In my twenties, I conceived an enthusiasm for Jimmy Durante. He seemed to me the epitome of a kind of entertainer I aspired to be: not the handsomest, not the funniest, not the most talented in any particular way, but still, he knew some jokes, could do a little soft-shoe, play some piano, sing in his way, whatever it took to get applause or a laugh from a room full of strangers. And, it appeared, he had managed the near-impossible task of making it through a fifty-year career in show business without making any enemies. One can only dream of such an achievement.
No doubt I was projecting onto Durante more than was sustainable by either man or icon. Nevertheless, as a musician who for the first time was touring full-time, I felt I was beginning to lose touch with friends, with the idea of home, and with common standards of behavior, so I looked to the pre-rock-and-roll era of vaudeville-trained entertainers as a model for sustaining that kind of life. I began collecting, from used bookstores in whatever town I happened to be in, biographies and memoirs of old showbiz figures: Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, Errol Flynn, John Barrymore. Inevitably, I came across, and was charmed and a little seduced by, the books of Gene Fowler.
Fowler was a newspaper reporter in Denver and New York in the teens and twenties, a bestselling author, and, for a time, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. He was a poker buddy of Buffalo Bill, a school friend of Jack Dempsey; a colleague of Walter Winchell, Ring Lardner, Heywood Broun, Grantland Rice, Damon Runyon (an acquaintance from Denver who brought the young Fowler to New York), and the other famous names of twenties journalism; he was a rumored lover of Queen Marie of Romania, he was a bar brawler and drinking buddy of everyone. He was rich and famous. He “wrote with lusty gusto,” said his Times obituary, and left “a legend of ribald escapades that matched anything he wrote.” He was most commonly described by his contemporaries with some combination of the epithets “legendary” and “colorful.” He is most commonly described these days not at all.
Fowler’s writing was publicly admired by Pulitzer Prize–winners Lewis Taylor and Robert Hillyer, who shared with him conservative politics and a taste for booze. Ben Hecht thought Fowler would “take his rightful place in the ranks of Steinbeck, O’Hara, Lardner, and Twain.” “I believe,” wrote his biographer H. Allen Smith in 1977, “that Fowler’s books will be read when the menudo of the Mailers and the posturings of the Philip Roths and, yes, the cosmic confusions of the Faulkners and Salingers have rotted away from pleasing neglect.” Well, nothing of the sort has happened, and Fowler’s bestsellers are, to the one, out of print and nestled deep in offsite library collections. How did Fowler’s reputation disappear so quickly, when so many of his peers retain some currency? Had I stumbled on a forgotten stylist who deserved to be resurrected, or simply a demonstration of the Peter Principle in letters?
His style—excessive, extravagant, unrestrained, shameless, mythologizing, anecdotal—is rich for current taste, though it should be noted that not all of his contemporaries bought what Fowler was selling. (The New Yorker was consistently hostile: “I cannot bring myself to like Gene Fowler’s new book,” began one review.) Fowler was an autodidact with an enthusiasm for Twain, Rabelais, Elizabethan poetry, and Samuel Johnson, and he had the defensive intellectual stance of the provincial. His was a half-learned and thoroughly unmodulated high style combined with the populist instinct of the tabloid reporter. He became the youngest managing editor in the Hearst chain of newspapers and was an avatar of their sensational style: both moralizing and amoral, and not above fabrication in the service of entertaining detail.
His books, roughly speaking, fall into three categories: novels, memoirs, and biographies. His three novels are, it must be said, bad, tending toward the boy’s-adventure form in characterization and dialogue (“Moussa, my cunning rogue, you have made me sublimely happy”). His memoirs—A Solo in Tom-Toms, about his Colorado youth and “my young years of window-shopping for a father”; Timber Line, about the Denver newspaper business; and Skyline, about his 1920s heyday—are a mixed bag of tone and content. Timber Line is Wild West burlesque, everyone in his anecdotes a scoundrel with a heart of gold who speaks in interchangeable sub-Twainian dialect, complete with appalling characterizations of Indians, fully imagined scenes and dialogue from decades before his birth, and a print-the-legend approach to history.
