Calling Don Marquis

Chalk Ernest Lawrence Thayer up as another of history’s Don Marquis-style writers.

Marquis, as has been detailed on this blog before, rued that he was best remembered for writing stories about a talking cockroach and a talking cat.

According to Louis Untermeyer, Thayer felt much the same way about his most famous work.

Thayer thought it neither better nor worse than his unusual output; he considered its vogue “simply unaccountable” and the controversy incredible.

Here’s the original text.

And here’s Dewolf Hopper making Casey famous.

Here’s Disney’s version, from 1946.

And Disney’s follow-up in 1954.

That’s all we’ll say about Thayer and his master work – as Thayer himself, per Untermeyer, left newspapers and became a “successful manufacturer of woolens, and was glad to be forgotten as a humorist.”

Go figure.

O. Henry. Inspiration from Disney to Serling. And Beyond.

So I’m not just imagining it.

After I read O. Henry’s story “The Ransom of Red Chief,” I immediately thought of the 1976 Disney film “No Deposit, No Return,” in which Darren McGavin and Don Knotts play two unsuccessful safecrackers who inadvertently “kidnap” two kids of generally absentee parents whose grandfather revels in their absence as he toys with the kidnappers in paying the ransom.

Of course, the story is also similar to that of 1982’s “Savannah Smiles,” starring Donovan Scott and Mark Miller, though in this case it’s the parents, not the “kidnapped” kid who are the real stinkers in the story.

But that’s O. Henry for you. Before Hollywood was there churning out the “surprise” plot trists, before Rod Serling was there, banally prattling on about the odd little twists of fate that lead people from a normal life into that twilightiest of all zones, there was O. Henry.

And there’s this version, an odd Russian version of the film, which makes it clear within the first few moments that the director saw the story as a jab against the capitalist stooges who set up their whole society so that one had to get capital in order to capitalize on the whole capitalist system. Capital capital capital. (Other than that, the telling here is pretty accurate to O. Henry’s story.)
 

(This was filmed in 1962, per IMDB.com. Unsure on international copyright for this.)

What first catches the ear is an odd simile:

“Hey, little boy!” says Bill, “would you like to have a bag of candy and a nice ride?”

The boy catches Bill neatly in the eye with a piece of brick.

“That will cost the old man an extra five hundred dollars,” says Bill, climbing over the wheel.

That boy put up a fight like a welter-eight cinnamon bear; but, at last, we got him down in the bottom of the buggy and drove away.

Like a welter-weight cinnamon bear. I like the sound of that.

I like the sound, too, of O. Henry’s first-person telling, at which he is amazingly consistent.

Of course, the brick in the eye isn’t the only first-person telling we get of this little brat’s impudence. There’s also this:

Just at daybreak, I was awakened by a series of awful screams from Bill. They weren’t yells, or howls, or shouts, or whoops, or yawps, such as you’d expect from a manly set of vocal organs – they were simply indecent, terrifying, humiliating screams, such as women emit when they see ghosts or caterpillars. It’s an awful thing to hear a strong, desperate, fat man scream incontinently in a cave at daybreak.

I jumped up to see what the matter was. Red Chief [the kid] was sitting on Bill’s chest, with one hand twined in Bill’s hair. In the other had had the sharp case-knife we used for slicing bacon; and he was industriously and realistically trying to take Bill’s scalp, according to the sentence that had been pronounced upon him the evening before.

Of course, in true Hollywood or Disney fashion, the kidnappers can’t get rid of the kid until they pay the imp’s father $250 for his return – and have to do so under cover of darkness besides, so the neighbors won’t know who to blame when the kid returns.

O. Henry is a wonderful practitioner of the short story, a lost art in America, and as well a chronicler of the unchronicled, choosing rather than the socialite, the war profiteer, the politician or the industry mogul, to write of the ordinary, from two-bit kidnappers in a tiny town in Alabama to their obnoxious prey. And while most folksa re more familiar with the Oprah-like shmaltz of O' Henry's pieces such as "The Gift," this piece shows that while hes tuck with the short story genre, he wasn't all shmaltz.

Full text of the story can be found here.

Good Committee Writing

Generally, I deplore writing by committee.

I don’t mind good collaboration, which you can see works wonderfully well in the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, and Disney’s Sherman Brothers:

And let’s face it – just about everything you read out there has been written by more than one person, for every writer has an editor guiding the way. It’s easy to pick out, for example, where JK Rowling’s editors stepped in to guide her in her earlier books, though she found her own way afterward. JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis shared their works with each other and with others, seeking and getting plenty of input. I’m seeking input on my own writing (though, it seems, so is everyone else).

