In the introduction to A Subtreasury of American Humor, published in 1941, E. B. White told of the various disappointments and disillusionments he and his wife had encountered in gathering the pieces that would make up the anthology. They had hoped to include a section of “newspaper humor” and canvassed friends and colleagues for suggestions. “We collected them, all right, and some of them were funny,” White wrote, but “old newspaper stories have an odor all their own. . . . After you find them, you wish you hadn’t.”
All readers know the disappointment of returning years later to some fondly remembered piece of writing and finding it withered with age. When I came upon this new collection from the University of Nebraska Press, The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner, I braced myself for the familiar disappointment. Lardner started writing for newspaper sports pages before he was 20, and he kept it up, off and on, until his death in 1933. By then he was one of the most famous writers in America; his best-known book, an epistolary novel called You Know Me Al, has never been out of print (and is now available for free all over the web). He published his fiction in only the most popular and highest-paying magazines. For generations, “Champion,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” “Haircut,” “I Can’t Breathe,” and several others stood as classics that every American high schooler was supposed to pretend to have read. His short stories revealed him, unexpectedly, to be an artist of very high rank, and he was certified as such by F. Scott Fitzgerald on this side of the Atlantic and by Virginia Woolf on the other. “Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order,” Woolf wrote. “He writes the best [American] prose that has come our way.”
Every tendril of 20th-century American literature and entertainment shows his influence. You find him in art high and low. The grotesques of Flannery O’Connor, Eudora Welty’s sly Southern hicks, the laconic heroes of Hemingway’s first stories, Liebling’s boxers, the rummies of Joseph Mitchell—they are unimaginable without Lardner’s having gone before. We can say the same about James Thurber and Dave Barry, Li’l Abner and Pogo, even the great Warner Bros. cartoons, on up to the surreal comedy of Donald Barthelme and George Saunders. Lardner the short-story writer looms at the top of the family tree.
But it was as a sports reporter and newspaper columnist that he learned to write, and he always remained a journalist at heart: He wrote fast, in great profusion, and for the moment. Reporters on the run often develop little tricks that allow them to kickstart the motor. Lardner’s trick was to slip into the dialect of a Midwestern rube and write the way he talked. He was himself a college dropout from Niles, Michigan, and had a touch of innocence in him. His journalism and his fiction are therefore sometimes hard to tell apart. In both, his sentences race along with double and triple negatives, grammatical boners, comic misspellings, malapropisms, and brutal disagreements between subject and verb. The new collection contains an account of a journey to Washington, D.C.:
Ordinarily this would be another reason for a new reader to be wary of Lardner, uncollected or otherwise. The only thing that stales faster than newspaper humor is newspaper humor written in dialect. Anyone who has staggered through more than three pages of Petroleum V. Nasby can tell you all about it, though such readers are rare.
In this collection, admirably and doggedly assembled by the sportswriter Ron Rapoport, we learn that Lardner was not always a dialectician, if that’s the word. He began his career playing it straight. His first reporting job was with the Times of South Bend, Indiana, 10 miles across the Michigan line from his hometown.
At the Times Lardner covered everything but had a special flair for sports, baseball in particular. The earliest piece collected here, from 1907, is a year’s-end roundup of sports in South Bend, and already the tone is amused and detached. He was an excellent play-by-play man, as other pieces demonstrate, but he refused to take his subject seriously. That disposition stayed with him long after he started writing about other, ostensibly more serious things. He got tagged early on as a “humorist”—that “loose-fitting and ugly word,” as Thurber the humorist called it—but he didn’t seem to mind.
From South Bend his reputation traveled at least as far as Chicago, where editors of the Inter-Ocean newspaper offered him a job. He bounced from paper to paper, and after a brief stint as editor of the Sporting News in St. Louis and another covering sports in Boston, he took over the Chicago Tribune’s flagship sports column, “In the Wake of the News.” Rapoport’s excellent introductions and notes capture how vital newspapers once were in the life of the country. They were the cheapest and most accessible form of entertainment, and Lardner, writing a thousand words a day six days a week, turned his column into a one-man variety show, filling space with poems, plays, song lyrics, fables, bogus correspondence, and anything else that would consume column inches—even sports.
