One of the most illuminating things Van Wyck Brooks ever said, about himself, was that Mr Dooley is already forgotten. It was particularly illuminating because Mr Brooks was in England when he made that statement, and it was some time before 1914—and it happens that it was in England, in 1917 that I was made to understand how living Mr Dooley is, how relevant to affairs and situations of the moment, and how much English men and women consider him as one of the better items in the heritage of Americans. The writer of The Ordeal of Mark Twain is an invaluable critic for America; yet one wishes that he, too, could see Mr Dooley’s place in our literature; one still hopes that he will begin to enjoy Ring Lardner.
The juxtaposition of these two names would be reasonable even if both of them did not write in slang, for one is the greatest of our retired satirists and the other has every chance (if not every intention) of becoming the greatest of our active ones. I should like to say at once that I am not addressing an open letter to Dear Mr Lardner, bidding him, while there is yet time, to think on higher things. I do not want him to forswear for a moment his hold on the popular imagination, nor to write for a more judicious clientèle. I am satisfied to have Mr Lardner amuse me; if the strain of satire in him is an accident and he prefers to go on with his slang humour—I can always read Mr Dooley or Dean Swift. But if the growing vein of satire in all of Lardner’s work is what I think it is, he has much to learn from Mr Dooley. I shall presently come to Mr Dooley and indicate what it is Lardner can learn in those beautiful pages; the main thing is that he is probably the only man in America with the capacity of learning the lesson of the master, and happily he can learn it without ceasing for a moment to live in his own world. I do not wish to force upon him the ordeal of being worried about.
There may have been a time when Mr Lardner gave cause for worry. Perhaps when You Know Me, Al had run as long as it needed to run, one might have feared that Mr Lardner, having discovered the American language as his medium, simply didn’t know what to do with it. If his humour was going to depend for ever on “1-sided” and “4-taste” and odd misspellings, it might cease to be funny. It was necessary, in short, that Mr Lardner should have something personal to say. He has answered the question of his future by showing the beginnings of a first-rate satirist, continuing the tradition of Mark Twain and Mr Dooley. And having these tentatives in mind we can begin to look back and wonder whether he wasn’t always something of a satirist, unconsciously.
The dates may confound my argument, so I will omit them; substantially Lardner began writing the letters of a busher just when the more serious magazines were exploiting the intellectual idea of “inside baseball.” Those were the days—and they must have been funny, we feel circa 1923 when the bought and sold world’s series and the letters of the fishing pitcher and suchlike scandal are in our memories, carefully tucked away because the honour of the national game is safe in the hands of a dictator—those were the days when the manager of a baseball team was regarded as a combination of a captain of finance (later events rather justified that assumption) a Freud, and an unborn Einstein. A fine body of college graduates, clean-living, sport-loving, well-read boys were the players; and a sport-loving, game-for-the-game’s sake body of men the enthusiasts. Hughie Fullerton and Paul Elmer More might be seen any day in the same column, and John J. McGraw, who allowed himself to be called Muggsy to show what a good democrat he was, lunched daily at the President’s table. Into this pretentious parade Mr Lardner injected the busher—and baseball has never recovered. The busher was simply a roughneck and a fool, a braggart and a liar; he was on occasions a good ball player, and he seemed to be inflated with the hot air which had been written about him. He pricked the bubble, and I do not wonder that Heywood Broun, despairing of making interesting his accounts of a recent world’s series, publicly prayed to God to change places with him for duration. Nothing short of divine power could save them.
It is a long time since the days of the busher and when Lardner returned to baseball it was clear that the subject interested him in no degree, and that he had changed much as a writer. It is not necessary to belittle the earlier work; only to note that in 1922 the Lardner touch was much more deft, that the language was both richer and more accurate, and that he was continually writing parodies, sometimes of a phrase, often of a whole style. Three or four of the reports he wrote for the New York American were jewels—and, although they had little to do with baseball, they must have been written in the few hours which intervene between the end of a game and the moment of going to press. The whole series of articles ought to be reprinted; I am limited to snatches from two of them. The first set the theme: that Lardner had promised his wife a fur coat from his winnings—he had bet on the Yankees. The headline was
Rings’ Mrs.
Outa Luck
On Fur Coat
and then followed:
Well friends you can imagine my surprise and horror when I found out to-night that the impression had got around some way another that as soon as this serious was over I was planning to buy a expensive fur coat for my Mrs. and put a lot of money into same and buy a coat that would probably run up into hundreds and hundreds of dollars.
Well I did not mean to give no such kind of a impression and I certainly hope that my little article was not read that way by everybody a specially around my little home because in the first place I am not a sucker enough to invest hundreds and hundreds of dollars in a garment which the chances are that the Mrs. will not wear it more than a couple times all winter, as the way it looks now we are libel to have the most openest winter in history, and if women folks should walk along the st. in expensive fur coats in the kind of weather which it looks like we are going to have, why, they would only be laughed at and any way I believe a couple can have a whole lot better time in winter staying home and reading a good book or maybe have a few friends in to play bridge.
Further and more, I met a man at supper last night that has been in the fur business all his life and ain’t did nothing you might say only deal in furs and this man says that they are a great many furs in this world which is reasonable priced that has got as much warmth in them as high price furs and looks a great deal better.