"The Story of the Old Ram" and the Tenderfoot Writer

"THE STORY OF THE OLD RAM" AND THE TENDERFOOT WRITER James L. Busskohl Eastern Washington University In the "Prefatory" to Roughing It, Mark Twain disarmingly reveals , as one of the most important themes of the book, a problem of composition or creativity. He announces that "this book is merely a personal narrative, and not a pretentious history or a philosophical dissertation"; he will not "afflict [the reader] with metaphysics or goad him with science." Yet he admits that the book does contain information and complains: "Sometimes it has seemed to me that I would give worlds if I could retain my facts, but it cannot be. The more I caulk up the sources, and the tighter I get, the more I leak wisdom."1 The creative problem here circumscribed is both of control (leaks) and direction (whether the book is to be entertainment or edification, a work of history or imagination). Of course, this rhetoric satisfies and disarms Twain's subscription book readers by promising entertainment justified by edification and edification sweetened by entertainment. Despite its playfulness, however, the "Prefatory" reveals an important concern both of the book and of "The Story of the Old Ram" in particular. One of the most complex uses Twain made of the frame technique of Old Southwestern humor, "The Story of the Old Ram" is the locus of a beginning writer's struggles with the difficulties of his craft: intractable materials, anarchic and unpredictable public taste, and inappropriate received forms. These problems are partially solved by combining a satire on the notion of special providence with a criticism of over-plotted fiction, a strategy that amounts to an iconoclastic aesthetic of realism. The frame technique achieves its main effects through contrasts between the frame and enclosed story and between the narrator and storyteller.2 In "The Story of the Old Ram" Twain employs this technique to dramatize a writer's struggles with his craft by means of a burlesque of romantic storytelling. The narrator, a neophyte writer who expects to hear a performance by a master storyteller, Jim Blaine, encounters an audience of "the boys," who are a kind of initiating community. Of course, Jim is not an inspired teacher but only a drunken miner. His story contrasts sharply with the narrator's expectations : it is not a stirring well-formed romance but an incoherent series of grotesqueries. The narrator's initiation is disillusioning, but he learns the valuable lesson that the factual materials of the shaping 184James L. Busskohl imagination are grotesque and virtually intractable and that the taste of his audience is a powerful solvent of literary pretentions. In "The Story of the Old Ram" the conventional contrast in Old Southwestern humor between the gentleman narrator and the clownish storyteller is ironically transformed into the relationship between neophyte writer and supposed master storyteller. Peculiarly, at this point in Roughing It, the narrator is more like the typical gentleman narrator than he was earlier in the book. He had already been initiated into the western mining community and is no longer a tenderfoot in that sense, but he has only recently become a writer (reporter for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise and a potential contributor to the literary paper, the Weekly Occidental), and it is for this naive and eager writer that the boys of the camp stage their hoax and initiation. The bait they use is specifically literary: "Every now and then, in these days," the chapter begins, "the boys used to tell me I ought to get one Jim Blaine to tell me the story of his grandfather 's old ram." The boys flatter the narrator in his new role, pretending to put him onto something in his line. He takes the bait, eager to hear this great storyteller: "My curiosity was on the rack to hear the story. I got to haunting Blaine."3 The narrator's romantic expectations of a great storyteller seem at first to be fulfilled. Jim is in the necessary inspired state, "not a cloud upon his brain thick enough to obscure his memory." He has a charismatic hold on his audience: "He was sitting upon an empty powder-keg, with clay pipe in one hand...