Getting Tully

“It was a dark and stormy morning …” which meant the light was terrible for taking photos of books. Yes, I could have listed other books and, yes, I could have tweaked the article for the upcoming NOBS (Northern Ohio Bibliophilic Society) newsletter which I owe the editor as we speak, but neither task called my name. Instead I took to Eric’s birthday Recliner-That-Doesn’t-Look-Like-A-Recliner and finished the biography of author Jim Tully I started last month. Between auctions, sales, that cold and larynigitis thing I had going on, and the fact that the book is too beautiful for my slipshod reading habits, I had to tackle it in dribs and drabs. A few pages over coffee at breakfast (carefully), some more at night sitting bolt upright so I wouldn’t doze off and drop it, and then today – finally! – a sustained push to the surprising and even shocking ending.

I promised myself I was not going to write a blog about this because I didn’t want it to be a shameless advertisement for my friend and fellow bookseller, Paul Bauer’s, biography, written with Mark Dawidziak who used to write for the Akron Beacon Journal and is now at the Cleveland Plain Dealer. I intended to stick to that too – that is, until today when the grey matter in my brain suddenly lit up like Vegas and I GOT it. For almost twenty years Bauer and Dawidziak researched an unschooled Irish-American writer from St. Mary’s, Ohio who had more lives than a cat. They even trekked out to California where they pored over the Tully papers at UCLA and sought out anyone who still remembered him even though he died in 1947.

If Jim Tully is not a household name to you, join the crowd. But the thing is, back in the day he was a popular wordsmith, penning any number of novels based on his life experiences – Shanty Irish, Circus Parade, Beggars of Life, Ladies in the Parlor, and The Bruiser, to name a few. Tully wrote in a dark gritty style that shocked his readers who had not as yet been exposed so rudely to life's underbelly. But all that happened only after he got his first break -- a job writing for Charlie Chaplin in California. The journey to literary fame and fortune began way before Chaplin when as a teenager he jumped off a train in Kent, Ohio and did his time making chain in a factory, reporting for the local newspaper, and even working as a tree surgeon for Davey Tree while he scribbled stories and dreamed of cobbling together a literary career.

Jim Tully grew up dirt poor, wound up in a hell-hole of a Catholic orphanage in Cincinnati when his  mother died and a few years later got hired out to a farmer and spent a winter lining his clothes with newspaper because he had no coat to work outdoors in such terrible cold. It's little wonder that he jumped the rails and took up the hobo life. The circus and the boxing ring came next, but I’m not going to get into all the details of his life because the book reads like a novel and I don’t want to spoil the plot. Tully was short in stature (shorter than me by half an inch at 5’1”) with a mop of curly red hair and a tough guy attitude. But the man could write and his sister knew it well before he did. Maybe it's my own Irish dysfunction or some  residual Catholic conflict seeking resolution in Tully's story, but this morning I  truly understood why Bauer and Dawidziak did this incredible thing –devoting nineteen years to a guy few people know, a guy who held  them firmly by the collar even as he moldered at Forest Lawn. Once you meet Jim Tully though I promise you will not forget him.

The authors compare him to Hemingway with one important difference – Hemingway wrote tough guy stories in an idealized way about how men should be in the world, whereas Tully wrote tough guy stories about the way men actually ARE in the world, which, the authors posit, is why one writer met immortality and the other seeks resurrection. Paul mentioned to me that in all his years as a bookseller he had never met a woman interested in Hemingway. I told him I’m not interested in Hemingway’s writing either, but I am most definitely interested in Hemingway himself, both as a person and a writer. I bet I have twenty books in my personal library about him and many more about those who surrounded him – Scott and Zelda, the Murphys, Sylvia Beach, Dos Possos, Ezra Pound, Martha Gelhorn, Gertrude Stein, Alice B.Toklas, Maxwell Perkins etc. While I have found glimmers of vulnerability and even softeness in Hemingway, to me Tully remained always the freckle-faced little boy packed off to the orphanage at the tender age of six, too innocent to realize he’d been sold down the river by the parish priest and his ne’er-do-well father. Imagine doing such a vile injustice to a little boy whose heart was broken over the loss of his mother, Biddy. I'll bet if it were in her power to do it Biddy would have flown out of the grave like a wild woman and knocked their two heads together like a pair of cymbals.

Anyway, it’s a great story even though I doubt I’ll read any of Tully’s books which have been reprinted by Kent State University Press in tandem with the biography which they also published. It’s not that the authors weren’t selling the product. They were, and with great conviction too, because it’s through the books that they made Tully’s acquaintance in the first place. But, as with Hemingway, my interest lies in the complexities of  Jim Tully both as a person and a writer. Imagine the leap of faith it took to entertain the notion that you could write when you have no real education to speak of and have to scrabble like a chicken in the dirt every single day for your very existence.

It’s far more faith than I ever had.  And I certainly do admire it.