MARK TWAIN’S OTHER MASTERPIECE:
"JIM BAKER’S BLUE-JAY YARN"

Walter Blair

I. "At His Best and Brightest"

Grizzled Jim Baker, the lone dweller in a deserted California mining camp, begins a story about favorite woodland neighbors by summing up his scientific findings during seven years:

Bernard DeVoto thought "Jim Baker’s Blue-Jay Yarn," an interlude in A Tramp Abroad (1880), typified Mark Twain’s humor in part because of the way it combined fantasy and reality. Baker’s furred and feathered friends not only talk but achieve levels of diction, metaphors, and even grammar. But Baker, "a creation from the world of reality," DeVoto says, is born not of fantasy but of "the sharp perception of an individual." "Fantasy," he concludes, "is thus an instrument of realism and the humor of Mark Twain merges into the fiction that is his highest reach."²

Critics of several persuasions saw Baker’s yarn as what W. E. Henley called it in an early review of A Tramp Abroad, Twain "at his best and brightest, . . . delightful as mere reading [and] of a high degree of merit as literature."⁵ DeLancey Ferguson, for example, thought it stood out in a book which "contained phrases and passages that were Mark Twain at his best," and added, "were one asked to choose from all Mark Twain’s works the most perfect example of the genuine Western tall tale, patiently and skillfully built up . . . the choice would come down at last" to this story.⁴

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A case can be made for the claim that, just as Huckleberry Finn is the greatest of Twain’s longer comic works, "Blue-Jay Yarn" is the greatest of the shorter ones. Although it does not have the depth, the scope, or the variety of the novel, it is equally characteristic, and judged on its own terms it is in some ways superior: it has fewer flaws and greater unity. Besides, it is delightfully funny. So it is worth a close look.

The story’s background partly accounts for its pre-eminence and helps one define its genre. Story-telling sessions with some masters of the art in the winter of 1864–65 helped the humorist not only discover the substance of the yarn but rediscover the form that was appropriate for it. Later practice and analysis helped him give the written narrative qualities that—quite rightly—he prized. And literary traditions and models also in important ways contributed to its excellence.

II. Calaveras County Bonanza

During the years before he went West in 1861, Sam Clemens constantly heard stories told well. His mother, an "obscure little woman" with an "enchanted tongue," he called "the most eloquent person" he ever met. Ned, his father’s slave, told "The Golden Arm" story which Twain retold year after year to lecture audiences. On the Missouri farm where he spent boyhood summers, he enjoyed his uncle’s storytelling; at night in the Quarters he heard Uncle Dan’l "telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris was to ... charm the world with, by and by." (Dan’l effectively prepared childish listeners for jimdandy nightmares by unloosing a bloodcurdling ghost story just before he sent them to bed.) During Sam’s Wanderjahren, fellow jour printers and steamboatmen were memorable yarnspinners .⁵

He grew up when American humorists were trying to catch in print the substance and the manner of oral yarns. At his printer’s case in Hannibal and elsewhere he set up their writings; in his leisure hours he read them. At about the time he went West, however, new styles of writing became fashionable. Many comic journalists replaced rustic yarnspinning with word-play, topsy-turvy sentences, parodies and burlesques.⁶ Writing for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and for San Francisco newspapers, Twain ground out comedy of the sort currently popular.⁷ Throughout the rest of his life, he would often—too often—write Phunny Phellow humor of diction. But a visit to the California mining country reacquainted him with the stuff and the style of fireside storytelling that shaped many of his best writings.

Clemens, a twenty-nine-year-old San Francisco journalist, peeved officials by publishing feisty exposés. When he found it expedient to absent himself a while, Jim Gillis, pocket miner out in the area where

Baker lived, asked him to be a guest. Between 4 December 1964 and 25 February 1865 the budding author stayed with Gillis and his partner, Jim Stoker, in a Jackass Hill cabin or bunked in a nearby Angel’s Camp hotel.

