Yates in The American Humorist (1964) went farther: his Mr. Dooley, although not lacking shrewdness altogether, is even more "naive," less "aware of his ignorance," less capable of conscious humor. He now "pontificates" in all earnestness about public affairs; when he tells Mr. Hennessy that he considered sending J.P. Morgan a reassuring telegram during a recent stock market crisis, in Yates’ view the saloon keeper is "foolish in pretending that he and Morgan are on familiar terms" (53, 253). Similarly, Yates regarded Mr. Dooley’s deadpan proposal that the Kaiser pay a state visit to Archey road, in order to understand our national character better, as a purely "pompous suggestion," containing "more truth than he knows" (85). Lastly, this commentator not only asserted like Blair that Mr. Dooley’s reading is confined entirely to the daily papers, but added the contention, as I understand it, that the saloon keeper consistently let them mislead him (86-87).
To my mind, then, both readings of the character are too reductive: Yates especially would relegate him not just to foolishness but to an essentially passive role, in which he is made to voice ideas he can scarcely comprehend. Such a role would leave him nearly as dull-witted and ingenuous as his foil, Mr. Hennessy; but one can fit Mr. Dooley to the role only by setting aside the crucial point, simply stated by Robert Hutchinson, that the saloon keeper "meant only half of what he said" (iv). Dunne recalled in 1936 that inventing an old immigrant Irishman who spoke in amusing brogue had freed him to attack powerful and corrupt Chicagoans as he would not have risked doing directly, as a young newsman (His Best xxiii); and no doubt the opinions of author and character, however obliquely Mr. Dooley sometimes delivered them, were thereafter to coincide much more often than not. But it does not follow, as I think that even Blair implied,3 that Dunne did not endow the character, his comic shortcomings notwithstanding, with the power to make shrewd, informed opinions seem truly his own, by conveying them with what amounted to his own convincing brand of sophistication. Indeed, regardless of how similar Mr. Dooley and his creator may have been in their opinions, I find a more significant resemblance in their ways of addressing us—their craft-consciousness. In my view, then, the point remains to be stressed that Dunne made his saloon keeper not his mere mouthpiece but an accomplished satiric humorist—an artful, playful master of hyperbole, understatement, and other forms of ironic discourse. Rightly understood, his so-called "limitations" are only secondary and peripheral—as I think is reflected by Dunne’s sharply curtailed emphasis on them after the early sketches of 1893-1898.
Mr. Dooley’s artfulness soon becomes apparent when we compare his actual with his declared reading habits. Granted, the record is
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clear that he reads the daily newspapers much more than anything else, and insists often on his low regard for reading generally; but it is not true that he reads only the papers, with no direct knowledge whatever of "the world of books" (Blair 247, Yates 87). Perhaps Dunne originally considered such a premise, but if so he quickly saw that it would restrict his subject matter drastically, and risk leaving Mr. Dooley a know-nothing caricature rather than an acceptably realistic "philosophical spectator of events": the saloon keeper could not at the same time be all but illiterate and have a range of reference broad enough to keep him interesting for very long. Dunne solved any potential difficulty here by patterning the character after many other professed anti-intellectuals in our own world: on close acquaintance, it develops that Mr. Dooley’s avowed contempt for "lithrachoor," which for him means anything in print, has been bred by more than a little familiarity. At times, of course, the author has Mr. Dooley claim that his bookworm acquaintance Hogan has been forcing literary esoterica on him; but we will shortly see that this device hardly begins to account for the self-taught saloonkeeper’s far-from-negligible knowledge of books.
