Day 36: The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County

While I'm reading A Tale of Two Cities (which will probably take me a while), I also decided to crack open the Mark Twain short story collection I got in the book haul. It includes his most noteworthy short stories, collected chronologically, and by reading them I'm hoping to get a better understanding of what a short story can be. When it comes to Mark Twain nothing quite fits into a label as simple as 'short story.' He bends the rules by telling stories with loosely defined beginnings, middles, and ends, but the way the he breaks the mold can say a lot about the mold he's breaking to begin with. Take for example the first story in the collection, and my favorite so far, 'The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,' published originally as 'Jim Smiley and His Jumping Frog.'

Here's the story if you'd like to read it: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/price/frog.htm

This story is set in Twain's time and focuses on a man named Jim Smiley, who is notorious for taking a bet on just about anything. Jim Smiley however, is not actually present during the course of the story. It begins with an unnamed narrator who you might assume is Mark Twain himself, though it's hard to say for sure. The narrator has been asked by a friend to call on 'garrulous old Simon Wheeler' to inquire about a friend of a friend named Leonidas W. Smiley. The narrator, who tells the story of the notorious Jim Smiley in the past tense, believes Leonidas is actually a ruse his friend created to trick him into getting the Jim Smiley story from Simon Wheeler, which he would never put up with listening to otherwise. If that feels a little convoluted for the intro of a short story, you might be amazed at how natural Twain is able to make this sound.

The story goes on as Wheeler describes the outlandish adventures of gambling obsessed Jim Smiley, from betting on horse races, dog fights, cat fights, chicken fights, to the implication that 'why, if there was two birds setting on a fence, he would bet you which one would fly first.' This rapidly escalates, and Jim offers to bet a man that his mother would die of the illness she suffered. Then he moves on to train a fighting dog whose only tactic was to grab ahold of the other dog's back legs. The dog meets its end when Smiley put the leg-latching dog (named Andrew Jackson) up against a dog with no hind legs. The kind of humor at play here just doesn't come across unless it's in Twain's own writing, or in this case, the distinct voice of Simon Wheeler:

'He see in a minute how he'd been imposed on, and how the other dog had him in the door, so to speak, and he 'peared surprised, and then he looked sorter discouraged-like, and didn't try no more to win the fight, and so got shucked out bad. He give Smiley a look, as much as to say his heart was broke, and it was his fault, for putting up a dog that hadn't no hind legs for him to take holt of, which was his main dependence in a fight, and then he limped off a piece and laid down and died.'

This had me howling.

Without his trusty dog, Jim Smiley is forced into a new betting gig. Old Andrew Jackson brought the money in because nobody would ever bet on a friendly looking dog that didn't do anything but latch on and refuse to let go, so Smiley comes up with an equally unlikely premise to make money. He trains a frog to outjump any other frog in Calaveras county. I won't spoil the ending, because it's just as funny as the dog, but needless to say, the notorious jumping frog doesn't work out perfectly well for Jim Smiley.

At the very end the narrator makes a swift retreat, displeased that he's sat listening to Simon Wheeler reminisce about Jim Smiley based on a ruse. The story feels more like a journalist's misadventure than a regular short story, bending the line between fiction and fact. It makes you wonder the whole time, 'did he really hear this story from someone?' and I think that is exactly what Twain was after. His ability to project a voice into your head is second to none, and Wheeler is such an authentic character that if you sat down in a bar yourself and heard someone go on about Jim Smiley like he had, you might just buy into it. I love the way Twain turns fiction into a reflection of reality, which many stories attempt to do, but fall just short of. His writing style, the structure of the story as a journalist's misadventure, the authentic voices, and the just ridiculous enough plot all make it feel more real than reality. This is a great story and I can't recommend you read it enough.

I'm looking forward to making more posts about the Twain short stories as I read them, so expect a few more this week. Thank you for reading.

Benjamin Hawley