THERE ARE CERTAIN humorists who become cult figures. Their admirers regard them as geniuses. Others are not so sure. There is no arguing the point. In Britain this position was occupied in the twentieth century by Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (1881–1975), whom many, led by Evelyn Waugh, proclaimed “the greatest writer of English of the day.” In America it was held by (Alfred) Damon Runyon (1880–1946), hailed by Ernest Hemingway as “the master of us all.” Both were accomplished stylists, writing in a hieratic they invented, which was peculiar to themselves and inimitable. Both Waugh and Hemingway changed the way people wrote English in fiction, and influenced so many authors as to change the language. Wodehouse and Runyon did not do that: they were eccentric and egregious, creating their own idioms, peculiar grammar, syntax, and punctuation, and making their mannerist prose inseparable from their subject matter. Each created a milieu which never did or could exist, but has a powerful reality of its own, like a fairy tale. The reader-addict can get lost in it, and emerge, blinking, into the light of common day.
Damon Runyon was one year Wodehouse’s senior and both lived in the New York area for many years, and their paths crossed, for Wodehouse was involved in Broadway musicals at a time when Runyon covered show business there. Indeed in 1935 Runyon wrote (with Howard Lindsay) a farce, A Slight Case of Murder, though it was not until four years after his death that his stories were turned into a hit musical, Guys and Dolls (1950). Runyon was a newspaper man all his life, and produced his material first in column form, until its success in book form, beginning with Guys and Dolls in 1931, allowed him to retire from regular hackwork. His compilation of tales—From First to Last, On Broadway, Take it Easy, In Our Town, and others—constitute a large and homogenous whole, all written in the same manner, about the same people, in the same area, and with the same outlook.
As a form of mannerist writing they are in the highest class, taking rank with Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills, or Somerville and Ross’s Experiences of an Irish RM, or Jack London’s outback stories, or Somerset Maugham’s Far East tales, or the Hollywood of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. Runyon, unlike Wodehouse, but like Kipling, was essentially a writer of short stories, which could not be fleshed out into novels. But many characters occur repeatedly, and the oeuvre as a whole has a unity.
Runyon is a quintessentially American comic writer. A central theme in this comedy springs from history: the creation of order out of chaos, which was the story of the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and well into the twentieth. In the course of the order-creation, the original chaos is necessary—i.e., in the Mississippi River valley, in the Great Plains and Rockies, and the conquest of the West. Cowboys and Indians, gunslingers and outlaws, hustlers and rustlers, sheriffs and marshals, saloon-bar proprietors and Diamond Lils, all are part of the primeval chaos, until American order emerges, and the tales cease. Runyon’s Broadway and Manhattan, with excursions to take in Brooklyn and Queens, St. Louis and Atlantic City, even Chicago and LA (though these are Foreign Parts), are made to seem chaotic. They are composed of gangsters and gamblers, speakeasies, nightclubs, and “joints,” and life is punctuated by regular lawbreaking and occasional murders and kidnappings. But these are fairy tales, not reality, so Runyon’s Manhattan is essentially an orderly/disorderly place, conforming to rules and limitations, in which an apparent anarchy is actually restrained by large numbers of things which are not done. It is even religious up to a point, with “Father Leonard” and “the Pastor” available to perform marriages and baptisms. Guys have dolls, but people get married rather than live in sin. Babies are sacrosanct, as is shown by the tale “Butch Minds the Baby,” Big Butch being a sort of retired safebreaker. The police, with names like Cassidy and Callahan, are both corrupt and honest, ruthless and tenderhearted and sentimental. No one swears, or if they do it is offstage and the words are not reproduced. This is a pre-four-letter-word culture in every respect. There is no explicit and very little implicit sex, and no dirty jokes. Runyon ran his own Hays Office, which is unobtrusive but absolute. Women usually emerge on top, which is necessary to preserve morality. The universe of Runyon’s Manhattan has its own Ten Commandments springing from a Judeo-Christian background.
Yet the fairy-tale world has a carapace of realism, often disguised as brutality. Runyon essentially covers the era of Melting Pot America, between the end of the Civil War and the Wall Street crash. Manhattan was its popular apotheosis, absorbing millions of immigrants from all over Europe, as well as an underclass of Southern Negroes and Asians. Runyon speaks to them, about them, and, in a sense, for them. That is the essence of his style. He always writes in the present, for that was the only tense the immigrants could master, to begin with. This has the marvelous double effect of giving his tales melting-pot authenticity and immediacy. There is no past and no future. All has happened, is happening, and will happen now, and in the next few minutes. It is a stroke of pure genius, on Runyon’s part, to hit on this dodge, stick to it mercilessly, and follow its logic with ingenuity.
