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Week One: Introduction to American Literature Post Civil War

Library of the Future® Emily Dickinson I’m nobody, who are you © McGraw−Hill, Inc., 1995

Emily Dickinson

Poems: Second Series 1891

LIFE

I’M nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then there’s a pair of us — don’t tell! They’d banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

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Library of the Future® Emily Dickinson The brain is wider than the sky

Emily Dickinson

Poems: Third Series 1896

LIFE

XLIII.

THE brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,

The one the other will include With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea, For, hold them, blue to blue,

The one the other will absorb, As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God, For, lift them, pound for pound,

And they will differ, if they do, As syllable from sound.

Emily Dickinson, The brain is wider than the sky 3

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Walt Whitman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

WALT WHITMAN (1819–1892)

Walt Whitman is important to our literature first of all because he was a great poet. “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” would be masterpieces in any litera- ture. Second, as an artist he had the kind of courage and vision upon which new epochs are founded. In 1855 he was the first voice of the revolution which after 1870 swept over European literature and much later reached the United States.

That kind of genius which is uncommon sense made him know that the time had come for many barriers to fall—barriers to the welfare and the expression of the individual, which he valued above all else. Thus, in advance of the “new” psy- chology he insisted on the unity of the personality and the significant importance of all experience. He extolled the values of the common, the miracle of the mouse, the wholesome soundness of the calloused hand, the body’s sweat. He attempted “to make illustrious” the “procreative urge of the universe,” or humans.

Whitman’s free verse provided an example that slowly communicated itself to later poets who likewise sought to refresh their art. His use of rhythm as a fluid instrument of verse demonstrated a range of possibilities beyond that of conven- tional meter. He wrote symphonically, associating themes and melodies with great freedom and suggestiveness; he abandoned conventional and hackneyed poetic figures and drew his symbolism freshly from experience. He remains one of our most important poets because he announced and instructed a new age; but he is equally important as a defender of the central American idealism of the past. Spir- itually he sprang from the tradition that Emerson represented—his was the tran- scendental or intuitional temperament that trusts the innate spiritual intimations of the individual and makes the individual responsible to them. On the plane of political thought he was also an apostle of individualism and represented the nineteenth-century projection of Jeffersonian idealism.

Walter Whitman was born on a farm on Long Island, then rural countryside, on May 31, 1819; his father was of British, his mother of Dutch, ancestry. Walter Whitman senior, a carpenter as well as a farmer, twice in Walt’s youth tried his fortune at house building in Brooklyn, at that time not quite a city in size. Thus the young poet experienced a vital cross section of American common life: rural Long Island, with its farmers and fishermen, its sailors and clammers, and the hamlets in which they lived; the nascent urban community of Brooklyn, where a boy could still catch fish in a nearby pond; the great harbor with its ships, and across the water the spires of Manhattan, visited by means of the exciting ferry- boats, and later to become for the poet always “my city.” As a boy he had five years of common schooling in Brooklyn, then in 1830 began work as an office boy. But by natural instinct he turned to the printing offices. Until the early fifties he worked as a journalist, attaining a considerable position as editor of the Brook- lyn Eagle (1846–1848). On the way up he was an apprentice on the Long Island Patriot (1832) and a journeyman printer in New York. Then, after teaching in various country schools on Long Island while contributing to local newspapers, he founded at Huntington his own weekly newspaper, the Long Islander, in 1838. In 1839 he was a compositor on the Long Island Democrat, and in 1840, at twenty- one, he stumped the island for Van Buren during the presidential campaign. Dur-

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Walt Whitman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

ing the next six years he was in New York, as newspaperman and as editor of the Aurora, the Tatler, and the New York Democrat. When he took over the Eagle in Brooklyn in 1846 he was seasoned in his profession, and he gained recognition in the New York area during his editorship. He resigned in 1848 because the backers of the paper, faced with the split in the Democratic party caused by the Mexican War, found it expedient to support compromise with the southern Democrats, while their editor was an unswerving free-soil Democrat. Probably for adven- ture’s sake, Whitman then took the editorship of the New Orleans Crescent, trav- eling southward partly by Mississippi steamboat with his brother Jeff; he returned in six months to edit the Brooklyn Freeman.

But now he had in mind his great project. Shaken by the ominous shadows that gathered over the country as “the irrepressible conflict” took shape in the Mexican War, he had conceived of a book to interpret American democratic ideal- ism as he had experienced it. It was to be a poem in a new form with which he had been experimenting since perhaps 1847. He gave up his newspaper work and, living with his parents in Brooklyn, worked part-time as a carpenter while writing Leaves of Grass. The first edition went on sale in New York probably on July 4, 1855. It had been privately printed, as were all but two of the first seven editions. The frankness of Leaves of Grass, together with its revolutionary form, precluded the possibility of wide reception. It was simply about sixty years ahead of its time, and Whitman, realizing this, accepted the situation with equanimity, knowing “the amplitude of time.” There was a dribble of orders for each successive edition, most of them sold from his home, wherever it then might be.

