by Damon Runyon
“Two Men Named Collins” (September 1907, Reader) anticipates the Broadway stories by using a self-dramatizing first-person narrator who is often verbally aggressive. Here is a narrative of male camaraderie in which violence takes a backseat to male bonding. The paranoid narrator begins with puzzling present-tense nonsequiturs reminiscent of the sociopathic behavior of Edgar Allan Poe’s self-deluded narrator in “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “I know some things all right if I could only think of them. These guys say I’m crazy—crazy in the head like a sheep.” The narrator’s name and character are inextricably intertwined with those of another man, perhaps reflecting Runyon’s fear that no matter what he achieves, a shadow of his dissolute Pueblo past will expose him as a drunken Runyan, which was his original name and identity. This early story of a double in which both characters have a dark, subversive side—one a coward deserter, the other seeking personal vengeance in the guise of doing his duty—may reveal not only Runyon’s fascination with the criminal mind but also his fear that, like Crummy Collins, he will always be regarded as an outsider.
OTHER FICTION
“Lou Louder” (August 8, 1936, Collier’s), like two other Collier’s sketches of 1936, “Joe Terrace” and “Burge McCall,” drew upon the popularity in urban areas of dime-novel westerns, where rugged individualists—sometimes desperadoes—were in control of their lives.
All three have the hard-edged cynical humor of the “In Our Town” sketches. Perhaps because they were slightly longer than the pieces in “In Our Town,” Runyon could sell them to Collier’s. Among other things, they reveal that during the Depression a popular magazine like Collier’s was willing to cater to gallows humor with sketches that are far less funny to us than Runyon’s usual stories.
“My Old Man” (columns collected in My Old Man, Stackpole and Sons, New York, 1938) is the closest Runyon comes to the myth of the American pastoral, the notion of the West as a simpler world of—to recall “America the Beautiful”—“spacious skies and amber waves of grain.” The concept of “homespun” represented a mythic version of an orderly premodern way of life based on household production: the farmer in his field, his wife at her spinning wheel or in her kitchen, craftsmen like cobblers and blacksmiths in their small shops, and children in little red schoolhouses. But Runyon also realized that this pastoral myth ignored the poverty and harshness of much rural life in the West.
“In Our Town” (columns collected In Our Town, Creative Age Press, New York, 1946) is a series of brief caricatures of small-town life that recall the world of Norman Rockwell. Runyon looks back nostalgically to a simpler world, but—following a tradition in American literature that included Twain, Faulkner, and Sherwood Anderson—his nostalgia is qualified by a hard-edged and cynical perspective. Runyon is amused by but not unsympathetic to the way that dreams provide sustaining fictions in a difficult world and the way that dreams are manufactured on the thinnest thread of evidence that a horse will come in or a scheme will come to fruition.
With its simpler world, Runyon’s nostalgic evocation of the American frontier at first seems to give his readers a pastoral myth. Like the Turp stories, the western stories depend upon an implicit juxtaposition to the world of sophisticates in New York. Yet Runyon reveals that underneath people are similar, some decent, some predatory, and many a mixture of both. Based on a fictional version of Pueblo, Colorado, which he evokes with neither New York hype nor his characteristic sardonic hyperbole, Runyon focuses on the small virtues, idiosyncrasies, and vices of the title figures of his anecdotes. While many of these figures maintain their integrity in the face of trying circumstances, others act mean-spiritedly after they reach their breaking point.
POEMS
Written primarily for his working-class and middle-class audience, Runyon’s poems were basically part of his journalism. His intended audience, as with much of his writing, seems to be more male than female, and his poems in particular take up male subjects of sports and gambling. Often written in dialect, they belong to an oral tradition of tale-telling and ballads. He not infrequently incorporated his verse into his newspaper columns. He dashed off poems with little literary merit, but because of the Runyon name and their accessibility in newspapers and magazines, they found an enthusiastic and large readership. Their wisdom and folk humor appealed to a readership that turned to Runyon each day for a moment’s pleasure and wisdom.
Runyon was editing Poems for Men (1947) at his death, and it was published posthumously. He did not even list in his collected works his early books of poetry, The Tents of Trouble (1911) and Rhymes of the Firing Line (1912). But in Poems for Men he and Clark Kinnaird, who completed the volume after Runyon’s death, acknowledged and reprinted some of the earlier poems. The best known is his paean to the jockey Earl Sande, entitled “A Handy Guy Like Sande,” wherein the speaker, undoubtedly a Runyon surrogate, nostalgically recaptures a feeling for his own youth in writing about Sande’s comeback in 1930 to ride Gallant Fox to victory in the Triple Crown. The poem, a composite of various stanzas that Runyon published in his columns in response to Sande’s racing exploits, including riding Flying Ebony to victory in the 1925 Kentucky Derby after what seemed to be Sande’s career-ending injury, evolved into the version reprinted here. Sande won five Belmonts and three Kentucky Derbys in addition to the one Preakness.
