Damon Runyon is Not Ring Lardner
This post has its roots in one simple fact: Damon Runyon is not Ring Lardner. Or perhaps I should say that Ring Lardner is not Damon Runyon.
As I mentioned in my last blog post: I mixed the two men up in my head. My fingers typed Ring Lardner in my original notes but my brain immediately jumped to Damon Runyon’s short stories set on Broadway in the early years of the twentieth century and Guys and Dolls, the musical based on those stories.* (One of my all-time favorites.) I didn’t remain confused for long. The first source I looked at in preparation for writing about the Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition, made it clear that Runyon was not the sports writer I was looking for. It also made it clear that while I know and love Runyon’s stories, I knew nothing whatsoever about Runyon. That was easily fixed.
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- Ring Lardner
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- Damon Runyon
It turns out that confusing Lardner and Runyon wasn’t that big a jump.** They were close in age, born in 1885 and 1880 respectively. Both recreated themselves with a strategic name change. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner decided to go by Ring for obvious reasons. Alfred Damon Runyon dropped the Alfred when he enlisted in the Army during the Spanish American War and discovered that Alfred was one standard deviation from Percival as far as the average enlisted man was concerned. Both were popular sports writers whose syndicated columns reached a national audience : Lardner with the Chicago Tribune and Runyon with the Hearst papers. Both successfully made the leap into fiction, writing in what purported to be very specific regional vernaculars, though I suspect that in both cases the idiom was in large part their own creation. And both traveled to Europe to report on the experience of American soldiers in “the war to end all wars”— the point at which my confusion between the two started.
Their war coverage is a good place to look at the differences between the two.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Tribune send Lardner to France to report on “the funny side of the war.” He was there for two months soon after the American Expeditionary Force arrived. His first piece of “war reporting”, titled “Lardner Meets Horrors the Wake of War,” begins with the fact that the water in his Paris hotel was turned off for a course of several hours and turns a small inconvenience into a satirical, stereotype-laden piece about the French not liking to drink water or to bath in it.
Runyon, by contrast, was an actual war correspondent. World War I was not his first experience of war. Runyon fought in the Spanish-American War, where he was wounded twice and earned the nickname “The Colorado Kipling” for his stories and verses about the experience. Later he traveled as a correspondent with Black Jack Pershing’s Punitive Expedition in search of Pancho Villa. He arrived relatively late to World War I, in October 1918,**** and primarily covered the Meuse-Argonne Offensive . His most powerful pieces were written not from the battlefield, but on the way home aboard the USS Leviathan, traveling with a large number of wounded men. And perhaps that is not surprising, given that his best work is stories of the man (and woman) on the street, even if that street is very specifically seventeen blocks of W. 27th Street, peopled by “burlesque dolls and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers…” Not to mention bookies, horse players, gin runners, and other “wrong gees.”
I bet none of us ever confuse Ring Lardner with Damon Runyon again.
*One of those stories, “Little Miss Marker, also inspired a movie by the same name starring six-year-old Shirley Temple. A reminder that sent me down the rabbit hole looking for streaming options.
**FYI: You also have to be careful not to confuse Lardner with his son, Ring Lardner Jr, who turned his own satirical voice to screenwriting, winning Oscars for Woman of the Year and M*A*S*H. I would apologize for the digression, but this post is essentially me taking you with me down a series of rabbit holes, and giving you all too clear a picture of how my brain works in the process.***
*** I would like to think that my mind is as orderly as library card catalog: the old kind that literally had little drawers that held 3 by 5 cards, arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, title, and subject headings.
Instead it looks more like this:
****For those of you who don’t carry the relevant dates in your head, the Armistice that ended the war was signed November 11, 1918.
Adventures in Journalism: The Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition
These days I’m deep in the history of American journalism, particularly America’s foreign correspondents and war correspondents. (FYI, not all foreign correspondents were war correspondents, and vice-versa.) It is a fascinating world of colorful characters, competition, camaraderie, and occasional back-stabbing.
Newspaper owners, particularly those who maintained reporters overseas, were engaged in a constant balancing act between running a business and offering a public service. I offer you the example of the Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition, which was both.
Note the baseball box scores right above the fold. McCormick and his editor knew their audience.
The Army Edition was a four-page paper aimed at American soldiers in France during World War I, launched in Paris in July, 1917. * The Tribune’s publisher, Robert McCormick, intended to provide soldiers with a blend of war and home town news, as well as popular features from the parent paper, including political cartoons by John T. McCutchen and a column from the Tribune’s editorial page titled “A Line O’Type or Two.”** Self-described “girl-reporter” Peggy Hull contributed chatty pieces under the heading “How Peggy Got to Paris” about her experiences as an unofficial and unaccredited guest of General Pershing and the American Expeditionary Force at an unnamed but easily identifiable American training camp . In August, Tribune sports writer and humor columnist Ring Lardner arrived for a two month stint with the assignment of reporting on “the funny side of the war.”*** (Hull and Lardner’s pieces also ran in the Tribune’s papers back home. McCormick believed in getting full value for his extravagant gestures.)