But it is a mistake to suppose that the author was neglected. Emerson wrote his famous message, “I greet you at the beginning of a great career,” less than three weeks after Whitman sent him a copy. Within the year Thoreau and Bronson Al- cott had ferreted out the author’s dwelling in Brooklyn, and Emerson himself soon paid a visit. So through the years, leaders of thought saw the greatness of what he was doing. By 1868 the young John Burroughs had written a book on Whitman, and William Michael Rossetti had responded to a growing interest among English intellectuals by publishing an English edition. During the 1870s Whitman’s name began to be mentioned by German critics, and within another decade translations of his poems in German and French made him famous on the Continent. Still, most Americans ignored his work, and he lived in poverty all his life.

From 1855 until 1862, he subsisted by literary hack work and journalism in Brooklyn, meanwhile enlarging his poems for the second edition of 1856 and the fundamental edition of 1860. There the poems began to fall into position as parts of a single “poem,” as the author said. It was to represent life in terms of one life, which had to be seen through the poet’s eyes, yet he would be reporting only what seemed true and important to everyone.

In 1862 his brother George was wounded, and Whitman went to the war front in Virginia. Finding his brother’s condition not serious, he remained in Wash- ington as a volunteer war nurse, visiting hospitals for a part of every day and sup- porting himself by part-time work in the army paymaster’s office. This was the experience which led to the poems of Drum-Taps (1865). “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” written for the second issue of this book, after the assas- sination of Lincoln that April, provided a passionate climax for the theme of the entire volume in its veneration of the president, who represented for Whitman a shining example of democratic comradeship and love for humanity.

Walt Whitman: Author Bio 5

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Walt Whitman Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

In 1865 Whitman was appointed clerk in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, only to be discharged in six months by Secretary Harlan because of the unsavory reputation of his book. At once appointed to the attorney general’s office, he rather gained by the experience because his eloquent friend William Douglas O’Connor, in his fiery pam- phlet The Good Gray Poet (1866), published a fine vindication of Whitman’s work.

The poet held his position in Washington until 1874, and during that time published, again at his own expense, two more editions of Leaves of Grass. In 1873, at fifty-four, he suffered a paralytic stroke and soon was an invalid at the home of his brother George in Camden, New Jersey. He never again recovered his full vitality, although he was well enough, on occasion, to give a public reading or lecture nearby or to visit Burroughs, now an established naturalist, at his Hudson River farm. In 1879 he made his long-anticipated transcontinental journey, as far west as Nevada.

In 1881 Leaves of Grass found a publisher in Osgood and Company of Boston and sold well until the district attorney classified it as “obscene literature” and or- dered the cancellation of “A Woman Waits for Me,” “To a Common Prostitute,” and certain isolated phrases. Whitman refused to comply. He took the plates to Rees Welsh, later David McKay, in Philadelphia, where his works were published for many years thereafter. In 1882 he published his best prose essays as Specimen Days and Collect. For the first time his volumes had a considerable sale. He was able to buy his own little house, now famous, on Mickle Street in Camden, and in the last decade of his life it became a place of pilgrimage for many American and British visitors. Until his death in 1892 he was never far from the edge of poverty, but as he said, in his own time he had “really arrived.” The 1892 edition of Leaves of Grass, which he signed on his deathbed, is one of America’s great books, and it has had worldwide influence.

The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman, begun under the editorship of Gay Wilson Allen and Scul- ley Bradley, remains a work in progress. Whitman’s writings were collected earlier as The Complete Writings of Walt Whitman, 10 vols., edited by R. M. Bucke and others, 1902, a limited edition long out of print. There are many editions of Leaves of Grass and the major prose essays. Harold W. Blodgett and Sculley Bradley edited the useful Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader’s Edition, 1965, and the Norton Critical Edition of Leaves of Grass, 1973. Sculley Bradley, H. W. Blodgett, William White, and Arthur Gelb edited Walt Whitman, “Leaves of Grass”: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, 3 vols., 1980. Edwin H. Miller edited Selected Letters of Walt Whitman, 1990. Ted Genoways, Walt Whit- man: The Correspondence, Vol. 7, 2004, completes a full collection begun by Miller.

Jerome Loving’s Walt Whitman: The Song of Himself, 1999, and Justin Kaplan’s Walt Whitman: A Life, 1980, are excellent biographies. Paul Zweig’s Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet, 1984, com- bines the life and the poems.

