My mother read to me from the time I could turn over from my back to my belly. Soon as I could walk, she began taking me to the little library on Central Street, and soon enough I’d run through all the wonderful books for kids the librarians knew of and could afford to buy.
Mom would take me to church rummage sales and buy for me any books I wanted. When I was ten or so, in the basement of a church under the dim, flickering yellow lights far above, a funny title caught my eye, The Bishop’s Jaegers, by Thorne Smith. I thought, let’s see what these “jaegers” are, and I opened the book.
I saw immediately that the line drawings weren’t for kids, as they included quite a few women wearing little or nothing, in postures that didn’t recall any of my previous reading adventures. I slipped the book into my stack, and my mother’s quarter set me on the low road my life has followed ever since.
Thorne Smith, I learned much later, was a funny little fellow who set out to make his living as a writer before the ‘20s began. He found little luck until one day, drunk at his typewriter and nearly ready to look for honest work, he saw the tail of a dog moving through an unmown weedfield across the street. The tail set him considering tails without dogs, and heads without bodies, and those musings eventuated in his novel Topper, in which a couple of young ghosts return to ruin the respectability and renew the life of a middle-aged banker. The book made a career for him, and he faithfully followed its formula through many more books, all of which I hunted down and read.
Smith’s heroes were always small, shy men – like Smith, like myself – who became embroiled with large, powerful people who despised authority and taught the small, shy men to do likewise. The women in his books were of two types – both perfect ‘20s stereotypes, of course – the shriveled or porcine, frightened, domineering wife/mothers, and the free-thinking, hard-drinking, sex-loving, irresistibly tragic young women immortalized by Dorothy Parker.
The representatives of authority Smith despised were many – the military, the judicial, the churchly, the captain of industry, the ingratiating salesman, the “civic leader” – and his raffish characters saw diligently to their comic humiliation. Smith’s political attitude, a cheerfully despairing anarchism, is best seen in this passage from Rain in the Doorway, in which Mr. Larkin explains to small, shy Hector Owen how his ideal city regards political realities:
“Those palaces there on the hill,” said Mr. Larkin, “are the homes of our retired mayors and political leaders. All built by graft. Graft, you know, my dear Owen, is also a fundamental craving. Self-interest is its brother. We used to attack graft in the old days. Now we encourage it. The only stipulation the voters make is that our grafters must share enough of their spoils with the people, spend enough on public welfare, roads, construction, amusements and holidays to keep us all happy and contented….”
“What happens to your politicians when they fail to share their graft?” asked Mr. Owen…. “
What happens?” repeated Mr. Larkin in surprise. “Naturally we run them out of town….”
“And those buildings down there in the valley,” broke in Mr. Dinner, his voice embodying the satisfaction he felt, “belong to the prohibitionists and other like vermin who endeavor to thwart nature. They’re jails. Very uncomfortable places.
Of course, Smith’s predilection for seizing the day in one hand, since his other was invariably wrapped around a bottle, took its toll. In his books, steady, daily consumption of strong drink makes people wittier, sexier, smarter and nicer than their sober-sided fellows. In his life, Smith’s love of booze led him to repeated stints at a funny farm where he was treated by blasts of water from a fire hose and, eventually, to his early death. Hemingway didn’t call liquor “the giant killer” for nothing, even if he didn’t correctly identify the giant being killed.
For all that, in spite of my own uneasy relationship with the giant killer, I remain grateful I discovered Thorne Smith when I did. He gave me courage to acknowledge my own distaste for the “family values” that surrounded me in the 1950s, the sniggling, adult values that trumpeted virtue and privately filched pennies and pinched defenseless earlobes and built atomic bombs and worshipped Mammon in the name of Jesus. Smith saw life in his America as a contest between what Nelson Algren later called the Apple-Pan-Dowdy God of the Middle Border and the God Dionysus, and his sympathies lay unequivocally on the side of the elder god.
As have mine ever since, to my frequent sorrow and eternal gratitude. For all my mistakes and fooleries, I can say I’ve chosen to live rather than conform, to take the side of the weak against the strong, to grasp the night in the face of the inevitable morning after. If heaven permits regrets, my mother may still regret that quarter she spent on Thorne Smith, but I think it was her very best.
[Thorne Smith’s best: Topper; Topper Takes a Trip; Rain in the Doorway; Turnabout; The Night Life of the Gods; The Bishop’s Jaegers; The Stray Lamb; The Glorious Pool]
