The Books: A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Ring Lardner” by H.L. Mencken

Next up on the essays shelf:

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, by H.L. Mencken

You know, I haven’t read much Ring Lardner. A piece here and there (some of them are anthologized in the various New Yorker collections that have come out), and of course F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a rather famous obituary for him (they had been friends). Fitzgerald, though, fell into the trap of thinking that because Ring Lardner wrote so much about sports he was somehow not serious, it wasn’t a topic worthy of him. He felt his friend could have done so much more. Virginia Woolf did not agree. She thought Ring Lardner was one of the best prose writers alive. More on all of that here. A giant in his time, one of the most popular writers writing, and now suffering from near total obscurity, although he has his devoted following. I should remedy my own error in not knowing more about Lardner. I have read some of his baseball pieces and they are as incredible as you would imagine. There’s a Damon Runyon quality to some of the stories he wrote, and yet his focus wasn’t so much on the underworld as the regular old malooks who circulated the streets of New York, the boxers, the butchers, the cab drivers. Ring Lardner died in 1933. The following piece, by Mencken, a huge Ring Lardner admirer, came out in 1924. Mencken went about (in other essays) destroying many of the beloved giants of the day. His essay on Theodore Dreiser is pretty devastating. He recognizes the skill but says most of it is “bilge”, and that of the many words in An American Tragedy, about 250,000 of them “are unnecessary”. Hahaha. Mean. Now I’m not an enormous Dreiser fan (haven’t read much of his work, in other words), but Mencken felt he overdid it, he wrote sloppily, he didn’t know what was important, he had no idea how to zoom in. His themes were big and important and he over-wrote compulsively. This is Mencken’s take. Ring Lardner, on the other hand, wrote spare perfect little pieces that absolutely captured individual characters in a way that had the breath of spontaneous life.

Oscar Wilde wrote, “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.” In Mencken’s essay, he praises Lardner’s mastery of the visible. We’ve covered this before but writers who fancy themselves to be Serious Commentators on the Zeitgeist sometimes are horrible at describing “the visible”. They can’t create characters, they can’t describe a damn room and make it pop into the reader’s mind in 3-D. Now, some writers aren’t “about” those things, it’s true. Some writers are not character-driven, they are more language-driven. I would put Jeanette Winterson into that grouping, but she’s a genius (in my opinion), and her stuff can’t be imitated. And when she imitates herself, she veers into self-conscious pretension. But when she’s “on”? She can’t be touched!

I am just putting this together from what I have read: Mencken was annoyed at the big serious writers like Dreiser who were over-praised by a gullible critical establishment who were in love with his “themes”, while superb popular writers like Ring Lardner didn’t get the laurels they deserved. So in this essay he tries to right some of those wrongs.

A Mencken Chrestomathy: His Own Selection of His Choicest Writing, “Ring Lardner,” by H.L. Mencken

His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and amusing; no other American of his generation, sober or gay, wrote better. But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass, that Lardner’s incomparable baseball players, pugs, song-writers, Elks, small-town Rotarians, and golf caddies were flittering figures of a transient civilization, and are doomed to be as puzzling and soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton’s Yankee clock peddler is today.

The fact – if I may assume it to be a fact – is certain not to be set against Lardner’s account; on the contrary, it is, in its way, highly complimentary to him. For he deliberately applied himself, not to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation, and he did it with such subtle and penetrating skills that one must belong to his time and nation to follow him. I doubt that anyone who is not familiar with professional ball players, intimately and at first hand, will ever comprehend the full merit of the amazing sketches in “You Know Me, Al”; I doubt that anyone who has not given close and deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how magnificently Lardner handled it. He had more imitators, I suppose, than any other American writer of the first third of the century, but had he any actual rivals? If so, I have yet to hear of them. They all tried to write the speech of the streets as adeptly and as amusingly as he wrote it, and they all fell short of him; the next best was miles and miles behind him. And they were all inferior in observation, in sense of character, in shrewdness and insight. His studies, to be sure, are never very profound; he made no attempt to get at the primary springs of human motive; all his people share the same amiable stupidity, the same transparent vanity, the same shallow swinishness; they are all human Fords in bad repair, and alike at bottom. But if he thus confined himself to the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations of that surface were extraordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant – that the character he finally set before us, however roughly articulated as to bones, was so astoundingly realistic as to epidermis that the effect is indistinguishable from that of life itself. The old man in “The Golden Honeymoon” is not merely well done: he is perfect. And so is the girl in “Some Like Them Cold.” And so, even, is the idiotic Frank X. Farrell in “Alibi Ike” – an extravagant grotesque and yet quite real from glabella to calcaneus.

Lardner knew more about the management of the short story than all of its professors. His stories are built very carefully, and yet they seem to be wholly spontaneous, and even formless. He grasped the primary fact that no conceivable ingenuity can save a story that fails to show a recognizable and interesting character; he knew that a good character sketch is always a good story, no matter what its structure. Perhaps he got less attention than he ought to have got, even among the anti-academic critics, because his people were all lowly boors. For your reviewer of books, like every other sort of American is always vastly impressed by fashionable pretensions. He belongs to the white collar class of labor, and shares its prejudices. He can’t rid himself of the feeling that Edith Wharton, whose people have butlers, was a better novelist than Willa Cather, whose people, in the main, dine in their kitchens.