Sorrowful

FATHER'S FOOTSTEPS (181 pp.)--Damon Runyon Jr.--Random House ($2.95).

Life in the pages of a Damon Runyon story is a happy affair, but Harry the Horse. Dave the Dude, Light-Finger Moe and many other guys and dolls seem to have been less engaging in fact than in fiction. When Runyon brought one of the real-life models of his characters home, his wife broke up the party by shouting: "Get that bum out of here!"

Mrs. Runyon drove her husband out of the house, and Mr. Runyon drove his wife to drink. None of this did Damon Jr. or his older sister any good. The sister had a nervous breakdown and Damon Jr. became an alcoholic. By 23, he had been through the D.T.s, jails and psycho wards before getting cured via Alcoholics Anonymous. In Father's Footsteps, Damon Jr., now 36 and a Miami newspaperman, gives his version of why Damon Sr. was everything a father should not be.

Damon Jr. is not much of a writer, and his resentment against his father is still so intense that at times his book is painful. But his unique story shows the sad and bitter side of a man who, to millions, has only meant a racetrack kind of gaiety, a Broadway kind of sentimentality.

"I'm Up!" As long as Damon Sr. stayed at home, the house rule was: "Don't upset Father." The children were warned away until Runyon had gone through the groans and mutters of the painful rising at noon. He would then fling open his bedroom door and announce: "I'm up!" Runyon's education of his son consisted in handing down first principles of conduct, e.g., "Never give a sucker an even break," "All horse players die broke," "How to live with women: Don't." On turning away from the dice table at Saratoga, where he had dropped $10,000 in one month, he warned: "Don't gamble."

Like Sorrowful in Little Miss Marker, Runyon looked sad and sour, even when joking, and little Damon always thought he was angry at him. Sometimes Runyon made shy overtures, but "his stumbling attempt to play the palsey Pop [was] so patently gawky" that Damon Jr. thought his father was just performing an unpleasant chore. Even Runyon's presents were wrong. Damon Jr. was afraid of the huge electric train and could not even lift the sailboat with a five-foot mainmast.

The worst time of all came when Runyon worked on one of his gay little stories. He was an agony writer, suffering torment over every painfully minted wisecrack. The household suffered with him, paralyzed into a dread silence.

"Try That on Your Zither." Eventually, Runyon left his family, and Damon Jr. watched his mother slowly drink herself to death. Father and son became reconciled only when Runyon was dying of cancer. Runyon may not have known how to live, but he knew how to die. It took more than two painful years. During that time he refused to stay in a hospital but went on living as fully as he could until the end. To his son's querulous letters, Runyon finally replied: "Sometimes when you are in a mood for thought give one to your old man, who in two years was stricken by the most terrible malady known to mankind and left voiceless with a death sentence hanging over his head, who had a big career stopped cold, and had his domestic life shattered . . . Try that on your zither some day, my boy, especially when those low moods you mention strike you."

When Runyon died in 1946, Damon Jr. was still unforgiving, but finally realized that his father had not been entirely in the wrong in relation to his mother or to himself. As Damon Jr. carried the urn with his father's ashes (to be scattered over Manhattan according to Runyon's request), the boy thought of the often-promised trips that his father had never taken him on. "Well," Damon thought, "at last we're going on that trip together."

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