There’s a terrific post on John Huston over at Cinephilia and Beyond, which has quickly become one of my favorite all-time sites. They give us a 1965 interview with Huston in Film Quarterly. Dig this:

Huston: Actually I don’t separate the elements of film-making in such an abstract manner. For example, the directing of a film, to me, is simply an extension of the process of writing. It’s the process of rendering the thing you have written. You’re still writing when you’re directing. Of course you’re not composing words, but a gesture, the way you make somebody raise his eyes or shake his head is also writing for films. Nor can I answer precisely what the relative importance, to me, of the various aspects of film-making is, I mean, whether I pay more attention to writing, directing, editing, or what-have-you. The most important element to me is always the idea that I’m trying to express, and everything technical is only a method to make the idea into clear form.

I’m always working on the idea: whether I am writing, directing, choosing music or cutting. Everything must revert back to the idea; when it gets away from the idea it becomes a labyrinth of rococo. Occasionally one tends to forget the idea, but I have always had reason to regret this whenever it happened. Sometimes you fall in love with a shot, for example. Maybe it is a tour de force as a shot. This is one of the great dangers of directing: to let the camera take over. Audiences very often do not understand this danger, and it is not unusual that camerawork is appreciated in cases where it really has no business in the film, simply because it is decorative or in itself exhibitionistic.

I would say that there are maybe half a dozen directors who really know their camera-how to move their camera. It’s a pity that critics often do not appreciate this. On the other hand I think it’s OK that audiences should not be aware of this. In fact, when the camera is in motion, in the best-directed scenes, the audiences should not be aware of what the camera is doing. They should be following the action and the road of the idea so closely, that they shouldn’t be aware of what’s going on technically.

Here’s more on Huston’s approach to storytelling from his autobiography: An Open Book:

I read without discipline, averaging three to four books a week, and have since I was a kid. Gram used to read aloud to me books by her favorite authors: Dickens, Tolstoy, Marie Carelli. She also read speeches from Shakespeare to me, and had me repeat them to her. When I was in my early teens, we’d talk about the “style” of an author. I puzzled over the meaning of the word. Was an author’s style his way of arranging words to set himself apart from other writers? An invention, so to speak? Surely there was more to style than that! One day it came to me like a revelation: people write differently because they think differently. An original idea demands a unique approach. So that style isn’t simply a concoction of the writer, but simply the expression of a central idea.

I’m not aware of myself as a director having a style. I’m told that I do, but I don’t recognize it. I see no remote similarity, for example, between The Red Badge of Courage and Moulin Rouge. However observant the critic, I don’t think he’d be able to tell that the same director made them both. Bergman has a style that’s unmistakably his. He is a prime example of the auteur approach to making pictures. I suppose it is the best approach: the director conceives the idea, writes it, puts it on film. Because he is creating out of himself, controlling all aspects of the work, his films assume a unity and a direction. I admire directors like Bergman, Fellini, Buñuel, whose every picture is in some way connected with their private lives, but that’s never been my approach. I’m eclectic. I like to draw on sources other than myself; further, I don’t think of myself as simply, uniquely and forever a director of motion pictures. It is something for which I have a certain talent, and a profession the disciplines of which I have mastered over the years, but I also have a certain talent for other things, and I have worked at those disciplines as well. The idea of devoting myself to a single pursuit in life is unthinkable to me. My interests in boxing, writing, painting, horses have at certain periods in my life been every bit as important as that in directing films.

I have been speaking of style, but before there can be style, there must be grammar. There is, in fact, a grammar to picture-making. The laws are as inexorable as they are in language, and are to be found in the shots themselves. When do we fade-in or fade-out with a camera? When do we dissolve, pan, dolly, cut? The rules governing these techniques are well grounded. They must, of course, be disavowed and disobeyed from time to time, but one must be aware of their existence, for motion pictures have a great deal in common with our own physiological and psychological processes—more so than any other medium. It is almost as if there were a reel of film behind our eyes . . . as though our very thoughts were projected onto the screen.

Motion pictures, however, are governed by a time sense different from that of real life; different from the theater, too. That rectangle of light up there with the shadows on it demands one’s whole attention. And what it furnishes must satisfy that demand. When we are sitting in a room in a house, there is no single claim on our awareness. Our attention jumps from object to object, drifts in and out of the room. We listen to sounds coming from various points; we may even smell something cooking. In a motion-picture theater, where our undivided attention is given to the screen, time actually moves more slowly, and action has to be speeded up. Furthermore, whatever action takes place on that screen must not violate our sense of the appropriate. We accomplish this by adhering to the proper grammar of film-making.

For example, a fade-in or a fade-out is akin to waking up or going to sleep. The dissolve indicates either a lapse of time or a change of place. Or it can, in certain circumstances, indicate that things in different places are happening at the same time. In any case, the images impinge . . . the way dreams proceed, or like the faces you can see when you close your eyes. When we pan, the camera turns from right to left, or vice versa, and serves one of two purposes: it follows an individual, or it informs the viewer of the geography of the scene. You pan from one object to another in order to establish their spatial relationship; thereafter you cut. We are forever cutting in real life. Look from one object to another across the room. Notice how you involuntarily blink. That’s a cut. You know what the spatial relationship is, there’s nothing to discover about the geography, so you cut with your eyelids. The dolly is when the camera doesn’t simply turn on its axis but moves horizontally or backward and forward. It may move closer to intensify interest and pull away to come to a tableau, thereby putting a finish—or a period—to a scene. A more common purpose is simply to include another figure in the frame.

The camera usually identifies itself with one of actors in a scene, and it sees the others through his eyes. The nature of the scene determines how close the actors are to each other. If it’s an intimate scene, obviously you don’t show the other individual as a full-length figure. The image on the screen should correspond to what we experience in real life. Seated a few feet apart, the upper body of one or the other would fill the scene. Inches apart would be a big-head close-up. The size of their images must be in accordance with the proper spatial relationship. Unless there’s a reason: when actors are some distance apart and the effect of what one is saying has a significant impact upon the person he’s talking to, you might go into a close-up of the listener. But still his distance, as he views the person who is speaking, must remain the same. Going into a big-head close-up with dialogue that is neither intimate nor significant serves only to over-emphasize the physiognomy of the actor.

Usually the camera is in one of two positions: “standing up” or “sitting down.” When we vary this, it should be to serve a purpose. Shooting up at an individual ennobles him. As children we looked up to our parents, or we look up at a monumental sculpture. On the other hand, when we look down, it’s at someone weaker than we are, someone to laugh at, pity or feel superior to. As the camera goes higher and higher looking downward, it becomes God-like.

The conventional film-maker usually shoots a scene in full shot—a master scene—followed by medium shots, close shots and close-ups . . . at various angles . . . then decides in the cutting room what to use. The opposite way is to find the one shot that serves as an introduction to a scene; the rest will follow naturally. Again there’s a grammar to it. Once you write your first declarative sentence, the narration flows. Understanding the syntax of a scene implies that you already know the way the scene will be cut together, so you shoot only what’s required. That’s called “cutting with the camera.”

I work closely with the cameraman and with the operator, the man who actually manipulates the camera. He looks through the lens, executing what you’ve specified. At the end of a shot you look to him to see if he’s brought it off. The camera is sometimes required to take part in a sort of a dance with the artists, and its movements timed as if they were to music, and I’ve noticed that most good operators have a natural sense of rhythm. They usually dance well, play drums, juggle or do something that requires good timing and balance.

Cameramen—most of them ex-operators—are really lighting experts. They like to be known not as cameramen but as directors of lighting. Young directors are, as a rule, somewhat frightened of their cameramen. This is understandable, for cameramen often proceed in an independent fashion to light each scene precisely as they please. Lighting is their first interest, since other cameramen will judge them by it.

As an actor, it’s been my opportunity to observe the working methods of other directors. For the most part, they go by the book. Inexperienced directors put great stock in the master scene—which is shot as though all the actors were on a stage; you see everybody at once, and all the action. Their idea is that if they’ve missed something in the closer work with the camera that they should see, they can always fall back to the master shot. They think of it as a way of protecting themselves. I’ve often heard cameramen advise such a procedure, but a cameraman is not a cutter. The fact that falling back to the master scene interrupts the flow of the whole scene and breaks whatever spell has been evoked through good close-up work is of no concern to him. Obviously I am not speaking about all cameramen. There are any number of outstanding professionals who are just as concerned with getting that ideal sequence of shots—whatever the cost—as any director.

So many things can go wrong while filming a scene. If only everything bad that’s going to happen would happen at once and be over with! You’re seldom that fortunate. Instead, it’s the camera, or an actor forgetting his lines, or the sound of an airplane, or a car backfiring, or an arc light that flickers. When things of this kind occur, you simply have to start again. It can drive a director up the wall. I recall an incident involving one especially volatile director who was making a film in Africa. During one take a native baby began crying, and that stopped the scene. He started over, and a lion began roaring when it wasn’t supposed to. The director shouted: “Cut! I can see there’s only one way to get this God-damned scene! Throw the fucking baby to the fucking lion!”

Now, if you can make use of two or even three set-ups—going from one balanced, framed picture to another without cutting-—a sense of richness, grace and fluency is evoked. For example, one set-up might be a long shot of a wagon train moving slowly across the screen. The camera moves with it and comes to two men standing together, talking. Then one of the men walks toward the camera, and the camera pulls back to the point where he encounters a third individual, who stands back to the camera until the other man has passed on out of the scene. Then he turns and looks after him, in close-up. Three complete set-ups—without cutting. Of course, the set-ups must be carefully laid out and perfectly framed, and this multiplies the chances of something going wrong. But I’ve discovered that, even with the increased possibility of error, the time spent is not much more than would be spent on three separate set-ups.

Such linked shots are the mark of a good director. The scenes I have put together in this fashion have scarcely—if ever—been remarked on by an audience or a critic. But the fact that they have gone unnoticed is, in a sense, the best praise they could receive. They are so natural that the audience is caught up in the flow. This is the exact opposite of the kind of thing people tend to think of as clever—somebody’s distorted reflection in a doorknob for instance, a stunt that distracts one’s attention from the scene. It is important to say things on the screen with ingenuity, but never to belabor the audience with images that say, “Look at this!” The work of the camera with the actors, as I mentioned before, often amounts to a dance-panning, dollying, following the movement of the actors with grace, not cutting. There’s a choreography to it. Not many picture-makers are up to this. I’d say a dozen or so.

It is best to shoot chronologically. In this way you can benefit by accidents, and you don’t paint yourself into corners. However. if the picture begins in India and ends in lndia, with other countries in between, it is economically impractical not to shoot the Indian material at one time. When you are on a distant location, you do everything that calls for that location. That is a compromise, but making a picture is a series of compromises. It is when you feel that the compromise will affect—or risks affecting—the overall quality of the picture that you must decide whether or not to go along with it.

