“I thought of God as a strangely emotional being. He was powerful; he was forgiving yet obdurate, full of wrath and affection. Both His wrath and affection were fitful, they came and they went, and I couldn't count on either to continue; although they both always did. In short God was such a being as my father himself.”—Clarence Day, “God and My Father,” in The Best of Clarence Day (1948)
This past holiday season, like others for the past half-century or so, featured that 1944 Judy Garland chestnut, Meet Me in St. Louis. Fans like myself glory in the wonderful songs (such as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) and even director Vincente Minnelli’s painter-like eye. Fewer people realize that the screenplay was based on a series of autobiographical sketches by New Yorker writer Sally Benson. I don’t know how many people at this stage have even read her 1941 book that inspired the film.
Another piece of Americana, likewise based on autobiographical sketches that originally appeared in The New Yorker, suffers much the same fate today. More than 70 years after it originally opened, Life With Father, by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, remains the longest-running straight play in Broadway history, with more than 3,000 performances, and the 1947 adaptation starring William Powell as the title character and the incomparable Irene Dunne as his beloved Lavinia remains a Turner Classic Movies perennial. (The two appear in the image accompanying this post.) There was even a TV version of the show in the 1950s, starring character actor Leon Ames (not having to break a sweat as the beleaguered but goodhearted paterfamilias, having played the role a decade earlier in Meet Me in St. Louis).
More people, I think, are aware that this droll play and movie derive from the reminiscences of Clarence Day (or, to be technical, Clarence Day Jr.) than know about Sally Benson’s connection to the seminal Garland-Minnelli musical. But I still don’t think many have actually gone back to the original sources: the short book that started it all, God and My Father, and, when that proved successful, two later books that quickly found a readership in the mid-1930s: Life With Father and Life With Mother.
Day Jr.—who died on this date in 1935, at age 61—wrote much of this material as a way of getting his mind off of the ferociously painful arthritis that increasingly afflicted him toward the end of his life. He didn't live to glory in the success of Life With Father as a book (a Book-of-the-Month Club hit) and play.
I picked up a copy of The Best of Clarence Day at a local used-book sale. In dipping into it, I’ve responded in much the same fashion that New Yorker readers did at the time. It’s like luxuriating in a bubble-bath from which you’ll continually chuckle—kind of like Edith Wharton’s Old New York, only focusing on the white-collar middle class rather than the aristocracy, and with affectionate humor rather than needling satire.
The above quote, from the first sketch in “God and My Father,” points obliquely to the central situation of the subsequent play and movie: Clarence Day Sr.’s relationship with the Almighty—or, as it turns out, his very tenuous connection to the deity, since he has never been baptized. In fact, “Father” has a few beefs with the way the Man Upstairs runs things, just as a perusal of the morning paper is likely to set him off on fulminations against the city government. (“He didn’t actually accuse God of gross inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was loud and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel.”)
Set in the 1880s and 1890s, Life With Father was viewed as a nostalgia piece when it first appeared, in much the same way that reruns of Happy Days are today. (Indeed, Mr. Cunningham, with the same qualities of outer crustiness but inner goodness of heart, is like a Clarence Day Sr. without the “damns” or the quizzical relationship with God.)
Nowadays, though, in a more secular time, filled with people far more hostile toward organized religion than Clarence Day Sr., the stratagems of “Vinnie” Day to have her husband baptized are likely to appear to be something from another, less tolerant planet. A good example is the otherwise endlessly insightful All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959, by Ethan Mordden.
Author of more than a dozen books, Mordden has forgotten more about the American theater than you or I could ever learn in a lifetime. He’s particularly good on the genesis of the play Life With Father, noting, for instance, that the autobiographical nature of the material required that producer Oscar Serlin, along with Lindsay and Crouse, obtain signed separate agreements from Day’s mother and his surviving brothers in order to mount the production.
But “Vinnie” Day’s concern for her husband’s soul strikes Mordden as less well-intentioned or even quaint than as “downright genderist,” an only somewhat milder version of “our own age of ever wilder encroachments on democracy by religion fascists.”
If the otherwise estimable Mordden had looked more closely at Day’s original source material, he might see that Clarence Day Sr. would have as much of a bone to pick with Mordden’s worldview as with the divines of his own late Victorian age. “Father” was put off by the clergy and disliked the demands made by religion, but at the same time, “It disgusted him when atheists attacked religion: he thought they were vulgar.”
Moreover, not a few of the modern “Vinnies” of the world even share a point in common with Clarence Day Sr.: They have their own arguments with God. They wonder how a being whom they revere could place so many obstacles in their path, and in their worst mental anguish even question why God would even feel the need to take someone they have come to love so much.
