Ian Frazier on why Ring Lardner is “a major figure in twentieth-century letters”

Photo by Sigrid Estrada

Writer and humorist Ian Frazier, a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and the author of many books (including the best-selling Travels in Siberia) spoke with us recently about the newly published Ring Lardner: Stories & Other Writings, which he edited for The Library of America.

Why should people read this book? Why should they care about Ring Lardner?

Ring Lardner wrote like nobody else, caught the feel of his era like nobody else, and knew how to make people laugh with a voice or a plot change-up or a small misspelling. He was a major figure in twentieth-century American letters.

Contemporaries called the language of Lardner’s stories “Lardnerese.” What is Lardnerese? What were his special gifts or contributions as a stylist?

As this anthology shows, Lardner heard his own voice with perfect clarity from the time he was a teenager. Just as clearly, he registered the way people around him talked in the Midwestern places where he lived and where he worked as a young man. He had a genius’s ear for living speech, and he went beyond the range of ordinary orthography to capture that speech in writing. His typewriter was like a John Cage prepared piano—it made sounds, and produced corresponding narratives, that were all its own.

How did your sense of Lardner as person or writer change while working on this book?

He was an amazing man—passionate and ice-cold simultaneously. As I learned more about him I saw him as an enigmatic, cold American—like a Clint Eastwood character in a Western, or like D. H. Lawrence’s definition of an American: “isolate, and a killer.” Those qualities come out especially, I think, in Lardner’s brilliant, often hilarious, and always merciless stories. But Lardner was a good friend and a gentle family man, too. That is apparent in his letters and in his biography. He had outstanding, remarkable children.

If Lardner were around today, what do you think he’d be doing for a living?

He would be writing—no one with a gift as great as his would be able to ignore it. But I’m not sure what. If he were around today, or if Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Harold Ross were around today, today would be something other than it is.

Do you detect his influence on other writers?

Definitely. On Thurber, for one. He laid out a Midwestern scene for Thurber to populate with Thurber characters. Lardner’s middle-class settings and small-town plots presage O’Hara, Updike, and Cheever. And Lardner’s view of the psychic obtuseness and frailty and in-spite-of-themselves lovability of baseball players has influenced the way generations of writers have portrayed athletes.

Best discovery while working on book?

I loved rereading pieces, well-known and not, that I hadn’t looked at for a long time. I had never seen his World War I writings, and I really enjoyed those. I hadn’t known how much the war had been a part of his early career and life. I admired Ellis Abbott, whom he courted in Lardnerian prose and who married him—luckily for him. She was a Midwestern aristocrat of the first rank, and a really cool person.

What do you think readers will find most surprising?

Maybe the extreme, ahead-of-its-time modernism of his short plays.

Favorite piece in collection?

The Young Immigrunts! This is a magic piece of humor writing. “ ‘Shut up,’ he explained,” is as funny as it is possible to be in only four words. But every line in this story is a magic trick. The only difference between this story and what actual magicians do is that their tricks can be explained. I’ve looked at The Young Immigrunts dozens of times, always with the same mystified delight, and I still couldn’t tell you how it was done.

Read The Young Immigrunts—in its entirety, with original illustrations by Gaar Williams—at The Library of America’s Story of the Week!

John Hollander (1929–2013)

John Hollander at a 2004 event to celebrate
the publication of American Wits.
Photo by Star Black

It was with great sadness that we learned over the weekend that poet and critic John Hollander had died at the age of 83. Hollander was a longtime advisor to The Library of America, who freely offered his incomparable expertise and shepherded six volumes to print, including the landmark two-volume collection American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century.

LOA editor-in-chief Geoffrey O’Brien recalls the pleasure of having Hollander for a colleague:

Working with John Hollander on his two-volume Library of America anthology American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century was like being given an intimately detailed tour of a country until then scarcely known. The large familiar landmarks—Dickinson, Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Poe—took on a new character when surrounded by scores of their contemporaries from every corner of that culture of verse which for John was a luxuriant garden. He wasn’t interested in reducing literary history to a few essential writers: his taste for poetry was expansive, extending to a multitude of minor and occasional voices. The hours spent getting texts and notes in order for this immense undertaking remain in memory as a delight, informed as they were by his profound knowledge and by an affection equally profound for the materials in hand. Nothing could have been less dry or schoolmasterish than his capacity to find the hum of poetry even at its most attenuated frequencies.