Plain, ordinary judgment plays a big part. For instance, you may well get what seems to be the ideal scene on your first take. Then you must question whether you have been sufficiently critical. Is the scene truly as good as you first thought? inexperienced directors are inclined to shoot almost every scene at least twice, in the fear that something may have escaped them. They may be blessed and not realize it—and, in trying to improve upon something that doesn’t need improving may run into these technical problems that I mentioned earlier. If the action is right and the artists have been everything you desire, then a second take will do you no good. If something is wrong with film or the lighting, it will be wrong on the second or third take, too, so that’s no kind of insurance. A director has to learn to trust his judgment.

Each time you get a good scene is a kind of miracle. Usually there is something wrong, however slight, and you must consider the importance of the error. As you repeat a scene, your demands in terms of quality tend to increase proportionately. You’ve got to watch this, and not become a fanatic.

I’ve come onto sets where a director has prepared ail the lighting and designated all the action before bringing in any of the performers. In some cases it was an inexperienced director following the advice of bis cameraman—in others, a matter of such a tight schedule that every second counted. But simply to light a set and say, “Now you sit here. You stand there,” without any preliminaries, only to embalm the scene: The actors are put into straitjackets. The best way, the only way, is to search out that first shot—that first declarative sentence which I mentioned earlier—and the rest will follow naturally. It’s not easy to come by, especially when there are a number of people in the scene. But until you get that shot you’re at sea. The answer is not simply to pull back for a fill shot. Instead, look for something that has style and visual energy, something in keeping with your ideas for the picture as a whole. You have the actors go through their paces and you still don’t see it. Now, don’t panic. Don’t worry about what the actors and the crew may think (that the director doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing!). This anxiety may force you into something false. And if you get off to a false start, there’s no correcting it. Given time and freedom, the actors will fall naturally into their places, discover when and where to move, and you will have your shot. And given all those shots, cut together, you will have your microcosm: the past on the winding reel; the present on the screen; the future on the unwinding reel . . . inevitable . . . unless the power goes off.

These observations are seldom remarked upon by picture-makers., They are so true, I suppose, that they are simply accepted without question as conventions. But they are conventions that have meaning—even for mavericks.

For more on Huston, get Agee on Film and read the great essay, “Undirectable Director.”

Hot off the presses comes Allen Barra’s new book, on sale today.

Here’s an exclusive excerpt from Mickey and Willie: Mantle and Mays, the Parallel Lives of Baseball’s Golden Age.

Dig in.

Mickey and Willie

By Allen Barra

I don’t know that anyone’s ever calculated this, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays, in that order, are the two most written-about players in baseball history, or at least two of the top three, along with Babe Ruth. The year 2010 saw the publication of a thick and well-researched biography of Willie, Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend, by James Hirsch, and there are countless shorter lives of Willie, several autobiographies and memoirs, and a superb life-and-times account, Willie’s Time, by Charles Einstein that, in my opinion, stands as the best thing ever written about him. Also published in 2010 was Jane Leavy’s Mantle biography, The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, the most detailed of the nine versions of his life.

There are also six volumes of autobiography, memoirs, and recollections, as well as numerous books by fans and collections of letters to and from Mickey, that have been published since his death. And yet, it seems to me that there has always been one major element missing from the many books on Mantle or Mays: each other. Though they are and always will be linked in the minds of millions, I don’t think it’s ever been noted exactly how much they had in common and how each man’s image reflected the other. The similarities in their lives were uncanny. Both were children of the Great Depression, born in 1931. They were almost the same size (about five-foot-eleven and 185 pounds, at least early in their careers); Mantle had a bit more muscle, and for most of his playing career probably outweighed Willie by five to ten pounds.

Both were heralded as phenoms when they arrived in New York in 1951 after brief but legendary minor league careers. (If integration had come along a couple of years earlier, they probably would have played against each other as minor leaguers.) Both started out playing for Hall of Fame managers, Mantle for Casey Stengel and Willie for Leo Durocher. Both played stickball in the streets of New York with kids (though only Willie was lucky enough to have TV cameras record the games). The burden of expectation caused each of them to break down in tears before his first season was over. Mickey exploded on the national scene in 1953 when he hit the first “tape measure” home run, and Willie the next year when he made the most famous catch in World Series and probably baseball history. In 1958 and 1959, they barnstormed against each other with specially selected All-Star teams.

Together they defined baseball in the 1950s and through the mid-1960s. Both made the covers of Time and Life, and they were the subjects of popular songs. In the 1960s, they were often pictured together on the covers of baseball magazines, including some devoted entirely to them. They were paired off on television on the popular show Home Run Derby, did commercials and endorsements together, and appeared together on numerous TV shows. Together they created nostalgia and the autograph and memorabilia craze. Finally, in the early 1980s, they were both banned from baseball by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn for doing public relations work for Atlantic City casinos.

They had exactly the same talents—everyone who saw them observed that no other players in the big leagues possessed their astonishing combinations of power and speed. And despite Willie’s far greater durability, they were, in terms of effectiveness on the field, remarkably similar. Both batted over .300 ten times and hit over 50 home runs in a season twice. Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball ranks Mays as the best player in the NL from 1954, the year he returned from the Army, through 1965, except 1959, when he ranked fourth. (For the 1956 and 1961 seasons, he shared the top spot with Henry Aaron.)

Mantle was Total Baseball’s best player in the AL every year from 1955 through 1962; he was also ranked second in 1952 and fourth in 1954. (Mantle was surely poised to top Total Baseball’s ranking in 1963, when he batted .314 but was limited to just sixty-five games by injuries.) In every season from 1954 through 1965, Mickey and Willie were selected for the All-Star teams. From 1951 through 1964, the Yankees or the Giants were in every World Series except in 1959. Their fortunes in the World Series and All-Star Games contrasted oddly. Mays was the ultimate All-Star, hitting .307 in twenty-four games, producing 29 RBIs and runs scored, while Mantle hit just .233 in sixteen All-Star Games without a single home run. But in twenty World Series games, Mays managed just .239 without a single home run; in sixty-five games, Mantle set the all-time World Series home run mark with 18.

That Mickey and Willie were the most dominant players of that period isn’t simply a myth built up by worshipful New York sportswriters—it’s a fact. The ultimate question isn’t “Were they the greatest of their time?” but “Which of them was the greatest?” (That’s a subject I explore in detail in Appendix A.)

Both were consummate all-around athletes who excelled at basketball and football in high school. Reversing the stereotype, Willie was a great passing quarterback at Fairfield Industrial High School in Westfield, Alabama; at the same time, Mickey was a dazzling running back at Commerce High in Commerce, Oklahoma. If circumstances had been different, they might have ended up playing for the two greatest college football coaches of their era: Willie for Bear Bryant, then at Kentucky—Bryant had been hugely impressed when he saw Willie play baseball for the Black Barons at Rickwood Field—and Mickey for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma.

They were both natural center fielders, but both played other positions when they were young. Mantle spent more time at shortstop than Willie, but neither of them ever quite got the hang of it. Willie began his rookie season in center field; Mickey began his rookie year in right field while Joe DiMaggio struggled through his final season, and in 1952 Mickey became the Yankees’ starting center fielder. Both had great throwing arms and were told during their early careers that they had a shot to make it as a pitcher. Mickey and Willie both idolized Joe DiMaggio. Both loved Westerns and, as boys, dreamed of growing up to be cowboys.

Their lives were dominated by their fathers, who saw baseball as a way for their sons to escape a life of brutal manual labor. For Cat Mays it was the steel mills, for Mutt Mantle the hellish zinc mines. By the time Mickey and Willie graduated from high school, both their mothers had almost disappeared from the narratives of their lives. It was often said of both that they were “born to play ball.” Whether or not that was true, they were certainly bred to the game. Cat began rolling a ball to his son while Willie was still an infant. Mutt began to throw to his son as soon as Mickey could hold a broom handle.

Both men were southerners. (New York sportswriters were fond of labeling Mickey a cowboy, a westerner—he did, after all, once ride a horse to school—but Mickey regarded himself as a southerner and often said so.) The Mantles and the Mayses were living, breathing Americana. The Mantles were what John Steinbeck’s Joad family might have been had they chosen to stay and scrape a living out of the harsh Oklahoma earth rather than emigrate to California. Willie’s folks were the country cousins of the Younger family in Lorraine Hansberry’s great play, A Raisin in the Sun; they resisted the lure of northern cities like Chicago and stayed near their roots.

They were both the products of two generations of ball-playing men, and both honed their skills through competition with industrial leaguers. Though neither of them was actually a member of an industrial league team, their fathers, uncles, and close friends played industrial ball, and Mickey and Willie played with and against them. Mantle and Mays were probably the last products of the great age of industrial league baseball that died out a few years after World War II. Neither man ever truly understood how to manage money. Mantle envied Willie’s salary; Willie was notoriously jealous of Mantle’s income from commercials and endorsements.

Needless to say, in spite of all these similarities, there were enormous cultural differences. Mickey grew up listening to country stars such as Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys; his favorite singer was Hank Williams. Willie and his family listened to country blues singers like Amos Millburn, the more sophisticated R&B sounds of Louis Jordan, and even jazz artists like Billie Holiday and Nat King Cole. The one singer both men enjoyed was Bing Crosby. The Mantle clan was large and closely knit; Mays came from a broken home. Mickey’s father drove him relentlessly toward baseball; Willie’s father helped him along and let him find the way to baseball on his own.

Mickey drank prodigiously and recklessly from an early age; Willie got sick on his first taste of alcohol and never touched it again. Mantle, though he remained married to his high school sweetheart for decades, led a sex life that was an unreported scandal. Mays, in contrast, was never the subject of rumors of promiscuity; his first marriage, to an older, more sophisticated woman, went badly. He had no biological children and, if the journalists who knew him are to be trusted, seldom saw his adopted son after his divorce.

One Mantle biographer, writing seven years after his death, concluded that “Mickey Mantle, like most heroes, was a construction; he was not real. He was all that America wanted itself to be, and he was also all that America feared it could never be.” Surely, it would be no stretch to say the same thing of Willie Mays. In his mammoth one-volume history of the decade, The Fifties, David Halberstam wrote that “Willie Mays seemed to be the model for the new supremely gifted black athlete. . . . He showed that the new-age black athlete had both power and speed. . . . [Mays was] a new kind of athlete being showcased, a player who, in contrast to most white superstars of the past, was both powerful and fast.” At the same time Mays was at his peak, there was a supremely gifted white athlete named Mantle who had at least as much power and speed. Bob Costas says, “There was one thing about Mantle that screamed out ‘The Natural.’ He was a God-made ballplayer.” Surely the same God made Willie Mays.

