June Moon, which he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman. A comedy about the popular songwriting business, it became one of the bigger hits of the 1929–30 Broadway season.
The excerpts quoted, along with later family revelations and my own memories, all testify to my impulse to assert myself. The fact that I was overweight and uncoordinated increased rather than diminished that need. The best way to get the attention I craved, it seemed, was to express opinions that ranged from the unexpected to the outrageous. By the time I was twelve, I had proceeded from identifying with God to denying his existence. There was no such entity, I told a next-door neighbor. (Though his mother lodged a complaint with my mother, I am happy to say that the boy eventually recovered from the shock and became a Congressman.)
The most striking thing about our household was the absence of outward emotion. What we sought to express were our thoughts rather than our feelings. A raised voice was a rare and unwelcome event, and all of us were fairly adept at holding our tongues, though William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, described my brother David, the youngest of us, as “a little more open and a little more talkative than the other Lardners . . . ”
My brothers and I never had the traditional man-to-man talk about sex with our father. I doubt if he even considered it, since he would have been unable to say the necessary words. (They were quite literally unmentionable in our household.) Increasingly, in the last decade or so of his life, Dad realized that other people did speak them—indeed, that some writers found sex not only a permissible but a favorite subject. These peers, from his point of view, were unforgivably deficient in taste. In his own work, even as it grew deeper and more psychologically complex, there was never a suggestion of amorous passion; nor did he ever write anything that would normally be considered a love scene.
If roots in the New World were a defense, I would have been well-protected against the charge of Un-Americanness. Ancestors on both sides of my family had been here since the seventeenth century, and the Lardners as well as the Abbotts (my mother’s forebears) were double pioneers, originally settling in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, in Michigan and Indiana. But their migration to the untamed Middle West is not to be confused with that of the propertyless pioneers in their covered wagons or the trainloads of European immigrants seeking free land—a hundred and sixty acres that, along with a lot of hard work, could support a family. The Lardners and Abbotts were looking for land, too, but in much larger quantities, as the best investment for their capital. As an added attraction, they were leaving metropolises with hundreds of upper-class people and heading for frontier settlements—Niles, Michigan, and Goshen, Indiana—where they would share their elite status with no more than half-a-dozen other families.
Dad’s maternal grandfather was rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Niles. My grandmother and aunt, both named Lena, played the organ in that church, consecutively, for a hundred and one years. The literalness of the religious faith in the older Lena can best be illustrated by a letter she wrote in 1898 to an acquaintance whose child had died:
Dear Mrs. Miller:
From my own experience I know how sad you are and how much you miss the bright child who was your sweet little companion in daily life. The only comfort for you is to try to realize that she is happy and safe. All that a loving mother could do for her does not compare with what her Heavenly Father has already done for her. After her brief suffering, she is safe and happy in His arms forever. It is by thinking of her joy that you can be consoled and with the Christian’s faith, you look forward to meeting her again.
Truly yours.
Lena B. Lardner
There were people even in those days who would have found such a message of consolation infuriating in its smug righteousness, but we may assume my grandmother knew her recipient and that it was received in the same warmhearted spirit in which it was written.
My grandmother was Dad’s only teacher until he was ten, when a private tutor took over his education and that of his two youngest siblings. So he was not subject to the kind of schoolyard talk, 1890s-style, through which children often gain some concept, however distorted, of the facts of life. He did, however, attend Niles High School for four years, and more significantly, after he became a sportswriter almost by accident, spent a decade in daily association with baseball players and other coarse creatures of the sporting world. Yet to a remarkable degree, he remained unaffected by these influences. As late as 1922, my brother Jim and I had our allowances canceled for a month for introducing the following sidesplitter at the dinner table:
Q: What was the longest slide in the Bible?
A: When Joshua went from Jericho to Jerusalem on his ass.
His old-fashioned values endured through the years that followed World War I, when styles of dress and speech as well as relationships between men and women altered so drastically. It didn’t matter that the two fields with which he was most closely associated were sports and the Broadway theater, or that a favorite friend was Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote stories about the Jazz Age and dedicated a book of them (All the Sad Young Men) to Ring and Ellis, my parents.
Two decades earlier, they had conducted a long courtship mainly by correspondence. They didn’t see much of each other because he was traveling most of the time with the Chicago White Sox or to other sporting events, while my mother, then Ellis Abbott, was an honor student at Smith College. After their formal engagement, she took a job teaching some of the faculty offspring at a military academy in Indiana, and he accepted one in St. Louis as editor of The Sporting News. His involved a raise from thirty-five to fifty dollars a week, but the main selling point he cited to Ellis and her family was that it would keep him in one place. After he quit that job, having discovered that his employer was a crook, he tried to sell Mr. Abbott on an offer he had received to become business manager of a minor-league baseball team in Louisville, Kentucky. But Ellis’s father, she reported in one of her letters, “thinks a ‘sporting man’ is a ‘sporting man’ and can’t change his sports, and that his daughters are delicate and rare things. And that they must not come in contact with that ‘damned sporting crowd.’” Dad responded by addressing Mr. Abbott directly, promising him that “Ellis won’t ever have to see a ballplayer or a ball game.”
Then came a surprising twist. The Boston American offered him forty-five dollars a week to cover baseball there, and his future father-in-law raised no objection. To the Abbotts of Andover, evidently, an association with Boston made anything, even ballplayers, more refined. Interestingly, Dad never advanced as an argument in his favor the possibility that he might sell stories to magazines and so become a professional writer, maybe because he hadn’t considered it. He was twenty-six when they were finally married in June 1911, and another three years passed before he wrote and sold his first piece of fiction to cover the expenses created by the arrival of his second son.
My mother was wise and charming as well as strikingly attractive, and we all derived as much from her as we did from our father. Besides the environmental influence, we got half our genes from the Abbott lineage. In all the important areas of parenthood, Mother and Dad shaped our attitudes. What they thought about books, art, music, theater, politics, people, and social behavior was what we responded to, usually affirmatively. With our father’s encouragement, we followed the big sports events and the Broadway hits, while Mother inspired us to read Charles Dickens and Jane Austen, her favorite authors.
Raised in a Presbyterian household in Goshen, Indiana, where the rules of speech and conduct were pretty much the same as the Lardners’s in Niles, Michigan, she was nonetheless better able to adjust to a changing environment. In her later years (she died in 1960), she could tolerate if not approve the idea of an unmarried couple living together. In his far shorter life, Dad never yielded ground at all. Confined to a hospital most of the two years before he died (with his attitudes hardened, perhaps, by ill health), he listened to the radio and
