294.

14 My Dear Bro, ed. Frederick Anderson (Berkeley, 1961) p. 8—hereafter cited as MDB and documented in text.

15 See “Dictation of M. H. De Young,” Bancroft Library, Berkeley. De Young helped establish the Dramatic Chronicle in 1865. His memory of Clemens' connection with the paper is faulty in some details.

16 “Amusements,” Dramatic Chronicle, 21 Oct. 1865, p. 3. The comparison with Richard III (whom Huck, the Duke, and the Dauphin knew all about), the punning, the easy slide from the factual into the fanciful, and above all the familiar delight in humanizing an animal suggest Clemens' comic imagination at this time.

17 Extant as “Exit ‘Bummer’,” Californian, 11 Nov. 1865, p. 12, from the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, 8 Nov. 1865. In “The Art and Satire …” (see n. 1) Sydney J. Krause argues that the bull-pup is Clemens' satirical portrait of the historical Andrew Jackson. He feels, e.g., that the pup's appearance of not being “worth a cent but to set around and look ornery and lay for a chance to steal something” is “an analogue of the legendary flashes of temper with which Jackson is known to have frightened opponents into submission” (p. 570). Referring to Mark Twain's sentence quoted in the text and comparing the pup's under-jaw to a steamboat's fo'castle, Krause writes: “In addition to its suggesting the fearful union of savagery with avarice, the idea that Smiley's pup has caught the gambling fever also carries a lurking reference to the stories of Jackson's fabulous exploits in gaming” (pp. 570–571). I feel that this view is overstated.

18 See, e.g., “The Evidence in the Case of Smith vs. Jones,” Golden Era, 26 June 1864, p. 4, collected in The Washoe Giant in San Francisco, ed. Franklin Walker (San Francisco, 1938), p. 82.

19 Call, 21 Aug. 1864, p. 2. A clipping of the item is in Moffett Scrapbook 5, p. 58, MTP. In “The Art and Satire …,” p. 573, Krause argues that the portrait of Dan'l the frog is Clemens' political satire of Daniel Webster, showing “how completely Twain had done Webster in almost every characterizing detail.” It should be noted that Webster died in 1852 and that Clemens' few references to him prior to 1865 are not politically hostile. See Mark Twain's Letters in the Muscatine Journal, ed. Edgar M. Branch (Chicago, 1942), p. 20; Franklin R. Rogers, The Pattern for Mark Twain's Roughing It (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1961), p. 35. I feel that Krause is unduly hard on Dan'l's integrity and accomplishment because he reads into him unflattering characteristics attributed to Daniel Webster the politician.

20 “A Wrecking Party in Luck,” Call, 3 Sept. 1864, p. 2.

21 “California Branch of the U. S. Sanitary Commission,” Call, 3 Sept. 1864, p. 1. The later Call item is “A Philanthropic Nation,” 10 Sept. 1864, p. 1.

22 TS of Notebook 3, p. 10, MTP.

23 Mark Twain: A Biography, ed. A. B. Paine (New York, 1912), i, 277. Paine's chronology here is vague, but his account suggests that considerable time passed before Ward renewed his invitation and that even then Clemens delayed his composition of the tale.

24 “An Inapt Illustration,” Virginia Evening Bulletin, 28 Dec. 1863, as preserved in Notebook 4, Carton 3, Grant H. Smith Papers, Bancroft Library, Berkeley. Courtesy of the Bancroft Library.

25 “A Voice for Setchell,” Californian, 27 May 1865, p. 9. The article is signed “X” but is unmistakably by Clemens. The editor of the Californian hints broadly at the authorship, and a clipping of the piece is in Clemens' Scrapbook of Newspaper Clippings …, Beinecke Library, Yale Univ. Reviewers of Setchell's acting often compared his manner and humor to Ward's. In June 1865 Setchell played the part of Ward in Artemus Ward, Showman, a three act play written for him by Fred G. Maeder and Thomas B. Macdonough.

26 Jacob Blanck, Bibliography of American Literature (New Haven, Conn., 1955), i, 314, No. 1527. Blanck notes that ten years after Ward's book appeared his publisher gave 23 Sept. as the publication date. The listing of Ward's book as received in the 14 Oct. issue of the New York Saturday Press may indicate a later publication date. West Coast periodicals noticed the book in late Nov. and early Dec. James M. Cox (Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, p. 32) believes, as I do, that Clemens wrote the “Jumping Frog” and his letter of 19 Oct. 1865 about the same time. My article was accepted for publication in its present form several months before I read Cox's excellent book.

27 See n. 23. Clemens usually claimed that the tale reached George W. Carleton too late for inclusion in Artemus Ward: His Travels, although he contradicts this in Mark Twain in Eruption, ed. Bernard DeVoto (New York, 1940), p. 144. See Letters, i, 102; Yale Scrap Book, opposite clipping of the “Jumping Frog”; Notebook, p. 7. Henry Clapp's admiring editorial preface to the “Jumping Frog” in the Saturday Press of 18 Nov. barely hints that the tale was inserted at the last moment.

28 From “A Defense of ‘Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog’ …,” an unpublished seminar paper. In my comments on Smiley I am indebted to Mrs. Flory.