D. Runyon & Pitching Novels

[ellenkushner]

I've loved the work of Damon Runyon for years - maybe even before I saw Guys & Dolls (5 times) at summer camp. I cited his Broadway underworld characters as an influence on Swordspoint, which only made sense to a few (are you one of them?). Some years ago I pulled out my battered old copy (my dad's originally) of Runyon short stories for Delia, and she was so enchanted that she read me nearly all of them aloud. I know. You haven't lived til you've heard her Nicely-Nicely Jones. So much did she love that guy that she put him in her nice little kid novel, Changeling: the Producer of Broadway is, in fact, a (magical) Runyon character.

Now that Broadway's reviving Guys & Dolls, the New Yorker's published a terrific piece by Adam Gopnik on him, which neatly nails both Runyon's appeal and his technique - which has almost everything to do with language: "Like Wodehouse, whom he in some ways resembles, Runyon inherited a comedy of morals and turned it into a comedy of sounds, language playing for its own sake." The narrator of my coming-out-any-year-now story, "The Duke of Riverside," is my attempt to do a Riverside Runyon voice: "the unchanging, perpetually nameless and anxious-eager Narrator, with his warily formal diction and his cautious good manners.... The Narrator is, crucially, one of the lowest-status figures in Runyon’s bicameral world, where the petty hustlers and horseplayers who haunt Lindy’s by day are set against their sinister opposites, hit men and gangsters, who mostly hail from Brooklyn and Harlem and arrive at night." (and now that I've read this article, I'm not at all sure I succeeded, and it is taking all my strength - and Delia's iron advice - not to demand that Ellen Datlow give me the ms. back so I can rewrite it....).

Also: don't miss Delia's more than somewhat excellent post on pitching your novel to editors (or, I would add, not boring someone silly when they politely ask you what your book's about. Just sayin').

Comments

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I picked up Delia's reference, but not yours. Now I feel like a fool.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

I don't see why! Nobody associates Runyon with cloaks & swords. But you see it now? That's cool!

[scbutler.livejournal.com]

Actually, I don't see it yet. Am still trying to figure it out (which may involve rereading).

Still a fool.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Well, I'm not saying I was all that successful . . . . I mean, it was an influence for me, not necessarily that there's anything that should leap off the page.

[tamago.livejournal.com]

I cited his Broadway underworld characters as an influence on Swordspoint, which only made sense to a few (are you one of them?).

In hindsight, that seems so bloody obvious, I can't believe I didn't catch it before. How many times have I re-read Swordspoint? Hm...

And reading Runyon aloud was a key component of my husband's courtship of me. I'm a sucker for good language, and he played me like a cheap fiddle. Yeah.

[ellen-kushner.livejournal.com]

Yeah!

[gaedhal.livejournal.com]

Runyon creates an Alternate New York that is almost like the
ones created in various comics (Gotham City, etc.), but it's
also more like a magical realist world, where the Underworld
is in the center rather than on the margins. Something like
"Little Miss Marker" is equal to Dickens, IMHO -- and with
much of the same sensiblilty. You don't see many writers
these days who can balance that comic and tragic.