Riding the Yellow Trolley Car: Selected Nonfiction

  Sullivan’s book, his twelfth since 1926, comes along the eve of his seventy-eighth birthday (September 22), when most writers have long since uttered their last word. It is a collection of some of his best comic pieces, dating to the early thirties, but it also includes many letters (from the twenties to the late sixties) that are new to everybody except those to whom they were originally sent.

  “They’re even new to me,” Sullivan said in an interview this week. “I’d really forgotten most of them.”

  Sullivan is known mainly as the fellow who writes the Christmas poem in The New Yorker magazine every year (he’s done it since 1932) and who dashes off occasional pieces on the state of things in Saratoga, his hometown. But his writing days are pretty much ended. He may not even do the Christmas poem this year. “I’ve banged that typewriter for a long time,” he says. “I think I’ll give it a rest.”

  Born in Saratoga a block from where he now lives on Lincoln Avenue, Sullivan went from Cornell to the army to the old New York Herald to The World, the most famous newspaper of the 1920s—the Pulitzer paper that had Herbert Bayard Swope as its editor and such famous names in journalism as Heywood Broun, F. P. Adams, and Sullivan.

  “I was a lousy reporter but meant well,” he recalled in 1967. “The motto at The World was, Never let Sullivan within a mile of a fact. That suited me fine. I drew down what was then a princely salary for covering the Atlantic City beauty parades and the shad-boning contests held annually at Hartford, Conn. It was fine until they gave me a goddam column, which spoiled everything.”

  Sullivan went to The World in 1922 and in 1925 was given the job of filling in as a columnist during F. P. A.’s vacation. It was the beginning of a daily grind that made Sullivan famous but also nearly drove him to quit writing altogether. He wrote in 1927 of his task that “the ‘modern daily feature’ idea is the most stultifying killing factor the brisk mind of the American editor has invented. The last two years, since I was torn from a very comfortable, happy and cloistered sinecure as a reporter, have made a neurotic out of me.… One simply hasn’t got something to give every day—especially not 1600 words.…”

  Nevertheless, Sullivan persevered and when The World died in 1931, it was more than sad. “It was an awful disaster in my life,” he said last week. He wrote a piece in 1931 called “Thoughts Before the Undertaker Came,” and he closed that out saying: “When I die I want to go where The World has gone, and work on it again.”

  In 1931 he went to The New Yorker magazine. He’d been dabbling with the magazine since it started in 1925, but in 1931 became one of editor Harold Ross’s regulars, and a member of that company of Great White Humorists that included Benchley (the funniest of them all, says Sullivan), and James Thurber and Dorothy Parker and E. B. White and Perelman and Ogden Nash and more.

  White Humor is an easy opposite of Black Humor, the favored style of some serious writers who leaven their seriousness with generous doses of wit. Sullivan and Benchley might have had a cutting edge to their humor, but basically, it was as non-serious as they could make it.

  Thinking about the subject last week, Sullivan reaffirmed something he said in 1967.

  “I think the humor is still what they call black—sick—most of it,” he said, “and very few are writing humor. Art Buchwald is one, and Sid Perelman is still writing—the only one of the old guard of my generation active now. Black humor doesn’t get me. Of course it’s understandable in these times—the times are not carefree now, not like the days when Benchley and Thurber were writing.”

  He appraised Woody Allen, a frequent New Yorker contributor, as “rather funny,” and Russell Baker, humor columnist for The New York Times, as having “a nice quiet humor. He belongs on The Times.”

  When Edna Ferber died he wrote to a mutual friend recalling a night at Saratoga with her and George Kaufman when “Ferb” was trying to interest Kaufman in doing a play about old Saratoga. Kaufman never bought the idea, and instead of a play the idea became Miss Ferber’s novel Saratoga Trunk. But the event was made memorable to Mr. Sullivan by a Kaufman remark about death: “Well, I’ve decided to kill myself when I reach sixty,” he said. Miss Ferber inquired deftly: “What with, George?” And he said: “Kindness.”

  The Sullivan character and taste emerge sideways from the letters, telling a friend, for instance, about the new Thornton Wilder novel: “It is such a pleasure to read a book by Thornton; he believes men and women have some innate decency and dignity through every tribulation, and reading him is like a cool drink on a hot day; he’s utterly free of all the atrocities you are up against in the trash that passes for today’s novels filled with drunkenness, perversion, drugs, incest, and despair.

