Woody Allen

Experimentalists like Eco, Calvino, David Foster Wallace, Gilbert Sorrentino and especially Borges delight in dissecting artists and opuses that exist only in their minds. One questions whether what keeps Allen from that list is a kind of literary snobbery, apart from the typical ghettoization of humor.

Allen is, in every way that counts, blue-collar: a self-taught craftsman with a relentless work ethic but no college degree (close to the same qualities that cause some people to insist Shakespeare couldn’t have written those plays).

It’s not a stretch to put Allen in the pantheon. McSweeney’s website editor John Warner offers this: “I would call Woody Allen’s writing ‘short stories’ in the same way Raymond Carver wrote short stories, but somewhere along the line we decided that these were not the same thing. Benchley, Perelman, Thurber and, later, Allen were all respected as writers, not ‘merely’ as comics. At some point, though, we began to codify the ‘short story’ as something that resembles the real, that aspires to verisimilitude.”

George Saunders (recent recipient of a MacArthur ‘genius grant’ for his satirical fiction) identifies a “comic virus” he caught from the Steve Martin prose collection Cruel Shoes. At the time, Saunders says, he didn’t realize Martin was exhibiting symptoms of exposure to Perelman and Allen. Later still, when Saunders discovered Donald Barthelme, he recognized yet another victim of the disease.

It must be admitted that Allen’s insistence on framing his works as “mere” humor pieces produces a defensive undertone. It’s there in the title of his book, turning his allusion (in Yeats’ apocalyptic lyric “The Second Coming,” he was using mere in its original sense of “absolute and undiminished”) into a kind of preemptive apology.

This humble tone is cemented in Allen’s penchant for the topical newspaper epigraph. Perhaps too many of the stories in Mere Anarchy rely on badly dated headlines like the nanny-tell-all stir or the fall of Michael Ovitz. Without the ballast of a newspaper quote, Allen sometimes relies on the labored setup (“As a hatchling chloroformed and shanghaied each summer to various lakeside facilities bearing Indian names…”) or the final rim shot.

“Pinchuck’s Law” ends the book with such a ba-dump-dump. All the way through, it’s a series of escalating and exhilarating twists on the police procedural, from a coroner who performs autopsies at weddings “for cigarette money” to a serial killer whose victims are “lightly dusted with lime and fresh mint.” It’s only in the last paragraph that Allen begins to flag, when he lays out the skeleton of a final joke. We’re left appreciating what he gave us, and imagining where the story might have gone next.

But that’s like criticizing a sonneteer for stopping at 14 lines. While Saunders’s visions and the pieces on the McSweeney’s site seem fresher as they strip away the old formulaic surfaces, Allen remains pure, funny and stubborn—the last feuilletoniste. And as Schoenberg said, there’s still a lot of great music to be written in the key of C.