Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings (LOA #244)

by Ring Lardner, Ian Frazier (Editor)

At the height of the Jazz Age, Ring Lardner was America’s most beloved humorist, equally admired by a popular audience and by literary friends like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Edmund Wilson. A sports writer who became a sensation with his comic baseball bestseller, You Know Me Al, Lardner had a rare gift for inspired nonsense and an ear attuned to the rhythms and hilarious oddities of American speech. He was also a sharp and dispassionate observer of the American scene. His best stories—among them such masterpieces as “Haircut,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” “A Caddy’s Diary,” and “The Love Nest”—cast a devastating eye on the hypocrisies, prejudices, and petty scheming of everyday life. In this Library of America edition, editor Ian Frazier surveys the whole sweep of Lardner’s talents, offering contemporary readers his finest stories, the full texts of You Know Me Al, The Big Town, and the long out-of-print The Real Dope, and a generous sampling of his humor pieces, sports reporting, song lyrics, and surrealist playlets.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Classics, Literature, Journalism

1300 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 29, 2013

About the author

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre.

Father of author Ring Lardner Jr.

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was aware of Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, or at least of the abbreviated version of that name, under which the man lived and published, knowing it to belong to a sports writer cum humorist, but hadn’t even the slightest notion that he was a fellow I very much ought to read until I got around to The New York Review Books edition of Elizabeth Hardwick’s collected essays in January of this year. Hardwick, her flair and passion infectious, cannot help but productively modify the bibliophile’s prospective itinerary; not only did she cause me to move an Alejo Carpentier and a Faulkner to the front of the queue, but after reading her delightful essay on Ring Lardner I knew I would be getting around to ol’ RWL in short order. “He wrapped his dreadful events in a comic language, as you would put insecticide in a bright can,” quoth Hardwick. She captures very well the author’s capacity for both quips and acid insight. She draws attention to a delightful gag in THE BIG TOWN, a masterpiece of a novel collected in The Library of America edition currently being considered, whereby a gentleman being shown the many expensive furnishings etc. of his cocksure host, inclusive of an antique bed said to belong to Marie Antoinette, asks what time Marie usually gets in. My previous intelligence on Ring Lardner had me vaguely associating him with baseball, and indeed he was a working sports journalist for most of his adult life. While reading the Library of America I also took the opportunity to revisit John Sayles’ 1988 film EIGHT MEN OUT, which tells the story of how a number of players for the Chicago White Sox threw the 1919 World Series in conspiracy with gangsters and fixers. Sayles not only wrote and directed the movie but appeared in it as Ring Lardner, who he certainly physically resembles, and who is depicted as a very canny reporter indeed, cynical but avowedly moral. In the Blu-ray commentary, Sayles says he based the performance on the fact that Lardner sang bass and was said by many close to him to resemble a funeral director with an extremely dry sense of humour. As a writer, Lardner does indeed possess a dry, sometimes extremely caustic sense of humour, but there is likewise something of a quality of stately decorum at play. Often placed on a continuum with Mark Twain and James Thurber, he makes marvelous comic music out of vernacular American language, and routinely exploits the pitfalls and liabilities of inflated self-regard. A man who would die at 48 in large part on account of his drinking, he possesses the alcoholic’s sensitivity to the workaday indignities central to life lived in human community. All of these elements are central in the Library of America’s first piece, the epistolary comic novel YOU KNOW ME AL, originally published in serialization, and the first of three collections (two included here, in their entirety) comprised of letters written by extremely dumb and fantastically egotistical baseball pitcher Jack Keefe to the eponymous childhood friend. Like a number of other Lardner characters, Keefe resembles certain spouters of hot air in Shakespeare’s comedies, notable for an epic doltishness counterbalanced by an almost complete lack of legitimately actionable knowledge regarding self and world. Keefe butchers syntax and relishes his jargon. He mangles idiom. “Good riddance is rubbish as they say,” or “but as they say beauty isn’t only so deep.” He uses peace instead of piece, hole instead of whole, threw instead of through, seen instead of scene, collect instead of colic. Etc. As a Canadian I was of course pleased to see mention of the great city of “Van Coover.” Very often the hilarity coincides with a kind of remarkable corkscrew beauty in the execution: “You did not know I was a speech maker did you Al and I did not know it neither until to-day but I guess they is not nothing I can do if I make up my mind and 1 of the boys says that I done just as well as Dummy Taylor could of.” Naturally, the Emperor of Japan becomes the Umpire of Japan. THE REAL DOPE follows the letter-writing Keefe to France and the First World War, but never quite to the front line; he falls victim to endless pranks at the hands of fellow servicemen who amuse themselves by exploiting his childish guilelessness, causing him at one point to threaten: “But they better remember that they’s plenty of time for the laugh to be on the other foot before this war