A READING OF MR. DOOLEY
John 0. Rees
Reviewing the first book of Mr. Dooley sketches in 1903, William Dean Howells put his finger on an important truth, but one that has been attended by a good deal of critical disagreement, about Finley Peter Dunne’s portrayal of his Irish philosopher. Howells praised the author’s "sensitive respect for Dooley’s personality":
Dooley is wise and shrewd and just for the most part; but from time to time he reaches a point where he is neither. . . . Mr. Dunne knows Mr. Dooley’s limitations, and he does not force him beyond them in the interest of the best purpose. He knows that there are moments when his philosophical spectator of events must lapse into a saloon keeper, and he guards the precious integrity of his creation from the perils of perfunctory humanity. . . . The generous instinct of Mr. Dunne would have been lost in Mr. Dooley if he had not known how to keep Mr. Dooley strictly within bounds as a character, sometimes sordid and sometimes stupid. (744-45)
All of Dunne’s later commentators, it would seem, have acknowledged the accuracy of Howells’ point, if not always directly: when Mr. Dooley holds forth on current affairs, whether to edify his customers or to entertain himself, he is not only something of a homespun sage, but at times also an inadvertent clown.1
Still, these writers have disagreed significantly on the relative proportions of the two in the saloon keeper’s make-up. I intend to take sides here; but my primary aim, after looking further at Mr. Dooley’s traits of character and reviewing some of the commentary on them, will be to discuss a feature of his satiric comedy which I think bears on the disagreement, and which I think has not yet been recognized as it deserves.
Such able critics and scholars as John V. Kelleher (119-25), Louis Filler (9-20), Barbara Schaaf(l-3 8), Charles Fanning (232ff.) and Grace Eckley (e.g. 55-71) have concerned themselves mainly with Mr. Dooley’s role as a sage; but over the years, his role as clown may well have been emphasized even more. At any rate, more people surely saw him as a stereotypical Irish buffoon around the turn of the century than has ever been the case again. Edward Ellis, Dunne’s biographer, surmises
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convincingly that in that era, when the sketches had their only mass audience, many readers enjoyed them for no better reason than that the old immigrant from Roscommon "spoke in a quaint language, a dialect associated with unskilled laborers and household servants, and it was therefore an occasion for smiles to find it in print" (289). But since then, commentators too have focussed on, and I think have occasionally overstressed, Mr. Dooley’s loutish, low-comedy side.
That side, in various shadings, is most in evidence in the earlier sketches, but it seldom escapes the reader’s attention for long. Mr. Dooley’s gaffes with cultural trivia are many, and memorable: unconsciously he commits malapropisms like "statue" for statute (Opinions 72), gaelicizes Monet to Mooney and thereby claims "th’ gr’reat imprishunist" painter as his fellow Irishman, (Observations 43-44), credits Andrew Jackson with writing the Declaration of Independence (Irish 446), identifies "th’ capital iv Sweden" as St. Petersburg, garbles the names of two celebrated composers "Bootoven" and "Choochooski" (Irish 218), and, after discussing Nansen’s polar expedition with Mr. Hennessy, is left wondering who the "Flora an’ Fauna" that the explorer reported seeing en route to the Arctic might be (Peace 195-96).
He has an Irish temper, too. Given the right comic conditions, even the amiable, obtuse Mr. Hennessy can get a spectacular rise from the saloon keeper, as in the classic ending of "War and War Makers." Mr. Dooley is in his best satiric form throughout this sketch, on the shortcomings of American leadership during the Philippine campaign. Although his criticisms include a familiar recommendation, that "th’ men that starts th’ wars . . . do th’ fightin" (Philosophy 39), Mr. Hennessy loses the thread of the argument just enough to conclude that it reflects instead on our common soldiers overseas. Ordinarily his protests cannot disconcert Mr. Dooley even mildly, but this time luck is with Mr. Hennessy, and he finds just the right jingo insult for his purpose. It stings Mr. Dooley unexpectedly—and the satirist in him gives way abruptly to the wrathful turn-of-the-century patriot:
". . . Th’ man that likes fightin’ ought to be willin’ to turn in an’ spell his fellow-counthrymen himsilf. An’ I’d even go this far an’ say that if Mack [President McKinley] wants to subjoo th’ dam Ph’lippeens.
"Ye’re a thraiter." said Mr. Hennessy.
"I know it," said Mr. Dooley, complacently.
"Ye’re an anti-expansionist."
