What Makes Sammy Run? (2 page)

One way of distorting the intent and meaning of the book is to overlook the fact that every one of Sammy’s victims is also Jewish: his idealistic father, his gentle brother, the easygoing Al Manheim, the gifted, impractical Julian Blumberg and the fading producer Sidney Fineman. Just as the Jews, in other words, have no monopoly on the Sammy Glicks, Sammy himself cannot and should not be interpreted as the personification of an American Jewry that has also given us Brandeis and Gershwin, Baruch,
General Rose and Irving Berlin, not to mention Benny Friedman, Hank Greenberg and Barney Ross. There was no passage in this book that I worked over with greater care than:

It struck me that Julian and Sammy must have been just about the same age, twenty-two or -three, probably brought up in the same kind of Jewish family, same neighborhood, same schooling, and started out with practically the same job. And yet they couldn’t have been more different if one had been born an Eskimo and the other the Prince of Wales. And there were so many Julian Blumbergs in the world. Jews without money, without push, without plots, without any of the characteristics which such experts on genetics as Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford and Father Coughlin try to tell us are racial traits. I have seen too many of their lonely, frightened faces packed together in subways or staring out of thousands of dingy rooms as my train hurled past them on the elevated from 125th Street to Grand Central, too many Jewish
nebs
and poets and starving tailors and everyday little guys to consider the fascist answer to
What Makes Sammy Run?

All right, if the fact of Sammy’s Jewishness is a false and thoughtless answer to the question, then what
does
make Sammy run? Of all the questions about the book that have been put to me through the years, this is the only one I find irresistible. It is not so much the novelist as the frustrated sociologist in me that stops for this one. In fact, one of my favorite sociology professors at Dartmouth once greeted me with, “Well, I see you got most of our Socy 1 course into
Sammy
. I’ll be interested to see what you’ll be able to do with Socy 2.” The Dartmouth sociology department, which uses
Sammy
as a textbook, recently sprung on its seniors this final-exam question, “What Makes Sammy Run? (Discuss for one hour.)” I couldn’t help wondering what mark I would have received on that one myself.

But it is less important for the novelist to solve his questions than it is to frame them in such human terms that each reader will be incited to come up with his own answers. One reader, Dr. Franz Alexander, head of the Psychoanalytical Institute at the University of Chicago, wrote his answer into a provocative book,
The Age of Unreason
. Finding the ultra-aggressive, ruthless and belligerently self-centered type rather common among second-generation Americans from impoverished immigrant families where the father has lost his prestige due to his inability to cope with his new environment, Dr. Alexander writes:

A common solution is that the son usurps the father’s place in the mother’s affection as well as in economic importance and acquires an inordinate ambition. He wants to justify all his mother’s hopes and sacrifices and thus appease his guilty conscience about his father. He can do this only by becoming successful at whatever cost. Success becomes the supreme value and failure the greatest sin because it fails to justify the sacrifice of the father. In consequence of this all other defects such as insincerity in human relationships, unfairness in competition, disloyalty, disregard of others, appear comparatively slight, and the result is a ruthless careerist, obsessed by the one idea of self-promotion, a caricature of the self-made man and a threat to Western civilization, the principle of which he has reduced to absurdity. I am impressed by the accuracy with which Schulberg has described this type, a victim of cultural conditions, and how well he has portrayed the hero, Sammy Glick, the “frantic marathoner” of life, “sprinting out of his mother’s womb, turning life into a race in which the only rules are fight for the rail, and elbow on the turn, and the only finish-line is death.”

It pleased me that he recognized Sammy as a victim. In the process of writing my book I discovered that while I had begun in a mood of pure hatred, I felt myself, toward the end, caught up in a compassion for Sammy’s obsession that threatened any moment to cross over the line into sentimentality. Perhaps that is why I have never gone on to a sequel, as originally planned. But whether I write it or not I have a habit of stopping to wonder, every once in a while, just what Sammy is doing this very minute. I see him now with his antiques and his collection of French Impressionists, slowed down somewhat, considerably refined and comparatively mellowed. He’s probably been analyzed, and his second marriage, made for sounder reasons than his first, may last if he’s careful. He wants children now; he has a vision of patriarchy.
He has been told that he must find a new set of values to fill the moral vacuum in which he throve and strove. In throwing over the ways of his father without learning any sense of obligation to the Judeo-Christian-democratic pattern, he had nothing except naked self-interest by which to guide himself. Instead of being “between pictures,” like some of those he overcame in his rush to the top, he may be said to be between patterns of social responsibility. And I believe this is true not only because he happens to be a second-generation product of the slums, but because our American culture as a whole may be in a state of dislocation. We are a babel of heterogeneous moralities. We are dizzy with change. We are Sunday Christians and summer Democrats. No wonder Sammy Glick (including all the Sammy Glicks who would never allow him into their clubs) has found the moral atmosphere so suitable and the underfooting so conducive to his kind of climbing. Yes, Sammy is still running, I’m afraid, and the question still is, How do we slow him down? Perhaps the answer involves an even bigger question: How do we slow down the whole culture he threatens to run away with and that threatens to run away with us?

Why all this moralizing about a book frequently described as racy, fast-moving and principally an entertainment? Well, there’s an old saying—or there ought to be one—“Scratch a novelist and you find a moralist.” Where is the tension in any novel to be found, after all, but in the discrepancy between the writer’s knowledge of what is and his vision of what ought to be?

New Hope, Pa
.
January 1952
 

CHAPTER 1       

   T
he first time I saw him he couldn’t have been much more than sixteen years old, a little ferret of a kid, sharp and quick. Sammy Glick. Used to run copy for me. Always ran. Always looked thirsty.

