[5/25/2011] Ring Lardner Tonight: A postscript to "Champion" -- How it found its way into book form (continued)

"Money was just one of the paper goods Ring never bothered to save. He casually threw away almost all the letters addressed to him, including a great many from people already famous or soon to be. He never made a copy of his own letters, or of his stories, sending the originals to magazines and never keeping the magazines after they were published."

-- Bill Lardner, in The Lardners

from

The Lardners:
My Family Remembered

by Ring Lardner Jr.

Scott Fitzgerald was the catalytic agent in the transformation of Ring Lardner from a journalistic funnyman to a literary figure. Just as he was to do with his next year's "find," Ernest Hemingway, Scott persuaded Ring and Max Perkins of Scribner's that both parties would benefit from an affiliation. The specific idea, which had apparently never occurred to Ring, was to make a book of a selection of his short stories, and the sample Scott presented to Perkins was the one the Saturday Evening Post turned down, "The Golden Honeymoon," which Ring had written on a train trip from Florida to New York. Ray Long, editor of Cosmopolitan, had bought it for fifteen hundred dollars and published it in his July, 1922, issue.

After reading it Perkins wrote Ring for copies of other stories, creating an impasse. Money was just one of the paper goods Ring never bothered to save. He casually threw away almost all the letters addressed to him, including a great many from people already famous or soon to be. He never made a copy of his own letters, or of his stories, sending the originals to magazines and never keeping the magazines after they were published.

Ring, Scott and Perkins met for dinner at Rene Durand's restaurant and speakeasy, across the tip of the bay from East Shore Road, to address themselves to this problem. After a long and liquid session, Ring got into his car and drove home. The other two men got into Scott's car and Scott drove them into Durand's lily pond.

Of the three Ring seemed the least interested in locating copies of the stories. He would say that "The Facts," for instance, had appeared in either McClure's or Metropolitan during 1916 or possibly 1917, and Perkins would send an assistant to the library to check it out. Seven months later he was still writing Ring about such matters as that McClure's had no copy of their August, 1915, issue (containing the story "Harmony") and that the Saturday Evening Post was indexed only from 1920 on, which meant he would have to have it "looked through in the library between 1914 and 1919 . . . and I think we can arrange to have the stories copied out."

Ring's only contributions to the correspondence in all that time were, in their entirety:

Great Neck, New York

December Fifth

DEAR MR. PERKINS: --

I enclose a (and, I guess, the only) copy of "Champion", which Scott tells me you have been looking for. I'm sorry to have kept you waiting.

And:

Great Neck, New York

December Second

DEAR MR. PERKINS: --

The arrangements and terms are satisfactory to me. I'm sorry you have had so much trouble gathering the stuff. Why not visit Great Neck again? It's safer now as Durand's pond is frozen over.

There was a lot of talk about a title before they decided on How to Write Short Stories (With Samples), which was Scott's idea, but all three men should be faulted for not anticipating that it would be classified in library catalogues with textbooks on writing. I think Ring accepted it because it gave him an idea for a preface. He regarded all prefaces (and most literary criticism) as nonsense, but they were practically obligatory in those days for such collections, so his solution was to write nonsense prefaces. This first one said in part:

. . . But a little group of our deeper drinkers has suggested that maybe boys and gals who wants to take up writing as their lifework would be benefited if some person like I was to give them a few hints in regards to the technic of the short story, how to go about planning it and writing it, when and where to plant the love interest and climax, and finally how to market the finished product without leaving no bad taste in the mouth. . . .

A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor. Personally I have found it a good scheme to not even sign my name to the story, and when I have got it sealed up in its envelope and stamped and addressed, I take it to some town where I don't live and mail it from there. The editor has no idea who wrote the story, so how can he send it back? He is in a quandary.

And then, typically, he turned his sights on his very sponsors. Perkins had published a Fitzgerald collection called Tales of the Jazz Age, in which each story title was followed by a couple of explanatory (and clearly superfluous) paragraphs about its contents and the circumstances in which it was written. Ring parodied this device, too. His foreword to "A Frame-up," for instance, which deals with a prizefighter from rural Michicgan, read:

A stirring romance of the Hundred Years' War, detailing the adventures in France and Castile of a pair of well-bred weasels. The story is an example of what can be done with a stub pen.

* * *

A FURTHER NOTE ON THOSE PREFACES

We have, of course, read the whole of Ring's Preface to How to Write Short Stories (With Samples), along with the chronological survey of his life, "Who's Who -- and Why," he wrote when he was 32. Bill Lardner goes on to comment on the prefaces for subsequent Lardner collections written by Sarah E. ("It was part of his charm") Spooldripper, and we've read the legendary Sarah's prefaces to The Love Nest and other stories and The Story of a Wonder Man Being the Autobiography of Ring Lardner.

Unfortunately, while all the stories in How to Write Short Stories have been republished in other collections, as far as I know they've been permanently shorn of the little commentaries, of which Bill provides the tantalizing sample for "The Frame-up." I should of course have tracked down Ring's words of wisdom concerning "Champion," and I assume the forewords are included in the 2004 reprint of How to Write Short Stories, but the cheapest copy Amazon lists is $23.84, and I haven't been willing to spring for that.

[Oh wait! I finally noticed the "other formats" link, and see there are copies of early hardcover editions available at, um, more reasonable prices. Hmm, I'll have to mull this over. I'm assuming that any copies in the nominal possession of the New York Public Library will turn out to be either "missing" or "lost" -- a distinction I've never understood -- but I'll have to check. One way or another, we'll get that "Champion" foreword, eventually.]


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