According to my parents, when I was first old enough to express wishes at Christmas or as my birthday approached, I always asked for "a book and a ball," which shows I guess that at least some people don't change much after they're three years old. Naturally, I got a lot of sports books as gifts, and I have to say that most of them were a disappointment. The fiction was corny and unrealistic; the biographies were worshipful; the histories as sanitary as the bios. Babe Ruth keeps his promise to hit a home run for a sick boy in the hospital! I read them all anyway, repeatedly. When I got older, I found my way to grittier fare, like Instant Replay, Ball Four, and Foul (about the basketball player, Connie Hawkins). I think I liked them mainly because they seemed like great snags of phlegm in an apparently bottomless can of whitewash.
The disappointments persisted, however. I read and loved a novel by Bernard Malamud, The Assistant, and so was really eager to consume his "baseball novel" called The Natural, which turned out to be a colossal bore. I suppose mainly it just wasn't what I expected, since I was interested in baseball as baseball, the game itself, whereas in the novel it's just a kind of vehicle for the delivery of an American Arthurian legend—this probably isn't fair, the only thing I remember for sure is being bored. The movie starring Robert Redford is also dull and it's possible that one, the movie or the book, is more oppressive than the other and that I'm conflating the two.
Ring Lardner is who I should have loved. I reacted against the phony elevation of sports and sports stars and no one more savagely knocked down the pedestal erected for them than Lardner. To give a taste, here are a few sentences from a 5-page essay on Lardner by Elizabeth Hardwick, a sure guide to any topic she ever took up:
[H]is subjects are dishonesty, social climbing, boastfulness, and waste. . . . Lardner's characters have every mean fault, but they lack the patience to do much with their meanness. The busher is boastful and stingy, and yet quite unable, for all his surface shrewdness, to discover his real place in the scheme of things. He is always being dropped by the women he had boasted about and all his stinginess cannot help to manage his affairs. Lardner's stories are filled with greedy, grasping people who nevertheless go bankrupt. . . . Vanity, greed, and cruel humor are the themes of Lardner's stories. The lack of self-knowledge is made up for by a dizzy readiness with cheap alibis. No group or class seems better than another; there is a democracy of cheapness and shallowness. . . . "Haircut" is one of the cruelest pieces of American fiction. Even Lardner seems to have felt some need for relief from the relentless evil of the smalltown joker and so he has him killed in the end. This cruel story is just about the only one that has the contrast of decent people preyed upon by a maniac. . . . [Lardner] wrapped his dreadful events in a comic language, as you would put insecticide in a bright can.
I say I should have loved him, but if, as Hardwick suggests, the author himself could not bear the "relentless evil" of his fictions, why shouldn't I have the same desire to escape? (I have that desire.) Just because there's a lot of sentimental rubbish about doesn't mean the whole world and everyone in it is sogged in sewage water. At first Lardner thrills you, you laugh at the jokes, which as they accrue are more plainly bitter ones, an aspect of the cold blank stare at depravity made trivial by its small objects, like "getting ahead," and finally making one's way through The Ring Lardner Reader is a suffocating slog. I think I persisted through 650 pages only on account of the puritanical notion that what's begun ought to be finished. Maybe one month I'll do it again since I'm also subject to the belief that unpleasantness is good for you. The jokes, or gags, might be funny if it were possible to divorce them from the underlying bitterness, which is unrelenting. From "A Caddy's Diary":
Mr. Thomas is one of the kind of players that when it has took him more than 6 shots to get on the green he will turn to you and say how many have I had caddy and you are suppose to pretend like you were thinking a minute and then say 4, then he will say to the man he is playing with well I did not know if I had shot 4 or 5 but the caddy says it is 4. You see in this way it is not him that is cheating but the caddy but he makes it up to the caddy afterwards with a $1.00 tip.
Enjoyable by the half pint but not the tanker load.
Lardner, however, has a successor, Mark Harris, who puts to gentler use some of Lardner's subjects, techniques, and stratagems. I'm thinking of Harris's series of four novels narrated by baseball pitcher Henry Wiggen of the New York Mammoths. I've written about these books before, here and here; they are the closest thing I know to exceptions to the rule I've been describing about sports fictions being generally disappointing. Whereas Lardner's athletes get kicked off the pedestal to join a democratic parade of human depravity, Harris makes them participants in a human comedy. Lardner's world of depravity is in Harris transmuted into something more like mere folly and the folly is ameliorated by humor, high spirits, and an admixture of visible decency percolating occasionally to the surface. There are neither saints nor villains. My own heterodox opinion is that the first in the series, The Southpaw (1953), is the weakest, and that successive installments keep getting better and better, concluding with the last and best, It Looked Like Forever (1979)—though I'll admit that the third book in the series, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), is by far the briefest and seems less ambitious than the others. Before the Thanksgiving weekend is over I'll write something more about the Wiggen books, with an eye perhaps toward explaining my fondness for the one about the seamstitch. I feel lucky—thankful—to enjoy solitary pursuits like reading that aren't precluded by public health considerations, especially since I also like restaurants and bars. At the neighborhood joint, I used to nurse beers through an entire ball game, plus a burger or small pizza at halftime or during the middle innings, but those days are gone for now. It's probably good for my liver that I'm bookish.
Stay safe! Happy Thanksgiving!
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