rees3

believe annythin’ ye see in th’ pa-apers," but only because he says he has always found that "th’ death notices were fairly acc’rate" (qtd. in Bander, Literary Life 283).

Blair and Yates also saw Mr. Dooley as primarily an unwitting clown in one final respect. J. V. Kelleher observed aptly that the saloon keeper "navigated in the world with his map of Archey Road" (123), because of his penchant for explaining every kind of national and international news as if the people involved were only his sixth-ward neighbors. Thus for Blair, the saloon keeper’s nicknaming a president or admiral, or describing a violent day at the Czar’s palace fancifully but with similar "great familiarity," were clearly acts of an innocent vulgarian who had no inkling that Bridgeport’s unpolished manners were not the norm everywhere, and who therefore "did not see anything strange" in his breaches of decorum (247). And as we have also seen, Yates went farther, calling Mr. Dooley’s equally brash references to J. P. Morgan and Kaiser Wilhelm "foolish" and "pompous," even when one of these irreverent fancies happens to contain more truth than he knows" (85, 90).

It is true that Bridgeport, with its small-town atmosphere and its old-country ties, makes up nearly all of Mr. Dooley’s frame of reference, and that he treats all of his new-found acquaintances from the headlines with little ceremony, affecting indifference to the often huge disparities of wealth, rank, power, and notoriety that separate them from his tavern customers and their families. However, it hardly follows that this droll entertainer is always in earnest when he does so, and is not cognizant of the implications of his speaking as he does. Like other parts of his repertory, his ways of reading his map of Archey Road repeatedly show him to be a versatile, pointedly inventive monologist. Granted, sometimes he applies his local experience to world affairs with no evident aim but to display what Blair called his "imported horse sense" (240): "Manny a man that cudden’t direct ye to the dhrugstore on th’ corner whin he was thirty will get a respictful hearin’ whin age has further impaired his mind" (Will 69); "Aristocracy, Hinnissy, is like rale estate, a matther iv location" (Philosophy 191); "th’ hand that rocks th’ scales in th’ grocery store is th’ hand that rules th’ wurruld" (Opinions 111). But many of his analogies between the great world and Archey Road create deliberate satiric absurdities, gentler perhaps than Swift’s but scarcely less grotesque—and the fact that Mr. Dooley recites them with a straight face is no indication that he invented them without full awareness of their outre quality.

When he applies Bridgeport tropes to the American plutocracy, this speaker’s irony, his intention to exaggerate and distort for satiric effect, is especially conspicuous. Noting that John D. Rockefeller has

been fined twenty-nine million dollars for violations of the Interstate Commerce Act, Mr. Dooley likens the close-mouthed monopolist, who was famous for his stiff dignity, to an obstreperous town drunk, who has been "goin’ around loaded up to th’ guards with Standard lie, exceedin’ th’ speed limit in acquirin’ money an’ singin’: ‘A charge to keep I have,’ till th’ neighbors cud stand it no longer." Mr. Dooley gravely tells Mr. Hennessy that as "an old offender," Rockefeller must either pay the fine or serve a Kafkaesque "fifty-eight millyon days"—for his sentence is "about akel to three millyon dhrunk an’ disorderly cases." The saloon keeper observes in fairness, however, that the aggrieved Rockefeller sees himself quite differently, as a tender-hearted family man whose neighbors misunderstand him:

He don’t care f’r money in th’ passionate way that you an’ me do, Hinnissy. Th’ likes iv us are as crazy about a dollar as a man is about his child whin he has on’y wan. Th’ chances are we’ll spoil it. But Jawn D., havin’ a large an’ growin’ family iv dollars, takes on’y a kind iv gin’ral inthrest in thim. He’s issued a statement sayin’ that he’s a custojeen iv money appinted be himsilf. He looks afther his own money an’ th’ money iv other people. He takes it an’ puts it where it won’t hurt thim an’ they won’t spoil it. He’s a kind iv a society fr th’ previntion iv croolty to money. If he finds a man misusing his money he takes it away fr’m him an’ adopts it. Ivry Saturdah night he lets th’ man see it f’r a few hours. An’ he says he’s surprised to find that whin, with th’ purest intintions in th’ wurruld, he is found thryin’ to coax our little money to his home where it’ll find conjanial surroundings an have other money to play with, th’ people thry to lynch him an’ th’ polis arrest him f’r abduction.