So it’s with this kind of baggage that I approach Jack Alan, an amalgam of Jack Goodman and Alan Green, both advertising men, who worked together on a series of humorous pieces that skewered the popular How-To books of their era.

They echo their skewering of the genre in the short piece “From Pillar to Post,” in which Jack Alan describes the early days of owning a Great Dane. Here, they describe what happens when Jack is called on to punish the misbehaving pup:

I now change my approach, deciding to try the Great Big Playmate tactic. Crouching on all fours, I advance on him, barking several times with mock ferocity. He decides to humor me by pretending he thinks I'm a huge, dangerous dog. With a happy yelp, he flashes around a chair and dashes upon me from behind. Since he weighs roughly eighty-two pounds at the moment, I am now flat on the floor with him on top of me. He wants to pretend he is shaking me by the neck. This is too difficult unless he actually does shake me by the back of the neck. So he does.

I get up and brush myself off. I brush him off me, too, several times. I have now succeeded in gaining his confidence and showing him that I am a regular fellow who doesn't mind a good, clean romp, so I am through. But he isn't. He likes it too well to quit. He gets my tie in his teeth and hangs from it. It is some time before I get my breath.

He still refuses to stop. It is therefore time for me to Punish Him. I decide to lock him in the bathroom. This consists of the following steps:

1. He instantly senses my purpose and scrambles into the bedroom under the bed.
2. I rush after him and say, “Come out from under there this minute!”
3. He doesn't.
4. I get down on the floor and look under the bed. We face each other silently for a moment, each trying to outstare the other. I blink, which gives him the round.
5. I mutter several dire threats. So does he.
6. I hold out my handkerchief, hoping he will grab it and pull, thereby enabling me to drag him out.
7. He grabs it and pulls.
8. We are now both under the bed.
9. I seize him firmly and wriggle out.
10. A head bumps severely against the box spring. It is not his.
11. I shove and pull him into the bathroom and back out, closing the door.
12. I stop closing the door to avoid catching his nose in it.
13. I shove him back and close the door, catching my hand in it.
14. We both howl simultaneously.

Returning to the living room, tired but victorious (look up Pyrrhic in any good encyclopedia), I now proceed to describe my dog to you. He is still a puppy, seven months old. He is a good dog to have for a case history because, although a thoroughbred, he has a character which is practically a cross section of that of America's dogs.

Full text of their funny tale is found here.

Here, Jack Alan shows the secret of committee writing: The whole is better than the sum of its parts. While the writers may work together on ideas and word choice, they keep in mind that the end goal is a good, readable story, not that they win every argument.

Now maybe I’m reading these two wrong. Some teams have an idea man and a writer. Others do a bit of both. I’m putting on rose-tinted glasses here, imagining how the process works. However they do it, those pulling Jack Alan’s strings do it well.

So Oddly Familiar . . .

What we have here, folks, is a case of what a writer wrote becoming bigger than the writer himself.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Writers want what they write to be recognized and loved – at least the writers I know and associate with. So if one of their creations becomes bigger than life itself, so much the better.

So here’s the familiar poem:

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

And here is this poem’s author: Denver journalist Eugene Field.

Here he is in Disneyfication, writing this most famous poem:

And here’s his poem, Disneyfied:

There are many, many, many renditions of this verse, from amateurs trying to do the Poet’s Voice on YouTube, to the Doobie Brothers and Carly Simon crooning their way through the song. If you like disco freaks and hippies, that is.

It’s quite possible I grew up knowing some of Eugene Field’s work, but it’s also just as likely that I’m more familiar with the humorous poems of Dutch author Jacob Cats, since those are the poems Dad remembered from his childhood. (I’d love to find some of Cats’ works in English, by the way. They’re extremely hard to find.)

Louis Untermeyer, inexplicably, offers up a rather dull Field poem called “Seein’ Things,” a dialectic account of a boy scared of monsters in his room and under his bed:

I ain’t afraid uv snakes or toads, or bugs or worms or mice,
An' things 'at girls are skeered uv I think are awful nice!
I'm pretty brave I guess; an' yet I hate to go to bed,
For, when I'm tucked up warm an snug an' when my prayers are said,
Mother tells me "Happy Dreams" an' takes away the light,
An' leaves me lyin' all alone an' seein' things at night!

