Ring Lardner: A Deadpan Author Comes of Age in the Deadball Era

Ring Lardner was one of the first "real" baseball writers. (via Simon and Schuster)

Ring Lardner was one of the first “real” baseball writers. (via Simon and Schuster)

Find a writer who is indubitably an American in every pulse-beat, an American who has something new and peculiarly American to say and who says it in an unmistakably American way, and nine times out of ten you will find that he has some sort of connection with the gargantuan abbatoir by Lake Michigan (Chicago), that he was bred there, or got his start there, or passed through there in the days when he was young and tender.”
–H.L. Mencken, 1920

The above quotation invites a game of literary one-upmanship. Who can think of the most names that fit the above definition? In 1920, Mencken probably was thinking of Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson and Upton Sinclair, as well as other authors whose books have long since gone out of print. The 1910-1920 decade was particularly rich and is sometimes characterized as the “Chicago Renaissance.”

In the succeeding 95 years, the statement could be applied to Ernest Hemingway, Ben Hecht, Saul Bellow, Nelson Algren, Richard Wright, James T. Farrell and any number of lesser lights – come to think of it, even me. (I lived in Chcago for a year in my early 20s, so put me in the “young and tender” category.)

But if you had to pick one writer who best exemplified Mencken’s maxim, you could hardly do better than to choose Ringgold Wilmer Lardner, even though he wasn’t born or bred there.

Lardner came into the world in Niles, Mich. in 1885. His background was that of small town gentry (his mother and two brothers were also writers) and his upbringing was like something out of Booth Tarkington. But Lardner didn’t stay in Niles for long. A small town in the upper Midwest may be a great place to grow up, but it is not a suitable venue for an aspiring man of letters.

After working for newspapers in South Bend, Ind. (only about 10 miles south of Niles), Lardner went to work in Chicago in 1907 at age 22. So he too fits the “young and tender” category. But as he matured, young and tender gradually gave way to old and misanthropic.

In every picture I’ve seen of Lardner, he appears grim and gaunt (at 6-foot-2, he was a tall man in his day), almost as though he’s entered a perpetual Buster Keaton look-alike contest. Ben Hecht described him as Mohican-faced. If Grant Wood had applied his American Gothic aesthetics to paint a portrait of an undertaker, it might have looked something like Lardner. Mirthless he appeared, but humorless he was not.

From day one, baseball was Topic A for Lardner. He bounced around from Chicago to St. Louis (where he worked for The Sporting News), Boston, and finally Chicago again, where he became a columnist at The Chicago Tribune.

Lardner was in Chicago at a busy time in local baseball history. He was there when the town had three teams, thanks to the Federal League. He was there when Bill Veeck Sr., a sportswriter for The Chicago American, was hired as vice president of the Cubs (a highly unusual career change; one wonders if Lardner ever fancied such a transition), and most importantly, he was there for the rise of the White Sox to a title in 1917 and disgrace in 1919 (with a Cubs pennant sandwiched in between).

On his own time, Lardner published a number of baseball-oriented stories in leading national magazines, such as Liberty, Redbook, and The Saturday Evening Post. As his career progressed, Lardner’s fiction was no longer confined to the ballpark. Eventually, he published a number of non-baseball stories, many still available today in anthologies. His reputation was so good at his peak in the mid-1920s that a piece in Cosmopolitan (not the vixenish publication it is today) could net him a $4,500 paycheck – a respectable sum even today.

But it was baseball that brought him to the public’s attention. His best known work, You Know Me Al, written in epistolary format, was as close as he got to writing a full-fledged novel. This 1916 collection of previously-published stories concerned Jack Keefe, a ballplayer, writing to his friend, Al Blanchard, who lived in Keefe’s hometown of Bedford, Ind.

Keefe had a live arm, but he was a hardheaded dimwit who was his own worst enemy. Since Lardner was acquainted with numerous ballplayers, there has always been speculation as to which ballplayer(s) served as the model(s) for Keefe (Frank Schulte was a leading candidate). Somewhat less renowned are Lardner’s tales of Keefe’s adventures after he was drafted into the Army and soldiered on in Europe as “Jack the Kaiser Killer.”

What distinguishes Lardner’s baseball work is the cast of characters. A number of real ballplayers, particularly the Chicago White Sox of the second decade of the 20th century, appear in Lardner’s work. Also there are appearances by or references to Christy Mathewson, Ty Cobb, Rube Marquard and many other non-ChiSox luminaries.

