A joy for life: the gaudy, brilliant world of Damon Runyon

Runyon, my father and me

My parents are both now dead. My father died last, aged 90, in 2016. I had always associated my love of books with my mother’s influence. My father’s passing, however, made me realise ‒ too late ‒ that most of the books I turn to for comfort are those to which he introduced me. I can track my childhood through the stories he read to me at bedtime, from Pooh and Alice through to Thurber, Leacock and Conan Doyle. Later came Chandler, Hašek and others. As we grew up, he continued to read some of these aloud to us, snorting with uncontrollable laughter at the jokes.

But no one amused either of us more than Damon Runyon, whose Broadway stories became hugely popular in Britain in the 1930s and ’40s, largely thanks to Lord Beaverbrook, who bought the rights to More than Somewhat, an early collection, and ran the stories one by one across the centre-fold of the Evening Standard. Later, two of them were combined to create the hit musical Guys and Dolls.

Many of these stories have nicely worked, if rather old-fashioned, plots that marry sentimentality and violence to pleasing effect. In ‘The Old Doll’s House’, for instance, a bootlegger named Lance McGowan, on the run from rival gangsters, hides in the house of Abigail Ardsley, a famously rich, reclusive old woman. They talk. She tells him how in her youth she fell in love with a clerk. He used to sneak into the house to see her, just as McGowan has. Her father discovered them together one night, the night of a great snowstorm. He threw her lover out. The young man froze to death on their doorstep.

When McGowan leaves, he tracks down his would-be assassins and shoots them. At his trial, everyone is stunned when the notoriously private Miss Ardsley is called as a witness. What time did the defendant leave your house that night? his lawyer asks. Twelve o’clock she says. It’s the very moment when McGowan’s rivals were murdered across town. The charges are dropped. Only at the end do we learn that Abigail long ago had every clock in the house stopped at midnight – the last time she saw her lover alive.

But one of my favourites, ‘Blood Pressure’, barely has a plot at all. It’s really little more than a picaresque tour of Runyon’s world of illicit gambling joints, speakeasies and all-night diners, told, as all the stories are, by a narrator who lives wholly in that world but who affects to be ‘a guy who is just around’. Its story is this: the narrator ‒ unnamed, but let’s call him Runyon too ‒ is standing on Broadway late one night contemplating his blood pressure. It is too high and he needs to avoid stressful situations. Runyon is accosted by a supremely vicious gangster named Rusty Charley. Charley drags Runyon to two gambling dens and a speakeasy, by way of a breakneck journey in a cab. His stress level gets higher every step of the way. Everyone is afraid of Rusty Charley, Runyon most of all; along the way Charley punches out a taxi driver, five policemen and a horse. At Charley’s apartment, his wife blames Runyon for leading her husband astray, hitting him on the head with a brick as he flees the scene. Back at the doctor’s, Runyon discovers his blood pressure is down. ‘It only goes to show what just a little bit of quiet living will do for a guy,’ the doctor tells him.

It’s a small world, this. Most stories take place in New York, in the five blocks either side of 50th Street, book-ended by 10th Avenue to the west and Park Avenue to the east. They were largely written in the first half of the 1930s and either look back to Prohibition or are set during the Depression. The rich and glamorous may pass through, but this is essentially a poor man’s world of gamblers, dreamers, gangsters and hustlers, most of whom live hand to mouth. ‘What Feets Samuels does for a living’, Runyon writes of a grifter in one story, ‘is the best he can, which is the same thing many other guys in this town do for a living.’

For all that his characters have colourful, almost vaudevillian names – Hot Horse Herbie, The Seldom Seen Kid, Dream Street Rose – and speak an argot all of their own, the world Runyon writes about was a real one. As a 1939 Random House travel guide explains, Broadway was ‘the district of glorified dancing girls and millionaire playboys and, on a different plane, of dime-a-dance hostesses and pleasure-seeking clerks . . . [of] gangsters and racketeers, panhandlers and derelicts, youthful stage stars and ageing burlesque comedians, world heavyweight champions and once-acclaimed beggars.’ That’s Runyon’s Broadway to a tee.

It is not a world that Runyon himself was born into, however. Alfred Damon Runyan (the spelling changed later) was born in 1880 in another Manhattan altogether – the hick one in Kansas – the eldest of four children. His mother was consumptive. When she died in 1888, his grandmother came and took Runyon’s three younger sisters to live with her. He never saw them again. His father was a drinker and a newspaperman. He and his son shared a room ‒ and a bed ‒ in a boarding-house. The father worked late into the night then headed for the saloon. Coming home at five in the morning he would rouse the son from bed so he could sleep the day through. Runyon’s schooling was negligible: he learned to read from his father’s old newspaper columns. He found for himself what education he needed either in the local library or by watching what happened on the streets. It’s not hard to make the leap from such a childhood to an adult who believed that everything in life was transactional.