"If ye say that again," cried Mr. Dooley, angrily, "I’ll smash in ye’er head." (Philosophy 43)
Mr. Dooley also has other comparatively minor foibles. He likes to assure his skeptical patrons that he is younger than he looks, that in his
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prime he was a feared brawler and "a gr’reat flirt," that even in his sixties "there’s many a good-lookin’ woman up an’ down th’ Archey road that has an eye on me," and so on (Irish 230, 259, 337, 418). And although Dunne pictures him as too warmhearted and at bottom too sensible to put them into action very seriously or often, the saloon keeper also has his share of ethnocentric and parochial biases.2 Like his fellow Irish in Chicago, he looks down on the Germans, Poles, Swedes, and Bohemians who have lately entered his home neighborhood of Bridgeport as dull-witted interlopers; and most other Continental immigrants settled elsewhere around the city he dismisses even more offhandedly, lumping them together as mere "Boolgahrians" (Irish 148, 321, 401, 469). He even harbors longstanding grudges against the Irish themselves, if they hail from other counties than his own Roscommon—with "sheep-stealin’ Mayo men" ranked lowest of the lot (Irish 17-19, 59, 95, 161).
Nor are these the only grounds we are given for looking down on the character, rather than admiring his sagacity. Walter Blair observed that Mr. Dooley’s "ethical standards, worked out during a rough life [on] the wrong side of the tracks," could lead him to "use loaded dice or pass bad money at times to cheat a neighbor he disliked; he had a liking for a good hard brick to settle an argument; he accepted vote-buying and crookedness as normal parts of politics" (248). And as Norris Yates pointed out, one especially unappealing sign of the saloon keeper’s narrow-mindedness is his often-voiced distrust of books (94).
So far as I can determine, none of Dunne’s commentators would seriously abridge this list of Mr. Dooley’s "limitations." They might well weight the items differently, however; Eckley for one considerably discounts the objections raised to his rough-and-ready ethics (55-56). And there is certainly room for disagreement also on such matters as when to take the saloon keeper’s seeming gaffes as genuine and when to applaud them instead as flashes of his wit. True, Dunne sometimes points us unmistakably to the right answer, for example using the telltale adverb angrily" to show when it is Mr. Dooley’s temper rather than his settled judgment speaking, or on the other hand having him patiently explain to Mr. Hennessy that something he has just said is only "‘a joke. I med it up’" (Observations 16). Similarly, we are not left in doubt that the "Flora an Fauna" joke is on the unsuspecting speaker himself (Peace 196), and it is just as clear, when he describes "‘a tug boat cooin’ to its mate"’ (qtd. in Fanning 73), that this time his sense of fun is again at work. But frequently the evidence is inconclusive, and the reader is left to decide for himself where the droll sage in Mr. Dooley leaves off and the innocent clown begins. Is the character really persuaded, say, when he calls Admiral Dewey his "Cousin George," that the naval hero is his blood
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relation? Or, when he calls the enemy’s hapless fleet off Cuba "th’ Spanish ar-rmadillo"’ (Peace 53), and so compares it aptly to the armor-plated but notoriously timid little burrowing animal, is it likelier that this is a touch of Mr. Dooley’s satiric invention, or only another of his unconscious malapropisms, like "bicyclopedia" for "encyclopedia"? One need not be a deconstructionist to recognize disagreement on points like these as inescapable.
But even though Dunne allows wide limits for debate on when his fictional philosopher is better laughed at than with, a number of comments by Blair and Yates which I have not yet cited, charging Mr. Dooley with still further extremes of ignorance and unawareness, in my judgment fall outside those limits. Eckley in fact has already briefly challenged both writers on thls matter (51, 55, 56, 64-65). I too will take issue with them here, but at greater length. Like other students of the history of American humor I am greatly indebted to Blair; and I freely admit to misgivings at differing with him on even a relatively minor point of interpretation. Hence I want to explain my disagreement with his position, and the similar one taken by Yates, in some detail.
Half a century ago, in the course of a lucid pioneering analysis of Mr. Dooley’ s continuity with our earlier dialect humorists, Blair in Horse Sense in American Humor (1942) reckoned up the character’s lapses into what I have called clownishness more severely than he was ever to do again. He of course recognized that Mr. Dooley was no mere ignoramus, but a "richly complicated" personage who in many circumstances displayed native astuteness and a sense of humor (248-49). Nevertheless, Blair did intimate strongly that because the saloon keeper was "in many ways a victim of his limited environment" (247), he honestly failed to grasp that any meaningful differences might exist between nearly isolated little Bridgeport—a predominantly shanty-Irish slum, far out on the western reaches of Chicago’s Archer Avenue, where he and his people lived and worked—and the great world that he read about in the newspapers. Thus Blair considered Mr. Dooley too innocently boorish to "see anything strange about calling President McKinley ‘Mack’ "or picturing even the Czar of Russia . . . with great familiarity" (247). Blair also declared flatly that the saloon keeper was "entirely unread in anything but the newspapers" and knew "nothing of the world of books," and that therefore he gullibly "ascribe[d] all sorts of fine sayings to his friend Hogan, giving him credit for all the phrases he had quoted" (247). Since he took this extreme view of Mr. Dooley’s artlessness, it was not surprising that when Blair went on to quote several typically wry, trenchant aphorisms from the sketches, he made a point of declining to guess whether the character had hit upon them "wittingly or unwittingly" (250).
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