This was not really a new technique (Tolstoy, for example, employed real historical figures, notably Napoleon, in War and Peace), but Lardner knew the people he inserted into his fiction. They were his contemporaries, not historical figures, even though they may appear so today.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

The players apparently enjoyed the attention and respected Lardner. Curiously, though he associated with uneducated, crude, rough-and-tumble men on a regular basis, he did not succumb to boorish behavior himself (with the exception of excessive boozing, which was instrumental in his demise).

As Eliot Asinof observed in Eight Men Out, Lardner was considered “a real writer, not like a lot of those bums who covered baseball.” Indeed, only a real writer could come up with a 1929 one-liner like “Jimmy Foxx would appeal to the imagination if he had nothing but a mania for needless consonants.”

Bons mots such as the above played a big part in Lardner being the first writer to receive the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, bestowed by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, in 1963. (The award was initiated in 1962, but the first recipient was the eponymous J.G. Taylor Spink, publisher of The Sporting News for almost half a century, who had passed away that year.)

Of course, there were outstanding sportswriters before Lardner. One was Hugh Fullerton, co-founder of the Baseball Writers Association of America, who discovered Lardner’s work in South Bend and brought him to Chicago. Another was Grantland Rice, who was Lardner’s peer as well as his friend. But Lardner was the first baseball writer to break through to literary respectability.

There were hints aplenty of originality even in Lardner’s beat writing assignments. Consider his use of unlined verse in this report:

It didn’t rain so awful hard, it didn’t rain so much; there wasn’t any blizzard that could really be called such; we asked most everybody that we met upon the street and couldn’t find a single soul who’d swear that there was sleet; we asked some information from the man who gathers mail, and he said that nowhere on his route had he encountered hail; we ran across a pioneer who’d lived here since a boy, and he vowed he’d seen a stronger wind sometimes in Illinois; but the awful combination of the wind and rain and all, it rendered quite impossible the scheduled game of ball.

All that effort just for a rainout! Hard to imagine how a sports editor would react to this today. I’m guessing it would be spiked. “Lardner, what have you been smoking?”

Now let’s look at an example – also involving inclement weather – of Lardner’s distinctive first-person narrative style. This comes from You Know Me Al (1914):

They was not no game here to-day on acct. of it raining and the people here was sore because they did not see no game but they all come a round to look at us and says they must have some speechs from the most prommerent men in the party so I and Comiskey and Mcgraw and Callahan and Mathewson and Ted Sullivan that I guess is putting up the money for the trip made speechs and they clapped there hands harder when I was making my speech then when any 1 of the others was making there speech. 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.

Now this is definitely not something one would hand in to one’s English teacher, but it does flow pretty well, despite all the lapses in spelling, grammar and diction. It indicates that Lardner really worked hard at sanding down the rough spots to make this passage as readable as possible. As his biographer, Jonathan Yardley, noted, “It was precisely because he knew proper English so well that he was able to reproduce improper English so meticulously and accurately.”

Lardner was not the first to write dialect (Mark Twain and Joel Chandler Harris, among others, got there ahead of him), but his baseball stories were largely written before the days of the mass media. The advent of radio, as big a boost as it was to baseball, promoted standardized English — Dizzy Dean notwithstanding. Come to think, of it, Dean’s personal mangling of the English language reads almost as though it were scripted by Lardner.

I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to assert that the first-person ramblings of Lardner’s characters display an incipient stream-of-consciousness technique. Admittedly, the consciousness on display is not highly refined.

It’s difficult to believe, but British novelist Virginia Woolf, who used stream-of-consciousness in Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), was a big fan of Lardner’s work and asserted that his work on baseball and other sports gave him a focus for writing about American society. According to Woolf, Lardner “writes the best prose to come our [Britain’s] way” although often “in language which is not English.” Stateside, his unique style was sometimes referred to as Lardner Ringlish.

Lardner never met Woolf, but he was acquainted with a number of American writers. He was a good friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald when both lived in the Long Island town of Great Neck, the wealthy enclave that inspired the setting for The Great Gatsby.

As writers, neighbors and boozers, Fitzgerald and Lardner were kindred souls. Even when sober, Fitzgerald was a big fan of Lardner’s work. Many seamheads may be aware that gangster Arnold Rothstein, who was behind the Black Sox scandal, was used as the model for Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby. It is less well known that Lardner was the model for the Abe North character in Tender Is the Night.

