Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

by William Kennedy

  KENNEDY: What work are you referring to?

  WARREN: Capote, say. In Cold Blood. Touting this as new. It’s an extremely effective book but there’s no novelty to it. It’s what Fuller was pulling for and others have practiced for a long, long time.… People read for a number of reasons. They want to find out how beet sugar is made or how to give a dinner party, or what’s the best practice in bed. These are all marvelous know-how books, and they also tell about people, gossip books. But the immediate appeal is the newsworthy element. Fitzgerald’s fame was based on his bringing news from the underworld of youth. That’s big, and why shouldn’t it be? … But one thing the fact novel or journalistic essay cannot do is give the inside, because only the imagination can do that. You believe the inside of Hamlet, or Marcel in Proust, or Ishmael more than you believe the inside of Henry Adams in the autobiography, or the inside of the Cold Blood killers. The killers you know a lot about, but you don’t know them. You know Clyde Griffiths, though. You know him only because he’s not factual, only because the fact of creation has made him credible. This is not saying better or worse, it’s saying different. The fact novel is fine for decor, the milieu. When the real crisis comes it’s always the thing seen from the inside that sticks.

  KENNEDY: But people don’t seem to value that truth these days. Talk to publishers and they say, “What are you going to do about fiction, it doesn’t sell.”

  WARREN: One reason we can say is that there are not enough good novels.

  KENNEDY: But why is that?

  WARREN: I’m just making a guess, and I don’t mean well-crafted novels but ones that take bold risks of imagination. Maybe too much depends on documentation. The novel approaches too close to journalism and forfeits its powers of imaginative creation to be more convincing at the level of reportage. And you can’t compete with reporting.

  KENNEDY: You wouldn’t think it was because of the absence of interest in the interior of the human being?

  WARREN: It may very well be that. At the same time the notion of the interior is news too. But [you find] people interested in inner life as treated by generalizations, by experts, by Kinsey researchers, by God-knows-who dealing with inner life. But they’re not talking about individuals. They’re talking about patterns. And it may be that the notion of individualism is in decay, that your mass culture isn’t interested in individuals at all.

  KENNEDY: What does this mean for fiction?

  WARREN: I don’t know, but you find people as far back as Valéry saying that journalism and movies give you immediacy of fact and impact you don’t get in a novel, and so literature can only become more abstract, move toward the patterns more or less like abstract painting. So you get the pattern in the art itself rather than art as related to life. And this is a very elite, very difficult kind of art which is not related to the meat and potatoes of living. Now this [move to abstract literature] is hailed today by some as new, but it’s not new at all, it’s an echo of Valery. It’s important to remember there’s a history to these things. It gives a different feeling about the future of the novel. Maybe a more pessimistic one, or optimistic, I’m not saying which it’ll be. We’re in a process that’s been going on a long time, and to gamble it has to be a long-range gamble. Meanwhile, I’m writing another novel, and I have to try to individualize it.

  1973

  Damon Runyon:

  Six-to-Five: A Nice Price

  There’s really only one question to ask about Damon Runyon: is he, or isn’t he, back in town? We all know he’s back on Broadway, ever since the spring of 1992, when the remarkable revival of Guys and Dolls opened. But there is also something else going on. I have been approached twice in the past month about writing a movie about his private life, something in which I have a minus-twenty-seven-percent interest; and now here comes Al Silverman (Viking out of Penguin) saying he has snatched up the rights of 125 of Runyon’s short stories that have been lying doggo for a number of years and is looking for somebody to handicap two and a half dozen of them and see if there is enough left in the old guy to justify a wager that he can still wow them not only on Broadway but also in Albany.

  When I was eleven years old I thought Runyon was the funniest man alive. He was a great newspaperman, which is how I first came to know his name; and then I discovered his short stories and found he could make me laugh three times in one sentence. That was maybe 1939. Now it is 1992 and I laugh four, maybe five times in a paragraph, like this one about a character named Feet Samuels:

  “He is a big heavy guy with several chins and very funny feet, which is why he is called Feet. These feet are extra large feet, even for a big guy, and Dave the Dude says Feet wears violin cases for shoes. Of course this is not true, because Feet cannot get either of his feet in a violin case, unless it is a case for a very large violin, such as a cello.”

  Feet Samuels is a relatively peaceful citizen, but Big Jule (usually pronounced Julie), who made a comeback by being the crapshooting villain of Guys and Dolls, is something else. He came on the scene long ago in the Runyon story “The Hottest Guy in the World.” Big Jule is considered hot because he is wanted for robbery or safecracking in such locations as Pittsburgh, Minneapolis, Kansas City, Toledo, Spokane, San Francisco, and Canton, Ohio, and there is, as Runyon puts it, “also something about a shooting match in Chicago, but of course this does not count so much as only one party is fatally injured.”

  But the tally makes Big Jule very hot indeed, about as hot as John Gotti, the Mafia chieftain who in early April of ’92 was convicted in Brooklyn of racketeering, which included five murders, a murder conspiracy, extortion, and such things.

