For inst. he says that a man is a sucker to invest thousands and thousands of dollars in expensive furs like Erminie, mule-skin, squirrel skin and Kerensky when for a hundred dollars, or not even that much, why a man can buy a owl skin or horse skin or weasel skin garment that looks like big dough and practically prostrates people with the heat when they wear them.
So I hope my readers will put a quietus on the silly rumour that I am planning to plunge in the fur market. I will see that my Mrs. is dressed in as warm a style as she has been accustomed to but neither her or I is the kind that likes to make a big show and go up and down Fifth ave. sweltering in a $700 hog-skin garment in order so as people will turn around and gap at us. Live and let live is my slocum.
If this were not funny its secondary qualities would not be worth noting. The single sentence which makes up the second paragraph is a miracle of condensation, for it contains the whole mind and character of the individual created behind it (it is not Ring Lardner, obviously) and at the same time it is a miracle of the ear, for the rhythm and intonation of the American spoken language is perfectly caught and held in it. What is the use of Babbitt in five hundred pages if we have Lardner in five hundred words? The fur episode was continued two days later, the Yankees continuing to lose and three kittens—“three members of what is sometimes referred to as the feline tribe”—out at Mr Lardner’s “heavily mortgaged home in Great Neck ... is practically doomed you might say ...” because Mr Lardner has met a man “who has did nothing all his life but sell and wear fur coats” and who assured him that catskin garments no bigger than a guest towel were all the rage and had been seen on “some of the best-dressed women in New York strolling up and down Tenth avenue....”
“These 3 little members of the feline tribe is the cutest and best behaved kitties in all catdom, their conduct having always been above reproaches outside of a tendency on the part of Ringer to bite strangers’ knuckles. Nowhere on Long Island is there a more loveable trio of grimalkins, and how it pierces my old heart to think that some day next week these 3 little fellows must be shot down like a dog so as their fur can be fashioned into a warm winter coat for she who their antics has so often caused to screech with laughter.”
The annihilation of the whole Black Beauty-Beautiful Joe style of writing in the last sentence is complete, and is accomplished with the retention of Lardner’s own peculiarities. It may shock Mr Lardner to know that he has done in little what Mr Joyce has done on the grand scale in Ulysses.
Indeed I feel that there must be hidden parody in the earlier writings of Mr Lardner, too, because he is so clean in handling it now. Satire in detail he had—there is a dictionary of it in his one word “he-ll.” Elsewhere, in a series later than You Know Me, Al he has described a half-fatuous, half-hardheaded roughneck dragging his silly and scheming wife and sister-in-law through the hotels and apartments of the backwash of society, and the story grew more and more sardonic, more and more entertaining; little of the aimless, sickly, trivial life of the merely prosperous escaped him. Unlike Mr Dooley, his chief concerns were private ones; it is only recently that he has touched upon public affairs. For a long time his only “universal” was baseball—a form of entertainment which now bores him exceedingly. He is also bored, I gather from an interview in the New York Globe, with the sort of fiction he has been writing, and amuses himself with writing plays. But as a satirist he is turning slowly towards matters of pith, and the question of his ultimate rank depends on this: Can he, as he broadens out, retain the swift, destructive, and tremendously funny turn of phrase, the hard and resistant mind, the gaiety of spirit which have made him a humorist? Can he, in short, learn from Mr Dooley and remain Mr Lardner? For many reasons I think he can.
Between the busher and these newspaper reports Mr Lardner has written much; among his ephemera, even, there are many pages not to be lost. I shall return to them after drawing a long course with Mr Dooley as my centre, for it is one of the significant things about Mr Dooley that you must always keep him in your eye when you are scanning the horizon for an American satirist.
Mr Dooley was a satirist of the highest order and an excellent humorist. The combination is interesting. Psycho-analysts may determine at a later date that the reason he wrote in dialect was that he was afraid to attack the American people directly; I prefer to believe that the good sense of his creator (Finley Peter Dunne, to be sure; but one always thinks of Martin Dooley in his independent existence) saw that a benevolent humour was the correct medium for a satire adequate to America. And that is America’s good fortune. Read the criticism of American warfare and politics as developed in the satire of Mr Dooley and compare it with the satire of French politics and warfare as expressed in the irony of Anatole France; without measuring the quality of the one by the other, think only that each is adequate to the subject. Less than the bitterness of Penguin Island and the Histoire contemporaine would not have served for France; more than the laughter of Dooley would have been disproportionate and unmanly for us.
Satire is like parody in admitting the integrity of the subject; it is a pruning knife applied for the good of the tree; and irony is a dagger with corrosive poison at the tip. Satire is proper to America because essentially the satirist believes that life is all right, and that only the extravagances and frailties of American life, at the moment of writing, need correction or are subject to mockery. The Frenchman, in a highly organized society, which he takes to be not only the best expression of life, but life itself, turns to irony as his natural mode when he is confronted with the ineluctable vision of its evil.
The danger is, to be sure, that our satirists remain superficial. When the thing is done roughly, without much humour, with no rich sense of the vastness and variety of the comic carnival, we get little more than the eternal “wise crack”; and the wise crack is no more entertaining in misspelled English than it is in capital letters, no more in pidgin than in Yiddish. I do not mean that George Ade and Wallace Irwin and Bill Nye and Montague Glass haven’t each a special quality which makes for amusement; I do mean that they lack the great general qualities of knowing and understanding which create humour. An illustration will do more than any defining to make the difference clear. The Japanese Schoolboy used to begin his letters, “To Hon. Editor” and Ring Lardner is, I suppose, the only man in America who can begin, “Well, friends....”