"Stomach Hake"

"Stomach Hake" "Even to this day," confesses Funnyman Lardner,* "the first week in March is set aside in Niles [Mich.] as 'Have a Baby Week.'" He came in there like a lion one March "before they had horses and boats and when you wanted to go from one town to another, you had to take a train." Graduates of the Lytton Strachey school of informal biography may suspect Mr. Lardner of shoving fun at their alma mater, the way he takes liberties with prominent names and dates in trying to solve the enigma of himself in an intimate way. "The Taylor who was elected President," he says, for instance, "was Zachary Taylor." And then he goes on. "... while the Taylor that lived near us was H. N. Taylor, the feed man. No relation to the other Taylor."

But after the story is under way, no fairminded reader will deny that Mr. Lardner is doing his flat and level best not to get funny. Chapter Six begins: "It was at a petting party in the Whits House that I first met Jane Austen." He took her to see Gov. Al ("Peaches") Smith, who complimented her: "I thought The Green Hat was a scream."

No autobiography will sell these days without some pranks at Yale. So Mr. Lardner recalls football days under John Paul Jones, a grandfather of Coach Tad Jones. He tells how a big guard named Heffelfinger got called down for unclean nails; how Brinck Thorne got his neck tickled by Ted Coy. There actually are three men by those names, and Mr. Lardner knows it. Books have been written before this on the theory that people dislike seeing their names in print and will pay $1.75 to keep at least one copy out of circulation.

Mr. Lardner has not shirked a single chance to rid himself of the reputation for "depth" which jealous fellow-writers recently fastened upon him. He puns along stoutly, just to show what he cares for humor. " 'If you do,' " he remembers a laundress retorting to one of his advances, " 'I will be hot under the collar.'" And he unblushingly sets down his comeback: "'Underwear, did you say?'"

Christmas presents are hung on a shoetree. Carols are proposed, " 'But don't bring Earl,'" says the laundress. A Princeton co-ed sisbooms "ad Nassaum." Yale sings "Beulah, Beulah." Funnyman Donald Ogden Stewart's technique is borrowed for an interview with Golfer Bobby Jones, aged one, in a lavatory. Pleased with himself, Mr. Lardner then interviews Horace Greeley in a bathtub. Toward the end of the book a Laplander lands in his lap. They marry and live in Gluten, N. Y. Divorce ensues. Queen Marie sings "Dat watahmelyon hangin' on de vine." He marries a Swiss called Geezle. He reforms the theatre by undressing the audience. In the last chapter, not without justice, he dies fishing for hake, suggesting posthumously and provocatively that it was stomach hake.

The Author is a cadaverous brunet with wide eyes and shut lips. The lips are shut so that nothing funny can escape Mr. Lardner before he puts it on paper and sells it. A man who lives near him in Great Neck, L. I., once heard him say something out loud, but did not find it amusing, which was lucky for both of them because ever since 1915, when he escaped the ranks of sports writers by publishing You Know Me Al, Mr. Lardner has been, in person if not always in print, a six-foot, hawk-nosed rebuke to unseemly public mirth.

*THE STORY OF A WONDER MAN, being the autobiography of King Lardner--Scribner ($1.75).