  Mr. Gotti, visited in the courtroom by movie stars, his wardrobe written about as a fashion trend, was, at the moment of trial, a celebrity of serious note, although having been sentenced after trial to life in prison, the note stands some chance of being muffled. But there are always appeals to higher courts, and John Gotti may make a comeback like Big Jule. What is certain is that if Damon Runyon had been alive in ’92 he would have covered the Gotti trial and probably would have been a sometime dinner companion of Mr. Gotti also, as he was with Al Capone before Mr. Capone’s trial for tax evasion; such was Runyon’s fascination with gangsters and his need to know what made them what they were.

  In his younger years Mr. Gotti served prison terms for attempted burglary and attempted manslaughter. But thereafter he avoided conviction on assault and racketeering charges in widely publicized trials. Incriminating tape recordings were used in his 1992 trial, but Mr. Gotti’s lawyers argued that these were not evidence of criminality, much as Big Jule says of himself in Guys and Dolls: “I used to be bad when I was a kid but ever since then I have gone straight as I can prove by my record—33 arrests and no convictions.”

  Many of Runyon’s characters are viewed at times as romanticized gangsters, defanged and cuddly, when they are really deadly citizens; and this sugarcoating of evil is said to be responsible for the popularity of his tales.

  Some consider this to be a knock on Runyon, but such a knock isn’t worth anybody’s time. Crime and criminals in any form are a given in literature, movies, and theater, and this fact antedates Runyon by centuries: in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera of 1728, for instance, from which the Brecht-Weill Threepenny Opera of 1928 derives, and where that engaging scoundrel Macheath, or Mack the Knife, was born. It was Jonathan Swift who suggested that a Newgate prison pastoral “might make an odd pretty sort of thing,” which it did in Mr. Gay’s hands, and it has continued to do so on Broadway and also in Hollywood, where sixteen (at least) of Runyon’s short stories have been turned into movies, some terrific, some dreadful. God must have loved gangster movies, he made so many of them.

  Criticism of Runyon that is more to the point of argument here was reported in a biography, A Gentleman of Broadway, by Edwin P. Hoyt, published in 1964. Mr. Hoyt wrote that in the early 1960s, 150 academics, mostly literature teachers, decided that Damon Runyon, in the biographer’s dismiss
ive synthesis, “stood and stands nowhere.”

  This was the man, two of whose short-story collections in the late 1920s and early 1930s had sold more than a million copies each in paperback; who was translated into French, Dutch, Italian, Indonesian, and British. Lord Beaverbrook published him at length in the London Evening Standard, and the Standard’s literary critic called Runyon (according to Clark Kinnaird’s preface in the Modern Library treasury) a genius as authentic as Laurence Sterne or James M. Barrie, saying Runyon had “invented a humanity as new and startling as Lewis Carroll did.”

  (In his story “The Lily of St. Pierre,” Runyon makes balanced mention of a Lewis Carroll work: “Lily talks English very good,” says the speaker, Jack O’Hearts, while he is recuperating from pneumonia in Lily’s house, “and she is always bringing me things … and sometimes she reads to me out of a book which is called Alice in Wonderland, and which is nothing but a pack of lies, but very interesting in spots.”)

  Runyon being embraced by the British prompted John Lardner to conclude that “very plainly … after a long, slow pull, by way of Poe, Whitman, James, Twain, Cather and Hemingway, our culture finally hit the jackpot with Runyon.”

  But Runyon died in 1946, his reputation faded, and at the time when he was standing “nowhere,” only two of his books and the Modern Library treasury were in print (the treasury is now out of print), and the man did seem to be going the way of yesterday’s newspaper.

  Today eleven, perhaps twelve of his collections of stories and journalism are in print, which is pleasant news for Runyon fanatics, of which there are several. Also, three more biographies have appeared: The World of Damon Runyon, by Tom Clark (1978); The Men Who Invented Broadway: Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell and Their World (1981), by John Mosedale; and Damon Runyon (1991), by Jimmy Breslin. These and the Hoyt book complement each other, filling in gaps in the life and the work and the age, and so we have a detailed overview of the maestro in his own time.

  Jimmy Breslin, whom some regard as the Runyon of his own era (but far more politically sophisticated), is the revisionist, bringing us into the Runyon private life, and finding the famous writer much more wanting as a human being than we previously thought. Mr. Breslin also offers this evaluation of the man’s achievement as a writer:

  “Damon Runyon,” he writes, “invented the Broadway of Guys and Dolls and the Roaring Twenties, neither of which existed, but whose names and phrases became part of theater history and the American language.… He made gangsters so enjoyable that they could walk off a page and across a movie screen.… He stressed fine, upstanding, dishonest people who fell in love, often to the sound of gunfire that sounded harmless.… Many of his people and their actions in real life were frightening to temporal authorities, but what does this have to do with the most important work on earth, placing merriment into the hearts of people?”

  This Runyon merriment was, and is, chiefly an achievement of language—the language of gamblers, hoodlums, chorus girls, and cops, that he acquired by listening, then used in his stories, and is therefore credited with inventing. It is a nonesuch argot, and he uses it like no other writer who came before or after him. In the best of his short stories there is a comic fluency in this invented tongue, an originality of syntax, a fluidity of word and event that is a relentless delight.

