BOOKS: Mark Twain's Book of Animals
From ANIMAL PEOPLE, March 2010: [print_link]
University of Calif. Press (2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94704), 2009. 325 pages, hardcover. $27.50.
“ANIMALS WERE INTEGRAL to Mark Twain’s work as a writer from the first story that earned him national renown to pieces he wrote during his final years that remained unpublished at his death,” notes Shelley Fisher Fishkin. “Twain is famous for having crafted amusing and mordant quips about animalsŠHe is less known for being the most prominent American of his day to throw his weight firmly behind the movement for animal welfare.”
Twain’s mother, Jane Clemens, was a cat feeder and rescuer, who deplored killing any animal and forbade keeping any animal caged. Twain’s daughters Suzy and Clara, became humane society volunteers; daughter Jean made her career in humane work. Twain himself, the middle generation, took frequent note of animals, deploring cruelty and neglect, years before the U.S. had any organized humane societies. Much as Charles Dickens saved the two-year-old Battersea Dogs & Cats Home with an 1862 essay entitled Two Dog Shows, Twain boosted the American SPCA in 1867, when it was barely one year old.
“One of the most praiseworthy institutions in New York,” Twain wrote, “and one which must plead eloquently for it when its wickedness shall call down the anger of the gods, is the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Its office is located on the corner of Twelfth Street and Broadway, and its affairs are conducted by humane men who take a genuine interest in their work.”
Unfortunately, Twain interupted this otherwise effective appeal, complete with address for sending contributions, by noting that the founders, led by Henry Bergh, “have worldly wealth enough to make it unnecessary for them to busy themselves about anything else.” The remainder of the essay was perhaps the earliest of many laudatory profiles of Bergh and his work to enforce the first New York state humane law.
Shelley Fisher Fishkin in Mark Twain’s Book of Animals collects Twain’s chief contributions to animal literature.
Twain’s first famous story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, has long been misused to rationalize the capture and abuse of frogs in jumping contests. Indeed, this was among the few Twain stories which at a careless glance does not appear to clearly damn cruelty. The “hero,” Jim Smiley, is a gambler who kept a fighting pit bull terrier, and “had rat-tarriers and chicken cocks, and tom cats, and all of them kind of things, till you couldn’t rest, and you couldn’t fetch nothing for him to bet on but he’d match you.”
A closer look reveals that Twain’s story, narrated by “good-natured, garrulous old Simon Wheeler,” is a damning expose of Leonidas W. Smiley, an alleged “young minister of the gospel,” who morphed into a mining camp rogue.
Much of Twain’s early satire was double-edged, but there is no mistaking his admiration of coyotes in “The Coyote, Allegory of Want.” A chapter of Roughing It, published in 1872, this essay incorporated every common slander of coyotes, and turned the slanders into virtues in the context of coyotes’ ecological roles and habitat. In conclusion, writing in the singular of all coyotes, “remembering his forlorn aspect and his hard fortune,” Twain “made shift to wish him the blessed novelty of a long day’s good luck and a limitless larder the morrow.”
The next prominent defenders of coyotes were Walt Disney, who produced his first of three films on behalf of coyotes in 1960, and Chuck Jones, the Warner Brothers animation director who first rehabilitated Bugs Bunny from inept and racist early versions by others, acknowledging inspiration from Twain, then in 1948 created Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. Jones in his autobiography Chuck Amuck acknowledged that encountering Roughing It at age seven had shaped his life–especially his portrayals of coyotes, which drew upon negative stereotypes to bring first laughter and then sympathy.
Lamentably, as Twain grew older and more popular, and perhaps more sensitive about being misunderstood, his satire became more pointed and often counterpointed by sentimentality that the younger Twain would have mercilessly burlesqued.
Twain cannot be faulted for having devoted the last several decades of his life to using his stature on behalf of good causes, especially opposition to racism, imperialism, and cruelty to animals. However, by the time Twain wrote a series of stories attacking sport hunting, bullfighting, and vivisection, he had degenerated as a fictionist into an author of melodramas. Essays were by far the strongest part of Twain’s later work, but because Twain hoped to reach a wide audience with his messages on behalf of animals, including children, he wrote on behalf of animals mainly in fictional form.
–Merritt Clifton
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Merritt Clifton is Editor in Chief of ANIMAL PEOPLE, the world’s largest independent publication on animal issues.
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