From Red Smith’s obituary on McNulty, collected in For Absent Friends:
Jim Thurber’s Credos and Curios … has a piece about John McNulty, and it just tore me up. Both Thurber and McNulty are dead now and that is why you don’t hear people laugh the way they used to.
Thurber says it is difficult to describe McNulty but John himself found it easy one day after a Derby Week in Kentucky. We had come over to Louisville after a stay in the Blue Grass country around Lexington and one of our crowd showed McNulty a snapshot he had made on a horse farm.
It showed John in a paddock in the Norfolk tweed jacket and snapbrim hat that nobody else could wear so jauntily, and a foal no bigger than a boxer dog was nuzzling his hand. McNulty didn’t try to conceal his delight.
“Look at that!” he said. “Imagine throwing a man like that out of the Social Register – John McNulty, heir to the McNulty rewrite millions!”
If there’s anybody here who doesn’t know, McNulty was a great writer of memorable books, author of incomparable pieces in The New Yorker when the magazine was better than it is, but mostly he was a newspaper stiff, a sportswriter for a while, oftener a rewrite man. When he felt identification necessary he identified himself as a writer, “author of those best-sellers, ‘Barking Dog Rouses Family, Saves 5 From Fire,’ ‘Hotel Thieves Get $45,000 in Gems.’”
Every story Thurber tells about McNulty reminds me of another. Jim describes a walk about the streets with McNulty: “Two men would pass by you, one of them saying, ‘It’s the biggest gorilla in the world. They call it Garganetta,’ or a waiter in the café would tell him, ‘We get stranglers come in here all hours.’”
McNulty didn’t invent these characters, he attracted them like a magnet. In a single afternoon with him in a saloon called Little Czechoslovakia, I met Gabriel the Horseplayer, a timid little man who was afraid to carry a Racing Form because then the cops always picked him up; a former fighter, who, John said, might have been light-heavyweight champion of the world except he hated to hit people; a German butler McNulty called the Clash Man because, though he seemed a fairly decent guy, his mild arrival in the saloon caused everybody to bridle and pretty soon there’d be a loud row; the nephew of the proprietor, a kid from a wartime prison camp with a face empty of feeling who played the piano so mechanically that John would rage at him, “Look, I’ll show you how to play ‘Some of These Days’ and mean something,” and the kid would look at him blankly and John would be ashamed of himself.
“’This is Joe the Russian,” McNulty said. “He was bartender here but he wasn’t a good bartender. When he got to like somebody he wouldn’t take any money from him.”
When Joe denied this with spirit, John said, “You gave me plenty drinks.”
“Sure,” Joe said, “but you deserve it.” …
Chances are this isn’t a sports column. The way it happened, there was this book by Jim Thurber, who used to get these notes from McNulty, too. The last one, Thurber says, began, “Dear Jimmy: I think maybe that threescore years and ten is subject to change without notice.”
McNulty was sixty at the time. I’m not sure what year it was. I remember I was in a motel in Buffalo and in the morning paper there was a one-sentence obituary under a one-line head. The copyreader who wrote the head would not get my vote as the most meticulous craftsman in the business. It read:
“John McCarthy, Writer.”
From a second Red Smith-written obit of McNulty, also collected in For Absent Friends:
… Only a long-shot fancier could have composed the telegram that a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, received after several days of unexplained silence from its reporter, McNulty, on an out-of-town assignment.
“Have been invited to join Marietta Lodge of Elks. Please send birth certificate and more expense money.” …
When he wasn’t speculating about how a rewrite man in Mecca would write a lead on a convention story (“Mecca became the New York of thousand today as the International Association of Pecan Growers gathered”), the stories he told were mostly about horse playing.
Like the time in Palm Springs or somewhere that he got $400 down to the local bookmaker. As John explained it, he had the money but it was in a joint checking account he was reluctant to milk. Because the bookie was getting importunate, John telegraphed n Eastern publishing house asking $2,000 advance, by wire, on a novel whose manuscript he would deliver on such-and-such a date.
This went through channels, causing delay. By the time the check (for $1,000) arrived, John was $12 on top of the bookmaker. He sent the check back, explaining he wasn’t going to write the novel, after all.