is over.” He confuses Shylock with Sherlock. (Boxing manager Tommy Haley will later get Sherlock and Shylock mixed up the other way around in the short story “Champion.”) Perhaps the highlight of the collection is the aforementioned masterpiece THE BIG TOWN, a novel whose narrator is less a swell-headed ignoramus than he is a very quick-witted disillusioned ironist in the mould of Groucho Marx at his most cutting. The narrator moves to New York with his wife and sister-in-law after the women inherit a determinedly minor fortune. Restrained mayhem and myriad zingers ensue. Our narrator is inclined to employ inventive pejoratives like “snow-eater,” and draw attention to a gentleman’s absence of sense by suggesting “his upstairs rooms is unfurnished.” Of the the studied charms of his sister-in-law Kate: “She’s one of these gals that can’t help from looking open house, even if the guy takes after a pelican.” The novel is a comic masterpiece and an ingenious construction. As for the Lardner short stories collected in the Library of America, they are indeed many and varied, taken from three collections, with four uniformly strong stories previously uncollected. Here we see Lardner at his most attentive to form. Like many of his contemporaries he would seem to live in dialogue with the considerable legacy of O. Henry, though true to Hardwick’s assessment his tragicomic sensibility is practically brutal. Hardwick was right. Look especially to "My Roomy" and "Champion" if you wish to see the writer's presentation of "dreadful events." That Lardner has a profound clarity about uncomely things and is able to garner both pathos and laughs from it means he cannot help but stand out from his contemporaries. Clueless motormouths abound. His clueless female motormouths are especially charming. Some of them make me think very much of Shelley Duvall, especially her performance in Robert Altman’s 1977 film THREE WOMEN. I kept thinking of Shelley whilst reading the endless delightful prattle of the congenial, not-too-bright, hard-partying nurse of “Zone of Quiet,” one of my favourite of the stories. There are comedies and tragedies in which hurt is central, where psychic wounds practically determine destiny. These stories perhaps feel like Lardner at his most personal. “Who Dealt?” is the funniest of these stories, “There Are Smiles” the saddest. I like very much the story “A Caddy’s Diary” for the way it seems so perfectly to express Lardner’s general sense of the ubiquity of convenient dishonesties (to others, perhaps most especially to oneself) in everyday life. Again and again in the stories, Lardner encapsulates the fool and the curmudgeon with sublime artistry. He understands that resentment is a dubious intoxicant. There is also one previously uncollected story which tells of how a regular working stiff happens to become a “seventy-two-hundred-dollar day nurse named Poodle.” The Library of America collection terminates with non-fiction sketches, a number of short playlets, some song lyrics, letters, and finally the useful chronology and notes ubiquitous to Library of America volumes. The non-fiction stuff is not the journalism. Editor Ian Frazier (himself a respected humorist) has opted to go with oddball tidbits, often absurdist, just as often autobiographical. Note a marvelous piece of business where Lardner tells a Follies chorus girl backstage that Valentino is in the audience, and when asked what he looks like, replies “‘I can’t describe male beauty,’ I says, ‘but I am often taken for him on the street.’” Or this from his discussion of the WHO’S WHO, a kind of encyclopedia of somebodies: “well worth reading if it didn’t learn you nothing except that they’s 2 men in this country named Goodnight, both of them college professors.” So, yes: more humour than reportage. The little plays are almost pure absurdity, to the extent of being practically avant-garde, excluding the first included (baseball-themed), which was written for the Ziegfeld Follies. In fact, Lardner did a lot of work for the Follies, but almost all of what we have in the Library of America is crazed lunacy involving lots of non sequiturs and stage directions like “Two Broadway theatrical producers, riding pelicans, enter almost nude.” In “The Tridget of Greva”: told by one character that his sister is expecting a baby, another asks “On what train?” Later the character who proffered the earlier punchline says that because he has no teeth he can only eat broth, to which the former straight man replies “Well, let’s go to a brothel.” Lardner wrote a lot of songs and bits for the stage. Only a very few are included. The collected Lardner writing concludes with a small sampling of his correspondences, generally not written in playful vernacular and beginning with letters of devotion and entreaty addressed to his future wife, to whom he would remain married until his early death. He writes to his friends Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, in March on 1925 even making a few suggestions for minor changes to the proofs of THE GREAT GATSBY. Lardner’s health was not good during his final years. He was in and out of hospitals and institutions, at one point contracting tuberculosis, exacerbated by his alcoholism. I am a recovering alcoholic myself, a very low bottom drunk, and have personal knowledge of the very grave nature of late stage of the condition. I recall my own agonies, my own shame and grandiosity, my sense of being both far more wretched and far greater than my fellows, my knowledge that hell is right here on earth, and I feel it very much when Lardner signs off as “A Refugee” in a painful 1930 letter to his sister-in-law. He would struggle only three more years. And here I am in 2019 reading a nearly thousand page book of Ring Lardner’s writing, a small fraction of the total output of this staggeringly gifted professional scribbler who died well before he’d seen fifty years.

