Treat 'Em Rough: Letters from Jack the Kaiser Killer

by Ring Lardner, Will Jonson (Editor)

Ring Larder was one of Ernest Hemingway's fravorite writers. As a beginning writer Hemingway sometimes wrote under the pen name Ring Lardner, Jr., a nod to his literary hero Ring Lardner.

Treat'em Rough - Letters From Jack the Kaiser Killer is a book on the First World War it is written in the form of letters. The ltters made heavy use of the fictional author's idiosyncratic vernacular. Treat'em Rough uses satire in much the same way as Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad.

"Ring Lardner thought of himself as primarily a sports columnist whose stuff wasn't destined to last, and he held to that absurd belief even after his first masterpiece, Ring Lardner's earned the awed appreciation of Virginia Woolf, among other very serious, unfunny people", wrote Andrew Ferguson, who named it, in a Wall Street Journal article, one of the top five writers of American humor.

58 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1983

About the author

Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre.

Father of author Ring Lardner Jr.

Reviews

[Chuck LoPresti · Rating 4 out of 5]

A book with a one-sided dialog of a neurotic and self-delusional athlete, now functioning as a soldier whose main function is to serve as the butt of jokes is certainly what you’d expect from Rind Lardner Sr. But what you might not expect is for Lardner to reduce the focus on humor to create a more revealing portrait of a specific man in a specific time. Generally the skill of Lardner is to use vernacular and humor to create a caricature that seems more revealing of sports or war in general. Jack Keefe has now matured as a character throughout “You Know Me Al” to the point where the depth of this portrait has increased to something greater than satire and simple comedy. It is almost impossible for me to read Ring Larder without two of my greatest heroes, Groucho and James Farrell, close in mind. Add James Thurber to that list with “Treat ‘em Rough” because where wit and Chicago living are comparable to Groucho and Farrell – it is Thurber’s sociological insight that comes to mind in this volume. This begs the question – then why not just read Groucho, Thurber and Farrell instead – and you won’t waste your time in doing that for certain – but Lardner’s newspaper skills have honed his writing to greater efficiency and colloquial intrapersonal clarity that is very enjoyable to read. Don’t mistake Larder as light-reading – he has always presented compelling gravity even in his most hilarious moments. I share the common opinion that the best humor requires that gravity to resonate as in Don Quixote but it might be the Dialog of the Dogs that serves as the better Cervantes point of reference in describing this specific Lardner work. Obvious enough for the one-sided dialog that is present here but more so in the way that Scipio and Berganza, dogs speaking as humans seems to echo Jack’s ballplayer as soldier otherness. It’s when these character steps out of their traditional roles that their dialog becomes more revealing. It’s this idea, in many ways, that empowers the theater of “reality” TV cheapened into pap – but in more respectful and skilled hands – it is this deconstruction of the traditional roles that serves as a powerful tool in generating characters that keep attentive readers engaged. If you’re looking for an outright hilarious read from Lardner – check out “You Know Me Al” – if you’d like to see how he matures as a thinker and writer – check out this seemingly forgotten book.

[Perry Whitford · Rating 3 out of 5]

I waited a long time to getting around to reading something by one of America's best loved comic writers, a guy whose name I had been aware of for ages and never quite forgotten, after all, it's got something of a ring to it.

Jack Keefe, ace pitcher for the Chicago White Sox ,volunteers for the army when America enters WWI. He's a big, gullible hunk of American jock, completely lacking in self-awareness but (mostly) a stand-up guy for all that.

This book is not the first Lardner wrote featuring the easily taken in right-hander, and like the others it consists of a series of short letters sent to a friend (a bro' in contemporary parlance) which probably appeared in periodicals initially.

These letters take us through his four months training, are full of bad spelling, erratic diction, and generally reveal their author to be anything but the sharpest bullet in the rifle.

No-Man's land becomes 'Nobodys Land,' the German gas attacks give you 'gastritis'. His wife doesn't seem to miss him much, but he gets to flirt by letter with a girl from Texas.

Being so dumb he gets wound-up plenty too, with Shorty Lahey his chief tormentor. The excerpt below is highly typical of the comic tone throughout, and though only mildly amusing is probably amongst the best jokes too:

'So afterwards when we was in the barracks he come up and says "If you are playing Jonah Vark you should ought to quit telling us to come on boys and give them hell because Jonah Vark wouldn't never use a word like that." So I said "I guess he would say a whole lot worse then that if he had a dirty rat like you in his command." So that shut him up.'

And would you believe it, during his training the Sox only go and win the 'world serious'.