So much for “An American Tragedy.” Hire your pastor to read the first volume for you. But don’t miss the second.
Ring Lardner
From FOUR MAKERS of TALES, PREJUDICES: FIFTH SERIES,
1926, pp. 49–56.
First printed in the American Mercury, July, 1924, pp. 376–77.
Lardner was born in 1885 and died in 1933
A FEW years ago a young college professor, eager to make a name for himself, brought out a laborious “critical” edition of “Sam Slick,” by Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, eighty-seven years after its first publication. It turned out to be quite unreadable—a dreadful series of archaic jocosities about varieties of Homo americanus long perished and forgotten, in a dialect now intelligible only to paleophilologists. Sometimes I have a fear that the same fate awaits Ring Lardner. The professors of his own days, of cóurse, were quite unaware of him, save perhaps as a low zany to be enjoyed behind the door. They would no more have ventured to whoop him up publicly and officially than their predecessors of 1880 would have ventured to whoop up Mark Twain, or their remoter predecessors of 1837 would have dared to say anything for Haliburton. In such matters the academic mind, being chiefly animated by a fear of sneers, works very slowly. So slowly, indeed, does it work that is usually works too late. By the time Mark Twain got into the text-books for sophomores two-thirds of his compositions had already begun to date; by the time Haliburton was served up as a sandwich between introduction and notes he was long dead. As I say, I suspect sadly that Lardner is doomed to go the same route. His stories, it seems to me, are superbly adroit and amusing; no other American of his generation, sober or gay, wrote better. But I doubt that they last: our grandchildren will wonder what they are about. It is not only, or even mainly, that the dialect that fills them will pass, though that fact is obviously a serious handicap in itself. It is principally that the people they depict will pass, that Lardner’s incomparable baseball players, pugs, song-writers, Elks, small-town Rotarians, and golf caddies were flittering figures of a transient civilization, and are doomed to be as puzzling and soporific, in the year 2000, as Haliburton’s Yankee clock peddler is today.
The fact—if I may assume it to be a fact—is certain not to be set against lardner’s account; on the contrary, it is, in its way, highly complimentary to him. For he deliberately applied himself, not to the anatomizing of the general human soul, but to the meticulous histological study of a few salient individuals of his time and nation, and he did it with such subtle and penetrating skills that one must belong to his time and nation to follow him. I doubt that anyone who is not familiar with professional ball players, intimately and at first hand, will ever comprehend the full merit of the amazing sketches in “You Know Me, Al”; I doubt that anyone who has not given close and deliberate attention to the American vulgate will ever realize how magnificently Lardner handled it. He had more imitators, I suppose, than any other American writer of the first third of the century, but had he any actual rivals? If so, I have yet to hear of them. They all tried to write the speech of the streets as adeptly and as amusingly as he wrote it, and they all fell short of him; the next best was miles and miles behind him. And they were all inferior in observation, in sense of character, in shrewdness and insight. His studies, to be sure, are never very profound; he made no attempt to get at the primary springs of human motive; all his people share the same amiable stupidity, the same transparent vanity, the same shallow swinishness; they are all human Fords in bad repair, and alike at bottom. But if he thus confined himself to the surface, it yet remains a fact that his investigations on that surface were extraordinarily alert, ingenious and brilliant—that the character he finally set before us, however roughly articulated as to bones, was so as toundingly realistic as to epidermis that the effect is indistinguishable from that of life itself. The old man in “The Golden Honeymoon” is not merely well done: he is perfect. And so is the girl in “Some Like Them Cold.” And so, even, is the idiotic Frank X. Farrell in “Alibi Ike” – an extravagant grotesque and yet quite real from glabella to calcaneus.
