Life in the Present Tense — Damon Runyon’s New York

By Stuart Mitchner

It’s the center of all these things. It’s the center of all these ideas.

—Jimmy Breslin (1928-2017) on New York City

In a C-SPAN interview about his book Damon Runyon: A Life (Ticknor & Fields 1991), Jimmy Breslin is asked to compare his journalistic style with Runyon’s. After saying Runyon “had his own way,” Breslin describes a card game that goes on for 26 hours and does not stop until one guy says, “He wins, I lose.” This is the source of Runyon’s “first-person-with-no-contractions present tense, or the historical present, as somebody calls it,” which Runyon decides will sound “great and comic and stilted coming out of the mouths of Nathan Detroit and people like that.”

Scattered Over Broadway

Born in Manhattan, Kansas, on this day, October 4, 1880, Damon Runyon dies on December 10, 1946, is cremated, his ashes scattered over Broadway by his son in a DC-3 flown by war hero Eddie Rickenbacker.

So extensive is the fallout from the big drop that when Guys and Dolls debuts on Broadway four years later, the title of the opening number is “Runyonland.” As Breslin says, Runyon “invented this place, this street called Broadway…. He had the guys, he had the dolls.” And his people are still around, which is why it is easy to love New York in the days when you can walk home from school down Broadway and one morning cross paths with Jackie Gleason, the Great One, you say, “Hi Jackie,” he says, “Hi Kid.” When such things happen, it is easy to love the city for all the years thereafter, even when it sometimes seems to be disappearing into a slow dissolve between scenes of an old movie. But whether you are there in your body or your mind, New York, like Damon Runyon, is always in the present tense. And as someone half in love with easeful contractions, I am taking the Runyon challenge and will do this piece in the present tense with no contractions.

Not a Shakespeare Man

Looking forward to Firestone Library’s 400 Years of Shakespeare’s First Folio exhibit, I am reading a Runyon story called “The Melancholy Dane” in which the journalist narrator takes you to a Broadway theater with his friend Ambrose the drama critic to see “an eighteen-carat hambola” named Mansfield Sothern play Hamlet. “Personally,” the narrator says, “I am not a Shakespeare man, although I see several of his plays before and, to tell you the truth, I am never able to savvy them, though naturally I do not admit this in public as I do not wish to appear unintelligent. But I stick with Ambrose through the first act of this one and I observe that Mansfield Sothern is at least a right large Hamlet and has a voice that makes him sound as if he is talking from down in a coal mine, though what he is talking about is not clear to me and consequently does not arouse my interest.” Later at Mindy’s (Runyon’s hangout, based on Lindy’s), the actor is seen reading Ambrose’s column and “shedding tears on the paper until the printer’s ink runs down into his bacon and eggs. Naturally, I go out and buy a paper at once to see what causes his distress and I find that Ambrose writes about the play as follows: “After Mansfield Sothern’s performance of Hamlet at the Todd Theatre last night, there need no longer be controversy as to the authorship of the immortal drama. All we need do is examine the graves of Shakespeare and Bacon, and the one that has turned over is it.”

Baseball Runyon Style

Whether or not he himself is “a Shakespeare man,” Damon Runyon knows his baseball, which is why he is covering the Giants for the New York American soon after arriving in Manhattan in 1910. He adds a Runyonesque flavor to his reportage of a May 11, 1911 game between the Giants and the Pirates with a story headlined “How’ja Like It, Hans?: Sneered Mr. Raymond.” While the conventions of sports writing demand a routine adherence to the past tense, Runyon injects present-tense excitement into his account of Bugs Raymond’s hitting and pitching heroics. First, Bugs delivers a solid hit and although “he is no Mercury on his glides,” scores from second base “like a locomotive on heavy pressure.” On the mound he holds the Pirates to just one run by refusing the great Honus “Hans” Wagner a single hit. It’s after striking out Wagner with two men on base that “Bugs scoffed, ‘How’ja like it, Hans?’ “

Runyon’s lead gives Bugs a full measure of respect: “Yes, indeed MISTER Raymond! This way, sir; your hat, MISTER Raymond; the VERY best seat in the house, sir; the VERY best of everything, MISTER Raymond, sir.” And so on through “a pleasant day” and a VERY, VERY stupendous afternoon.”

