Home    Childhood     Road Years      Novels      Hollywood      Biographers      Influences     DMP

Jim Tully: Holistic Barbarian

by Charles Willeford

Jim Tully was a short stocky man, without much neck. His arms and shoulders were powerful, and he was physically strong from driving tent stakes, making chains, fighting, and hanging on to the iron ladders of fast intercontinental freights. His kinky red hair, too thick to be combed, resembled Elsa Lancaster’s electrified hair in the awful movie, Bride of Frankenstein.
A cheerful, cynical stoic, he believed in nothing - or so he claimed - and in no one other than himself. Like Jack London, Jack Black, and Josiah Flynt, Tully was a road kid who found a way to get off the road. He learned how to write.
George Jean Nathan, who rarely had a kind word for any writer, said, "If there is a writer writing meaner stories about mean people than Jim Tully, I don’t know who it is."
In 1943, Damon Runyan, in a burst of enthusiasm, placed Jim Tully among the top five American writers. Those who liked Tully’s work had a tendency to overrate its merit. He wasn't that good, not even in 1943, a bad wartime year for American literature. (Number One, by John Dos Passos, was probably the best novel published in 1943.)
H. L. Mencken, who was one of the first of many editors to recognize Jim Tully’s ability, published Tully in the closing issue of  Smart Set, and featured many of the vagabond tales during his long editorship of The American Mercury. Fully aware of Tully’s limitations, Mencken wrote, "If Jim Tully were a Russian, read in translation, all the professors would be hymning him. He has all of Gorki's capacity for making vivid the miseries of poor and helpless men, and in addition he has a humor that no Russian could conceivably have."
Louis Kronenberger described Tully’s writing as "a succession of direct hard blows from the shoulder. The prose has the defiant blare of trumpets; all of it is speed and force and action. It is not art. But it is the creative and compelling journalism of a creative mind."
Like many blurbs, these comments are hyperbolic, but in the Twenties and Thirties, when Tully was considered as a peer of Ernest Boyd, Ring Lardner, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Waldo Frank, et al., the evaluation was, at least, in keeping with those times.
Today, of course, with the current interest in positive psychology, instead of the earlier morbid concentration on personality malfunctions, Tully would be classified as a "self-actualizing" writer, and would be recognized as a "fully functioning" individual. He did not have a cause, like Jack London, and the world, just as it was, suited him right down to the hobo jungle.
For every booster, Tully had a half-dozen detractors, and many critics despised him for his arrogance. To the general reading public, Tully was a curiosity, a tramp who wrote about a lifestyle they hadn't known about. They bought his books eagerly. Tully’s uncommon adjustment to his rapidly changing times, together with his disinterested observation of life, indicate a much finer intelligence than he was ever given credit for during his lifetime.
Jim Tully was born near St. Mary’s, Ohio, June 3, ca. 1891. As a result of a lingering heart ailment, he died June 22, 1947, in Hollywood. His death made headlines in many metropolitan newspapers, and a fair evaluation of his life and work was printed in the New York Times. Today his name is forgotten by contemporary readers, and all of his books are out of print.
But the critical neglect of this important American writer is understandable. Tully was a paradox. Together with Dashiell Hammett, Tully was one of the founders of the hard-boiled school of writers in the U. S., but his earlier important work has been overshadowed by the personality features he wrote for national magazines during his later years in Hollywood. During twenty-one years as a full-time professional writer, Tully made two fortunes: one as a leader in the field of naturalist - "proletarian" - fiction and non-fiction, and the second by describing the shallow lives of Hollywood movie stars and other celebrities for mass circulation magazines.
Although his personality feature articles postdate his superior autobiographical books, he commanded top prices in both writing fields. Tully evaluated people as he saw them, not as they saw themselves, and, in America, "new" journalism was a highly original approach to non-fiction. How he felt personally about the people he interviewed frequently made him unfair to his subjects. For example, he downgraded Arnold Bennett, when he interviewed him in London, because the novelist had none of Tully’s books on his shelves. Tully was both feared and hated as an interviewer, but he was never turned down because it was prestigious to have an article by Tully published in a national magazine.
As an Irishman, Tully had little compunction about making a good story better than it already was by exaggerating the facts, but he had very little imagination. One critic called him a "frustrated novelist," a comment the author resented bitterly. But the observation was fair. Tully’s mind was too literal for imaginative, inventive fiction. The vivid characterization of the movie director in his novel Jarnegan was practically a step-by-step biography of Jim (The Covered Wagon) Cruze. To provide the gauche director with needed touches of sensitivity, Tully snatched tracer elements from the life of his friend, Paul Bern (Irving Thalberg’s right-hand man and "artistic conscience.")
