Sammy stopped running today

Writer Budd Schulberg died yesterday at the age of 95, a bit of news that gave me the one-two punch of “I didn’t realize he was still alive/So sorry he’s dead.” Mr. Schulberg was perhaps best known as the screenwriter for “On the Waterfront,” but the work of his that I will most cherish is his 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run? From the Globe obituary:

“What Makes Sammy Run?’” was published in 1941 and follows the shameless adventures of Sammy Glick as he steals, schmoozes, and backstabs his way from a New York newspaper office boy to production chief at a major Hollywood studio.

Unlike Nathaniel [sic] West’s “The Day of the Locust,’” which immortalized the desperation of show business outsiders, Mr. Schulberg’s book was an insider’s account. Hollywood was fascinated, and betrayed. Many were convinced they knew the real-life model for Glick. Mr. Schulberg later said he based the character on hustlers he had encountered.

“What I had, when I read through my notebook, was not a single person but a pattern of behavior,” he later wrote.

What Makes Sammy Run? is one of those books that everyone has heard of, but few folks have read–a classic in its day, perhaps, but not for long thereafter. For whatever reason, I often like these books more than the ones that do make it into the official canon–I wrote about a couple of similar ones, also from the 1940s, here. This is one you want to read, you really do. Unlike Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust … it’s fun to read: sharp and quick and lethal as Mack the Knife. You think you’re laughing until you realize that grin is actually your own slashed throat. (I know, I know, Miss Lonelyhearts and all that–sorry. I can’t stand Nathanael West, though I will do him the courtesy of spelling his name right.)

It’s also a fascinating examination into the different ways that people respond to oppression. Sammy Glick didn’t come out of nowhere. He came out of a background of poverty, and bullying, and anti-Semitism, and the lesson he took from that was to trust no one, use everyone, and at all costs–never stop running. Schulberg himself was accused of painting an anti-Semitic portrait of the echt venal Jew–even Shylock loved his late wife, and had a genuine friendship with Tubal. But it does not slander a people to acknowledge that oppression, often, does not ennoble. And the book portrays Jewish characters who have more honorable ways of coping with discrimination–and with their own ambitions.

Everyone knows a Sammy Glick–that’s what they say. It’s easy to point out the Glickiness of others. But we are all running from, or to, something. There’s a little Sammy Glick in all of us. So pick up the book, get your best 1940s slang on, and introduce yourself to Sammy.

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