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The Trouble Begins at 8
A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West
Chapter One
The Man Who Made Frogs Famous
Mark Twain was born fully grown, with a cheap cigar clamped between his teeth.The event took place, as far as is known, in a San Francisco hotel room sometime in the fall of 1865. The only person attending was a young newspaperman and frontier jester named Samuel Langhorne Clemens.Who?A person of little consequence. He was a former tramp printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, and ink-stained scribbler who'd made a small noise in the brand-new Nevada Territory.
Sam, or even Sammy, as boyhood friends and relatives sometimes called him, sat in the light from the hotel window scratching out a comic story about a jumping frog contest. He'd discovered the bleached ribs of the story not far off, in the California Gold Rush foothills. He now set the tale in his native folk language. He gave the story fresh and whimsical orchestration. He made it art.
He rummaged around among several pen names with which he'd amused himself in the past. Newspaper humorists, such as his friends Petroleum V. Nashby and Dan De Quille, commonly hid in the shade of absurd false fronts. Should he be Josh again? Thomas J. Snodgrass? Mark Twain? How about W. Epaminondas Blab?
Mark Twain. It recalled a shouted refrain from his riverboat days, signifying a safe water depth of two fathoms, or twelve feet. He'd given the pen name a trial run on a political scribble or two, but the name had only enhanced his obscurity. He had let it molder and die.
Still, he would feel cozy under the skin of a character from his beloved Mississippi River. Maybe he'd blow on itsashes and resurrect the pseudonym. With earnest decision, a possible snort, and a flourish of his pen, he signed the piece, "By Mark Twain."
Nothing traveled fast in those days except the common cold. But once the celebrated frog of Calaveras County reached the East Coast and was reprinted by newspapers large and small, the nation had seizures of giggles and guffaws. The merriment spread with the swiftness of a gale-force wind. The story crossed the Atlantic Ocean, and before long the English and later the French "most killed themselves laughing" as Twain reported, falling back on his Missouri drawl.
Today, we are still smiling out loud at how Smiley lost the frog-jumping contest to a stranger with a secret cache of buckshot.
Mark Twain had made the overstuffed amphibian famous. At first, the creature had grabbed the spotlight exclusively for himself. The author reacted with a bilious grunt of jealousy toward his creation. Complained Twain, "It was only the frog that was celebrated. It wasn't I."
But soon Mark Twain caught up, sprinting past the croaker to become the most famous American alive. And the funniest.
Each chomping simultaneously on the same cigar, Sam Clemens and Mark Twain conspired to write what many regard as America's greatest novels, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its companion The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. And that's not to mention the knockabout pages of Life on the Mississippi or the fanciful The Prince and the Pauper, a novel about two look-alikes who exchange places, with results you can imagine. An unending carnival of movies, plays, and Broadway musicals have been spun off from Mark Twain's rowdy comedies and satires.
From under the author's full mustache, hanging like a rusted scimitar over his sharp quips, came an evergreen stream of wit. His sayings remain as perky today as when Twain first minted them. "Man is the only animal who blushes, or needs to," said he. "Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education." "Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."
Not bad for a barefoot boy with a prairie fire of curly red hair who was born in Florida, a Missouri village so small that Sam remembered it as "almost invisible." Halley's comet was streaking across the sky like a chalk mark the day he was born. Seventy-five years later, it came blazing back, as if by personal invitation—the day the celebrated author snubbed out his cigar and moved in with the immortals.
But there was something more remarkable afoot in Florida, Missouri, the day Sam added himself to the world's population. Destiny had searched out the obscure village of twenty-one homes for a flash of its rarest lightning—genius.
Sam was struck in the funny bone. Burdened with literary imagination and originality, he grew up to snatch the dust covers and embroidered antimacassars off the novels of the day. He changed literature forever. He scraped earth under its fingernails and taught it to spit. He slipped in a subversive American sense of humor. He made laughing out loud as respectable as afternoon tea.
The Trouble Begins at 8
A Life of Mark Twain in the Wild, Wild West. Copyright (c) by Sid Fleischman . Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.
