The Ring Cycle

By John Skow

THE LARDNERS: MY FAMILY REMEMBERED by RING LARDNER, JR. 371 pages. Harper & Row. $1 2.95.

SOME CHAMPIONS--SKETCHES AND FICTION BY RING LARDNER Edited by MATTHEW J. BRUCCOLI and RICHARD LAYMAN 205 pages. Scribner's. $8.95.

Before he died in 1934, at 48, Ring Lardner wore out, but he never wore thin. In recent, self-absorbed decades, he has been more reminisced about than read. The literate young know him fondly (a middle-aged reader supposes) as a hard-drinking character in one of Damon Runyon's baseball stories, or perhaps as the author who invented the hard-drinking baseball player, Damon Runyon.

That is either here nor there, as Lardner's hard-spelling pitcher Jack Keefe wrote to his friend Al in Call for Mr. Keefe! Some dusting off is necessary, not for the benefit of the splendid Lardner, but for those hardship cases who have yet to become his readers. The two volumes at hand do the job agreeably.

Some Champions is a collection of Lardner's sketches and short stories, not quite his best work but in no sense resembling the failed first drafts and wadded-up fragments that literary trash sifters sometimes tie like tin cans to the reputations of the famous dead. All the pieces have been published, but none have been collected--some late works, because Lardner died before getting around to putting them between hard covers, and some early pieces, because he didn't know where they were. He never made carbons, according to his son Ring, Jr., and he fired his originals off to magazines with the carelessness of a man folding and tossing paper airplanes.

Amiable Lies. There are a couple of funny baseball stories in Some Champions. Lardner's hero is the stalwart Keefe, who has a nice smile and a gorgeous head of bone. He brags in a letter to Friend Al that he is in line for a big raise if he beats the Red Sox. The date of the story--roughly 1918--can be guessed from the fact that the Boston pitcher is Babe Ruth, who had not yet switched to the Yankees and the outfield, and from the size of the big raise--$600, bringing Keefe to the affluence of $3,000 a year, a sum barely adequate to pay a modern player's hair stylist.

Some of Lardner's best work appeared as a kind of joshing reminiscence, in which amiable lies were the form and truths of varying bitterness were the content. In What I Ought to of Learnt in School, published in the American Magazine in 1923, the writer reports bleakly of his schooling in Niles, Mich.: "Well I don't know how it is now, but in those times practally all the teachers in high school was members of the fair sex. Some of them was charter members." That throwaway second sentence, evoking algebra-spouting harpies of deadly rectitude, would be recognizable as pure Lardner if it were found unsigned in a fortune cookie.

Three-Day Bat. The humor is more rueful in a short piece called XRay, written for The New Yorker in 1930. By that time Lardner's health was failing. He was drinking heavily, though still writing lightly. At the end the author is being carted to a hospital, his Lardner tone still unmistakable: "In an ambulance they made you ride lying down, whereas you can take your choice in a taxi."

Ring Lardner, Jr., who is now 60 himself, recalls his father, his mother Ellis and his three brothers with an affection that seems entirely clear and untroubled. He is the last survivor of a bright and rowdy household. Both mother and Elder Brother John died 15 years ago. Jim Lardner, a year older than Ring, Jr., died at 25 while fighting with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. The youngest brother, David, died reporting on World War II for The New Yorker. Remarkably, each son became a writer, and a good one. Jim and David were respected journalists in their early 20s; John was the best sports columnist in the country (give or take Red Smith) when he died, and Ring, Jr., a gifted screenwriter, won an Academy Award for a Katharine Hepburn movie called Woman of the Year. He survived the years of the Hollywood blacklist (he was a Communist and a member of the "Hollywood Ten," who refused to give testimony about other party members) and came back to write the original movie script for MASH.

But Father was clearly the star of the family--as writer, impromptu poet, rough-and-tumble piano player, talker, storm center, alcoholic and great soul. He was a boyish man who died young, and perhaps if he had gamboled into old age he would have oppressed his sons. As things were, when he was absent from the big, prosperous houses he set up in Great Neck and then in East Hampton, he was missed. He spent days in Manhattan, working in a hotel room or boozing with his friends, and when he came home on the morning train, shaky from a three-day bat, he made sure that he did not appear till his sons had left for school.

There is bitterness in Lardner's later work, and critics have put forward the assertion that his humor sprouted in a bog of misanthropy. Not so, says Ring, Jr. convincingly; his father was a cynic, but he did not hate mankind.

The dark strain in his work is self-disgust. He knew that booze -- writers' disease -- was gaining on him, and that he could not run any faster. John Skow

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