Paul Bauer - Jim Tully: American Writer, Irish Rover, Hollywood Brawler

S helby Foote once shared an apt description of Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln that has always stuck with me. He said that they both wrote with the bark on. They both spoke American English. They spoke to Americans in a language they understood because it was of them and from them. Im not sure if that is a description directly attributable to Shelby or whether he was just passing it along from some other keen observer, but, clearly, what we also have in the work of the remarkable Jim Tully is a distinctly American writer who wrote with the bark on.

Tully is a diamond in the rough, untrained as he is both structurally and narratively. But it doesnt matter. His gifts so far outweigh his limitations; there are no doubts that the reader is encountering an American original. There are echoes of Twain, to be sure, but this is not an imitation of that great writer or anyone else for that matter. This is a unique American voice, born in unspeakable poverty, shaped by hardships, and illuminated by enormous compassion. Jim Tully has been nothing less than a revelation to mean amazing and extraordinary discovery. I love his books, and I loved getting to know him in the pages of this wonderful, hugely important biography. Here is a writer who not only deserves to be rediscovered, he needs to be rediscovered.

Although his books are accounts of a bygone America, they have a timeless quality about them. The elasticity of his narrative amazingly puts his bailiwick somehow between the Great Potato Famine and the Great Depression; the effect is like getting a remedial course about whole parts of America that heretofore have been excluded for the obvious reason that they are embarrassingly unfit for our sanitized Madison Avenue view of the past. He opened up a whole world that has been conveniently airbrushed over the decades. It is incredibly valuable to have this view of our past, mined as it is from its darkest corners. Whether he is remembering the brutalities of the hobo world or the boxing ring or the circus, Jim Tully never flinches from showing us something more decrepit and more dangerous and more depraved than we possibly could have expected. Consider what he does in his 1927 book, Circus Parade. We think of the circus as a source of joy and wonder and eternal childhood, so we are shocked but nonetheless fascinated by the savagery and dissipation he is describing. This is not a sentimental work but rather an artistry born of the excruciating facts of his own experience and suffering. Tully does this again and again in his books. He shows us real life, at the beginning of the American century when we like to think that we are at our best and emerging into an industrial worldwide power, and he stands there, alone almost, listening, watching, insisting that attention must be paid to this gigantic, Yes, but. Yes, we are this way, but there are all these other parts of American life that have been largely kept from view. Yes, we are this way, but there are also these marginalized lives, and we must know about them too.

These are lives filled with authentic tragedy, not the inconvenience of divorce and scandal, disgrace and loneliness, but the real human tragedy of abject poverty, cruelty, death, and even starvation. These people knew things. Tully knew them too, and he fashioned them into an art, drawing on his unflinching recollection of what he saw and heardand what he experienced firsthand. One of the great joys of reading Tully is realizing how fantastically he noticed everything, observing nuances of speech, behavior, and personality. Then he set these people down on paper without judgment or denunciation.

You feel a kind of authenticity here that reaches back into the last half of the nineteenth century and moves clear up to the Second World War, when there is a sense that America has somehow been united. Jim Tully digs in and says to us, Maybe, but dont miss this part. He constantly exposes us to those brutal realities and inconvenient truths often scrubbed clean by history, but what makes this a universal and transcendent experience is that he does this with an unerring eye for detail and with a great capacity for compassion. The human transcendence that comes from his art, when it comes, is diffused with a remarkable sympathy, and that is a blessing. It somehow mitigates the suffering he is describing. It is a wonderful thing to behold, leaving us with a sense of brotherhood and fellowship that transcends race, ethnicity, and economic station. His common humanity, the heroism of so-called ordinary people, is always spectacularly in evidence.