Ring Lardner Tonight: Part 1 of John Lardner's Introduction to "You Know Me Al"

Virignia Woolf, "who didn't know an infielder
from a fungo bat," hearts Jack Keefe.

Mr. Lardner does not waste a moment when he writes in thinking whether he is using American slang or Shakespeare's English -- whether he is proud of being American or ashamed of not being Japanese; all his mind is on the story. Hence, incidentally, he writes the best prose that has come our way. Hence we feel at last freely admitted to the society of our fellows. . . .

Mr. Lardner has talents of a remarkable order. With extraordinary ease and aptitude, with the quickest strokes, the surest touch, the sharpest insight, he lets Jack Keefe the baseball player cut out his own outline, fill in his own depths, until the figure of the foolish, boastful, innocent athlete lives before us. As he babbles out his mind on paper there rise up friends, sweethearts, the scenery, town, and country -- all surround him and make him up in his completeness. . . .

It is no coincidence that the best of Mr. Lardner's stories are about games, for one may guess that Mr. Lardner's interest in games has solved one of the most difficult problems of the American writer; it has given him a clue, a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of people whom a vast continent isolates, whom no tradition controls. Games give him what society gives his English brother.

-- Virginia Woolf, quoted by John Lardner
in his 1958 Introduction to You Know Me Al

by Ken

A chronological note first: This may have been changed in more recent editions, but in my copy of the 1960 You Know Me Al (I've been referring to this as the "1959 edition," but I see that the copyright is clearly 1960), the new Introduction by John Lardner (born 1912) is dated "October, 1959." This seems improbable given that sources seem to agree he died on Dec. 8, 1958, age 46, following a heart attack, having survived close calls during his three years as a World War II correspondent and an early-'50s bout of tuberculosis (which had killed his father). He had established himself as a preeminent sportswriter and branched out into other kinds of writing.

We've already mined some nuggets from John's You Know Me Al Introduction, and could continue to do so. But it covers so much ground, and seems to me to do so so terrifically, that I've planned this interlude from our traversal of Chapter I of the book to present the Introduction in full, tonight and tomorrow night.

FOR PART 1 OF JOHN LARDNER'S INTRODUCTION
TO YOU KNOW ME AL, CLICK HERE

RING LARDNER'S YOU KNOW ME AL

John Lardner's Introduction (1958), Part 1 and Part 2

Chapter I: A Busher's Letters Home
Part 1: Ring's Preface, and Jack's letters of September 6 and December 14 and 16
Part 2: The busher reaches the bigs -- March 2, 7, 9, and 16
Part 3: Countdown to Opening Day -- March 26 and April 1, 4, 7, and 10
Part 4: Jack makes his big-league debut -- April 11 and 15
Part 5: A major development for Jack -- April 19, 25, and 29

THURBER TONIGHT (including BENCHLEY, WILL CUPPY, WOLCOTT GIBBS, RING LARDNER, BOB AND RAY, E. B. WHITE, and JEAN SHEPHERD TONIGHT): Check out the series to date

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