I used to read my uncle Oscar’s mail.
This may sound problematic, but it was actually quite innocent. My mother and I would come home from the high school where she taught and I allegedly learned, walk the dog, and then make the perilous journey from our comfortable brick Colonial on a nice street to Oscar’s brick and stone executive ranch less than two miles away. Mum would scoop up the mail the local postman had shoved through the slot in the door, sort out the bills and correspondence, then hand me the magazines and newspapers while she went to start dinner for her siblings and child.
What happened next varied. Sometimes I’d hole up in the spare bedroom to watch Star Trek, Ultraman, or Spider-Man reruns. Sometimes I’d practice the piano. Sometimes I’d work on a particularly time-consuming bit of homework. Sometimes I’d labor over my latest fan writing, none of which was particularly memorable, interesting, or good.
And sometimes I’d read Oscar’s magazines.
Business Week, Forbes, and Fortune were not to my taste; I’ve no head for figures or finance now, and I cared even less as teenager. Ditto The Wall Street Journal, which I found puzzlingly defensive of Richard Nixon even after he’d resigned and been pardoned. I’d read Grit, the farmer’s newspaper, even though I found much of it disturbingly bland, and of course I devoured American Heritage cover to cover each month. I even read Reader’s Digest, although that was much more Betty’s favorite than Oscar’s
Then there was The Saturday Evening Post, which Oscar started to receive in the early 1970’s, around the time that they found a young artist named Robert Charles Howe to churn out the sort of folksy cover art once produced by the likes of Normal Rockwell and John Philip Falter. That Rockwell had quit because the Post was not interested in less folksy Rockwells like The Problem We All Live With or The Connoisseur did not matter. The Post, which boasted of being founded by Benjamin Franklin, stood for good, clean, middle American values. Others could grapple with pesky social issues like feminism, civil rights, and drugs. The Post would hold fast for two-parent families, well-scrubbed children, and the traditional American lifestyle as it had emerged after the war.
That this stance was somewhat at odds with the reality of Benjamin Franklin (who’d fathered at least one child out of wedlock), the recent past (the Depression could have been in another century, not within my uncle’s lifetime), and the Post’s own history (they set aside their conservatism long enough to publish The Four Freedoms series by Rockwell) did not seem to matter. The Post’s mix of general interest articles and finely wrought fiction by popular authors had made the magazine a staple in middle class American homes for many years. There was no reason to change.
In particular, the Post prided itself on the quality of its fictional offerings. These stories, many by well known and well liked authors such as Ray Bradbury, P.G. Wodehouse, Robert Heinlein, William Faulkner, Agatha Christie, Paul Gallico, Rex Stout, and Jack London, may not have been as literary or as groundbreaking as those found in, say, The Atlantic or The New Yorker, but they were well written, entertaining, and more than sufficient for the Post’s clientele. Publication in the Post launched many a career, and it's safe to say that American letters would be much, much different without it.
Many of the Post's stories were what were deemed “series fiction” that chronicled the doings of an individual with a distinctive job, quirky friends, and the sort of problems that could easily be resolved in 3-9,000 words. They were just the thing for a weary middle manager or housewife to enjoy after a hard day selling bonds, washing walls, or otherwise living the American Mid-Century Dream.
The series, and their lead characters, were superficially different (Clarence Budington Kelland's Efficiency Edgar and Scattergood Baines, William Hazlett Upson's Alexander Botts, and so on). All, however, shared a common, unstated belief in the power of friendship, good plain common sense, and the superiority of the American system. Even the brightest and best educated characters were not so intelligent as to be inaccessible, even the most passionate believed implicitly in working through the law, and the most eccentric were never frightening.
It’s no surprise to learn that some of these stories were adapted for the screen, or that their format – episodic but never life-changing – was very similar to pre-Hill Street Blues television. Some of them, most notably Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason stories, actually were adapted for television, and the mindset behind them – series characters rarely die, friends should be quirky, main characters should have interesting jobs, much happens but little changes – still prevails in many series.
Perry Mason, his loyal secretary Della Street, his investigator Paul Drake, and his adversaries Lt. Trask and ADA Hamilton Burger, had an outsize influence on American television – how many shows, even today, chronicle the lives and adventures of crusading attorneys? – but few today realize that Perry and his friends were in turn heavily influenced by the greatest of pre-war American lawyers. This learned counselor, who appeared in approximately eighty short stories and novellas in The Saturday Evening Post, set the pattern for fictional lawyers that continues to this day. Always on the side of the “little man,” learned in the law and wise as to human nature, supplemented by a loyal sidekick, a beautiful female associate, his ultimate allegiance was to Lady Justice herself.