This past holiday season, like others for the past half-century or so, featured that 1944 Judy Garland chestnut, Meet Me in St. Louis. Fans like myself glory in the wonderful songs (such as “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”) and even director Vincente Minnelli’s painter-like eye. Fewer people realize that the screenplay was based on a series of autobiographical sketches by New Yorker writer Sally Benson. I don’t know how many people at this stage have even read her 1941 book that inspired the film.
Another piece of Americana, likewise based on autobiographical sketches that originally appeared in The New Yorker, suffers much the same fate today. More than 70 years after it originally opened, Life With Father, by Howard Lindsay and Russell Crouse, remains the longest-running straight play in Broadway history, with more than 3,000 performances, and the 1947 adaptation starring William Powell as the title character and the incomparable Irene Dunne as his beloved Lavinia remains a Turner Classic Movies perennial. (The two appear in the image accompanying this post.) There was even a TV version of the show in the 1950s, starring character actor Leon Ames (not having to break a sweat as the beleaguered but goodhearted paterfamilias, having played the role a decade earlier in Meet Me in St. Louis).
More people, I think, are aware that this droll play and movie derive from the reminiscences of Clarence Day (or, to be technical, Clarence Day Jr.) than know about Sally Benson’s connection to the seminal Garland-Minnelli musical. But I still don’t think many have actually gone back to the original sources: the short book that started it all, God and My Father, and, when that proved successful, two later books that quickly found a readership in the mid-1930s: Life With Father and Life With Mother.
Day Jr.—who died on this date in 1935, at age 61—wrote much of this material as a way of getting his mind off of the ferociously painful arthritis that increasingly afflicted him toward the end of his life. He didn't live to glory in the success of Life With Father as a book (a Book-of-the-Month Club hit) and play.
I picked up a copy of The Best of Clarence Day at a local used-book sale. In dipping into it, I’ve responded in much the same fashion that New Yorker readers did at the time. It’s like luxuriating in a bubble-bath from which you’ll continually chuckle—kind of like Edith Wharton’s Old New York, only focusing on the white-collar middle class rather than the aristocracy, and with affectionate humor rather than needling satire.
The above quote, from the first sketch in “God and My Father,” points obliquely to the central situation of the subsequent play and movie: Clarence Day Sr.’s relationship with the Almighty—or, as it turns out, his very tenuous connection to the deity, since he has never been baptized. In fact, “Father” has a few beefs with the way the Man Upstairs runs things, just as a perusal of the morning paper is likely to set him off on fulminations against the city government. (“He didn’t actually accuse God of gross inefficiency, but when he prayed his tone was loud and angry, like that of a dissatisfied guest in a carelessly managed hotel.”)
Set in the 1880s and 1890s, Life With Father was viewed as a nostalgia piece when it first appeared, in much the same way that reruns of Happy Days are today. (Indeed, Mr. Cunningham, with the same qualities of outer crustiness but inner goodness of heart, is like a Clarence Day Sr. without the “damns” or the quizzical relationship with God.)
Nowadays, though, in a more secular time, filled with people far more hostile toward organized religion than Clarence Day Sr., the stratagems of “Vinnie” Day to have her husband baptized are likely to appear to be something from another, less tolerant planet. A good example is the otherwise endlessly insightful All That Glittered: The Golden Age of Drama on Broadway, 1919-1959, by Ethan Mordden.
Author of more than a dozen books, Mordden has forgotten more about the American theater than you or I could ever learn in a lifetime. He’s particularly good on the genesis of the play Life With Father, noting, for instance, that the autobiographical nature of the material required that producer Oscar Serlin, along with Lindsay and Crouse, obtain signed separate agreements from Day’s mother and his surviving brothers in order to mount the production.
But “Vinnie” Day’s concern for her husband’s soul strikes Mordden as less well-intentioned or even quaint than as “downright genderist,” an only somewhat milder version of “our own age of ever wilder encroachments on democracy by religion fascists.”
If the otherwise estimable Mordden had looked more closely at Day’s original source material, he might see that Clarence Day Sr. would have as much of a bone to pick with Mordden’s worldview as with the divines of his own late Victorian age. “Father” was put off by the clergy and disliked the demands made by religion, but at the same time, “It disgusted him when atheists attacked religion: he thought they were vulgar.”
Moreover, not a few of the modern “Vinnies” of the world even share a point in common with Clarence Day Sr.: They have their own arguments with God. They wonder how a being whom they revere could place so many obstacles in their path, and in their worst mental anguish even question why God would even feel the need to take someone they have come to love so much.
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