Of the many earlier biographies, those still in use include Emory Holloway, Whitman, an Interpreta- tion in Narrative, 1926; Newton Arvin, Whitman, 1938; H. S. Canby, Walt Whitman, an American, 1943; Frederick Schyberg, Walt Whitman, translated from the Danish by Evie Allen, 1951; Gay W. Allen, The Solitary Singer: Walt Whitman, 1955, 3rd ed., revised, 1967, thoroughly dependable and a bibliographical source as well; and a distinguished critical biography, Roger Asselineau, The Evolution of Walt Whitman, 2 vols., translated from the French, Cambridge, Mass., 1960, 1962.

Useful studies include Edwin H. Miller, Walt Whitman’s Poetry: A Psychological Journey, 1968; Thomas L. Brasher, Whitman as Editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, 1970; Joseph J. Rubin, The Historic Whitman, 1973; Floyd Stovall, The Foreground of “Leaves of Grass,” 1974; Harold Aspiz, Walt Whit- man and the Body Beautiful, 1980; M. Wynn Thomas, The Lunar Light of Whitman’s Poetry, 1987; Betsy Erkkila, Whitman the Political Poet, 1988; Kerry C. Larson, Whitman’s Drama of Consensus, 1988; Kenneth Price, Whitman and Tradition: The Poet in His Century, 1990; Michael Moon, Dissemi- nating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in “Leaves of Grass,” 1992; and David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, 1995.

The following texts of Leaves of Grass are those of the last authorized edition, Philadelphia, 1891–1892; the “preface” is that of the first edition, 1855.

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Walt Whitman I Saw in Louisiana a Live−Oak Growing

WALT WHITMAN

From CALAMUS1

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing, All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches, Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous leaves of dark green, And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself, But I wonder’d how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there without its

friend near, for I knew I could not, 5 And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it, and twined

around it a little moss, And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room, It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends, (For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,) Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love; 10 For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana solitary in a wide

flat space, Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near, I know very well I could not.

1860, 1867

1. The “Calamus” poems first appeared in the third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860). The calamus, a species of water reed, sometimes appears in myth and literature, as it does here, as a symbol of male comradeship.

Walt Whitman, I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing 7

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Walt Whitman A Noiseless Patient Spider © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

WALT WHITMAN

From WHISPERS OF HEAVENLY DEATH

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider, I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated, Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding, It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself, Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them. 5

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul. 10 1868 1881

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

MARK TWAIN (1835–1910)

The pattern of the life of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, or “Mark Twain,” for seventy-five years was the pattern of America—from frontier community to in- dustrial urbanity, from riverboats to railroads, from an aggressive, bumptious adolescence toward a troubled and powerful maturity. His intuitive and romantic response to that life was colored simultaneously by healthy skepticism and a strong suspicion that the geography and citizens of America were not conforming to scriptural patterns of the Promised Land. This discrepancy between the Ameri- can expectation and the disturbing reality, to which many writers have reacted with bitterness, or with gloomy acceptance and alarms, provoked Mark Twain to adopt the critical weapons of the humorist.

The inheritor of an indigenous tradition of humor compounded of Indian and Negro legend, New England wryness and dryness, and frontier extravagance, Mark Twain spent his early years in an ideal location for such influences to mold his life and his writing. Hannibal, Missouri, strategically placed on the banks of the Mississippi, in the period before the Civil War saw the commerce and travelers of a nation pass its wharfs and look westward from its streets. For a perceptive boy, such experiences were not to be forgotten, and later he preserved them in books that are world classics of the remembrance of a lost and happy time. His youth was typical of life in a fluid, diverse, yet morally exacting community in a chaotic period. His schooling was brief, and at eighteen he went to Philadelphia, New York, and Washington, doing itinerant newspaper work and sending his first travel letters to his brother Orion, who published them in his Muscatine Journal. He followed his brother to Keokuk, then moved on to Cincinnati, and from there embarked on an intended journey to South America, with the amusing results re- counted in Life on the Mississippi. Once he was on the river, his boyhood ambition to be a pilot returned, and discarding all thoughts of the Amazon, he persuaded Horace Bixby, a famous pilot, to school him in the intricate art of Mississippi nav- igation. After less than two years as a “cub,” Twain received his pilot’s license; the Civil War then put an end to piloting, but his nostalgic love of the river life was forever fixed in his pseudonym, “Mark Twain,” the leadsman’s cry meaning a two-fathom sounding, or “safe water.”

