Jim Tully was one of the fine American novelists to emerge in the 1920s and ’30s. He gained this position with intelligence, sensitivity, and hard work. Born in St. Marys, Ohio, in 1886 to Irish parents, Tully was placed in an orphanage at the age of six when his mother died. He ran away at eleven, working as a farmhand and then becoming a hobo until age twenty-one. Despite his troubled childhood, he managed to give himself a good literary education. He haunted libraries and read Balzac, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Twain, and his early idol, Jack London, among others.
After working as a newspaper reporter in Akron, Tully settled in Hollywood and worked for a time as a press agent for Charlie Chaplin. He wrote or cowrote more than two dozen volumes, not all of them published, until his death in 1947. By that time, his work had gained the praise of H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan.
Published in 1927, Circus Parade deals with the time Tully worked as a laborer for a traveling circus. He did this because the state of Mississippi, where he was located, treated hoboes so badly. “In other parts of the United States a tramp is not molested if he keeps off railroad property,” Tully wrote in Circus Parade. In Mississippi, however, a price is put on his head. With no money to pay the vagrancy fine, he is put to work at twenty-five cents a day and can spend several years as a virtual slave of the state.
Circus Parade consists of a series of vignettes, rather than a tight narrative structure. The first chapter, for example, has to do with a black lion tamer. Tully notes that most lion tamers he’s encountered have been black. In Circus Parade and in other books, Tully pays special attention to blacks. He sympathizes with them, although he also seems puzzled by them. Anybody who loved the Irish as much as Tully might have a hard time fully understanding another minority group, but Tully was the exception. Consider his attitude in Blood on the Moon (1931) toward Joe Gans, the great African American lightweight boxer of the early twentieth century. Gans was obviously a bright guy with a good sense of humor. He wasn’t easy for Tully to categorize. Tully wrote, “His features were more Semitic than Negroid” and “if the art of pugilism can reach genius, Gans was so gifted. The elements were blended in him—stamina, caution, cunning, swift and terrible execution.” Blood on the Moon joins Circus Parade as one of Tully’s finest achievements.
Circus Parade contains some of Tully’s most memorable characters, black and white. The book differs from his other autobiographical works as the plot revolves around other circus employees, not himself. For example, the owner of the circus was a seventy-three-year-old carny veteran named Cameron, a clever con artist who was extremely cheap. Cameron was not well liked by most of his employees. Nonetheless, they all stuck together when they were attacked. Their rallying cry was “Hey, Rube!” as they hurried to fight oil workers or townspeople or anyone looking for a fight.
Tully also writes about people in the side show, like “The Moss-Haired Girl,” a beautiful young woman who dyed her hair green and was the object of wonder to many customers. Another circus attraction was Lila, the four-hundred-pound German strong woman. She was a stellar attraction, but then she started buying fashionable clothes and reading romance novels. Her desire for a man led to tragic results.
I wondered if Tully had actually known Lila, or whatever her name was. But the important thing is that he made her and the scene believable, both with his economical, straightforward, no-nonsense writing style and his inclusion of many details that give the whole story the air of truth. He does this often. No matter how crazily violent or fantastic his stories are, you accept them as nonfiction. Tully makes the improbable seem true. But then he must have had some amazing experiences in his hobo years. He was even a prizefighter for a time.
Where does Tully fit among the writers of his time? His work was relatively popular and received much critical praise during his lifetime. He created an original style, blending a spare writing approach with some fantastic stories, often about lower-class life with slang dialects and phonetic spellings (he had a very good ear). Tully was somewhat anticipated by Stephen Crane in tone, however, particularly in Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893). Crane wrote about life in the New York City slums, using slang and phonetic spelling: “‘Run, Jimmie, run! Dey’ll get yehs,’ screamed a retreating Rum Alley child. ‘Naw,’ responded Jimmie with a valiant roar, ‘dese Micks can’t make me run.’” I can find no evidence that Tully ever read Crane or was influenced by him; the similarities could very well be coincidental. But Crane, who died in 1900, obviously anticipated Tully, whose first novel was published in 1922. Tully read so much that a number of writers probably influenced his style, whether he realized it or not.
Regarding Tully’s huge appetite for literature of all kinds, it’s interesting to note that he had a real respect for at least some avant-garde writing, as his sensitive and perceptive chapter on James Joyce in Beggars Abroad illustrates. The fiction-reading public these days is about as confused about Joyce as it was when Ulysses was published.
As for Tully’s legacy, perhaps it is most clearly seen in detective stories beginning about 1930. His work often had a tough quality, but it is genuine, not affected like Ernest Hemingway’s.
The Kent State University Press should be praised for publishing long-out-of-print works by this important Ohio writer. I hope we will see a renewal of interest in his work and additional volumes published, including Tully’s writing about Hollywood. He wrote an early novel about the film industry (Jarnegan, 1926), an unpublished biography of Charlie Chaplin, and many uncollected movie articles for magazines and newspapers.
In one interview, Tully claimed he had “the best library in Hollywood.” I believe it.