“There Are Smiles” on Ring Lardner’s Birthday

By Stuart Mitchner

How can you laugh if you can’t cry?

—Ring Lardner (1885-1933)

Today is Ring Lardner’s birthday, spring training baseball is underway, and I’ve been reading You Know Me Al: A Busher’s Letters (Doran 1916), in which “living” and “having” are spelled “liveing” and “haveing,” and a series between two teams becomes a “serious.” After Lardner’s team, the White Sox, were branded the Black Sox for throwing the 1919 “World Serious,” he saw it as a betrayal, although five years passed before he said, “I have kind of lost interest in the old game, or rather it ain’t the old game that which I have lost interest in it, but it is the game which the magnates have fixed up to please the public with their usual good judgement.”

In her August 1, 1925 Saturday Review essay on “American Fiction,” Virginia Woolf surprised a great many readers, including no doubt Ring Lardner and his neighbor at the time F. Scott Fitzgerald, by observing that Lardner “writes the best prose that has come our way” and “often in a language which is not English. Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order. With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us. As he babbles out his mind on paper there rise up friends, sweethearts, the scenery, town, and country—all surround him and make him up in his completeness.”

As it happens, Woolf’s eloquent appraisal could be applied to another character who is allowed to “cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths” until he “lives before us” as he “babbles out his mind on paper,” with friends, girlfriends, enemies, a little sister named Phoebe, scenery (Central Park) and town (New York City) all surrounding him and making him up “in his completeness.”

Lardner and Salinger

Early in The Catcher in the Rye, after a pronouncement worthy of You Know Me Al — “I’m quite illiterate, but I read a lot” — Holden Caulfield goes on to say that his “next favorite author” after his brother D.B. is Ring Lardner. As an example, he mentions “this one story about a traffic cop that falls in love with this very cute girl that’s always speeding. Only, he’s married, the cop, so he can’t marry her or anything. Then this girl gets killed, because she’s always speeding. That story just about killed me.”

Had Holden provided the title, I’d have gone looking for the story years ago, but the present occasion being Lardner’s 139th birthday, I borrowed his Best Short Stories (Scribner’s 1957) from the Princeton Public Library, found the story, and will tell you about it “if you really want to know.” While I can’t say that it “almost killed me,” it made me realize how much Holden’s “completeness” owes to Lardner.

A Fifth Avenue Tale

With a title like “There Are Smiles,” the story is already heading toward an answer to Lardner’s question, “How can you laugh if you can’t cry?” Though he is described in the third person, the cop stationed at Fifth Avenue and 46th Street seems to be talking to us one-on-one. What sets him apart from other traffic cops is that he “just naturally appeared to be having a good time whether he was scolding you or not; his large freckled face fairly beamed with joviality…. It heartened you to look at him. It amused you to hear him talk. If what he said wasn’t always so bright, the way he said it was.” Instead of scolding you for running a red light, he’d say “I suppose you didn’t see that red light,” and after the driver said “no,” he’d say “Well, what did you think the other cars was stopped for? Did you think they’d all run out of gas at once?” He delivered these “sly rebukes” in “such a nice way that you were kind of glad you did wrong.”

Then one day along comes a new Cadillac at a speed “violating all the laws of common sense and of the State and City of New York.” The cop, who is 6’4, has to stand in front of the car and then jump on the running board (those were the days), ready to “speak his mind in words beginning with capitals when he got his first look at the miscreant’s face. It was the prettiest face he had ever seen and it wore a most impudent, ill-timed, irresistible smile, a smile that spoiled other smiles for you once and for all.”

After the cop delivers several sly rebukes such as “Maybe you thought you was in London where they drive on the left side of the street,” the girl says, “You’re cute” in “a voice as thrilling as her smile.” With her leading the way (“I’d like to hear your whole line someday”), they make a date timed to Fifth Avenue traffic, which moved both north and south in those days.

It’s the sort of situation that Hollywood romantic comedies of the time thrived on, and Lardner brings the flirtation to life with a few pages of lively, pitch perfect dialogue. The girl lives in Rye, north of the Bronx, where he lives, and the best conversations take place the two times she drives him home. Not until the last time do they exchange names. His is Ben Collins. When he says “I could learn yours by asking to see your driver’s license,” she says “Heavens! Don’t do that! I haven’t any.” Perfect. They have taken the relationship all the way to this moment, both so deeply distracted that the cop has yet to ask for her driver’s license. Meanwhile it’s been raining, hard. Her name is Edith Dole. “It’s a funny combination,” she says. “Edith means happiness and Dole means grief.”

Even if you don’t already know what happens shortly after she drops him off at 164th Street, you’re not surprised, and even if it doesn’t kill you or knock you out, it gets to you, you’re touched, and by the end you’re feeling what the cop feels as he talks aloud to himself for the first time since he was a kid: “I can’t feel as bad as I think I do, I only seen her four or five times. I can’t really feel this bad.”

Lardner and Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote most of The Great Gatsby in the summer of 1924 when he and Lardner were neighbors. It’s amusing to think that Lardner, a misspelling virtuoso, helped read the typescript of a notoriously bad speller. Lardner is also a presence in the novel by way of the character known as “Owl Eyes,” Fitzgerald’s real-life nickname for him. Owl Eyes first appears in Gatsby’s library, drunkenly sequestered from the crowd at one of Gatsby’s famous parties. And except for Nick Carraway, Owl Eyes is the only one of the partygoers who attends Gatsby’s funeral. 

When Lardner died at 48 in 1933, Fitzgerald remembered him in the New Republic, writing, “At no time did I feel that I had known him enough, or that anyone knew him.” For baseball fans, a troubling feature of Fitzgerald’s recollection is his lament about the amount of time Lardner “moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy’s game. 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…. So long as he wrote within that enclosure the result was magnificent: within it he heard and recorded the voices of a continent. But when, inevitably, he outgrew his interest in it what was Ring left with?”

Virginia Woolf knew: “It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner’s stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner’s interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother.”

And now, with the World Serious of American politics approaching, the game is on. Is it “the game which the magnates have fixed up to please the public with their usual good judgement.” Or does judgement have nothing to do with it?

Lou Reed (1942-2013)

On the trip to the library that led to Lardner’s story, I picked up The King of New York (Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2023), Will Hermes’s 500-page biography of Lou Reed, whose birthday was last Saturday, March 2. In an interview cited on “thebaseballbloggess.com,” Reed refers to the “childhood trauma” of “the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn, which, if you think about it, is a reason why some of us are imbued with a cynicism that we never recovered from.”