Fred's Book Club: Frankly Speaking.

Welcome to another episode of the Humpback Writers, the book feature that's named after the hump of a camel, because it's Wednesday and we're at our most feeble-minded on Wednesdays, when we named it. Hey, it'd been a long week.

At our last book club meeting I said we might actually turn the spotlight on a book that's actually still available, and indeed we have, although I must confess that it's available from Dover, the publisher that specializes in great books that would otherwise be out of print. And paper dolls. They do a lot of paper dolls.

Longtime readers (you generous souls) know that I have a weakness for humorists, even and perhaps especially those neglected today -- Wodehouse is not neglected, thankfully, and Jerome K. Jerome hangs on, but not so fellows like Will Cuppy (the subject of our first book club entry), Finley Peter Dunne, H. Allen Smith, Max Shulman, Robert Benchley, and today, Frank Sullivan.

Frank Sullivan was a humorist, mostly active in the 1930's and 1940's, although he wrote in and around those decades as well, for outfits like The New Yorker and The Saturday Evening Post. He is said to have looked like a school principal c. 1900, but he didn't write like one. I'd say he was somewhere between the Benchley and H. Allen Smith schools; where Benchley was known for brilliant affectation, and Smith a two-fisted (booze or punching) journalistic style, Sullivan is a practical man in an impractical world, not exasperated or helpless but holding on to his sense of humor with white knuckles. And a great sense of humor it is. Despite, or perhaps because of, his enjoyment for a drink, he made it to age 83, which is pretty good for a New York writer.

I don't know if anyone quite grasped the man himself, because so many of the details he provided were just meant to be funny. One of his famous pieces, "The Night the Old Nostalgia Burned Down," is a series of these "biographical" gems:

Father was very strict about the aristocratic old New York ritual of the Saturday-night bath. Every Saturday night at eight sharp we would line up: Father, Mother, Diamond Jim Brady; Mrs. Dalrymple, the housekeeper; Absentweather, the butler; Aggie, the second girl; Aggie, the third girl; Aggie, the fourth girl; and twelve of us youngsters, each one equipped with soap and a towel. At a command from Father, we would leave our mansion on East Thirtieth Street and proceed solemnly up Fifth Avenue in single file to the old reservoir, keeping a sharp eye out for Indians. Then, at a signal from Papa, in we'd go. Everyone who was anyone in New York in those days had his Saturday-night bath in the reservoir, and it was there that I first saw and fell in love with the little girl whom I later made Duchess of Marlborough. 

In fact, he was born in and eventually returned to the lovely town of Saratoga Springs, New York, where one could enjoy the countryside, repair to the therapeutic hot springs, and lose a fortune at the famous horse track. Plus, it's just 37 miles north of the capital of Albany, that place we send all our lying weasels to keep them out of town. There's something about Sullivan's writing that seems to summon all of these things. He was a Cornell man and a World War I veteran, and only his newspaper duties kept him from being a regular at the Algonquin Round Table. Plus, he preferred to do his drinking and card-playing at night.

Some great advice of his, or would be if I needed it, came from an essay called "Why Not Worry?" This, right here, shows that Sullivan and I are from the same tribe in life. "Don't put off worrying," he writes. "Don't say: 'Well, I won't worry today. I'm having too much fun. I'll worry tomorrow.' Tomorrow you may be having more fun." Now, that's sound advice. "The Fate of Civilization is like needlework. You can take it up and worry about it at odd moments. I myself worry about the Fate of Civilization ten times every morning near an open window, clad in just the lower part of my pajamas."

His most famous creation was Mr. Arbuthnot, the cliché expert, who was often called on to testify Q&A style on various topics by using every cliché possible. Here's a bit from his interview about health:

Q: I suppose you don't sleep well.
A: Why, I go to bed all tired out and then don't get a wink of sleep. Don't shut my eye all night long. Just lie there and toss. Least little thing wakens me. And when I get up in the morning I'm just as tired as when I went to bed. Just like a rag, no good all day.
Q: Have you taken anything?
A: I've taken everything but nothing seems to do me any good.
Q: Maybe you're coming down with a cold.
A: Oh, I always have a cold. I'm subject to colds.
Q: There's certainly quite a lot of 'em around.
A: You know, I'm supposed to say that. I'm the cliché expert around here, not you. 

In Frank Sullivan at His Best we are blessed with seven such testimonies from the cliché expert.

I'm not sure which of his pieces might still be covered by copyright, so I'm going to take a chance and slip a short one in this post, in hope that it encourages you to buy a copy of the Dover edition. People always say humor doesn't age well, but I say, it depends on the humor. This piece is called "The Redwood Table," and while it is addressed as a letter to the now-defunct company of B. Altman, the famed Manhattan department store at Fifth and 34th, would work just fine today addressed to any modern purveyor of furniture, especially IKEA. Few other topical references would have to be changed. See below:

😁

The Redwood Table

By Frank Sullivan

B. Altman & Co.--

Dear Fellows,

Appreciating that you like to know all about the little joys and sorrows and triumphs of your customers I thought you might be interested to learn that I came out pretty well with that redwood garden table that I bought from you in June. I had no idea when I bought the table that you were planning to put me on my mettle the way you did. The sample I saw in your showroom was a complete, fully assembled table, all ready to receive newspapers, garden shears, Tom Collinses, cigarette butts and other pastoral impedimenta. But the table I got by express was a jigsaw puzzle in forty-three pieces waiting to be assembled and set up by me. Me, the original guy with the ten thumbs! Brothers, if I had known beforehand you were going to play pranks like that on me, I'd have taken it on the lam to Wanamaker's like a bat out of hell.

Now I'm glad I tackled that table. It's been an interesting experience. I am a bigger and sturdier man for it. 

Well, sirs, when I unpacked that jigsaw puzzle masquerading as a table I wouldn't have given you a thin dime for its chances of being assembled for this summer, and only even money for next summer. Then I conquered my first impulse to flee in panic and got to fiddling around with the forty-three pieces. Pretty soon I got interested. Forgot my troubles, forgot the war, forgot Sen. Taft and heat waves, and eureka, first thing I knew I had the contraption assembled! But not into a table. My aged relative said it was a combination library chair and medicine cabinet. I thought it seemed more like an old-fashioned whatnot. Then the aged relative got interested and took a hand and first thing you know she had the forty-three pieces assembled -- but again, not into a garden table. That seemed to elude us. Well, boys, frankly I haven't had so much fun since I was in kindergarten playing with blocks, and for my money I'd have spent the summer right there on the floor with the hodgepodge of redwood. But, meanwhile, the garden was tableless. 

Something had to be done and I did it. I know you will frown and go: "Ts! Ts!" when you hear what I did, because I know the spirit of Altman's is to have each customer work out his problems by himself and thus grow to be a self-reliant, thrifty, canny customer who pays his bills promptly each month and is a credit to the old Alma Mater at Fifth and Thirty-fourth. Frankly, I weakened and sent for Mr. Muller, the Kindly Karpenter. Mr. Muller took a look at the forty-three pieces and started to leave. I grabbed him and reminded him of his Hippocratic oath, so he reconsidered and set to work bravely to assemble a garden table out of the forty-three pieces.

He did it. I knew he would. It will take more than you slick city fellers to baffle Mr. Muller. It is a fine table, too, and works beautifully. There is only one flaw in our joy. Two, rather. We -- meaning Mr. Muller -- had two little pieces of redwood left over after we assembled the table. The table seems all right without them, but the fact that they are staring us in the face makes us nervous. For God's sake, let us know where they go, will you, so that Mr. Muller, the aged relative and I can get some sleep.