The Family Album/Introduction

by Arthur Baer

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INTRODUCTION

The first thing to be said of Bugs Baer is that he is one of the entertaining American humorists. That at once distinguishes him from the majority of his fellow-workers; and what gives him distinction, in the literal sense, from the rest is that he expresses himself in an intensely personal way. There are humorists so gifted that even without a style of their own, they have the capacity to amuse us; Baer is not one of them. Remove him ever so slightly from his manner, tell over one of his amazing Family Albums with the change of one adjective, and it is all lost. His fun is neither furious nor rollicking, but it is rowdy and this rowdiness runs through his manner. I have suggested elsewhere that he is a kinsman of Falstaff and his companions, and this is not a purely literary analogy. I found it by the simple accident of quoting phrases for several days when I had been reading both, and finding that at least half of the time I had ascribed them to the wrong source.

His work seems to me wholly outside the literary tradition, even outside the American tradition of vulgar humor. He is not like Bill Nye and not like Mark Twain; with the latter he shares the gift of illuminating exaggeration, but with Baer the exaggeration is in a phrase, not in an incident. The Government bureau of hopeless statistics having informed him that two-dollar bills do not last long, he writes that it is not news; “one-dollar bills turn up right in your hand and fifty-cent pieces explode on contact.” This sentence is unusual for him in that it contains all the customary parts of speech; a much more representative sentence is his question: “Are motion picture directors robustly correct when they claim that average skull age of public is but eight slender years?” His whole work is a cable-language of his own.

He is neither a satirist nor an ironist. What he has is an exceptionally oblique outlook upon the world and an elliptical expression which gives the same effect as small and agreeable galvanic shocks. In the Glutt he has created a wild roughneck and a home-town hero, exaggerated beyond all imagination, a mad bull of caricature. HIs daily comment on sport has the same quality, slightly toned down. Recently he said, after describing an inning in which nearly every player hit safely that if any more had passed first base they would have opened a United Cigar Store there. He has the extraordinary faculty of seeing the relation between the most incongruous objects, and his elliptical method jams them up against each other in such a way as to make pleasure follow swiftly on surprise.

I say that his outlook on the world is oblique. This does not refer to his predilection for violence, although to refined people there must be something unpleasant in a person who could every week for two years describe the physical encounters of an average household. I mean that things come before his mental and physical vision which no one else seems to see. “Hello” is the beginning of one page in the Album, “we heard you at the door, but just thought you were part of the bad weather.” (I have before me this solitary example of his work, and it is proof enough of his quality that it contains everything essential in him; he is so specifically himself that in spite of his imitators you can identify his work from half a sentence.) “The folks,” it continues, “are in having supper at each other, and pop says that unless uncle can get control of his table manners he will have to eat by himself, if he can get that far away from anybody.” When you have read half a dozen of his pages you will understand what he means by the word “at” in the first line. “Pop was a very hard man to please no matter what you give him,” and after the flight:

“Mom decided that pop had outgrown our town and thought it would be a good idea of we moved . . . and pop could start life all over again and grow a new set of thumbprints. “But pop wouldn't leave the town where he had been born and ignored. . . .

“Well, that started intimate hostilities between pop and mom, and pop as usual finished second best. . . .”

He is always leaving out the intervening, the logically necessary, step, and giving you premise and conclusion as if suddenly. It is one part of his peculiar nature, and others bring him full into the stream of mad humor which is one of the most entertaining of current phenomena. It is engagingly irresponsible; it has none of the usual points of reference, it exists intensely by itself and has probably not a vestige of social or philosophical significance. What on earth does he mean when he says, “Not that pop wasn't optimistic, because he wasn't”? And how on earth does he manage to make it seem to mean everything as he places it in his sketch? How, in fact, has he managed to make the character of the narrator of the Family Album seem so definite?

My only suggestion for an answer lies in the book itself—in the irreducible quality you call his personality or his style. He writes and thinks as no one else writes and thinks; in a way it is lunatic; in another way, not the very greatest way, but in a refreshing way, it is genius.

Gilbert Seldes