Other Library of America volumes edited or co-edited by Hollander include Henry James: Complete Stories 1892–1898, American Wits: An Anthology of Light Verse, Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems, and the Paperback Classics edition of the Walt Whitman: Leaves of Grass. He also served on the advisory board for the two volumes of American Poetry: The Twentieth Century.

See today’s New York Times for an extended summary of Hollander’s remarkable career.

Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. celebrates the environmental vision of his ancestorJames Fenimore Cooper

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.’s tribute to his great-great-grandfather James Fenimore Cooper. Mr. Cooper is the author of numerous books on space exploration and was for many years a staff writer at The New Yorker. His remarks were delivered by his daughter, film producer Molly Cooper, joined on stage by her cousin Sage Mehta, who offered a reading from one of James Fenimore Cooper’s novels.

Molly Cooper,
with Sage Mehta in the background
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

My father once told me that people who talked too much about their ancestors were like potatoes: The best part of them is underground. I always try to remember that, but it may be a tough piece of advice to follow tonight.

My father, when my brother and sisters and I were young, used to read The Leatherstocking Tales to us out loud. We would lie on the floor, put our heads under the couch, and go to sleep. It was a great many years before I finally came around and learned to appreciate the books in their own right.

One of the important things about Cooper is that, as a novelist, he has chalked up a great many “firsts.” This may not have been as difficult for America’s first well-known novelist as it would be for writers today; back then, the field of “firsts” was fairly open. For example, he wrote our first international blockbusters. He wrote the first Westerns. He wrote the first novels of the sea by someone who had actually been to sea. He was the first American novelist to make a living from his writing. And, of course, he was, in The Leatherstocking Tales, the first novelist to bring the American wilderness, and the American Indian, to a national, and then an international, audience.

Cooper’s love of the wilderness led to his being a very early, and major, source of the conservation movement in this country. He came by his love of the wilderness naturally. He grew up in Cooperstown, a village founded in 1789 by his father. It is at the foot of a large lake—the Glimmerglass of The Deerslayer. It was, and is, surrounded by woods. Cooper, and his next older brother, William, grew up in these woods and on the lake. “They are quite wild,” their older sister Hannah wrote of them. When their father was elected to Congress in 1797 in Philadelphia, his wife, who hated the wilderness, wanted to move the family with him; but her two youngest children put their collective feet down and refused to go. She remained. Cooper wrote in the introduction to The Pioneers, published in 1823, that it was his childhood in Cooperstown that gave him his strong feelings about nature; it was these feelings that later in his writings he broadcast across the country and around the world.

He was also an early source in this country of the environmental movement. Environmentalism, of course, goes a step beyond conservation, because by conserving nature, you preserve that which sustains you. The whole succession of the five Leatherstocking Tales is a steady progression westward, as Leatherstocking and his friend Chingachgook keep moving on in order to stay ahead of the settlers with their axes, chopping down the forests that Leatherstocking and his friend depend upon for a living. In The Pioneers, much is made of the “wasty ways” of the settlers. They cut down trees indiscriminately, including the sugar maple, which uniquely supplied them with the makings of maple sugar, a major product of the woodlands. They haul in fish by the net-full, leaving most of them to rot on the shore. One of the great scenes in The Pioneers is the migratory flight of the passenger pigeons over the Lake, darkening the sky. The settlers run out with their shotguns, peppering the sky with shot and bringing down the birds by the thousands; Leatherstocking shoots just one, leading to a homily about never killing more birds or fish than you actually need, lest you destroy that which sustains you. As you know, the last passenger pigeon died early in the last century.

In a sense, Cooper still lives. For one thing, his books have not been out of print since the early 1820s, not true of any other American novelist. And environmentalists in Cooperstown, which include some members of my family, are very apt to quote him in their never-ending battles against local unplanned developers. Cooper’s descendants are still in Cooperstown; indeed, the story of Cooper children compelling their mother to stay there has been repeated at least once. Cooper is at his best when he is writing about nature, whether it be the wilderness or the sea. Melville and Conrad have acknowledged their debt to him. Cooper’s writing can at times be turgid—if two old pioneers, or two old salts, are cracking jokes, it is time to turn the page. But give him a break. He was writing before almost any American novelist you ever heard of. When he is in the woods or at sea, he is unbeatable; at its best, his writing is powerful and lyrical. He was the most prominent literary pioneer of this country. I am very happy that The Empire State Center for the Book and The New York Library Association have selected him for the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

Now I will stop, lest you think I really am a potato.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

A recent Story of the Week selection:
“Storm and Shipwreck,” from James Fenimore Cooper’s Ned Myers

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott
Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero
Paul O. Zelinsky on Maurice Sendak

Paul O. Zelinsky on Maurice Sendak: “books for children can and should acknowledge a full range of human emotions”

Reader’s Almanac continues its presentation of remarks offered at the 2013 New York State Writers Hall of Fame induction ceremony with Paul O. Zelinsky’s tribute to Maurice Sendak. Zelinsky is a Caldecott Medal–winning illustrator of such celebrated children’s books as The Wheels on the Bus, Rapunzel, and Z is for Moose.