Fitzgerald lauded Lardner’s work to Maxwell Perkins, the famed editor at Scribner’s. While most editors, even the best of the bunch, lived quiet lives behind the scenes, Perkins was an exception. He was not only interested in editing profitable tomes for Scribner’s but in advancing American literature. The extent of his contributions to the careers of Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe can be debated but not denied. (Hemingway, by the way, was so taken with Lardner’s work that the byline for his articles in his high school newspaper was Ring Lardner Jr.)

When Fitzgerald convinced Perkins to bring out a collection of Lardner’s stories, they both were amazed to discover he hadn’t saved any copies of his published works. As a result, Perkins had to assemble the collection by going to the library, tracking down back issues of magazines, and making copies of Lardner’s stories. Fitzgerald, who was well aware of his own contributions to American literature, was astounded that someone as talented as Lardner could be so cavalier about his work.

Fitzgerald and Perkins encouraged Lardner to do more “serious” work. Fitzgerald criticized Lardner’s reliance on baseball for inspiration. He felt that the national pastime was “a boy’s game with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bound by walls which kept out novelty or danger or adventure.”

(I pause here so you may all boo F. Scott Fitzgerald…All right, that’s enough. He can’t hear you anyway.)

While Fitzgerald’s work is inextricably linked with the Jazz Age, the Roaring 20s, or whatever you want to call it, it also transcended the era and became part of the American literary canon. While Lardner is also linked with this era, his work often seems dated.

At his peak, however, Lardner was taken seriously. Critic Carl Van Doren wrote an article called Ring W. Lardner: Philologist Among the Low-Brows. H.L. Mencken, who was a philologist as well as a journalist, thought highly of Lardner’s mastery of the “American vulgate,” but wondered about its lasting value. (Thoroughly unrelated but fun fact: Mencken’s father was part owner of the Washington Senators baseball team in the late 19th century.) While acknowledging that “few American novelists, great or small, have had character more firmly in hand,” he predicted his fame would be short-lived:

He deliberately applied himself, not to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation, and he did it with such subtle and penetrating skills that one must belong to his time and nation to follow him.

Mencken wrote the above in 1924, and time has proved him right to some extent. Of course, this is a risk inherent in any work of art that is too much a product of its time. When times change, the work of art risks becoming dated, ending up as a curiosity at best or an irrelevance at worst. Lardner, however, was not writing for posterity.

Lardner’s attitude toward writing was simple: (1) write; (2) publish; (3) cash check; (4) go on to next project. Eighteenth century author/lexicographer Dr. Samuel Johnson famously observed, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” Well, according to Johnson, I am a blockhead, but Lardner wasn’t. Nevertheless, he often took the time to include poetry in his private correspondence. This work was done off the books, so to speak, with no hope of remuneration. I suspect Lardner would have continued to write, even without financial enrichment, because he enjoyed it.

The pivotal moment in Lardner’s career was the World Series of 1919, when Lardner was 34 years old. He knew something was wrong and kept the Black Sox story alive in his columns after the series. It might be a stretch to say there would have been no investigation, no Judge Landis, and no trial without Lardner, but he certainly nudged events in that direction.

The movie Eight Men Out portrays Lardner singing a ditty he and some other sportswriters had composed. It was based on “I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles,” which was a popular tune of the day:

I’m forever blowing ball games,
Pretty ball games in the air.
I come from Chi.,
I hardly try,
Just go to bat, and fade and die,
Fortune’s coming my way,
That’s why I don’t care.
I’m forever blowing ball games,
For the gamblers treat me fair.

If you see Eight Men Out, you can see John Sayles (who adapted Eliot Asinof’s book and directed the movie) playing Lardner and singing the above tune. It’s not just a vanity project on Sayles’ part, as his gaunt visage provides a passable approximation of Lardner’s.

After the Black Sox scandal, Lardner began writing more and more stories with non-baseball backgrounds, which enhanced his literary reputation. Previously, some arbiters of public taste, though acknowledging Lardner’s unique talents, had dismissed him as a “sportswriter” or a “humorist.”