It’s okay, and Untermeyer is right in saying it’s funny. But I like the more lyrical, ethereal tone and cadence of “Wynken, Blynken and Nod.” Poets often let the words and the rhymes and the dialects get in the way of the rhythm, making their writing incredibly hard to read from a lyrical sense. It’s no surprise that the simplicity of “Wynken” lends itself to be sung, and sung quite prettily. It’s like the difference between fences made of pickets or cinder blocks. The cinder block fence is sturdier and far uglier than the simple picket, which lets the wind blow through and the daisies grow between the pickets.

Ellis Parker Butler KILLED in 1905. NOT!

First of all, I know it’s a hamster, not a guinea pig. But since guinea pig/Lego elevator videos are in short supply, this will have to suffice.

In Ellis Parker Butler’s “Pigs is Pigs,” we have two things going: First, the ever-popular humor tactic of a semantics arguments. Mr. Morehouse wants to have two guinea pigs delivered, twenty-five cents each. The reticent railway clerk insists that “pigs is pigs” and wants to charge the 30-cent-per-head rate for livestock. Hilarity ensues.

Or somewhat.

Because the other thing we have going in this story is a wide selection of Things that Will Likely Never be Shouted in Ordinary Dialogue, such as:

“You everlastingly stupid idiot!”

“Why you poor ignorant foreigner!”

“Where’s the ink!” (How anachronistic can you get, unless, of course, you’re talking of the inkjet, $85 a gallon variety.)

But there is this gem:

Mr. Morehouse went home raging. His boy, who had been awaiting the guinea-pigs, knew better than to ask him for them. He was a normal boy and therefore always had a guilty conscience when his father was angry. So the boy slipped quietly around the house. There is nothing to soothing to a guilty conscience as to be out of the path of the avenger.

The story then evolves into a history of bureaucratic mayhem, as officers both high and low in the Interurban Express Company debate whether guinea pigs are livestock or pets, all the while as the Oirish-speakin’ clerk at the depot continues to feed the guinea pigs cabbage and as they multiply like Tribbles. By the time the snafu is fixed – and it went all the way to the president of the company, who sent to an eminent scientist exploring in the Andes a request on the ruling: are guinea pigs pets or pigs—Mr. Morehouse has moved, his son, we can assume, went on feeling guilty about crimes we’re sure he committed and Mr. Flannery had 4,270 guinea pigs to care for at the depot:

"Error in guinea-pig bill. Collect for two guinea-pigs, fifty cents. Deliver all to consignee."

Flannery read the telegram and cheered up. He wrote out a bill as rapidly as his pencil could travel over paper and ran all the way to the Morehouse home. At the gate he stopped suddenly. The house stared at him with vacant eyes. The windows were bare of curtains and he could see into the empty rooms. A sign on the porch said, "To Let." Mr. Morehouse had moved! Flannery ran all the way back to the express office. Sixty-nine guinea-pigs had been born during his absence. He ran out again and made feverish inquiries in the village. Mr. Morehouse had not only moved, but he had left Westcote. Flannery returned to the express office and found that two hundred and six guinea-pigs had entered the world since he left it. He wrote a telegram to the Audit Department.

"Can't collect fifty cents for two dago pigs consignee has left town address unknown what shall I do? Flannery."

The telegram was handed to one of the clerks in the Audit Department, and as he read it he laughed.

"Flannery must be crazy. He ought to know that the thing to do is to return the consignment here," said the clerk. He telegraphed Flannery to send the pigs to the main office of the company at Franklin.

When Flannery received the telegram he set to work. The six boys he had engaged to help him also set to work. They worked with the haste of desperate men, making cages out of soap boxes, cracker boxes, and all kinds of boxes, and as fast as the cages were completed they filled them with guinea-pigs and expressed them to Franklin. Day after day the cages of guinea pigs flowed in a steady stream from Westcote to Franklin, and still Flannery and his six helpers ripped and nailed and packed—relentlessly and feverishly. At the end of the week they had shipped two hundred and eighty cases of guinea-pigs, and there were in the express office seven hundred and four more pigs than when they began packing them.

The story concludes with the typical zinger:

He paused long enough to let one of the boys put an empty basket in the place of the one he had just filled. There were only a few guinea-pigs left. As he noted their limited number his natural habit of looking on the bright side returned.

"Well, annyhow," he said cheerfully, "'tis not so bad as ut might be. What if thim dago pigs had been elephants!"