Tully’s first novel, Emmett Lawler, was a barely disguised autobiographical account of his dreary boyhood in an orphan home, of slave labor on the isolated farm of a maniac, followed by sketchy incidents of his later life as road kid, factory slave, tramp, circus roustabout, and professional fighter. He knew so little about writing at the time, the first draft of Emmett Lawler was one 100,000 word paragraph. Emmett Lawler, however, adumbrates his later autobiographical books, and its publication in 1922 was the beginning of his writing career.
As he matured and developed his spare, blunt style, Tully returned to his vagabond years for the material of his best autobiographical books - Beggars of Life, Shanty Irish, Circus Parade, Shadows of Men, and Blood on the Moon. Altogether, counting Broadway plays and other works he wrote in collaboration with Robert Nichols, Frank Dazey, and Charles Behan, twenty-nine books were published under Tully’s name. In his best books, Tully had the ability to uproot the reader from a comfortable environment, to make him feel and live with his men of the road, the jail, and the professional boxing ring.
The son of a ditch-digger, and the grandson of another, Tully was never impressed by the near great nor even by the truly great. From boyhood he called himself "Jim." When a New York critic asked him why he didn't use his full name on his books, he said, "They call servants 'James.'"
Today, among top magazine writers, Richard D. Gelman probably comes closest to Tully in capturing the telling facets of a personality in two thousand words. Writing was hard for Tully, and he often worked sixteen hours a day at his desk, writing and revising his work. As a consequence, his work holds up very well today, including his ephemeral magazine articles - and he was published in more than forty magazines.
Yesterday I reread "An Ex-Hobo Looks at America" (Scribner's, Sept., 1927). I was surprised at his insights, and by how little social conditions have changed in America since 1927. Our political-industrial-military-academic complex is virtually the same. Wealthy men are still given probation, and poor men still go to prison; working men are still exploited , and only second-rate men with second-rate minds enter politics.
Every year I receive from thirty to fifty "examination" copies of new college readers. It is hard to tell one reader from another. The articles and essays are the same ("Shooting an Elephant"), the stories are the same ("The Killers"), and the poems are the same ("The Red Wheelbarrow"). It would be a pleasant relief to see "An Ex-Hobo Looks at America" reprinted in one of these college readers, even if it did disturb Business Administration majors. At least our Vietnam veterans, now attending college on the G. I. Bill, would understand and appreciate it.
Tully rarely worked at a regular job before he became a writer, nor did he consider himself a migratory worker (hobo). He was a road kid, and then a tramp - a beggar. But because the general public does not make the distinction between "hobo" and "bum," he was never able to escape the appellation of "hobo," a term his publishers considered more colorful. This distinction was important to Tully. A hobo is primarily a worker, a field hand who rides freight trains from one poorly paying job to another to save money. In time, or if he was fortunate, the hobo obtained a permanent job and never rode freights again. In other words, the hobo was - and is - an establishment hopeful looking for an establishment. A road kid and a tramp are professional bums who have chosen the road as a way of life, or, more often than not, it has chosen them. The tramp, or professional bum, is proud - as Tully was proud - of his rejection of society, and of society’s rejection of him. But it is a hard way to live; only a bitter man can stay on the road for a lifetime.
During Tully’s many years on the bum he spent most of his idle time in public libraries. And, when he left a library, he usually took a couple of books with him - hidden under his jacket. He once stole a two-volume, illustrated edition of Paradise Lost. He needed enough reading material to last him for a long freight train trip to the coast. The would-be writer invariably does a lot of indiscriminate reading before he tries to write anything himself, and Tully had always wanted to be a writer, a notion he got from the success of Jack London.
Road kids, professional criminals, dope addicts, radio announcers, writers, and other society misfits who are constitutionally unable or unwilling to hold a regular job, spend many fruitful hours in public libraries. Self-educated writers like Jim Tully get strange educations through voluminous, undirected reading. As a general rule, they resemble graduate students in English - well-versed in the humanities, and almost totally ignorant in the sciences.
"Career block" specialists (Paul Goodman comes to mind) would consider Tully’s ambition to write as an "unrealistic goal." Certainly no other American writer had as little formal preparation for writing; but Tully had persuaded himself that he could become a writer. His wide range of reading gave him a veneer of culture that astonished the society and literary figures he met after his initial successes. Frank Scully, Sara Haardt, Damon Runyon, and particularly Arnold Bennett, were charmed by Tully’s self-confidence, social ease, and wide range of knowledge. The only man he never impressed was his good friend Wilson Mizener, who accused Tully of not having a bath until he was thirty, and called him a "porter in the bawdy house of words." (Wilson Mizener, of course, holds the world’s championship for self-confidence as a writer. He once wired in a "short short" story to Liberty magazine [about 1,200 words], and requested payment by return wire. The editors complied.)