The Civil War brought change and tension to the Clemens family, who were, like so many, divided in their loyalty and allegiance. Orion Clemens, a strong Union man, campaigned for Lincoln and was appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Troubled by his brother’s inclination toward the southern tradition of the family, Orion persuaded him, rather easily, to go west as his assistant, although he did not need one. In 1861 they traveled by stagecoach across the plains to Car- son City, a journey described with hilarious half-truth and half-fiction in Rough- ing It. Neither the political job nor subsequent ventures in mining were profitable, and Twain began contributing letters, signed “Josh,” to the Virginia City Territo- rial Enterprise, which led to his joining its staff in 1862. From that time he was to remain a writer, although he occasionally lectured and ventured into business on the side. The “Jumping Frog” story, now famous as “The Notorious Jumping Frog

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

of Calaveras County,” published in the New York Saturday Press in 1865, brought him national attention; on the West Coast he was already well known as a jour- nalistic associate of Bret Harte and Artemus Ward, remembered for his humorous sketches in various papers and for a successful reportorial trip to Hawaii. A com- mission from the Alta California to write a series of travel letters now enabled him for the first time to go to Europe.

Twain’s excursion on the Quaker City to Europe and the Holy Land resulted in The Innocents Abroad (1869), a best-seller, followed by an equally successful lec- ture tour. In 1870, he married Olivia Langdon and settled down as editor of the Buffalo Express, but he soon moved to Hartford. His first effort at a novel, The Gilded Age (1873), written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, was a bit- ter yet amusing narrative of post–Civil War political and business corruption and offers interesting parallels with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), a comic critique of society in a fantastic vein. These books, with their quizzi- cal and detached humor, suggest Twain’s ability to view his age with qualified affec- tion while satirizing the economic and spiritual disorders, the narrow insularity, of mid-nineteenth-century America. Yet that American provincialism, exploited for comic effect in The Innocents Abroad and in the later travel books, A Tramp Abroad (1880) and the classic Life on the Mississippi (1883), never overshadowed his love of the American land and its people. That love, intensified by childhood memories, evoked his two unquestioned masterpieces.

Tom Sawyer (1876) and Huckleberry Finn (1884) combine recollections of Hannibal in Twain’s youth, the spell of a great river, and the intangible quality of an art that relies on simplicity for its greatest effect. On one level, the nostalgic account of childhood, on another, the social and moral record and judgment of an epoch in American history, the two books have attained the position of classics in the world’s literature. They were followed by lesser works, such as The American Claimant (1892), The £1,000,000 Bank-Note (1893), The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), and Following the Equator (1897), the last of the travel volumes. Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896) ended Twain’s employment of Huck and Tom in fiction.

The tradition of American humor, from colonial folk myth and Poor Richard’s Almanack to the Yankee wit of Lowell’s Biglow Papers, spreading through the na- tional press from Josh Billings, John Phoenix, Artemus Ward, and unnumbered, forgotten local humorists, followed the pattern of any folk literature in its imme- diate and intuitive response to cultural and social patterns. Mark Twain is America’s greatest humorist not only because of his unsurpassed mastery of that essential pattern but also because his humor served to point up errors in American life—its gaucheries, pretenses, and political debilities—and at the same time expressed a faith in the American dream, optimistic and unquenchable.

The discrepancy between that dream and its questionable fulfillment, so obvi- ous to the writers of the twentieth century, found expression also in Mark Twain’s personal life. His literary successes and popularity in America and abroad were contrasted with emotional complexities, tragic losses, and business disappoint- ments; his later writings evidence a skepticism saved from petulance by a great artist’s sincerity. The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg (1900), and The Mysteri-

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Mark Twain Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

ous Stranger (1916) are indictments of more than national cupidity and hypocrisy; they are troubled inquiries into the nature of the human race. And they appear to be at strange variance with such books as Tom Sawyer unless the reader recog- nizes in Twain the dichotomy of personality that William Dean Howells may have had in mind when he called him “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Several multivolume editions of Mark Twain have been published, of which the most recent is The Oxford Mark Twain, in 29 vols., 1996, facsimiles of the first American editions. Earlier are the Author’s National Edition, in 25 vols., 1907–1918, and the rare but excellent The Writings of Mark Twain, 37 vols., edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1922–1925. A definitive edition of the works was published jointly by the University of Iowa and the University of California, and a documentary collection of Mark Twain Papers is available from the University of California.

The Autobiography of Mark Twain, edited by Charles Neider, 1959, includes material not in the 1924 edition by Albert Bigelow Paine or in Mark Twain in Eruption, edited by Bernard De Voto, 1940. The authorized life by Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, A Biography, 3 vols., 1912, was reissued in 1935. This is supplemented by DeLancey Ferguson, Mark Twain, Man and Legend, 1943; by Bernard De Voto, Mark Twain’s America, 1932; by Dixon Wecter’s Sam Clemens of Hannibal, 1952; by Justin Ka- plan’s excellent Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain, 1966; and by Everett Emerson’s Mark Twain: A Literary Life, 2000. Mark Twain’s Letters, in 5 vols. to date, are part of the University of California Mark Twain Papers series. Important earlier collections of correspondence are Mark Twain’s Letters, 2 vols., edited by Albert Bigelow Paine, 1917; The Love Letters of Mark Twain, edited by Dixon Wecter, 1949; Mark Twain—Howells Letters, 2 vols., edited by Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, 1960; and Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii, edited byA. Grove Day, 1966. Charles Neider edited The Complete Short Stories, 1957, The Complete Essays, 1963, and The Complete Travel Books, 2 vols., 1967. Letters from the Earth, miscellaneous sketches, was edited by Bernard De Voto in 1939 and published in 1962.