We discover in "National Housecleaning" that he has been supplementing his regular attention to newspaper stories by poring over the muckraker magazines—and steadfastly refusing to let them depress him (Dissertations 257)—but books clearly make up more of his reading than this brief diversion does. Three of his satiric monologues deal in detail with popular works of the day, which he grudgingly reveals that he has just read for himself. "A Book Review," one of Dunne’s most widely reprinted sketches, is a lampoon in perfect pitch of Rough Riders (1899), TR’s ultra-cocky account of his exploits in Cuba (Philosophy 13—18); "Sherlock Holmes" establishes the saloonkeeper’s close but unenthusiastic acquaintance with "th’ gr-reatest detictive that iver was in a story book" (Observations 23); and in "The Food We Eat," although he does not dismiss all of the young tourist Upton Sinclair’s charges against the Chicago meat industry in The Jungle (1906), Mr. Dooley leaves no doubt that he has found the novel itself only a melodramatic travesty—as indeed it is—of immigrant life in his city (Dissertations 247-54). Moreover, his incidental remarks in other sketches hint often at a closer personal acquaintance with books than he admits to openly. He has thumbed through enough library books, for example, to know how routinely readers disfigure them with scribbled comments like "‘good’ or ‘this man is crazy’ in th’ margin" (Dissertations 180); he also regularly shows his knowledgeability, in the form of good-natured derision, about the third-rate Romantic fiction and verse of Morse Hewlett, Richard Harding Davis, Hall Caine, Ella Wheeler Wilcox, Laura Jaen, and other now
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forgotten "lithry" men and women (e.g., Observations 7, Dissertations 47, Peace 173, Says 48, Will 52). And as I will show, Dunne also gave Mr. Dooley a generous share of his own familiarity with more enduring authors as well.
All this being the case, why does the saloon keeper ever seemlngly forget himself, and pretend that his considerable literary lore comes to him only from a book-loving acquaintance? Dunne leaves us free either to consider the putative "Hogan" a badly brainwashed but genuine Archey Road neighbor of Mr. Dooley’s, or only a product of his sly imagination, or possibly a hybrid of the two; but sketch after sketch removes any possibility that the gullible saloon keeper really believes that Hogan has thought up his "fine sayings" himself. The more of these sayings we come upon, the clearer it becomes that they are only Mr. Dooley’s satiric playthings: he cites Hogan not in awe of the man’s learning, but always with dry amusement. None of the many Hogans whom he mentions as his neighbors stand particularly high in his regard; but the bookish Hogan he so often purports to credit as a phrasemaker is probably the most foolish and certainly the most affected specimen among them. Evidently he can wax rhapsodic about any feature of contemporary life whatever, from the McKinley White House to the latest fads to reach Chicago, "goluf’ and auction bridge (Will 154-58, 169-70); yet on the other hand, his very infatuation with the imperial "Anglo-Saxon" epoch that he is living through makes him fret darkly about the Yellow Peril that he sees ahead, with China and Japan conspiring to engulf us (Says 52-3, 100-2). Mr. Dooley has no illusions about this wonderfully silly figure, calling him "wan iv th’ best-read an’ mos’ ignorant men I know," who is "always wrong about ivrything" (Observations 8, Says 140); and least of all is Mr. Dooley unaware that the rhetorical finery he keeps gravely imputing to Hogan has other, earlier sources. Sometimes what "Hogan says" is a pastiche of spread-eagle cliches obviously lifted from recent editorials or from oratory reprinted on the front pages, and although we can only guess where in the daily press Mr. Dooley first encountered these cliches, we can be sure that this avid critic of expansionist propaganda has been acquainted with them at least as long as the soft-headed Hogan has been:
whin we plant what Hogan calls th’ starry banner iv Freedom in th’ Ph’lippeens . . an’ give th’ sacred blessin’ iv liberty to the poor, down-trodden people iv this unfortunate isles,—dam thim! —we’ll larn thim a lesson. (Hearts 3)
When the saloon keeper professes to quote his "pathrite" neighbor here, Dunne’s purpose surely is not to show up Mr. Dooley as naive, but rather
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to let Mr. Dooley show us his awareness that the Hogan who is always wrong about everything has just been wrong again.
But most of Hogan’s fine sayings are culled not from the daily press, but from literary classics. Since we have Mr. Dooley’s solemn word that he takes no interest in this kind of reading, (e.g., Peace 106-7, Says 134), these instances at least would seem at first to confirm Blair and Yates—especially because the familiar allusions are always somewhat skewed by the time they reach us, so that we might plausibly see innocent mistakes in them by the saloon keeper, and possibly also by Hogan before him. But here again, the evidence argues finally that Mr. Dooley is anything but an innocent clown when he credits the skewed allusions to his neighbor.