Respect for money dominates Runyon’s world, be it old money made a generation back by railroad tycoons or the new money of the bootleggers and hoodlums. Life is a game played with weighted dice; anyone who beats them is owed respect. On a train, Runyon and a friend bump into one such man, Mr Phillips Randolph. ‘Why . . . he is the sixth richest guy in this country, or maybe the seventh,’ the friend says. ‘It is a great honour for us to be travelling with Mr Phillips Randolph, because of him being such a public benefactor and having so much dough, especially having so much dough.’

The people most at home in this world are gangsters and horseplayers, no matter where they are from, but there are quite a few stories about out-of-towners who are washed up into it. Men like Tobias Tweeney, for example, in ‘Tobias the Terrible’, who comes to the city from rural Pennsylvania to meet some gangsters because his home-town girlfriend compares him unfavourably with her idols, James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson. When Tobias asks Runyon if he knows such types, he is horrified. ‘I do not know any such characters,’ he says, ‘and if I do know about them I am not going to speak about it, because the best a guy can get in this town if he goes around speaking of these matters is a nice kick in the pants.’ The first rule of Broadway is, you don’t talk about what goes on on Broadway.

It is, in fact, one of the glories of Runyon’s style this, the great propriety and exactitude with which he and his characters avoid saying things directly. Famously, there are no contractions but there are euphemisms aplenty. Saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing – heavens, wearing the wrong thing – might prove fatal. Rusty Charley ‘is known to often carry a gun in his pants pocket, and sometimes to shoot people down as dead as door-nails with it if he does not like the way they wear their hats – and Rusty Charley is very critical of hats’. So naturally, people choose their words carefully. Words mean things; the wrong words in particular.

‘Runyonese’, the critic Ian Hamilton said, was ‘a lingo invented to convey the simultaneous workings of a slow brain and a speedy tongue’. But I think that might be the wrong way round. Everyone is thinking fast about what not to say. In ‘Gentlemen, the King!’ a Philadelphia gangster named Kitty Quick approaches Runyon.

‘Listen,’ he says, ‘do you know anybody in Europe?’

Well, this is a most unexpected question, and naturally I am not going to reply to unexpected questions by guys from Philly without thinking them over very carefully, so to gain time while I think, I say to Kitty Quick: ‘Which Europe do you mean?’

This is dialogue as prevarication, holding what you know close to your chest while you wait to play out your hand. Everyone who belongs on Runyon’s Broadway thinks this way, and it’s the one thing they have in common with the way Runyon writes. The formality, the euphemisms, the sensitivity to how words might be received go hand in hand. They are a necessity because everyone, Runyon’s narrator included, lives wholly in the present tense. It’s what makes them, and the way they live, so attractive, despite their foibles – if homicide can be classed as a foible.

It’s a transient world, too; the trajectory of the lives in it is downwards – and they all know it. ‘All Horseplayers Die Broke’, one story is titled. ‘I long ago come to the conclusion that all life is six to five against,’ a ticket tout named Sam the Gonoph says in ‘A Nice Price’. Jo-Jo, a Chicago gangster and associate of Kitty Quick, is pointed out to visitors to the city as a ‘very remarkable guy because he lives as long as he does, which is maybe forty years’.

For all that Runyon’s world is long gone, its slang filed away in dictionaries, the stories are so vivid and their sometimes ridiculous characters so alive because the prose still sings in the timeless vernacular of the moment, and the very transience of the lives depicted sharpens the vitality of the language to an exquisite point.

That point, in most stories, is more comic than it is poignant, but it is often poignant nonetheless. I feel that more piercingly than I once did, partly, I think, because I can hear my father’s voice more clearly, his delight in the ever-living now of that historic present tense, in the lovely open rhythms of the phrases, which often seem to decline through the cases of a thought towards the definitive expression of an idea. ‘As Sam gets older,’ it is said of Sam the Gonoph, ‘he will not think of stealing anything. At least not much, and especially if it is anything nailed down.’

As I get older, these stories, more than any others that my father introduced me to, allow me to experience again a different historic present, where he is still reading aloud to us and his voice is briefly, keenly real once more.

This essay first appeared under a different title in Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly, Issue 76, Winter 2022. (If you don’t know Slightly Foxed, it’s a wonderful literary magazine. A joy to read and a joy to write for. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Single issues from £12; annual subscriptions from £48.)