The region once had swarmed with goldseekers, but the rich diggings had played out, and now only a few desultory pocket miners dotted fields, hills, and forests. Clemens did a little pocket mining without luck and was kept from doing more by a rainy season which—even for a state where what natives call Unusual Weather flushes houses down hills—was worse than usual. He, his hosts, and soggy neighbors huddled for hours around the cabin fireplace or the hotel bar-room stove. His notebook jottings gripe about endless deluges and the "beans and dishwater" monotonously served by the hotel’s French restaurateur. He complains that "4 kinds of soup which he furnishes to customers only on great occasions . . . are popularly known among the Boarders as Hellfire, General Debility, Insanity and Sudden Death." The booze must have been as corrosive: in a plaint that has the poignancy of a personal reminiscence, Clemens holds that a shot of the tavern’s straight whiskey "will throw a man a double somerset and limber him up like boiled macaroni before he can set his glass down."⁸

All the same, looking back, he would call this area a "serene and reposeful and dreamy and delicious sylvan paradise" where he had "a fascinating and delightful time." He fondly remembered dates with the Eves of this Eden, a miner’s pneumatic daughters whom he called "the Chapparal Quails."⁹ More important, every few years during more than four decades, he praised the purveyors of the chief entertainment aside from drinking, the mining camp yarn-spinners, analyzed their artistry, and at the top of his form imitated them and retold their stories.

There is support for the guess several scholars have made that the mining country visit, because of the impact of those storytelling orgies in Jim Gillis’s Jackass Hill cabin and the Angel’s Camp caravansary, brought a turning point in the author’s career. The very first sketch he published after he got back to San Francisco had as its best and chief ingredient a vernacular monologue by one of the Angel’s Camp crowd.¹⁰ One evening he told anecdotes to a group of fellow reporters so well that they lost all track of time. Within months he decided that he had a "call" to "drop all trifling . . . & strive for a fame" by cultivating his "talent for humorous writing."¹¹ Soon after this discovery of his vocation, he published one of the tales that he had heard "around the tavern stove"—"the germ," as he put it, "of my coming good fortune," a piece of writing that "became widely known in America, India, China, England—and the reputation it made for me . . . paid me thousands and thousands of dollars. . . ."¹² The story furnished the chief part of the title of Twain’s first book, and though

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he infrequently revised any piece once it had been printed, he carefully—and substantially—revised this one three times. Other retellings of California mining camp yarns came out in 1865, 1867, 1871, 1880, 1884, 1893, and 1907.13

The cream of what turned out to be a bumper crop was the "Blue-Jay Yarn" on eleven pages of A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880 when the author paused part way through the writing of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

The "lovable" personality and the skill of the original teller of this story in the Mother Lode country doubtless helped Twain see its merit. This was Jim Gillis, "gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly educated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled," but "a gallant creature" whose "style and bearing could make any costume regal . . . a man, and a whole man." "A much more remarkable person than his family and his intimates ever suspected," Jim in the humorist’s opinion was a genius—"a born humorist, and a very competent one" who "would have been a star performer if he had been discovered, and had been subjected to a few years training with a pen." Twain identified Jim, who he thought was the best raconteur in the diggings, as the originator of three of his mining camp tales, though one of them almost certainly was told by Jim’s partner. The writer’s notebook jottings, his characterizations of the tellers, and his vivid picturings in memoirs and in the stories themselves justify the other attributions.

When inspired, Jim stood with his back to the fire, unleashed his imagination, and spun yarns. Each was a gaudy lie created as he went along but soberly told as "history undefiled." Usually he made his "pard" Stoker the incongruous hero, and Stoker sat smoking, listening solemnly but amiably to his "monstrous fabrications." One of the stories that Twain retold celebrated Stoker’s prodigious cat, Tom Quartz, a beast that "had never existed," Twain said, "outside of Jim Gillis’s imagination." Another was "Jim Gillis’s yarn about the blue jays"—"a charming story, a delightful story, and full of happy fancies."¹⁴ When he theorized about oral story-telling and a writer’s adaptation of its ways, he found Jim Gillis a useful teacher.

III. A "High, Delicate Art" Adapted

Twain would call the oral story as Gillis told it "high and delicate art," and would find "no merit in ninety-nine out of a hundred [stories] except the merit put into them by the teller’s art."¹⁵

He deliberately tried to use that art in his books. But he repeatedly said that written art had to modify the ways of oral storytelling. If an author merely set down the golden words of a fine storyteller, a funny thing happened on the way to the printer: they turned to dross. Clemens

prohibited publication of an interview he gave because quoting talk in print is "an attempt to use a boat on land or a wagon on water."¹⁶

