Street Scene

THE WORLD OF JOHN McNULTY (357 pp.)--John McNuIty--Doubleday ($4.50).

It is just 18 months since the pillars of New York's Third Avenue "El" were torn down and replaced by a system of greenstuff, which a few of the older or more traveled natives claimed to be able to identify as trees. Before this alarming change, Third Avenue clearly was New York's most hardened artery, and its mile or two in midtown Manhattan is still largely given over to antique stores and saloons, the real antiques being the saloons. In these is preserved a way of life that belongs more to a village than a metropolis. The "El" that protected this enclave like a leaky umbrella was a symbol of that way of life; its antiquary, interpreter and poet was a sometime newspaperman named John McNulty.

The "El"--"The Soul of a Soulless City," Painter C. R. W. Nevinson called it --predeceased McNulty by a few months. John McNulty himself would never have gone on in Nevinson's excitable fashion about a segment of New York's rapid-transit system, but in a subtle, simple way --by drinking, thinking and writing on the avenue--he made the caption come true. This excellent selection of his stories, articles and miscellaneous pieces proves that a man can find wisdom as well as booze in a gin mill.

He Broods Easy. The Irish quality of McNulty's New York is more than the green ice cubes that appear on St. Patrick's Day to startle the unwary. It is a place of great men in small jobs, stubbornly resisting the mere geographical transition from Mayo or Offaly or Cork to a great city; it is a place echoing with anecdote, irony and the great Irish wastefulness of spirit involved in drink, tragic brooding and baffled frustration about women. "He's Irish and he broods easy," says one McNulty character of another.

Author McNulty himself was no native Irishman, but a Massachusetts-born nar-rowback, a term used by the oldtime immigrants to describe the clerkly quality of their nonlaboring sons. Like a true narrowback, McNulty in his heart hungered for the lost village--and he found it in Third Avenue's vestiges of Irish life, in the awful cooking, the hatred of machinery, the acid yet basically gentle manner of one man to another. This last quality crops out in many stories: the querulous man who has to go into the Army without having anyone to say goodbye to; the cabby who night after night watches out for the same group of drunks; the bartender who is paternally protective about his inept, sick handyman ("Don't die, you little son of a bitch!").

Ex-Altar Boy. McNulty had an ear like a hard neighborhood cop for the giveaway phrase. Describing one of his sad quirky little pub characters, a man called The Slugger, he wrote: "He looked like a guy that was maybe a small altar boy and fell into bad company for thirty-four years."

McNulty, himself an ex-altar boy (at St. Mary's, Lawrence, Mass.) fell into no better company than his own. He was a man much loved by newspapermen, horse-players, bartenders, dogs, writers, children and other odd characters who knew him. He had the weaknesses of his subject matter, but like the work of his own "sour-beer artist" (see glossary) his apparently sloppy words came out in (crystal. Unfortunately, the total recall of irrelevant detail which is wonderful in the saloon anecdotes is a bit of a bore in McNulty's journalistic pieces. Irish writers like McNulty should deal only with New York Irishmen. Even when he went back "to where I had never been," i.e., to Ireland, he found that to his ears Gaelic sounded like Yiddish; and that the stay-at-home Irish--unlike their New York brothers who are constantly obliged to make themselves heard in the surrounding din--talk softly to each other.

John McNulty did not create his own most famous character--Mat, the proprietor of a gin mill known as "Mat's." He simply wrote down what the man said. What resulted was that great Irish art form known as conversation, which, at its best, is always above and beyond the call of truth. In his later stories, McNulty often slipped into the habit of giving Mat his real name--Timothy Athena Costello, proprietor of Costello's Restaurant, Third Avenue at 44th.

The Girl Scout Age. This saloon McNulty celebrated and helped make famous --until it became blighted by literary admen: "Nobody goes there any more; it's too crowded." And, not far from Costello's, in the heartland of McNulty's world, half a block of stores has recently been razed to make room for the cleanly headquarters of the Girl Scouts of America, who will have no difficulty at all in identifying the trees. It is all very sad, but McNulty's work remains to lighten the loss. His art was as well-hidden and as obvious as a horse parlor. Officially it did not exist, but it was there.

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