Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Donald Elder's Biography Helps Solve Mysteries of Ring Lardner IT is surprising that someone didn't get around to writing a biography of Ring Lardner before...
...Elder is quick to quarrel with exaggerations of this kind...
...On the strength of the evidence given, one almost has to say that the good stories were an accident, but that is only a way of admitting how little we understand...
...He has been quite solidly there on the literary scene and well worth taking a look at...
...The second mystery is Lardner's misanthropy, about which Mr...
...There is a third aspect of Lardner's character that is easier to understand, and that is his preoccupation with money...
...It is to Mr...
...Much of the ironic effect of Lardner's best stories comes from this way he has of reproducing speech when it is being used either as a weapon or as pure self-expression...
...One feels, indeed, that he wishes he could prove that Lardner took a cheerful view of his fellow men, but his respect for facts will not let him go to that extreme...
...Whatever he wrote, he was a careful craftsman, and he was proud of his craftsmanship...
...His father had once been a wealthy man, and he married into a well-to-do family...
...But Mr...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks Donald Elder's Biography Helps Solve Mysteries of Ring Lardner IT is surprising that someone didn't get around to writing a biography of Ring Lardner before Donald Elder undertook the job...
...He had another quality that he was proud of--his knowledge of the way people really talk...
...That was the kind of writer Lardner wanted to be...
...At the time of his marriage he was a hard-working and not particularly well paid newspaperman, but soon afterward he sold the first of his baseball stories, and the money began to roll in...
...The facts he has amassed he has set down soberly, without resort to fictional devices and with no urge to prove anything whatever...
...No one has more successfully rendered speech in its non-communicative aspects: Lardner's characters talk to one another less often than they talk at one another, and a good deal of the time they just talk...
...He himself does not seem to have had much capacity for judging what work was good and what was trivial...
...He lived lavishly, and he was happy to take on any kind of hack work that enabled him to spend on the scale he aspired to...
...The facts present two mysteries...
...He had faithfully studied the common mistakes in grammar and pronunciation, but more important than his mastery of certain mannerisms was his understanding of the varied functions of talk...
...Donald Elder's Ring Lardner (Doubleday, $4.75) is a substantial, painstaking job...
...Because he sometimes writes clumsily, quotes a good deal of trivial material, and occasionally slips into banality, the book is not a pleasure to read, but the facts are here...
...Elder's credit that he does not produce some pat psychological theory, for one has only to think a little bit about the history of alcoholism through the ages to realize how inadequate most contemporary theorizing is...
...From his letters it would appear that he worked harder over musical-comedy lyrics than he did over his best stories...
...Although Lardner seems to have had an uncommonly happy childhood, and to have found satisfaction in his marriage, he wrote a great deal about the miseries of married life, and even the less bitter stories emphasize the inadequacies of the human animal in its social relationships...
...Scott Fitzgerald, with an eye on his own problems, thought that Lardner had debased himself and blamed both his misanthropy and his drive toward self-destruction on the disgust that he felt with himself...
...Elder doesn't seem able to make up his mind...
...Elder has examined even the obscurest of Lardner's writings, has talked with his friends, and has been able to consult and to quote from many of his personal letters...
...Elder does suggest that Lardner was fundamentally a shy and sensitive person, and this is probably true as far as it goes, but one feels sure there is more to be said...
...Lardner himself questioned the enthusiasm with which some of his admirers portrayed him as a second Dean Swift, and Mr...
...If his work has never been fashionable in quite the way Scott Fitzgerald's was a few years ago, he has never been wholly out of fashion...
...In the '20s many writers saw no incompatibility between literary and financial ambitions, and some of them succeeded both in writing well and in making and spending a lot of money...
...Only a small part of what Lardner wrote is first-rate, but he remains an important figure in American literature...
...Elder seems to be right in maintaining that Lardner was quite free from self-pity...
...In the first place, there is the record of Lardner's compulsive drinking, which was a problem to him during a good part of his life, interfered with his work in his later years, and helped to bring on his early death...
...During his lifetime, Lardner was not only popular but also, at least in certain circles, highly esteemed, and his reputation has held up well in the 23 years since his death...
Vol. 39 • July 1956 • No. 27
