How To Write Short Stories - Ring W. Lardner

Another gem from the bookshelf as I was scanning this morning to find something to blog about is "How To Write Short Stories [With Samples] by Ring W. Lardner.

Originally published in 1924, the name Ring W. Lardner might "ring" a bell with you if you're a fan of the work of J.D.Salinger who references Lardner in "Catcher In the Rye" and "Franny and Zooey". He was also a friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Lardner and Fitzgerald both happened to live in Great Neck (New York) between October 1922 and April 1924. It was an improbable friendship aided by alcohol and that their wives got along well. Zelda who had "special standards" for people (I couldn't find any information on exactly what those standards were and what made them special according to an article in the New York Times), didn't always get along with Scott's friends, but she liked Ring well enough to allow him to conduct a mock courtship of her.

Of all the girls for whom I care,
And there are quite a number,
None can compare with Zelda Sayre,
Now wedded to a plumber.
So here's my Christmas wish for you:
I worship Leon Errol,
But the funniest girl I ever knew
Is Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald.

A poem from Ring to Zelda

Another poem from Ring to Zelda, click to enlarge.

Another story regarding their friendship involves dancing on a lawn in the hopes of gaining an audience with Joseph Conrad who was visiting America at the time. Conrad had them thrown off the property without seeing them.

Lardner's friendship proved to be a bigger inspiration to Fitzgerald than I originally thought. I thought the extent of the literary proof of their friendship in fiction anyway - since they wrote each other letters for many years - was that Lardner was a model for Abe North in "Tender Is the Night". Further research has shown that Lardner also appeared in "The Great Gatsby" as Owl Eyes who delivers Gatsby's obituary of "The poor son of a bitch", presumably as a thank you Lardner proofreading the book.

Later Fitzgerald would use Lardner's looks and wit. The man Fitzgerald referred to as "my alcoholic" would be reflected in Abe North further. North as the gifted musician who had ruined himself with drink and loss of belief in his work is exactly what Lardner had become. But Fitzgerald never abandoned his friend. After Lardner's death Fitzgerald wrote an elegy called "Ring" for The New Republic where he expressed with deep regret that:

"At no time did I feel that I had known him enough, or that anyone knew him - it was not the feeling that there was more stuff in him and that it should come out, it was rather a qualitative difference, it was rather as though, due to some inadequacy in oneself, one had not penetrated to something unsolved, new and unsaid. That is why one wishes that Ring had written down a larger proportion of what was in his mind and heart. It would have saved him longer for us, and that is itself would be something. But I would like to know what it was, and now I will go on wishing - what did Ring want, how did he want things to be, how did he think things were?

A great and good American is dead. Let us not obscure him by flowers but walk up and look at that fine medallion, all abraded by sorrows that perhaps we are not equipped to understand. Ring made no enemies, because he was kind, and to many millions he gave release and delight."

Lardner was also an inspiration to another writer. Ernest Hemingway. In high school Hemingway wrote for his school paper under the nom de plume Ring Lardner Jr. (the real Ring Lardner Jr. went on to win an Academy Award for "Woman of the Year" and for "M*A*S*H). Though he doesn't openly admit Lardner's influence there is some evidence to be found in Hemingway's letters that Lardner continued to influence Hemingway throughout the course of his life.

• "Burton Rascoe said In Our Time showed the influences of who the hell do you think?--Ring Lardner and Sherwood Anderson!" (To Ezra Pound, Burguete, Spain, 19 July 1924).

• "Some bright guy said In Our Time was a series of thumbnail sketches showing a great deal of talent but obviously under the influence of Ring Lardner. Yeah! That kind of stuff is fine. It doesn't bother." (To Edmund Wilson, Paris, 18 October 1924).

• "Your friend Ring is hampered by lack of intelligence, lack of any aesthetic appreciation, terrible repressions and bitterness. Any one of those is a terrible load for any writer to carry no matter how talented. He is, of course, 100 times as intelligent as most U.S. writers." (to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Paris, 20 April 1926).

• "Learned from Anderson but it didn't last long. Imitated Ring Lardner as a kid but didn't learn from him. Nothing to learn because he doesn't know anything. All he has is a good false ear and has been around." (To Arnold Gingrich, Key West, 3 April 1933) 

If you read the preface to Lardner's "How ToWrite Short Stories" it is full of sage advice and a writing style that helps me understand why it would have attracted the likes of Hemingway and Salinger - but I can also see how it might have influenced other writers like Bernard Malamud writer of "The Natural", perhaps one of the best novels ever written about the great sport of baseball.

But knowing the outcome of Lardner's life from Fitzgerald's point of view makes the knowledge that Lardner's work went on to inspire some of the greatest writers American literature has ever known bittersweet.

Lardner's preface is a mere five pages long, but full of helpful advice. He shows how a trivial line of dialogue can upset an entire plot and lead the author him or herself astray. My eyes stayed fixed to the line "it will be good practice" for quite some time. Practice. Writing takes practice.

And in case you're wondering about Lardner's references in Salinger's "The Catcher In the Rye", he's mentioned twice. Once as being an interest of Holden's brother and the other as being Holden's favourite writer after DB.

