I'd Hate Myself in the Morning. Lardner Ring
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to me, to say that we did the only thing we could do under the circumstances, short of behaving like complete shits.
It’s hard in the year 2000 to recall my thoughts as I sat on the witness stand. Like the others who testified with me, I couldn’t yet know just how much liberty and property and comfort I was going to lose and for how long. None of the very tangible and personal consequences were clear to me as I leaned into the microphone, hoping only to be heard over the hubbub and to make a few telling points before the chairman cut me off. But I could begin to sense what has become more obvious with the years: The triumph of reason was going to take a little longer than I had imagined.
The story of how I came to be a political prisoner goes back to my earliest years, when I displayed a compelling urge to shock people with unorthodox opinions, extravagant boasts, and wild exaggerations. At the breakfast table one morning when I was three, I threatened to commit mass murder. “If you say one more word to me,” I announced, addressing my next older brother, Jim, “I’ll kill you, Mr. Jimmie, and Mr. John [my eldest brother] and Mr. Daddy and Mr. Baby Brother.”
To which Jim responded, “Oh, nobody could kill baby brother bees he’s too little.”
“I’ll kill him because I’ll bake him in the oven and kill him,” I continued. “That’s what I think I’ll do.”
Those were our exact words as set down by our father in his Chicago Tribune column, “In the Wake of the News,” where he frequently described the family conversations at our house in Evanston and then, as we prepared to relocate to New York in the spring of 1919, in our apartment on Buena Avenue. We were moving east so that Dad, already known nationally for his You Know Me Al stories in The Saturday Evening Post, could write a syndicated column that would run in a hundred and fifty newspapers and make his one of the best-known names in America.
A skillful pianist and amateur songwriter, he was blessed with perfect pitch and an astonishing ability to render the way semiliterate Americans spoke and wrote. The combination of that remarkable ear and plentiful opportunities to listen to baseball players and other athletes as a sportswriter had produced a literary style all his own: “And he give her a look that you could pour on a waffle,” says the cigar-salesman narrator of “The Big Town” about the man who has fallen for his sister-in-law. Elsewhere in the same collection of stories (which were, along with You Know Me Al, as close as my father came to writing a novel), we learn about a pricey hotel on Long Island where “They even got a barber and a valet, but you can’t get a shave while he’s pressing your clothes, so it’s pretty near impossible for a man to look their best at the same time.”
My father didn’t want me named Ring and used his column to apologize for it:
When you are nicknamed Ringworm by the humorists and wits,
When people put about you till they drive you into fits.
When funny folk say, “Ring, ring off,” until they make you ill,
Remember that your poor old Dad tried hard to name you Bill.
Having his name made me particularly aware of how well known it was. During his lifetime (he died in 1933 at the age of forty-eight) and for a considerable time afterward, the response I got when introduced was either, “You’re related to the writer?” or “You’re the writer?” But by the nineteen-forties and fifties, the recognition was beginning to fade, and eventually people started saying, “Ring? What kind of a name is that?”
An impressive-looking man, he had high cheekbones and deep-set eyes and stood two inches over six feet tall, which was unusual in his generation. He didn’t talk a lot and almost never raised his voice, but what he had to say was always worth listening to and sometimes very funny—the more so because he didn’t laugh as he was saying it. H.L. Mencken, Virginia Woolf, and Edmund Wilson, among others, saw him as a literary pioneer; nevertheless, Dad thought of himself primarily as a newspaperman, and it was his standards of journalism that he sought to pass on to his sons. With four New York papers delivered to the house every day, mealtime conversation was often about which one had handled a particular story best. Only my brother John had actually begun work as a reporter before Dad died, but the rest of us also got our first jobs on New York papers, and we all benefited from his instruction.
His continued insistence on identifying himself with journalism was part of a general refusal to take himself or his writing too seriously. “Are you a humorist?” I remember asking him when I was a child, based on something I had read.
“If I said ‘yes’ to that,” he answered, “it would be like if somebody asked a ballplayer what position he played and he said ‘I’m a great third baseman.’”
In 1924, when F. Scott Fitzgerald sold Max Perkins of Charles Scribner’s Sons on the idea of a collection of Ring Lardner short stories, Dad had no copies of most of them and couldn’t remember where some had been published. After they had been dug out of various libraries and assembled, he accepted Scott’s title, How to Write Short Stories. Instead of a serious introduction, though, he wrote: “A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. Personally I have found it a good scheme to not even sign my name to the story, and when I have got it sealed up in its envelope and stamped and addressed, I take it to some town where I don’t live and mail it from there. The editor has no idea who wrote the story, so how can he send it back? He is in a quandary.” Each story came with an explanation attached. “A Frame Up,” actually about a boxing prodigy, was described as “a stirring romance of the Hundred Years’ War, detailing the adventures in France and Castile of a pair of well-bred weasels.”
The year that first collection was published, my father offered his take on the European Dada movement, in the form of a play (never theatrically performed, to my knowledge) called I Gaspiri, or The Upholsterers:
ACT I
A public street in a bathroom. A man named Tupper has evidently just taken a bath. A man named Brindle is now taking a bath. A man named Newburn comes out of the faucet which has been left running. He exits through the exhaust. Two strangers to each other meet on the bath mat.
FIRST STRANGER
Where was you born?
SECOND STRANGER
Out of wedlock.
FIRST STRANGER
That’s a mighty pretty country around there.
SECOND STRANGER
Are you married?
FIRST STRANGER
I don’t know. There’s a woman living with me, but I can’t place her.
(Three outsiders named Klein go across the stage three times. They think they are in a public library. A woman’s cough is heard offstage left.)
A NEW CHARACTER
Who is that cough?
TWO MOORS
That is my mother. She died a little while ago in a haphazard way.
A GREEK
And what a woman she was!
(The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the passage of a week.)
The mind that could conceive such disjointed nonsense was the same one that prided itself on its accuracy in reporting factual events. In his account of a World Series game or a conversation among his sons, Dad was equally scrupulous in providing the reader with his best recollection of the acts and words he had witnessed. In these further excerpts from his Chicago columns, I am now three and a half and known as “Bill.”
IN THE WAKE OF THE NEWS