“Today,” Arnold Hano, one of Willie’s first biographers, wrote in 1965, “players are as skilled as most stars of the past, but something is lacking. Call it color, call it magic, but you call for it in vain. Except for Willie Mays. Oh, there are a few others. Mickey Mantle has always brought his own sense of excitement to the game.” He most certainly did, and who, at their peak, could have denied that Mantle’s “own sense of excitement” was a brand quite similar to Willie’s?

Though their names are melded in the minds of three generations of American sports fans and their careers ran along uncannily parallel lines, they are still, oddly, segregated. Indeed, for most of their playing careers the realities of American life dictated that they be segregated. It wasn’t until the early 1960s that they could meet together at restaurants and nightclubs in most parts of the country, and even then not in the Deep South. And it wasn’t until the 1970s that they began to appear together regularly at card shows, in commercials, and on television shows. Mantle and Mays were friends, probably as close as it was possible for a white man and a black man to be at that time.

In any event, their work schedules didn’t allow them to see each other more than a couple of times a year. Always, the newspapers kept one apprised of what the other was doing. “We kept an eye on each other, Willie and me. I was always aware of him,” Mantle remarked. “I’d go long periods without seeing him,” Mays said after Mantle died, “but I couldn’t go for two days without hearing about him. It was like we were never far apart.” Mickey and Willie—they were given boys’ names that they never grew out of. The private lives of both men revealed that they were ill equipped for life after baseball, a fact that those of us who loved them found almost impossible to understand. How, though, could we have understood? From our perspective, what could have been better than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays? Even after baseball, what better life could a fan imagine than being Mickey Mantle or Willie Mays?

“In some ways,” Roger Kahn told me, “I believe they knew each other better than anyone else knew them. They were the only two men in America who understood the experience they had both been through.”

Reprinted from Mickey and Willie by Allen Barra. Copyright © May 2013. Published by Crown Archetype, a division of Random House, Inc.

Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, David Wolpe reviews Greg Bellow’s memoir, Saul Bellow’s Heart:

After James Atlas’s 2002 biography, widely panned, with its portrayal of an altogether unappealing philanderer, is there balm in Gilead?

“Our father was always easily angered, prone to argument, acutely sensitive, and palpably vulnerable to criticism.” Reading this sentence in Greg Bellow’s new memoir, Saul Bellow’s Heart, one remembers the saying attributed to a French King, “I would rather be killed by my enemies than by my children.” Maybe we should have stuck with Atlas.

But Greg (permit me the first name, to distinguish from his father) has done something complicated and remarkable. He has spared none of the unsavory parts of his father’s character and still enabled us to understand why this man could generate, throughout his life, so much love. Greg expresses anger along the way — this book does not pull punches with the characters who moved through Bellow’s life — without the rancorous bitterness that suggests still unsettled reflections. Greg has opened his own heart. If there is any truth to the old adage that you judge a parent by the child, Greg is a testimonial.

[Photo Credit: Ann Street Studio]

Dwight Garner profiles John Le Carre in the Times:

Yet John le Carré’s greatest invention is easily John le Carré himself. Born in 1931 in Poole, a sprawling coastal town in Dorset, he is a product of a childhood both unusual and enviable — if you happen to be a writer. It made him suspicious of charm of any sort and gave him a limitless fascination with humans and their secrets.

Le Carré, as most of his fans know, is a son of a great, debonair English con man. His father, Ronnie Cornwell, born into mundane middle-class life, remade himself into a funny, gracious man who found that he could talk anyone out of anything, and did so. He was friendly with the Kray twins, the notorious and photogenic London gangsters. He was jailed for insurance fraud. He always, le Carré said, had a scam or two in the works.

“In his high days, he had a racehorse at Maisons-Lafitte outside Paris, and dancing girls, and he’d go whizzing off to Monte Carlo with the former lord mayor of London to stay in grand style at the Hotel de Paris,” le Carré said. “His social rise was extraordinary.” When things went badly, le Carré recalls, “not only were the police looking for him, but the boys were. We had to put the cars behind the house, keep the lights out and so on.”

Le Carré likes to cite a passage from the autobiography of Colin Clark, the son of the art collector Lord Clark, who wrote about what it was like to be taken in by le Carré’s father: “He was your favorite uncle, your family doctor, Bob Boothby and Father Christmas rolled into one.” He could, Clark wrote, “fix anything” and did. “Ronnie invited me to Royal Ascot and gave me a few good dinners. Then he showed me a piece of derelict property, which he did not own, promised to double my money in three months and took the lot.”

Last spring Tyler Plimpton wrote this piece about his father in The New Yorker:

My father’s voice was like one of those supposedly extinct deep-sea creatures that wash up on the shores of Argentina every now and then. It came from a different era, shouldn’t have still existed, but nevertheless, there it was—old New England, old New York, tinged with a hint of King’s College King’s English. You heard it and it could only be him.

So it was that George Plimpton’s accent could not be imitated. On “Saturday Night Live,” even the great impersonator Dana Carvey couldn’t get it quite right. Alan Alda, portraying my dad in the movie version of “Paper Lion” (his book on playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions), didn’t bother with his voice at all. He got the personality totally wrong, too. Alda’s version was always angry or consternated, like a character in a Woody Allen film, while my dad, though he certainly faced hurdles as an amateur in the world of the professional, bore his humiliations with a comic lightness and charm—much of which emanated from that befuddled, self-deprecating professor’s voice.

If you are a certain age and grew up in New York the name Pete Fornatale means Rock n Roll on FM radio. Fornatale passed away last year but he wasn’t just a legendary DJ, he was a writer, too. His final book is on the Stones, an entertaining oral history, combining original interviews with previously published material.

Here’s an excerpt, concerning a pivotal moment in the group’s evolution.

Check it out, enjoy, and then go pick up the book.

From 50 Licks

By Pete Fornatale

At the start of 1968, the Stones were a group in turmoil, coming off what was mostly a lost year. The rift between Brian and the rest of the band was deepening. Brian had been abusive to his girlfriend of two years, Anita Pallenberg, and she ended up leaving him for Keith. Did Keith feel guilty about this?

KEITH RICHARDS: Brian, in many ways, was a right cunt. He was a bastard. Up to a point, you could put up with it. In the last year or so, when Brian was almost totally incapacitated all of the time, he became a joke to the band. It was the only way we could deal with it without getting mad at him. So then it became that very cruel, piss-taking thing behind his back all the time . . .

Things only got worse after Jones’s second bust for marijuana possession in May. Now, not only was Brian in danger of no-showing gigs in the UK, but his legal problems might prevent him from joining the band if and when they decided to return to America.

Keith Richards: There was no immediate necessity to go through the drama of replacing Brian because no gigs were lined up. We first had to recognize the fact that we needed to make a really good album. After Satanic Majesties we wanted to make a STONES album.

And that’s where Jimmy Miller came in.

GLYN JOHNS: Jagger came to me after Satanic Majesties and said, “We’re going to get a new producer, an American.” I thought, “Oh my God, that’s all I need. I don’t think my ego can stand having some bloody Yankee coming in here and start telling me what sort of sound to get with the Rolling Stones.” So I said, “I know somebody! I know there’s one in England already and he’s fantastic,” and he’d just done the Traffic album: Jimmy Miller. And it was a remarkably good record he made, the first record he made with Traffic. I said, “He’s a really nice guy.” I’d met him, he’d been in the next studio room and I said, “I’m sure he’d be fantastic.” Anything but some strange lunatic drug addict from Los Angeles. So . . . Jagger actually took the bait and off he went, met Jimmy Miller and gave him the job. And the first thing Jimmy Miller did (laughs) was fire ME. ’Cause he’d been using Eddie Kramer as an engineer. And so, naturally, quite obviously, he wanted to use his own engineer, the guy he knew.

Miller was exactly what they needed at that time. His roots-based approach allowed the Stones to do what they did best.

ANDY JOHNS: Jimmy Miller made the Stones into the band they should have always been, and tried to be in the beginning.

BILLY ALTMAN: He was a tremendous producer. Mick especially was very impressed with the last Spencer Davis album and that first Traffic album that he had done. He was able to get them a very big sound that they had never really managed to have prior to that. I don’t know how much of that was attributable to Andy Oldham nominally being their producer up until then, but I think on a sonic basis, Miller really got to the heart of what they sounded like as a band, really honing in on Keith’s guitar and Charlie Watts’s drumming.

EDDIE KRAMER: I think they’d had enough at that point. Thank God they found Jimmy Miller. Certainly Mick and Keith and the boys had heard what we’d done with Traffic. And it was amazing. When you put Dear Mr. Fantasy up against Satanic Majesties it completely blows that away. So the Stones probably think, “Who is this guy Jimmy Miller?”

If not for him, I don’t think the Stones would be in the place they are today. Because what he did is that he went to the heart and soul of where they came from. And he was so adept at milking the inner psyche of the band. And he was so clever at production. And he’s the guy I’ve always modeled myself after in terms of how to get a session going, how to make the artists really get excited about what they’re playing. Even to the point where Charlie couldn’t play the drum part the way he was hearing it, he would go and sit in on the drums.

ANDY JOHNS: Jimmy was an extremely talented man. His main gift I think was his ability to get grooves. Which for a band like the Stones is very important. Look at the difference between Beggars Banquet and Satanic Majesties. He put them right back on the rail. So he was quite influential then and came up with all sorts of lovely ideas for them. In fact that’s him playing the cowbell at the beginning of “Honky Tonk Women.” He sets it up.

ROBERT GREENFIELD: Jimmy Miller was a lovely guy. He had this great disposition. And if you want to talk about his greatness as a producer, look at his Traffic albums. What Jimmy brought to the Stones was groove. Jimmy gave them a soul groove, a rhythm groove that they never had before.

JIMMY MILLER: Musically they were just coming out of their psychedelic period, which hadn’t been too successful for them, and I think that was lucky for me, because I didn’t insist that they change direction but they were ready to do so, as was evident from the new songs that they played me. What they had written was rock ’n’ roll, yet I subsequently received a lot of credit for getting them back on course, so I benefited a lot from being in the right place at the right time. There again, I think it’s fair to say that being American also helped, because—as was the case with many successful British bands during that era—they had been raised on American records. As things turned out, it was not always easy—they could take a long time over certain things—but it was always a pleasure, especially when they’d eventually hit those magic moments as they inevitably seemed to do. The first of those just happened to be on the very first track that I produced for them, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

KEITH TALKS “JUMPIN JACK FLASH”

“Jumpin’ Jack Flash” was released as a single in 1968 and remains one of the Stones’ most identifiable songs. It’s also significant in that it essentially kicks off the next period in the band’s existence, Rolling Stones “Mach Two,” as Keith has called it. In Life, Keith tells the story of how the tune got its name:

KEITH RICHARDS: Mick and I had been up all night, it was raining outside and there was the sound of these heavy stomping rubber boots near the window, belonging to my gardener, Jack Dyer, a real country man from Sussex. It woke Mick up. He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Oh, that’s Jack. That’s jumping Jack.” I started to work around the phrase on the guitar, which was in open tuning, singing the phrase “Jumping Jack.” Mick said, “Flash,” and suddenly we had this phrase with a great rhythm and ring to it. So we got to work on it and wrote it.

