March 28, 1925—The evolution of Ring Lardner—from accomplished sportswriter/editor to master of the American idiom, to, quite simply, one of the finest short-story writers of the last century—advanced another step with the publication, in Liberty Magazine, of “Haircut,” a virtuosic exercise in unreliable first-person narration.
For a long time, you could turn to almost any anthology of American fiction covering the last hundred years and find “Haircut”—or, better yet, get your hands on an entire volume of his short stories at your local library. It’s getting harder and harder to find both, at least if my experience today is any indication.
Nowadays, fiction anthologies, like history textbooks, have to cover a longer time period—and encompass ethnic and racial groups long excluded from such books. In effect, what this means is that the “Big Three” of American fiction in the first half of the last century—Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner—will remain in the anthologies, but the likes of Lardner and his East Coast contemporary, Damon Runyon, will get squeezed out.
When I finally turned up “Haircut” today, it was from 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, a volume edited by Martha Foley in 1975. It figures—that’s when I discovered Lardner, in my freshman year of high school, in another anthology of the time.
I hope American students today aren’t missing out on the chance to read Lardner. It’s not just that, like Mark Twain, he progressed from journalism to pitch-black satire. It’s also that his influence runs through the American literary pantheon over the last few decades:
* F. Scott Fitzgerald, his great and good friend, not only admired his manifold literary gifts, but also paid tribute to his friend in the 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, in the form of Abe North, the sarcastic sidekick of Dick Diver whose alcohol-fueled downward spiral foreshadows his companion’s.
For a long time, you could turn to almost any anthology of American fiction covering the last hundred years and find “Haircut”—or, better yet, get your hands on an entire volume of his short stories at your local library. It’s getting harder and harder to find both, at least if my experience today is any indication.
Nowadays, fiction anthologies, like history textbooks, have to cover a longer time period—and encompass ethnic and racial groups long excluded from such books. In effect, what this means is that the “Big Three” of American fiction in the first half of the last century—Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner—will remain in the anthologies, but the likes of Lardner and his East Coast contemporary, Damon Runyon, will get squeezed out.
When I finally turned up “Haircut” today, it was from 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, a volume edited by Martha Foley in 1975. It figures—that’s when I discovered Lardner, in my freshman year of high school, in another anthology of the time.
I hope American students today aren’t missing out on the chance to read Lardner. It’s not just that, like Mark Twain, he progressed from journalism to pitch-black satire. It’s also that his influence runs through the American literary pantheon over the last few decades:
* F. Scott Fitzgerald, his great and good friend, not only admired his manifold literary gifts, but also paid tribute to his friend in the 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, in the form of Abe North, the sarcastic sidekick of Dick Diver whose alcohol-fueled downward spiral foreshadows his companion’s.
* Ernest Hemingway, who used the pseudonym “Ring Lardner Jr.” when working on his high-school newspaper—and who used Lardner’s device of repetition for heightening irony in much of his early fiction, such as The Sun Also Rises.
* J. D. Salinger, whose Catcher in the Rye protagonist, Holden Caulfield, cites Lardner as one of his favorite authors—and who also employs a narrator of limited self-awareness.
Covering the Chicago White Sox exposed Lardner not just to the baseball players but to people from every walk of life everywhere they played, and he soaked up all these idioms. After he turned away, in disillusionment, from covering baseball following the “Black Sox” gambling scandal, he was left with an enduring appreciation of this motherlode of oral culture—and a more hardened cynicism about stupidity, greed, and callousness.
Nine years before “Haircut,” Lardner had started using first-person narration in what was, in effect, an epistolary novel about a baseball player, You Know Me, Al. Over the next decade, he spiced his fiction with turns of phrase that—certainly at the time—sounded fresh and new (e.g., “he gave her a look you could have poured on a waffle”).
In 1924, Lardner had come up with the collection How to Write Short Stories (With Samples). He was increasingly casting his unillusioned, Swiftian sensibility on a whole range of characters, capturing them in their raw state—unpolished, barely literate, deceptive or morally blinkered.
Which brings us to “Haircut.” Lardner gained his great fame in the 1910s and 1920s as a humorist, but this tale is really about humor’s cruel misuse. That misuse not only defiles the perpetrator, but also Whitey, the barber who narrates the tale without understanding its import.
I found only one clear instance in the story of the type of humor that Lardner’s readers had come to love. It comes when Whitey explains why, unlike other barbers, he only charges three instead of five dollars when taking on the job of shaving corpses:
“I just charge three dollars because personally I don’t mind much shavin’ a dead person. They lay a lot stiller than live customers. The only thing is you don’t feel like talkin’ to them and you get kind of lonesome.”
That anecdote comes as true relief in a story that gains in moral horror as it goes along.
An excellent analysis of “Haircut’s” meaning can be found in this analysis from the blog “Dark Party Review.” Still, some additional points can be offered on how Lardner achieves his stunning effects.
Whitey recalls to his visitor the good old days in this small town, before Jim Kendall died, when he and sidekick Hod Meyers used to regale the community: “I bet they was more laughin’ done here than any town its size in America.”
At first, we believe we’re in the presence of a person given to rough but not nasty humor (“Whitey, your nose looks like a rosebud tonight”). But already, small hints of doubt appear about what Whitey is actually telling us.
Jim’s favorite seat, for instance, is next to a spittoon, suggesting his coarseness. And why do other customers at the barbershop instantly jump out of this chair when Jim arrives? Is it because he has an honored place in the shop or, as we suspect more and more as the story proceeds, he’s a nasty piece of work that it’s best not to cross for any reason?
Each time Whitey tells us something complimentary about his customer—that he was “comical,” “a card,” “a caution”—we learn something new that immediately makes us revise everything the barber says: Jim’s a lout whose wife would divorce him if it didn’t leave her in even more dire circumstances. He loses his job as a salesman because he’s a drunk. And he’s given to nasty practical jokes that humiliate family and anyone who annoys him, even total strangers.
Jim’s comeuppance comes at the hands of a mentally challenged man on whom he has played one of his characteristically mean jokes before. The narrator remains equally clueless about how Jim met his fate and why it was so deserved.
“Haircut” was a masterpiece of its kind, a near-primer in how to alert readers that what one character says varies drastically from the facts of the case. Lardner would produce several more short-story collections and a 1929 comedy with George S. Kaufman, June Moon, before dying of a heart attack in 1933.
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