This is a guest post by David Quantick.
“My parents are both married and ½ of them are very good looking.”
This is the story of two very different writers, one an American comic writer of genius, playwright and sportswriter, the other a young English girl with terrible spelling.
The American was Ring Lardner. Lardner began his career as a sports journalist with a particular interest in baseball, widened his remit to humorous columns, and became one of the best-known comic writers of his time. His novel You Know Me Al, written in the form of letters from a baseball player to a friend, is still extremely funny, while his theatrical parodies display a sardonic surrealism (a line from one of those short plays is still quoted in anthologies: “The curtain is lowered for seven days to denote the lapse of a week”).
Lardner was the epitome of the hard-drinking, sports-loving American writer, admired by Hemingway, used as the basis for a character by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and immensely popular with the public; and he had a journalist’s scepticism. In 1919, the world was delighted by a very short novel apparently written by a nine-year-old girl called Daisy Ashford. The book – which had apparently been discovered by the British writer Frank Swinnerton, who passed it on to Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie – was called The Young Visiters. It recounted the story of Ethel, a young Victorian woman, and her social-climbing older friend, Mr Salteena, written in a breathless pastiche of the romances of the day. The Young Visiters was, and still is, unintentionally hilarious, and at the end of the First World War became an international best seller. Ashford, now in her early 20s, was a celebrity.
I shall put some red ruge on my face said Ethel because I am very pale owing to the drains in this house.
Daisy Ashford, The Young Visiters (1919)
Most of the world took Ashford at her word and The Young Visiters at face value, but there were those who were less convinced, and indeed, there is something about the book that suggests another hand was at work (lines like “he sat down and eat the egg which Ethel had so kindly laid for him” always seem a bit knowingly comic to me). One person who thought the book was a fraud was Winston Churchill; another was Ring Lardner. “I didn’t, and I don’t, believe Daisy Ashford in spite of Swinnerton’s testimony and that of other ‘witnesses.’” he once wrote.
But Lardner did more than express his doubts about The Young Visiters, he rewrote it. Or rather, he wrote a parody of it, called The Young Immigrunts.
First serialised in The Saturday Evening Post in 1920, The Young Immigrunts abandons the plot of Ashford’s book and its musings on social advancement and the aristocracy and replaces them with something completely American: the story of the Lardner family’s move from Goshen, Indiana, to their new home in Greenwich, Connecticut. The comedy is now about the awfulness of their road trip (and the father’s vile temper and reactions to said trip), but as the story is told by Lardner’s young son Bill, the book is able to retain the same youthful, naïve tone of its original.
We see the world through Bill’s eyes but, where Ashford’s prose is (apparently) unwittingly funny and unobservant, Lardner’s is very knowing, and directed at an adult readership. The Father and Mother are constantly sniping at one another, the journey is a nightmare, and the various cops, kids, and landladies that the family run into are a gallery of grotesques.
Will you call us at ½ past 5 my mother reqested to our lanlady as we entered our Hudson barracks.
I will if I am awake, she replid useing her handkerchief to some extent.
It’s clear from reading The Young Immigrunts that whatever his views on the original, Lardner must have enjoyed reading it. His use of language, the turns of phrase he adopts, the mixture of literary styles and pure illiteracy, take Ashford’s text as a template and a jumping-off point for Lardner’s own viewpoint. Sport, particularly baseball, features heavily (there’s even (possibly) a reference to the famous “Black Sox” baseball scandal.
The result is a book that’s a note-perfect parody of The Young Visiters – “We will half to change our close replid my mother steping into a mud peddle in front of the hotel with an informal look” – but also takes the text into a new, Lardnerian direction. It’s a masterpiece that works perfectly whether you’ve read the original or not.
And it contains what many people – or rather, all sane people – consider to be the funniest line in the history of literature (a line so memorable that at least two books about Lardner have been named after it).
I can’t really follow it so I’ll just say goodbye and leave you with the line. Here it is:
Are you lost daddy I arsked tenderly.
Shut up he explained.
David Quantick is a writer with seven novels and over a dozen nonfiction books to his name. His most recent novel, Ricky’s Hand, was published in August 2022. You can find out more at davidquantick.com.