Keith gives himself some of the credit for the reinvention of the Stones’ sound as well.

KEITH RICHARDS: “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Street Fighting Man” came about because I had become fascinated by the possibilities of playing an acoustic guitar through a cassette recorder, using it as a pick up, really, so that I could still get the crispness of an acoustic—which you can never get off an electric guitar—but overloading this tiny little machine so the effect was that it sounded both acoustic and electric. Technology was starting to increase in sophistication, but I just wanted to reduce it back to basics. I bought one of the first cassette machines—a must for a budding songwriter—and then day in, day out recorded on it. Then I began to get interested in the actual sound of the machine, how close you could put the microphone to the guitar and what effect you could get out of it . . . When we were in the studio I would bring in that little Philips cassette recorder, get a wooden extension speaker, plug that into the back of the recorder, shove a microphone in front of the speaker in the middle of the studio and record it. We would all sit back and watch this little microphone record the cassette machine in the middle of the studio at Olympic, which was the size of Sadler’s Wells. Then we’d go back, listen to it, play over it, mash it up, and there was the track.

EDDIE KRAMER: We used Jimmy Miller’s Wollensak—a cassette machine with a microphone in it. We put it on the floor of the studio and we recorded Keith’s guitar, and I believe Charlie was just using a brush or a stick on the snare for the backbeat. After we cut the track on the cassette machine, we played it back on a little speaker, then rerecorded that on one track of a four-track machine. That was the guide track, then everybody overdubbed to that. When you hear the beginning of the song, you can hear the amount of wow—on a cassette machine when you play the straight chord you hear “bo-wow wowwow” because the movement of the tape against the pinch wheel was never very steady. It wasn’t a professional machine . . . You hear the movement of the pitch, which is the reason that it has this funky sound which everyone dug at that time.

The resulting album would go on to be one of the Stones’ collective favorites. Its back-to-basics approach was natural for them.

BILL WYMAN: It’s probably because we listened to and played so much early blues material. Musically, it was very simple, so you had to put a lot of feeling into it to make it work. Whenever we rehearse and learn new numbers, every other thing we play is a jam on an old Elmore James or Muddy Waters or Chuck Berry thing. I know a lot of people say, “What are you playing that old stuff for?” But we’re not doing it for sentimental reasons, we’re doing it to retain the feeling of those blues and R&B things.

You can’t have everybody flying off everywhere and showing off your chops. Besides, our chops aren’t always that good! I think the great thing about the Stones is the simplicity of it—that slightly ragged rhythm that sounds like it might fall apart by the next bar but never does. We always have scrappy endings; we play with kind of a pulse that fluctuates between being slightly behind and slightly in front of the beat but it swings like that. And it works for us. I hate bands that play on eighths or sixteenths, there’s no feel there, nothing seems to be coming from inside them.

On the contrary, the bluesy feel of Beggars Banquet still resonates. One album track that stands out is “No Expectations.”

BILLY ALTMAN: “No Expectations” to me is one of the great Stones songs in their entire body of work. And it really stands out to me because it’s one of the last things of substance that Brian Jones was able to contribute to the band, his slide playing on there. It’s Robert Johnson, it’s Delta blues, it’s everything about their connection to the American blues. For me, that remains one of the high points of the album.

MICK JAGGER: That’s Brian playing [slide guitar]. We were sitting around in a circle on the floor, singing and playing, recording with open mics. That was the last time I remember Brian really being totally involved in something that was really worth doing. He was there with everyone else. It’s funny how you remember—but that was the last moment I remember him doing that, because he had just lost interest in everything.

BILLY ALTMAN: Even though Brian was already out the door, there’s more of him on there than he’s usually given credit for. His spots are few, but they are significant. In addition to his work on “No Expectations,” his sitar on “Street Fighting Man” and his harmonica on “Prodigal Son” give him a real presence.

With Brian fading toward the background, other musicians stepped up as well.

BILLY ALTMAN: Nicky Hopkins added a tremendous amount to Beggars Banquet. I’m not sure how much of this was Jimmy Miller, but it seems like someone realized that they need some other voice instrumentally besides Keith’s guitar, and Nicky Hopkins is the secret weapon of Beggars Banquet and then again on Let It Bleed. He is really one of the great unsung heroes of British rock during that period. And the combination of Nicky Hopkins and Ian Stewart during that period works wonderfully and adds dimension because Stewart is such a good boogie-woogie blues pianist.

ANDY JOHNS: Nicky is on everything. He was the best and the greatest. God bless Nicky Hopkins. He added so much to that band. Sometimes you wouldn’t really notice it. But if you take the piano out then the house of cards collapses a bit. He was always coming up with gorgeous little melodies. Earlier, “She’s a Rainbow.” That’s Nicky. Of course he was doing a lot of things like that. Plus he was extremely rhythmic. People don’t remember him for being rhythmic. But he was.

When people think of Nicky Hopkins they think of his right hand. But he would make the groove happen sometimes. If you took him out, it’s “Oh, what happened here?” Which is normal. If they are listening to him they are gonna play around him. Or with him. And if you take one of those elements out: “What happened here?” It’s music. See. That’s how it works.

The album’s focal point became one of the Stones’ most famous songs, “Sympathy for the Devil.”

CHARLIE WATTS: “Sympathy for the Devil” was tried six different ways. I don’t mean at once. It was all night doing it one way, then another full night trying it another way, and we just could not get it right. It would never fit a regular rhythm. I first heard Mick play that one on the steps of my house on an acoustic guitar. The first time I heard it, it was really light and had a kind of Brazilian sound. Then when we got in the studio we poured things on it, and it was something different. I could never get a rhythm for it, except one, which is like a samba on the snare drum. It was always a bit like a dance band until we got Rocky Dijon in, playing the congas. By messing about with that, we got the thing done.

COUNTRY HONK

Beggars Banquet also featured another new, rootsy element for the Stones: country music.

KEITH RICHARDS: It is the other side of rock ’n’ roll. Rock ’n’ roll, basically, is blues, and then put in a little bit of white hillbilly melody. It’s that lovely coming together of one culture hitting another which is what music’s always about. What I’ve always loved about rock ’n’ roll is that it’s a beautiful synthesis of white music and black music. It’s a beautiful cauldron to mix things up in.

Keith’s budding friendship with Gram Parsons was the inspiration.

KEITH RICHARDS: I first met Gram in 1968, when the Byrds were appearing in London . . . I knew the Byrds from Mr. Tambourine Man on . . . But when I saw them with Gram, I could see this was a radical turn. I went backstage, and we hooked up. Then the Byrds came through London again, on their way to South Africa. I was like, “Man, we don’t go there.” The sanctions and the embargo were on. So he quit the Byrds, right there and then. Of course, he’s got nowhere to stay, so he moved in with me.

Others, notably Chris Hillman of the Byrds, have doubted that apartheid had anything to do with Parsons’s decision to leave the band. Hillman went so far as to suggest that Parsons was a Rolling Stones groupie. A friend of Parsons and employee of the Stones from that time refutes this idea:

PHIL KAUFMAN: Nothing could be further from the truth. Gram was one of the only guys in the world who hung out with famous people like the Stones and who carried his own weight. If anything, Keith was the “groupie” of Gram. Gram was teaching the Rolling Stones country music. Quite often we’d just sit around the house—Gram, Mick, Keith, and I. They had been to Ace Records and bought every country album they could find: George Jones, Merle Haggard, Dave Dudley, Ernest Tubb—you name it. Gram would say, “Here is an example of this,” and he’d tell me which record he wanted and I’d play the record. They’d listen to it, tap their toes to it, listen to the chords, and then Gram had me play George Jones, . . . That was what Gram was doing. I recorded Gram and Keith singing together, but sadly those tapes are long gone.

Here’s Mick’s take on the Stones first foray into country:

MICK JAGGER: As far as country music was concerned, we used to play country songs, but we’d never record them—or we recorded them but never released them. Keith and I had been playing Johnny Cash records and listening to the Everly Brothers—who were SO country—since we were kids. I used to love country music even before I met Keith. I loved George Jones and really fast, shit-kicking country music, though I didn’t really like the maudlin songs too much . . . The country songs, like “Factory Girl” or “Dear Doctor,” on Beggars Banquet were really pastiche. There’s a sense of humor in country music anyway, a way of looking at life in a humorous kind of way— and I think we were just acknowledging that element of the music.

BILLY ALTMAN: There is a lot of humor in the country songs on Beggars Banquet. At the time, I’m not sure how much of it any of us got. Back then, with everything that was going on with the tensions of 1968, they just seemed kind of weird. But listening now, “Dear Doctor” and “Factory Girl” are a lot of fun. And I think that’s one of the nice things about the album. They provide a balance against things like “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.”

One critic correctly identified a source of inspiration for “Sympathy for the Devil —the Stones’ own blues roots.

MICK FARREN: One of the major devices used by the Stones (and a lot of blues singers—Howlin’ Wolf, Robert Johnson, Lightnin’ Hopkins) to accentuate the shock of their music is consistent use of first person involvement in their lyrics. Jagger doesn’t sing about the Devil, he sings about being the Devil.

KEITH RICHARDS: “Sympathy” is quite an uplifting song. It’s just a matter of looking [the Devil] in the face. He’s there all the time. I’ve had very close contact with Lucifer—I’ve met him several times. Evil people tend to bury it and hope it sorts itself out and doesn’t rear its ugly head. “Sympathy for the Devil” is just as appropriate now, with 9/11. There it is again, big time. When that song was written, it was a time of turmoil. It was the first sort of international chaos since World War II. And confusion is not the ally of peace and love. You want to think the world is perfect. Everybody gets sucked into that. And as America has found out to its dismay, you can’t hide. You might as well accept the fact that evil is there and deal with it any way you can. “Sympathy for the Devil” is a song that says, “Don’t forget him.” If you confront him, then he’s out of a job.

UNDERCOVER OF THE NIGHT

Both Decca in the UK and London Records in the US rejected the planned album cover for Beggars Banquet.