Fitzgerald and Perkins exhorted him to go beyond short pieces. (Curiously, Lardner’s favorite writer was the verbose Dostoyevsky.) To really earn his spurs, Lardner had to tackle the Great American Novel. To be sure, a major literary reputation needed a major work to secure it. As critic Edmund Wilson observed, “If Ring Lardner has anything more to give us, the time has now come to deliver it.” And by more, he did mean more diverting short stories.

After all, had Mark Twain never ventured into writing novels and remained content with journalism, short stories, and travel writing, he would not now be a giant of American letters.

Ironically, while Lardner hit his stride professionally in the 1920s, he was not thrilled with the changes taking place in American society. Having come of age during the Victorian/Edwardian era, Lardner found he had become something of an old fuddy-duddy during the 1920s.

As a young man Lardner had carried on a chaste, long-distance courtship of Ellis Abbott. Like Lardner, she haled from a prominent family in a small Midwestern town, namely Goshen, Ind. They lived in an era of front-porch courtship, church picnics and ice cream socials, but they had to carry on their courtship by mail, as she was a student at Smith College in Massachusetts, and he was a peripatetic sportswriter. Their lengthy, carefully-crafted letters (Ellis, by the way, was no slouch verbally, as she was a published poet and an honors graduate of Smith) are in stark contrast to today’s world of texting, emails, BFF, LOL and WASSUP.

Lardner married Abbott in 1911 and they had four sons, whom Lardner often wrote about in his newspaper columns. There is no indication Lardner was ever anything other than a dedicated family man, though some biographers of Dorothy Parker insist that she was more than a friend and a fan.

As Lardner approached middle age, the looser morals of the 1920s left him aghast. He was particularly upset by suggestive lyrics of popular songs. As a practical matter, after 1920, Prohibition offered him a chance to distance himself from alcohol, which he did… somewhat.

While baseball has been the springboard for many a writer, even today most do not venture far from the ballpark. It certainly isn’t a stretch to consider Lardner the first “real” writer in baseball history. One of his best known short story is Alibi Ike, an amusing take on a ballplayer who not only has an alibi to explain why he did something wrong, but an alibi to explain when he wasn’t even better when he did something right.

Most of Lardner’s best-known stories, however, have nothing to do with baseball. Haircut starts out as a slice of Americana, with a stranger paying a visit to a small-town barber shop, and ends up as a tale of the town ne’er-do-well being murdered by the village idiot. The Love Nest deals with a former movie actress trapped in a gilded cage. The Golden Honeymoon deals with the marital strains of an aged couple “celebrating” their golden anniversary in Florida. Some Like Them Cold deals with two young people who have a chance meeting at a train station, then carry on their flirtation via the mail, and finally break up.

And Lardner was hardly limited to print media. In 1925, he scripted a silent film called The New Klondike. He also wrote for Broadway, notably a baseball play (with George M. Cohan) called Elmer the Great and a comedy called June Moon. His other outlets included popular songs and comic book dialogue. He was nothing if not versatile, and while the above-mentioned works may not have passed the test of time, they did put some extra money in his pocket.

Not surprisingly, Hollywood mined his work, notably movies based on Alibi Ike and Elmer the Great (both starring Joe E. Brown, whose son, Joe L. Brown, served as GM for the Pittsburgh Pirates); So This Is New York, a comedy based on the novella The Big Town; and Champion, a 1949 boxing film based on the short story of the same name.

Lardner made plenty of money during his writing career, but he had a large family, so he needed a healthy income. While the 1920s were by and large good years, things took a turn for the worse in the 1930s, and not just because of the Great Depression. Lardner’s health deteriorated, and he died of tuberculosis in 1933 at age 48. His legacy, however, was not limited to his published works. Amazingly, all four of his sons became writers.

Ring Lardner Jr. (born in 1915) was the best known, as he wrote the screenplays for Woman of the Year (1942 Academy Award for best original screenplay) and M*A*S*H (1970 Academy Award for best screenplay adaptation). Lardner Jr. insisted that he won another Academy Award for a screenplay attributed to another writer during the blacklist phase of his career. (An admitted member of the Communist Party, he had come to the attention of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947.)

In his autobiography, I’d Probably Hate Myself in the Morning, Lardner Jr. fondly recalls his upbringing in a highly literate, privileged environment. As an example of the dinner table banter of the Lardner boys, consider the following:

What was the longest slide in the Bible?
When Joshua went from Jericho to Jerusalem on his ass.

