Word: lardners
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That is either here nor there, as Lardner's hard-spelling pitcher Jack Keefe wrote to his friend Al in Call for Mr. Keefe! Some dusting off is necessary, not for the benefit of the splendid Lardner, but for those hardship cases who have yet to become his readers. The two volumes at hand do the job agreeably...
Some Champions is a collection of Lardner's sketches and short stories, not quite his best work but in no sense resembling the failed first drafts and wadded-up fragments that literary trash sifters sometimes tie like tin cans to the reputations of the famous dead. All the pieces have been published, but none have been collected-some late works, because Lardner died before getting around to putting them between hard covers, and some early pieces, because he didn't know where they were. He never made carbons, according to his son Ring, Jr., and he fired...
Amiable Lies. There are a couple of funny baseball stories in Some Champions. Lardner's hero is the stalwart Keefe, who has a nice smile and a gorgeous head of bone. He brags in a letter to Friend Al that he is in line for a big raise if he beats the Red Sox. The date of the story-roughly 1918-can be guessed from the fact that the Boston pitcher is Babe Ruth, who had not yet switched to the Yankees and the outfield, and from the size of the big raise-$600, bringing Keefe to the affluence...
...Some of Lardner's best work appeared as a kind of joshing reminiscence, in which amiable lies were the form and truths of varying bitterness were the content. In What I Ought to of Learnt in School, published in the American Magazine in 1923, the writer reports bleakly of his schooling in Niles, Mich.: "Well I don't know how it is now, but in those times practally all the teachers in high school was members of the fair sex. Some of them was charter members." That throwaway second sentence, evoking algebra-spouting harpies of deadly rectitude, would...
Three-Day Bat. The humor is more rueful in a short piece called XRay, written for The New Yorker in 1930. By that time Lardner's health was failing. He was drinking heavily, though still writing lightly. At the end the author is being carted to a hospital, his Lardner tone still unmistakable: "In an ambulance they made you ride lying down, whereas you can take your choice in a taxi...