Critical studies include Edward Wagenknecht, Mark Twain: The Man and His Work, 1935 (revised, 1967); K. A. Lynn, Mark Twain and Southwestern Humor, 1959; W. Blair, Mark Twain and Huck Finn, 1960; R. B. Salomon, Twain and the Image of History, 1961; A. E. Stone, Jr., The Innocent Eye * * *, 1961; Douglas Grant, Mark Twain, 1963; H. N. Smith, Mark Twain: The Development of a Writer, 1962; Louis Budd, Mark Twain: Social Philosopher, 1962; Pascal Covico, Mark Twain’s Humor: The Image of a World, 1962; Robert Wiggins, Mark Twain: Jackleg Novelist, 1964; Margaret Duckett, Mark Twain and Bret Harte, 1965; James M. Cox, Mark Twain: The Fate of Humor, 1966; Robert Regan, Unpromising Heroes: Mark Twain and His Characters, 1966; Fred W. Lorch, The Trouble Begins at Eight: Mark Twain’s Lecture Tours, 1968; Maxwell Geismar, Mark Twain: An American Prophet, 1970; Hamlin Hill, Mark Twain: God’s Fool, 1973; William M. Gibson, The Art of Mark Twain, 1976; Louis Budd, Our Mark Twain: The Making of His Public Personality, 1983; Richard Bridgman, Traveling in Mark Twain, 1987; David R. Sewell, Mark Twain’s Languages: Discourse, Dialogue, and Linguistic Va- riety, 1987; Harold Beaver, Huckleberry Finn, 1987; Susan Gillman, Dark Twins: Imposture and Iden- tity in Mark Twain’s America, 1989; Sherwood Cummings, Mark Twain and Science: Adventures of a Mind, 1989; J. Lauber, The Inventions of Mark Twain, 1990; Laura E. Skandera-Trombley, Mark Twain in the Company of Women, 1994; and R. Kent Rasmussen, Mark Twain A–Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings, 1995.

Mark Twain: Author Bio 11

Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Mark Twain How to Tell a Story © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

MARK TWAIN

How to Tell a Story

The Humorous Story an American Development. —Its Difference from Comic and Witty Stories.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told, for I have been almost daily in the company of the most expert story-tellers for many years.

There are several kinds of stories, but only one difficult kind—the humorous. I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, the comic story is English, the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter.

The humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular; but the comic and witty stories must be brief and end with a point. The humorous story bubbles gently along, the others burst.

The humorous story is strictly a work of art—high and delicate art—and only an artist can tell it; but no art is necessary in telling the comic and the witty story; anybody can do it. The art of telling a humorous story—understand, I mean by word of mouth, not print—was created in America, and has remained at home.

The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. And sometimes, if he has had good success, he is so glad and happy that he will repeat the “nub” of it and glance around from face to face, collecting applause, and then repeat it again. It is a pathetic thing to see.

Very often, of course, the rambling and disjointed humorous story finishes with a nub, point, snapper, or whatever you like to call it. Then the listener must be alert, for in many cases the teller will divert attention from that nub by drop- ping it in a carefully casual and indifferent way, with the pretence that he does not know it is a nub.

Artemus Ward used that trick a good deal; then when the belated audience presently caught the joke he would look up with innocent surprise, as if wonder- ing what they had found to laugh at. Dan Setchell used it before him, Nye and Riley and others use it to-day.

But the teller of the comic story does not slur the nub; he shouts it at you— every time. And when he prints it, in England, France, Germany, and Italy, he ital- icizes it, puts some whooping exclamation-points after it, and sometimes explains it in a parenthesis. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to re- nounce joking and lead a better life.

