A Busher’s Letters; the Ring Lardner classic
I wrote a foreword to an edition of You Know Me Al published six years ago by Skyhorse (link below). I think the publisher will not mind my sharing it now. [https://www.amazon.com/You-Know-Me-Al-Bushers/dp/1613216939]
Happy Birthday, Jack Keefe. The busher whose letters home comprise Ring Lardner’s classic is 100 years old. His missives were published serially as six short stories in the Saturday Evening Post. Note that I have not yet called this book a novel though there is every good reason to do so. The epistolary novel goes back long before Samuel Richardson made a hit with Pamela in 1740, and many authors, including Charles Dickens, made up their stories weekly, holding a nation in suspense.
“A Busher’s Letters Home” was the title of the first Jack Keefe story, appearing in the Post dated March 7, 1914, and it would supply the subtitle when the six stories were gathered in book form in 1916. You Know Me Al — don’t give it a comma; its protagonist never did — was a sensation a century ago and its literary standing has never dimmed, even as new generations of readers puzzled over who these peripheral characters were: Schalk, Lord, Weaver, Cobb, McGraw, Comiskey, et al. If these names are familiar to you as members of the Chicago White Sox, You Know Me Al may be slightly more delicious, but Virginia Woolf saw the brilliance of Lardner’s work unimpeded by the arcana of inside baseball.
Jack Keefe is a pitcher called up to the White Sox from the Central League. He is based on one real-life pitcher for the White Sox especially (Ed Walsh), but not entirely. Keefe is a hayseed, a rube, a farmboy with a cardboard valise like Denton True Young, whose nickname “Cy” owed as much to his being a Cyrus from the sticks as it did to his cyclonic speed. He also is a dope and a braggart who, like that archetypal “reuben” George Edward “Rube” Waddell, provoked mirth among the city swells and hero worship among children. Keefe is engaged three times over the six stories; Waddell married three times that we know about.
Jack Keefe is an innocent, but he is no wide-eyed Candide. He is a boob who thinks he is sharp, a braggart who continually gets his comeuppance — from the reader as well as his teammates — because he is immune to embarrassment. An oddly endearing narcissist, Keefe never meets the obstacle he can’t conquer with bluff or dumb luck. In his letters to “Friend Al,” back home in Bedford, Indiana, he wields his optimism as a cudgel from beginning to end. No wiser on the last page then he was on the first, he is an enduring American anti-hero.
You Know Me Al was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.