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PARTISAN REVIEW
faith, no revelations which ideas bring--even wrong ideas, no romantic
yearnings. But Lardner was interested in sports. And Fitzgerald regretted
that, "during those years when most men of promise achieve an adult
education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of
a few dozen illiterates playing a boy's game."
Yet it was this early immersion in the pre-World War I world of
baseball, the training camps, bull-pens, press rooms, gambling houses,
cheap hotels, that provided him with the materials for his work. Mr. El–
der quotes from an interesting mixture of sense and nonsense of Virginia
Woolfs. She is praising Lardner above Sinclair Lewis for getting at
the essentially American: "It is no coincidence that the best of Lard–
ner's stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner's
interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the
American writer; it has given a clue, a centre, a meetmg place for the
diverse activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no
tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English
brother." There is no doubt that baseball is profound; but of course
there was a viable society in Niles, Michigan, and in Chicago, and Mr.
Elder-from Niles-shows this. And it is this which makes up the
"America" which Mrs. Woolf
discerned in
the baseball stories. It is
not the humor which interests her, and
certainly
no: baseball
itself,
since
she
is
an Englishwoman, but the total
vision,
sparse as
it is.
And
though
it
seems
like
a grotesque, Lardner joke to say so, the explana–
tion probably lies in the fact that in the early, longer baseball things he
did convey a larger picture through a device known these days--even
in the minor leagues-as covert pastoral. In writing of his "bushers,"
his caddies, his boobies, and their odd removal from the workaday world,
their complex slang and simple, passionate, narcissistic, and swinish lives,
their defeats by love and by wise and good umpires and managers (and
wives), he was perhaps trying to put down some desperate, Chicago
version of the pastoral. It would explain some things about this provincial
and conservative writer-why his satire was transmuted in some places
and so harsh in others, why his jokes worked in some contexts and
fell so flat in others. The fact is that he really cared for his goofs and
boobs, as Elder points out, in defending him from Fadiman, who de–
clared Lardner a "born hater." In the '30s his work was bound to
be misunderstood. In any case, it seems to me that early work like
You Know Me Al
expresses Lardner more fully. One must hurry to
add that it is not his picture of baseball life which one remembers
with greatest pleasure, but hilarious passages of dialogue, such as in
Alibi Ike
and the short Nonsense Plays, and these can be found all
through his work.
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