His name was Ephraim Tutt, senior partner in the venerable (albeit somewhat notorious) law firm of Tutt & Tutt. He was the brainchild of Arthur Cheney Train, Esq. And despite a long and distinguished history in the fiction section of one of America’s most popular general interest magazines, Mr. Tutt somehow became the subject of a Lawsuit So Bad It’s Good because a reader had gotten it into his head that Mr. Tutt was real.
Arthur Cheney Train boasted the sort of background any attorney might envy. Born to a distinguished New England legal and political family, he went to Harvard College for his BA and Harvard Law School for his LLD. By 1901 he was an assistant district attorney in New York, where he worked for the next seven years before going into private practice with future reformer and anti-gangster DA Charles Albert Perkins. He married, had four children, and outwardly lived the life of respectable, liberal-minded public service that was expected of a New England blueblood of his generation.
Arthur Train had a secret life, however: he wanted to be a writer. And despite the responsibilities of his career, his family, and his position, that is exactly what he did, beginning in 1904 with the publication of his first short story.
For the next several years Train produced a series of short stories, novels, plays, and magazine articles and books about the law. These ranged from pieces that drew on his experience as an attorney and former DA to science fiction to outright horror. His best known early novel, Mortmain, concerns a man with an “alien hand” that wreaks havoc without its owner’s knowledge, and if there’s a creepier concept than body parts with a will of their own, I really don’t want to know about it.
Mortmain LINK sold well enough to be filmed in 1915, but despite this, Train would probably be best described as a classic mid-lister. He wrote well but not exceptionally so, his stories sold for decent but not outrageous sums, and he wisely kept his day job for the first eighteen years in his career. At that point, forty-nine years old and a widower, his children grown and royalties steady, Arthur Train decided to take the plunge and work full time as a writer.
This was a somewhat risky proposition, even for someone who’d been a working professional for nearly two decades. Writing has never been a particularly lucrative way to make a living, and the early 1920’s was a time of fierce competition and changing tastes. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, “Lipstick” and the other young bloods at The New Yorker - these authors and hundreds like them wrote a cleaner, more colloquial prose style than Arthur Train, and their books and magazine pieces were the hot, hip, happenin’ prose of the day.
Train, however, had a secret weapon. This personage, lean, unfashionably dressed, rarely without a stogy or a stovepipe hat, had first appeared in 1919 in a collection of surprisingly readable short stories. Soon a fixture in the pages of The Saturday Evening Post and a mainstay of Charles Scribner’s Sons, this transplanted Yankee in and of himself brought in enough income that the former DA chucked it all and did nothing but write for the remaining twenty-two years of his life. Ephraim Tutt was his name, the law was both his passion and his game, and beginning with Tutt and Mr. Tutt, he became the best known fictional lawyer in America.
This may be hard to believe today – only a handful of the Tutt books are available today, most notably Tutt and Mr. Tutt on Project Gutenberg LINK – but once one has read a couple of Ephraim Tutt stories it’s not hard to see why. Tutt himself, irascible, wily, and sometimes skating dangerously close to the unethical in the defense of his client, is the sort of attorney anyone would love to have. The client always comes first regardless of the circumstances, justice must always be served regardless of the situation, and if these worthy goals involve mocking or outwitting the blinkered minions of the DA’s office, all the better.
If that weren’t enough, Mr. Tutt’s legal staff is more than a match for their boss. Samuel Tutt (not a relative, but also a Yankee), the other attorney…Bonnie Doon, the legal clerk who drums up business…Minerva Wiggin, the office manager and attorney in her own right…all of these, especially Samuel Tutt, are an entertaining group of sidekicks and associates to the brilliant and uncompromising Mr. Tutt. Their adventures, which often turn on obscure points of the law, shine through the early 20th century verbiage that was pushed aside by Hemingway’s laconic style.
This is not to say that the Tutt books are perfect. Far from it. The aforesaid early 20th century verbiage can be most annoying for a modern reader (don’t ask how many times I paged ahead on my Nook in certain stories), and the long arm of coincidence gets quite the workout. There’s also an unpleasant strain of period-appropriate but still appalling racial attitudes in the early stories (the stereotyping in “Mock Hen and Mock Turtle,” an early story based vaguely on the tong wars of the early 20th century left me agape). Fortunately this faded as the series progressed and attitudes changed, but it’s still a major knock against Mr. Tutt and his chronicler.
For all that, one could spend an afternoon in worse company than that of Tutt, Mr. Tutt, Miss Wiggin, and their clients. The legal trivia and doctrines in the stories are based on established law and court decisions, and Mr. Tutt’s insistence on representing the poor, the weak, and the marginalized in preference to the rich and wellborn is a refreshing change from much other literature of his time. There are many crusading lawyers in American letters, from Daniel Webster on to Mickey Haller, but they all owe a debt to Ephraim Tutt.
