The Royko Thread

Good one, Slap . . . knew there was a reason I keep logging onto this place.

 

Ring Lardner, FWIW, wrote *nothing* like most journalists are taught to write today. And that's not even because of his time -- a time when many sports scribes wrote flowery prose -- it's because Ring Lardner's style was uniquely his own. Read the "You Know Me, Al" stories or some of his "World Serious" columns ... up until 1919, of course. That's not journalism -- that's literature. (Both can be very good, but it's not the same.)

if a young Hemingway was trying to imitate Lardner's style, and I don't know enough to say he was or wasn't, then Ernie certainly wasn't honing his style writing like a newspaperman. Writing like Lardner is not the same. I haven't read any of Hem'way's stories with the KC Star -- I'm sure the job helped influence him to write as concise as he did, somehow -- but I seriously doubt that was the turning point or even the beginning for his "revolution of modern English."

I'm with Dye on this one: Hemingway and Royko are hard to compare. Doesn't mean they're both not great at what they did, because they were, but it's two different sports. Baseball and cricket. Same tools -- a ball, a bat, fielders, bases/wickets -- but two completely different games.

 

Dye: Let's not overlook Boss, now, hmm . . .

. . . .not to mention that the compilations cost well over $3.95, over the counter . . .

 

and, Buck: the Ring / Hem story is a true one.

Remember, this was HIGH SCHOOL. Hem obviously didn't emerge from that experience fully-formed. Lardner
at his best was a master of precise writing / sentence structure -- and the earlier that's learned, the better.

 

That's fine. I'll take your word for it.

My point, though, was that Lardner didn't write similar to the way Hemingway eventually did (i.e. very concise writing; short, almost choppy sentences). Ring often used long, free-flowing, often nonsensical sentences that were more reminiscient of James Joyce than the style you seem to be talking about. Again, read "Alibi Ike" or "The Immigrunts." There's plenty of short sentences, but also a lot of what most people would call "imprecise" structure, too.

I'm sure Ring influenced Hem, no doubt, but not because of that.

 

I hear ya . . . but for Ring, the ballplayer/dialect stories eventually gave way to the Golden Honeymoon / Some Like Them Cold period . . .
appreciated them both, for different reasons.

Didn't you and Eddie Cicotte marry sisters?

 

True enough. Ring's later style was different than his early (i.e. sports) style. Then again, that would negate your point about high school, because Hem graduated high school during WWI, started working for the KC Star in 1917. But anyway ...

And no, Eddie's got his own "wife and kiddies" to grab $10K for look out for. 8)

 

And people thought Edward R. Murrow couldn't pitch . . .