Tully held a variety of menial, nondescript jobs, but finally learned how to make chains in Ohio. Although he never became an expert at this trade, he confessed to Sara Haardt, he learned it well enough to dodge the draft during World War I by becoming a government chain inspector - a "war-essential" draft-exempt position. It is interesting to note that he kept his union card and dues as a chain-maker up-to-date at the height of his career, when he was averaging $80,000 a year from his writing. Making chains is highly skilled work, and expert chain-makers were proud of their prowess at this difficult craft. Tully describes these craftsmen at some length in Blood on the Moon, and he was rightfully proud of his union card. But a permanent job as a chain-maker was unsuitable for a man of his temperament.
After more than seven straight years on the road, including a stint as a circus roustabout and stake driver, Tully tried another path to success that is always open to the poor and uneducated in America - the professional prize ring. Gentle Joe Gans had given him a few professional tips on boxing in Chicago, and Tully had served a willing apprenticeship in street fights and rough-and-tumbles. He knew that he could hit hard and absorb punishment, and those are adequate qualifications for any would-be club fighter. In a newspaper print shop, Tully faked some newsclippings that "proved" a record of thirty winning fights without a single loss. Armed with these phony clippings, he began to fight professionally, as a featherweight, in Cleveland. Some twenty fights later, after fighting under an assumed name in San Francisco, he regained consciousness in his hotel room. He had been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours. His watch and the purse he had received for the fight had been stolen from him. He quit the ring forever, determined to become a writer.
Ten years later his first book was published.
While he learned his craft, he became an itinerant tree surgeon. This is seasonal work, for the most part, and between jobs Tully worked on his first book until it was finished. Realizing that he needed editorial help, he went first to Harold Bell Wright, in Los Angeles, and then to Upton Sinclair. Wright advised him not to write in the first person, and Sinclair refused to read the manuscript. Finally, Rupert Hughes, the "reactionary," helped him by going over the 100,000 words with a blue pencil, gave him money when he was destitute, and stuck with him faithfully through the difficult revisions of Emmett Lawler.
Tully’s first publisher didn't give him an advance, and even after the book came out he was still broke in Hollywood. Ralph Block, who had faith in Tully’s ability, introduced him to Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin, then at the height of his fame, hired Tully as his press agent at fifty dollars a week. Chaplin, whose background of poverty was similar to Tully’s, liked to have Tully in his entourage, although he didn't care for his writing. During the eighteen months Tully was employed to write articles for Chaplin’s signature, the comedian signed only one of them.
Once, when Tully slept soundly throughout a story conference on The Gold Rush, Chaplin said, "You’re a snob, Jim." A few years later, when Tully wrote Chaplin’s biography, he admitted that this was the only compliment Chaplin had ever given him.
Chaplin was angered enough by Tully’s unauthorized version of his life to sue the writer for a half-million dollars. Chaplin lost the suit. The biography was true, if unflattering, and Tully’s Chaplin biography is a must book for our burgeoning crop of cinema historians.
Like many self-educated writers, Tully was chary of English grammar and syntax, and avoided compound sentences. His paragraphs were rarely more than three sentences in length, a practice he learned from writing newspaper publicity releases. Often each sentence was its own paragraph, containing a single thought. Despite his large reading vocabulary, Tully wrote as if he were restricted to the Basic English list of 850 words.
He was also fond of the orotund cliché, and he invented many of them. His prose is filled with terse, one-line paragraphs. He used these short lines to drive home points that had already been made. When they work they are powerful; when they don’t they are embarrassing.
"He is impersonal as weather."
"Winchell, for once, was silent."
"He did not move or speak again."
Even out of context these are strong sentences. The cumulative effect of these short sentences in a full-length book is sometimes overwhelming. There are powerful, single chapters in all of his books, but many chapters are uneven in a full-length book, and some chapters are ragged.
Unimaginative, wit did not come easily to Tully, although some of his epigrams are still in circulation: "Fame is merely the prolonging of neighborhood gossip."
Some of Tully’s similes would make Fannie Hurst wince: "-as somnolent as an Indian," "-as still as a rural gravestone," but many of them worked. The bad ones stand out because he used so many similes.
Although some of Tully’s finest passages are noticeably strained, he had the great artist’s ability to capture, with a few efficient words, the essence of a man’s appearance and personality. And once a reader is caught up in the story Tully tells, plangent discords are rarely bothersome. The rhythm of his writing has a poetic quality similar to the late John Masefield’s proletarian verse.
Here, for example, is a short scene from Tully’s novel, The Bruiser:
Sully’s manager pointed to Rory's two defeats by the champion, and insisted that he fight Bangor Lang. He disposed of him with, "He'll never get by Lang."
"If we do, do we get Sully?" asked Tim.
"After you fight Torpedo Jones."
"But Sully didn't beat him."
"He's champion - and our terms go."