Runyon often used his poems to impart the wisdom of his life experience. But in a poem entitled “A Jew” in the November 1922 Cosmopolitan—a poem not included in Poems for Men—he is a teacher reminding his readers of the folly of anti-Semitism. Making little effort to create a dramatized persona, Runyon presents a speaker who is more like Runyon himself than usual. It is a poem in praise of a real hero, Sam Dreben, a Jewish soldier who emigrated from Russia and was much decorated for his World War I service by France and the United States. When the poem was originally published, underneath it in italics was a brief description, presumably written by Runyon, that concludes: “Sam Dreben, patriot, soldier and gentleman known throughout the army as ‘The Fighting Jew,’” an epithet we might find less appealing than Runyon meant it to be.
TRIAL REPORTING
By the 1920s modern urban life had created a spectator culture, where the morning newspaper reported on sensational events, especially crime scenes and trials. As part of this culture, Runyon’s reporting of major trials affected the public’s response to these crystallizing media events. What distinguishes the modern spectator culture is its focus on not only the act of observing but also the interchange between those looking and those being looked at. In thinking about how spectator culture evolved, we need to examine not only the evolution of penny newspapers and tabloids but also the invention of photography.
In 1903, wireless telegraphy not only enabled messages to reach ships, but also enabled political leaders to communicate across the ocean. When Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated at the outset of World War I, the shot was heard round the world because of telegraphic communications and the resulting newspaper stories. The age of electronic communication not only reflected but created events. The reporter as spectator became not merely the person who detachedly observes the effects of events but the person whose perspective helps create those effects.
“Arnold Rothstein’s Final Payoff”: Runyon covered the trial of George C. McManus, who was charged with shooting Arnold Rothstein at the Park Central Hotel on November 4, 1928, after Rothstein lost a large sum in a poker game in which they both participated. It was assumed—perhaps correctly—that Rothstein couldn’t or wouldn’t pay McManus the money he owed him. Because the state could not prove that McManus was the gunman, the judge ordered a verdict of not guilty and did not allow the jury to deliberate.
“Al Capone”: In the columns collected under the title “Al Capone,” we see Runyon’s sympathy with the gangster on trial in 1931 for income tax evasion. Runyon never reveals that he knew Capone quite well or that he was taken with the splendor of Capone’s lifestyle, including Capone’s Palm Island
house. If in the Rothstein piece Runyon at times emphasizes the distance between himself and a gangster he knew well, here he somewhat bridges the distance by humanizing Capone as “Al,” a victim of big government. He implies that citizens of America might expect more from their government, whom he refers to as “your Uncle Sam,” than the pursuit of Capone for $215,000. Runyon’s calling Capone “Al” has the effect of making him into a regular guy being pursued by a predatory government that wants to imprison him.
“Morgan the Mighty”: When Runyon covered the Senate Committee on Banking and Currency’s 1933 investigation of Morgan’s business empire, he showed no mercy to J. Pierpont Morgan. Runyon’s scathing portrayal of Morgan’s arrogance and of the favoritism shown to insiders, who accumulated stock at a special price before others could purchase it, helped create the political environment needed for the establishment of the Securities and Exchange Commission. Ultimately, the Securities and Exchange Commission was empowered to regulate how stocks were issued and sold.
Writing during the high tide of the Depression, Runyon the populist underscored the revelation that Morgan himself paid no taxes in 1931 and 1932 and that the Morgan partners paid a mere $48,000 in 1930 and nothing in 1931 and 1932. Using his characteristic technique of iteration to create caricatures, Runyon repeats the ironic epithet “the mighty” after Morgan’s name as if Morgan—the despot of Mammon—were conquering royalty descended from an ancient line of kings and emperors.
Lindbergh Trial
After the March 1, 1932, kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby, the story dominated the media. Even the elite New York Times devoted thirteen columns of its March 2 issue to news and photographs. Finally on May 12, the baby was found in a shallow grave near the Lindbergh home. Bruno Richard Hauptmann, the alleged kidnapper and murderer, was arrested on September 19, 1934. The guilty verdict came in on February 13, 1935, and Hauptmann was sentenced to die in the electric chair on March 18, 1935.