This is partly because the seeming mistakes in the quotations have a way of lending themselves deftly to the saloon keeper’s argument of the moment. For example, he replaces annals in 1.31 of Gray’s Elegy with a rough homonym that suits his purpose far better, in the course of explaining that newspapers report misdeeds in high society in lavish detail to boost circulation: "No wan wants to hear what Hogan calls ‘Th’ short an’ simple scandals iv th’ poor"’ (Opinions 122). Similarly, he ridicules aged misers who write mean-spirited wills to spite their relatives, as an "amusement [that] comforts their declinin’ years." Then with the aid of another misquotation/malapropism that he again charges to Hogan, Mr. Dooley intensifies the irony further. Instead of simply echoing Milton’s Lycidas 1.71 verbatim, which would portray the behavior of the misers with something like pity as an infirmity, the mocking saloonkeeper modifies this key word and thereby gives their last-ditch spitefulness an even more grotesque tinge than when he had called it an amusement": "It is as Hogan says, ‘th’ last infirmary f’r their noble minds’" (Will 5).
A second sign that Mr. Dooley makes consciously satirical use of Hogan is that many quotes imputed to the man take him out of character. Ordinarily, Hogan speaks as befits his sentimental nature and devotion to elegant stock phrases: he asks Father Kelly if he has "offered up prayers f’r th’ success iv th’ cause" in Cuba (and receives a brusque reply), and is given to such high-toned euphemisms as "th’ marts iv thrade" and "in th’ arms iv Or’rphyus" (Peace 34, 51, 81). But now and then Hogan briefly sheds his romantic persona, and speaks instead with Mr. Dooley’s hard-boiled realism—as when he supposedly declares, "I care not who casts th’ votes iv me counthry so long as we can hold th’ offices" (Says 39). And surely Hogan as Mr. Dooley regularly pictures him could never have devised this witty, jaundiced new version of Pope’s famous quatrain on Vice in the Essay on Man: "‘Women,’ as Hogan says, ‘are creatures
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iv such beaucheous mien that to be loved they have but to be seen; but,’ he says, ‘wanst they’re seen an’ made secure,’ he says, ‘we first embrace, thin pity, thin endure,’ he says’" (Dissertations 43).4
Quotes like these can easily remind us of a crucial point about Hogan. His is strictly an offstage voice, not unlike the sensible, kindly Father Kelly’s, but even more akin to that of Mr. Dooley’s bellicose Uncle Mike, "as rough a man as iver laid hands on a polisman" (Peace 205). We know this legendary figure only through his wrathful boasts, relayed to us by his admiring nephew, like "‘Anny place I can get into I can get out iv’" (Peace 20). At one point, in fact, Mr. Dooley frankly confides to Mr. Hennessy that the putative uncle is more or less a fabrication: "When I want to say annything lib-lous, I stick it on to me Uncle Mike" (Hearts 15). It is at least as likely that Mr. Dooley sticks other comments that he finds useful on to Hogan in the same way, comments that can serve either of two purposes. The saloon keeper cites Hogan as his source not only when he wants to hold some romanticized, bookish misconception of American reality up to ridicule, but also when he claims to know literature only on Hogan’s authority. And Hogan in this second role is patently a makeshift—not just because Mr. Dooley lets us see from time to time how much he has read on his own, but because, as we have just been noting, he commonly lets Hogan the supposed authority on this or that text sound quite unlike his usual moonstruck self.
