[5/4/2011] Ring Lardner Tonight: Part 2 of John Lardner's Introduction to "You Know Me Al" (continued)

"For the knowledgeable, the baseball details are pure delight; the thirsty fan drinks them down like cold water. Many names and conditions that were topical in 1914 -- Cobb, Mathewson, the 'Federals,' McGraw, the gracefully ruthless Comiskey, Walsh, the spitball, Cicotte, Buck Weaver -- are historical now; but history, for the baseball-lover, is full of romance. And the baseball technique and dramatics of You Know Me Al are as timeless as the literary values. . . . Everything that is inherently sound in our national diversion, and everything that is characteristically silly, are fixed for all time in this story."

-- John Lardner, in tonight's installment

You Know Me Al

Introduction by John Lardner (1958)
Part 2

It was a long and not very relevant step to this kind of analysis from the entertainer's mood in which the busher letters were written. There's a long distance, too, between the views of Mencken and Mrs. Woolf and the untrained, reflexive pleasure of the public's reaction to You Know Me Al. Mrs. Woolf has shown why ignorance of baseball need not prevent a reader from appreciating the book as a classic. But there is a great deal in it that she was bound to miss. For the knowledgeable, the baseball details are pure delight; the thirsty fan drinks them down like cold water. Many names and conditions that were topical in 1914 -- Cobb, Mathewson, the "Federals," McGraw, the gracefully ruthless Comiskey, Walsh, the spitball, Cicotte, Buck Weaver -- are historical now; but history, for the baseball-lover, is full of romance. And the baseball technique and dramatics of You Know Me Al are as timeless as the literary values.

Gilbert Seldes [1893-1970, seen here in 1932 -- in 1958 he would become the first dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania; he was the father of the actress Marian Seldes (born 1928)], in discussing what he felt was the iconoclastic effect of Al, wrote that "baseball has never recovered" from what my father did to its heroes. I think it's true that there was an element of shock in the author's treatment of Keefe and one or two other non-historical characters. I believe that Mr. Elder stated the point a little more reasonably when he said that baseball fandom was "far more ingenuous" before the First World War than it is now, and that You Know Me Al reduced the "baseball hero" (my father, however, did not make Keefe a type, or even necessarily a fans' hero) to human dimensions. Baseball did not have to recover from You Know Me Al, because its hard assets had not been disturbed. The book did make an important change in a state of mind which Mr. Seldes, writing in the early 1920's, could recall vividly. Since then, there have been other changes in player attitudes and in fan habits with which the Keefe letters had nothing to do. It's noteworthy that Al has survived change as easily as it has created it. Everything that is inherently sound in our national diversion, and everything that is characteristically silly, are fixed for all time in this story.

Superficially, ball players are not quite the same kind of people today as they were in Keefe's day. Present times have developed a distinct athlete class, to which most professional players belong -- a group of men at least semi-educated in classrooms as well as lavishly trained since early youth in sports. In former times, professional baseball was the chancy lot of a handful of average working-men. Only a thin margin of luck and physical aptitude separated the ball player from the clerk, the cab-driver, the farmer, and the coalminer. The difference between old-time and present-day players is reflected partly in the jargon of the modern game. Keefe used a certain amount of shop-talk; but the new athlete class has greatly refined and expanded baseball culture, and its wordiness has infected fans and baseball writers and sportscasters (who to some extent have re-infected the players). The vocabulary of the game has become swollen with expertise, with "changeups" and "breaking stuff" and "hitting the ball where it is pitched" and "getting good wood on it" and "shading him a little toward left" and "three speeds of curve" and the whole prolix cult of the "slider." "Inside ball," which was a glamorous mystery in the heyday of McGraw and Mack, is now public property, and there is, ostensibly, a hell of a lot more of it than there used to be.

But all the essential truth about ball-playing can be found in You Know Me Al. Its broader values to one side, there has never been a sounder baseball book. The story flows along with unpretentious smoothness. But if you stop to pick over the accounts of ball games, you see that each detail is correct in relation to place, weather, time of year, and the hitting, pitching, or fielding idiosyncrasies of each of a hundred players. Baseball strategy is set down as accurately as the speech and characters of Keefe, his friends, his girls, and his in-laws. I have never read a piece of baseball fiction, besides this one, in which there was no technical mistake. (Thirty-odd years ago, my father and mother worried and conferred when I was caught reading a novel about flaming youth called The Plastic Age [by Percy Marks, published in 1924; in 1928 a film adaptation was made with Clara Bow]. But my father was even more worried when he caught me reading a baseball novel called Won in the Ninth. He didn't take it away from me, but he warned me not to let my mind be soiled by corrupt observation of baseball procedures.)

There is one more salient point about You Know Me Al. It is funny. The fact has gone unmentioned, or been taken for granted, by Mrs. Woolf, Mencken, Fitzgerald, and others as they studied the literary or scientific aspects of the book. But Al knocked the country head over heels in the first place because people laughed at it, so intensely that the echoes have been accepted at face value ever since. My feeling about nonreaders and tradition-carriers is that they also serve. But reading, as I said before, is better.

John Lardner

New York


TOMORROW in RING LARDNER TONIGHT: Part 3 of You Know Me Al: Countdown to Opening Day -- letters of March 26 and April 1, 4, 7, and 10


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