The Story of the Bad Little Boy

Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim--though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books. It was strange, but still it was true, that this one was called Jim.

Mark Twain may not have been perfect, but he came pretty close to my ideal of what a human being is supposed to be. He was a dreamer who sank more money than he had into a printing machine whose inventor could never quite make it work. His lawyers advised him to declare bankruptcy and to pay his creditors a few cents on the dollar of what he owed them. As a celebrity--one of the most widely beloved men of his time--even his creditors would probably have forgiven him if he had opted to declare bankruptcy. But Twain insisted on honoring his debts; he knew before he started dreaming of the fortunes to be made through venture capital that sometimes we have to pay a price for our dreams. And he paid the price of lecturing night after night, in one meeting hall after another, across the country and around the world. He lectured until every last penny was paid to every last creditor.

He didn't have any sick mother, either--a sick mother who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy, and the anxiety she felt that the world might be harsh and cold toward him when she was gone. Most bad boys in the Sunday books are named James, and have sick mothers, who teach them to say, "Now, I lay me down," etc., and sing them to sleep with sweet, plaintive voices, and then kiss them good night, and kneel down by the bedside and weep. But it was different with this fellow. He was named Jim, and there wasn't anything the matter with his mother--no consumption, nor anything of that kind. She was rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss. She always spanked Jim to sleep, and she never kissed him good night; on the contrary, she boxed his ears when she was ready to leave him.

Because political correctness is the new code by which those who are witless impose their witlessness on others, Twain has actually earned himself a reputation of racial insensitivity. Nonsense. Twain invariably went out of his way to stand up for the oppressed and the misunderstood. Consider the outrage he expressed in his excoriating "The United States of Lyncherdom" and his tirade against anti-semitism in "Concerning the Jews." Particularly indicative of his character--his sense of himself as a citizen of the world--is his wickedly satirical "King Leopold's Soliloquoy," concerning the atrocities in the Belgian Congo [1].

Once this little bad boy stole the key of the pantry, and slipped in there and helped himself to some jam, and filled up the vessel with tar, so that his mother would never know the difference; but all at once a terrible feeling didn't come over him, and something didn't seem to whisper to him, "Is it right to disobey my mother? Isn't it sinful to do this? Where do bad little boys go who gobble up their good kind mother's jam?" and then he didn't kneel down all alone and promise never to be wicked any more, and rise up with a light, happy heart, and go and tell his mother all about it, and beg her forgiveness, and be blessed by her with tears of pride and thankfulness in her eyes. No; that is the way with all other bad boys in the books; but it happened otherwise with this Jim, strangely enough. He ate that jam, and said it was bully, in his sinful, vulgar way; and he put in the tar, and said that was bully also, and laughed, and observed "that the old woman would get up and snort" when she found it out; and when she did find it out, he denied knowing anything about it, and she whipped him severely, and he did the crying himself. Everything about this boy was curious--everything turned out differently with him from the way it does to the bad Jameses in the books.

Although Twain's novels are justly celebrated for their wit, their charm, their use of dialect, and the insights that they offer us into humanity, there is far more to Twain than the story of the double that occupies him in The Prince and the Pauper, The American Claimant, and Pudd'nhead Wilson. His novels tend to be informed by and to bog down in their own outrageous premises. That doesn't keep them from being enjoyable, but they generally lack the exuberance of his short stories. Despite our preconceptions, Twain was really more of a sentence-crafter than a story-teller. Like Faulkner or Melville or Hawthorne, he gravitated towards the outrageous in his fiction. He liked a tall tale better than a believable one. And why should we pay attention to stories that we don't believe unless it's because of the way they're presented? Generally speaking, Twain's stories do not ask us to suspend our disbelief, but to use our disbelief as a tool for examining ourselves and our world. Instead of employing his characters to help as accept his stories, he uses his stories to help us reject the phony characters of the world. More often than not, Twain focuses on a single idea in a story. He wants to use literature to teach us something that he has had to learn through hard experience. And he makes the lesson fun and memorable and powerful.

