Don't Quit The Day Job:
Here Come The Snoozies!
By Marshall J. Cook
Last issue we handed out the Snoozie Awards to famous writers who sustained themselves by working in the great and noble insurance industry. If you missed it (and where were you?), Franz Kafka took second runner up, Wallace Stevens was first runner up, and the great Tom Clancy walked off with the Snoozie.
This issue, we turn to another category before handing out the ultimate Snoozie: Day Job that embodies the very definition of boring: banker.
Disqualified: William Sydney Porter
We know him better as O. Henry, twister of tales with snapper endings. (He also created the “The Cisco Kid.”) But before any of that he was a bank teller in Houston. He disqualified himself for an award in this category, however, when he was accused of embezzling and absconded to Honduras. That’s much too exciting for a Snoozie winner!
He and his wife eventually returned to Houston, and he was arrested and sentenced to five years in stoney lonesome. There he had plenty of time to write and lots of seedy characters to write about. He stayed in jail for three years, lived for nine more, and wrote some 600 stories. He died broke.
First runner-up:
Raymond Chandler
One of the daddys of hard-boiled P.I. fiction, Chandler worked for a bank in San Francisco and then became a bookkeeper and auditor for the Dabney Oil Syndicate for 10 years, losing his job during the Great Depression, allegedly for drunkenness and absenteeism. He turned to writing for the pulp magazines to support himself and his wife, first surfacing with a story called “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” in the December 1933 issue of Black Mask, the best of the P.I. pulps. Chandler learned his craft well, creating the prototype tough-guy PI, Philip Marlowe, in such classics as The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1954).
But the Snoozie and a tip of the green eyeshade for being perhaps the most overeducated banker in history goes to:
Thomas Stearns Eliot.
Eliot earned BA and MA degrees at Harvard and spent a year studying at the Sorbonne, where the precocious poetic prodigy wrote that all-time freshman English baffler, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” He returned to Harvard for graduate studies in philosophy and began a doctoral thesis. He produced a great deal of literary criticism and more poetry, including one of the most famous poems of the 20th Century, “The Waste Land.”
He taught at Highgate Junior School and for the University Extension but quit to become a clerk in the Colonial and Foreign Department of Lloyd’s Bank. He only lasted there a few years, but it was the last “real” job he would hold.
As unexciting as banking might seem to the uninitiated, it has to be downright exotic compared to the decades-long career of our grand prize winner.
Drum roll, please. The Doozie Snoozie Award for holding down the most brain-numbingly boring job for the longest time goes to ...
Harvey Pekar.
Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1939 (which sounds boring right there), Pekar sampled college but dropped out, tried to join the Army but got turned down, and ended up a file clerk for the VA hospital in Cleveland, where he toiled for almost 40 years!
But he had this friend, a fellow who went by the name R. Crumb when he drew his comic books, and Harvey’s buddy R. suggested he write about his daily life. Pekar did, and Crumb and a few other artists illustrated it. In 1976 the comics started appearing as American Splendor, the life and times of Harvey and his wife, the job at the VA, and Harvey’s rather dismal view of life in general.
The work attracted a small but very devoted following (the very definition of “cult classic”) and gained far greater exposure when American Splendor became a movie in 2003, starting Paul Giamatti as Harvey and Hope Davis as his wife, Joyce Brabner, along with cartoon versions of them.
Thus, Harvey Pekar took the very dross of his asphyxiating life and spun it into the gold of literature.
There’s hope for all of us who toil at less-than-completely fulfilling day jobs while we labor on nights, weekends, and around the edges to create our life’s real work.
The wonder, of course, is why those boring day jobs don’t drive us completely bonkers. (Or maybe they do.)
Next issue we’ll examine alleged links between mental illness and writing success. I won’t call for nominations in this category -- there are plenty of well-known writers who qualify, but I’d love to hear from you. Tell me about your day job. mcook@dcs.wisc.edu.