Volume 24, Number 14 · September 15, 1977
A Silent Ring
By Robert Towers
Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner
by Jonathan Yardley
Random House, 415 pp., $12.95
For a minor—though engaging—figure in American literature, Ring Lardner has received ample biographical attention in the last twenty years or so. Have Bret Harte and Ambrose Bierce faired so well? Donald Elder's Ring Lardner (Doubleday, 1956) still, in my opinion, remains the best single work on the subject—a well-written, knowledgeable, and extremely fair account of the life and works of the poker-faced Ring; I can find no internal evidence to support Jonathan Yardley's statement (in 'A Note on Sources' in the book under review) that Elder 'had the misfortune to lose interest in his subject, and the book shows it.' If the Elder biography does not advance, very far into the subterranean complexities of Lardner's personality, neither does it tease us with reticences as does Ring Lardner, Jr.'s family memoir, The Lardners (Harper and Row, 1976). When the latter appeared, it was generally welcomed as the gracefully written and interesting chronicle that it is but severely criticized in this journal for, among other things, the superficiality with which it treated the major pathology of Lardner's life—his alcoholism. The latest biography, Yardley's Ring, leaves us, I am afraid, more thoroughly on the outside of the subject than either of its predecessors.
Review, 2095 words
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