  The letters are to Howard Lindsay, Nunnally Johnson, Thurber, Corey Ford, Ferber, Robert Sherwood, Wilder, Russell Crouse, Will Cuppy, Alexander Wollcott, Ross, and dozens more.

  They provide a portrait of an era, obliquely seen to be sure, sandwiched in sideways between Sullivan’s endless stream of jokes, but there nevertheless. And Sullivan also emerges as the very nice gent that all his friends apparently thought he was. Who else but a nice gent could have written this to James Thurber after Thurber dedicated his book The Years with Ross, to Sullivan:

  “Well I never had a book dedicated to me before but if by some occult arrangement I could have picked the book I wanted dedicated to me, this would have been the one? I would have turned a deaf ear to Proust, Shaw, Maugham, Hemingway and all such when they begged me to let them dedicate books to me, and I’d have said to them, ‘No, I’m sorry, but Jim Thurber is going to write a book along about 1958 which he will dedicate to me, and I prefer to wait for that, thank you.’”

  1970

  The Fan Man:

  Kotzwinkle’s Buddha as a Saint of Dreck

  Here it is only March, man, and we already have the funniest book of 1974. It’s the story of Horse Badorties, man, a fellow who says man a lot and who has a lot to say to any man.

  Who is Horse Badorties? He’s an avatar for our time, a filthy, hippie dope fiend and dealer who lives in what he calls an ever-shifting shit pile, who plays the moon lute and chases fifteen-year-old chicks, man. And catches them. But has trouble making it after the catch, man, because he’s so busy. And so is his pad. Take that Chinese chick who went up to the filthy, stinking, horrible, soaking-wet Horse Badorties pad with Horse, there to confront reality:

  We struggle around in the junk, man, trying to find a place to lay down, but it is not safe on the floor, even the roaches are going around in little paper boats. “We’ll have to do it standing up baby.” She reaches for my Horse Badorties pants, man, and I am knocked off balance, and we topple, down into the unknown impossible to describe trash pile. We are rolling around in the dark contents—old loaf of bread, bicycle tire, bunch of string in peanut oil, bumping weird greasy things and slimy feelings and sand and water, lid of a tin can floating by on a sponge. There’s my book on telepathy with a roach on page 12 reading about the Dalai Lama.

  Horse’s beloved trash thwarts Horse’s lovemaking, Chinese chick splits, but Horse is sanguine and considers how chick will perhaps return tomorrow to ride with him in old yellow school bus he is going to buy with rubber check at a New Jersey junkyard; also buys old air raid siren, old minesweeper, braking mechanism from old subway car and ten-dollar greasy dog covered with slime and ick and so rotten when he brushes against you you have to throw your clothes away. Horse piles all equipment and dog into bus and drives off:

  Listen to that engine purring. It handles like a tank, man. I can hardly steer it, what an advantage. Turning it around man, in the junkyard practically tears my arms out of the sockets.… Maestro Badorties is wheeling along at last, man, 40 miles an hour in his own valuable vehicle.

  Horse Badorties is obviously an unusual person. So also must be William Kotzwinkle, who has invented Horse in this short, artfully structured, supremely insane novel about a freaky quasi-Hindu-shmindu brahman who is one with the ridiculously filthy, worn-out
world. It is Buddha’s story turned inside out, glopped up and set in Manhattan, notably the East Village where Horse’s ever-shifting shit pile is situated.

  Kotzwinkle’s artistry is such that you take the allusions to Buddhism and Hinduism for granted as merely arcane tidbits from the weird, eclectic Horse Badorties speech pattern. But the fan obsession, man, begins to form a religious pattern of its own. It hums. Horse is deep into fans, carries several $1.95 battery-powered Japanese fans with him in his also eclectic satchel, buys more fans, gives them away, orders one for each member of the Love Chorus he is organizing at St. Nancy’s Church in the Bowery, where Horse is at home among the bums, where many fifteen-year-old chicks show up to sing medieval harmonies to the accompaniment of the sound of the fans, the one sound in which all other sounds are contained, the sacred note OM, which when blown forth through Horse’s fans, or past his sphincter, or especially through the huge fan in the Museum of Natural History which Horse visits, sounds like this: B R A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A A AAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMMMMMMMMMMMMMNNNNNNN. This is brahman as well as OM, or, as it is broken down, A-U-M, a trinity of syllables that embodies the creator, the preserver and the destroyer, all of which Horse simultaneously is. He is into samadhi, man, the identification with all worldly objects, so that he is, as any halfway decent avatar ought to be, tuned into a thousand things at once. Consider his state of mind as he plays his moon lute:

  It is an incredibly weird sound, man, the likes of which no one in Tompkins Square Park has ever heard. It is so weird, man, it is driving me crazy to play it, but at the same time it is so perfectly beautiful, man, because I am master of every opening and closing rhythm pattern known to the mind of man, and in moments like these, man, when I am playing them all, I know man, that music should be the only thing I ever do. Which is why I am going to become a used car salesman instead, man.… Fingers going man, fifty fingers, all over the strings … how I wish I was eating a clam sandwich … this is so beautiful man, I have to split over to my pads immediately, someone might be trying to phone me about some carrots.

  And so as Horse gallops along through his densely packed realm we perceive him not as another Ginger Man, which at times he seems to be, but as a lowest-level saint of dreck and yecch, a holy man climbing up from the oily, filthy bottom muck of Central Park lake, following Buddha’s path, lugging a red, white and blue hot-dog umbrella to protect himself, moving toward a cosmic consciousness of all things—stinking hundred-year-old Chinese eggs, wild saxophones and trombones, piña colada and Forty-second Street rubber hamburgers, merging into the pure white grease of this and every other historical and precognitive phase of life, tuned into dinosaurs and elephant dances, the Egyptian piano, the Etruscan bagpipe, the Babylonian police, which he remembers running from.

  He is moving toward the rekindling of first enlightenment, like Buddha remembering the bo tree. Horse finds his tree in Van Cortland Park in the Bronx, the one beneath which he balled his first chick. He sits in the park while his Love Chorus gathers in front of NBC cameras, a miracle of oneness arranged by Horse alone, avatar of unifying music and the collective social consciousness.

  I have the missing centuries in my grip, man, brought back into consciousness through musical discipline. I’ve studied it all, man, I know the music of the ages. A memory like this is a great power, man, to be used for the good of the world. I will have to open a special Memory School, man, and train people to remember all of their lifetimes, or money back.

  Horse is probably destined for another life, avatar or not. He is purifying himself but has not yet learned to love violins or Ukranian folk songs and he is racist on Puerto Ricans who he fears are taking over the world with their chicken rhythm music, which he keeps out of his mind by wearing his soundproof Commander Schmuck Imperial Winter Hat with anti-Puerto-Rican-music earflaps, man. We all have our failings and prejudices, even Horse.

  Wearing one Japanese, one Chinese shoe, uncoding the Tibetan Book of the Dead and dealing Acapulco produce via Colorado, Horse walks into American literature a full-blown achievement, a heroic godheaded head, a splendid creep, a sublime prince of the holy trash pile. Send congratulations to William Kotzwinkle, also a hero, man.

  1974

  Nathanael West:

  The Stink of Life and Art

  When Nathanael West gave his mother a copy of his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, it was her pride to anticipate that she could now brag about her son who had gone to Paris to write a book, and then prove it by showing the book. But, she told her son, she couldn’t show it because “all it says is ‘stink, stink, stink.’” She thought it was a dirty book.

  Life treated West like that over and over again, which is the same way life treats the characters in West’s novels. He was destiny’s literary tot, just as Miss Lonelyhearts, the lovelorn columnist in West’s novel of the same name, is the fateful victim of his own Christian heart. Miss Lonelyhearts weeps for the girl with no nose who writes him a sad letter, and for all the other letter writers “all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife.”

  We could almost weep the same way for West, reading of his life in Jay Martin’s splendid biography, Nathanael West: The Art of His Life. But only “almost,” because West, victim though he was, also had a counterbalancing sense of hope, and of the importance of the day to day life. Robert Coates, the writer-critic who was a close friend of West’s, said of him, “He was about the most thoroughly pessimistic person I have ever known.… But though this colored all his thinking, both creatively and critically, it had no effect on his personality, for he was one of the best companions I have known, cheerful, thoughtful, and very flexible in all his personal attitudes.”