Once he climbed up in Farmer Acorn's apple trees to steal apples, and the limb didn't break, and he didn't fall and break his arm, and get torn by the farmer's great dog, and then languish on a sickbed for weeks, and repent and become good. Oh, no; he stole as many apples as he wanted and came down all right; and he was all ready for the dog, too, and knocked him endways with a brick when he came to tear him. It was very strange--nothing like it ever happened in those mild little books with marbled backs, and with pictures in them of men with swallow-tailed coats and bell-crowned hats, and pantaloons that are short in the legs, and women with the waists of their dresses under their arms, and no hoops on. Nothing like it in any of the Sunday-school books.

I have chosen to write about Twain for my contribution to the Father's Day write off because Twain was, in a manner of speaking, my grandfather. My own father was abandoned by his father in infancy. Although his older brothers served as role models of a sort, they never really struck him as father figures. When my father found his way to the books of Mark Twain in his youth, he found precisely the kind of voice that he had always thought of a father as having--patient, funny, wise, confident, friendly, encouraging, and honest. My dad learned that there is a certain flattering light in which civilization struggles to present itself. He began to see that there was an unwritten code that all the other kids knew they were supposed to pay lip service to even though they also knew it was fake. There had been no one in his life to debunk that code for him, no one to tell him when you had to pretend to believe in societal hocus-pocus and when you could ignore it. Twain taught him about life. And when it was time for my father to teach me, I found him to be patient, funny, wise, confident, friendly, encouraging, and honest.

Once he stole the teacher's penknife, and, when he was afraid it would be found out and he would get whipped, he slipped it into George Wilson's cap--poor Widow Wilson's son, the moral boy, the good little boy of the village, who always obeyed his mother, and never told an untruth, and was fond of his lessons, and infatuated with Sunday-School. And when the knife dropped from the cap, and poor George hung his head and blushed, as if in conscious guilt, and the grieved teacher charged the theft upon him and was just in the very act of bringing the switch down upon his trembling shoulders, a white-haired, improbable justice of the peace did not suddenly appear in their midst, and strike an attitude and say, "Spare this noble boy--there stands the cowering culprit! I was passing the school door at recess, and, unseen myself, I saw the theft committed!" And then Jim didn't get whaled, and the venerable justice didn't read the tearful school a homily, and take George by the hand and say such a boy deserved to be exalted, and then tell him to come and make his home with him, and sweep out the office, and make fires, and run errands, and chop wood, and study law, and help his wife do household labors, and have all the balance of the time to play, and get forty cents a month, and be happy. No; it would have happened that way in the books, but it didn't happen that way to Jim. No meddling old clam of a justice dropped in to make trouble, and so the model boy George got thrashed, and Jim was glad of it because, you know, Jim hated moral boys. Jim said he was "down on them milksops." Such was the coarse language of this bad, neglected boy.

Whisking a Connecticut Yankee back in time to Camelot is a fairly absurd plot device, but Twain was capable of much greater absurdity. Any silly notion that popped into Twain's head seemed to be an occasion for a short story. In "The Canvasser's Tale," for instance, his purpose seems to be to write a story concerning the most outrageous thing that a door-to-door salesman might try to peddle. Twain's narrator listens in disbelief as the canvasser explains that he is trying to sell off his uncle's collection:

"[My uncle] was resolved that he would choose things . . . that no other man was collecting. He carefully made up his mind, and once more entered the field--this time to make a collection of echoes."

"Of what?" said I.

"Echoes, sir. His first purchase was an echo in Georgia that repeated four times; his next was a six-repeater in Maryland; his next was a thirteen-repeater in Maine . . . Well, next he bought a lot of cheap little double-barreled echoes, scattered around over various states and territories; he got them at twenty per cent off by taking the lot."