Jim Thurber’s Credos and Curios … has a piece about John McNulty, and it just tore me up. Both Thurber and McNulty are dead now and that is why you don’t hear people laugh the way they used to.
Thurber says it is difficult to describe McNulty but John himself found it easy one day after a Derby Week in Kentucky. We had come over to Louisville after a stay in the Blue Grass country around Lexington and one of our crowd showed McNulty a snapshot he had made on a horse farm.
It showed John in a paddock in the Norfolk tweed jacket and snapbrim hat that nobody else could wear so jauntily, and a foal no bigger than a boxer dog was nuzzling his hand. McNulty didn’t try to conceal his delight.
“Look at that!” he said. “Imagine throwing a man like that out of the Social Register – John McNulty, heir to the McNulty rewrite millions!”
If there’s anybody here who doesn’t know, McNulty was a great writer of memorable books, author of incomparable pieces in The New Yorker when the magazine was better than it is, but mostly he was a newspaper stiff, a sportswriter for a while, oftener a rewrite man. When he felt identification necessary he identified himself as a writer, “author of those best-sellers, ‘Barking Dog Rouses Family, Saves 5 From Fire,’ ‘Hotel Thieves Get $45,000 in Gems.’”
Every story Thurber tells about McNulty reminds me of another. Jim describes a walk about the streets with McNulty: “Two men would pass by you, one of them saying, ‘It’s the biggest gorilla in the world. They call it Garganetta,’ or a waiter in the café would tell him, ‘We get stranglers come in here all hours.’”
McNulty didn’t invent these characters, he attracted them like a magnet. In a single afternoon with him in a saloon called Little Czechoslovakia, I met Gabriel the Horseplayer, a timid little man who was afraid to carry a Racing Form because then the cops always picked him up; a former fighter, who, John said, might have been light-heavyweight champion of the world except he hated to hit people; a German butler McNulty called the Clash Man because, though he seemed a fairly decent guy, his mild arrival in the saloon caused everybody to bridle and pretty soon there’d be a loud row; the nephew of the proprietor, a kid from a wartime prison camp with a face empty of feeling who played the piano so mechanically that John would rage at him, “Look, I’ll show you how to play ‘Some of These Days’ and mean something,” and the kid would look at him blankly and John would be ashamed of himself.
“’This is Joe the Russian,” McNulty said. “He was bartender here but he wasn’t a good bartender. When he got to like somebody he wouldn’t take any money from him.”
When Joe denied this with spirit, John said, “You gave me plenty drinks.”
“Sure,” Joe said, “but you deserve it.” …
Chances are this isn’t a sports column. The way it happened, there was this book by Jim Thurber, who used to get these notes from McNulty, too. The last one, Thurber says, began, “Dear Jimmy: I think maybe that threescore years and ten is subject to change without notice.”
McNulty was sixty at the time. I’m not sure what year it was. I remember I was in a motel in Buffalo and in the morning paper there was a one-sentence obituary under a one-line head. The copyreader who wrote the head would not get my vote as the most meticulous craftsman in the business. It read:
“John McCarthy, Writer.”
From a second Red Smith-written obit of McNulty, also collected in For Absent Friends:
… Only a long-shot fancier could have composed the telegram that a newspaper in Columbus, Ohio, received after several days of unexplained silence from its reporter, McNulty, on an out-of-town assignment.
“Have been invited to join Marietta Lodge of Elks. Please send birth certificate and more expense money.” …
When he wasn’t speculating about how a rewrite man in Mecca would write a lead on a convention story (“Mecca became the New York of thousand today as the International Association of Pecan Growers gathered”), the stories he told were mostly about horse playing.
Like the time in Palm Springs or somewhere that he got $400 down to the local bookmaker. As John explained it, he had the money but it was in a joint checking account he was reluctant to milk. Because the bookie was getting importunate, John telegraphed n Eastern publishing house asking $2,000 advance, by wire, on a novel whose manuscript he would deliver on such-and-such a date.
This went through channels, causing delay. By the time the check (for $1,000) arrived, John was $12 on top of the bookmaker. He sent the check back, explaining he wasn’t going to write the novel, after all.
posted by Kit Kiefer | 8:00 PM
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