McCormick saw the paper as a service to soldiers, but he also wanted it to pay for itself. He sold the paper for two cents, the same price as the much larger Chicago Tribune. He also actively courted ads from retailers who wanted to sell mail order goods to soldiers. (He also pitched this as a service to soldiers who had arrived in France and found it difficult to buy winter clothing, boots, and other necessities.)
After the war, McCormick used the structure he had put in place with the Army Edition to create the famed Paris Edition, which became a home away from home for Lost Generation luminaries like Ernest Hemingway (who wrote for the paper) and F.Scott Fitzgerald (who just liked to hang out there). It was also the training ground for a generation of foreign correspondents.
*The official army newspaper, Stars and Stripes, was originally founded during the American Civil War by Union soldiers, who used a captured newspaper press to print four issues. The paper was revived by the Army in World War I and produced by an all-military staff. Its first issue was published on February 8, 1918, almost six months after the debut of the Tribune’s Army Edition. The paper was created because soldiers complained that they weren’t getting reliable news from home. Not an endorsement for the Army Edition as a source of news rather than a source of entertainment.
**A truly dreadful pun on the linotype machine , a type-setting machine that was hot technology at the time. First introduced in 1866, it powered the production of daily newspapers around the world through the 1970s.
In my opinion, the column was as dreadful as the punny title: a collection of whimsical essays, light verse, “humorous” clippings from rural newspapers, and pieces that poked fun at the “so-called human race”. A lot of people must have disagreed with me. The column ran for thirty years under three separate editors.
***Ring Lardner is not particularly well known today. (In fact, I got him mixed up in my head with Damon Runyon, whose work I love. I was mighty disappointed when I realized my error.) But he was quite famous at the time. So famous that a would-be writer named Ernest Hemingway sometimes signed his sports articles for the Oak Park and River High School newspaper as “Ring Lardner, Jr.”
At the risk of thoroughly establishing a reputation as a grouch, I will admit that I don’t think Ring Lardner is funny. You don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s an example in which he combines baseball and international relations: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/in-the-wake-of-the-news-france-e61713260255
The Fabric of Civilization
Two sentences early in Virginia Postrel’s The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World caught my imagination:
“What we usually call the Stone Age could just as easily be called the String Age. The two prehistoric technologies were literally intertwined.”
I was predisposed to enjoy the book, which combines two of my favorite things—history and textiles—in a big picture exploration of commerce, technology, and civilization itself. But with those two sentences I was hooked. And I remained hooked for the entire book. If I had been reading in a hard copy instead of an e-galley, I would have put lots of exclamation marks in the margins and stuffed it full of sticky notes.
The Fabric of Civilization is a story of innovation, or more accurately a series of stories. Postrel convincingly argues that textiles have played a central role in the histories of technology, commerce, and civilization itself. She describes innovations in the creation of textiles, from the game-changing discovery of string in the Stone Age to current efforts to engineer “smart textiles.”* She explains the fundamental principles of spinning and weaving, and the unexpected relationship between weaving and binary code.** She considers how changes in textile manufacturing shaped the larger world, including the textile mills that sparked the Industrial Revolution and the search for better dyes that created the modern chemical industry. She looks at the development of information technologies as a result of long-distance textile trades: business letters in ancient Assyria, regular mail service in medieval Italy, double-entry bookkeeping in Renaissance Italy and the roots of modern banking in the need for international credit arrangements in the early modern era.
Postrel is writing history on a global scale, but she never loses sight of the people in her story. A woman weaver in ancient Assyria, responding to changing market demands, the teenaged Niccolo Machiavelli*** mastering the “new math” of Hindu-Arabic numerals, paleoanthropologists attempting to reproduce prehistoric fibers, and modern textile chemists and engineers all play a role.
Combining exhaustive research with an accessible writing style, The Fabric of Civilization will appeal to both fans of micro-histories and to textile junkies interested in the history of their passion.
*I doubt that I’ll be an early adopter.
**She describes weavers as “visually trained people with strong number skills.” This was reinforced in my research for a piece on Afghan war rugs for MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History. When one scholar asked an Afghan weaver how she translated images into rug patterns she said: “I don’t see it as a picture. I see it as numbers and I make it a song.” But I digress.
***I assume that most of you recognize the name Machiavelli, or at least the term machiavellian. A minor fifteenth century Italian diplomat, he is best known as the author of The Prince, a work of political philosophy that argues princes must see things as they are and take action accordingly, rather than act based on ideal principles.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.