Nowhere does the Archey Road wag shuttle "Hogan" from one expedient role to the other more obviously, or with more blithe assurance, than in his discourse on Upton Sinclair’s novel. Midway through the sketch we learn that Hogan as well as Mr. Dooley has read The Jungle, and that they have discussed it together; as we would expect, Hogan considers it "a grand book," one which "almost made him commit suicide." Next, however, Mr. Dooley makes the startling claim that Hogan has just tried his hand at a novel defending the meat packers against Sinclair’s charges, by picturing the stockyards as a tasteful, hygienic paradise for the workers and livestock alike. The saloon keeper even pretends to remember and quote several hundred words from Hogan’s "sample," which is replete with sardonic fancies like these:
Th’ air was redolent with th’ aroma iv th’ spring rendherin’, an’ beneath rh’ smoke ivth’ May mornin’ th’ stately expanse iv Packin’town appeared more lovely than iver befure. On th’ lawn a fountain played brine incessantly an’ melojously on th’ pickled pigs’-feet. Beyond th’ hedge a physician was thryin’ to make scow show her tongue, while his assistant wint over th’ crather with a stethescope. Th’ air was filled with th’ joyous shouts iv dhrivers iv wagons heavily laden with ol’
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boots an’ hats, arsenic, boric acid, bone-dust, sthricknine, sawdust, an’ th’ other ingreejents iv th’ moat nourishin’ food fur a sturdy people. . . . (Dissertations 250-51)
It is equally impossible to imagine Hogan as we regularly hear him devising this kind of parody in the first place, and Mr. Dooley troubling himself to memorize any long effusion of Hogan’s whatever in the second. Just as he does again and again in other sketches, the saloon keeper here is unmistakably spinning a parody out of his own quizzical, skeptical imagination on the spur of the moment—with Dunne leaving us no reasonable choice but to acknowledge Mr. Dooley himself as a sly, deadpan mimic, and Hogan as his handy alter ego.
At times, moreover, Mr. Dooley openly puts this alter ego aside and drops his unlettered pose long enough to quote poetic luminaries from Pope and Goldsmith to Longfellow and Whittier in his own right. By doing this, it seems to me, the saloon keeper removes the last possibility that he is skewing the familiar allusions only because he has never discovered them for himself, in their full contexts. Each witty misquotation amounts to a knowing, mocking laugh by Mr. Dooley at some current piece of absurdity or hypocrisy. Thus he pretends to approve of Andrew Carnegie’s showy satisfaction in being known as a philanthropist: "Do good be stealth, says I, but see that th’ burglar alarm is set" (Dissertations 182). With equal irony, he imagines himself having this high-toned exchange with a bully bent on fighting him, when "they isn’t a polisman in slght":
I say to th’ man . . . "Sir, I fain wud sleep." "Get up," he says, "an’ be doin’," he says. "Life is rale, life is earnest," he says, "an’ man was made to fight," he says, fetchin’ me a kick. (Philosophy 26)
And he portrays domestic beet-industry spokesmen in Congress as shameless plagiarists of the patriotic rhetoric of other times. As fanatical believers in the sanctity of the domestic beet crop, they exhort all loyal Amerleans to stand firm against the threat of cane-sugar imports from Cuba.
Whoiver touches a hair iv yon star spangled Beet, shoot him on th’ spot. A bold Beet industhry a counthry’s pride whin wanat desthroyed can niver be supplied. "Beet sugar an’ Liberty Now an’ Foriver, wan an inaiprable"—Dan’l Webster. . . . (Observations 93)5
To return here to the final charges of clownishness against Mr. Dooley, Yates considered him amusingly flawed even as a newspaper reader. This commentator, at odds with nearly all the others, postulated
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that Dunne meant, in Mr. Dooley, to "debunk . . . the Progressive ideal of the intelligent, ‘well-informed’ citizen" (87). The saloon keeper fails to live up to this ideal, Yates asserted, largely because "he can’t possibly keep well informed. All he reads is the ‘pa-apers,’ and the data in his mind are a weird mixture of truth and misinformation"(87).6
Even if we disregard his inaccuracy about what Mr. Dooley reads, these charges by Yates seem no more defensible than the earlier ones. We have seen that the saloon keeper can be a defiant lowbrow on occasion— for example, when he sarcastically reduces to absurdity the latest evolutionary theories, or when he belittles college professors as arrogant, supercilious loafers (Will 82, Dissertations 107-12, qtd. in Bander, Literary Life 277). Admittedly, then, one cannot always accept Mr. Dooley as intelligently posted on current affairs. Nevertheless, the great preponderance of sketches show him assessing them quite astutely, if rarely in perfect earnest, and certainly most of Dunne’s commentators past and present have taken the view that behind his oblique drollery Mr. Dooley keeps very well-informed indeed. One early, forceful testimonial to his powers came from John D. Long, McKinley’s Secretary of the Navy, in a June 29, 1898, letter, at mid-point in "the splendid little war" with Spain. The saloon keeper’s tongue-in-cheek accounts of strategic and diplomatic meetings in Washington were so disconcertingly accurate, Long wrote, that he and other cabinet officers were convinced that the apocryphal "Dooley," like a precursor of Watergate’s Deep Throat, was actually "somebody very near the scene of action and more familiar than any outsider can be with the internal proceedings" (qtd. in Ellis 113). And a later age has found many of Mr. Dooley’s appraisals of institutions and events of his day rich enough in informed insight to qualify as prophetic—as the jurist Edward Bander acknowledged, when he wrote that "both the humor and the tragedy of Dooley’s pieces is that they still have so much bearing on our own times" (Choice of Law vi).