“Good morning, Mr. Manheim,” he said to me the first time we met, “I’m the new office boy, but I ain’t going to be an office boy long.”

“Don’t say ain’t,” I said, “or you’ll be an office boy forever.”

“Thanks, Mr. Manheim,” he said, “that’s why I took this job, so I can be around writers and learn all about grammar and how to act right.”

Nine out of ten times I wouldn’t have even looked up, but there
was something about the kid’s voice that got me. It must have been charged with a couple of thousand volts.

“So you’re a pretty smart little feller,” I said.

“Oh, I keep my ears and eyes open,” he said.

“You don’t do a bad job with your mouth either,” I said.

“I wondered if newspapermen always wisecrack the way they do in the movies,” he said.

“Get the hell out of here,” I answered.

He raced out, too quickly, a little ferret. Smart kid, I thought. Smart little yid. He made me uneasy. That sharp, neat, eager little face. I watched the thin, wiry body dart around the corner in high gear. It made me uncomfortable. I guess I’ve always been afraid of people who can be agile without grace.

The boss told me Sammy was getting a three-week tryout. But Sammy did more running around that office in those three weeks than Paavo Nurmi did in his whole career. Every time I handed him a page of copy, he ran off with it as if his life depended on it. I can still see Sammy racing between the desks, his tie flying, wild-eyed, desperate.

After the second trip he would come back to me panting, like a frantic puppy retrieving a ball. I never saw a guy work so hard for twelve bucks a week in my life. You had to hand it to him. He might not have been the most lovable little child in the world, but you knew he must have something. I used to stop right in the middle of a sentence and watch him go.

“Hey, kid, take it easy.”

That was like cautioning Niagara to fall more slowly.

“You said rush, Mr. Manheim.”

“I didn’t ask you to drop dead on us.”

“I don’t drop dead very easy, Mr. Manheim.”

“Like your job, Sammy?”

“It’s a damn good job—this year.”

“What do you mean—this year?”

“If I still have it next year, it’ll stink.”

He looked so tense and serious I almost laughed in his face. I liked him. Maybe he was a little too fresh, but he was quite a boy.

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground for you, kid. Maybe in a couple of years I’ll have a chance to slip you in as a cub reporter.”

That was the first time he ever scared me. Here I was going out of my way to be nice to him and he answered me with a look that was almost contemptuous.

“Thanks, Mr. Manheim,” he said, “but don’t do me any favors. I know this newspaper racket. Couple of years at cub reporter? Twenty bucks. Then another stretch as district man. Thirty-five. And finally you’re a great big reporter and get forty-five for the rest of your life. No, thanks.”

I just stood there looking at him, staggered. Then …

“Hey, boy!” And he’s off again, breaking the indoor record for the hundred-yard dash.

Well, I guess he knew what he was doing. The world was a race to Sammy. He was running against time. Sometimes I used to sit at the bar at Bleeck’s, stare at the reflection in my highball glass and say, “Al, I don’t give a goddam if you never move your ass off this seat again. If you never write another line. I default. If it’s a race, you can scratch my name right now. Al Manheim does not choose to run.” And then it would start running through my head: What makes Sammy run?
What makes Sammy run?
I would take another drink, and ask one of the bartenders:

“Say, Henry, what makes Sammy run?”

“What the hell are you talking about, Al?”

“I’m talking about Sammy Glick, that’s who I’m talking about. What makes Sammy run?”

“You’re drunk, Al. Your teeth are swimming.”

“Goddam it, don’t try to get out of it! That’s an important question. Now, Henry, as man to man, What makes Sammy run?”

Henry wiped his sweaty forehead with his sleeve. “Jesus, Al, how the hell should I know?”

“But I’ve got to know. (I was yelling by this time.) Don’t you see, it’s the answer to everything.”

But Henry didn’t seem to see.

“Mr. Manheim, you’re nuts,” he said sympathetically.

“It’s driving me nuts,” I said. “I guess it’s something for Karl Marx or Einstein or a Big Brain; it’s too deep for me.”

“For Chri’sake, Al,” Henry pleaded, “you better have another drink.”

I guess I took Henry’s advice, because this time I got back to the office with an awful load on. I had to bat out my column on what seemed like six typewriters at the same time. And strangely enough that’s how I had my first run-in with Sammy Glick.

Next morning a tornado twisted through the office. It began in the office of O’Brien the managing editor and it headed straight for the desk of the drama editor, which was me.

“Why in hell don’t you look what you’re doing, Manheim?” O’Brien yelled.

The best I could do on the spur of the moment was:

“What’s eating you?”

“Nothing’s eating me,” he screamed. “But I know what’s eating you—maggots—in your brain. Maybe you didn’t read your column over before you filed it last night?”

As a matter of fact I hadn’t even been able to see my column. And at best I was always on the Milquetoast side. So I simply asked meekly, “Why, was something wrong with it?”

“Nothing much,” he sneered in that terrible voice managing editors always manage to cultivate. “Just one slight omission. You left all the verbs out of the last paragraph. If it hadn’t been for that kid Sammy Glick it would have run the way you wrote it.”

“What’s Sammy Glick got to do with it?” I demanded, getting sore.

“Everything,” said the managing editor. “He read it on his way down to the desk …”

“Glick read it?” I shouted.

“Shut up,” he said. “He read it on his way to the desk, and when he saw that last paragraph he sat right down and re-wrote it himself. And damn well, too.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “He’s a great kid. I’ll have to thank him.”

“I thanked him in the only language he understands,” the
editor said, “with a pair for the Sharkey-Carnera scrap. And in
your name.”