Writing up baseball games, he was of course surrounded by professional ballplayers, most of them country boys fresh off the farm. He began using their voice in his own columns. One of these efforts was a series of semiliterate letters from a fictitious hurler named Jack Keefe, sent to his friend Al back home in southern Indiana. Editors at the Tribune rejected it for reasons long ago lost to the ages, and unimaginable now. Lardner mailed the piece to the country’s most popular magazine, the Saturday Evening Post. It was immediately accepted, and it made a sensation. The editor asked for more. Lardner, now married with children, was eager to provide. Outside the “Wake of the News,” the letters were his first stab at writing fiction for publication. Two years later they appeared as You Know Me Al.
He started writing for the magazines regularly and lucratively, and in 1919, he quit the Trib to become a freelance in New York. Jonathan Yardley, in his classic biography Ring (1976), quotes a letter in which Lardner explains his motive for heading east—the same one that has goosed every freelance writer who ever lived. “It’s dough and the prospect of it that would tempt me to tackle the New York game,” Lardner wrote a friend. “I think a gent in this business would be foolish not to go to New York if he had a good chance. From all I can learn, that’s where the real money is.”
The Lardners moved to an estate in Great Neck, on Long Island, just in time for the descent of Prohibition and the rise of the Roaring Twenties. He traveled in heady company. Among his neighbors were show business stars (Groucho Marx, Bert Lahr, and George S. Kaufman), journalists (Herbert Bayard Swope, Franklin P. Adams, and Grantland Rice), and book writers (Joseph Conrad, P. G. Wodehouse, and Fitzgerald, who used his own sojourn on Long Island to gather material for what became The Great Gatsby). Lardner was a devoted father and husband, but also an insomniac and a binge drinker. Long and productive periods on the wagon alternated with superhuman benders during which he would disappear for days at a time. He drank to cure his insomnia, and insomnia usually followed the binges. With a bender coming he escaped to the city, away from his wife and kids. Yardley tells the story of Lardner appearing at the Friars Club one evening for a drink and then another, and then one more, until he had remained in the lobby, quietly drinking, for 60 hours straight.
When he was sober and hard at work earning money, it turned out that Lardner’s most pressing professional ambition wasn’t to write short stories or journalism but to write Broadway musicals, and he spent a great deal of energy grinding them out with one collaborator after another. Sometimes they made it to the stage. He had a single hit, a comedy written with Kaufman called June Moon, and a long trail of flops.
It takes a lot of money to support a Broadway habit, and Lardner was indiscriminate in accepting the many freelance offers dangled in front of him. He even wrote a daily comic strip. By now his fame was such that magazine editors were paying him the highest compliment a humorist can receive: They asked him to cover events usually reserved for the Big Boys of the news desk—international conferences, political conventions, presidential inaugurals. Those reported pieces make up a good chunk of this new collection. Here he is at Warren Harding’s inaugural:
In 1921, a newspaper syndicate sent him to a disarmament conference in Washington. The conference was the first step in a diplomatic grind that eight years later produced the notorious Kellogg-Briand Pact—the treaty that declared war illegal. It was signed by most of the civilized nations of the world but—no need for spoiler alerts—it didn’t work. Lardner suspected as much: “The object of this meeting is to get all the different nations to quit building warships and making ammunitions, etc., and it looks now like they would all agree to the proposition provided they’s an understanding that it don’t include they themselfs.”
The voice of Lardner’s rube-journalist wears better than you might expect, because the rube is sharper and wittier than you might expect, as rubes often are. I worry, though, that as 21st-century readers leaf through The Lost Journalism of Ring Lardner—it’s a book for dipping in and out of, not for reading straight through—they will sooner or later arrive at the point of diminishing returns, when the humor no longer compensates for the strangeness and artificiality of the bumpkin dialect. Lardner’s mastery of all the modes of American speech is essential to his fictional sketches of Broadway main-chancers, lovestruck teens, gabby Babbitts, and certified hicks like Jack Keefe. But in journalism, in accounts of real people and real events, readers like to know the stuff isn’t made up. The dialect looks like a dodge.