A Sorrowful Season

A regular in Runyon’s Broadway company of gamblers, gangsters, fixers, and roughnecks is Sorrowful Jones from whom I am borrowing the “Sorrowful” for the 2023 baseball season that has come to an end with the St. Louis Cardinals in the basement of the division they won last year. This is a team that stormed out of spring training with the best record in the Majors (18-6), a solid Las Vegas favorite to win the Central and possibly the whole shambola. So picture me as an updated version of Mansfield Sothern, shedding tears on the sports page until the printer’s ink runs down into my peanut butter and jelly English muffin. Except there is no ink to run since the scores appear not in a newspaper but on a computer screen. The high point of the season comes when Nicely Nicely Adam Wainwright ends his 18-year pitching career by shutting out first-place Milwaukee for his 200th career win at a time when the Brewers are 20 games over .500 and the Cardinals 20 games under.

“Guys and Dolls”

Based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” and two other stories, Runyon’s only work with a performative afterlife equal to a Shakespearean play is Guys and Dolls, with music by Frank Loesser and book by Abe Burrows. Writing in February 2009 when a “lavish and energetic new production” is opening, the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik calls it “the best of all New York musicals.” Reviews of the original production put Runyon front and center. Says the Post: “Guys and Dolls is just what it should be to celebrate the Runyon spirit … filled with the salty characters and richly original language sacred to the memory of the late Master.” Says the World-Telegram: “It recaptures what [Runyon] knew about Broadway, that its wickedness is tinhorn, but its gallantry is as pure and young as Little Eva.” Says the Daily Mirror: “We think Damon would have relished it as much as we did.”

Manhattanites

Every weekday morning I’m off to school by subway, disembarking at Columbus Circle. Our apartment being on East 53rd Street, half a block off Third Avenue, my mother rides the El to her job downtown working for the Waterfront Crime Commission while my father subways it to the catacombs of Columbia’s Butler Library and the Medieval manuscript he’s “Englishing.” The night view from our south-facing windows — the floodlit towers of the Waldorf Astoria and the orange-gold General Electric building — makes lifelong Manhattanites of all three of us, even my homesick Midwestern mother.

The summer before we move to midtown, we share a railroad flat at Riverside Drive and 137th Street, a situation that threatens my parents’ marriage, such is my mother’s aversion to the babble of alien languages echoing in the courtyard and the naked man jumping to his death on Broadway during her first day at the shops. What saves the day for her is another night view, of the Hudson and the lights of Palisades Park.

My parents both being show biz wannabes from the Hutchinson Kansas Little Theatre who sell two plays to Samuel French co-written while they are courting, another upside is that we are subletting the place from a movie actor even though he plays the Nazi kid in Tomorrow the World and shoots Gregory Peck in the back in The Gunfighter.

“Little Miss Marker”

When Shirley Temple dies in February 2014, I enter the Runyon present for a showing of Little Miss Marker (1934) in which his story of the same name helps put Hollywood’s greatest child star on the map. In the film when Sorrowful Jones picks up the “little doll” with both hands, holds her close, face to face, and stares into her eyes, it is his way of reckoning her value as collateral for her father’s $20 bet. As he sets her down, he is already showing signs of the slow melt. To noises of disbelief from his cohort Regret, the horse player, the no-nonsense Sorrowful accepts the kid as a marker for a bet, saying, “A little doll like that is worth 20 bucks any way you look at it.” Knowing as we do that the doll proves to be a money-making phenomenon beyond all imaginable mortal reckoning makes this one of the greatest little-did-they-know lines in history.

New York, New York

At one point in the December 1991 C-SPAN interview, when Breslin is asked if he ever spent much time outside New York City, he admits once spending “six, seven months in Ireland,” and goes on to say, “You’re not going to have a country without New York City. They think they can get along without it, but I don’t think they really understand you cannot get along without vitality, without culture. It’s the center of all these things. It’s the center of all these ideas.” Earlier, speaking of Runyon’s New York, he says, “Nobody went to sleep. Everything was going on. In the meantime, the whole life of a city was going on. Nobody even knew it had happened. But he invented it and made it, and I think it was important to write about somebody who could do that. It’s a spectacular achievement. He invented a whole era that never was.”