Lardner knew more about the management of the short story than all of its professors. His stories are built very carefully, and yet they seem to be wholly spontaneous, and even formless. He grasped the primary fact that no conceivable ingenuity can save a story that fails to show a recognizable and interesting character; he knew that a good character sketch is always a good story, no matter what its structure. Perhaps he got less attention than he ought to have got, even among the anti-academic critics, because his people were all lowly boors. For your reviewer of books, like every other sort of American, is always vastly impressed by fashionable pretensions. He belongs to the white collar class of labor, and shares its prejudices. He can’t rid himself of the feeling that Edith Wharton, whose people have butlers, was a better novelist than Willa Cather, whose people, in the main, dine in their kitchens. He lingers under the spell of Henry James, whose most humble character, at any rate of the later years, was at least an Englishman, and hence superior. Lardner, so to speak, hit such critics under the belt. He not only filled his stories with people who read the tabloids, said “Shake hands with my friend,” and bought diamond rings on the instalment plan; he also showed them having a good time in the world, and quite devoid of inferiority complexes. They amused him sardonically, but he did not pity them. A fatal error! The moron, perhaps, has a place in fiction, as in life, but he is not to be treated too easily and casually. It must be shown that he suffers tragically because he cannot abandon the plow to write poetry, or the sample-case to study for opera. Lardner was more realistic. If his typical hero has a secret sorrow it is that he is too old to take up osteopathy and too much in dread of his wife to venture into bookmaking.
In his later years a sharply acrid flavor got into Lardner’s buffoonery. His baseball players and fifth-rate pugilists, beginning in his first stories as harmless jackasses, gradually converted themselves into loathsome scoundrels. Turn, for example, to the sketches in the volume called “The Love Nest.” The first tells the story of a cinema queen married to a magnate of the films. On the surface she seems to be nothing but a noodle, but underneath there is a sewer; the woman is such a pig that she makes one shudder. Again, he investigated another familiar type: the village practical joker. The fellow, in one form or other, has been laughed at since the days of Aristophanes. But here is a mercilessly realistic examination of his dunghill humor, and of its effects upon decent people. A third figure is a successful theatrical manager: he turns out to have the professional competence of a phrenologist and the honor of a highjacker. A fourth is a writer of popular songs: stealing other men’s ideas has become so fixed a habit with him that he comes to believe that he has an actual right to them. A fourth is a trained nurse—but I spare you this dreadful nurse. The rest are bores of the homicidal type. One gets the effect, communing with the whole gang, of visiting a museum of anatomy. They are as shocking as what one encounters there—but in every detail they are unmistakably real.
Lardner concealed his new savagery, of course, beneath his old humor. It did not flag. No man writing among us had greater skill at the more extravagant varieties of jocosity. He saw startling and revelatory likeness between immensely disparate things, and he was full of pawky observations and bizarre comments. Two baseball players are palavering, and one of them, Young Jake, is boasting of his conquests during Spring practise below the Potomac. “Down South ain’t here!” replies the other. “Those dames in some of those swamps, they lose their head when they see a man with shoes on!” The two proceed to the discussion of a third imbecile, guilty of some obscure tort. “Why,” inquires Young Jake, “didn’t you break his nose or bust him in the chin?” “His nose was already broke,” replied the other, “and he didn’t have no chin.” Such wise cracks seem easy to devise. Broadway diverts itself by manufacturing them. They constitute the substance of half the town shows. But in those made by Lardner there is something far more than mere facile
humor: they are all rigidly in character, and they illuminate that character. Few American novelists, great or small, have had character more firmly in hand. Lardner did not see situations; he saw people. And what people! They are all as revolting as so many Methodist bishops, and they are all as thoroughly American.