He decided that careful artistry alone could give printed words the sound of free-and-easy speech. "I amend dialect stuff by talking and talking and talking it till it sounds right."¹⁷ Measures like those he took to give painstakingly memorized platform monologues the qualities of off-the-cuff utterances helped him write colloquial passages—"a touch of indifferent grammar flung in here and there, apparently at random" but in fact shrewdly deployed; "heaving in . . . a wise tautology"; "sprinkl[ing] in one of those happy turns on something that has previously been said."¹⁸ The chief incongruity in the two hundred word opening paragraph of Baker’s story—between fulsome praise of book-talk and grammar and abysmal ignorance about both—is made apparent by only four assorted—and strategically placed—grammatical mishaps. And the paragraph illustrates "wise tautology" by reiterating half a dozen times the belief that a jay can express whatever it feels.

Twain lauded Gillis for "build[ing] a story as it goes along, careless of whither it is proceeding, enjoying each fresh fancy as it flashes from the brain." In "How to Tell a Story," he held that the very basis of the American art was "to string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and purposeless way."’⁹ He downgraded jokes with payoff lines, praised stories with "pervasive" humor which, like that of William Dean Howells, "flows softly all around about and over."²⁰ So his aim was to ape in print the leisurely imagining and inundating humor of Gulls and other experts.

Twain makes "The Blue-Jay Yarn" seem to meander, for one thing, by prefacing it with an apparent unhurried digression of his own, then by having Baker sidle into his monologue at his leisure. The humorist, a continent and an ocean away from the Mother Lode country, strolls into the woods above the Neckar. Soon, remembering German legends that he has been reading about the area, he falls "into a train of dreamy thought about animals which talk, and kobolds, and enchanted folk." Later, lost and alone in the dense silent woods, he fancies that he glimpses some of these creatures in the shadows under the trees.

Suddenly the quiet is shattered by the croak of a raven staring down from a branch at the intruder. A second bird comes along:

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The confrontation leads Twain to recall the man who could understand birds and animals—Jim Baker. Baker’s background and some of his opinions are detailed. Only after this preamble—one that at first glance appears to be very loosely related—does Baker’s monologue start with the remarks about the great skill with which jays communicate. In a passage a bit longer than the first, and therefore an apparent over-elaboration, Jim next argues that "a jay is just as much a human as you be" by mentioning sundry human traits and ("wisely tautological") repeating the claim several times:

The impression that Baker is loquacious is heightened by the introduction here of a different type of comedy. These remarks, proving as they do that his birds are human chiefly by arguing that they are depraved in as many ways as human beings are, have the bite of satire. Twain would have said that Jim’s equating of humanity with total depravity, in addition to "wandering in an apparently purposeless way," introduces an important component. "It takes a heap of sense to write good nonsense," he told himself in a note shortly before he wrote the blue-jay yarn.²² As an oldster, he would marvel at the way his humor outlasted that of more than eighty popular contemporaneous humorists, thus living "forever." ("By forever," he explained, "I mean thirty years.") His explanation: "I have always preached."²³ The humorist was repeating a judgment of his best

friend, Howells, who said that "what finally appeals to you in Mark Twain . . . is his common sense."²⁴

The way the tale that follows is unfolded reinforces the impression that it wanders since—simple though it is—it (in Twain’s phrase) seemingly "fools along and enjoys elaboration" for almost thirteen hundred words. It does not, in fact, detour: each of two parts illustrates a claim Baker makes as he starts his monologue.

Part one: Baker describes the comic doings of some jays around a deserted log house near his cabin. One finds a knot-hole in the roof and decides to fill it with acorns. Though he dumps in huge numbers, since the house is "just one big room," he fails. The bird becomes increasingly frantic, frustrated, outraged; and his more and more eloquent orations prove that "whatever a blue-jay feels, he can put into language."

Part two: Attracted by his commentaries, first one, then more jays gather and discuss the phenomenon. Finally one learns what the trouble is and announces his discovery. Thereupon greater and greater numbers of birds fly in, study the scene, and jeer about the frustrated jay’s mistake. The reactions prove that jays are "just as human as you be." When he makes this uncomplicated fable laughable, Twain proves that the effect of a humorous story depends less upon matter than on manner, in a printed story as well as an oral one, if the author of the printed version adapts oral procedures.