It’s not clear how comfortable Lardner was in letting the mask slip. The critic Edmund Wilson, who like most of his contemporaries revered Lardner’s short stories, once wrote about an evening he spent with him at the Fitzgeralds’ house on Long Island. Everyone was drunk, no surprise, but Lardner was happy to sit with Wilson before a roaring fire and talk about his work. Lardner said that his chief trouble as a writer was that he, Lardner, couldn’t write “straight English.” When Wilson asked him what he meant, Lardner said, “I can’t write a sentence like ‘We were sitting in the Fitzgeralds’ house, and the fire was burning brightly.’ ”
This wasn’t quite true, as Rapoport’s collection shows. Writing as himself, in a few straight reviews and essays, Lardner wrote effectively, if not ingeniously, in the American plain style, with no horsing around. But his overuse of dialect in his nonfiction may have been one reason his admirers pushed him to be more ambitious—to go long, with a novel or a weighty work of drama. Fitzgerald got his editor Maxwell Perkins to join the effort, and it was Perkins who first published Lardner’s stories in book form, to charm him into seriousness with the lure of hard covers.
True to form, Wilson was the pushiest of Lardner’s admirers. He went public with a review in the Dial, urging Lardner to reach for the heights attained by an earlier American humorist with a gift for dialect. “Will Ring Lardner, then, go on to his Huckleberry Finn or has he already told all he knows?” wrote Wilson. If Lardner “has anything more to give us, the time has now come to deliver it.”
Wilson’s impertinence is breathtaking (and completely in character). That such a gauntlet could be tossed at the feet of a writer who had already written a dozen unimprovable short stories, not to mention You Know Me Al, and would go on to produce half a dozen more—well, it seems ungrateful at least. Perkins and Fitzgerald and Wilson and the other unsatisfied admirers of Ring Lardner misunderstood the nature of his gift. Lardner knew better.
One incident reveals Ring’s feelings toward his own work. When Perkins persuaded him to agree to a collection of his stories, Lardner had to confess that he hadn’t saved copies of any of them—not even carbon copies of his typed manuscripts, which he had ripped from his typewriter and sent off to editors without a thought. Perkins had to dispatch aides to libraries to fish the stories from back issues of magazines and newspapers.
This story only deepens my admiration for Ron Rapoport, who must have had to range even farther for Lardner’s stuff, going back more than a century. It also deepens my admiration for Lardner and his natural modesty. If he underestimated the stories he had written, he understood why he had written them and not something else. He was a slap-hitter, going for singles and doubles, rather than a long-ball slugger, swinging the heavy lumber and aiming for the fences. He considered himself a tradesman, a journalist through and through, from his spats to his boater. It seems accidental that he produced imperishable art.
He ended his career as he began it, writing straight, with no dialect, as the radio critic for the New Yorker magazine. He continued to produce his reviews even when he entered the hospital with a fatal illness. In several of the pieces he railed against what he, and no one else, saw as the shocking vulgarity and licentiousness of popular entertainment circa 1932. His younger admirers, from Fitzgerald and Wilson to Perkins and Thurber, were slightly embarrassed that their old idol, writing from a tubercular bed, had become a prig. The booze finally carried him off with a heart attack. He was 48.
“No other contemporary American, sober or gay, writes better,” H. L. Mencken declared when Ring was at the height of his powers. It’s a serious compliment, given that Lardner’s contemporaries included Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Willa Cather and Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis and Sarah Orne Jewett. Like Woolf and Wilson, though, Mencken was praising Lardner’s fiction, not the journalism enshrined here. If this new collection, with its anachronisms and uneven quality, turns the casual reader away from Lardner, or if it delays a rediscovery by the reading public of Lardner at his best, then it may even be a disservice. Yet here and there some of the journalism rises to the sublime level of the short stories, and in it you can hear Lardner’s most enduring voice. It’s the strange mix that gave his fiction its power—the mind of a journalist married to the heart of an artist, making a creature as rare and improbable as the jackalope and heffalump.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