Just in case you’re wondering, Walt Disney Studios did make a cartoon of this story, filled with ethnic stereotypes:

By the way, I really like how Flannery schwiggles his hips as he builds that guinea pig cage.

And now something for you linguists out there: Lots of people like to consider the rejoinder “Not!” as a modern construction. Not. So, In Butler’s 1905 story, there is this:

“Proceed to collect,” he said softly. “How thim clerks do loike to be talkin’! Me proceed to collect two dollars and twinty-foive cints off Misther Morehouse! I wonder do thim clerks know Misther Morehouse? I’ll git it! Oh, yes! ‘Misther Morehouse, two an’ a wuarter, plaze.’ ‘Cert’nly, me dear frind Flannery. Delighted!’ Not!”

Josh Billings and his, uh, Tripes

It’s every writer’s dream to be remembered.

Actually, it’s every writer’s dream to be followed by billowing clouds of cash blown out of his or her pockets wherever they go, but being remembered for something written down is second best.

That brings us to Josh Billings, the nom de plume of Henry Wheeler Shaw, pictured at left.

Shaw as Billings was one of the first popular "crackerbarrel" philosophers, who brought folk comedy, philosophy and spelling to the fore of American popular culture. Aside from Mark Twain, Billings was the most popular author in America in the 19th century.

Thing is, you've heard things Josh Billings said, but you don't recognize them as his. First of all, that line -- "In the whole history of the world there is but one thing that money can not buy... to wit the wag of a dog's tail," was featured in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp."But infinitely more famous is this little four-liner:

I hate to be a kicker,
I always long for peace,
But the wheel that does the squeaking,
Is the one that gets the grease.

Yep, every time you say "It's the squeaky wheel that gets the grease," you're paraphrasing Josh Billings.

For "The Treasury of Laughter," Untermeyer chose two pieces, the first of which we'll discuss here. It's called "The Mule." Behold:

The mule is haf hoss, and haf Jackass, and then kums to a full stop, natur diskovering her mistake. Tha weigh more, akordin tu their heft, than enny other kreetur, except a crowbar. Tha kant hear anny quicker, nor further than the hoss, yet their ears are big enuff for snow shoes. You kan trust them with enny one whose life aint worth enny more than the mules. The only wa tu keep them into a paster, is tu turn them into a medder jineing, and let them jump out. Tha are reddy for us, just as soon as they will du tu abuse. Tha haint got enny friends, and will live on huckel berry brush, with an ockasional chanse at Kanada thissels. Tha are a modern invenshun, i dont think the Bible deludes tu them at tall. Tha sel for more money than enny other domestik animile. Yu kant tell their age by looking into their mouth, enny more than you could a Mexican cannons.

And it goes on like this.

Tha are the strongest creeturs on earth, and heaviest, ackording tu their size; i her tell ov one who fell oph from the tow path, on the Eri kanawl, and sunk as soon as he touched bottom, but he kept rite on towing the boat tu the nex stachun, breathing thru his ears, which stuck out ov the water about 2 feet six inches; i didn't see this did, but an auctioneer told me ov it, and i never knew an auctioneer tu lie unless it was absolutely convenient.

Music to the ears of Henry Higgins, I'm sure. We kind of hear echoes of Billings in the twang and slang written by contemporary Mark Twain and in any string of radio comics, from the Old Timer on Fibber McGee and Molly to Amos 'n' Andy's Silverfish. This kind of folksy hokum is pretty much extinct today, being heard only in whispers of Rancid Crabtree in Pat McManus' delightful reminisces. Garrison Kellior is too progressive and urbane for this kind of tomfoolery, fortunately enough for us. He's ugly enough without this kind of misdirected language coming out of his puss.

Billings' death was ignominious, but remembered. Per Wikipedia:

Billings' death is described in Chapter 12 of John Steinbeck's fictional Cannery Row. According to Steinbeck's homage, Billings died in the the Hotel del Monte in Monterey after which his body was delivered for burial preparation by the local constable to the town's only doctor, who also doubled as an amateur mortician. The doctor, per his usual embalming protocol, dispensed of Billings' entrails by tossing them into the gulch behind his house before packing the torso with sawdust. The stomach, liver and intestines were found in the gulch the following morning by a dog whose master, a small boy, intended on using them for fish bait. Some local men, realizing the disgrace this could bring to Monterey -- a town proud of its literary heritage -- were able to stop the boy as he was preparing to row out to sea, retrieved the "tripas" and forced the doctor to give Billings' organs a proper burial befitting a great author.