"Let me interrupt you," I said. "My friend, I have not had a moment's respite from canvassers this day. I have bought a sewing-machine which I did not want; I have bought a map which is mistaken in all its details; I have bought a clock which will not go; I have bought a moth poison which the moths prefer to any other beverage; I have bought no end of useless inventions, and now I have had enough of this foolishness. I would not have one of your echoes if you were even to give it to me. I would not let it stay on the place. I always hate a man that tries to sell me echoes. You see this gun? Now take your collection and move on; let us not have bloodshed."

On one rather humorous level, the point of the story seems to be to create a context in which the sentence, "I always hate a man that tries to sell me echoes" is actually meaningful. But the use of the term 'always' seems to suggest that there are other peddlers out there who are in the habit of selling the rest of us echoes. What does it mean to buy an echo? Is it anything like purchasing the next Grisham book in which he will change the names of the characters and have them go through the same tired motions before resolving the plot with some clumsy deus ex machina? Is it like sending money to a televangelist? Is it like buying a decorative, non-functioning phone (remember these?) for the purpose of persuading people walking past your car that you're too busy and upwardly mobile not to have a car phone?

But the strangest thing that ever happened to Jim was the time he went boating on Sunday, and didn't get drowned, and that other time that he got caught out in the storm when he was fishing on Sunday, and didn't get struck by lightning. Why, you might look, and look, all through the Sunday-school books from now till next Christmas, and you would never come across anything like this. Oh, no; you would find that all the bad boys who get caught out in storms when they are fishing on Sunday infallibly get struck by lightning. Boats with bad boys in them always upset on Sunday, and it always storms when bad boys go fishing on the Sabbath. How this Jim ever escaped is a mystery to me.

The New Yorker is known for its witty contributors. It's hard not to smile at the biting prose of Hendrik Hertzberg, for example, and I usually find something in each issue that makes me chuckle. But apart from a few spectacular moments in the work of Franz Kafka, I don't know of any writer whose sense of humor so much as approaches that of Twain. His collected stories are not only laugh-out-loud funny; they are close-the-book-and-slide-out-of-your-seat-and-roll-around-on-the-ground funny. His spoof on the typical romance story "The Loves of Alonzo Fitz Clarence and Rosannah Ethelton" has its characters say some of the most improbably unromantic things you've ever heard, e.g., "That clock hardly ever knows what time it is; and when it does know, it lies about it." His blistering parody of human society ("Some Learned Fables for Good Old Boys and Girls") does a masterful job of exposing what passes for sound thinking with our various experts. When a group of swamp creatures perform an archeological examination of human artifacts, they do an admirable job of misinterpreting the Waterside Wax Museum:

Professor Woodlouse affirmed that the word 'Museum' was equivalent to the phrase 'lumgath molo,' or 'Burial Place.' Upon entering, the scientists were well astonished. But what they saw may be best conveyed in the language of their own official report:

Erect, in a row, were a sort of rigid great figures which struck us instantly as belonging to the long extinct species of reptile called Man, described in our ancient records. This was a peculiarly gratifying discovery, because of late times it has become fashionable to regard this creature as a myth and a superstition, a work of the inventive imaginations of our remote ancestors. But here, indeed, was Man, perfectly preserved, in a fossil state. And this was his burial place, as already ascertained by the inscription. And now it began to be suspected that the caverns we had been inspecting had been his ancient haunt in that old time that he roamed the earth--for upon the breast of each of these tall fossils was an inscription in the character heretofore noticed. One read, 'Captain Kidd the Pirate'; another, 'Queen Victoria'' another, 'Abe Lincoln'; another, 'George Washington,' etc. . . .

The specimen marked 'Captain Kidd' was examined in detail. . . . With great labor its loose skin was removed, whereupon it body was discovered to be of a polished white texture, thoroughly petrified. The straw it had eaten, so many ages gone by, was still in its body, undigested--and even in its legs.