Runyon enhances his presentist style by judicious punctuation, the use of “furthermore” instead of a period, a clever use of commas amounting to genius at times, and a sentence beginning, “I wish to say,” for emphasis. He often ends a sentence with a comma, followed by “indeed” or “at that.” These tricks are judiciously spaced out, so they do not annoy. Runyon has a mannerist vocabulary assembled with cunning, part composed of underworld argot, often genuine, part invented. A pele-box is a safe. A stuss-house is a late-night club. Scratch is cash. So is “the old do-re-mi.” A deuce is $2. A finnif is $5, also known as “a pound note.” A snatch is a kidnap, and to finger is to denote the object of a snatch (or give it away). Girls are dolls, broads, pancakes, cookies, and tomatoes (the last “very vulgar”). To “give everybody a square rattle” is to be fair. To “pig’s it” is to renege. Gondola is a foot. Java is coffee. Kisser is face. Smuch is mouth, as in “He kissed her ker-plump right on the smuch.” “Shylocks” will lend you money (at high rates) right at the gambling table. A warm squattivoo is the electric chair, usually in Sing Sing. “Corned” is liquored up, and there are many words for alcohol and its consequences, to rival the list of 340 expressions for intoxication compiled by Edmund Wilson in Prohibition America. Thus “this guy gets himself pretty well organized” by “belting the old grape” and so “feeling very brisk.”
Among expressions I have noted as choice Runyon are as follows. “Now this is strictly the old ackamarack as the Lemon Drop Kid cannot even spell arthritis, let alone have it.” “I have long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six-to-four against” (Sam the Gonoph). “A smart old broad. A pity she is so nefarious.” Angie the Ox is “an Importer, including artichokes and extorsion.” Nicely-Nicely “dearly loves to commit eating.” (When thin, he is Edmund Jones.) He is also known as a “Hooray Henry,” a term invented by Runyon (see the story “Lonely Heart”). Scoodles Shea is “a big red-headed muzzler with a lot of freckles and a wide grin all over his kisser.” Black Mike is “a guinea.” Joe Goss, who runs a nightclub in Atlantic City “just off the Broadwalk,” is “a lily for looks.”
This brings us to the list of characters, who constitute the particular strength of Runyon as a top mannerist writer. He himself, or his narrator, is never exactly described. But he is characterized: “I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around.” He is occasionally pounced on by hoodlums who want his company, for reasons they do not give. At such times, in addition to being cowardly he is frightened that the hoodlum will commit some wrongdoing in which, being in his company, the narrator will be implicated. So: “I am trying to think up some place to go where people will see me, and remember afterwards that I am there, in case it is necessary for them to remember.” At other times, a hoodlum spots him in a restaurant, such as Bobby’s Chophouse on Broadway, eating Bobby’s famous beef stew, and without asking, eats off his plate. The narrator puts up with this, as he puts up with being hoicked off. But as a rule he is a mere observer and recorder, whose ambition is simply to keep out of trouble, while retaining a ringside seat at its enactment.
Of the characters, there are three main types: guys who are gangsters or gamblers, and dolls who cover a variety of activities and nonactivity. It is sometimes difficult to distinguish between gangsters and gamblers. Indeed many hoodlums also gamble. The gangsters include three “notorious hoodlums from Brooklyn,” Harry the Horse, Little Isadore, and Spanish John. There is Rusty Charlie, a redhead, who also has a red-haired wife. Milk Ear Willie and Hymie Banjo Eyes speak for themselves. Horse Thief is also known as Horsey. Gloomy Gus Smallwood also speaks for himself, but is “written out of the script” or, as Runyon puts it, “guzzled in Philly” (murdered in Philadelphia). Jew Louie is not exactly a gangster, being a “Shylock,” but requires protection and strong-armers to ensure his victims pay the high interest they owe. Then there are hoodlums described as “seen at Detroit’s.” Detroit holds high-stakes craps games, illegally of course, and among those “seen at” his place are Sleepout Sam Levinsky, Lone Louie (from Harlem), and three men described as “high shot gangsters,” Nick the Greek, Grey John, and Okay Okun. There is a category of gangsters who are exceptionally strong and tough, known as a gorill. Rusty Charlie is one, Earthquake another. Knife O’Halloran speaks for himself. So does the Seldom Seen Kid. Red Henry, “who does not take a bath since he is out of Dannemora” (a Federal penitentiary), but who is nevertheless known to dance with the rich Harriet MacKyle, is another gorill. Other gangsters include three noted as attending a big Broadway wedding described by Runyon. These are Skeets Boliver, Tony Bertazzola, and Rochester Red. Gangsters fall into three main racial categories, Italian, Jews, and Irish, but there are a few blacks (“from Harlem”), Spanish-speaking Puerto Ricans or Cubans, and indeterminates. In the story “Dark Dolores” we hear of the three St. Louis gangs who hold a peace conference in neutral Atlantic City, brokered by Black Mike Marrio.