[Deborah Schuff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had enjoyed reading Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al years before when I was in high school. I finished rereading it again this summer, and I found it just as delightful as before.

[Alan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
—The Young Immigrunts, Chapter 10 (p.332)

The sardonic wit of Ringgold Wilmer Lardner (quite a mouthful—no wonder he shortened it to "Ring") was often cloaked in this kind of vernacular from a faux-naïve narrator. The memorable exchange above is actually what triggered my interest in Stories & Other Writings when I saw this collection on the shelf—I've been using the father's line myself for years, knew it was Lardner's, but never knew exactly where it came from.

Ring Lardner was an enormously popular American humorist and sports writer in the early 20th Century. Something like a cross between Groucho Marx and Thorne Smith, Lardner wrote on topics as varied as baseball, travel, New York City, marriage, World War I, and Prohibition. His attitude toward Prohibition, in particular, was like Thorne Smith's, both cynical and defiant.

Lardner's work was often episodic or epistolary—the first part of the volume at hand, for example, is You Know Me Al—A Busher's Letters, comprising a bush-league baseball player's letters to a friend back home, after his move up to the major-league Chicago White Sox. These turn out to be a good introduction to Lardner's work... breezy and not at all literary in tone (almost illiterate sometimes, in fact), their protagonist oblivious to his teammates' teasing as well as to the consequences of his own financial and romantic misapprehensions.

The other characters who appear in Lardner's fiction may be better able to handle English grammar, but they're usually just as blithely unaware of much that the reader sees. It's all part of the fun.

One thing that wasn't as much fun: Lardner's casual use of racist terms—noticeable even for that time and place—seems to have been part of his own character, not just of his creations. But apart from such occasional landmines of prose, it's still possible to enjoy Lardner's work as it was written.

This collection is rounded out with song lyrics, short plays (unproduceable ones—one instructs that the curtain be "lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week"!) and letters Lardner wrote to correspondents like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

As is typical with Library of America editions, the scholarly additions—such as extensive notes on the text, and a timeline of Lardner's life—provide substantial context for the author's own work. The Library of America has turned out to be a real gold mine for me in general... and I have hundreds of titles in the series yet to explore.

[Mills College Library]

Fiction L321s 2013

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 4 out of 5]

Includes You Know Me Al, the best baseball book ever wroten.