  Not pitiable, then, but certainly West was a writer whose career was cataclysmically awful, and worth studying by prospective writers of originality and talent, for the world that did in West hasn’t changed much.

  Miss Lonelyhearts and Day of the Locust are both major achievements, Balso Snell and A Cool Million less successful artistically. Yet West’s fame is secure if only because of Lonelyhearts, a perfect piece of work only ninety pages long. It took him four years to write, always condensing, paring, throwing out chunks and phrases alike. Martin captures West the artist—reading the sentences of Lonelyhearts aloud, trying them out in speech until he perfected them. “He had to read it to know what it sounded like,” said another writer who was in the next room while West was writing.

  He was influenced variously, but Martin singles out the work of Flaubert as most significant to West, for it crystallized his own desire to achieve perfection in style. Someone wrote that Miss Lonelyhearts might have been another work like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot if West had not been so concerned with understatement. But he himself had once said that he felt he could have improved Dostoyevsky—with a pair of shears. Miss Lonelyhearts’ intensity cannot be improved upon.

  Liveright published Miss Lonelyhearts at the approximate moment that the firm went into bankruptcy. Some two thousand of the 2,200 printed copies were held by the printer, who refused to release them until he was paid. Despite some astute blurb gathering by West for the dust jacket—heavy praise by Edmund Wilson, Dashiell Hammett, Erskine Caldwell (all of whom West had given free rooms when he was manager of the Sutton Hotel in New York), and despite rave reviews with almost no negative comment, the book could not be bought. West eventually signed a contract with Harcourt, Brace two months after the original publication, but too much time had elapsed, and the public no longer was thinking of Miss Lonelyhearts. The novel was remaindered.

  Similar sad tales are told of the rest of West’s career as a novelist. As a screenwriter he was prolific, but only in service of movies even film buffs have forgotten. As a playwright he was a flop. He was killed stupidly, passing a stop sign—his own characteristically bad driving—and crashing with another car. His wife, Eileen, died with him, on December 22, 1940.

  He populated his novels with grotes
que people and events, and in Day of the Locust he wrote the most powerful novel ever written about Hollywood without ever depicting anyone of higher status than a screenwriter. The grotesques at the lower level of life were what he had observed closely and written about so compellingly—the locusts who came to California to die. And the accuracy of his vision Martin points up in a paragraph telling what happened in the West home after the Wests were killed: “Acquaintances moved in and divided West’s books and Eileen’s wardrobe among them; one person laid claim to the furniture in the bedroom.”

  Martin, professor of English at the University of California (Irvine), has done justice to West’s grotesque life. His book is easily the best source of information and insight into one of the best American writers of the twentieth century.

  1970

  Nothing Happens in Carmincross:

  Benedict Kiely’s Deathly Variety Show

  The main character in Benedict Kiely’s new novel is a man named Mervyn Kavanagh, and when he is asked by a publisher to write a coffee-table history of Ireland, he thinks: “I’ll do it and welcome: anything to oblige and the money’s good. I’ll send them my plan here and now. Begin with the latest atrocity.”

  He conceives of the dust jacket of the book depicting a man rushing madly out of a freshly bombed building, arms wide and on fire from head to toe, a flaming cross on the run. Happily printed underneath the picture would be the old Irish saw: “Health and long life to you, land without rent at you, the woman of your choice at you, and death in Ireland.”

  We might think of the new Kiely novel, Nothing Happens in Carmincross, as the surrogate for that book, in the same way that we might think of Mr. Kavanagh as the surrogate for Mr. Kiely. The novel brims with fire, bombs, and dead men, much to the pain and woe of Mr. Kavanagh, who was born in the North of Ireland, like Mr. Kiely, but who has grown up as an Irish-American (Mr. Kiely is widely known in this country for his short stories). At book’s opening Mr. Kavanagh is returning to Ireland to attend the wedding of his favorite niece at Carmincross, a composite town in the North created from Mr. Kiely’s memory of such peaceful small communities, and from his latter-day perception of what has happened to those places as the result of the presently rampant insanity that is usually referred to, with enormous understatement, as “the troubles.”