(Says 158-67)

Mr. Dooley predicts cynically but accurately that an obliging appeals court will see that "The Big Fine" goes uncollected, even though Rockefeller need only "put his hand down in his pocket, skin twinty-nine millyon dollar bills off iv his roll an’ hurl thim at th’ clerk." This sketch presses its case against the American legal system of 1906 adroitly by indirection; by picturing the Standard Oil potentate only in metaphorical blue-collar settings which are glaringly inappropriate to his situation, Mr. Dooley implies repeatedly and forcefully that the laws that apply equitably in a small, low-income community like Bridgeport cannot hold when great corporate interests are at stake.

"The Carnegie Libraries" satirizes Andrew Carnegie for different excesses, but again features at least one devastatingly funny working-class simile in the caricature. History has judged Carnegie’s library bequests more kindly than Dunne or Mr. Dooley evidently foresaw. The saloon keeper is as distrustful of "doing good" as he is of reform, and through much of the sketch he ridicules the new library buildings as

impractical, costly frauds, for the gifts do not include any endowment to buy books or pay the ongoing maintenance expenses. But Mr. Dooley denounces the project ultimately as a clumsy attempt by the donor to gratify his own vanity: the longer and louder the steel baron congratulates himself, the more he convinces the Bridgeport sage that these supposed philanthropies are only misdirected fiascoes. Showing his usual mastery of deflation and anticlimax, Mr. Dooley makes this point in several ways, but never more tellingly than in this inspired comic image from his home neighborhood: "Ivry time he dhrops a dollar it makes a noise like a waither fallin’ downstairs with a tray full iv dishes" (Dissertations 177-82).

One more of Mr. Dooley’s typically far-fetched couplings of Archey Road and the outside world is pertinent here, I think. As before, his full awareness that he is speaking extravagantly is clear, but this time, reversing his usual procedure, he pretends briefly to navigate in Archey Road with a map of some thriving business district, like the one downtown in Chicago’s Loop. If the saloon keeper is to be charged with cloistered ignorance in discussing the rich and powerful as he does, the tacit assumption is necessarily that he has no notion of what such people are really like; when he draws "strange" or "foolish" parallels between them and his plebeian neighbors, it can only be because in his naivete he is blind to the differences and truly supposes that life cannot possibly be lived, anywhere, on other cultural or social levels than Bridgeport’s. It seems to me that the sketches just considered, and many others like them, argue strongly to the contrary: Mr. Dooley may no longer travel very far from his tavern door, but he has learned enough about national icons like Rockefeller and Carnegie from his varied reading to understand how to satirize them insightfully and with great flair on his home ground. Nevertheless, "Short Marriage Contracts" deserves notice as well, for it puts his manipulation of Bridgeport analogies as an assured ironic humorist in still another perspective.

When Mr. Hennessy asks his opinion of George Meredith’s recent suggestion that marriages should be limited to three or four years, and then renewed only by mutual consent, Mr. Dooley pretends to approve and improvises a scenario showing how such an arrangement might work for a sixth-ward couple. Archibald, a rather stuffy young wholesale grocer, woos his Belinda humbly and cautiously, with his best courtship manners, and after a decent interval this "innocint young girl iv thirty two.. . blushes a rosy red, . . . falls on his bosom, an’ between her sobs" accepts him. But despite this surge of maidenly emotion she keeps her contractual rights to a short-term marriage firmly in mind, and states her conditions in the crisp, no-nonsense language of a bank officer or real-

estate broker: "‘I cannot take ye f’r life, but I’ll give ye a five-year lease an’ resarve th’ right to renew at th’ end iv that time,’ she says. ‘Will that do? . . . Thin let us repair at wanst to th’ Title Guarantee an’ Thrust Comp’ny an’ be made man an’ wife.’" As time passes, the husband grows complacent, neglects his appearance at home, and takes Belinda increasingly for granted, until she shocks him with the news that the contract has just expired. She likes him, she explains, but he has not turned out well as an investment property. "‘Th’ repairs haven’t been kept up. Ye haven’t allowed enough fr wear an’ tear.... I’m goin’ into th’ market to prospect f’r a husband with all modhren improvements,’ says she." Mr. Dooley allows the chastened Archibald to retrieve the situation, however, and the account ends with the happy couple, attended by their great-grandchildren, being remarried for the eleventh time "by the president iv th’ First Naytional Bank" (Dissertations 43-48). This sketch would be memorable for its generously detailed realism alone—its wise, witty observation of marital folkways on Archey Road, and the humorous hazards of marriage anywhere. But it gains added piquancy from Mr. Dooley’s brief but expert venture into burlesque of the business world; unexpected but quite in character for him, it shows us yet again why the saloon keeper defies easy labelling as an unwitting "victim of his limited environment" (Blair 247).