Huneker: a Memory
From PREJUDICES: THIRD SERIES, 1922, pp. 65–83. First printed in the Century, June, 1921, pp. 191–97. Huneker died Feb. 9, 1921. My first writing about him was a review of his Egoists, in the Smart Set, June, 1909. In Oct., 1913, I gave a long review to The Pathos of Distance, and include a discussion of his work in general. In July, 1914, I reviewed a new edition of Old-Fogy, and in July, 1915, I led my Smart Set article with New Cosmopolis, under the title of The Prometheus of the Western World. In Dec., 1915, I reviewed Ivory, Apes and Peacocks; in Dec., 1917, Unicorns; in May, 1920, Bedouins; in Dec., 1920, Steeplejack; in Feb., 1922, Variations (published posthumously), and in Jan., 1923, the bowdlerized edition of Huneker’s letters brought out by his widow. In 1929 I edited a volume of selections from his writings, entitled Essays by James Huneker
THERE was a stimulating aliveness about him always, an air of living eagerly and a bit recklessly, a sort of defiant resiliency. In his very frame and from something provocative showed itself—an insolent singularity, obvious to even the most careless glance. That Caligulan profile of his was more than simply unusual in a free republic, consecrated to good works; to a respectable American, encountering it in the lobby of the Metropolitan, it must have suggested inevitably the dark enterprises and illicit metaphysics of a Heliogabalus. More, there was always something rakish and defiant about his hat—it was too white, or it curled in the wrong way, or a feather peeped from the band—and a hint of antinomianism in his cravat. Yet more, he ran to exotic tastes in eating and drinking, preferring occult goulashes and risi-bisis to honest American steaks, and great floods of Pilsner to the harsh beverages of God-fearing men. Finally, there was his talk, that cataract of sublime trivialities: gossip lifted to the plane of the gods, the unmentionable bedizened with an astounding importance, and even profundity.
In his early days, when he performed the tonal and carnal prodigies that he liked to talk of afterward, I was at nurse, and too young to have any traffic with him. When I encountered him at last he was in the high flush of the middle years,1 and had already become a tradition in the little world that critics inhabit. We sat down to luncheon at one o’clock at Lüchow’s, his favorite refuge and rostrum to the end. At six, when I had to go, the waiter was hauling in his tenth (or was it twentieth?) Seidel of Pilsner, and he was bringing to a close Prestissimo the most amazing monologue that these ears (up to that time) had ever funneled into this consciousness. What a stew, indeed! Berlioz and the question of the clang-tint of the viola, the psychopathological causes of the suicide of Tschaikowsky, why Nietzsche had to leave Sils Maria between days in 1887, the echoes of Flaubert in Joseph Conrad (then but newly dawned), the precise topography of the warts of Liszt, how Frau Cosima saved Wagner from the libidinous Swedish baroness, what to drink when playing Chopin, what Ceézanne thought of his disciples, the defects in the structure of “Sister Carrie,” Anton Seidl and the musical union, the complex love affairs of Gounod, the varying talents and idiosyncrasies of Lillian Russell’s earlier husbands, whether a girl educated at Vassar could ever really learn to love, the exact composition of chicken paprika, the correct tempo of the Vienna waltz, the style of William Dean Howells, what George Moore said about German bath rooms, the true inwardness of the affair between D’Annunzio and Duse, the origin of the theory that all oboe players are crazy, Ibsen’s loathing of Norwegians, the best remedy for Rhine wine Katzenjammer, how to play Brahms, the sheer physical impossibility of getting Dvořák drunk, the genuine last words of Walt Whitman …
I left in a sort of fever, and it was a couple of days later before I began to sort out my impressions, and formulate a coherent image. Was the man allusive in his books—so allusive that popular report credited him with the actual manufacture of authorities? Then he was ten times as allusive in his discourse—a veritable geyser of unfamiliar names, shocking epigrams in strange tongues, unearthly philosophies out of the backwaters of Scandinavia, Bulgaria, the Basque country. And did he, in his criticism, pass facilely from the author to the man, and from the man to his wife, and to the wives of his friends? Then at the Biertisch he began long beyond the point where the last honest wife gives up the ghost, and so, full tilt, ran into such complexities of adultery that a plain sinner could scarcely follow him. I try to give you, ineptly and grotesquely, some notion of the talk of the man, but I must fail inevitably. It was, in brief, chaos, and chaos cannot be described. But it was chaos drenched in all the colors imaginable, chaos scored for an orchestra which made the great band of Berlioz seem like a fife and drum corps.
