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The Mythologizer Mythologized
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20393 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
3 / 1992 |
2,551 Words |
| Author
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Tom Clark
Tom Clark, professor of literature at New College of
California, is the author of thirty books of poetry, including
Fractured Karma and Sleepwalker's Fate (Black Sparrow Press).
His other books include The World of Damon Runyon (1978), Jack
Kerouac (1984), The Exile of Celine (1987), and Charles Olson:
The Allegory of a Poet's Life (1991). |
Remember Herodotus, the ancient Greek historian who got a bad rap in his time for purveying myth, not fact, in his accounts of the Persian War and other notable goings-on? This was a scribe with a major weakness for a good story.
Both Damon Runyon, the great Hearst newspaperman and spinner of tales about the colorful doings of the guys and dolls of the criminal demimonde between the two world wars, and his current life-chronicler, veteran New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, could be called mythologists of the Herodotus school. But once that's said it must quickly be added that while Runyon's most extensive hedgings on the facts for the sake of the myth at least had the excuse of happening inside the relatively privileged aesthetic realm of the short story. Breslin is ostensibly operating in the traditionally more stringent about the facts domain of biography. (And his publisher obviously agrees, listing this book as "Nonfiction.")
Mind you, Breslin has come up with some extravagant claims for his new, improved version of the form, which he sees to envision as a kind of stretched model, easy on the mind and user friendly. "Its not a biography of Oliver Cromwell," he pointed out to a reported while on his promotional tour.
It's supposed to make you smile, which nobody does these days. It's written by someone secure enough to look at someone in his own field and not be overawed to the point where you genuflect on every page as most biographers do.
I say this book will change the form of biographies. May be they won't like it, but it will come to point when you have to get people of better caliber to write biographies, not some assistant professor of history.
Breslin's Damon Runyon is the mythologizer mythologized. The ultimate canny, opportunistic New York scribe, Runyon knocks off a literary fortune by cleverly transmuting into his "Broadway" fables a vast store of bleak and often brutal data collected in a lifetime passed patiently hanging out among gamblers, thieves, and killers. The key to the success formula, Breslin suggests, is a sort of cautious moral vacancy or calculated neutrality Breslin's Runyon, true to his famous "Get the Money" motto, is a man without any values other than the gratification of his own need, including his need for great luxury, satisfied increasingly with the accumulation of time an success.
Breslin
...
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