Books: The Hired Rebel

RUNYON FIRST AND LAST (255 pp.)—Damon Runyon—Lippincott ($2.75).

By 1945, when Damon Runyon wrote his last stories, they had become as predictably stylized as a Balinese dance. His Broadway heroes, for example, were called Sam the Gonoph, Harry the Horse or Gigolo Georgie; they could calculate the death of a pal as coldly as the third race at Jamaica—but in Runyon's last-paragraph twists and hooks they always proved to have hearts of gold.

Latter-day Runyon creatures spoke a language of their own, a dialect which showed traces of remote English ancestry but which, despite its lack of formal grammar, was curiously courtly in its rhythms. When a Runyon character wanted to say that a tout had left money to his girl friend to buy him a tombstone, he said, "I am under the impression that he leaves Beatrice well loaded as far as the do-re-mi is concerned and I take it for granted that she handles the stone situation." In Runyonese there was only one tense, the universal present, for the characters who used it were usually too engrossed in the immediate moment to look either backward or forward.

Diverting Frankenstein. Damon Runyon's Broadway stories were highly readable and amusing; to a large following, they stood for incisive reporting of U.S. big-city life. But, as he himself seemed to know, Runyon had created a kind of literary Frankenstein: the formula that brought him fame and money also limited his growth as a writer.

In Runyon First and Last, a collection of his earliest and last pieces, there are two mildly amusing Broadway stories and over three dozen sketches written between 1907 and 1915 in Runyon's youthful, pre-formula days. One of them, a hobo story called "The Informal Execution of Soupbone Pew," is a report of a murder told in a bantering tone reminiscent of Ring Lardner. Others are gentle spoofs on his old home town in the West, sketches of Army life in the Spanish-American War, or idyllic reminiscences of childhood.

Considered Opinion. The early Runyon shows talents of two kinds: he might have written boys' stories with the charm and freshness of Booth Tarkington's Penrod books, or he might have become a Lardner-like realist in vernacular. Instead, he mastered a highly successful formula.

In one of his last columns for Hearst's King Features Syndicate, Runyon wrote a review of his own work. Said Runyon of Runyon: "By saying something with a half-boob air ... he gets ideas out of his system on the wrongs of this world which indicate that he must have been a great rebel at heart but lacking moral courage . . . He is a hired Hessian of the type writer ... I tell you Runyon has subtlety but it is the considered opinion of this reviewer that it is a great pity the guy did not remain a rebel out & out, even at the cost of a good position at the feed trough."