The real Huneker never got himself between covers, if one forgets “Old Fogy” and parts of “Painted Veils.” The volumes of his regular canon are made up, in the main, of articles written for the more intellectual magazines and newspapers of their era, and they are full of a conscious striving to qualify for respectable company. Huneker, always curiously modest, never got over the notion that it was a singular honor for a man such as he—a mere diurnal scribble, innocent of academic robes—to be published by such a publisher as Scribner. More than once, anchored at the beer-table, we discussed the matter at length, I always arguing that all the honor was enjoyed by Scribner. But Huneker, I believe in all sincerity, would not have it so, any more than he would have it that he was a better music critic than his two colleagues, the pedantic Krehbiel and the nonsensical Finck. This illogical modesty, of course, had its limits; it made him cautious about expressing himself, but it seldom led him into downright assumptions of false personality. No where in all his books will you find him doing the things that every right-thinking Anglo-Saxon critic is supposed to do—solemn essays on Coleridge and Addison, abysmal discussions of the relative merits of Schumann and Mendelssohn, horrible treatises upon the relations of Goethe to the Romantic Movement, dull scratchings in a hundred such exhausted and sterile fields. Enterprises of that sort were not for Huneker; he kept himself out of that black coat. But I am convinced that he always, had his own raiment pressed carefully before he left Lüchow’s for the temple of Athene—and maybe changed cravats, and put on a boiled shirt, and took the feather out of his hat. The simon-pure Huneker, the Huneker who was the true essence and prime motor of the more courtly Huneker—remained behind.
This real Huneker survives in conversations that still haunt the rafters on the beer-halls of two continents, and in a vast mass of newspaper impromptus, thrown off too hastily to be reduced to complete decorum, and in two books that stand outside the official canon, and yet contain the man himself as not even “Iconoclasts” or the Chopin book contains him, to wit, the “Old Fogy” aforesaid and the “Painted Veils” of his last year. Both were published, so to speak, out of the back door—the former by a music publisher in Philadelphia and the latter in a small and expensive edition for the admittedly damned. There is a chapter in “Painted Veils” that is Huneker to every last hitch of the shoulders and twinkle of the eye—the chapter in which the hero soliloquizes on art, life, immortality, and women—especially women. And there are half a dozen chapters in “Old Fogy” – superficially buffoonery, but how penetrating! how gorgeously flavored! how learned! – that come completely up to the same high specification. If I had to choose one Huneker book and give up all the others, I’d choose “Old Fogy” instantly. In it Huneker is utterly himself. In it the last trace of the pedagogue vanishes. Art is no longer, even by implication, a device for improving the mind. It is wholly a magnificent adventure.
That notion of it is what he brought into American criticism, and it is for that bringing that he will be remembered. Almost single-handed he overthrew the esthetic theory that had flourished in the United States since the death of Poe, and set up an utterly contrary esth
etic theory that had flourished in the United States since the death of Poe, and set up an utterly contrary esthetic theory in its place. If the younger men of today who followed him emancipated themselves from the Puritan esthetic, if the schoolmaster is now palpably on the defensive, and no longer the unchallenged assassin of the fine arts that he once was, then Huneker certainly deserves all the credit for the change. What he brought back from Paris was precisely the thing that was most suspected in the America of those days: the capacity for gusto. He had that capacity in a degree unmatched by any other critic. When his soul went adventuring among masterpieces it did not go in Sunday broadcloth; it went with vine leaves in its hair. The rest of the appraisers and criers-up could never rid themselves of the professorial manner. When they praised it was always with some hint of ethical, or, at all events, of cultural purpose; when they condemned that purpose was even plainer. The arts, to them, constituted a sort of school for the psyche; their aim was to discipline and mellow the spirit. But to Huneker their one aim was always to make the spirit glad—to set it, in Nietzsche’s phrase, to dancing with arms and legs. He had absolutely no feeling for extra-esthetic valuation. If a work of art that stood before him was honest, if it was original, if it was beautiful and thoroughly alive, then he was for it to his last corpuscle. What if it violated all the accepted canons? Then let the accepted canons go hang. What if it lacked all purpose to improve and lift up? Then so much the better. What if it shocked all right-feeling men, and made them blush and tremble? Then damn all men of right feeling forevermore.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 58