Whether he's tackling a target as popular as Sherlock Holmes (in "A Double-Barreled Detective Story") or as obscure as a malfunctioning alarm system (in "The McWilliamses and the Burglar Alarm"), Twain is never anything but hilarious.

This Jim bore a charmed life--that must have been the way of it. Nothing could hurt him. He even gave the elephant in the menagerie a plug of tobacco, and the elephant didn't knock the top of his head off with his trunk. He browsed around the cupboard after essence of peppermint, and didn't make a mistake and drink aqua fortis. He stole his father's gun and went hunting on the Sabbath, and didn't shoot three or four of his fingers off. He struck his little sister on the temple with his fist when he was angry, and she didn't linger in pain through long summer days, and die with sweet words of forgiveness upon her lips that redoubled the anguish of his breaking heart. No; she got over it. He ran off and went to sea at last, and didn't come back and find himself sad and alone in the world, his loved ones sleeping in the quiet churchyard, and the vine-embowered home of his boyhood tumbled down and gone to decay. Ah, no; he came home as drunk as a piper, and got into the station-house the first thing.

Twain was devoted to his home and family. His wife Livy was a more important influence on his writing than any editor ever could have been. Out of respect for his wife's values, he went to church even though he thought it was silly. He even made a valiant effort throughout his life not to curse so much, but there lurked in him an intelligence that could never quite see the purpose of or the profit in making certain words tabboo simply because they're good at describing the things they're intended to describe. He found a way to be himself in a world that he never for one second pretended to understand. He not only made room for himself, but snookered the rest of humanity into paying him for pointing out their foibles and hypocrisies. He uses the same tactics in his novels and his stories, but his stories are better because he makes even fewer compromises with his readers in his short works.

And he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an ax one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest, wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the legislature. So you see, there never was a bad James in the Sunday-school books with such a streak of luck as this sinful Jim with the charmed life. [2]

This Epinion is part of the 2001 Father's Day Write-Off hosted by sumo_rhino. Contributing authors include: AdaDavis, AggieBrett, AngelaBar, Arazim, dougsanders, GinaHill, Howard_Creech, JAMES23, JediKermit, jkkelley,
JNGowan, kevlog, LDiablo, MadTheory, mike.holmes, mattjoe, Nathanael73, PSobel, scoobysnack00, Shalott, Sloucho, and sumo_rhino.

The write-off celebrates our dads. Participants have chosen topics for review that offer remembrance of their paternal relationships or bind them to their fathers in some way. For an uplifting experience, please visit the other contributions. A complete list of participants/reviews and links is available at our web page:

http://www.gpaulray.com/writeoff

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[1] Because I don't want to mislead readers, these three selections are essays, not short stories, and can be found in Mark Twain on the Damned Human Race rather than Twain's collected stories. In the interest of strict accuracy, allow me to point out that much of what Twain has to say about race (particularly in his "Concerning the Jews") would be considered racist today. The argument that Jews are smarter and better than the rest of us is precisely the kind of argument that has stirred up hatred in anti-semites throughout history. But historical context really does matter; at a time when the Dreyfus affair was polarizing people around the globe, a time when 'Jew-lover' was seen as a damning epithet by an alarmingly high number of people, it was profoundly meaningful for Twain to step forward and declare himself an admirer of Jews.

[2] I was inspired to alternate paragraphs from "The Story of the Bad Little Boy" with sections of my review by horswispr's excellent review of Twain's stories, which can be found here:
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-58C5-8D1B4D8-39415A54-prod6/tk_~CB008.1.1
Horswispr concludes by saying: "You could have read The Story of the Bad Little Boy (1865) in the time it took to read this review. Nowhere is Twain’s wit, humor, compassion, and hatred of hypocrisy more evident than in his short stories." If you want to read my review, then you can check out what I have to say between the sections of the story (all italicized). But I agree with horswispr 100% in that you'll be better off getting a taste of Twain's stories from one of Twain's stories than from anything that anyone has to say about them.

Recommended: Yes