To conclude this study I will look more closely at a third important characteristic of Mr. Dooley’s, which I have already touched on several times in passing. Satiric humor, his forte, apparently has always demanded at least some imitation of the speech or writing of the targeted person; at any rate verbal mimicry and caricature have flourished in satire from classical and neoclassical times to our own (when for example the Woody Allen character in Sleeper, suitably medicated, lets himself be persuaded for the time being that he is a Miss America contestant, and when Gary Trudeau’s Doonesbury often quotes President Bush for us—and sometimes, for good measure, the president’s "evil twin" Skippy also). But the perennial strength of Mr. Dooley’s commitment to this method, and his virtuosity with it, may be unmatched in any period. Except for the 1894-1897 pieces, pathetic or tragic in tone, that emphasized Bridgeport suffering, dignity, and courage, nearly all of the sketches that Dunne reprinted in his eight collections show the saloon keeper in divers ways attributing his own words to a vast aggregation of other speakers and writers. For want of a better term, then, let us call the sage and sometime clown of Archey Road an impersonator as well.

As we have seen, the "impersonations" begin among his neighbors, with Uncle Mike and the bibliophile Hogan serving him at least occasionally as bogus sources.⁸Perhaps it could even be argued that Mr. Dooley’s playful sallies at Mr. Hennessy’s expense suggest efforts to cast

him in a similar role: the saloon keeper often pretends jokingly that he knows what his long-suffering listener has on his mind or is preparing to say (e.g., Peace 104, Will 49, 147, 190ff).

But all the rest of Mr. Dooley’s mockeries and misattributions are aimed outside Bridgeport, chiefly at personages he has been reading about. Examples of clear-cut parody of one author or another appear frequently, sometimes imputed to Hogan and sometimes not: they range in length and in spirit from the extended take-offs of Roosevelt and Sinclair, and an equally long mock-transcript of the murky, jargon-ridden testimony of a "medical expert" at the Lutgens murder trial in Chicago, through wild travesties of the Darwin theory and the plot of Julius Caesar in three or four paragraphs, down to Mr. Dooley’s brilliant version of a Kipling couplet, "tis written iv Cashum-Cadi an’ th’ book iv th’ gr-great Gazelle that a manhole cover in anger is tin degrees worse thin hell" (Hearts 14). Then too the literary allusions that we have seen the saloon keeper warping for his own enjoyment constitute parody of a sort in themselves; and he even subverts other familiar quotations from popular ballads like "His Own Fireside" and the enduring, lachrymose favorite from the Civil War, "The Vacant Chair." (Mr. Dooley commiserates with a bereaved family of hippopotamuses, after the patriarch has been carried off to an American zoo, by intoning "They will meet, but they will miss him, there will be wan vacant lair" (Says 182).)

Moreover this inveterate mimic repeatedly varies his parody with burlesque, in which he patterns his utterance after a whole class of writings rather than a single clearly identifiable work. We soon learn to distinguish between his way of speaking naturally, when he is eschewing imitation altogether:

Now, says I, give these Tampa mules a chanst, an’ we’ll have no need iv wastin’ ammun-nition. Properly led, they’d go fr’m wan end iv Cuba to th’ other, kickin’ th’ excelsior out iv ivry stuffed Spanish gin’ral fr’m Bahoohoo Hoondoo to Sandago de Cuba. They’d be no loss iv life. (Peace 16)

I dinnaw what to do about th’ Ph’lippeens. An’ I’m all alone in th’ wurruld. Ivrybody else has made up his mind. Ye ask anny con-ducther on Ar-rchy R-road, an’ he’ll tell ye. Ye can find out fr’m th’ papers; an’, if ye really want to know, all ye have to do is to ask a prom’nent citizen who can mow all th’ lawn he owns with a safety razor. But I don’t know. (Peace 47)

Nobody had been very pr-roud iv Adam as an ancesthor, but still ye cud put up with him if ye took into account that he was dalin’ with new problems an’ was th’ first married man. (Will 85-6)

21

and his loftier, more portentous style, in irreverent imitation of the solemn-silly journalese of Dunne’s time:

Whin Tynan gathered his followers in Hyde Park, an’ notified thim iv the positions they was to take an’ disthributed th’ dinnymite among thim, th’ detictives become decidedly suspicious. Their suspicions was again aroused whin Tynan asked permission iv th’ common council to build a bay window up close to th’ queen’s bedroom. (Peace 133)

Thuradab mornin’... th’ reg’lar cavalry, con-sistin’ iv four hundhred an’ eight thousan’ well-mounted men, was loaded aboard th’ tug Lucy J., and departed on their earned iv death amidst th’ cheers iv eight millyon sojers left behind at Chicamaha. (Peace 7)

Th’ proceedin’s was opened with a prayer that Providence might r-remain undher th’ protection iv th’ administhration. (Peace 83)

Th’ Hon’rable Joe Choate, dillygate fr’m th’ United States moved that in future wars enlisted men shud not wear ear-rings. Carried, on’y Italy voting no.