For all his legal sagacity and literary popularity, Ephraim Tutt could not hold back the ravages of time. By the early 1940’s Arthur Train’s health was starting to fail, and he knew that his days were numbered. He therefore decided to end his career with a most unusual book about his beloved character. Not a compilation, not a final novel, not even a story that killed off Mr. Tutt to prevent others from writing about him – no, Arthur Train had something very different in mind.
He would write Ephraim Tutt’s autobiography.
Yankee Lawyer, which came out in 1943 to excellent reviews, is that rarest of literary creations: the autobiography of a fictional character. Written in the first person by Ephraim Tutt, who is allegedly stepping forward to tell his story without the assistance of his dear friend and amanuensis Arthur Train, the book tells the story of Ephraim Tutt from birth to the present in most convincing fashion:
-- The book is copyright “Ephraim Tutt,” not “Arthur Train.”
-- There’s an introduction by Arthur Train describing how he’d finally persuaded Mr. Tutt to tell his own story.
-- Illustrations include photographs of Mr. Tutt’s eminently respectable Victorian parents, Mr. Tutt as an eminently respectable Victorian child, and Mr. Tutt’s eminently respectable Victorian sweetheart, who married someone else and was the reason that Mr. Tutt (unlike his partner Tutt) never married.
-- There are repeated references to real people whom Mr. Tutt had known or worked with.
-- The covers of both the original print run and the Armed Forces Edition paperback distributed to active duty serviceman name the author as “Ephraim Tutt,” not “Arthur Train.”
-- Train himself reviewed for the book for the Yale Law Journal, commenting wryly that, “To review the book of a friend is inevitably a delicate and offtimes a dangerous task.”
All of this was very entertaining for long-time Tutt fans, legal buffs, and the boys in uniform. Oh, some people who hadn’t read the Tutt stories didn’t get the joke (one Marine wrote to Arthur Train asking him to settle a bet with his buddies about whether Ephraim Tutt was real or not, never mind that he was writing from Okinawa during the battle), but both Train and his publisher assumed that after nearly a quarter century the average reader was in on the joke.
Alas for Arthur Train and Charles Scribner’s Sons, they were wrong.
As amusing as it may be to imagine a naïve young draftee taking the authorship of a paperback at face value, soldiers and sailors were not the only ones who were fooled by Yankee Lawyer. Practicing attorneys who were vaguely familiar with the name “Ephraim Tutt” wrote to Mr. Tutt for legal advice. Non-lawyers wrote admiring missives lauding Mr. Tutt for being such a shining example of what a lawyer could be, never mind all the machinations and unorthodox legal doctrines he relied upon in his cases. Soft-hearted women, saddened by his blighted romance, invited him to visit, have a cup of tea, and perhaps – just perhaps - finally heal his broken heart. There were letters from Harvard alumni claiming to remember Tutt, and even a supposed cousin wishing to correspond with his long-lost relative.
As bad as this sounds, however, worse was to come. Another (real) lawyer, one Lewis R. Linet of Philadelphia, was so incensed at the deception that he brought suit against Arthur Train (or Ephraim Tutt), Charles Scribner’s Sons, and senior editor Maxwell Perkins (better known for working for with Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe).
Yes. Really.
Linet not only wanted a return of a potion of the $3.50 he’d spent on Yankee Lawyer. He also sought damages on behalf of approximately 50,000 other purchasers, most of whom probably had never heard of “Lewis R. Linet” and had no idea he was suing on their behalf. Worst of all, he wanted to force Scribner to withdraw the book from publication, permanently, thus depriving not only Mr. Tutt of his day in the sun but frustrating all those GI Joe’s and leathernecks on Okinawa, in France, Belgium, Monte Cassino, etc., etc., etc., who risked having their precious reading material snatched from their grimy hands.
Arthur Train’s reaction was both amused and frustrated. “I don’t admit that it was a hoax,” he commented, citing Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe as inspirations. “It was a perfectly natural and legitimate way to make the character tell his own story.”
Fortunately for Train, although not for Lewis R. Linet, the judge agreed. He denied the request for injunctive relief, allowing Yankee Lawyer to remain in print. Train, who had admitted that he’d actually written the book in an article entitled “Should I Apologize?” in (of course) The Saturday Evening Post, said that he was convinced that Mr. Tutt would outlive him…but only after saying that there might actually be a real, live, genuine Ephraim Tutt out there somewhere.
Whether the judge would have agreed with this is not known, as Arthur Train died before the matter of Lewis R. Linet’s $3.50 was resolved. It is a matter of public record, however, that Mr. Linet did not attempt to track down and sue Ephraim Tutt for fraud once his amanuensis had passed on….
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Did you ever read the autobiography of someone who never lived? Read The Saturday Evening Post? Watch the exploits of Perry Mason? Find a battered copy of Yankee Lawyer at a tag sale? Step up to the bar and give your testimony....
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