By way of preface, a few lines concerning the "critical consensus" regarding Ring Lardner (1885-1933). According to his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lardner wasted his talent writing about baseball, "[a] boy's game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure." John Berryman thought this was mostly wrong: Lardner was not primarily a "baseball writer" and, even if he had been, there's nothing inherently unserious about that. Berryman:
Yogi Berra is a boy? Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors, or focuses of national attention. They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere. Here they are, in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well. Now take a man who had always a dim view of life: this precariousness makes a good subject . . .
Berryman, however, expands on Fitzgerald's suggestion concerning a lack of seriousness by arguing that almost all Lardner's best-known works exhibit carelessness and a lack of anything like artistic purpose. Of "The Love Nest," for example, he says the story could only have been written in order to get a big check from The Saturday Evening Post and that whatever appeal it has is connected to the cheap thrill of a journalistic exposure. You think Hollywood big shots have happy marriages? Think again! (Berryman doesn't mention that almost no one who's able to read thinks that Hollywood big shots are known for their happy marriages.) Elizabeth Hardwick amplifies when she puzzles over "the element of self-destroying indifference" in the prefaces Lardner wrote to his story collections—collections, she says, that include a few great stories, which she enumerates: "My Roomy," "Champion," "Some Like Them Cold," "The Golden Honeymoon," "Haircut," and "Zone of Quiet." It would have been amusing, and a blow to the notion that there's a critical consensus on Lardner, if she'd included "The Love Nest."
"The Golden Honeymoon" is about the fiftieth anniversary wedding trip of a New Jersey couple to the Tampa-St. Pete area. The story is told in the voice, including the grammar and spelling and malapropisms, of the husband. This is a device Lardner, in one form or another, used over and over again. Some of his fictions are the diaries of the leading character; others, the principal's personal letters; here, the husband, back home in New Jersey, is setting down his semi-literate account of his Florida trip. In Huck Finn, the boy's natural, unliterary voice registers the truth about every situation he encounters. In Lardner, it's one more way in which the author registers disapproval. By their language you will know them to be rubes. I think I've noticed that the word "cringy" is these days enjoying an elevated currency, and is often used, for example, to describe social media posts in which the unselfconscious user accidentally reveals their own unflattering traits. That, I think, is how these stories of Lardner's may be said to "work." The reader has to see through the self-presentation to the truth, but it isn't hard.
The husband is of a type described by Miller in Death of a Salesman and by Lewis in Babbitt, a sort of Chamber of Commerce dunce. Here he is on the story's first page, when we're just getting to know him:
Yes, sir, we was married just fifty years ago the seventeenth day of last December and my daughter and son-in-law was over from Trenton to help us celebrate the Golden Wedding. My son-in-law is John H. Kramer, the real estate man. He made $12,000 one year and is pretty well thought of around Trenton: a good, steady, hard worker. The Rotarians was after him a long time to join, but he kept telling them his home was his club. But Edie finally made him join. That's my daughter.
These few sentences aren't a bad introduction to Lardner's subjects and methods, in "The Golden Honeymoon" and most everywhere else. Have you not heard of John H. Kramer—note the use of the middle initial, conferring dignity—"the real estate man?" In that case, you must not read the business section like a serious man. Lardner's characters are obsessed with attaining a level of social prestige—by how much money they make, by whom they marry and associate with, whatever is required to be esteemed by others. You can imagine that the son-in-law must be quite the specimen of humanity, given his income and that he can afford to put the Rotarians on the back burner. The Rotarians are like a running gag in "The Golden Honeymoon." When the celebrating couple finally gets to Tampa, the husband makes sure to mention if any of the other retirees he meets are Rotarians, and he never misses a social club meeting if a Rotarian is going to speak on a topic such as the current business climate. A couple less obvious things to mull over. Is it social climbing that moves Edie to make John H. Kramer join the Rotarians, or does she maybe just want the tedious drudge out of the house? I am surmising that if our narrator praises his son-in-law for being "a steady, hard worker," it means the guy's a tedious drudge, but Edie would know for sure. Also, who gets married a week before Christmas?—unless there are extenuating circumstances the Rotarian worshiper chooses not to divulge.
The question about what Edie makes of her husband prefigures one concerning what "Mother" (the narrator's designation for his wife) makes of her husband. For he is a manifest drudge, and she's been married to him for fifty years. That's a long time to listen to his patter. It doesn't seem possible, but in Florida there occurs a plot twist that places him in a more ridiculous light. By chance, they meet some fellow vacationing septuagenarians—a Michigan veterinarian who more than fifty years ago had been the narrator's rival for Mother's hand, and his wife. Naturally, the narrator attributes his former rival's long-ago relocation in Michigan to humiliation over having not been chosen by Mother. Naturally, the narrator makes invidious comparisons between his former rival's white beard and his own more youthful looks. Naturally, the narrator thinks that the Michigander did not make as good a match as he did. The problem with the vet's wife, the narrator informs us, is that she talks too much and brags about her kids, which is likely true but of course it's definitely true about him. This is where college freshmen write "Irony" in the margin of their anthology.
Absurdly, these two men reenact their courtship rivalry from a half century ago. It seems that the vet and his wife are at more ease financially—their lodging situation, the restaurants they favor—and you can imagine the pain this causes our narrator. He makes it unintentionally plain while ostensibly criticizing the other fellow's lack of thrift. When the couples play five hundred, opposite spouses are partners, and the Michigander and Mother always win. They then joke about being "a winning team," a detail the narrator cannot prevent himself from noting. He begins lobbying for competitions at which he excels, the main one being checkers, a game whose name is virtually synonymous with simplicity. His victory of fifty years ago is nothing for him now and, notwithstanding an ability to maintain a tone of chatty ease, his irritation radiates. In the presence of the women, he says something rude to the Michigan man, whose name is Hartsell (the narrator has hurt his thumb while losing a game of horseshoes):
Well, my thumb was giving me considerable pain and I felt kind of out of sorts and I guess maybe I forgot myself, but anyway, when we was about through playing Hartsell made the remark that he wouldn't never lose a game of cards if he could always have Mother for a partner.
So I said:
"Well, you had a chance fifty years ago to always have her for a partner, but you wasn't man enough to keep her."
The Hartsells are offended and thereafter avoid the narrator and his wife, whose vacation days, like the story, are anyway coming to an end. But not only the Hartsells are offended: the narrator's wife stops talking to him. His annoyance extends to her, so in order that there might be a happy ending she has to make a conciliatory move—which she does, by comparing Hartsell unfavorably to the man she married.
Usually in Lardner, everything is obvious and there is no one to cheer for. In a fairly typical situation, there is "romantic interest" between a cad and an attractive woman alert to the possibilities for getting ahead. They mutually exploit one another and the reader is obliged to hate them both, along with whatever supporting cast might be occasionally hustled on and then off the stage to advance the cause of trivial villainy. What I like about "The Golden Honeymoon" is the suggestion, however faint, that Mother has been "managing" this dummy for fifty years. It's her penance for having married him. At one point in the story, the narrator is running down Hartsell's wife, cataloging her faults, when he sees fit to register her response:
"You are getting too cranky. Maybe she does talk a little too much but she is good hearted. And Frank is always good company."
This is a rare instance in the fiction of Ring Lardner: a human being plausibly defended by another human being, who credits the accused with having "a good heart." The story also succeeds, I think, as a quietly desolating account of the wan fun to be enjoyed among retirees in Florida.