***Out In The 1920s Baseball Night- Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Book Review

The Ring Lardner Reader, including You Know Me Al, Ring Lardner

The first paragraph of this review was written for the series of stories in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me, Al that is contained in the present book under review as well. In addition to You Know Me, Al there some other classic baseball stories here, particularly Alibi Ike (about a ball player, of course, who can’t seem to do anything except blush and well alibi when he is not perfect, even when he is not perfect with a little blush romance thrown in which throws the whole team into fits) and My Roomy (naturally about the screwball characters, and they were, if the stories about them are half-true) that can be covered by the comments in the first paragraph. The other, non-baseball, stories in this book are reviewed in the second paragraph.

At one time early in the first part of the 20^th century there was no question that baseball was the American pastime. Now eclipsed by, ah, texting or some such thing, okay, maybe football. That was a time when the name Ring Lardner was well known in sports writing and literary circles. The sports writing part was easy because that was his beat. The literary part is much harder to recognize but clearly the character of Jack Keefe in You Know Me, Al has become an American classic. Does one need to be a baseball fan to appreciate this work? Hell, no. We all know, in sports or otherwise, this Keefe guy, right?

You know the guy with some talent who has no problem, no problem at all, blaming the other guy, or happenstance, for mistakes while he (or she) is pure as the driven snow. That is the concept that drives these stories told in the form of letters to Al, his buddy back home. Back home in the heartland, the place of certain quintessential American values honored, perhaps, more in the breech than the observance. The language, the malapropisms and the schemes all evoke an earlier more innocent time in sport and society. I do not believe that you could create such a character based on today’s sport’s ethic. The athletes would have a spokesperson ‘spinning’ their take on the matters of the day for their respective clients. The only one that might come close is Nuke LaRouche in the movie Bull Durhambut as that movie progressed Nuke was getting ‘wise’. Read these stories, read them more than once on those hot stove winter nights between seasons.

There is no question that aside from a deft ear as a sportswriter that Ring Lardner also had an ear for the foibles and frustrations of the newly rising middle class of the post- World War I Midwestern heartland. This is not the land of Fitzgerald’s or Hemingway’s “Lost Generation” scripted in such works as The Great Gatsby, The Beautiful and The Damned, and The Sun Also Rises but of those left behind trying to scratch out an existence anyway they could in the first edition of go-go consumer America. However, rather than beat up on the ‘yokels’ straight up Lardner pokes and prods at their pretensions in a fairly harmless way, at least on the surface, but on re-reading these stories recently I found myself saying ‘ouch’ to the literary stabs in the backs that he thrust at his victims in stories like Gullible’s Travels (a title which aptly sums up my comment) and The Big Town where the small city ethos is smothered by the big one . Read on.