Let me set down an instance of the comic method, using an anecdote which has been popular all over the world for twelve or fifteen hundred years. The teller tells it in this way:

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

Mark Twain How to Tell a Story © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2007

THE WOUNDED SOLDIER

In the course of a certain battle a soldier whose leg had been shot off appealed to another soldier who was hurrying by to carry him to the rear, informing him at the same time of the loss which he had sustained; whereupon the generous son of Mars, shouldering the unfortu- nate, proceeded to carry out his desire. The bullets and cannon-balls were flying in all direc- tions, and presently one of the latter took the wounded man’s head off—without, however, his deliverer being aware of it. In no long time he was hailed by an officer, who said:

“Where are you going with that carcass?” “To the rear, sir—he’s lost his leg!” “His leg, forsooth?” responded the astonished officer; “you mean his head, you booby.” Whereupon the soldier dispossessed himself of his burden, and stood looking down

upon it in great perplexity. At length he said: “It is true, sir, just as you have said.” Then after a pause he added, “But he TOLD me IT

WAS HIS LEG!!!!!”

Here the narrator bursts into explosion after explosion of thunderous horse- laughter, repeating that nub from time to time through his gaspings and shriekings and suffocatings.

It takes only a minute and a half to tell that in its comic-story form; and isn’t worth the telling, after all. Put into the humorous-story form it takes ten minutes, and is about the funniest thing I have ever listened to—as James Whitcomb Riley tells it.

He tells it in the character of a dull-witted old farmer who has just heard it for the first time, thinks it is unspeakably funny, and is trying to repeat it to a neighbor. But he can’t remember it; so he gets all mixed up and wanders helplessly round and round, putting in tedious details that don’t belong in the tale and only retard it; taking them out conscientiously and putting in others that are just as useless; making minor mistakes now and then and stopping to correct them and explain how he came to make them; remembering things which he forgot to put in in their proper place and going back to put them in there; stopping his narrative a good while in order to try to recall the name of the soldier that was hurt, and fi- nally remembering that the soldier’s name was not mentioned, and remarking placidly that the name is of no real importance, anyway—better, of course, if one knew it, but not essential, after all—and so on, and so on, and so on.

The teller is innocent and happy and pleased with himself, and has to stop every little while to hold himself in and keep from laughing outright; and does hold in, but his body quakes in a jelly-like way with interior chuckles; and at the end of the ten minutes the audience have laughed until they are exhausted, and the tears are running down their faces.

The simplicity and innocence and sincerity and unconsciousness of the old farmer are perfectly simulated, and the result is a performance which is thoroughly charming and delicious. This is art—and fine and beautiful, and only a master can compass it; but a machine could tell the other story.

To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and some- times purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct. Another feature is the slur- ring of the point. A third is the dropping of a studied remark apparently without knowing it, as if one were thinking aloud. The fourth and last is the pause.

Artemus Ward dealt in numbers three and four a good deal. He would begin to tell with great animation something which he seemed to think was wonderful;

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then lose confidence, and after an apparently absentminded pause add an incon- gruous remark in a soliloquizing way; and that was the remark intended to ex- plode the mine—and it did.

For instance, he would say eagerly, excitedly, “I once knew a man in New Zealand who hadn’t a tooth in his head”—here his animation would die out; a silent, reflective pause would follow, then he would say dreamily, and as if to him- self, “and yet that man could beat a drum better than any man I ever saw.”

The pause is an exceedingly important feature in any kind of story, and a fre- quently recurring feature, too. It is a dainty thing, and delicate, and also uncertain and treacherous; for it must be exactly the right length—no more and no less— or it fails of its purpose and makes trouble. If the pause is too short the impressive point is passed, and the audience have had time to divine that a surprise is in- tended—and then you can’t surprise them, of course.

On the platform I used to tell a negro ghost story that had a pause in front of the snapper on the end, and that pause was the most important thing in the whole story. If I got it the right length precisely, I could spring the finishing ejaculation with effect enough to make some impressible girl deliver a startled little yelp and jump out of her seat—and that was what I was after. This story was called “The Golden Arm,” and was told in this fashion. You can practise with it yourself— and mind you look out for the pause and get it right.

THE GOLDEN ARM

Once ’pon a time dey wuz a monsus mean man, en he live ’way out in de prairie all ’lone by hisself, ’cep’n he had a wife. En bimeby she died, en he tuck en toted her way out dah in de prairie en buried her. Well, she had a golden arm—all solid gold, fum de shoulder down. He wuz pow’ful mean—pow’ful; en dat night he couldn’t sleep, caze he want dat golden arm so bad.

When it come midnight he couldn’t stan’ it no mo’; so he git up, he did, en tuck his lantern en shoved out thoo de storm en dug her up en got de golden arm; en he bent his head down ’gin de win’, en plowed en plowed en plowed thoo de snow. Den all on a sudden he stop (make a considerable pause here, and look star- tled, and take a listening attitude) en say: “My lan’, what’s dat!”

