Do You Know Me Now: Cultural Reflection and Resistance in Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al

Ring Lardner’s novel You Know Me Al (1916) was first published as a series of short stories in the Saturday Evening Post in 1914. Since that time, critics have come to recognize the letters of Jack Keefe as the first instance of literary baseball fiction, an assessment that becomes problematic for some due to the Post’s staunch middle-class audience.¹ While writers were drawn to the Post and other mass-market magazines because they paid well for short fiction, critics tended to discount the cultural value of such “machine-made stories.” ² With regard to style, Lardner’s use of vernacular humor was already a proven commodity based on the number of newspapers sold by Finley Peter Dunne’s Mr. Dooley in the first decade of the twentieth century. Thus, the production and nature of You Know Me Al are in keeping with criticism that it was shaped by commercial interests. Even so, Lardner’s work struck a chord with the middlebrow audience of the Saturday Evening Post, as evidenced by the fact Post editor George Horace Lorimer published eighteen of his baseball stories between 1914 and 1919. Further support for Lardner’s work came from Edmund Wilson and H. L. Mencken, two contemporary literary critics who believed his stories went beyond the “machine-made” qualities of other massmarket fiction.³

A contributing factor to Lardner’s winning of both of these audiences is that You Know Me Al tapped into the links between baseball and America that were being established the first decades of the twentieth century. More than just a pastime or a metaphor for the fledging nation, baseball provided a source of individual, local, and national identity for America and Americans. The game was enjoying a newfound sense of legitimacy as a part of the Progressive and Muscular Christian projects for self-improvement and Americanization through exercise.⁴ Americans who became professional players could earn as much as double the average income for seven or eight months of “work,” allowing poor and under-educated men the opportunity to get ahead. While baseball was entering its fifth decade as a professional sport, the “baseball creed” created by owners and sportswriters molded urban identities and reminded middle-class America of its glorious past and allowed it to look toward a bright future.⁵ On the national level, Albert G. Spalding, an impressive player and the game’s first great entrepreneur, convened a blueribbon panel in 1905 to “determine” that the game had been created by Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, and put Henry Chadwick’s notions about the contributions of English rounders to rest. Despite the bucolic and idyllic beginnings Spalding’s group imagined, baseball was an urban game at the professional level, mirroring the migrations from the farm to the cities during the early-twentieth century.⁶ Baseball was splashed across the pages of newspapers and pulp-fiction magazines, and when Charles Comiskey and John J. McGraw took their White Sox and Giants around the world from 1913 through 1914, they brought along a movie crew to record the historic event with the developing medium of film. If nothing else, the baseball in You Know Me Al would have resonated with a significant portion of the Post’s audience due to the ubiquitous presence of the game.

After tapping into the contemporary interest in baseball, Lardner further won over his middle-class Post audience by creating an American success story they could identify with. On a basic cultural level, pitcher Jack Keefe is just another young man from a small town trying to adjust to life in the city and prove to the folks back home that he is “making good” and taking his place in the world. However, when Lardner adds an ironic level to Keefe’s portrayal, he slips in a cultural critique of America’s transition from Victorian and rural mores to modern and urban values that resonated with critics of his time. Thus, a series of emblematic and problematic aspects of You Know Me Al illustrate...