You Know Me Al: A Busher's Letters – Ring Lardner, 1916 ★½

Just Getting it Over

People who talk classic American fiction sooner or later get round to Ring Lardner.

Many talk about how unfairly underrated he is, how he made slang not just respectable but lyrical, or perfected such techniques as the unreliable narrator and character humor into staples of the form.

Then there are a miserable few who think he was rated just about right as a short fiction specialist, where his gifts for colloquialism, narrative voice, and irony shine brightest.

Sorry to say, I’m one of them, admire him though I do.

His one well-regarded novel, You Know Me Al, demonstrates my point. It’s an engaging but thin first-person narrative about a headstrong rookie pitcher, Jack Keefe, who makes it to baseball’s American League as a starter for the Chicago White Sox. Talented as he is, his selfish attitude lands him in tight fixes he wiggles out of completely oblivious.

While it offers more than a one-joke premise, Al never develops a real narrative, lacking the complexity or richness of classic Lardner shorts like “Haircut,” “The Golden Honeymoon,” or “The Mayville Minstrel.” You get the feeling Lardner found a groove here and was content to just keep going on about this fellow with the magic arm and ten-cent head. And so he does:

He says Are you in shape? And I told him Yes I am. He says Yes you look in shape like a barrel. I says They is not no fat on me and if I am a little bit bigger than last year it is because my mussels is bigger. He says Yes your stomach mussels is emense and you must have give them plenty of exercise.

Comiskey Park circa 1912, around the same time the fictional Jack Keefe joins its home team, the Chicago White Sox. Image from https://www.ballparksofbaseball.com/ballparks/comiskey-park/.

Jack’s not just a dumb rookie, or a “busher” in the parlance of the period; he is a cheapskate and an overeater who is more than a bit lazy and prone to blaming others whenever things go wrong, for example when opposing batters knock him off the mound.

Ring Lardner wrote a lot of baseball stories, both fictional and fact-based. When it was the American Pastime, this defined him in mostly a good way, though there were always detractors. One was F. Scott Fitzgerald, on the whole a Lardner admirer but one who did see his baseball focus as a drawback, of parameters as restricted as baselines:

So long as he wrote within that enclosure the result was magnificent: within it he heard and recorded the voice of a continent. But when, inevitably, he outgrew his interest in it, what was Ring left with?

Fitzgerald wrote the above in 1933, shortly after Lardner’s death. But you sense something of the issue even in those halcyon days when baseball was a thing of joy to Lardner and You Know Me Al a literary sensation that swept up even European writers like Virginia Woolf.

A dust jacket for a 1925 hardcover published by Charles Scribner's Sons correctly dubs You Know Me Al as "The Book That Made Its Author Famous." Image from https://www.dustjackets.com/pages/books/4655/ring-w-lardner/you-know-me-al.

Al’s format, a series of rambling letters written by Keefe to a hometown buddy named Al, does amuse, especially in the first two chapters when the premise is established. For a time, Jack struggles to find his form:

I says Why don’t you get a catcher? He says We don’t need no catcher when you’re pitching because you can’t get nothing past their bats. Then he says You better leave your uniform in here when you go out next inning or Cobb will steal it off your back. I says My arm is sore. He says Use your other one and you’ll do just as good.

After a spell in the minors, Keefe improves and returns to the White Sox. There he proves a capable starter despite an unwillingness to learn his craft or take care of his body.

On paper, Keefe is his own worst enemy. He even brags about his lack of effort after getting a lucky single: “I guess I could have made it two bases but I didn’t want to tire myself out.”

Coach Kid Gleason puts up with a lot from Jack Keefe in You Know Me Al.  The real-life future White Sox skipper would endure true misery managing the 1919 Black Sox. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kid_Gleason.

It’s wrong to dock a guy points for just being funny, but the best of Lardner’s short fiction makes a case for his ability to inject subtle pathos or timeless social commentary into a clever, witty story. He can be a quiet master at puncturing the American tendency for groupthink, almost Orwellian in that regard. See “Haircut” as Exhibit A.

In “Champion” he takes on hero worship in a dark and withering lampoon. In “I Can’t Breathe,” the letter-writer, like Jack, is a narcissist blissfully unaware of how lucky in life she is.

A chance to read a novel by the writer of the above pieces, and a lot else that’s great in American short fiction, promises much. Throw baseball in there for an old fan like me, and it’s even more of a tease.

This time, more is less. Jack is just a jerk who never learns, getting by on talent he never appreciates. His manager just shakes his head:

I says Yes I got more stuff when I wind up. He says Of course you have but if you wind up like that with Cobb on base he will steal your watch and chain. I says Maybe Cobb can’t get on base when I work against him. He says That’s right and maybe San Francisco Bay is made of grapejuice. Then he walks away from me.

“Cobb” here is Ty Cobb, the famous ballplayer. Much is made of Lardner’s use of real-life baseball players of the era. In playing for the White Sox in the early 1910s, Jack showers with many notables, including Eddie Cicotte and Buck Weaver, two of the famous 1919 Black Sox implicated in throwing that year’s World Series.

Ring Lardner in later life. He kept Keefe writing letters to Al long after the publication of You Know Me Al, until he tired of it in 1919, the year of the Black Sox scandal. Image from https://shop.factorysale2021.com.

White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, often criticized for cheapness that led to that World Series fix, shows up here as a fair businessman who lets Keefe run himself off the team trying to force a raise. Kid Gleason, White Sox manager in 1919, is a coach here, often taking on a middleman role between stubborn Keefe and manager Nixey Callahan.

Because Keefe is an idiot, little insight is given on how the game was played in the early 1910s. Keefe just brags about his wins and striking batters out, or whines about bad fielding when he loses. It gets stale.

Lardner changes things up after the first two chapters by giving Keefe a wife, Florrie, but she’s another debit, a frivolous character who controls the easily misled Keefe into spending more money than he has. People on the team seem to know she’s no good, but Keefe is blinded by the birth of their son. Or perhaps I should say her son, as there is some question about Jack’s parentage:

Well Al it would be just my luck to have him left handed and Florrie should ought to of knew better than to name him after Allen. I am going to hire another Dr. and see what he has to say because they must be some way of fixing babys so as they won’t be left handed. And if nessary I will cut his left arm off of him.

So popular were the Jack Keefe stories that they were made into a comic strip from 1922-1925, with Lardner initially writing them. Here Keefe's cheapness is on display, a carryover from the novel. Image from http://www.bronxbanterblog.com/2013/08/29/bgs-you-know-me-al/

Yes, this is amusing. But the more the novel goes on, the more it feels like its sole point, taking comedic jabs at a dumb jock.

Where did Keefe come from? What were his parents like? What drew him to baseball? What Lardner gives us is as thin and flat as a baseball card, only without the stats. At one point we do learn he is 10-6, and seems to build up a degree of celebrity as the book progresses. But even his rise in the sport is given short-shrift.

You Know Me Al wound up continuing past the last chapter here, as Lardner kept feeding his audience even more letters to Al over the ensuing years, including Keefe in World War I. Another reason for preferring Lardner’s shorter fiction: There he could quit while he was ahead.