The Horse goes home
Benny Green
The death in Baltimore last week of an obscure old punter called Benjamin Caplan is a reminder that immortality can come to a man in the oddest ways. For Caplan was by no means obscure in his idealised :state, which was Harry the Horse in Damon Runyon's short stories, that impressive sport who is "about as good an off-hand liar as there is in the United States," and who is " by no means as bad looking as the photos of him the cops send around make him out." When he died Caplan was sixty-nine, and taking into account the fact that Runyon, whose vintage years were those between the wars, died twenty-seven years ago, Harry the Horse must have been one of the last survivors from that flat but brilliant world of racetracks and nightclubs where Rusty Charley threw punches at a milkman's horse. Nicely-Nicely .Johnson lost the World Eating Championship, and Feet Samuels, after selling his own body to a hospital, failed to find a way of delivering the goods on the appointed day.
Runyon is one of the most peculiar prose masters of this century, a born storyteller who, realising that man cannot live by plot alone, took a sidelong glance at de Maupassant and Edgar Allan Poe and saw that what he had to do was to embellish plot with literary artifice, or Style as it is sometimes called. His problem was to find a way of orchestrating his prose to the tempo at which his strange unliterary oddball characters thought and spoke, and, after a much more arduous process of trial and error than is often assumed, he arrived at the outlandish device of the consistent use of the Historic Present tense. All that was then left to do was to endow the long procession of punks and hustlers with the surface conversational punctilio of latterday Tennysonian knights. Nobody in a Runyon story is ever frightened, only nervous; never murdered, only eliminated; never hates 'his enemy, only does not wish him well, a use of litotes perfectly expressed not only in the title of one of the most famous Runyon collections, More Than Somewhat, but also in the title of one of the finest of the stories, 'A Slight Case of Murder.'
It was a desperate technical gamble and it succeeded so completely that Runyon actually added, a whole new department to the repertoire of popular myth, wherein hardfaced softies in sharp fedoras shoot craps in the backroom, which is the kind of scene so well suited to a three-dimensional transformation that it is no wonder Runyon was pounced on by the adaptors and librettists almost before the ink was dry on the paper.
It is impossible to think for long about Runyon without thinking also about his famous predecessor William Porter. Obviously there are parallels to be drawn. Both were prolific, both were obsessed with petty crime, both tried to lead the reader up the garden. Both were prone to the kind of sentimentality you can savour in Porter's The Skylight Room or Runyon's Little Pinks, and both men were utterly serious artists:
Porter: " You can't write with ink and you can't write with your own heart's blood, but you can write with the heart's blood of someone else. You have to be a cad before you can be an artist."
Runyon: "Good writing is simply a matter of application-, but I learned many years ago that the words will not write themselves down on paper in dreams or in conversations " • But the resemblances go much further than a knack of writing tales with a sting in the last line. The most important one is the fact that both were small-town boys, Porter from Greensboro, North Carolina, Runyon from a place in Kansas with the comically prophetic name of Manhattan. Both were prudish and mildy misogynistic. Porter hid behind the pseudonym of 0. Henry. As for the ' I ' in a Runyon story, who is he? We know only that because he poses no threat, he is tolerated by the thugs.
It is as well that Runyon found a style, for the alternative would surely have been that awful verbal pomposity which lies like a scar across the face of so many Porter stories. What can the modern reader make of such facetiously archaic names and orotundity of manner?:
Abimilech Fetcher sat upon the front stoop of the Parkins County courthouse, smoking a fretful pipe and paying no heed to the snowlined breezes that searched his meagre apparel.
As Stephen Crane once said of Robert Louis Stevenson, " it puts back English fiction fifty years." The only surprise is that the passage is not 0. Henry but Runyon, in the years before his triumphal flight from syntax. As for Harry the Horse, who once coined those immortal words, "All horseplayers die broke," nobody ever lived — or died — truer to his own precepts. Caplan dropped dead just as he was about to put fifty dollars on a filly in the third at Pimlico. She finished third.
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