Our Third Lily: Runyon again & bootleggers ahoy

The Lily of St Pierre by Damon Runyon

 short story, published 1930

[excerpt, based in a Manhattan late-night club] Well, naturally, we finally get around to torch songs, as guys who are singing in quartet are bound to do, especially at four o’clock in the morning, a torch song being a song which guys sing when they have the big burnt-up feeling inside themselves over a battle with their dolls.

When a guy has a battle with his doll, such as his sweetheart, or even his ever-loving wife, he certainly feels burnt up inside himself, and can scarcely think of anything much. In fact, I know guys who are carrying the torch to walk ten miles and never know they go an inch. It is surprising how much ground a guy can cover just walking around and about, wondering if his doll is out with some other guy, and everybody knows that at four o’clock in the morning the torch is hotter than at any other time of the day.

Good Time Charley, who is carrying a torch longer than anybody else on Broadway, which is nearly a year, or even since his doll, Big Marge, gives him the wind for a rich Cuban, starts up a torch song by Tommy Lyman, which goes as follows, very, very slow, and sad:

Gee, but it’s tough

When the gang’s gone home.

Out on the corner

You stand alone.

…It gives me a great chance with my fine baritone, especially when I come to the line that says Gee, I wish I had my old gal back again…

I wish to say it is nothing for me to make five or six of the hostesses in Good Time Charley’s cry all over the joint when I hit this line about Gee, I wish I had my old gal back again... 

 

St Pierre

comments: Having said  (while discussing Undertaker Song) that my favourite Runyon stories are Manhattan-based, here’s another one that ventures outwards. It struck me to look it up for two reasons: I’ve always liked that description/definition of a torch song, and also – Lily. We’ve had Lily Tripp, and a book called Consider the Lilies. I had to keep checking I had the right Word file…

And this also deals with singing quite a lot, like Undertaker Song.

It is a touching story of a NY tough guy, Jack O’Hearts, who goes to St Pierre about his business. Which – this is 1924 – is bootlegging. Prohibition is in full swing and Jack works for someone who is running liquor into the USA.

bootleggers not from St Pierre

Jack gets sick, and ends up in the house of his doctor, and becomes friends with him and his young granddaughter.

I could not decide which was Lily between these 2 little girls

St Pierre (& Miquelon) is an anomaly – it is off Newfoundland in Canada, but is a French territory. It is also very quiet with not much going on (though see bootlegging details below), but Jack learns to enjoy the peace. He goes back for several summers.

So I sing such songs to Lily as “There’s a Long, Long Trail,” and “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” although of course when it comes to certain spots in this song I just go dum-dum-dee-dum and do not say the words right out.

By and by Lily gets to singing with me, and we sound very good together, especially when we sing the “Long, Long Trail,” which Lily likes very much, and even old Doctor Armand joins in now and then…

 

Then he makes a mistake: he takes a friend Louis for a quiet trip, and this friend is not trustworthy around a young woman.

(this is something like the David Copperfield strand with Steerforth and Little Emily)

The story starts with the end: Jack goes after Louis, to try to kill him, then tells his version of events  to our usual unnamed narrator.

His narration ends like this:

The doctor says ‘you will please sing the song about the long trail, Jack O’Hearts.”

So I stand there in the fog, the chances are looking like a big sap, and I sing as follows:

There’s a long, long trail a-winding

Into the land of my dreams,

Where the nightingale is singing,

And the white moon beams.

But I can get no farther than this, for something comes up in my throat… and for the first time I remember I bust out crying.

The narrator then ruins it all with his final cynical line, but it is a great story.

 You can find the full text of it here The Lily of St. Pierre

washerwomen of St Pierre

St Pierre really was the centre of drink distribution into the US in those years – fascinating article here at the Smithsonian, with great pictures

This Tiny French Archipelago Became America’s Alcohol Warehouse During Prohibition

Pictures:

Ada "Bricktop" Smith with unidentified friends in a nightclub. - NYPL Digital Collections

Harbor of St. Pierre, Miquelon | Library of Congress

Washerwoman of St. Pierre - digital file from intermediary roll film copy | Library of Congress

(there are many places called St Pierre, so searching for pictures was tricksy, but this painting is by the same person who did the harbour one, which is definitely St P & M, so it seems likely…)

The two bootleggers are from the front cover of a book literally called 'Bootleggers of St Pierre', but (& I should have left it at that) when I investigated further, they turn out to be from Minnesota. The picture is widely shared on the internet.