Dictionaries define curmudgeon as a churlish, irascible fellow; a cantankerous old codger. The origin of the word is unknown, but it might come from an old Scottish word that meant “murmur” or “mumble,” or from the French coeur mechant, “evil heart.” The archaic definition made it a synonym for miser, and the word has had recent currency in a somewhat milder connotation, to describe a not entirely unlikable grouch.
A curmudgeon’s reputation for malevolence is undeserved. They’re neither warped nor evil at heart. They don’t hate mankind, just mankind’s excesses. They’re just as sensitive and soft-hearted as the next guy, but they hide their vulnerability beneath a crust of misanthropy. They ease the pain by turning hurt into humor. They snarl at pretense and bite at hypocrisy out of a healthy sense of outrage. They attack maudlinism because it devalues genuine sentiment. They hurl polemical thunderbolts at middle-class values and pop culture in order to preserve their sanity. Nature, having failed to equip them with a serviceable denial mechanism, has endowed them with astute perception and sly wit. Offense is their only defense. Their weapons are irony, satire, sarcasm, ridicule. Their targets are pretense, pomposity, conformity, incompetence.
When I was a small boy, my father took me to the Stage Delicatessen in New York, having told me beforehand to keep my eyes open for “celebrities.” By the time we were seated at a double table next to a tall, dour man, I had unsuccessfully scanned the place for Uncle Miltie or Captain Video or even Dagmar. Disappointed, I blurted out, “I don’t see any celebrities!” Our tablemate slowly looked up from his mushroom barley, and with his patented scowl, Fred Allen did a very, very slow burn in my direction. It was the dirtiest look I’d ever received, but I wasn’t intimidated. Rather I felt that we’d shared a joke, that I’d been his straight man. He never let on, but I knew he was amused. My father introduced me to Mr. Allen, and as he gently shook my hand without cracking a smile, I felt his unmistakable goodwill behind the curmudgeon’s mask.
Curmudgeons are mockers and debunkers whose bitterness is a symptom rather than a disease. They can’t compromise their standards and can’t manage the suspension of disbelief necessary for feigned cheerfulness. Their awareness is a curse; they’re constantly ticked off because they’re constantly aware of so much to be ticked off about, and they wish things were better.
Maybe curmudgeons have gotten a bad rap in the same way that the messenger is blamed for the message: They have the temerity to comment on the human condition without apology. They not only refuse to applaud mediocrity, they howl it down with morose glee. Their versions of the truth unsettle us, and we hold it against them, even though they soften it with humor.
H. L. Mencken was the quintessential curmudgeon, the one against whom all others must be measured. He wrote thirty books and countless essays, columns, and critical reviews. He was a lexicographer, reporter, and editor, the literary champion of Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O’Neill.
Mencken was the scourge of the middle class, which he called the “booboisie.” In spite of his condescending tone and lack of faith in his fellowman, he was a crusader against bigotry and injustice. He championed libertarianism and derided piety “Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” he wrote.
The other great curmudgeons who have contributed to the general sanity of mankind—from Mark Twain and Ambrose Bierce to G. K. Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw, from Groucho Marx and W. C. Fields to Dave Barry and Lewis Black—have all had the facility for pointing out the absurdities of the human condition.
If there was a Golden Age of curmudgeonry, it was during the 1920s and ’30s at New York’s Algonquin, an otherwise undistinguished hotel on West Forty-fourth Street. A dazzling array of wits and raconteurs gravitated to the table of Alexander Woollcott, the New York Times theater critic and book reviewer, and made it a bastion of urbanity and sparkling repartee. Edmund Wilson dubbed it an “all-star literary vaudeville.” According to Groucho Marx, “The admission fee was a viper’s tongue and a half-concealed stiletto. It was a sort of intellectual slaughterhouse.” Clare Boothe Luce, no doubt because she was a frequent target of some of its members, was not amused: “You couldn’t say ‘Pass the salt’ without somebody turning it into a pun or trying to top it.”
The regulars among the artists, celebrities, and intellectuals who frequented the round table included Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, George S. Kaufman, Harold Ross, Heywood Broun, Ring Lardner, Robert E. Sherwood, Robert Benchley, and Dorothy Parker. Other habitués included Oscar Levant, the Marx Brothers, Tallulah Bankhead, Herman Manckiewicz, Herbert Bayard Swope, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, Charles MacArthur, and S. N. Behrman. As a result, the Algonquin Round Table is the single greatest source for the quotations and anecdotes in this book.
The “featured” curmudgeons in these pages are not necessarily typical. Indeed, curmudgeons are fierce individualists by definition. Nevertheless, an examination of the lives of W. C. Fields, Oscar Wilde, George S. Kaufman, Robert Benchley, Oscar Levant, Dorothy Parker, and Groucho Marx, reveals common threads. Many of them had unhappy childhoods and grew into neurotic, reclusive, self-centered adults. Many remained shy and insecure in spite of their celebrity. An inordinate number were prone to alcoholism, drug addiction, insomnia, hypochondria, misogyny, even suicide.
The contemporary curmudgeons I interviewed displayed none of these tendencies. They’re all intelligent, articulate, and personable. Many are happily married or mated, and they all appeared healthy and sober when we met. They were unanimous in their reluctance to characterize themselves as curmudgeons without the proviso that anybody who isn’t a curmudgeon nowadays is just not paying attention. They were invariably forthcoming and responsive to my questions, both pertinent and impertinent. I’m grateful to all of them for their un-curmudgeonly cooperation.
You don’t have to be a curmudgeon to make a curmudgeonly statement, so quotes from non- and quasi-curmudgeons are included herein—apparently even the terminally Pollyannaish can have flashes of clarity. But the majority of the quotes in these pages are from the world-class curmudgeons listed herein.
I think I became a connoisseur of curmudgeons sometime in the early 1960s, when I saw Oscar Levant in a series of television interviews with Jack Paar. Levant had been in and out of psychiatric institutions (“I was once thrown out of a mental hospital for depressing the other patients”), was a mass of tics and twitches, and chain-smoked Newports (although his hands shook so badly, he needed help to lighting them). I was captivated by the twisted, toothless smile, the lucid mind within the degenerate body. (Paar: “What do you do for exercise?” Levant: “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”) Levant was at once pathetic and brilliant, witty and helpless, the essence of curmudgeonry in one enthralling package, a raw nerve of vulnerability eloquently lashing out at the sources of its torment.
By the early seventies I began to notice curmudgeonly tendencies in myself. I lost my tolerance for anything cute or trendy. I became increasingly out of step with everyone and everything around me. I developed a permanent sneer. I wrote fan letters to John Simon. I began to cultivate my surliness instead of trying to conceal it. Eventually I gained the courage to come out of the closet, to go from an isolated, would-be iconoclast to an out-in-the-open curmudgeon. (Curmudgeons are like sumo wrestlers; it takes a long time and a lot of abuse to make one; curmudgeons are also like writers: you’re a curmudgeon only when someone else says you’re a curmudgeon.)
In short order I got an unlisted telephone number, enrolled in law school, divorced my wife, and managed to irreparably insult most of my friends and relatives. And I began collecting this material with the intention of someday compiling it in a book from which other closet curmudgeons might take solace.
J. W.
Pacific Palisades, California
March 1987