The Lindbergh kidnapping immediately captured the attention of the nation. One of America’s heroes had been plagued by tragedy, and a whirlwind of drama surrounded the case as it developed. With themes of celebrity, suspense, ransom money, and murder, this case truly was to become the trial of the century. Thus it was not surprising that on January 2, 1935, such famous reporters as Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell descended upon the small town of Flemington, New Jersey, to observe and report on the trial. Although Runyon’s articles on the Lindbergh trial are not included in this collection, his reports on the case are an important part of his oeuvre.
The Lindbergh case was a litmus test of the power of the media and gives an idea of the world in which Runyon was working. Using techniques that had boosted the importance of major sporting events and employing reporters like Runyon, who had made his mark in sports writing, the media created a spectacle that captured the imagination of the American public.
While Winchell never wavered in zealously advocating Bruno Hauptmann’s guilt, Runyon became increasingly detached and thoughtful. Yet early in the Lindbergh trial he had milked the event for its sensationalism, beginning his report of January 3, 1935, the day after the trial began, with a characteristically precise description in terms that would arouse the sympathy and anger of his readers: “They hand slender, gentle, little Anne Morrow Lindbergh the stained, torn garments that her baby wore the last night she saw him alive in the crib, as she sits on the witness stand this afternoon, bravely fighting back tears.” And in the same piece he juxtaposes the woman on the witness stand to Hauptmann’s wife—sitting with the Hauptmanns’ “own little son”—while telling us that “Hauptmann himself stares at the lovely figure on the witness stand out of his deep-sunken eyes, his face impassive.” In this story of the trial’s opening, he organizes his story around the mother’s testimony rather than the father’s, whom he calls Colonel Lindbergh; he speaks of the “day of drama which reaches its peak when his wife is on the witness stand facing the staring eyes of the spectators, with half the women in the courtroom sobbing in sympathy with her.” However, in his contribution to the 1935 Cosmopolitan article “Why They’ll Never Forget the Trial of the Century,” Runyon wrote movingly in favor of abolishing the death sentence.
OCCASIONAL PROSE
“Why Me?” “Sweet Dreams,” and “Passing the Word Along” (Short Takes, 1946). After Runyon’s April 1944 operations removing his malignant larynx, he could no longer speak. His frankness about disability takes place in a world where such infirmities were either not discussed or were discussed only in whispers behind the victim’s back: “Since I lost my voice or about 90 percent of its once bell-like timbre, I have discovered many inconveniences as well as some striking conveniences.” A man who had once had the cachet of a movie star, Runyon was reduced to virtual silence. He took the position of one who is handicapped: “The hale and hearty shun the afflicted and I cannot say I blame them much.” We hear Runyon’s irrepressible spirit as well as his resilient attitude; he insists that we can’t feel sorry for ourselves and that we all start where we are. But we also hear some self-pity and bitterness: “Maybe it would be better for all concerned if I did not try to talk at all because everybody else is talking these days and I would not be missed.” He poignantly describes how he communicates by notepad and how his friends begin searching for their spectacles.
Runyon’s illness revealed a poignant yet attractive vulnerability. His columns on his illness, some of which are collected in Runyon First and Last as “Written in Sickness” and in Short Takes as “On Being Sick,” are excruciatingly honest and moving. He is every-man asking for sympathy, even while knowing it will not help. Indeed, Runyon’s eloquence and directness as his life slowly ebbed would have been particularly striking to an audience that was, as many of us born in the 1930s and 1940s recall, culturally educated not to speak about such things.
“Your Neighbor—The Gambler” (November 1921, Cosmopolitan) embodies what I call gangster chic. Runyon himself was a gambler and was fascinated by those whose commercial dealings were on the edge of legality or crossed over into criminality. Just as the demimonde within his fiction has an attraction for supposedly respectable people who are quite pleased to consort with gangsters, so too, Runyon realized, does the demimonde have an attraction for readers. Respectable middle-class people enjoyed reading about those who don’t work nine-to-five jobs before returning to their family lives at the end of the day.
“Mr. ‘B’ and His Stork Club” (May 1947, Cosmopolitan), Runyon’s last magazine article, is a hagiographic piece about Sherman Billingsley and the Stork Club, a nightclub where he spent a great deal of time in his final year.
Notes
*“The Big Umbrella” and a few other stories mentioned below—“Pick the Winner,” “That Ever-Loving Wife of Hymie’s,” “Situation Wanted,” and “Baseball Hattie”—do not appear in this collection.
1Inventing Times Square: Commerce and Culture at the Crossroads of the World, ed. William Taylor (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1991), 179.
2Lampard, Eric, “Introductory Essay,” in Taylor, 16.
3Holden, Stephen, “Books of the Times: Not for Just an Hour, Not for Just a Day . . . but Always,” New York Times, October 31, 2001, E10.
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