Joseph William Meagher's Tippy Locklin is a magical and wildly funny re-creation of a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1920s. As Richard Sullivan in The New York Times Book Review observed, it is a novel "so loaded with warm, hearty people, so charged with honest, affectionate fun that in final effect it is a small celebration of the very goodness of being alive." For what Tippy's world instills in him is "a belief that all is intrinsically well and that the world is not a jungle of broken glass but a well-ordered place where things go wrong and people misbehave, but whose foundation is strong and indestructible."
The characters in Tippy's world are memorable. Especially notable is his neighbor, Mr. Duffy the cabdriver, wondrously tattooed with a motto of his own composition: "For God, Country, Mother and Girl Friend." Mr. Duffy has an enormous wife ("Lousy cook, but the strongest woman you ever saw"), a lady addicted to sitting down. Early on she endears herself to the reader when she sits down on a crate, part of the parlor furniture, and just as she cozily establishes herself, there is a noise of splintering wood and above it a pleasant tinkling sound. "Fine!" Mr. Duffy says. "Those were the Christmas tree ornaments."
Reading Tippy Locklin is like opening a grab bag of delightful surprises - the laughter, warmth and love that fill the book remain vivid long after the last page has been turned.
"I little thought," wrote Dorothy Parker at the close of her lengthy review in Esquire magazine, "that I should ever go on like this over a book about a small boy - especially one named Tippy. But here I am, and all naked of apologies."
Born in Brooklyn in 1917, Joseph William Meagher loved his birthplace front, back and sideways, and would have been astounded that the streets he knew so well would become the ultra-chic neighborhoods they are today.
A childhood bout with polio left his spine, he said, shaped like the harp of his Irish ancestors. During four years at a hospital school on Long Island, he began reading great novels and in a child's awe and enthusiasm, thought they were so great he'd like to write one or two himself. And by the end of his life he had written six novels, two novellas and a memoir.
He went to Manual Training High School in Brooklyn where he "learned everything but manual training." He took a stenography course at night and got a job in a Brooklyn shipyard where women stenographers weren't allowed. In two months he was hiring people and remained there through World War II.
In 1950 he became a New York State employment interviewer. Never sure what he would earn from his writing, he kept the job for much of his life. He loved meeting applicants and felt it was impossible to get bored or jaded talking to them and hearing their dreams. They helped fill the "crowded attic of his mind," as one critic described it, and he couldn't wait to get home at night to write.
He wrote 80 short stories and didn't sell a one. It occurred to him that maybe he wasn't a short story writer. He decided to try a novel. He took a writing course at New York University and showed the first chapters to his teacher, Saul Bellow. Bellow got him an agent and the agent got him a publisher.
His first novel was Through Midnight Streets, set in the shadows of the Brooklyn Bridge, The story centers around the seedy Hotel Rochambeau, where every room is an emotional universe. His next book was The Tenement of Dreams, a tale of Old New York. Filled with a kind of glee in the face of life's absurdities, it tells of odd dwellings and even odder dwellers without itself being odd. Following this came Tippy Locklin, a rollicking novel of warmth, affection and wild good humor.
Joseph William Meagher died in 2001. After his death his wife published his memoir, Broken Yesterdays, and three more novels, The Family Overhead, The League of the Less Lucky and The Bristol Warrior Job, plus two novellas under the title Demons to Doughnuts.