CHARLIE WATTS: The toilet one. The graffiti one around the toilet, which they used in an ad later. That was the first one and they refused to put it out.

MICK JAGGER: We really have tried to keep the album within the bounds of good taste. I mean we haven’t shown the whole lavatory. That would have been rude. We’ve only shown the top half! Two people at the record company have told us that the sleeve is “terribly offensive.” Apart from them we have been unable to find anyone else who it offends. I asked one person to pick out something that offended him and he quite seriously picked out “Bob Dylan.” Apparently “Bob Dylan’s Dream” on the wall offends him . . . We’ve gone as far as we can in terms of concessions over the release of this sleeve. I even suggested that they put it in a brown paper bag with “Unfit for Children” and the title of the album on the outside. But no, they wouldn’t have it. They stuck to their guns . . . It was simply an idea that had not been done before and we chose to put the writing on a lavatory wall because that’s where you see most writings on walls. There’s really nothing obscene there except in people’s own minds . . . We’ll get this album distributed somehow even if I have to go down the end of Greek Street and Carlisle Street at two o’clock on Saturday morning and sell them myself.

In the end, Mick’s guerrilla marketing strategy wasn’t necessary. After several months of delay, the record was released with an album that looked like a wedding invite, complete with the letters RSVP.

[Photo Credit: Tim Kelley Collection; Photofest; Ira Korman Collection; poster by David Edward Byrd]

Over at the New York Review of Books here’s Gary Wills on Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power:

Robert Caro’s epic biography of Lyndon Johnson—this is the fourth volume of a planned five—was originally conceived and has been largely executed as a study of power. But this volume has been overtaken by a more pressing theme. It is a study in hate. The book’s impressive architectonics come from the way everything is structured around two poles or pillars—Lyndon Johnson and Robert Kennedy, radiating reciprocal hostilities at every step of the story. Caro calls it “perhaps the greatest blood feud of American politics in the twentieth century.” With some reservations about the word “blood,” one has to concede that Caro makes good his claim for this dynamic in the tale he has to tell.

There are many dramatic events, throughout the volume, that illustrate Caro’s theme. I begin with one that could seem insignificant to those not knowing the background on both sides, because it shows that even the slightest brush between these two triggered rancorous inner explosions. Johnson, newly sworn in as president, had just come back to Washington on Air Force One from the terrible death of John Kennedy in Dallas. Robert Kennedy sped up the steps to the plane and rushed fiercely down the length of the cabin through everyone standing in his way (including the new president) to reach Jacqueline Kennedy. Understandable that he would first of all want to comfort the widow? Yes, but. This was the first of many ways Bobby (called that throughout) tried in the first days to ignore the man who had ignominiously, in his eyes, supplanted his brother by a murder in the man’s own Texas.

Caro understands that Bobby was determined not to see Johnson, even if he saw him—so he did not see him. But Johnson saw him not seeing, and hated him the more. That is how hate narrows one—narrows what one wants to see, or is able to see, in order to keep one’s hatred tended and hard.

Check out this BBC radio documentary on the great Damon Runyon.

Check out Michael Weinreb’s appreciation of Donald Westlake over at Grantland:

Westlake admired Hammett’s laconic ability to tell a story without delving into sentimentality; he never liked Chandler and some of the others much at all, and while he published some private-eye novels under a pseudonym, he also recognized the shortcomings of the form. In 1960, he wrote his first novel under his own name, The Mercenaries. He was young and voracious, and he produced so much that he required multiple pen names to keep up with his output: In 1961 alone, he published nine books under three different names.10 And then one day around that time, Westlake went to visit a friend in New Jersey and took the wrong bus home and wound up on the wrong side of the George Washington Bridge. He trudged across the bridge, and the wind and the tension of the bridge inspired in him the idea of a character whose “speed and solidity and tension matched that of the bridge” itself. He thought of a man who looked a little like Jack Palance, a man seething with anger, a man who, when offered a ride by a Samaritan while walking across the bridge, tells him — “for reasons none of us have been able to figure out,” Block says — to go to hell. This was the catalyst, and this became the opening scene of the first Parker novel, The Hunter.

One evening Block traveled to Westlake’s apartment in the Canarsie neighborhood of Brooklyn and read the first chapter. Block asked if he knew where it was going; Westlake assured him he’d figure it out. It was how he worked on most everything: He called it the “narrative-push” method, in which one chapter leads to the inspiration for the next, and nothing is outlined. In his first draft of The Hunter, Westlake landed Parker in prison at the end, because, in the early 1960s, that seemed the natural denouement for such a remorseless persona; his paperback editor at Pocket Books, Bucklin Moon, found it compelling enough that he asked Westlake if he could devise a way to more easily position Parker for a follow-up. Westlake obliged. The Hunter was published in 1962, and the following year, Westlake published three more Parker books. In the sequel, The Man With the Getaway Face, Parker visits a plastic surgeon who alters his appearance, and then he robs an armored car; in The Outfit, Parker schemes against the mafia; in The Mourner, Parker attempts to abscond with a 15th-century statue and slugs an asthmatic hoodlum in the process; in The Score, Parker and a band of professionals manage to rob an entire small town over the course of an evening.11

More than anything, Westlake once said, these are books about a man at work. Parker is strangely puritanical, in that he does not permit himself to even think about sex until a job is complete. During a holdup, he learns the first names of the people he’s holding at gunpoint, in order to soothe their egos. Parker and his catalogue of partners carry their twisted Protestant work ethic from job to job: It is fascinating how much of the text focuses on the process of criminality, on scenes of men sitting around a table in front of blueprints, on the notion of preparing for the worst and then accepting that things might go off in unexpected directions regardless of how much you plan for them. There are double-crosses and betrayals and outright failures, and the world is indifferent to all of this suffering, but Parker soldiers onward. And I imagine all of this has at least a little to do with the way the author felt when he sat down at his typewriter every morning.

My father loved Damon Runyon’s Broadway stories so I grew up hearing phrases like “certain parties” and “more than somewhat.” I started reading Runyon when I was in high school and had a book-on-tape of Runyon’s short fiction that was read by Joe Mantenga–or was it Jerry Orbach? Either way, I enjoy the stories and every so often will pick up one of his compilations and choose a random piece just to get a taste.

Here’s the novelist William Kennedy writing about Runyon for the New York Times back in 1992:

[The] 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 infused into 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 wondrous to encounter.

…Far more serious writers than Damon Runyon have fallen on their faces and other parts because they lacked what he had: a love and mastery of language. His plots, on the other hand, were usually convoluted exercises in simple irony — O. Henry reversals, frequently predictable, sometimes zany, with resolutions, at times, 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.

And here is Pete Hamill from the Introduction to a fine Runyon collection:

The beautiful thing about Damon Runyon is that he still speaks to us across the decades. He was born in the nineteenth century—fittingly in Manhattan, Kansas—and died in 1946 after a long struggle with cancer. In between, he wrote millions of words of journalism, some poetry, and the wonderful Broadway stories that make up part of this book.

Almost all of them are tales related by an unnamed narrator (who is surely a stand-in for Runyon), and they describe a world that vanished long ago, if indeed it ever existed at all. The world was located in about ten square blocks of midtown Manhattan during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Usually the area is called Times Square, although Runyon, who worked for Hearst and never The New York Times, seldom uses that name. It is a world primarily inhabited by the New York children of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, although Runyon enjoys describing the collisions of his Broadway people with various outlanders: slumming members of the upper class, greenhorns from way out in America, ambitious grifters in town to make big scores. There are almost no African-Americans (and in the racist argot of the era, Runyon refers to various black porters and waiters as “stove lids”). Harlem in that era was vivid with life and ambition. Runyon, the story writer, never bothered going there, except for glancing visits on the way to and from the Polo Grounds, where a team called the Giants once played baseball, long ago.

The Runyon world appears in these stories to be a male club (one critic describes it as “homoerotic”). His gangsters, gamblers, old bootleggers, prizefighters, waiters, musicians, and newspapermen are triumphantly male. Their language has a male rhythm. So do their lives, where the macho codes often lead them to mayhem. But many of the stories feature women, and the effect they have on men. The women are often tougher than men, and certainly more realistic. Most of them accept the notion of love, but they almost never separate that dangerous and delightful emotion from the hard realities of economics. Runyon’s showgirls all seem to understand that their beauty is a transient thing, an accident of genes and luck, but that with clarity and a certain amount of guile, a doll can build a secure future upon that splendid accident. Most of Runyon’s females would have agreed with Runyon’s advice to young writers: “Get the money.”

Hamill continues:

The voice of those stories is usually the “historical present,” as in “Butch Minds the Baby”:

“One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John.”

The narrator is not sitting in Mindy’s while be is telling the story; this unfolding story happened in the past even though Runyon uses the present tense. But the simple device gives the stories a kind of energy that would be absent in most uses of the past tense. It looks easy, until you try to do it. The voice was above all urban, drawing on Yiddish, which in the 1920s was New York’s second language, as Spanish is today. Thus, a five-dollar bill is a “finiff” and various people are “starkers” {tough guys) or “gonophs” (thieves, cheats, pickpockets). Sometimes we can hear Runyon’s people talking above their station, playing social roles that are lies, but we certainly don’t mistake them for cbaracters out of Edith Wharton, who do the same thing.

This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don’t speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours. There is no obscenity, for example, no compounding of vile words to express contempt. And in the tales of romance there are subtle implications of sexual activity but no clinical details and no eroticism. Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives.

Runyon’s influence on pop culture is undeniable, you can see his language filtered on down through Tony Soprano and his boys. And Francis Ford Coppolar, Martin Scorsese, and David Simon have all been accused of sentimentalizing their gangsters.

Anyhow, if you’ve never read Runyon, I found his Omnibus on-line, so I’m going to take the opportunity to reprint some of his work in this space. Meanwhile, over at the Internet Archive you can find some radio shows based on his stories.

For now, please enjoy…

“Romance in the Roaring Forties”:

By Damon Runyon

Only a rank sucker will think of taking two peeks at Dave the Dude’s doll, because while Dave may stand for the first peek, figuring it is a mistake, it is a sure thing he will get sored up at the second peek, and Dave the Dude is certainly not a man to have sored up at you.

But this Waldo Winchester is one hundred per cent. sucker, which is why he takes quite a number of peeks at Dave’s doll. And what is more, she takes quite a number of peeks right back at him. And there you are. When a guy and a doll get to taking peeks back and forth at each other, why, there you are indeed.

This Waldo Winchester is a nice-looking young guy who writes pieces about Broadway for the Morning Item. He writes about the goings-on in night clubs, such as fights, and one thing and another, and also about who is running around with who, including guys and dolls.