En he listen— en listen— en de win’ say (set your teeth together and imitate the wailing and wheezing singsong of the wind), “Bzzz-z-zzz”—en den, way back yon- der whah de grave is, he hear a voice!—he hear a voice all mix’ up in de win’—can’t hardly tell ’em ’part—“Bzzz-zzz—W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?—zzz— zzz—W-h-o g-o-t m-y g-o-l-d-e-n arm? (You must begin to shiver violently now.)

En he begin to shiver en shake, en say, “Oh, my! Oh, my lan’!” en de win’ blow de lantern out, en de snow en sleet blow in his face en mos’ choke him, en he start a-plowin’ knee-deep towards home mos’ dead, he so sk’yerd—en pooty soon he hear de voice again, en (pause) it ’us comin’ after him! “Bzzz—zzz—zzz— W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n—arm?”

When he git to de pasture he hear it agin—closter now, en a-comin’!— a-comin’ back dah in de dark en de storm—(repeat the wind and the voice). When he git to de house he rush up-stairs en jump in de bed en kiver up, head and years, en lay dah shiverin’ en shakin’— en den way out dah he hear it agin!— en a-comin’!

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En bimeby he hear (pause—awed, listening attitude)—pat—pat—pat—hit’s a-comin’ up-stairs! Den he hear de latch, en he know it’s in de room!

Den pooty soon he know it’s a-stannin’ by de bed! (Pause). Den—he know it’s a-bendin’ down over him— en he cain’t skasely git his breath! Den— den—he seem to feel someth’n c-o-l-d, right down ’most agin his head! (Pause.)

Den de voice say, right at his year—“W-h-o—g-o-t—m-y—g-o-l-d-e-n arm?” (You must wail it out very plaintively and accusingly; then you stare steadily and impressively into the face of the farthest-gone auditor—a girl, preferably—and let that awe-inspiring pause begin to build itself in the deep hush. When it has reached exactly the right length, jump suddenly at that girl and yell, “You’ve got it!”

If you’ve got the pause right, she’ll fetch a dear little yelp and spring right out of her shoes. But you must get the pause right; and you will find it the most trou- blesome and aggravating and uncertain thing you ever undertook.)

1897

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Perkins−Perkins: Selections from American Literature

MARK TWAIN

From Roughing It1

[When the Buffalo Climbed a Tree]

Next morning just before dawn, when about five hundred and fifty miles from St. Joseph,2 our mud-wagon3 broke down. We were to be delayed five or six hours, and therefore we took horses, by invitation, and joined a party who were just starting on a buffalo hunt. It was noble sport galloping over the plain in the dewy freshness of the morning, but our part of the hunt ended in disaster and disgrace, for a wounded buffalo bull chased the passenger Bemis nearly two miles, and then he forsook his horse and took to a lone tree. He was very sullen about the matter for some twenty-four hours, but at last he began to soften little by little, and fi- nally he said:

“Well, it was not funny, and there was no sense in those gawks making them- selves so facetious over it. I tell you I was angry in earnest for awhile. I should have shot that long gangly lubber they called Hank, if I could have done it without crip- pling six or seven other people—but of course I couldn’t, the old ‘Allen’s’4 so con- founded comprehensive. I wish those loafers had been up in the tree; they wouldn’t have wanted to laugh so. If I had had a horse worth a cent—but no, the minute he saw that buffalo bull wheel on him and give a bellow, he raised straight up in the air and stood on his heels. The saddle began to slip, and I took him round the neck and laid close to him, and began to pray. Then he came down and stood up on the other end awhile, and the bull actually stopped pawing sand and bellowing to con- template the inhuman spectacle. Then the bull made a pass at him and uttered a bellow that sounded perfectly frightful, it was so close to me, and that seemed to literally prostrate my horse’s reason, and make a raving distracted maniac of him, and I wish I may die if he didn’t stand on his head for a quarter of a minute and shed tears. He was absolutely out of his mind—he was, as sure as truth itself, and he really didn’t know what he was doing. Then the bull came charging at us, and my horse dropped down on all fours and took a fresh start—and then for the next ten minutes he would actually throw one handspring after another so fast that the bull began to get unsettled, too, and didn’t know where to start in—and so he stood there sneezing, and shoveling dust over his back, and bellowing every now and then, and thinking he had got a fifteen-hundred dollar circus horse for breakfast, certain. Well, I was first out on his neck—the horse’s, not the bull’s—and then un- derneath, and next on his rump, and sometimes head up, and sometimes heels— but I tell you it seemed solemn and awful to be ripping and tearing and carrying on so in the presence of death, as you might say. Pretty soon the bull made a snatch

1. The sketches in Roughing It were based on Twain’s memories, generously intermingled with elements of the tall tale, of his overland trip to Nevada in 1861 in company with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Orion kept a journal which Mark drew on for certain facts. The present text of Roughing It is based on the first edition of 1872. 2. The Missouri gateway to the frontier, from which the overland stages started westward. 3. A less comfortable type of stagecoach, with open sides and simple benches. 4. A revolver named after its inventor, often called a “pepperbox” because it had six barrels.

