Quote of the Day (Clarence Day, on His Mother Buying a Clock at Auction)

“Mother knew in her heart that she had no business going to auctions. She was too suggestible, and if an hypnotic auctioneer once got her eye, she was lost. Besides, an auction aroused all her worst instincts —her combativeness, her recklessness, and her avaricious love of a bargain. And the worst of it was that this time it wasn’t a bargain at all. At least she didn’t think it was now. The awful old thing was about eight feet tall, and it wasn’t the one she had wanted. It wasn’t half as nice as the clock that old Miss Van Derwent had bought. And inside the hood over the dial, she said, there was a little ship which at first she hadn’t noticed, a horrid ship that rocked up and down every time the clock ticked. It made her ill just to look at it. And she didn’t have the money, and the man said he’d have to send it this evening, and what would Father say?”—American humorist and cartoonist Clarence Day (1874-1935), “Father and His Hard-Rocking Ship,” in Life With Father (1935)

(The image accompanying this post is from the 1947 film Life With Father, based on Day’s book and the long-running Broadway comedy adapted from it. William Powell play Clarence Day Sr. and Irene Dunne his wife “Vinnie.”)

Quote of the Day (Clarence Day, on Early Home Phones)

“When the telephone was invented and was ready to use, hardly anybody cared to install one. We all stuck to our buzzers. Messenger boys were quite enough of a nuisance, suddenly appearing at the door with a letter and expecting an answer. But they came only a few times a year, and a telephone might ring every week. People admitted that telephones were ingenious contraptions and wondered just how they worked, but they no more thought of getting one than of buying a balloon or a diving-suit.”— Clarence Day, “Father Lets in the Telephone,” in Life With Father (1935)

A prior post of mine discussed Clarence Day—or, as he and his family thought of the comic memoirist, because of the presence of their larger-than-life patriarch, Clarence Day Jr.—and the circumstances surrounding his once-celebrated publishing, theatrical and cinematic success, Life With Father. But today, 140 years after his birth, it seems worth remembering him again, since he is so little read today. (Even the appearances of adaptations of Life With Father for the stage, big and small screen are not as frequent as they once were. Considering the stellar resumes of co-stars William Powell and Irene Dunne, the 1947 movie is not run on Turner Classic Movies as much as their other films; the 1950s TV series, having filmed only four episodes, has disappeared since its original run; and—and most remarkable for the longest-running non-musical play in Broadway history, it has not been revived on the Great White Way since ending its eight-year run in 1947.)

The New York Public Library contains a set of extensive papers, manuscripts and archives associated with Day and his family, but I wonder how much it is used today. It would have been a far different story even as late as the 1950s, I suspect.

By the 1930s, when Day was concluding his reminiscences of his lovably blustering stockbroker father, the 1880s—when the buzzer was about to be replaced by the telephone—would have been an object of nostalgia, in much the same way that the 1960s—when black-and-white televisions began to give way to the color variety—have become for baby boomers today. Today, of course, the Victorian Era might as well be on the far side of the moon for many of us.

Ben Yagoda, a professor of English at the University of Delaware, notes how Life With Father epitomized and benefited from two trends in the decades surrounding its publication. First, he observed in his history of The New Yorker, About Town (2000), the now-legendary magazine had, in its early years, felt the need to fill space created by its burgeoning advertising. Editor Harold Ross committed to more text—and, specifically, more continuing series.

From 1933 to 1938, Ross published 44 of the writer’s wry sketches about his father—pieces that, unlike much of the material the magazine would issue then (or later), could be read independently of each other. The material, about life at a turning point for Gotham's upper crust, held special appeal for The New Yorker’s affluent subscribers. Small wonder, then, that Ross (who, by this time, had become a friend of Day’s) told another contributor, Frank Sullivan, “If I had never done anything but publish Clarence Day, I would be satisfied.”

Second, unlike the confessional, trauma-triggered memoirs so common in the last two decades, personal accounts from the 1920s to 1960s were light, exuding “the shared sense that the United States was the best place on earth, capable of overcoming any setbacks and fixing any flaws,” Yagoda writes in his 2010 survey of the genre, Memoir. Day’s breezy, even nostalgic ruminations were consumed eagerly by a public that also took to Ruth McKenney’s My Sister Eileen and Sally Benson’s Meet Me in St. Louis. In contrast, Yagoda has written that if Day had written a memoir today, “it would in all likelihood center on his battle with [rheumatoid] arthritis.”

Nobody paying attention to Day’s wry narrative voice, a reflection of his essentially convivial nature, could have had the slightest inkling of this medical condition that had plagued him since his service in the Spanish-American War. To ease the joint inflammation, stiffness and lacerating pain that resulted, Day resorted to massage and bed rest, writing or drawing (yes, he published caricatures, too) with his hand suspended over the pad by a trolley and sling.

You can tell the initial high regard for Life With Father in the first few decades after its publication from its frequent appearances in comic anthologies. That hasn’t happened so often in recent years, undoubtedly because the book has gone out of print.

In another sense, though, the influence of Life With Father—and the man who created it—has rooted itself deeply into American culture. Like I Remember Mama, another exercise in nostalgia based on family experiences (in the latter case, Kathryn Forbes’ immigrant grandmother), it set a template, in book, play, movie, and TV form, for the domestic comedy genre that, in a more contemporary setting, dominated American television from Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show to, more recently, The Cosby Show.

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1947 film adaptation of Life With Father, featuring co-stars William Powell and Irene Dunne. As his medical condition dramatically worsened in the mid-1930s, Day was ready to sell the rights to his stories to Paramount Studios until he heard of its casting choice for the paterfamilias: W.C. Fields. It is doubtful that the comedian, no matter what his gifts, could have brought to the role what Powell did.)

Quote of the Day (Clarence Day, on His Father and God)

“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.