In this comic story, the theme is humiliation, but pain and pleasure are artfully mixed. While Wheeler takes pleasure in Jim’s acute embarrassment, his humor also helps him to preserve his sense of proportion—and the reader’s, too.31 The story was widely reprinted. Mark Twain liked the story so much that he retold it twice, each time with modifications, in an 1872 speech and in his autobiography.32
In the Alta letters, the writer reports the limited success of his ambitions to publish a book. When the publishers of Artemus Ward’s collection (in which the “Jumping Frog” was to have appeared) rejected his manuscript, Charles Henry Webb, former editor of the Californian and now in New York City, arranged to publish The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, and Other Sketches in late April. Described as “Edited by John Paul,” Webb’s pen name, it contains twenty-seven pieces. The author and Webb revised the sketches and stories selected for publication by removing slang, local references, and allusions to gambling, alcohol, sex, and damnation. This first censorship was largely self-inflicted.33 The prefatory advertisement in the volume explains playfully that “the somewhat fragmentary character of many of the sketches” resulted from “detaching them from serious and moral essays with which they were woven and entangled” in the writings of the man known as “the Moralist of the Main.” In his Alta letter, Mark Twain praises the “truly gorgeous frog” on the cover, so beautiful that maybe it will be well to “publish the frog and leave the book out” (p. 158).
The writer made nothing from the sales of his first book, to his considerable disappointment. In December 1870, he wrote to F. S. Drake that he had “fully expected the ‘Jumping Frog’ to sell 50,000 copies & it only sold 4,000.” But unbeknownst to him, the publication benefited him considerably. It was pirated by the English publishers George Routledge and Sons and John Camden Hotten, who sold more than 40,000 copies. Moreover, the volume received favorable reviews in England.34
Neither from the Frog collection nor from the Alta letters of the period does one get a strong sense of Mark Twain’s identity as a writer. He appears particularly divided on the question of his social standing. Did he want to climb, as Burlingame had urged? He had discreetly cleaned up his earlier pieces for book publication. He was sensitive to the differences between East and West, as his comments in an Alta letter show: Sut Lovingood’s collection of humorous sketches “will sell well in the West, but the Eastern people will call it coarse and possibly taboo it” (p. 221). Was he to be of the West or of the East? His fortunes seemed to be carrying him east, and his comments in his letters about his New York experience seem to show an increasing liking for it. And New York was where he must succeed. “Make your mark in New York,” he wrote to the Alta, “and you are a made man. With a New York endorsement you may travel the country over … but without it you are speculating on a dangerous issue” (p. 176). On the other hand, he was willing to describe the night he spent in jail as a result of trying to stop a fight: he seems to have enjoyed meeting the prisoners there. He delighted in the conversation of bootblacks; their speech and sentiments are reported appreciatively. He is gladdened that his “old Washoe instincts that have lain asleep in my bosom so long are waking up here in the midst of this late and unaccountable freshet of blood-letting that has broken out in the East.” The newspapers are full of violence—murders, suicides, assassinations, fights. “It is a wonderful state of things,” he reports (p. 232). The coarseness that he had identified with, even cultivated, in the West—what part was it to have in the continuing development of the literary personality of Mark Twain? Samuel Clemens obviously did not know.
Mr. Brown was disappearing from his Alta letters. He appears frequently in the earlier ones, but later he makes appearances only when Mark Twain seems at a loss for something to write about. He is absent from the non-humorous letters written in May, one about a visit to the Bible House of the American Bible Society, one about an asylum for the blind. These institutions could scarcely be treated comically, and the writer had decided to report on more serious subjects. When Mark Twain visits an exhibition at the Academy of Design, he does feel free to make jokes and profess pride in his ignorance: he is “glad the old masters are dead, and I only wish they had died sooner” (p. 239). But his comments are not vulgar or outspoken, as they would be later, when he saw the old masters’ paintings in Europe. He was even now working his way to a position that he was to set forth more fully eight years later in “Old Times on the Mississippi.” Here he writes:
It is a gratification to me to know that I am ignorant of art, and ignorant also of surgery. Because people who understand art find nothing in pictures but blemishes, and surgeons and anatomists see no beautiful women in all their lives, but only a ghasdy stack of bones with Latin names to them, and a network of nerves and muscles and tissues inflamed by disease. The very point in a picture that fascinates me with its beauty, is to the cultured artist a monstrous crime against the laws of coloring; and the very flush that charms me in a lovely face, is, to the critical surgeon, nothing but a sign hung out to advertise a decaying lung. Accursed be all such knowledge. I want none of it. (p. 238)
Later he would compare the unromantic outlook of the physician and that of the steamboat pilot, who can no longer appreciate the beauty of the river.
This appreciation of the blessings of innocence and ignorance contrasts sharply with another observation, one that shows he had not forgotten that his Western experiences had led him to shed some of his illusions. He writes, “I am waiting patiently to hear that they have ordered General Connor out to polish off those Indians, but the news never comes. He has shown that he knows how to fight the kind of Indians that God made, but I suppose the humanitarians want somebody to fight the Indians that J. Fenimore Cooper made. There is just where the mistake is. The Cooper Indians are dead—died with their creator. The kind that are left are of altogether a different breed, and cannot be successfully fought with poetry, and sentiment, and soft soap, and magnanimity” (p. 266).
Despite uncertainties about his literary identity, Mark Twain tried out a version of his Sandwich Islands lecture. He badly needed the money for the trip he was about to take.35 In May he appeared at the Cooper Institute, the Athenaeum in Brooklyn, and at Irving Hall in New York, with his friend from the west Frank Fuller as manager. His topic was the Sandwich Islands; the lectures were well received, to the lecturer’s great relief. He considered these lectures “a first-rate success”; he “came out handsomely” (pp. 178–79). He had been painfully aware that there were many competing attractions.
Later he would build effectively on this success; now his real interest was the trip he was about to undertake. He wrote to his mother on June 1 of being “wild with impatience to move—move—move!” A week later he complained that he had written himself “clear out” in his letters to the Alta, “the stupidest letters that were ever written from New York.” He had written ten letters in less than three weeks, letters vastly better written than the bulk of his western journalism. He was also writing for the New York Sunday Mercury, where five pieces appeared, in addition to “Jim Wolf and the Tom-Cats,” and he had written for the Tribune and the Saturday Evening Express.36
Presumably his impatience was chiefly over his dissatisfaction with his career as a writer and his failure to achieve any sense of fulfillment. He was thirty-one years old and had not yet discovered fully his métier. He was growing, intellectually, very fast, even though he considered himself, he wrote his mother, “so worthless that it seems to me I never do anything or accomplish anything that lingers in my mind as a pleasant memory.” Meanwhile, his European trip was in his mind not a great opportunity but—as he wrote to his friend Will Bowen—simply an occasion for fun.
CHAPTER THREE
Turning Point
In 1909, only a year before Sam Clemens’s death, Harper’s