"You're a nice fellow, Al - an honor to the game," Silent Tim sneered.
"I'm lookin' after my fighter."
"You'd better."
A match was made with Lang.
Compare this scene with Masefield’s idiomatic rhythms (from Everlasting Mercy):
"I'll never shake your hand," he said.
"I'd rather see my children dead,
I've been about and had some fun with you,
But you're a liar and I'm done with you.
You've knocked me out, you didn't beat me;
Look out the next time that you meet me;
There'll be no friend to watch the clock for you
And no convenient thumb to cock for you.
That puts my meaning clear I guess,
Now get to hell; I want to dress."
Tully's decline in popularity can be explained as easily as his success: He was a writer attuned to the exact instant of his times, in accord with the twenty-year cultural lag in American literature. He became popular in the mid-Twenties, and his books were popular throughout the Thirties. But the best years he wrote about were those from 1896 to 1912. His books were direct outgrowths of the pre-WW1 social system, the product of the material conditions of his youth. By the time his books appeared they were "historical" novels, but the reading public of the late Twenties and Thirties accepted them as current fare. Today they are truly historical, but they are still fresh and vital as American literary history.
Clyde Griffiths, Nick Adams, and Emmett Lawler: these are the three young literary heroes who became the prototypes for the American initiation novel of the 1896-1912 period. Clyde Griffiths, the pragmatist-sneak, and Nick Adams, the romantic, upper-middle-class rebel, are still an important duo in American literature. Their adventures are still recommended highly to college students today. But Emmett Lawler, the orphan-road kid, has been lost somewhere along the way. Now that the "culturally disadvantaged" are being admitted to colleges under the open door policy, Emmett Lawler could, quite possibly, turn out to be the most important archetype of the three.
I am not concerned with the adventures, or incidents, in Tully’s autobiographical books - although they are of interest in themselves, from an historical point of view - my primary concern is with the attitude, the amused stoicism of the narrative "I" in his books.
We can easily understand a Nick Adams volunteering his services for a foreign army (as an ambulance driver with "officer" status, naturally, but not as a combat soldier, because that was the thing to do: See dos Passos, e. e. cummings, etc.); and we can understand, with sympathy if not empathy, the ambition of young Clyde, who was willing to kill for plenty of dough and a neat social life. But if we don’t understand Jim Tully, and the conditions that produced men like him, conditions that are producing more just like him every day - but without, as yet, his drive - we will fail to understand how at least one third of our nation feels and thinks about the American Way of Life.
It took a lot of guts to dodge the draft during World War II (remember Pearl Harbor?), but can you imagine what kind of guts it took to dodge the draft in World War I? Well, then, if you are a middle-class reader, as most readers are, ponder the indifference to public opinion of Jim Tully, examining chains during World War I, and that of his buddy, and fellow road kid, Jack Dempsey, working in the shipyards during the war that was supposed to end all wars. But Tully - and Dempsey - weren't as stupid as Muhammad Ali; they found legitimate ways to avoid the draft.
Tully did not indulge in the psychographic or social overtones so popular in the fiction of the Twenties, nor did he make value judgments about yeggs, heisters, wolves, bums, club fighters, and sneak thieves in his books. By straightforward narration of the social events he knew intimately, and from firsthand experience, he made the readers of his time as conscious of the social evils as Frederic C. Howe did in his muckraking reports on a slightly higher literary level.
Tully’s impersonal article, for example, on the legal execution by hanging of a young man in California, is as great an indictment against capital punishment as anything ever written on the subject by Albert Camus ("California Holiday," The American Mercury, Jan. 1928).
Walt Whitman said, "Literature is big only in one way - when used as an aid in the growth of the humanities - a furthering of the cause of the masses - a means whereby men may be revealed to each other as brothers."
At least five of Tully’s books (Beggars of Life, The Circus Parade, Shanty Irish, Shadows of Men, Blood on the Moon) are within Whitman’s concept of literature. These are the five books Tully wanted to have published some day as his "Underworld Edition." He thought, and in this I agree with him, that his literary reputation would rest on these five books. Today, however, as I mentioned earlier, all of Tully’s books are out of print. The copyrights have expired, and his work is now up for grabs for any U. S. publisher, with a penchant for social history, to reissue.
What Jim Tully had to say about growing up absurdly in an earlier America should not be lost on today’s readers. The "Underworld Edition" should be reprinted and reissued in a single inexpensive volume. For a writer of mean books, Jim Tully’s achievement was not mean, but it will be demeaning to all of us if we fail to give him a second trial.

This essay and many other pieces by Charles Willeford will be included in Writing and Other Blood Sports, scheduled to be published in January 2000 by, who else, Dennis McMillan.

Home    Childhood      Road Years       Novels       Hollywood       Biographers       Influences     DMP