A Trio of Lardners

SHUT UP, HE EXPLAINED (277 pp.)--A Ring Lardner Selection edited by Babette Rosmond and Henry Morgan--Scribner ($4.50).

There were two Ring Lardners that counted--or, at any rate, a plump one and a half. There was the man whose best stories are superb revelations of character, the lord of vernacular, the laureate of dull lives, crass hopes and mean minds. The second Lardner that counted was a fellow of short nights and wild swoops and demented plunges, of parody and nonsense, of non sequiturs that on occasion proved knockout blows. Perhaps the most inspired of these--a daunted parent's reply to a child's bedeviling question--provided the title for Shut Up, He Explained, which restores the second Lardner to print with a mixed bag containing glittering tinsel as well as genuine treasures.

In many ways, Shut Up, He Explained is a curious book. For a generation to which Lardner is largely a distant figure of the 1920s (he died in 1933), familiar chiefly through textbooks and a few anthologies, it does not do full justice to the lasting appeal of the great American humorist. Nor is it likely to satisfy the Lardner buff (there are still a great many), who likes to sample his Lardneriana over the wide range offered by a box of Mother's Day chocolates. When Lardner was good, he was very, very good; when he was bad, he could be awful. This collection, by concentrating on Lardner rarities, too often fails to distinguish between the two, could better have been an anthology of Lardner's best for an era that could well profit from his trenchant humor.

Tootle & Twang. The publication in the 1920s of such nonsense "plays" as Lardner's Clemo Uti--"The Water Lilies" and I Gaspiri (The Upholsterers) perhaps marked the literary debut of the New Lunacy. Hailed in some quarters as offshoots of Dada and in others as potshots at it, they helped form the Krazy Katechism of the era. With the mere setting of the scene in Clemo Uti--"the Outskirts of a Parchesi Board"--there sounded a note that would tootle and twang and echo from Perelman to Mad Magazine; it was there, too, in the very first lines of I Gaspiri:

1st Stranger: Where was you born?

2nd Stranger: Out of wedlock.

1st Stranger: That's a mighty pretty country around there.

These dramas, and such others as The Tridget of Greva and Cora, or Fun at a Spa, used various approaches. Sometimes they played upon words: "They tell me you and the President are pretty close."

"He is."

Sometimes they went in for crossed wires: "Do you have much luck with your hogs?"

"Oh, we never play for money."

Sometimes the wires went dead, but the best moments were hilarious.

Shut Up restores much more: initial-spouting spoofs of corporation conferences; parodies of name droppers or of gossip columns ("What subscriber to the N.Y. telephone directory has got a cold?"); the very readable first act of June Moon, the hit Lardner wrote with George S. Kaufman; and some no longer very readable oddments. What is much the longest entry in this collection most resembles the Other Lardner. The Big Town is a novelette of the husband, the wife and the sister-in-law who decamp from South Bend for New York and rub their shoddy provincial aspirations against its spotted Main-Stem realities. If it dips in places to its own thematic dullness, it remains a vivid photo strip that has by now a real period air. Shut Up also contains evidence of what was really a third Lardner that counted--the pioneer. This was the Lardner whose imitators, as Scott Fitzgerald said, "lifted everything except the shirt off his back--only Hemingway has been so thoroughly frisked."

Even before he midwifed the New Lunacy, Lardner was focusing at the flatlands of U.S. life a hard, unsparing look that went way beyond the familiar and funny. Moreover, years before a Lewis' Babbitt or a George Kelly's Show-Off, Lardner's satiric eye and sportswriter's knowledge had, in You Know Me Al, created that wonderfully breathing, ballplaying ape and peacock. Jack Keefe. Very little else written in so jocular a vein has severed the jugular vein so neatly. Thereafter, with stories that often became minor classics, Lardner went from ballpark to prize ring in Champion, or to Haircut with its prize heel, or to The Love Nest, The Golden Honeymoon, Some Like Them Cold.

To a Grunt. But the pioneer Lardner, by so often having his people self-condemned in their own words, did more than etch in acid living American types. He preserved in amber a stuttering American language (as its most famous student, H. L. Mencken, was quick to acclaim).

He knew to a grunt how America's illiterate and half-educated citizenry spoke and mispronounced, foundered on syntax, loundered among cliches; time and again he scored bull's-eyes as his characters went wide of the mark. Their narrow lives made for a narrowed talent--the people sometimes a touch too commonplace, the types a trifle too set, the gunfire mixed with gags--while Lardner's own cultural interests were left blurred. But his human values were implacably sound, and, such were their realistic findings, it is small wonder that he chose surrealism for his fun.

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