I didn’t think anybody besides me knew about Jim Tully, but the Kent State University Press has proved me wrong by reissuing two Tully novels. Shanty Irish is a memoir of growing up poor in Ohio at the end of the 19th century, while Circus Parade is about Tully’s time as a circus laborer.

Jim Tully was a tough little guy — he looked a lot like actor Charles Bickford, except a foot shorter — who was a favorite of H.L. Mencken’s, wrote a couple of bestsellers about the mean streets of life in the 1920s, went to Hollywood, worked for Charlie Chaplin for a while, and even did some acting. He developed a sideline in movie star interviews that were considered extremely tough for the time.

His ship went out in the ’30s — I suspect alcohol — and he died broke in 1947.

If I had to compare Tully’s work to anybody, it would be Charles Bukow-ski, especially in his lack of self-pity and a plain–spoken style that acted as a sort of counterpoint to the lush prose, settings and characters of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
These books bring back a writer who has been forgotten for too long. John Sayles contributes an introduction to Shanty Irish, while Harvey Pekar does the honors for Circus Parade.

Another interesting reissue comes from The New York Review of Books. Elaine Dundy’s excellent The Old Man and Me takes on the Jamesian theme of an American girl in London.

The time is 1962, so things happen that Henry James wouldn’t have dreamed of, but there comes a rude awakening of which James would definitely have approved.

Mike Browning’s Word of the Week …

formication: the hallucination that snakes or insects are crawling over the skin.