LIT CORNER. I picked up some old books for a song (well, 50 cents apiece) at a sale. Fascinating specimens. One was Gene Fowler's bio of Jimmy Walker, the Roaring Twenties mayor of New York, called "Beau James." With Fowler I was previously acquainted; I'd read his cheapy bio of Jimmy Durante, "Schnozzola," and the Walker book follows a similar pattern: anecdotes and witty sayings bridged by historical data seemingly recited from imperfect, but compulsively perfecting, memory -- the polar opposite of those meticulous 800-page biographies that win the Pulitzers. Fowler seems to have been pals with both Durante and Walker, and with Damon Runyon, whose style he shares a bit. That this style also intrudes into the "quotations" of his subjects only adds to the charm, if not the versimilitude. Here's a Walker tale, via Fowler:

Whenever Jim shaved he used 'Champagne' toilet water, his only perfume, as a lotion. He paid six dollars a bottle for this dressing, which he also used after a bath. One of his servants seemed unable to buy the toilet water for less than ten dollars a bottle.

Jim was not the man to quibble about expenses, but somehow he had set his mind upon six dollars as a fair price for his favorite toilet water.

"I wonder," Jim said to the servant one day, "if we might strike a bargain, you and I? I'm going to raise your salary on the condition that you find a place that sells the toilet water for six dollars a bottle."

The servant qualified for the wage increase. "You know," Jimmy once said to his friend Johnny O'Connor, "if someone stole Brooklyn Bridge I'd be the last person in town to miss it. But when someone gyps me on toilet water, I feel that I am being more used than usual."

Does this sound stenographically accurate? Who cares?Walker had style, and so did Fowler, and if one owed some of his style to the other, I don't care to know of it. We're always hearing about how eloquent Bush is, but are offered very flat champagne (or toilet water) as evidence. At least Fowler had the decency to gussy up his subject so that we might believe him to be as smooth as advertised. Not truth, then, but legend, and we who revere "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance" know what choice to make.

I also got an 1899 edition of Norris' "McTeague." This of course is the source material for von Stroheim's ill-fated "Greed," and for William Bolcom's opera (libretto by Arnold Weinstein and Robert Altman!). I can see why grand stylists are attracted to this property, even though the novel's pitch is tuned to the first faint notes of naturalism coming then out of Europe. Norris seems to have caught the Zola bug bad. Every squalid flat is rendered down to the last rusted coathook and battered chair-rail, and all relations are inevitably reduced to their grubby essence, often with disdainful and sometimes horrified commentary by the author, as in this passage detailing the quack dentist McTeague's infatuation with the childlike Trina:

The poor crude dentist of Polk Street, stupid, ignorant, vulgar, with his sham education and plebean tastes, whose only relaxations were to eat, to drink steam beer, and to play upon his concertina, was living through his first romance...

Ugh. Before McTeague first kisses Trina while she is anaesthetized in his dentist's chair (!), his inner struggle is rendered thusly:

He was alone with her, and she was absolutely without defence. Suddenly the animal in the man stirred and woke; the evil instincts that in him were so close to the surface leaped to life, shouting and clamoring... it was the old battle, old as the world, wide as the world -- the sudden panther leap of the animal, lips drawn, fangs aflash, hideous, monstrous, not to be be resisted...

Double ugh. One sympathizes with Eugene O'Neill's old man, who, after seeing his son's "Beyond the Horizon," asked him, "What are you trying to do, send the audience home to commit suicide?" For there is something purposefully ugly about the early attempts of American writers to not only grab hold of the truth as they saw it, but to thrust it under the nose of the bourgeoisie.

And yet... along this muddy track the novel proceeds single-mindedly and gathers great force and even beauty. One can see where Dreiser got it from -- the ham-handed, club-footed narrative style that, seemingly by brute force, draws readers in and carries them down into the muck. Mencken, that great champion of these authors, once said of the oratory of Warren G. Harding, a very different kind of writer, that it reminded him of "a string of wet sponges; it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." I wonder if Mencken, whose aversion to poetry is legendary, might not have admired something of idiotic barking-dog grandeur in Norris and his decedents as well?