Th’ conference thin discussed blowin’ up th’ enimy with dinnymite, poisonin’ him, shootin’ th’ wounded, settin’ fire to infants, bilin’ prisoners-iv-war in hot lard an’ robbin’ graves. (Says 210)

Mr. Dooley also apes the specialized rhetoric of the courtroom:

Th’ pris’ner... shot in self-definse, to protict his home an’ th’ honor iv American womanhood, while shtrugglin’ with th’ victim to keep him fr’m committin’ suicide because th’ pris’ner wudden’t take his watch as a presint, th’ gun accidintally wint off, a long an’ a short man were seen leavin’ th’ premises afther th’ crime, an’ th’ pris’ner was in Mitchigan City on that night on his way to see his sick child. . . .

(Will 218)

Well, th’ decision iv th’ Coort (th’ others dissentin’) is as follows: First, that th’ Disthrict iv Columbya is a state; second, that it is not; third, . . . that all states ar-re states an’ all territories ar-re territories in th’ eyes iv other powers, but Gawd knows what they are at home. In th’ case iv Hogan varsus Mullins, th’ decision is he must paper th’ barn.

(Opinions 24)

and the clich�s most favored by politicians and editorial writers:

I must raise me claryon voice again’ th’ invasion iv this fair land be th’ paupers an’ arnychists iv effete Europe.

(Observations 50)

At prisint th’ opinion that pre-vails in th’ ranks iv th’ gloryous ar-rmy iv ray-form is that there ain’t annything worth seem’ in this lar-rge an’ commodyous desert but th’ pest-house an’ th’ bridewell.

(Peace 112)

D’ye think . . . that ye mus make no sacryfices to uphold th’ right iv property? Ivrybody will have plenty iv fuel this winter. Th’ rich can burn with indignation, thinkin’ iv th’ wrongs inflicted on capital, th’ middle or middlin’ class will be marchin’ with th’ milishy, an’ th’ poor can fight among thimailves.

(qtd. in Choice of Law 7 1-72)

and the jargon of scientific obfuscation:

Th’ purpose iv th’ pitcher is to project th’ projectyle so that at a pint between his position an’ th’ batsman th’ tindincy to pro-ceed on its way will be countheracted be an impulse to return whence it come.

(Will 95)

He can even slip expertly into the spiel of the vaudeville emcee, to introduce a hootchy-kootchy dancer who performs "without th’ aid iv th’ human fut" (Philosophy 163-64), or to tout "th’ first appearance in this city iv th’ greatest iv nachral orators, Willum Jennings Bryan, who will render his cillybrated barytone solo: ‘Th’ Prince iv Peace’ (accompanied on th’ piccolo be Profissor Woodrow Wilson)" (Will 140).

But easily Mr. Dooley’s favorite impersonation device, which he relies on as often as all of the foregoing ones together, is the fabricated quotation; it is second nature for him to put his own words into the mouths of nearly all of the real-life and fictitious figures in his satires. As we would expect, this exercise involves a good deal of direct, obvious parody:

[Roosevelt]: "Th’ thrusts," says he to himsilf, "are heejous monsthers built up be th’ inlightened intherprise iv th’ men that have done so much to advance pro-gress in our beloved counthry," he says. "On wan hand I wud stamp thim undher fut; on th’ other hand not so fast."

(Observations 223)

[William Jennings Bryan]: "Profissor, th’ key iv G, if ye plaze. . . . All th’ wurruld is love. Soft an’ sweet an’ sticky it covers th’ globe. It is heerd fr’m th’ throats iv th’ little sparrows in th’ sthreets, in th’ awash iv th’ waves that break on th’ shores lv Lake Chat-talky (where I appear week en din’ July fifteen), in th’ cry iv th’ shrapnel whirlin’ over th’ threnches. . . . I love th’ kaiser, th’ Mikado iv Japan, th’ Sultan iv Turkey, Champ Clark, th’ reptile press, an’ th’ infamious conspiracy iv Wall Sthreet criminals that has skinned me out iv th’ prisidincy three times runnin .

