12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Much more than shtick, November 1, 2009
This review is from: Guys and Dolls and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
Readers who know Damon Runyon only through his Broadway stories may think that he was a writer of shtick. Good shtick, but shtick. This Penguin collection shows that not to be the case.
Right from the start, when he was under 30, Runyon could write a good running story, although he was nearly 50 before he began writing fiction regularly. He seems to have found his Broadway voice right off the bat when he began writing the Guys and Dolls stories in 1929. Although he ground out nearly a story a month for Collier's, the quality remained high. He never seems to have rushed or to have tossed one off.
But as this collection shows, something dark happened to Runyon's fiction as time went by. It is sometimes claimed that a thoughtful editor's selection can change the way readers value a writer. This supposedly happened when the Viking Portable Faulkner rescued William Faulkner from relegation to a place as an oddball failure.
It is not stated who made the selections in this 2008 collection, the latest of many, but presumably Professor Daniel Schwartz had a big hand in it. I cannot say I think much of his commentary, which sounds at times as if he didn't read the stories. At least, while I hear the Yiddish slang in the Broadway stories, I don't hear the Italian that Schwartz says is so prevalent. Some of his other comments seem equally off base.
However, by arranging the Broadway stories in order of publication (for the practical reason that the characters recur and need to be properly introduced, he says), and by including very early stories, it becomes obvious that Runyon's plots got more violent over time.
Many, perhaps most of his stories were reworkings of news events -- the shootings of gamblers, kidnappings etc. But right from the start, Runyon softened real crimes. The 1907 "Defense of Strikerville," presumably based on a particular event, though I cannot identify which one, turned militia assaults on helpless miners and their families with real bullets into a comic snowball fight. (The Ludlow Massacre would be the template, but it happened later.)
The early Broadway stories, too, tended to rework real violence into comic horseplay. As in Shakespeare, there was plenty of murder in the background but almost always off stage. In the early stories, the right guy and the right doll usually ended up mated, and those were the stories that Hollywood liked, like "Madame La Gimp."
Even the tearjerkers, which Hollywood liked even better, saw death come from disease, not the mouth of a John Roscoe, as in "Little Miss Marker." The apparent exception, "Dark Dolores," proves this rule. The wronged doll resorts to trickery and natural forces, not guns, for her revenge.
Later, the denouements turned more and more to gunplay, notably in the extremely bitter "Sense of Humor." I don't think Runyon's view of life darkened so very much. The very last piece he wrote, a history of the Stork Club, was bright; and the essays he wrote about his own final illness were as realistic and tough as anything he ever wrote about Broadway, but also without self-pity -- or much of any other kind of pity.
I suspect the gunplay and on-stage violence were a reaction to the movies. His Broadway stories even compare his real originals at times to the pretend tough guys like Robinson and Cagney. Stories on the printed page are capable of more subtlety than visual stories. That is why film "documentaries" always have to focus on vigorous action even when quiet negotiations were the real story, and that is why newspaper stories are inherently more balanced than televised accounts of the same event.
But when the two collide, it is print that moves toward the graphic, trying to hold an audience; the graphic presentations never, ever veer toward subtlety and complexity. I think Runyon's stories display that in an early stage of the debasement of public presentation.
Runyon may have had to play to the taste of the times, but he never lost his edge. Just about the time he wrote "Sense of Humor," he also wrote "The Lemon-drop Kid," where disease, not gunplay, carries the plot, and nobody, not even Runyon, ever wrote a more bitter tale.
From first to last, Runyon never wavered from the view, expressed by Sam the Gonoph in a late story ("A Nice Price," his bloodiest): "All life is six to five against."
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good collection, but missing some stories, September 20, 2009
This review is from: Guys and Dolls and Other Writings (Penguin Classics) (Mass Market Paperback)
I was looking for a complete, unabridged collection of the "Broadway" stories of Damon Runyon---the ones they based the musical "Guys and Dolls" on. This comes close, but isn't quite complete---I know of at least one story ("Lonely Heart") that isn't present, and there may be others.
Even so, it's got a good, solid selection of them, and is a good selection for someone who wants to get acquainted with the unique voice of Damon Runyon. His unique style has become so iconic in its way that I've seen it used (in, among other places, the comic book _Wolff and Byrd: Counselors of the Macabre_) to indicate that the speaker is an underworld type.
Apart from missing at least a few stories, the only other nit I can find to pick is that the typeface is smaller and finer than I care for. But that's just me.
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