Paul O. Zelinsky
Photograph by Tatiana Breslow

I want to express my gratitude for the privilege of inducting Maurice Sendak into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. I only wish that he could be here to accept the honor, which I understand came very close to happening only last year, but it proved to be impossible. Maurice Sendak is already, I am fairly sure, the most honored figure in American children’s literature, having won every major award in the field. But as everyone in the field knows, it’s unusual to find a children’s book creator even in the running when honors are going to makers of grown-up art. This award, and the company it places him in, would have pleased Maurice greatly.

I hope you’ll excuse me if I presume to speak for him. I knew Maurice, perhaps not as closely as some, but longer than most, since the fall of ‘71 when I had the luck to be in the first class he ever taught. So I have heard him express many opinions and ideas, always with great fervor. And I seem to have absorbed these ideas well enough that I now carry around inside my head a little Maurice Sendak voice, which rises up occasionally to render praise or spew invective in the unrestrained and hilarious way that you might have glimpsed if you saw Stephen Colbert’s interview with him on television.

The idea that put Maurice on the cultural map was his insistence, embodied in picture books that caught the attention and earned the love of young readers everywhere, that books for children can and should acknowledge a full range of human emotions, not just the pretty or instructive ones. There is wildness in every soul, and that is as it should be. From the beginning, Sendak’s drawings were unusually expressive—vivid, funny, and full of spirit. He was already highly visible as an illustrator when Where the Wild Things Are unleashed this radical idea on the world. That it is no longer radical is proof of its enduring influence. Sendak’s books affected the very way Americans understand what childhood is.

These books don’t set out to teach lessons, but they do contain ideas—not intellectual statements, but something more like thoughts wrapped in a mystery. Maurice looked for reverberations and he looked for meaning, and he believed fiercely that what he discovered, if he worked it up right, would be accessible to anyone of any age who was open to it. If one of these right, reverberating images happened to upset the adult guardians of good behavior, it was not Maurice’s concern. In the Night Kitchen’s sensual dream broke through boundaries and disturbed a great many gatekeepers not because Maurice wanted to, but because the book needed to.

Maurice Sendak loved art; he loved it high and he loved it low. For years he worked to the strains of Mozart, who made his way into the illustrations of Outside Over There. Melville was not only an obsessively favorite writer, Herman Melville was, and still is, Maurice’s beloved German Shepherd. A massive collection of antique Mickey Mice infested Maurice’s house. He got the Disney people to give him a videotape of Pinocchio at a time when Disney cartoons were rigorously kept unavailable outside of their measured theatrical release. No matter how high or low Maurice’s own art is, and whether it works best for people whose age is one digit long, or two, or three, it is fully appropriate to pay tribute to it, and to him, here, with this induction.

Coming together like this to honor a great talent, we are also honoring ourselves, creating a link between us and this artist, or what there is of the artist that lives in our heads, in a way that links us together as well. And in the end, isn’t that the best place and the perfect response for an artist and his art?

Still, there was a Maurice Sendak who very much had his own head and didn’t need to live in ours; he lived in Brooklyn, then in Manhattan, and even though he moved to Connecticut for the second half of his life, he never gave up his Greenwich Village apartment, which qualifies him all the more for this New York State award. I miss him a lot. I am proud to induct Maurice Sendak into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

At a June 4 ceremony here in midtown Manhattan, The Empire State Center for the Book formally inducted eight writers into the New York States Writers Hall of Fame, which it established in 2010 to recognize New York-born or based poets, novelists, journalists, and historians who have made an indelible mark on our culture. The class of 2013 included living writers Marilyn Hacker, Alice McDermott, Walter Mosley, and Calvin Trillin, as well as James Fenimore Cooper, Countee Cullen, Miguel Piñero, and Maurice Sendak.

Previous posts from the Hall of Fame ceremony:
Honor Moore on Marilyn Hacker
Charles Molesworth on Countée Cullen
Dan Barry on Alice McDermott
Daniel Gallant on Miguel Piñero