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for us and brought away some of my horse’s tail (I suppose, but do not know, being pretty busy at the time), but something made him hungry for solitude and sug- gested to him to get up and hunt for it. And then you ought to have seen that spider- legged old skeleton go! and you ought to have seen the bull cut out after him, too—head down, tongue out, tail up, bellowing like everything, and actually mow- ing down the weeds, and tearing up the earth, and boosting up the sand like a whirlwind! By George, it was a hot race! I and the saddle were back on the rump, and I had the bridle in my teeth and holding on to the pommel with both hands. First we left the dogs behind; then we passed a jackass rabbit;5 then we overtook a cayote,6 and were gaining on an antelope when the rotten girths let go and threw me about thirty yards off to the left, and as the saddle went down over the horse’s rump he gave it a lift with his heels that sent it more than four hundred yards up in the air, I wish I may die in a minute if he didn’t. I fell at the foot of the only solitary tree there was in nine counties adjacent (as any creature could see with the naked eye), and the next second I had hold of the bark with four sets of nails and my teeth, and the next second after that I was astraddle of the main limb and blaspheming my luck in a way that made my breath smell of brimstone. I had the bull, now, if he did not think of one thing. But that one thing I dreaded. I dreaded it very seri- ously. There was a possibility that the bull might not think of it, but there were greater chances that he would. I made up my mind what I would do in case he did. It was a little over forty feet to the ground from where I sat. I cautiously unwound the lariat from the pommel of my saddle—”

“Your saddle? Did you take your saddle up in the tree with you?” “Take it up in the tree with me? Why, how you talk. Of course I didn’t. No

man could do that. It fell in the tree when it came down.” “Oh—exactly.” “Certainly. I unwound the lariat, and fastened one end of it to the limb. It

was the very best green raw-hide, and capable of sustaining tons. I made a slip- noose in the other end, and then hung it down to see the length. It reached down twenty-two feet—half way to the ground. I then loaded every barrel of the Allen with a double charge. I felt satisfied. I said to myself, if he never thinks of that one thing that I dread, all right—but if he does, all right anyhow—I am fixed for him. But don’t you know that the very thing a man dreads is the thing that always hap- pens? Indeed it is so. I watched the bull, now, with anxiety—anxiety which no one can conceive of who has not been in such a situation and felt that at any moment death might come. Presently a thought came into the bull’s eye. I knew it! said I— if my nerve fails now, I am lost. Sure enough, it was just as I had dreaded, he started in to climb the tree—”

“What, the bull?” “Of course—who else?” “But a bull can’t climb a tree.” “He can’t, can’t he? Since you know so much about it, did you ever see a

bull try?” “No! I never dreamt of such a thing.”

5. A large rabbit indigenous to the West, jokingly said to resemble a miniature donkey. 6. Twain’s spelling for “coyote,” a prairie wolf.

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“Well, then, what is the use of your talking that way, then? Because you never saw a thing done, is that any reason why it can’t be done?”

“Well, all right—go on. What did you do?” “The bull started up, and got along well for about ten feet, then slipped and

slid back. I breathed easier. He tried it again—got up a little higher—slipped again. But he came at it once more, and this time he was careful. He got gradually higher and higher, and my spirits went down more and more. Up he came—an inch at a time—with his eyes hot, and his tongue hanging out. Higher and higher—hitched his foot over the stump of a limb, and looked up, as much as to say, ‘You are my meat, friend.’ Up again—higher and higher, and getting more excited the closer he got. He was within ten feet of me! I took a long breath,—and then said I, ‘It is now or never.’ I had the coil of the lariat all ready; I paid it out slowly, till it hung right over his head; all of a sudden I let go of the slack, and the slip-noose fell fairly round his neck! Quicker than lightning I out with the Allen and let him have it in the face. It was an awful roar, and must have scared the bull out of his senses. When the smoke cleared away, there he was, dangling in the air, twenty foot from the ground, and going out of one convulsion into another faster than you could count! I didn’t stop to count, anyhow—I shinned down the tree and shot for home.”

“Bemis, is all that true, just as you have stated it?” “I wish I may rot in my tracks and die the death of a dog if it isn’t.” “Well, we can’t refuse to believe it, and we don’t. But if there were some

proofs—” “Proofs! Did I bring back my lariat?” “No.” “Did I bring back my horse?” “No.” “Did you ever see the bull again?” “No.” “Well, then, what more do you want? I never saw anybody as particular as

you are about a little thing like that.” I made up my mind that if this man was not a liar he only missed it by the

skin of his teeth. 1872

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