This Month
Michael Street Reviews Ring Lardner's
You Know Me, Al
Monday August 13, 2007 12:30pm
The Golden Days of Baseball were also the Golden Days of Newspaper Writing, the exploits of one one feeding the other like some wonderful perpetual motion machine. Newsmen like Grantland Rice laced their columns with poetry and purple prose, inventing eponyms ("The Georgia Peach" or "The Sultan of Swat") phrases ("Tinker to Evans to Chance") and other linguistic baseball bits that survive even today. Foremost among those writers was Ring Lardner, with his knack for capturing the scarcely literate utterances of the ballplayers of the day, for whom "college boy" was an ill-disguised insult, and reading an act more despicable than church attendance.
Lardner wrote straight stories and had a regular column; modern fans might know him as the straw-hatted sportswriter whose identification of questionable plays during the 1918 Black Sox World Series was featured in the movie Eight Men Out. But he is best known for his columns, and the characters Lardner created in them helped establish ballplayers as heroes, even as he prolonged the preconceptions of their degeneracy and illiteracy. His columns often took the form of dramatic monologue, told from the mouths of real or imaginary players, and while they didn't always talk about the game that just transpired, they managed nonetheless to capture the essence of that day's contest.
A particularly long-running and successful series of Lardner's columns followed Jack Keefe, a fictitious rookie left-handed pitcher whose brashness was only matched by his ignorance. Even "Nuke" LaLoosh, the absurdly confident (and hopelessly thick-headed) fastballer in Bull Durham couldn't match dimwits with "The Busher" Keefe. The columns purported to be letters from Keefe to his friend Al back home in Bedford, Illinois, following the Busher's rise, fall, and rise again through the ranks of White Sox pitchers and farm teams, even as he bungles his contract negotiations, relations with women, and his own chances to pitch in the game he so obviously loves.
Though they are written episodically, when assembled together into a book, the columns come precariously close to being a novel, even if Lardner himself always disregarded such notions. Perhaps the only thing standing between the book and novel status is the development of Keefe, who remains as stubbornly boastful and self-ignorant on the last page as he was on the first, seemingly unchanged by the toils and travails that have come before. But even this would be hard to establish, for one only understands Keefe in spite of himself; any teenager would marvel at the amount of irony and sarcasm Lardner ladles out on his main character.
The title of the book, You Know Me Al , refers to Keefe's constant refrain to his friend back home, typically after Keefe has proudly described how he has cleverly accomplished something he has so clearly bungled. His friend Al (along with us, the reader) may know the Busher quite well, but Jack Keefe certainly does not know himself. This points to the central irony of the book: the more Keefe describes himself, the better we understand him, although it is typically directly contrary to what he has just explained about himself. If Jack discusses a smart move he has made, it is inescapably stupid, and that which is confusing to him is clearly plain to us.
Early on in the book, he declares his resolve to hold out against the famously stingy Charles Comiskey: "I am going to get a contract for three thousand and if he don't want to give it to me than he can do the other thing," Jack boasts. The next day, he describes his meeting with Comiskey, saying, "He is a great old fellow Al and no wonder everybody likes him." Comiskey rebuffs Keefe's absurd offer (established players in this time made no more than $5,000 a year, and Keefe is a raw rookie), giving him a contract for half of what was offered, reminding him "we always have a city serious here in the fall where a fellow picks up a good bunch of money." It's true that players often made a few hundred dollars in such cross-city series, but Keefe is nowhere near his contract demand. Yet he concludes, "My yearly salary will be fifteen hundred dollars besides what the city serious brings me. And that is only for the first year. I will demand three thousand or four thousand dollars next year." As he always does, the Busher turns his own loss into an obvious victory-obvious, of course, only to him.
Aside from Lardner's marvelously backhanded characterization and his perfectly captured dialect (which sparkles even today, nearly a hundred years later) he gives us a fantastic glimpse into the golden years of baseball, the days of Cobb, McGraw, Kid Gleason and Eddie Collins, the latter in their prelapsarian days, before the Black Sox scandal forever marred their names. Players far savvier than Keefe play on the Busher's ignorance, playing the sort of psychological games Cobb made famous, praising his fastball and swelling his head before he takes the mound, or playing pranks on him off the field. Since Keefe is so ignorant, he reports these moments with the innocence and naivete of a child, making them even clearer in the retelling.
The hardest thing that Lardner does is to make such a boastful and ignorant narrator so sympathetic. He does this, of course, by putting the Busher through hard times, as he fights for a spot on the roster or blusters his way out of his next year's contract. His handling of women is simply awful, and he seems to regard marriage as lightly as he does the mighty players he faces on the field, bouncing back and forth between two women clearly bent on manipulating him to their own ends. He repudiates one before joyously taking her back a few weeks later, showing that his childlike simplicity, enthusiasm and gullibility extend even off the field.
We should expect little development from Jack, however, as You Know Me Al is so obviously a comic novel, Lardner's protests aside. The fun is in the jokes and the silly situations that the Busher gets himself into, and not in tearfully watching the little fella grow up. No less than Virginia Woolf and H.L. Mencken have sung the praises of You Know Me Al, and I add my small voice to their chorus. I have taught this book in a fiction class, as an example of a horribly unreliable narrator and the beautiful uses of irony and dialect, and it has always been well received, even by non-sports fans. Baseball fans in particular will devour this wonderful little book and crave more from the masterful typewriter of Ring Lardner.
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