At one of the Dumbles’s Cosmic Evenings (their term), W. E. Woodward, Bunk’s narrator as well as author, hears a man proclaim, “We are now conducting de-bunking operations on a rather large scale.” What is de-bunking? asks another guest. “Why, de-bunking means simply taking the bunk out of things,” he replies.
In 1923, bunk was a fine piece of American slang, or at least buncombe or bunkum was. Dating from the 1830s, according to the 1915 edition of Webster’s dictionary, it stood for “speechmaking for the gratification of constituents” or simply “insincere public action of speech.” In his massive study, The American Language, H. L. Mencken wrote that “the American clipped form bunk arose toward the end of the World War” (and Google’s Ngram confirms this). The popular awareness of the extent of bunk in American life grew from a combination of the increased skepticism about existing power structures and values that arose from the war and the subsequent breakdown of old empires and the proliferation of advertisement as an engine of capitalist economies.
William E. Woodward was in a good position to understand bunk: a former newspaperman, salesman, and early partner at J. Walter Thompson, America’s first big advertising firms, Woodward had generated a fair share himself. After rising to the post of vice-president of the Industrial Finance Corporation of New York, he decided he’d had his fill of it and launched himself into a second career as a writer at the age of 48. “I’ve done enough business in the last twenty years for two men, and I fear I’ll over-do it if I keep on in business, so now I’m going into literature,” he told a reporter from the Columbus, Georgia Enquirer-Sun after Bunk, his first novel, was published.
Though Woodward was no longer in the marketing business, he could still pump out the bunk when appropriate. Rather than go on about literature, he told the reporter, Woodward felt the paper’s editor would prefer he talk about Columbus, so he proceeded to sit down at the desk in his hotel room and write out an interview that was full of, um, bunk: “Columbus stands in a class by itself. Your wide streets, with the tree and parks in the center are simply splendid….” He went on to say that Columbus had the potential to become “a great winter resort.”
If by 1923 Americans had gotten good at spotting bunk when they saw it, what they hadn’t figured out was what to do about it. Woodward’s idea was to use his first novel to illustrate what happens when a man decides to call out lies, exaggerations, misinformation, and deliberately misleading information when he sees it. To do this, he introduces Michael Webb, the man he first hears at the Dumbles’s Cosmic Evening.
Except this isn’t their first meeting. Michael Webb, Woodward tells us, is a character he created years earlier when he first began experimenting with writing fiction. “You know, I intend to write a book,” he tells Mrs. Dumble, “so I created one of the characters — his name was Michael Webb — and sent him out in the world to get experience, and he never came back.” After bumming around the globe for a while, Webb came up with a theory that the root of mankind’s problems was the quest for excellence and that the best place to find happiness was in complacency. Accepting things as they are not only kept one in one’s comfort zone but also avoided forcing anyone else out of theirs. He wrote it up in a book he called The Importance of Being Second-Rate and it became a nationwide bestseller, with “Second-Raters” clubs popping up in every town. (The idea is strikingly similar to the philosophy of Centralism described in Alan Harrington’s classic of 1950s conformity, The Revelations of Dr. Modesto.)
Michael Webb invites Woodward to join him at the Characters Club, a weekly lunch club in Manhattan at which other fictional characters escaped from their creators share their grievances about authors “forcing them to do things that a gentleman ought not to be made to do.” Although Sherlock Holmes shows up, most of the other characters Woodward meets are from then-bestselling, now-forgotten books like Joseph Hergesheimer’s Cytherea and Floyd Dell’s Moon-Calf.
Woodward and Webb then repair to Dodge Farm, a grand estate in the Hudson Valley owned by Richard Ellerman, an automobile magnate and father of Bingo, Webb’s newest client. And at this point, a promising book full of metafictional inventions runs into a plot swamp from which it never emerges. At Dodge Farm, Webb stumbles into a series of little adventures ranging from writing a scenario for the movie star to almost being enlisted into a South Seas treasure hunt by a crusty old seaman, none of them managing to move the narrative forward to a conclusion. Bunk is everywhere, Woodward seems to be saying, but somewhere along the way, he forgets to engage in any actual de-bunking.
Woodward claimed that he approached the task of writing a novel with no preconceived narrative arc. “It occurred to me that I would simply put some characters together and see what would happen. I hope they will do something of their own accord. If I keep them talking long enough maybe they will talk themselves into a mess of some kind.”
“That’s the way it is in life,” he argued, which is exactly why Woodward’s technique is only slightly more reliable than 500 monkeys at typewriters when it comes to creating good fiction. Most of the book’s reviewers gushed about the originality of Woodward’s conception, and at times his ability to slip from realism quite typical of fiction of his time into absurdity and metafiction that seems worthy of the early surrealists is remarkable.
But he never quite commits to the risk-taking required to transform a good idea into a great one (or at least an admirable failure). The Dial‘s reviewer was among the few to be more measured in his assessment of the book. Woodward attempts to juggle satire, fiction, and philosophy, he wrote, but “Just when he works up to the applause, he drops one of the balls, and the spectators walk out on him.” Twenty-some chapters into the book, the reader grows weary of starting into yet another promising episode with the near-certain expectation that it will end not with a bang but a whimper. Nothing kills satire as effectively as tedium.
For some readers, however, even Woodward’s tentative satire of “the romance of business” cut too close to the bone. The editors of the Daily Times of Palo Alto were so offended by the passages declaring that business was only interested in profits and that all of the grander goals it proclaimed were pure bunk that they devoted an editorial page column to a counterattack. “Modern society would bog down and become a hopeless mess without business; the practical sciences and the spread of intelligence would dwindle to nothing without the spur of individualistic purpose and rewards.” How ironic that this is the same kind of bunk we hear from Palo Alto residents like Sam Altman of Open AI today. Sales Management magazine was more honest when it wrote, “Read Bunk. But don’t do it if you have unalterable convictions that business ethics are as good now as they ever can be.”
Within a few years of taking up his new career as a writer, Woodward shifted from fiction to nonfiction, where he remained for most of the next 25 years until his death in 1950. His first nonfiction work, George Washington: The Image and the Man (1925) was considered the first “warts and all” biography, and not surprisingly, reviewers pro and con labelled Woodward a “de-bunker” of the mythic Washington first constructed by Parson Weems. Woodward followed this by several more biographies and an ambitious 900-page New American History (1938), among other books.