Fowler was most comfortable and effective when creating or promulgating legends—primarily his own, but also those of friends and people he saw as kindred spirits: Mack Sennett, William Fallon, W.C. Fields, John Barrymore, Jimmy Durante, Jimmy Walker. These biographies are best understood as exercises in projection, memorializing a series of (mostly) ethically dubious men as he himself wanted to be remembered: as fallible but essentially good-hearted rogues.
But the subjects and content are an easy fit for Fowler the raconteur; there is a natural affinity of style and personality in these books. The best of the bunch is Good Night, Sweet Prince, in which Fowler encounters a subject broader and more bathetic than he, and allows himself to be overshadowed. The book is pompously but romantically separated into “cantos” for a pompous and romantic subject. Fowler sketches his first impressions of John Barrymore deftly. Barrymore, at their first meeting, “put on a coat that seemed, in shape and size, to be the property of someone larger-bodied and less solvent than himself”—a description that evocatively captures the diminishment of the star gone to seed. He puts on a fedora, “a vintage number in every respect,” and we get the transformation into the majestic actor: “It might have been forest-green once. But as he adjusted the crown, giving it certain deft tugs and pats, it suddenly took on a quality of magnificence.” Barrymore is portrayed as flirtatious, erudite, courtly, and self-mocking, going around intoning lines like “The rain beats with the persistence of an unpaid madam at our door.” By contrast, Fowler himself seems almost restrained, and his sense of aphorism and detail (and real grief at Barry-more’s decline) is equal to his subject: “Jack had loved [my dog], as he had loved all creatures that did not talk.”
When Fowler indulges in front-of-stage monologue, usually at the beginning of a chapter, the results are less salubrious. But then the slot machine dings, and out pop some rather pointed phrases, with a reckless linguistic bravado: a bench of homeless men are “a rank of frowsy goblins…chilled and vagrant cynics,” a sculptor produces “stolid angels and emaciated doves,” a drunk lies “like a dissected frog on the tiles,” another shakes his head “like a tired bison.” Barrymore gets a detailed and sincerely emotional deathbed scene: “I entered Jack’s room to find him breathing like the sound of a cloth being slowly torn.”
Certainly, Fowler saw himself in Barrymore, the handsome, charismatic man with a way with words who squandered his skill: “No-one can run downhill as fast as a thoroughbred,” remarks a friend. The book concludes with a final chapter of anecdotes about the clique of broken thoroughbreds—Fields, Barrymore, Fowler, the art forger (and, it transpires, bigamist) John Decker, and the poet and art critic Sadakichi Hartmann—who called themselves the Bundy Drive Group. (Bundy Drive, in Brentwood, was the address of Decker’s house, the men’s drinking den.) This Fowler expanded into Minutes from the Last Meeting.
It is this odd, sad book which I submit as a very minor lost classic enlivening a deflated reputation. It shares some affinity with Orson Welles’s film F for Fake (without Welles’s knowing wink) as a collage of charlatans and wrecked or misplaced genius. In fact, had Welles been born a decade or two earlier, he would have been exactly the sort of character—a half-wasted talent and half-conscious self-caricature—who might have washed up at the Bundy Drive clubhouse. It is a document for connoisseurs of the Ozy-mandiases of American celebrity, bankrupt, alcoholic, incontinent, and jealous of their pride. The group’s raillery is less macho than sad, undermined by their physical decline and the more touching for it. The persistent, burbling theme is the sickness and death of Fowler’s friends (and his own heart attack); his accounts of impromptu drunken pastiches of Macbeth are interrupted by hemorrhages and funerals, car accidents, sanatoria, and roundabout suicide.
The nominal subject of the book is Hartmann, once a young modernist and Greenwich Village eccentric who wore a sprig of parsley in his buttonhole (and ate it when necessary). His literary talent was apparently real, particularly as an avant-garde dramatist and prescient art critic. But it was soon said of him that he “never finished much of anything, except a friendship or a bottle.” This crumbling provocateur, an experienced freeloader, appears in the book as a kind of insult comic, whom the group kept around the way one might a grudgingly beloved dog who bites strangers and pees on the carpet. He inspires Fowler to descriptive crescendos: “This living gargoyle…this vagabond scoffer not only believed that the world owed him a living, but proved his theory… He looked like a forgotten potato.”
