The Perfect Ear

...The hacked-out formula fiction notwithstanding, he reminds us, Ring was "a master of the miniature...

...The chief value of Yardley's biography lies, in fact, in his recalling for us that Lardner was a pioneer in setting down the American language as it is actually used...

...Why did he become a drinker...

...If Yardley tends to make too much of Ring's journalism and nonsense plays, one must still be grateful to him for reintroducing us to the pleasures of Lardner's most brilliant stories...

...The biographer offers abundant details and anecdotes that bring Lardner to life, yet leaves some important aspects of the man a mystefy...

...Surely, Mrs...

...Lardner's love of music set her son on his quixotic quest to be a successful songwriter...

...In Ring, Lardner emerges as a decent, likeable, hard-working craftsman who clearly possessed a fine and original American comic voice...

...Editors demanded Lardner's work...

...But Yardley does capture the nuances of small-town life in Niles, Michigan, where Lardner was born into a wealthy family in 1885 and had a sheltered childhood, replete with private nursemaids and tutors...

...Lardner may have written for the day and the dollar, but he simply won't go away...

...Confronted with the relative paucity of first-rate Lardner fiction, Yardley apparently feels obliged to count this salaried work in the enduring Lardner canon...

...Yet if the economic motive was to some extent what kept him from tackling the novel, there was also his training as a reporter...

...In addition, there are those troublesome gems-like "Haircut" and "The Golden Honeymoon"-that continue to turn up in short-story anthologies...

...Yardley describes (he naive, crude and sentimental ballplayers well, enabling us to understand Ring's fascination with them, how he could have felt compelled to transform them into the Alibi Ikes and Jack Keefes of his fiction...

...He says Pretty Lucky Boy but I will get you next time...

...In this interesting biography, Yard-ley, a perceptive critic and a newspaperman himself, defends Lardner against the detractors...

...Yardley correctly observes that Ring's perfect ear "made writing so natural to him that he rarely had to wrench anything from deep inside, and as a result was rarely moved to...

...Virginia Woolf, H. L. Mencken and others praised it...

...But it was to no avail...

...I says Yes you will...

...Although he already possessed what Yardley calls "an aristocrat's reserve made all the greater by a shy and sensitive man's need for protection," within three years he was a sports reporter on Chicago's leading daily, the Tribune...

...Ring's mother was the lasting influence...

...Yardley is probably right in believing that Ring had "the journalist's fear of taking on something so long and complex and structurally unclear...

...The sportswriter emerged as a short-story writer in 1914 with the sale of "A Busher's Letter Home," the first of the You Know Me Al pieces, to the Saturday Evening Post...

...The response to this and ensuing tales of Jack Keefe, the ballplayer who writes letters to "Friend Al" back home in Bedford, Indiana, was immediate and startling...

...Even now, many critics apparently would prefer to forget this alcoholic newspaperman who wrote short stories on the side-for the money!-except that he had considerable influence on Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson, Nathanael West, plus other major writer...

...By the 1920s, several story collections and a nationally syndicated column had made Lardner a celebrated figure, with a following that included the Algonquin group...

...Toward the end, a semiinvalid because of tuberculosis, Lardner tried to earn what he could with the least effort...

...Their four-year correspondence, quoted at length by Yardley, reveals a very proper but increasingly passionate romance that had to be conducted by mail: Ring was continually on the road with baseball and football teams, and during this period frequently shifted sportswriting jobs...

...What were the true lasting effects of the deformed foot that necessitated Lardner's wearing a leg brace until he was 11 ? Neither Yardley nor Ring Lardner Jr., in his recem' fgntfly memoir, The Lardners, adequately explains Ring's dependence on alcohol or explores the possible impact of his handicap...

...There was much formula fiction, some collaboration with George S. Kaufman and George M. Cohan in that continuing and elusive search for success in the theater, and a stint as radio critic for the New Yorker...

...He hit it all right but it was a line drive right into Chase's hands...

...This Ring did mar-velously well...

...For Ring and his family were living the high life in their Long Island enclave, and short fiction paid off immediately...

...In clubhouses and Pullman cars, Lardner met the real-life prototypes of characters who would say: "This should 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 alltogether but what do I care about my record Al...

...In 1927, Ring's fee from Cosmopolitan was $4,500 per story...

...Instead of giveing him a slow one like I said I was going I handed him a spit-ter...

...He died in 1933 at the age of 48...

...Listen, for example, to Keefe tell of facing Ty Cobb: "Cobb came pranceing up like he always does and yells Give me that slow one Boy...

...After graduating from high school in 1901, Ring wandered through a series of odd jobs until, by pure chance, he found himself a reporter on the South Bend Times...

...In those days it was "a country boy's game played by hillbillies and urban rejects," the people who provided Lardner with colorful copy throughout his journalistic and literary career...

...And it is time, he suggests, to stop harping that Lardner was basically a journalist, refused to take his work too seriously, and never wrote the novel everyone demanded of him: "Ring deserves to be judged, whether favorably or not, for what he did, not for what others expected him to do...

...For the next six years he wrote a column that Yardley numbers "among the extraordinary accomplishments of American journalism...

...We learn little about his father, a quiet, genial man who was to lose the family's money in a disastrous speculation...

...Scott Fitzgerald, his neighbor in Great Neck, New York, urged him on, as did their Scribner's editor, Maxwell Perkins...

...Writing a daily newspaper column is certainly a demanding task, but Lardner's collection of baseball gossip, parodies, letters, nonsense plays, short stories, nursery tales, etc.?especially judging from the samples quoted here-hardly qualify for such praise...

...She seems responsible for his quietly playful spirit-and, perhaps, for his inability to make a serious commitment to fulfilling his talents...

...Indeed, they tended to overpraise it, so taken were they by this young writer who had given voice to the American vernacular...

...But I fooled him...

...Reviewed by Joseph Barbato Contributor, "Smithsonian," "Change," "National Observer" As Jonathan Yardley observes, Ring Lardner was often dismissed in the early 1920s as "a talented but limited Midwestern sports writer...

...With Ellis pregnant, soon after their 1911 marriage, Ring needed more money and returned to the Tribune...

...Yardley also subverts the familiar complaint that his subject was a mere sportswriter...

...Don't be what you are, the literati began to tell him in 1924," reports Yardley, "be what we want you to be-write a novel...

...The beginning of Lardner's newspaper career coincided with his courtship of Ellis Abbot, a Smith student...

...So I says All right...

...Granting that baseball was "at or near the very core" of Lardner's existence (at least until his disillusionment over the Black Sox scandal of 1919), the author devotes a delightful early chapter to an account of the national pastime at the turn of the century...