In Lardner's Line

MY EARS ARE BENT--Joseph Mitchell --Sheridan House ($2.50).

In his best short stories the late Ring Lardner pictured a strange, submerged, widely-publicized but yet unknown type-- the amiable, unselfconscious egomaniacs

who abound in the theatrical world and flourish on the baseball diamond. F. Scott Fitzgerald explained that Lardner's silence and confusion resulted from the presence of "ivory" in the circles he _knew: "Remember it was not humble ivory," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was arrogant, imperative, often megalomaniacal ivory.' Since Lardner's death nobody has carried on his work as laureate of this thick-skulled world; nobody has caught the tones of its odd, original speech, or the flavor of its half-ironic, half-fatuous humor. But with a collection of brief sketches published last month, a young Manhattan reporter looked like the most promising candidate so far for Lardner's vacant post. His stories showed much of Lardner's tormented sympathy for voluble boneheads, a good deal of his ability to write common speech without making it grotesque, but less of Lardner's misanthropy or his flair for turning a street-corner conversation into a story of general significance.

After eight years of interviewing industrial leaders, explorers and prominent people generally, Joseph Mitchell came to the conclusion that "the best talk is artless, the talk of people trying to reassure or comfort themselves, women in the sun, grouped around baby carriages ... or men in saloons, talking to combat the loneliness everyone feels." As a result, the characters in My Ears Are Bent -- strip-tease artists, fan dancers, baseball players -- chatter away with the utmost seriousness on subjects of whose absurdity they are unaware, or perform the unthinkingly idiotic gestures of people who think they are alone. One of Mitchell's unselfconscious heroes was Mr. Holton, self-taught authority on mass insanity, who went crazy. Mr. Holton's wife picked up every crazy fad that came along. One night she woke him up and said "Knock, knock." "I am too old for that sort of by-play," Mr. Holton complained to Mitchell. "I do not wear long pants just because they become me." But Author Mitchell hits the authentic Lardner note most strongly in The Pickle Works, a brilliant sketch of Jimmy Durante. nursing a hangover and memories of his youth at a rehearsal, talking himself from gloom to good humor until he launches on a flight of Broadway poetry: "The stage may be the pickle works to some people, but it's a big box of candy to me. Look at that blonde. ... I should be paying the boss for the privilege of working here."

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