Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on Baseball)

"Baseball is a game where a curve is an optical illusion, a screwball can be either a pitch or a person, stealing is legal, and you can spit anywhere you like except in the umpire's eye or the ball.”—American sportswriter, short-story writer, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Lardner on Baseball (2003)

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on a Mistake Made by Young Writers)

“A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor.”—American fiction writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), Preface to How to Write Short Stories (1924)

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, on ‘Fightin’ Words’)

“You know they's lots o' words that's called fightin' words. Some o' them starts a brawl, no matter who they're spoke to. You can't call nobody a liar without expectin' to lose a couple o' milk teeth--that is, if the party addressed has got somethin' besides lemon juice in his veins and ain't had the misfortune to fall asleep on the Panhandle tracks and be separated from his most prominent legs and arms. Then they's terms that don't hit you so much yourself, but reflects on your ancestors and prodigies, and you're supposed to resent 'em for the sake of honor and fix the speaker's map so as when he goes home his wife'll say: ‘Oh, kiddies! Come and look at the rainbow!’" —American short-story writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), “Three Without, Doubled,” from Gullible's Travels (1917)

In days gone by, “fightin’ words” could get you involved in a duel (think Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin or, closer to home, Hamilton) or a clan feud (one of the centerpieces of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn). These days, they are regularly lobbed on Facebook, among longtime friends, and involve politics. 

In high school or college, friends would be too busy partying to care much about religion, the free-enterprise system, or the role of the government. Now, alone at a computer, unable to break bread, drink it up, and have some laughs, you can’t believe what an idiot that guy is. 

In one way, I suppose, all that “social distancing” we have been doing recently might work—we simply have no means to come to blows, let alone whip out a gun, when someone really, really annoys us. (Years ago, when two co-workers got into a raging argument, one told me later: “For the first time in my life, I understood the value of gun control!”)

On the other hand, distance—and, even more so, the anonymity provided in many parts of the Internet—has encouraged hyperbole and unreason. In those moments, forbearance is in short supply. 

At that point, it’s best to have a laugh—and glory in the fascination with American slang—displayed by that true original, Ring Lardner (much admired by good friend F. Scott Fitzgerald), in passages like the above.

Quote of the Day (Scott Fitzgerald, on Friend Ring Lardner)

"A great and good American is dead. Let us not obscure him by the flowers, but walk up and look at that fine medallion, all torn by sorrows that perhaps we are not equipped to understand. Ring made no enemies, because he was kind, and to millions he gave release and delight."—F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Ring,” in The New Republic, Oct. 11, 1933

After years of battling alcoholism, Ring Lardner—sportswriter-turned-fiction writer—died on this day 80 years ago, at age 48, of a heart attack in East Hampton, Long Island. That death devastated younger friend—and drinking buddy—F. Scott Fitzgerald, who used him as a partial model for the character Abe North in his 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night.

“I am a woman and my business is to hold things together,” says Nicole Diver, wife of Abe’s good friend, the psychiatrist Dick Diver, in that book.

“My business is to tear them apart,” North responds—and so he does.

Biographer Otto Friedrich notes that Lardner’s first published short story involved “defeat, humiliation and failure.” That melancholy was part of the tie between Lardner and Fitzgerald—and, of course, between Dick Diver and Abe North.

“Dick’s lungs burst for a moment with regret for Abe’s death, and his own youth of ten years ago,” writes Fitzgerald—and that moment mixes the nostalgia for a lost way of life that had become the novelist’s in recent years, as well as his own sense of the similar fate awaiting himself, only seven years later—also dead in his 40s, after two decades of alcoholism.

Oddly enough, the great kindness that Fitzgerald and other contemporaries felt in Lardner are often absent in his short fiction (see, for instance, my posts on the short story “Haircut” and his epistolary novel, You Know Me, Al).  That work has influenced numerous American writers over the years, including those reluctant to acknowledge the debt (Ernest Hemingway), others frank in doing so (Terry McMillan) and yet others where it is so obvious that denial is useless (Elmore Leonard).

I first read Lardner when I was in high school, and over the years, when I’ve had the chance to read a stray story here and there, I’m still surprised by how fresh he still sounds. Now, according to a recent review by Allen Barra in The Daily Beast, he’s reaching another form of literary Valhalla by having a collection of his stories and other writings edited by Ian Frazier for the Library of America series.

Quote of the Day (Ring Lardner, Giving Voice to a Boneheaded Ballplayer)

“FRIEND AL: Coming out of Amarillo last night I and Lord and Weaver was sitting at a table in the dining car with a old lady. None of us were talking to her but she looked me over pretty careful and seemed to kind of like my looks. Finally she says Are you boys with some football club? Lord nor Weaver didn't say nothing so I thought it was up to me and I says No mam this is the Chicago White Sox Ball Club. She says I knew you were athaletes. I says Yes I guess you could spot us for athaletes. She says Yes indeed and specially you. You certainly look healthy. I says You ought to see me stripped. I didn't see nothing funny about that but I thought Lord and Weaver would die laughing. Lord had to get up and leave the table and he told everybody what I said.”—American short-story writer, sportswriter, and playwright Ring Lardner (1885-1933), You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (1916)

Anyone interested in the continuing relevance of the national pastime—heck, anyone interested in 20th-century American literature—will want to read the first successful book by Ring Lardner, the epistolary novel You Know Me Al. 

More than 70 years before Ron Shelton envisioned Ebby Calvin "Nuke" LaLoosh for his classic film Bull Durham, Lardner had set the prototype for the callow rookie pitcher with his protagonist, Jack Keefe.

Once you’re done guffawing at the “busher” hoping to make it with the Chicago White Sox, you’ll want to turn to a fine article in the Spring 2011 issue of The American Scholar, “Baseball’s Loss of Innocence,” by Douglas Goetsch, which looks at Lardner’s savage disillusionment with the game he once approached with a sportswriter’s skill but a fan’s heart.

I’m not saying the piece is perfect, mind you—for my money, I wish Goetsch had discussed how the light irony of the Keefe pieces (originally published in the Saturday Evening Post) shaded into Lardner’s increasingly bitter (non-baseball) short stories of the 1920s (e.g., "Champion," "Haircut").

But it spotlights a part of this great original writer’s career that I, for one, knew little about: his views of the game in the 1910s. (Inexplicably, this sharp-eyed man noticed Ty Cobb’s hustle and drive on the diamond, but not his near-psychopathic tendencies.)

From the article, it appears that writer-director-actor John Sayles’ depiction of Lardner in his film about the Chicago “Black Sox” gambling scandal, Eight Men Out, was on target. 

Goetsch also speaks with shrewd insight into why contemporary baseball writers, like Lardner eyeing corruption in the game, have reacted with such bitterness to the steroids scandal: 

“They like to keep reminding their audience that ‘baseball is a business,’ yet their job is about the love of sport, and the good ones can’t help sniffing the same glue as the fans.”

No matter what the verdicts will be in the Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens trials, keep that quote in mind when the two former bulked-up baseball bruisers come up for election to Cooperstown at the hands of these successors to Lardner.

This Day in Literary History (“Haircut,” Lardner’s Masterpiece of Small-Town Cruelty, Published)

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.

* 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.