Examining the Ring of Truth

RING by Jonathan Yardley; Random House; 415 pages; $12.95

Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly. Shut up he explained.

In those lines lie the reasons for Ring Lardner's ambiguous reputation. Forty-four years after his death, he remains one of the nation's most original humorists --and keenest literary disappointments. As his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald observed, "Whatever Ring's achievement was, it fell short of the achievement he was capable of, and this because of a cynical attitude toward his work."

In this critical biography, Jonathan Yardley examines the achievement and concludes that Ring Lardner was "a miniaturist to whom the world seemed to be shouting 'Inflate! Inflate!' and he could not handle it. Which is a great pity, because what he did do should command our respect and gratitude. To begin with, he told us how to write the way we talk."

He began that demonstration as a baseball reporter who wrote against the American grain. In Ring's epoch, Grantland Rice was the most revered sports journalist: "When the One Great Scorer conies to write against your name, He marks--not that you won or lost--but how you played the game."

Hogwash, countered Lardner, and created such antiheroes as Alibi Ike, a venal, semiliterate baseball player, and Midge Kelly, a heavyweight champion whose fists are used on women and cripples. From the stadiums he ventured into the larger arenas of domesticity and small-town archetypes. As always, Lardner wrote out of familiarity and ambivalence. He had been raised in Niles, Mich., the son of wealthy and indulgent parents. His sensitivity to social nuances was profound, to social problems minimal. "I've known what it is to be hungry," Lardner once cracked, "but I always went right to a restaurant."

After false starts as a bookkeeper and a bill collector, Ringgold Wilmer Lardner signed on the Chicago Examiner as a sportswriter. In the locker rooms and bleachers he collected the rhythms of American locution. His observations were to emerge as mordant short stories, works that have since affected every sports observer from Philip Roth to Howard Cosell. Lardner anticipated Casey Stengel with Jack Keefe, a bush-league player: "This should ought to of gave me a record of 16 wins and 0 defeats because the only games I lost was throwed away behind me but instead of that my record is 10 games win and 6 defeats and that don't include the games I finished up and helped the other boys win which is about 6 more altogether but what do I care about my record Al?" More important, he rivaled Sinclair Lewis and Sherwood Anderson with such ironic tales of American life as Haircut, the story of an idiot's revenge on a practical joker, and The Golden Honeymoon, a warty portrait of a long marriage: "Mother set facing the front of the train, as it makes her giddy to ride backwards. I set facing her, which does not affect me."

Fame, Yardley notes, was swift and disproportionate, H.L. Mencken thought there was "more of sheer reality in such a story as The Golden Honeymoon than in the whole canon of Henry James." Edmund Wilson praised Lardner's distinguished, aloof intelligence. Virginia Woolf provided the greatest accolade. Mr. Lardner, she said, "writes the best prose that has come our way."

Ring was not corrupted by the bitch goddess. Grown suddenly wealthy, he subsidized relatives and friends until he went broke. Exhorted by critics and editors to write a great novel, he confined himself to the bunts and singles of literature: short stories, song lyrics, sketches for Broadway comedies. Pursued by feminine admirers, he nonetheless remained a withdrawn suburban husband and father, concerned that Tin Pan Alley songs were growing too risque for innocent ears. In The Young Immigrunts, a "diary" written as though by his young son, Lardner became the butt of his own jokes--a pose he maintained in life. The alcoholism that had dogged him in obscurity ("How do you look when I'm sober?" was a classic query) continued in his prominence. It exacted a high price. Seams and hollows marred the Keatonesque deadpan; bouts of physical and psychological depression appeared as tragic relief.

In Tender Is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald provided the most memorable description of Lardner's decline, disguised as the last days of Songwriter Abe North: "All of them were conscious of the solemn dignity that flowed from him, of his achievement, fragmentary, suggestive and surpassed. But they were frightened at his survivant will, once a will to live, now become a will to die." The death occurred in 1933, when Ring was a badly aged 48.

Lardner's celebrity did not survive him. During the last three years of his life, book royalties amounted to about $1,000. Although sales have picked up markedly since then, the author has enjoyed no true renaissance. If he is read by the young it is largely in high school anthologies. Ring greatly aids in the burnishing of a worn reputation and the restoration of a 24-volume canon. Yardley's assessment is admiring but astringent; Ring's tendencies toward slickness and bathos are noted in detail, along with the author's manifest virtues of diction and wit. Indeed, Yardley is far more effective as critic than cheerleader. "[Ring] helped teach us not only to laugh at ourselves but to laugh at that which is unique in us, to delight in our very Americanness" belongs on a dust jacket, not in a biography. But such excesses are few.

Ring "was a man whose habit it was to wear a mask," recalled Sherwood Anderson. Until now, that wry persona seemed permanent. Jonathan Yardley manages to remove it and to discern beneath a serious figure worthy of reappraisal -- and a comic artist worthy of revival.

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