I find the charge more interesting, because of its ambiguity, that Mr. Dooley’s alleged reliance on newspapers alone has left "the data in his mind a weird mixture of truth and misinformation." Yates did not elaborate on or document his assertion, but he presumably meant either that Mr. Dooley in his ignorance simply misreads the news on the printed page, or else that he reads it accurately enough, but then gullibly accepts its false and true information alike as hard fact. Still, I am at a loss to guess how either of these readings might be adequately supported, for I know of no sketches in which Mr. Dooley offers us an inaccurate version of a newspaper report with what I take to be genuine naivete. It is true that he often parodies news stories, so that we can be sure that the "facts" he is presenting are wild distortions of whatever was originally printed;7
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but we are unable to miss his conscious irony in virtually all of these cases—as when he informs Mr. Hennessy that our forces preparing to invade Cuba include "injineers, miners, plumbers, an’ lawn tinnis experts, numberin’ in all four hundherd an’ eighty thousan’ men, ar-rmed with death-dealin’ canned goods" (Peace 6). And the "weird mixture" charge presents a further complication. Yates may have intended this term only in the broadest sense, to suggest nothing more than his belief that "truth and misinformation" are scattered at random throughout Mr. Dooley’s commentaries on the news; this reading too would appear to defy illustration. As it happens, however, more literal "weird mixtures" of journalistic data can also be found in his satire, and perhaps Yates had one or more of these passages in mind:
Th’ Ph’lippeens. . . is a poverty-sthricken counthry, full iv goold an’ precious stones, where th’ people can pick dinner off th’ threes an’ aare starvin’ because they have no step ladders. Th’ inhabitants is peaceful, industhrus, an’ law-abidin’, but savage an’ bloodthirsty in their methods. They wear no clothes except what they have on, an’ each woman has five husbands an’ each man has five wives.
(Peace 45-6)
Captain Dhryfuss plainly shows his throubles, which have made him look tin years younger. His raven hair la intirely white; an’ his stalwart frame, with th’ shoulders thrown back, is stooped an’ weary. His haggard face was flushed with insolent confidence, an’ . . . as he passed, a young Fr-rinch sojer was with diff’culty resthrained fr’m sthrikin’ him an’ embracin’ him with tears in his eyes.
(Hearts 242-43)
But the difficulty, as before, is that Mr. Dooley is so clearly not in earnest in cases like these. He is only regaling himself, if not Mr. Hennessy, by ridiculing the unreliable, contradiction-ridden early coverage that he has learned to expect from the papers on special occasions—for example, when a major story first breaks in some little-known region overseas.
And what these satiric take-offs so strongly imply, the saloon keeper also says directly: he declines on principle to give more than guarded, provisional credence to anything that the dailies print. Thus he sees the mission of the American and British correspondents at the Dreyfus trial as their customary one—to "protect th’ public agin th’ degradin’ facts" (Hearts 240). And he ends a trying study of the press dispatches from Peking, where an international army has reportedly crushed the Boxer Rebellion, by observing that the troops seem to have "fought their way [into the city] in th’ face iv incredible misstatements" (Dissertations 288). Nor has he much more confidence in reporting on the home front: he will not side with "thim cynics that say that ye can’t
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