Sometimes this is very embarrassing to people who may be married and are running around with people who are not married, but of course Waldo Winchester cannot be expected to ask one and all for their marriage certificates before he writes his pieces for the paper.

The chances are if Waldo Winchester knows Miss Billy Perry is Dave the Dude’s doll, he will never take more than his first peek at her, but nobody tips him off until his second or third peek, and by this time Miss Billy Perry is taking her peeks back at him and Waldo Winchester is hooked.

In fact, he is plumb gone, and being a sucker, like I tell you, he does not care whose doll she is. Personally, I do not blame him much, for Miss Billy Perry is worth a few peeks, especially when she is out on the floor of Miss Missouri Martin’s Sixteen Hundred Club doing her tap dance. Still, I do not think the best tap-dancer that ever lives can make me take two peeks at her if I know she is Dave the Dude’s doll, for Dave somehow thinks more than somewhat of his dolls.

He especially thinks plenty of Miss Billy Perry, and sends her fur coats, and diamond rings, and one thing and another, which she sends back to him at once, because it seems she does not take presents from guys. This is considered most surprising all along Broadway, but people figure the chances are she has some other angle.

Anyway, this does not keep Dave the Dude from liking her just the same, and so she is considered his doll by one and all, and is respected accordingly until this Waldo Winchester comes along.

It happens that he comes along while Dave the Dude is off in the Modoc on a little run down to the Bahamas to get some goods for his business, such as Scotch and champagne, and by the time Dave gets back Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are at the stage where they sit in corners between her numbers and hold hands.

Of course nobody tells Dave the Dude about this, because they do not wish to get him excited. Not even Miss Missouri Martin tells him, which is most unusual because Miss Missouri Martin, who is sometimes called ‘Mizzoo’ for short, tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.

You see, the idea is when Dave the Dude is excited he may blow somebody’s brains out, and the chances are it will be nobody’s brains but Waldo Winchester’s, although some claim that Waldo Winchester has no brains or he will not be hanging around Dave the Dude’s doll.

I know Dave is very, very fond of Miss Billy Perry, because I hear him talk to her several times, and he is most polite to her and never gets out of line in her company by using cuss words, or anything like this. Furthermore, one night when One-eyed Solly Abrahams is a little stewed up he refers to Miss Billy Perry as a broad, meaning no harm whatever, for this is the way many of the boys speak of the dolls.

But right away Dave the Dude reaches across the table and bops One-eyed Solly right in the mouth, so everybody knows from then on that Dave thinks well of Miss Billy Perry. Of course Dave is always thinking fairly well of some doll as far as this goes, but it is seldom he gets to bopping guys in the mouth over them.

Well, one night what happens but Dave the Dude walks into the Sixteen Hundred Club, and there in the entrance, what does he see but this Waldo Winchester and Miss Billy Perry kissing each other back and forth friendly. Right away Dave reaches for the old equalizer to shoot Waldo Winchester, but it seems Dave does not happen to have the old equalizer with him, not expecting to have to shoot anybody this particular evening.

So Dave the Dude walks over and, as Waldo Winchester hears him corning and lets go his strangle-hold on Miss Billy Perry, Dave nails him with a big right hand on the chin. I will say for Dave the Dude that he is a fair puncher with his right hand, though his left is not so good, and he knocks Waldo Winchester bow-legged. In fact, Waldo folds right up on the floor.

Well, Miss Billy Perry lets out a screech you can hear clear to the Battery and runs over to where Waldo Winchester lights, and falls on top of him squalling very loud. All anybody can make out of what she says is that Dave the Dude is a big bum, although Dave is not so big, at that, and that she loves Waldo Winchester.

Dave walks over and starts to give Waldo Winchester the leather, which is considered customary in such cases, but he seems to change his mind, and instead of booting Waldo around, Dave turns and walks out of the joint looking very black and mad, and the next anybody hears of him he is over in the Chicken Club doing plenty of drinking.

This is regarded as a very bad sign indeed, because while everybody goes to the Chicken Club now and then to give Tony Berzola, the owner, a friendly play, very few people care to do any drinking there, because Tony’s liquor is not meant for anybody to drink except the customers.

Well, Miss Billy Perry gets Waldo Winchester on his pegs again, and wipes his chin off with her handkerchief, and by and by he is all okay except for a big lump on his chin. And all the time she is telling Waldo Winchester what a big bum Dave the Dude is, although afterwards Miss Missouri Martin gets hold of Miss Billy Perry and puts the blast on her plenty for chasing a two-handed spender such as Dave the Dude out of the joint.

‘You are nothing but a little sap,’ Miss Missouri Martin tells Miss Billy Perry. ‘You cannot get the right time off this newspaper guy, while everybody knows Dave the Dude is a very fast man with a dollar.’

‘But I love Mr. Winchester,’ says Miss Billy Perry. ‘He is so romantic. He is not a bootlegger and a gunman like Dave the Dude. He puts lovely pieces in the paper about me, and he is a gentleman at all times.’

Now of course Miss Missouri Martin is not in a position to argue about gentlemen, because she meets very few in the Sixteen Hundred Club and anyway, she does not wish to make Waldo Winchester mad as he is apt to turn around and put pieces in his paper that will be a knock to the joint, so she lets the matter drop.

Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester go on holding hands between her numbers, and maybe kissing each other now and then, as young people are liable to do, and Dave the Dude plays the chill for the Sixteen Hundred Club and everything seems to be all right. Naturally we are all very glad there is no more trouble over the proposition, because the best Dave can get is the worst of it in a jam with a newspaper guy.

Personally, I figure Dave will soon find himself another doll and forget all about Miss Billy Perry, because now that I take another peek at her, I can see where she is just about the same as any other tap-dancer, except that she is red-headed. Tap-dancers are generally blackheads, but I do not know why.

Moosh, the doorman at the Sixteen Hundred Club, tells me Miss Missouri Martin keeps plugging for Dave the Dude with Miss Billy Perry in a quiet way, because he says he hears Miss Missouri Martin make the following crack one night to her: ‘Well, I do not see any Simple Simon on your lean and linger.’

This is Miss Missouri Martin’s way of saying she sees no diamond on Miss Billy Perry’s finger, for Miss Missouri Martin is an old experienced doll, who figures if a guy loves a doll he will prove it with diamonds. Miss Missouri Martin has many diamonds herself, though how any guy can ever get himself heated up enough about Miss Missouri Martin to give her diamonds is more than I can see.

I am not a guy who goes around much, so I do not see Dave the Dude for a couple of weeks, but late one Sunday afternoon little Johnny McGowan, who is one of Dave’s men, comes and says to me like this: ‘What do you think? Dave grabs the scribe a little while ago and is taking him out for an airing!’

Well, Johnny is so excited it is some time before I can get him cooled out enough to explain. It seems that Dave the Dude gets his biggest car out of the garage and sends his driver, Wop Joe, over to the Item office where Waldo Winchester works, with a message that Miss Billy Perry wishes to see Waldo right away at Miss Missouri Martin’s apartment on Fifty-ninth Street.

Of course this message is nothing but the phonus bolonus, but Waldo drops in for it and gets in the car. Then Wop Joe drives him up to Miss Missouri Martin’s apartment, and who gets in the car there but Dave the Dude. And away they go.

Now this is very bad news indeed, because when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing the guy very often does not come back. What happens to him I never ask, because the best a guy can get by asking questions in this man’s town is a bust in the nose.

But I am much worried over this proposition, because I like Dave the Dude, and I know that taking a newspaper guy like Waldo Winchester out for an airing is apt to cause talk, especially if he does not come back. The other guys that Dave the Dude takes out for airings do not mean much in particular, but here is a guy who may produce trouble, even if he is a sucker, on account of being connected with a newspaper.

I know enough about newspapers to know that by and by the editor or somebody will be around wishing to know where Waldo Winchester’s pieces about Broadway are, and if there are no pieces from Waldo Winchester, the editor will wish to know why. Finally it will get around to where other people will wish to know, and after a while many people will be running around saying: ‘Where is Waldo Winchester?’

And if enough people in this town get to running around saying where is So-and-so, it becomes a great mystery and the newspapers bop on the cops and the cops hop on everybody, and by and by there .is so much heat in town that it is no place for a guy to be.

But what is to be done about this situation I do not know. Personally, it strikes me as very bad indeed, and while Johnny goes away to do a little telephoning, 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.

Finally Johnny comes back, very excited, and says: ‘Hey, the Dude is up at the Woodcock Inn on the Pelham Parkway, and he is sending out the word for one and all to come at once. Good Time Charley Bernstein just gets the wire and tells me. Something is doing. The rest of the mob are on their way, so let us be moving.’

But here is an invitation which does not strike me as a good thing at all. The way I look at it, Dave the Dude is no company for a guy like me at this time. The chances are he either does something to Waldo Winchester already, or is getting ready to do something to him which I wish no part of.

Personally, I have nothing against newspaper guys, not even the ones who write pieces about Broadway. If Dave the Dude wishes to do something to Waldo Winchester, all right, but what is the sense of bringing outsiders into it? But the next thing I know, I am in Johnny McGowan’s roadster, and he is zipping along very fast indeed, paying practically no attention to traffic lights or anything else.

As we go busting out the Concourse, I get to thinking the situation over, and I figure that Dave the Dude probably keeps thinking about Miss Billy Perry, and drinking liquor such as they sell in the Chicken Club, until finally he blows his topper. The way I look at it, only a guy who is off his nut will think of taking a newspaper guy out for an airing over a doll, when dolls are a dime a dozen in this man’s town.

Still, I remember reading in the papers about a lot of different guys who are considered very sensible until they get tangled up with a doll, and maybe loving her, and the first thing anybody knows they hop out of windows, or shoot themselves, or somebody else, and I can see where even a guy like Dave the Dude may go daffy over a doll.

I can see that little Johnny McGowan is worried, too, but he does not say much, and we pull up in front of the Woodcock Inn in no time whatever, to find a lot of other cars there ahead of us, some of which I recognize as belonging to different parties.

The Woodcock Inn is what is called a road house, and is run by Big Nig Skalsky, a very nice man indeed, and a friend of everybody’s. It stands back a piece off the Pelham Parkway and is a very pleasant place to go to, what with Nig having a good band and a floor show with a lot of fair-looking dolls, and everything else a man can wish for a good time. It gets a nice play from nice people, although Nig’s liquor is nothing extra.

Personally, I never go there much, because I do not care for road houses, but it is a great spot for Dave the Dude when he is pitching parties, or even when he is only drinking single-handed. There is a lot of racket in the joint as we drive up, and who comes out to meet us but Dave the Dude himself with a big hello. His face is very red, and he seems heated up no little, but he does not look like a guy who is meaning any harm to anybody, especially a newspaper guy.