  In a story called “Broadway Incident” he tells of the suffering love of Ambrose Hammer, a Broadway drama critic, for a beautiful doll named Hilda Hiffenbrower, whose husband, Herbert, will not give her a divorce. Runyon writes:

  “Well I happen to know Hilda better than Ambrose does. To tell the truth I know her when her name is Mame something and she is dealing them off her arm in a little eating gaff on Seventh Avenue, which is before she goes in show business and changes her name to Hilda, and I also know that the real reason Herbert will not give her this divorce is because she wants eight gallons of his heart’s blood and both legs in the divorce settlement, but as Herbert has a good business head he is by no means agreeable to these terms, though I hear he is willing to compromise on one leg to get rid of Hilda.”

  This is a bit of serious character building through language; but Runyon’s asides are often what ring the gong, for instance in that St. Pierre story again: “The first time I see St. Pierre I will not give you eight cents for the whole layout, although of course it is very useful to parties in our line of business [smuggling whiskey]. It does not look like much, and it belongs to France, and nearly all the citizens speak French, because most of them are French, and it seems it is the custom of the French people to speak French no matter where they are, even away off up yonder among the fish.”

  Far more serious writers than Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of his language, a playful use of its idiosyncrasies. His plots, on the other hand, were usually convoluted exercises in simple irony—O. Henry reversals, frequently predictable, sometimes zany, with resolutions often sticky with treacle—and will not stand up in court.

  And yet he salvaged these stories, more often than not, with his rhythmic street idioms, his indefatigable wit, and his peculiar acceptance of the paralegal rules of this world that he chronicled. If he’d been a moralist among the grifters, goons, and golddiggers, he’d have remained an outsider, without the privileged insights that have made his work so singular.

  The Runyon method was to be the nameless narrator, the detached observer, the reticent sponge, taking it all in, but not even asking questions; for, as he pointed out, when you start asking questions; people are liable to think that you are perhaps looking for answers. He knows everybody and has formed cogent opinions on them all. As to Judge Goldfobber in the story “Breach of Promise,” the narrator points out that he is only a lawyer, not a judge, “and he is 100 to 1 in my line against ever being a judge, but he is called Judge because it pleases him, and everybody always wishes to please [him because he] is a wonderful hand for keeping citizens from getting into the sneezer, and better than Houdini when it comes to getting them out of the sneezer after they are in.”

  The chance of any writer’s work surviving his own death for very long is always a longshot. I used to quote Runyon as saying “All life is nine-to-five against.” But Peter Maas, the writer, countered my numbers and said that the true quote was as follows: “All life is six-to-five against, just enough to keep you interested.” It turns out that Peter is somewhat correct. The quote comes out of the story “A Nice Price,” in which Sam the Gonoph hears that the odds on a boat race between Harvard and Yale are one-to-three, Yale, and Sam the Gonoph, who is handy at making odds, says, “Nothing between human beings is one-to-three. In fact I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six-to-five against.”

  And so, confronting the question of whether Damon Runyon is back in town, we must consider the catalytic effect of the Guys and Dolls revival, and then all these old Runyon films turning up regularly on cable TV—like Lady for a Day and its remake, Pocketful of Miracles, both of which I always watch all over again. And I think of how I was convulsed many years ago by the movie made from the Runyon—Howard Lindsay play, A Slight Case of Murder; and I think of the vibrant journalism Runyon wrote—Trials and Other Tribulations, for instance, which was the book he was preparing for publication when he died.

  And I think, most of all, of the short stories in this book, which I have just been rereading for the past week as a way of challenging my most significant values, such as, can I still read these things? And half a century after I discovered them I am delighted to report that I find myself tickled silly by them still, all of them, and want to pass them on to my grandchildren. I already passed them on to my children.

  Like a second-story man who can’t stand heights, I don’t want to get too lofty about all this; and, what is more, I have predicted comebacks in the past for John O’Hara and William Saroyan and I am still waiting for their trains; and I know the thinning ranks of modern readers will be put off by Runyon’s
antique argot, and by the prehistoric hipness (hepness in those days) of his world; and yet I am willing to take a little of that six-to-five that Damon Runyon is back, not quite settled in yet, a little unsteady on his pins after the journey, but definitely here: our literary equivalent of his contemporaries, the Marx Brothers (does anybody ever knock them because of their plots?), which is to say that his work has not turned into dusty dingbats but has proven to be enduringly comic, thoroughly original, and that he ranks as one of the funniest dead men ever to use the English language. Six-to-five, a nice price. Bet me.

  1992

  PART THREE

  Thirteen Reviews, One Review Rebutted

  Samuel Beckett:

  The Artful Dodger Revealed

  We thought we knew how it is with Samuel Beckett—maestro of the reclusive act, translator of spiritual angst into the mysterious, convoluted novels and plays that have made him the most written-about writer of the century. But we didn’t know. Now we know, from Deirdre Bair’s new biography. It is difficult to imagine a more revealing work of literary scholarship being published in this age than this stunning tale of the horrendous and admirable life of one of the world’s most important writers.