(Will 75-6)

Usually, however, the quoted parties simply talk like Archey Road Irishmen:

Says [Foreign Secretaryl Jawn Hay, "Ill tillygraft to Mark that ivrything is all r-right . . . an’ that our relations with his majesty or her majesty or their Boxerships or th’ Down-with-th’ foreign-divvlers or whoiver’s runnin’ th’ shop over beyont are as they ought to be or worse or betther, as th’ case may be," he says. "Good," says [Chinese Ministerl Woo, "ye’re a man afther me own heart,"’ he says. "I’ll send ye a little book wrote be a frind iv mine in Peking Tis called ‘Heart to Heart Lies I Have Had,’ "he says. "Ye’ll like it," he says.

(Philosophy 87)

Gin’ral Grant [seesl Gin’ral Lee settin’ under an apple three an’ says he: "Gin’ral," says he, "let’s talk it over." "All right," says Gin’ral Lee, "but I was just finishin’ me plans to massacrec ye in th’ mornin

"Tis lucky I called," says Gin’ral Grant. "Let’s go inside," says he. "Very well," says Gin’ral Lee, "but ‘twill spile th’ story about th’ ol’ apple three."

(Peace 58)

No matter which way these personages express themselves, however, they are much more alike than not. Granted, not all have the majestic assurance of the "Onion League Club" Wasps of "On Reform Candidates" or of Andrew Carnegie explaining his philanthropic aims; but noblesse oblige and a fondness for handing down pronouncements are much in evidence throughout the group—and with rare, no-nonsense exceptions like Grant and Lee, or Admiral Dewey tersely reporting his victory at Manila, practically every member of this affable prestigious multitude speaks only to give himself away, as an unconscious emblem of complacency. At the same time, however, the saloon keeper goes about his satiric impersonations with remarkably little vindictiveness, open or implied. It is as if his prime concern, and his creator’s, is less to denigrate the prominent and powerful than simply to make them seem more accessible—more answerable to our own potential authority, and even Mr. Hennessy’s, as democratic citizens—than "th’ pa-apers" in various ways imply that they are.

Late in his career of punditry, Mr. Dooley looked back once, briefly and somewhat ambiguously, on his long didactic practice of speaking through and for others. In "Things Spiritual"—his one discourse on the occult, a subject where many American satirists before and after Dunne have enjoyed field days of flippancy—Mr. Dooley makes an extraordinary disclaimer, half jocular, half rueful. He begins by letting his fancy play, as freely and entertainingly as we have come to expect, on a psychic researcher’s recent statement that every human soul has a literal, measurable avoirdupois weight. But Mr. Dooley’s usual aplomb

falters midway through the sketch, or seems to, and he asserts that he knows too little about spiritualism after all to denounce it flatly. Then, for the only time on record, he goes even farther, and actually declares himself unqualified to go on teaching his friend.

I’ve been pitchin’ information into ye f’r more years thin annywan iver wint to colledge, an’ I tell ye now I don’t know annything about annything. . . . I’m a modest man. Won’t somebody else get up? Won’t ye get up, Tiddy Rosenfelt? won’t ye, Willum Jennings Bryan? won’t ye, Prisidint Eliot? won’t ye, pro-fissers, preachers, doctors, lawyers, iditers? Won’t annybody get up? Won’t annybody say that they don’t know annything about annything worth knowin’ about? Thin, be Hivens, I will. All alone I’ll stand up befure me class an’ say: "Hinnissy, about annything that can’t be weighed on a scales or measured with a tap line I’m as ignorant as—ye’ersilf. I’ll have to pay ye back th’ money I took fr’m ye f’r ye’er schoolin’. It was obtained be false pretinces."

How can I know annything, whin I haven’t puzzled out what I am mesilf. . . . Though I’d make a map fr’m mem’ry an’ gossip iv anny other man f’r mesilf I’m still uncharted.

(Says 122-23)

Fortunately the saloon keeper’s little seizure of humility passed quickly, and by the end of the sketch he had Mr. Hennessy’s schooling firmly in hand once more. And in later pieces Mr. Dooley continued to call upon TR, Bryan, Harvard’s sublimely self-assured president "Dock Eliot," and many more of the old, proven cadre of professors, preachers, doctors, lawyers, and other quotable worthies to "get up" and take an unwitting hand in the satiric comedy as before. It could hardly have been otherwise: if he had been left to soliloquize for long without the aid of these facetious mouthpieces, we may imagine, Dunne’s wonderfully versatile blue-collar savant and improvisationist would have been reduced to something less than himself.

Kansas State University