‘Come in, guys!’ Dave the Dude yells. ‘Come right in!’

So we go in, and the place is full of people sitting at tables, or out on the floor dancing, and I see Miss Missouri Martin with all her diamonds hanging from her in different places, and Good Time Charley Bernstein, and Feet Samuels, and Tony Bertazzola, and Skeets Boliver, and Nick the Greek, and Rochester Red, and a lot of other guys and dolls from around and about.

In fact, it looks as if everybody from all the joints on Broadway are present, including Miss Billy Perry, who is all dressed up in white and is lugging a big bundle of orchids and so forth, and who is giggling and smiling and shaking hands and going on generally. And finally I see Waldo Winchester, the scribe, sitting at a ringside table all by himself, but there is nothing wrong with him as far as I can see. I mean, he seems to be all in one piece so far.

‘Dave,’ I say to Dave the Dude, very quiet, ‘what is coming off here? You know a guy cannot be too careful what he does around this town, and I will hate to see you tangled up in anything right now.’

‘Why,’ Dave says, ‘what are you talking about? Nothing is coming off here but a wedding, and it is going to be the best wedding anybody on Broadway ever sees. We are waiting for the preacher now.’

‘You mean somebody is going to be married?’ I ask, being now somewhat confused.

‘Certainly,’ Dave the Dude says. ‘What do you think? What is the idea of a wedding, anyway?’

‘Who is going to be married?’ I ask.

‘Nobody but Billy and the scribe,’ Dave says. ‘This is the greatest thing I ever do in my life. I run into Billy the other night and she is crying her eyes out because she loves this scribe and wishes to marry him, but it seems the scribe has nothing he can use for money. So I tell Billy to leave it to me, because you know I love her myself so much I wish to see her happy at all times, even if she has to marry to be that way.

‘So I frame this wedding party, and after they are married I am going to stake them to a few G’s so they can get a good running start,’ Dave says. ‘But I do not tell the scribe and I do not let Billy tell him as I wish it to be a big surprise to him. I kidnap him this afternoon and bring him out here and he is scared half to death thinking I am going to scrag him.

‘In fact,’ Dave says, ‘I never see a guy so scared. He is still so scared nothing seems to cheer him up. Go over and tell him to shake himself together, because nothing but happiness for him is coming off here.’

Well, I wish to say I am greatly relieved to think that Dave intends doing nothing worse to Waldo Winchester than getting him married up, so I go over to where Waldo is sitting. He certainly looks somewhat alarmed. He is all in a huddle with himself, and he has what you call a vacant stare in his eyes. I can see that he is indeed frightened, so I give him a jolly slap on the back and I say: ‘Congratulations, pal! Cheer up, the worst is yet to come!’

‘You bet it is,’ Waldo Winchester says, his voice so solemn I am greatly surprised.

‘You are a fine-looking bridegroom,’ I say. ‘You look as if you are at a funeral instead of a wedding. Why do you not laugh ha-ha, and maybe take a dram or two and go to cutting up some?’

‘Mister,’ says Waldo Winchester, ‘my wife is not going to care for me getting married to Miss Billy Perry.’

‘Your wife?’ I say, much astonished. ‘What is this you are speaking of? How can you have any wife except Miss Billy Perry? This is great foolishness.’

‘I know,’ Waldo says, very sad. ‘I know. But I got a wife just the same, and she is going to be very nervous when she hears about this. My wife is very strict with me. My wife does not allow me to go around marrying people. My wife is Lola Sapola, of the Rolling Sapolas, the acrobats, and I am married to her for five years. She is the strong lady who juggles the other four people in the act. My wife just gets back from a year’s tour of the Interstate time, and she is at the Marx Hotel right this minute. I am upset by this proposition.’

‘Does Miss Billy Perry know about this wife?’ I ask.

‘No,’ he says. ‘No. She thinks I am single-o.’

‘But why do you not tell Dave the Dude you are already married when he brings you out here to marry you off to Miss Billy Perry?’ I ask. ‘It seems to me a newspaper guy must know it is against the law for a guy to marry several different dolls unless he is a Turk, or some such.’

‘Well,’ Waldo says, ‘if I tell Dave the Dude I am married after taking his doll away from him, I am quite sure Dave will be very much excited, and maybe do something harmful to my health.’

Now there is much in what the guy says, to be sure. I am inclined to think, myself, that Dave will be somewhat disturbed when he learns of this situation, especially when Miss Billy Perry starts in being unhappy about it. But what is to be done I do not know, except maybe to let the wedding go on, and then when Waldo is out of reach of Dave, to put in a claim that he is insane, and that the marriage does not count. It is a sure thing I do not wish to be around when Dave the Dude hears Waldo is already married.

I am thinking that maybe I better take it on the lam out of here, when there is a great row at the door and I hear Dave the Dude yelling that the preacher arrives. He is a very nice-looking preacher, at that, though he seems somewhat surprised by the goings-on, especially when Miss Missouri Martin steps up and takes charge of him. Miss Missouri Martin tells him she is fond of preachers, and is quite used to them, because she is twice married by preachers, and twice by justices of the peace, and once by a ship’s captain at sea.

By this time one and all present, except maybe myself and Waldo Winchester, and the preacher and maybe Miss Billy Perry, are somewhat corned. Waldo is still sitting at his table looking very sad and saying ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ to Miss Billy Perry whenever she skips past him, for Miss Billy Perry is too much pleasured up with happiness to stay long in one spot.

Dave the Dude is more corned than anybody else, because he has two or three days’ running start on everybody. And when Dave the Dude is corned I wish to say that he is a very unreliable guy as to temper, and he is apt to explode right in your face any minute. But he seems to be getting a great bang out of the doings.

Well, by and by Nig Skolsky has the dance floor cleared, and then he moves out on the floor a sort of arch of very beautiful flowers. The idea seems to be that Miss Billy Perry and Waldo Winchester are to be married under this arch. I can see that Dave the Dude must put in several days planning this whole proposition, and it must cost him plenty of the old do-re-mi, especially as I see him showing Miss Missouri Martin a diamond ring as big as a cough drop.

‘It is for the bride,’ Dave the Dude says. ‘The poor loogan she is marrying will never have enough dough to buy her such a rock, and she always wishes a big one. I get it off a guy who brings it in from Los Angeles. I am going to give the bride away myself in person, so how do I act, Mizzoo? I want Billy to have everything according to the book.’

Well, while Miss Missouri Martin is trying to remember back to one of her weddings to tell him, I take another peek at Waldo Winchester to see how he is making out. I once see two guys go to the old warm squativoo up in Sing Sing, and I wish to say both are laughing heartily compared to Waldo Winchester at this moment.

Miss Billy Perry is sitting with him and the orchestra leader is calling his men dirty names because none of them can think of how ‘Oh, Promise Me’ goes, when Dave the Dude yells: ‘Well, we are all set! Let the happy couple step forward!’

Miss Billy Perry bounces up and grabs Waldo Winchester by the arm and pulls him up out of his chair. After a peek at his face I am willing to lay 6 to 5 he does not make the arch. But he finally gets there with everybody laughing and clapping their hands, and the preacher comes forward, and Dave the Dude looks happier than I ever see him look before in his life as they all get together under the arch of flowers.

Well, all of a sudden there is a terrible racket at the front door of the Woodcock Inn, with some doll doing a lot of hollering in a deep voice that sounds like a man’s, and naturally everybody turns and looks that way. The doorman, a guy by the name of Slugsy Sachs, who is a very hard man indeed, seems to be trying to keep somebody out, but pretty soon there is a heavy bump and Slugsy Sachs falls down, and in comes a doll about four feet high and five feet wide.

In fact, I never see such a wide doll. She looks all hammered down. Her face is almost as wide as her shoulders, and makes me think of a great big full moon. She comes in bounding-like, and I can see that she is all churned up about something. As she bounces in, I hear a gurgle, and I look around to see Waldo Winchester slumping down to the floor, almost dragging Miss Billy Perry with him.

Well, the wide doll walks right up to the bunch under the arch and says in a large bass voice: ‘Which one is Dave the Dude?’

I am Dave the Dude,’ says Dave the Dude, stepping up. ‘What do you mean by busting in here like a walrus and gumming up our wedding?’

‘So you are the guy who kidnaps my ever-loving husband to marry him off to this little red-headed pancake here, are you?’ the wide doll says, looking at Dave the Dude, but pointing at Miss Billy Perry.

Well now, calling Miss Billy Perry a pancake to Dave the Dude is a very serious proposition, and Dave the Dude gets very angry. He is usually rather polite to dolls, but you can see he does not care for the wide doll’s manner whatever.

‘Say, listen here,’ Dave the Dude says, ‘you better take a walk before somebody clips you. You must be drunk,’ he says. ‘Or daffy,’ he says. ‘What are you talking about, anyway?’

‘You will see what I am talking about,’ the wide doll yells. ‘The guy on the floor there is my lawful husband. You probably frighten him to death, the poor dear. You kidnap him to marry this red-headed thing, and I am going to get you arrested as sure as my name is Lola Sapola, you simple-looking tramp!’

Naturally, everybody is greatly horrified at a doll using such language to Dave the Dude, because Dave is known to shoot guys for much less, but instead of doing something to the wide doll at once, Dave says: ‘What is this talk I hear? Who is married to who? Get out of here!’ Dave says, grabbing the wide doll’s arm.

Well, she makes out as if she is going to slap Dave in the face with her left hand, and Dave naturally pulls his kisser out of the way. But instead of doing anything with her left, Lola Sapola suddenly drives her right fist smack-dab into Dave the Dude’s stomach, which naturally comes forward as his face goes back.

I wish to say I see many a body punch delivered in my life, but I never see a prettier one than this. What is more, Lola Sapola steps in with the punch, so there is plenty on it.

Now a guy who eats and drinks like Dave the Dude does cannot take them so good in the stomach, so Dave goes ‘oaf,’ and sits down very hard on the dance floor, and as he is sitting there he is fumbling in his pants pocket for the old equalizer, so everybody around tears for cover except Lola Sapola, and Miss Billy Perry, and Waldo Winchester.

But before he can get his pistol out, Lola Sapola reaches down and grabs Dave by the collar and hoists him to his feet. She lets go her hold on him, leaving Dave standing on his pins, but teetering around somewhat, and then she drives her right hand to Dave’s stomach a second time.

The punch drops Dave again, and Lola steps up to him as if she is going to give him the foot. But she only gathers up Waldo Winchester from off the floor and slings him across her shoulder like he is a sack of oats, and starts for the door. Dave the Dude sits up on the floor again and by this time he has the old equalizer in his duke.