IV. Literary Influences

Writings as well as oral storytellers of course shaped the blue-jay yarn. A beast fable, this narrative is in a genre that had amused audiences, literally, for ages. Even before Aesop, its beginnings, like Aesop himself, are hidden in the mists of antiquity, and from those beginnings to the present, the form has flourished. A few outstanding practitioners were Hesiod, Aristophanes, and Socrates in the ancient world; Chaucer and myriads of anonymous celebrators of Reynard the Fox in the Middle Ages; Robert Henryson and William Caxton in the fifteenth century; François Rabelais in the sixteenth; Jean de la Fontaine (twelve books; "I use Animals to teach Mankind") and Sir Roger L’Estrange in the sevententh; Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Gotthold Ephriam Lessing, Bernard Mandeville, Matthew Prior, William Cowper, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and Benjamin Franklin in the eighteenth; Leo Tolstoi, Ivan Krylov, Rudyard Kipling, Trilussa (C. A. Salustra), Guy Wetmore Carryl, and others in the nineteenth.

Since (as scholars have proved) Clemens read widely, he knew several of his remote predecessors in the anthropomorphic field. About the time he wrote Baker’s yarn, his reading had helped him remember or discover three

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Americans working in the genre in the 1880s. As co-editor of a forthcoming anthology—Mark Twain’s Library of Humor (1888) he was jotting down in Notebooks 15 and 16 lists of possible inclusions. Four times he mentioned George T. Lanigan (1846-1886) or his World’s Fables, and the anthology would include seven of Lanigan’s pieces. Twice he named Ambrose Bierce; one entry recalled fables published in a newspaper as many as thirteen years earlier; and the anthology had seven of Bierce’s fables, at the time still uncollected. In Bierce’s "The Robin and the Woodpecker," the latter bird admits that he does not know why he pecks holes in a dead tree: "Some naturalists affirm that I hide acorns in these pits; others maintain that I get worms out of them." Alert source-hunters will notice the bird’s theoretical kinship with Baker’s blue-jay, which dumped acorns into his knot-hole for reasons that never were clarified. They also may be interested in the fact that at one time when he talked about his story long after he wrote it, Twain called it "a tale of how the poor and innocent woodpeckers tried to fill up a house with acorns."²⁵

"Uncle Remus (?) writer of colored yarns," another notebook entry, Clemens made before the yarns had appeared between hardcovers and, evidently, before he had learned that the creator’s name was Joel Chandler Harris. Clemens and his co-editors included two of Harris’s narratives in their anthology; he read Harris’s tales to audiences, corresponded with him, swapped stories, arranged meetings, called him "a fine genius," and even tried to get the shy little man to share lecture platforms. It seems possible that partly because he so admired Harris and, like him, as a boy had heard Black storytellers tell animal legends, he did well when he exploited what Harris called "that incongruity of animal expression that is just human enough to be humorous" in the "Blue-Jay Yarn."²⁶

Several passages in Jim Baker’s story are enriched by comic linkings between bird and animal—for instance the jay’s discovery of the hole: "He cocked his head to one side, shut one eye and put the other one to the hole, like a possum looking down a jug"; or the dog-like gesture showing the jay’s puzzlement: "he took a thinking attitude . . . and scratched the back of his head with his right foot." (A kinship—perhaps something more—is indicated when one compares a passage in "Uncle Remus Initiates the Little Boy," the first Uncle Remus story and one included in Twain’s anthology: "Den Brer Rabbit scratch on one year wid his off hine-foot sorter jub’usly. . . .") More incongruities are of the sort Harris mentioned—between bird and humans. After he drops the first acorn into the hole, the jay

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His puzzlement grows; so does his anger:

Now he decides that he’ll be damned if he doesn’t fill that hole if it takes a hundred years, and for two hours and a half, he heaves in acorns without stopping:

The culmination of his frantic efforts and of his frustration is accompanied by his greatest flight of eloquence:

In addition to the animalization or the humanization of birds, the story as Baker tells it amuses because of its comic picturings. Incongruities, as Max Eastman has noticed,²⁸ are stressed when they are made highly concrete. Twain creates pictures because, as Howells says, "he is the impassioned lover, the helpless slave of the concrete:"²⁹ the jay peering into the knot-hole, shaking his head, cussing himself black in the face, turning pale with rage, taking a thinking attitude, and leaning his back agin the chimbly attest to this slavery.

There are more humanizations and bodyings forth in the second movement of the story. A jay passing by hears the baffled bird "doing his devotions," stops, learns the reason, and calls in other jays:

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