One particularly amusing incident concerns a neighborhood ballgame when his friends discovered they were playing with a ball autographed by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and their Yankees teammates. Young Lardner told them not to worry; there were plenty more where that came from.

The eldest son, John Lardner (born in 1912), a sportswriter and war correspondent, died of tuberculosis at the age of 48, unfortunately following in the final footsteps of his father.

Lardner’s other sons were James (born in 1914), a journalist killed in the Spanish Civil War, and David (born in 1919), a war correspondent who was killed in World War II. Ring Lardner Jr. was the only one who lived to a ripe old age, dying in 2000 at the age of 85.

But literary pursuits didn’t stop with the second generation. I won’t detail the family lineage here, but if you’re interested, just type “lardnermania” into your search engine.

Literary fashions have changed greatly since the passing of the patriarch, yet he has not been entirely forgotten. In 2013, an omnibus volume entitled Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings (edited by Ian Frazier) was published. Literary reputations are rarely straight lines but wax and wane over time. It’s not impossible that Lardner’s work may find an audience in the 21st century. Even today, he is often pigeonholed as a baseball writer. But I think he would have been OK with that.

The story goes that late in life, Lardner was attending a BBWAA meeting and was puzzled why he had gotten a lukewarm reception from the attendees. “What’s the matter with you boys?” he wondered. “I belong here. I am still a baseball writer and always will be.”


Frank Jackson writes about baseball, film and history, sometimes all at once. He has has visited 54 major league parks, many of which are still in existence.
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John Thorn
8 years ago

Great piece!

mustbunique
8 years ago

Check plus. Love this article, immediately downloaded the You know me Al audiobook. The quote where he uses incorrect english on purpose really hits home for me, as I like to do similar things when reflecting on language used in text messages and social media. Thanks for writing this up.

BobDD
8 years ago

Well, wasn’t Mark Twain himself almost a baseball writer? After all, he wrote that movie about Babe Ruth (as Sir Sagamore) and Bing Crosby, two Yankees trying to hit a curve off Merlin or something like that.

Donald Jennings
8 years ago

Mencken cited one passage from You Know Me Al that I found particularly amusing. A friend of Ike told him that he should have gotten even with some protagonist by hitting him on the chin and breaking his nose. Ever ready with an alibi, Ike said, “I would have, but his nose was already broke and he didn’t have no chin.” That’s hilarious!

Joe Pilla
8 years ago

‘Lovely piece, Frank! It will compel me to pore over my bookshelves seeking Lardner. I haven’t read him in so long.
Your point about the wax-and-wane of literary careers is well-taken. Lardner’s friend Fitzgerald is certainly a case in point. As detailed in Maureen Corrigan’s recent book, SO WE READ ON, on the staying power of THE GREAT GATSBY, Fitzgerald’s reputation sagged as the 30s progressed, sales of his new works negligible, his major works–even GATSBY–virtually forgotten at his sad, premature demise in 1940. Thanks to compact paperback copies of GATSBY provided to WW2 servicemen, it slowly but steadily became the stalwart of the canon it is today, read by students perhaps more than any other novel of its time. And Fitzgerald has achieved the fame and following he never approached in life.
Lardner’s best work is as representative of its time as Fitzgerald’s, and the former was arguably more popular than the latter during their salad days. But there is no GATSBY from Lardner, no signature novel that transcends its era to evoke passionate identification in modern readers. There is “Haircut,” and “You Know Me, Al,” but no GATSBY. It is that cold fact–fine Frazier anthology notwithstanding–that keeps Lardner from being rediscovered by more young readers today. Dying young is important for posterity, but it’s clearly not enough.
I love the sweep of your article, moving as it does from pre-WW1 porch courtships to the bittersweet memories of Lardner’s blacklisted son. Somehow, it seems to me to further baseball’s rep as the game with the most talented literary groupies.
Sayles’ EIGHT MEN OUT, modest tho it is, may be the best baseball movie ever. When Sayles’ blotto and bitter Lardner, betraying his shattered cynical pose, warbles his song to the Black Sox, it truly is sublime. (And the word for Sayles’ facial likeness to Lardner is uncanny.)
One last note–and one which further demonstrates Lardner’s popularity and earning power compared to the more esteemed Fitzgerald’s: Lardner wrote a syndicated comic strip version of “You Know Me, Al” in the early ’20s, perhaps earning him $30G annually. His pal Scott perhaps didn’t even read the funnies, let alone deign to write for ’em.