The gamblers include Educated Edmund, who plays klob; Regret the Horse Player; Big Nig, who runs the crap school; Olive Street Oscar, described simply as “a betting man”; Dave the Dude, another all-rounder; Hot Horse Herbie, a tipster with “a depressing kisser”; and Jack the Beefer, “a gambler’s nark.” The Sky, as you’d expect, is a high roller; Brandy Bottle Bates “has a large beezer and a head like a pear”; and Meyer Marmalade bets on football. What Frying Pan Joe does can be left to the imagination. The bookmakers include Bookie Bob and Willie the Worrier. The Brain is an amorphous or protean character who hovers over both gambling and crime. His real name is Arnold Rosenthal, and his cunning annoys people, so that Homer Swing hires Daffy Jack to stick a knife into him.
The dolls are endless. Lovely Lou works in the 300 Club, owned by Miss Missouri Martin. Maud Milligan is Big Nig’s doll, and Big Marge is Goodtime Charlie’s doll. Princess O’Hara is the daughter of King O’Hara, who drives a hackney coach. One of the most notable of the dolls is Lola Sapola, who comes from a circus family known as The Rolling Sapolas. She is variously described as “A doll about five feet high and five feet wide” and “The Wide Doll.” Runyon says: “She looks all hammered down. Her face is as wide as her shoulders and makes me think of a full moon.” Among other actions ascribed to her is to “slam Dave the Dude in his solar plexus.” Amelia Bodkin is the doll of Jabez Tuesday, described as “the rich millionaire.”Hortense Hathaway is the daughter of Skush O’Brien, the cab driver.
Drivers and the like are often important in the stories. David the Dude’s driver is Wojo Joe. Solid John, also known as Dobber, is the doorman at Detroit’s, and the Stick Guy there is Scranton Slim. The doorman at the Woodcock Inn is Slugsy Sachs. At the 300 Club the doorman is Soldier Sweeney. These people humanize the background and often work the machinery of Runyon’s plots. Other regular inhabitants and linkmen are Judge Goldfobber, Doc Bodecker, and the Widow Crumb. There are various journalists or “newsscribes,” such as Ambrose Hammer, and Waldo Winchester, supposedly based on Walter Winchell. Marvin Clay represents café society, the actor Paul Hawley the stage, and Buddy Donaldson the songwriting profession. The most notable of the musicians is Walter Gumple the trombonist, based upon Paul Whiteman the bandleader. These characters serve to give the world of Runyon authenticity and place it in a definite historical context.
But beyond a certain point, Runyon is not aiming at authenticity or historical truth. His object is consistency to his own creation, and its poetic truth. You can live in his Broadway world, but you cannot find it in reality. It is not true but in Runyon’s imagination. It has no more physical connection with the actual Manhattan of the twenties than the Thames does with the world that Kenneth Grahame, a contemporary of Runyon, describes in The Wind in the Willows. That is its strength as a work of art. It never gets out of date because it never was in date. The story “Sense of Humor” describes a practical joker named Hot Foot who goes around Broadway looking for preoccupied individuals into whose shoe soles he can stick, unobserved, a lighted match. It is called “giving them a hot foot.” Nothing more is known about him, or what he did before he became addicted to this annoying habit, or what became of him after he was too easily recognizable to get away with it anymore. He lives in an instant of time, and that is all which is required of him, for the purposes of Runyon’s art. In enjoying Runyon’s stories there has to be, in Coleridge’s words, “a willing suspension of disbelief,” and once this is conceded, the magic works. Indeed, Runyon’s Manhattan is a magic isle, full of strange sounds which give delight and hurt not. When Runyon pulls down the curtain, and we close the book, the characters, “all spirits, are melted into air, into thin air.” The concrete canyons of New York, the brightly lit theaters of Broadway, Mindy’s Restaurant, the 300 Club, Detroit’s, and the Woodcock Inn “dissolve and like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a wrack behind.” Runyon’s guys and dolls “are such stuff as dreams are made on,” and their “little life is rounded with a sleep.” But while on the page still, they are “very lively, indeed.”