Le Père
La Mère
John, the eldest son
Jim, the middle-sized son
Bill, the son-of-a-gun
SCENE: Breakfast
BILL
I’m all through with my breakus.
LA MÈRE
Have you got a kiss for me?
BILL
I can’t be kissing people every day. Just Wednesday.
LA MÈRE
But this is Wednesday.
BILL
Just afternoons.
LE PÈRE
What kind of an automobile have you got, Mr. Bill?
BILL
I’ve got a dangerous automobile. It runs over big ladies.
JOHN
If you ran over ladies you’d get arrested.
BILL
It runs over policemen, too.
And in another installment:
BILL
But why didn’t I get something?
LE PÈRE
You did, you got a ball, but it isn’t your birthday. It’s John’s and Jim’s birthday.
BILL
It is my birthday.
JIM
It isn’t your birthday, bees you’re not anything old.
BILL
I am as old as you are, Mr. Jimmy.
JIM
You’re not, bees I’m five years old.
BILL
I’m one billion and thirty-nine years old and that’s old.
JIM
But you’re not even older than John bees he’s seven.
BILL
But I’m older than John because he’s seven and I’m God. I’m older than anybody in the world. I’m the oldest man in the world, I think.
JIM
Oh, think yourself.
JOHN
If he thinks he’s old, let him think he’s old. We’re older.
BILL
No, you’re not, Mr. Johnny. Because I’m older than anybody.
JIM
Oh, older yourself. Giants are older.
BILL
I’m a giant myself. I’m God, I think.
Though the column ran seven days a week, Dad somehow found time to take on an array of other writing assignments, including a six-day-a-week comic strip of “You Know Me Al” and the script for a 1925 movie, The New Klondike, which involved a baseball player caught up in the Florida realestate boom. (It was directed by Lewis Milestone, who would go on to make All Quiet on the Western Front.) By the mid-twenties, he had cut back on his newspaper work in order to concentrate on short stories. Even so, he managed to write revue sketches and song lyrics for Florenz Ziegfeld, contributing six numbers to the Ziegfeld-produced musical Smile, with a cast that included Fred and Adele Astaire. (“Someone gave me a rhyming dictionary for Christmas once,” Dad told a reporter who wanted to know what had caused him to take up lyric-writing. “I couldn’t exchange it for a tie.”) A source of particular satisfaction to him, after a number of unsuccessful attempts to write for the stage, was the play June Moon, which he co-wrote with George S. Kaufman. A comedy about the popular songwriting business, it became one of the bigger hits of the 1929–30 Broadway season.
The excerpts quoted, along with later family revelations and my own memories, all testify to my impulse to assert myself. The fact that I was overweight and uncoordinated increased rather than diminished that need. The best way to get the attention I craved, it seemed, was to express opinions that ranged from the unexpected to the outrageous. By the time I was twelve, I had proceeded from identifying with God to denying his existence. There was no such entity, I told a next-door neighbor. (Though his mother lodged a complaint with my mother, I am happy to say that the boy eventually recovered from the shock and became a Congressman.)
The most striking thing about our household was the absence of outward emotion. What we sought to express were our thoughts rather than our feelings. A raised voice was a rare and unwelcome event, and all of us were fairly adept at holding our tongues, though William Shawn, the longtime editor of The New Yorker, described my brother David, the youngest of us, as “a little more open and a little more talkative than the other Lardners . . . ”
My brothers and I never had the traditional man-to-man talk about sex with our father. I doubt if he even considered it, since he would have been unable to say the necessary words. (They were quite literally unmentionable in our household.) Increasingly, in the last decade or so of his life, Dad realized that other people did speak them—indeed, that some writers found sex not only a permissible but a favorite subject. These peers, from his point of view, were unforgivably deficient in taste. In his own work, even as it grew deeper and more psychologically complex, there was never a suggestion of amorous passion; nor did he ever write anything that would normally be considered a love scene.
If roots in the New World were a defense, I would have been well-protected against the charge of Un-Americanness. Ancestors on both sides of my family had been here since the seventeenth century, and the Lardners as well as the Abbotts (my mother’s forebears) were double pioneers, originally settling in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, respectively, and then, in the mid-nineteenth century, in Michigan and Indiana. But their migration to the untamed Middle West is not to be confused with that of the propertyless pioneers in their covered wagons or the trainloads of European immigrants seeking free land—a hundred and sixty acres that, along with a lot of hard work, could support a family. The Lardners and Abbotts were looking for land, too, but in much larger quantities, as the best investment for their capital. As an added attraction, they were leaving metropolises with hundreds of upper-class people and heading for frontier settlements—Niles, Michigan, and Goshen, Indiana—where they would share their elite status with no more than half-a-dozen other families.
Dad’s maternal grandfather was rector of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Niles. My grandmother and aunt, both named Lena, played the organ in that church, consecutively, for a hundred and one years. The literalness of the religious faith in the older Lena can best be illustrated by a letter she wrote in 1898 to an acquaintance whose child had died:
Dear Mrs. Miller:
From my own experience I know how sad you are and how much you miss the bright child who was your sweet little companion in daily life. The only comfort for you is to try to realize that she is happy and safe. All that a loving mother could do for her does not compare with what her Heavenly Father has already done for her. After her brief suffering, she is safe and happy in His arms forever. It is by thinking of her joy that you can be consoled and with the Christian’s faith, you look forward to meeting her again.
Truly yours.
Lena B. Lardner
There were people even in those days who would have found such a message of consolation infuriating in its smug righteousness, but we may assume my grandmother knew her recipient and that it was received in the same warmhearted spirit in which it was written.
My grandmother was Dad’s only teacher until he was ten, when a private tutor took over his education and that of his two youngest siblings. So he was not subject to the kind of schoolyard talk, 1890s-style, through