Beggars of Life , livre ebook

Jim Tully
Beggars of Life
Jim Tully, 1886–1947
Beggars of Life
by Jim Tully
Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak

Black Squirrel Books
KENT, OHIO
© 2010 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2010008637
ISBN 978-1-60635-000-3
Manufactured in the United States of America
First published by Albert & Charles Boni, Inc., New York 1924.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Tully, Jim.
Beggars of life / by Jim Tully.
p. cm.
“Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.”
ISBN 978-1-60635-000-3 (pbk. :alk. paper) ∞
1. Tully, Jim.
2. Tramps—United States—Biography. I.Title.
HV4505.T8 2010
305.5′68—dc22
[B]
2010008637
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.
To RUPERT HUGHES A Friend and CHARLIE CHAPLIN A Mighty Vagabond
TRAVEL
The railroad track is miles away,
And the day is loud with voices speaking,
Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day
But I hear its whistle shrieking.
All night there isn’t a train goes by,
Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,
But I see its cinders red on the sky,
And I hear its engine steaming.
My heart is warm with the friends I make,
And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
No matter where it’s going.
—E DNA S T . V INCENT M ILLAY
TABLE OF CONTENTS   I NTRODUCTION BY P AUL J. B AUER AND M ARK D AWIDZIAK I. S T . M ARYS II. I NITIATION III. A MY, THE B EAUTIFUL F AT G IRL IV. A DVENTURE A GAIN V. A T ALE OF THE P HILIPPINES VI. A R IVER B APTISM VII. F URTHER E SCAPADE VIII. B ILL’S S TORY IX. A M IX-UP X. T HE R OADS D IVERGE XI. A W OMAN AND A M AN XII. A T URN IN THE R OAD XIII. A L ONG R EST XIV. A N E LECTION V ICTORY XV. T HE V ICTORY B ALL XVI. T HE R OAD A GAIN XVII. A S AMARITAN’S F ATE XVIII. A W ORLD’S R ECORD XIX. T HE K ANGAROO C OURT XX. A W ILD R IDE XXI. A S WITCH I S T HROWN XXII. B URNED O UT XXIII. T HE J UNGLE XXIV. O KLAHOMA R ED XXV. A N E ASY R IDE XXVI. T HE M AN OF V ISIONS XXVII. A W OMAN R EMEMBERED XXVIII. H APPENINGS XXIX. A T RAIN P ASSES XXX. S TEEL T RAIL’S E ND XXXI. W ORDS
INTRODUCTION
PAUL J. BAUER AND MARK DAWIDZIAK
Jim Tully (June 3, 1886–June 22, 1947) was an American writer who won critical acclaim and commercial success in the 1920s and ’30s. His rags-to-riches career may qualify him as the greatest long shot in American literature. Born near St. Marys, Ohio, to an Irish immigrant ditch-digger and his wife, Tully enjoyed a relatively happy but impoverished childhood until the death of his mother in 1892. Unable to care for him, his father sent him to an orphanage in Cincinnati. He remained there for six lonely and miserable years. What further education he acquired came in the hobo camps, boxcars, railroad yards, and public libraries scattered across the country. Finally, weary of the road, he arrived in Kent, Ohio, where he worked as a chainmaker, professional boxer, and tree surgeon. He also began to write, mostly poetry, which was published in the area newspapers.
Tully moved to Hollywood in 1912, when he began writing in earnest. His literary career took two distinct paths. He became one of the first reporters to cover Hollywood. As a freelancer, he was not constrained by the studios and wrote about Hollywood celebrities (including Charlie Chaplin, for whom he had worked) in ways that they did not always find agreeable. For these pieces, rather tame by current standards, he became known as the most-feared man in Hollywood—a title he relished. Less lucrative, but closer to his heart, were the books he wrote about his life on the road and the American underclass. He also wrote an affectionate memoir of his childhood with his extended Irish family, as well as novels on prostitution, boxing, and Hollywood and a travel book. While some of the more graphic books ran afoul of the censors, they were also embraced by critics, including H. L. Mencken, George Jean Nathan, and Rupert Hughes. Tully, Hughes wrote, “has fathered the school of hard-boiled writing so zealously cultivated by Ernest Hemingway and lesser luminaries.”
With the publication of Beggars of Life in 1924, Jim Tully found his voice as a writer. It was a voice that carried the echoes of many sounds: the hum of the railroad lines, the rumble of boxcars, the roar of the chain factories. The voice that had sometimes wavered in his first book, the autobiographical novel Emmett Lawler (1922), reached full-throated expression in Beggars of Life .
Pounding out the first draft over a six-week span in 1922, Tully poured what he had learned about the road and about life into the book’s thirty-one lean chapters. The white-heat of creation had taken his writing to a dynamic new level. Something stronger, harder, and tougher had been forged. Seared away were the weaker elements of his writing so evident in Emmett Lawler . Discarded, too, was popular novelist Harold Bell Wright’s foolish advice to never write in the first person. Accordingly, Tully had written Emmett in the third person, but Beggars was Jim Tully’s story, written in his own crisp voice. So the descriptions are less sentimental, even though, as the writer himself observed, there are moments of high sentiment.