 Further reading:

• If you'd like to read the preface in full to Lardner's collection of short stories, you can find it here.

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A Recipe (for life) from Zelda Fitzgerald

Zelda Fitzgeral was dubbed by her husband the writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night) as "the first American flapper" and is (or should be) for any aspiring flâneuse-eur a sort of inspiration. Any aspiring flâneuse-eur would be flattered to be the embodiment of an entire era in history. Non? 

After her husband's success with the novel This Side of Paradise, the Fitzgeralds were nearly instant celebrities. Zelda had always welcomed the limelight, and welcomed the invitations and the parties - the jazz and the gin.

The Fitzgeralds were, colloquially speaking, drunks. An early version of Bonnie and Clyde except instead of robbing and stealing the Fitzgeralds drank to excess, took naps in chic Upper East Side sitting rooms, and went to party after party.

She was even drunk at the birth of her daughter and admitted as much."Oh, God, goofo I'm drunk. Mark Twain. Isn't she smart—she has the hiccups. I hope it's beautiful and a fool—a beautiful little fool".

The new father wasn't too inebriated to be present for his daughter's birth and the proof is in the plagarism. Daisy Buchanan would later utter the same words to her daughter in The Great Gatsby. 

 The Fitzgeralds quickly became accustomed to their new life as parents thanks to the extensive staff they employed of a nurse for Frances ("Scottie"), a couple who cleaned the house, and a laundress - who I like to imagine Zelda never once referred to as a laundry lady in the high-falutin' conversations she likely had with some of her top drawer chums.


It is Zelda's sort of exaggerated WASPishness that made me so curious about her in the first place. I Wiki'd her and my curiosity was rewarded with a sort of recette pour la vie, or Zelda's at least.

(Asked to submit a recipe for a book, she sent them the following.)

"See if there is any bacon, and if there is, ask the cook which pan to fry it in. Then ask if there are any eggs, and if so try and persuade the cook to poach two of them. It is better not to attempt toast, as it burns very easily. Also, in the case of bacon, do not turn the fire too high, or you will have to get out of the house for a week. Serve preferably on china plates, though gold or wood will do if handy".

To be a true flâneuse or if the case applies, a flâneur - means deciding that life is to be lived. It is seizing a moment to be witty instead of admitting you don't know how to cook*. Of course you know what one should serve, but you wouldn't serve it yourself because that would be unspeakable. (GASP!)

But choosing the life of the flâneuse, the bohemian, the vagabond, the layabout, the dandy, the fop, the eccentric - it's not for everybody and it's not always a pretty picture either.  Zelda was in many ways oppressed by her husband.  When she asked for a divorce because she was smitten with another man, F. Scott locked her in the house and didn't let her out again until she agreed to not divorce him. His work isolated a woman who wanted nothing more than to find a creative outlet for herself.  On top of everything Zelda grew increasingly resentful of all the things she'd written that found their way into her husband's work.

When she was approached to write a cheeky review of her husband's new book The Beautiful and The Damned, Zelda it seemed couldn't resist mentioning how her husband edited her words.

To begin with, every one must buy this book for the following aesthetic reasons: First, because I know where there is the cutest cloth of gold dress for only $300 in a store on Forty-second Street, and, also, if enough people buy it where there is a platinum ring with a complete circlet, and, also, if loads of people buy it my husband needs a new winter overcoat, although the one he has has done well enough for the last three years ... It seems to me that on one page I recognized a portion of an old diary of mine which mysteriously disappeared shortly after my marriage, and, also, scraps of letters which, though considerably edited, sound to me vaguely familiar. In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that is how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.

The review led to offers of work from other magazines, but in the end it was her husband who would be mentioned alongside Hemingway and the other greats of The Lost Generation that they had been a part of while living in France. Zelda would be diagnosed as schizophrenic. Their glamorous life was over. Their famous friends and wealthy admirers now considered them unpleasant company.

Zelda wrote her own book, Save Me the Waltz, in just six weeks and sent it off to the publisher.  When her husband finally read the book he was furious. It was Zelda's autobiography and whilst writing it she had dared to use parts of her life and their life together that Fitzgerald himself had already planned on using for his book Tender is the Night. 

In the end Zelda's book sold only a little over a thousand copies, less than half of the 3,010 books the publisher had printed because her husband would call her a plagarist (ha!) and a third-rate writer (insecure much?) and force her to revise it until it met his conditions. 

The same man who locked Zelda in the house so she couldn't leave him would leave her in a mental hospital while he went off to Hollywood to write for TV, and where because there may actually be poetic justice in the world he would die from drinking before her and without her.

Eight years later Zelda died while waiting for electroshock therapy as the mental hospital she was living in burned to the ground. She never finished her last book.
 

Their daughter Scottie had the last words of The Great Gatsby inscribed on their headstone - "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past", but I prefer this line that was 100% Zelda's - "I don't want to live. I want to love first, and live incidentally."

* Some flâneuse-eur like myself do like to cook and consider cooking extremely decadent things a school of philosophic thought of its own. It's called yumology.

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