‘Only for me being a gentleman I will fill you full of slugs,’ he yells.

Lola Sapola never even looks back, because by this time she is petting Waldo Winchester’s head and calling him loving names and saying what a shame it is for bad characters like Dave the Dude to be abusing her precious one. It all sounds to me as if Lola Sapola thinks well of Waldo Winchester.

Well, after she gets out of sight, Dave the Dude gets up off the floor and stands there looking at Miss Billy Perry, who is out to break all crying records. The rest of us come out from under cover, including the preacher, and we are wondering how mad Dave the Dude is going to be about the wedding being ruined. But Dave the Dude seems only disappointed and sad.

‘Billy,’ he says to Miss Billy Perry, ‘I am mighty sorry you do not get your wedding. All I wish for is your happiness, but I do not believe you can ever be happy with this scribe if he also has to have his lion tamer around. As Cupid I am a total bust. This is the only nice thing I ever try to do in my whole life, and it is too bad it does not come off. Maybe if you wait until we can drown her, or something–‘

‘Dave,’ says Miss Billy Perry, dropping so many tears that she seems to finally wash herself right into Dave the Dude’s arms, ‘I will never, never be happy with such a guy as Waldo Winchester. I can see now you are the only man for me.’

‘Well, well, well,’ Dave the Dude says, cheering right up. ‘Where is the preacher? Bring on the preacher and let us have our wedding anyway.’

I see Mr. and Mrs. Dave the Dude the other day, and they seem very happy. But you never can tell about married people, so of course I am never going to let on to Dave the Dude that I am the one who telephones Lola Sapola at the Marx Hotel, because maybe I do not do Dave any too much of a favour, at that.

News that Phillip Roth has retired from writing made its way around today. Here is David Remnick’s take over at The New Yorker:

Roth told Les inRocks that when he turned seventy-four he reread his favorite authors—Dostoyevsky, Conrad, Turgenev, Hemingway. Then, he said, “When I finished, I decided to reread all of my books beginning with the last, ‘Nemesis.’

“I wanted to see if I had wasted my time writing. And I thought it was more or less a success. At the end of his life, the boxer Joe Louis said, ‘I did the best I could with what I had.’ It’s exactly what I would say of my work: I did the best I could with what I had.”

“After that, I decided that I was finished with fiction,” Roth went on. “I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!”

…Roth long resisted the idea of a biography, and he has mocked the form in his fiction and in interviews. Some years ago, he worked for a while with Ross Miller, a professor at the University of Connecticut, but the two fell out and there was no biography. Recently, he wrote a hilarious screed for The New Yorker’s Web site about the Wikipedia entry for “The Human Stain.” But the need for a rather more complete account of his life persisted. This year, Roth relented and signed a collaborative agreement with Blake Bailey, who has written fine biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates. He told Les inRocks that he is allowing Bailey free access to his archives for as long as necessary, but that he has instructed his executors to destroy the archive after his death. “I don’t want my papers lying around,” he said. “No one has to read them.”

[Photo Credit: Eric Thayer]

Joyce Carol Oates salutes Norman Mailer:

I became acquainted with Norman Mailer in the last 10 or 15 years of his life, at a time when he was, shall we say, mellower than he’d been. By this time he’d been married six times and was at this point married to Norris Church—as you all know Norris was one of the most beautiful women … And her physical beauty was matched by an inner, spiritual beauty—she was really quite extraordinary.

I knew them, if not well, as a couple. The first time I’d met Norman was at an event at Lincoln Center—I think it was a fundraiser for a literacy organization. Norman was the MC. And I was one of a number of writers who were giving readings. When I came out on stage, Norman was gracious and shook my hand and introduced me by saying, “Joyce Carol Oates has written this remarkable book On Boxing.” He let that sink in to the audience, then added, “It’s so good I’d almost thought that I had written it myself.” And there were waves of good-natured laughter from the audience and Norman seemed just slightly puzzled, like—Why is that funny?

Norman had meant his remark as the highest praise. In speaking of Norman Mailer we’re speaking of the male ego raised to the very highest, without which we wouldn’t have civilization, I’m sure.

John Cheever turns 100.

Here’s Allan Gurganus on Cheever over at the New York Review of Books:

I come, not to bury Cheever, but to praise him.

John was my teacher then my friend. Forty years later I write early every morning, like him. Like him, instead of deciding what new work to read I reread Flaubert’s “A Simple Heart.” I have never let one of my students pay for lunch. Two strong bourbons are now my wild outer limit, unlike him. But that lesson also comes from John. Unlike Cheever, I’ve never made a sexual move on one of my students, even when they beg. (And lately there’s been far too little begging.)

John Cheever, now unfairly known as the gloomy, sodden satyr of suburbia, was at least rarely gloomy. Fact is he was more fun per minute than is legal in a nation this Republican. If his fiction still throws off salt spray and blinding daylight, his company amused, intrigued, specialized in dares. He always wanted to have a good time. “What’ll we try for fun now, and next, and…?”

Pete Townshend’s “deeply felt but often ungainly” memoir, Who I Am, is reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the Times:

What Mr. Townshend does manage to do here with insight, verve and sometimes grandiosity is describe how the Who and its music evolved: how the group “set out to articulate the joy and rage” of the generation that came of age in the “teenage wasteland” that was post-World War II Britain, under the shadow of the atomic bomb and deeply alienated from the established class system. This is why the Who’s early sound — with all the screaming feedback and distortion, the wrecked guitars and Moon’s frenetic drumming — was so aggressive and explosive.

“I wasn’t trying to play beautiful music,” Mr. Townshend explains. “I was confronting my audience with the awful, visceral sound of what we all knew was the single absolute of our frail existence — one day an aeroplane would carry the bomb that would destroy us all in a flash. It could happen at any time. The Cuban Crisis less than two years before had proved that.”

This is Mr. Townshend in his rock theorist mode — familiar to fans, who have read his music essays and reviews, or listened to his ruminative interviews. He speaks candidly in these pages about the influence that artists like the Kinks and Bob Dylan had on him, recalling that when he first sat down to try to write songs for the Who, he isolated himself in the kitchen of his Ealing flat, and listened to a few records over and over again: “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”; Charles Mingus’s “Better Git It in Your Soul,” from “Mingus Ah Um”; John Lee Hooker’s “Devil’s Jump”; and “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the MGs.

He proves equally engaging as a sort of rock historian, describing the musical landscape in Britain in the early 1960s, when rock exploded on the scene. He describes how it upended the old order represented by the swing music that his father, a clarinetist and saxophonist, played in a band called the Squadronaires. And he charts how the Who came to push the boundaries of rock, creating one of the most acclaimed early concept albums (“The Who Sell Out,” 1967) and pioneering the form of the rock opera with “Tommy” in 1969.

As Mr. Townshend sees it, the Who’s ascendance would eventually be undermined by the rise of punk rock in the late ’70s. Though Who songs like “My Generation” and “Won’t Get Fooled Again” became “anthems for a particular time,” Mr. Townshend writes, by 1981 “a gulf had opened up between the Who and the new younger generation.

“I had to accept that we had reached our peak of popularity at Woodstock, and however famous and successful we still were as a band, our ability to reinvent ourselves was declining as we continued a long slow descent from that moment when Roger sang ‘See me, feel me, touch me, heal me,’ the sun rose up behind us, and my guitar screamed to 500,000 sleep-tousled people.”

Here’s more Pete from Alexis Petridis in the Guardian.

Over at Harper’s check out this 1947 contract between Kurt Vonnegut and his pregnant wife.

Over at The New York Review of Books, here’s Larry McMurtry on his final book sale:

Calling it the Last Book Sale was a conceit based on the fact that my novel The Last Picture Show had been filmed on the same site. In fact, the reputable firm of Bonham’s is conducting a major literary auction on the West Coast right now. Our auction was probably the last on this scale I will be involved with.

I’ve been an active book dealer for fifty-five years, and one thing I learned to avoid is the adjective “rare.” Poe’s Tamerlane exists in twelve known copies. It’s rare and so are his stories; but most books aren’t rare. What I sold, over two days in August, were second-hand books—or antiquarian books, if you want to fancy it up. I’ve owned most of them more than once in my career, although many of them are now at least uncommon.

My firm, Booked Up Inc., owned about 400,000 books, spread among four large buildings in Archer City, a small oil patch town in the midwestern part of Texas. I also have a 28,000-volume personal library, in the same town. I’m getting old and so are my buildings. My heirs are literate but not bookish. Dealing with nearly half a million books would be a huge burden for them: thus the downsizing.

[Photo Credit: -circa]

From Letters of Note comes this 1961 letter from Flannery O’Connor to a college English professor:

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

[Picture by Linden Frederick via Zeroing]

Listen to William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize Speech.

Since we’re talking literature, check out this recent piece on James Joyce by Louis Menand in the New Yorker.

Even better, dig these rare illustrations Henri Matisse did for a 1935 edition of “Ulysses.”

Here’s Charles Simic in the New York Review of Books on “Why I Still Write Poetry”:

When my mother was very old and in a nursing home, she surprised me one day toward the end of her life by asking me if I still wrote poetry. When I blurted out that I still do, she stared at me with incomprehension. I had to repeat what I said, till she sighed and shook her head, probably thinking to herself this son of mine has always been a little nuts. Now that I’m in my seventies, I’m asked that question now and then by people who don’t know me well. Many of them, I suspect, hope to hear me say that I’ve come my senses and given up that foolish passion of my youth and are visibly surprised to hear me confess that I haven’t yet. They seem to think there is something downright unwholesome and even shocking about it, as if I were dating a high school girl, at my age, and going with her roller-skating that night.

…The mystery to me is that I continued writing poetry long after there was any need for that. My early poems were embarrassingly bad, and the ones that came right after, not much better. I have known in my life a number of young poets with immense talent who gave up poetry even after being told they were geniuses. No one ever made that mistake with me, and yet I kept going. I now regret destroying my early poems, because I no longer remember whom they were modeled after. At the time I wrote them, I was reading mostly fiction and had little knowledge of contemporary poetry and modernist poets. The only extensive exposure I had to poetry was in the year I attended school in Paris before coming to the United States. They not only had us read Lamartine, Hugo, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Verlaine, but they made us memorize certain poems of theirs and recite them in front of the class. This was such a nightmare for me as a rudimentary speaker of French—and guaranteed fun for my classmates, who cracked up at the way I mispronounced some of the most beautiful and justly famous lines of poetry in French literature—that for years afterwards I couldn’t bring myself to take stock of what I learned in that class. Today, it’s clear to me that my love of poetry comes from those readings and those recitations, which left a deeper impact on me than I realized when I was young.

[Photo Credit: Fernanda Chemale]