With Beggars of Life , subtitled A Hobo Autobiography on the front cover by the publisher, Tully learned how to bring his hard-boiled form of writing to the boiling point. Indeed, it’s the book that defines his style, setting the pattern for the twelve books that would follow over the next two decades.
Tully never liked the subtitle, considering it inaccurate and misleading. He would take pains in print and in conversation to point out that the book largely detailed his years as a road kid, not a hobo. Few bothered to make the distinction. He did not, it is worth pointing out, object to the publisher labeling the book an autobiography. And when he began writing his memoirs in the late 1930s, he omitted his road years, letting Beggars of Life stand as his account of that period.
Jim Tully just wanted to be known as a writer. The success of his second published book put him on a road to fame as “hobo writer Jim Tully.” Wherever he would go for the remaining twenty-three years of his life, this two-word title would follow him. It was the sort of typecasting that haunted so many who found their way to Hollywood.
Still, at least there was finally a measure of celebrity to be enjoyed, and Tully had Beggars of Life to thank for it. There had been too many years of struggle not to savor this delightful turn of literary events. He would write better books, but none would become better known or open more doors for him than Beggars of Life . Before the decade was out, there would be a Broadway version of Beggars of Life (adapted by no less than playwright Maxwell Anderson) and a film version (directed by William “Wild Bill” Wellman). The book would enjoy several printings, editions, and translations.
Published by Albert & Charles Boni in mid-1924 at a price of three dollars, Beggars of Life established the writer as a gritty Gorky-like chronicler of America’s so-called “underclass.” At the same time that the Princeton-educated F. Scott Fitzgerald was turning out finely polished tales of Jazz Age wealth, the road-wise Tully was using his raw prose to tell readers about those at the other end of the spectrum.
From the opening conversation on a railroad trestle, Beggars of Life rattles along like the Fast Flyer Virginia that Jim boards midway through the book. Chapter after chapter in Beggars of Life , one finds Tully sharpening the skills that will carry him through the rest of his writing life. And perhaps the most significant advance over Emmett Lawler is his ability to vividly describe an individual or scene with a few tersely worded sentences.
His devotion to such authors as Twain and London had taught him the importance of giving the reader a sense of place, and this he does brilliantly, again and again, throughout Beggars of Life .
When we meet a hobo or railway detective in Beggars of Life , we are convinced that he is the genuine article, not some romanticized refugee from a cheap melodrama. Tully makes you feel the cold and hunger of a bleak winter ride. He makes you hear the train whistle and the sound of a skull cracking under the snap of a blackjack. He makes you see the tramps and the wanderers with a tenuous grip on the lowest rungs of the social ladder.
Beginning with Beggars of Life , when Tully wishes to transport the reader to a time and place, he accomplishes the trick with ease. What was it like waiting in the dark for a train? “Great clouds of steam and smoke fell all around us,” he tells us. “A faded yellow moon would now and then shine through the vapor.”
It’s typical of the visual sense Tully displays in Beggars of Life . A Hollywood cinematographer could do no better.
In two finely crafted paragraphs, he gives us the sights, sounds, and smells of waking up near a hobo jungle:

The sun climbed early over a wood nearby and threw its rays upon our faces. We sat erect and sleepily watched the peaceful scene around us. Some geese were swimming in circles in the middle of the river. A passenger train thundered over the railroad bridge on its way to Chicago. The frogs still croaked along the bank as we left the boat.
We walked away from the railroad tracks for several hundred feet. Smoke curled through the air at the edge of a wood. As we drew near, we smelt the odour of frying meat and boiling coffee.
Tully could move effortlessly from such straightforward detail to scenes that are evocative, even poetic. His recollections of a spring sunset are reminiscent of Twain’s deft handling of hues and colors when describing a river sunrise in Life on the Mississippi . Tully is standing near a viaduct after being rousted out of a boxcar by an armed train crew:

The sun soon sank, and the sky faded to a dull grey. Then a