Irregular Fellows
And bad poetry
Regular Fellows I Have Met by Ring Lardner
Ring Lardner’s regular fellows are not ordinary. Some of them are. But most of them are not. They’re lawyers, doctors, businessmen, men in oil, tycoons, capitalists, politicians, the owners of theatres and cinemas and film companies. They’re in show business; they’re in paper; they’re in construction. They all have their little peculiarities and tricks. That’s what makes them people.
But what surprises me, and what comes across most powerfully from this collection of poetry about great contemporaries, is the negative. It’s how bland Lardner’s verses are. How he tends to reuse certain phrases (‘heavenly choir’ being the one I noticed most) and particular rhymes. How trite and cack-handed a lot of the versifying is. Even if it’s a joke, it’s a bad joke. Perhaps even a joke in bad taste.
And one cannot but notice, too, how boring so many of his subjects are. At least in the way they are portrayed: both by Lardner and, indeed, by the regular guy caricaturists who did the illustrations.
The illustrations are bad. Lawyers hold law books. Politicians have bills furled up in their pockets. Often, there are superfluous bits of paper or signs in the background, all of them announcing some pointless, redundant fact. If a man called Goode speculated in cotton, for instance, there would as often as not be a newspaper signboard behind him saying something like ‘Goode Corners Cotton Market.’
Things like this cannot be needed. And if they are needed, surely, they cannot help. It’s elementary cartooning to avoid the excessive use of labels. It is the product of elementary study in the visual arts to realise that you must say what you wish to say in images and not in words.
No wonder the cartoonists for this volume go unnamed. I’d want not to be named, too, if I were responsible for work like this.
And, perhaps worst of all, the cartoons do nothing to supplement or improve the tedious, tedious poetry.
Lardner has only two or three subjects. He talks about his regular fellows’ jobs; he talks about their hobbies; or he simply marvels and says gee whiz, I sure think Mr So-and-so’s a swell guy with a lot going on. He sure moves fast. He sure makes his money and stacks that paper. (One exception perhaps is allusion to the last war. But Lardner never does much with that promising subject.)
Talk about work and these regular fellows being dynamic is boring enough. But hearing about their hobbies is perhaps most egregious because they are all the same. All the men depicted here, if they have hobbies that Lardner alludes to, they like fishing. They like to hunt, too. And they like golf. They like golf and the sports pages. They like the theatre less, and books even less than that. For these are regular fellows, men’s men, I suppose, and a real man goes out to the golf links with all the other men, and they joke about their handicaps and say, by the way, did any of the rest of you individuals know I also liked to fish?
It is not endearing or funny to read the hundredth man’s fishing anecdotes. It is not amusing to hear that certain animals run away when they hear the twenty-fifth eager hunter’s name. And it is not fun, not at all fun, to learn that so and so likes gambling and so and so like smoking and so and so likes the golf course and would play a hundred holes an afternoon if he had his way. Almost none of this is interesting the second time, sometimes even the first.
In a strange way, this is an indictment of early twentieth century man. All that money, all that money, arriving and sloshing around in cities like Chicago, and the elite the money produces is so dull. So philistine and dull. It’s certainly something.
Lardner has to take the blame here, or most of it. His subjects have something to do with their lack of interest. After all, they decided to have the same hobbies as other men, the same virtues and vices as other men, to exist in the same tedious world that many of them helped to build. But it is the poet’s fault if he highlights the banal and the commonplace. If the poem does not satisfy. And it certainly does not satisfy here.
Other poems of Lardner’s have in the past amused me. The sentimental ones about children and how much chaos they are and also how much fun. I must admit, I’m sentimental. I liked them. But this is so banal it’s almost unreal. To hear that every industrialist is a golfer, that every manufacturer of paper is a great devotee of fly-fishing. Give me a break.
Give me a break! I kept saying to myself as a leafed through this one, yawning. Barely able to keep my eyes open.
Many writers of his own day admired Lardner but what they admired almost certainly wasn’t this. He must have written short stories about other things (sport, perhaps, or the First World War) that had a certain economy of style, a certain understanding of the rhythms of speech, that won him fans.
I can’t accept that anyone, except an exact contemporary who knew the people depicted in this book personally, could enjoy this stuff and find it amusing. It simply seems implausible. Hard to believe: hard to swallow.