Meanwhile, Hartmann’s persistent critique of his late-stage drinking companions as doomed mediocrities has acuity and bite—“Decker will end his life painting barns…Barrymore will die in the gutter. And Fowler will break his neck while stumbling over a dictionary in his sleep”—that cuts through Fowler’s fond, complacent mythologizing about how, in a “very special sense, these men were seeking the Truth” (nonsense, they were drinking themselves to death in an escapist boys’ club). Hartmann is willing to perform in exchange for food and drink, while ruthlessly expressing what appear to be his genuine opinions. His stinging and placidly transcribed assessment of Fowler’s Orientalist novel Illusion in Java indicates that he retained some sense not just of aesthetic critical judgment, but of his role as a jester and exotic pet. The success of the book is due in large part to the presence of this acid commentary by an unfamous cynic, which blows through Fowler’s foggy clemency—possibly without Fowler’s conscious intent.
“The almost lost art of phrasemaking attracts the scorn only of those who have never made up a stylish phrase in their lives,” wrote Paul West in the Times in a 1985 essay. One can locate purple prose (the phrase is from Horace) in Faulkner, in Melville, in Joyce. Ubiquitous in nineteenth-century American writing, it is scarce on the contemporary ground (Cormac McCarthy, and perhaps Ben Metcalf, come to mind). Certainly one sees it in Nabokov, who found in the “nonutilitarian delight” of embellished language, as in the purely aesthetic flourishes of nature, “a form of magic”—locating God in the superfluous.
Purple prose is more than deeply unfashionable, says conventional taste—it’s un-American, it’s undemocratic, it’s not the simple voice speaking simply. Purple has ambitions above its station. Purple says, I can get away with this, because I’m that good. But purple is also aspirational—in the mediocre writer who imagines himself a great one, in the gauche American nouveau-riche taste for ostentatious display that slaps gold leaf on every façade, that claims a place in elite taste without understanding elite subtlety.
Most of all, though, it’s fun. It’s fun to write, and, when done well, fun to read; and perhaps there is something salutary about the florid shameless bravado of it all contra the stark defensive crouch of more minimalist prose. I don’t have to approve of a sentence like “[New York City] wears her grimy snow as an aging harlot does a frowzy ermine wrap left over from more affluent times” to cackle appreciatively at it. This may not be distinguishable, as a matter of sensibility, from textbook camp—an aesthetics of the frivolous and decorative, or a taste for the pathos of failed seriousness. But I find camp in Fowler only when he indulges in damp sentimentality; the rest, depending on how high he appears to be aiming in a particular passage, simply falls along the continuum between mannerism and overindulgence.
Fowler was a flamboyant hack, a half-man of letters, a pretentious drunk—and he knew it. He quoted approvingly a critic who called one of his books the best badly written book he’d ever read. “I lacked the effective weapons of a disciplined intellect,” he wrote in one of his memoirs. “My writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.” His very speed and facility overrode what editorial sensibility he had: his prose was, wrote Edmund Wilson in a grudging appreciation of the Barry-more book, “something that is exhaled like breath or exuded like perspiration.” He couldn’t tell his good from his bad. Out of laziness or limitation, he fell into what V.S. Naipaul called “the error of thinking of writing as a kind of display.”
His charisma infused his reputation, and in the absence of the man, the reputation collapsed. (The rowdy, macho misbehavior that made his legend has aged, perhaps, even less well than his work.) But the life and the style were indivisible: hedonistic, indulgent, writing for the pleasure and titillation of reader and writer alike; writing as performance, not craft.
When I listen to a recording of Jimmy Durante on an old NBC radio show, the jokes aren’t necessarily all that funny on their own terms, or amusing to the modern ear. They were delivered on a particular day to a particular audience, not aimed toward posterity, and they were sold by a peculiarly magnetic personality. Still, the effervescence of it all still makes me laugh. The overwrought, sentimental melodrama of pre-rock vocal styles retains an emotional power entirely apart from camp appreciation. Like Durante, perhaps, the purple prose of Gene Fowler is the apotheosis of an outmoded form of populist entertainment—not built to last, but not without its obsolete charm.
Franz Nicolay’s writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, and other publications. He is the author of The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar.
