Books: In Lardner's Line

MY EARS ARE BENT—Joseph Mitchell —Sheridan House ($2.50).

In his best short stories the late Ring Lardner pictured a strange, submerged, widely-publicized but yet unknown type— the amiable, unselfconscious egomaniacs

who abound in the theatrical world and flourish on the baseball diamond. F. Scott Fitzgerald explained that Lardner's silence and confusion resulted from the presence of "ivory" in the circles he _knew: "Remember it was not humble ivory," Fitzgerald wrote, "it was arrogant, imperative, often megalomaniacal ivory.' Since Lardner's death nobody has carried on his work as laureate of this thick-skulled world; nobody has...