Fred's Book Club: Cheeky Devil!

Well, hello there! You must like to read, huh? You're doing it right now! And you're in the right place for our book feature, the Wednesday "Hump Day" feature we call the Humpback Writers, although nary a hump remains to be found. Hey! Get your mind out of the gutter!

Today's novel is an unusual bird, a surreal comedy from 1943 that is still hilarious. You know the author best (if at all) as writer and creator of The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. But before he wrote the Dobie Gillis stories that became a movie and later a TV show, he wrote this, his first book:

Max Shulman took the title from the John Greenleaf Whittier poem that every schoolchild would have known back then, left off the "of tan," and pegged it to his novel about a dumbbell named Asa Hearthrug and his freshman year at Shulman's alma mater, the University of Minnesota. Calling this book a novel is kind of a stretch; it is a book-long comedy of the college scene, unsurprising since Shulman made his name as a humorist in college. 

You get the feel for how the book is going to go straight off the front matter, in the Author's Note: 

All characters and events in this book are fictitious. The University of Minnesota is, of course, wholly imaginary. I think it would be of some interest to the reader to know how I happened to pick the name "Minnesota."
     It is a combination of two Indian words -- "Minne" meaning a place where four spavined men and a minor woman ate underdone pemmican, and "sota" meaning the day the bison got away because the hunter's wife blunted his arrows in a fit of pique.
     The combination of the two words means little, if anything, but the reader must consider that they are the only two Indian words I know. 

And we're off to the races.

Our book opens as Asa says farewell to his parents before his sojourn at the university. He also must bid a touching good-bye to his sweetheart, Lodestone La Toole:

Then I was beside her, and my funny little crooked smile gleamed across my bronzed face, and my brooding gray eyes crinkled at the corners. "Lodestone," I said simply.

     "Asa," she breathed, for that was my name.

     She was in my arms. Our lips met. Time crashed wildly about us as the entire universe was resolved into our wild embrace. I was laved in the fragrance of her. I knew a pulsing, mounting ecstasy, Then suddenly I was still, at peace in a pastel world. 

     "I'm hungry," said Lodestone at length. "Can't we get something to eat?"

     "Not now, my own. I haven't time. I must leave you in oh, too short a time to go to the University of Minnesota."

     "Maybe we could just get a hamburger. That don't take long."

     "I am going," I continued, "and yet I am not going. For you will always be with me. Wherever I am, whatever I do, I shall always think of you."

     "There's a White Castle down the road a piece. They have real nice hamburgers. It don't take them hardly no time to fix them neither."

Alas, soon our Asa is in college, and before you know it, swept into the Alpha Cholera fraternity, confused by professors, and prey to a femme fatale.    

I felt a prod in my ribs. Turning, I saw a dark-eyed, finely mustached girl in a close-knit burlap dress. "Hey," she whispered, "you know what sociology is?"

     "The study of how people live together," I answered.

     "Nah," she said. "It's the study of how the working class is oppressed under the capitalistic system."

     The professor fixed us with a baleful eye. "If you two don't mind," he said, "I'll go on with my lecture."

     "Tool," hissed the girl.

Yes, this is a member of the students communist party, Yetta Samovar. Or so she calls herself, having taken the name from a hero of the Soviet workers' paradise.

"She was the first Soviet woman to operate a power crane," said Yetta. "One day while working at the Dnepropetrovsk dam she leaned out of her crane to wave a greeting to a young man whose bed she shared and with whom she had become quite friendly. She leaned too far. Down she plunged into a block of newly laid, quick-drying concrete. Her last words as the concrete hardened around her were, 'Solidarity forever!'"

Asa's fraternity brothers struggle to save him from the grip of the communists by setting him up with another woman, named Noblesse Oblige. Asa falls in love with both. But what of sweet and hungry Lodestone La Toole? How will Asa decide? 

Asa is also put forward by his Cholera brothers to run for freshman representative to the student council -- can he win? What about the student newspaper? Why are they yelling all the time? ("Tear out the front page! I just got the results of the intramural chess matches.") 

It's a fast read and very funny, and while time has changed college culture to be even worse than it was in 1943, rest assured that it should all be recognizable to a student in any era.

I have to confess that the copy pictured above is not mine; mine is a 1948 three-in-one edition that I got from the Strand for $4 (price tag still inside). The collection includes Barefoot Boy, World War II home-front sendup The Feather Merchants, and the further adventures of Asa Hearthrug in The Zebra Derby.

I just want to mention one more gag, this from The Zebra Derby, in which Asa goes to war. In that book we find out that Asa's father is named Max Hearthrug. Max Shulman includes this footnote:

There are twenty-four characters in this book named Max. Let there be an end to this silly business of authors never giving their own names to characters in their novels. False modesty, faugh!

And sure enough, in the course of The Zebra Derby we meet Max Pilfering, Max Onus, Max Clodde, Max Nipthung, Max Stagecraft, etc. etc.... and the return of Yetta Samovar! 

With jokes like these, you should read something else?