The quiet grace of Ring Lardner Jr., who died the other week at 85, seemed at odds with these noisy, thumping times. I cannot imagine Ring playing Oprah or composing one of those terribly earnest essays, “writers on writing,” that keep bubbling to the surface of the New York Times. He was rightly celebrated

for personal and political courage but underestimated, it seems to me, as a protean writer who was incapable of composing an awkward sentence. It ran against Ring’s nature to raise his voice. Lesser writers, who shouted, drew more acclaim, or anyway more attention.

The obituaries celebrated his two Academy Awards but made less of other achievements. Ring’s novel,The Ecstasy of Owen Muir, begun in 1950 while he was serving his now-famous prison sentence for contempt of Congress, drew a transatlantic fan letter from Sean O’Casey. Ring felt sufficiently pleased to have the longhand note framed under glass, which he then slipped into a shirt drawer. He was not about advertisements for himself. In 1976 he published The Lardners: My Family Remembered. Garson Kanin commented, “In the American aristocracy of achievement, the Lardners are among the bluest of blue bloods. In Ring Lardner, Jr. they have found a chronicler worthy of his subject. The Lardners is a moving, comical, patriotic book.”

The progenitor was, of course, Ring Lardner Sr., the great short-story writer, who sired four sons, each of whom wrote exceedingly well. James Lardner was killed during the Spanish Civil War; David died covering the siege of Aachen during World War II; a heart attack killed John in 1960, when he was 47. Add Ring’s prison term to the necrology and you would not have what immediately looks to be the makings of a “moving, comical” book. But The Lardners was that and more because of Ring Jr.’s touch and slant and his overview of what E.E. Cummings called “this busy monster, manunkind.”

From time to time, Ring published splendid essays. The one form he avoided was the short story. He wrote, “I did not want to undertake any enterprise that bore the risk of inviting comparison with my father or the appearance of trading on his reputation.”

We became close in the days following the death of John Lardner, who was, quite simply, the best sports columnist I have read. I set about preparing a collection, The World of John Lardner, and Ring, my volunteer collaborator, found an unfinished serio-humorous “History of Drinking in America.” He organized random pages with great skill. Reading them I learned that the favorite drink of the Continentals, shivering at Valley Forge, was a Pennsylvania rye called Old Monongahela. George Washington called it “stinking stuff.” At headquarters the general sipped Madeira wine.

A year or so later, with the blacklist still raging, I picked up Ring for lunch at the Chateau Marmont, an unusual apartment hotel on Sunset Boulevard near Hollywood. Outside the building, a fifty-foot statue of a cowgirl, clad in boots and a bikini, rotated on the ball of one foot, advertising a Las Vegas hotel. I asked the room clerk for Mr. Robert Leonard. Ring was writing some forgotten movie, but could not then work under his own name. “Robert Leonard” matched the initials on his briefcase.

This was a pleasant November day, but the blinds above Ring’s portable typewriter were drawn. When I asked why, he opened them. His desk sat facing the bikinied cowgirl, bust-high. Every eighteen seconds those giant breasts came spinning round. “Makes it hard to work,” Ring said and closed the blinds.

The Saturday Evening Post was reinventing itself during the 1960s, on the way to dying quite a glorious death, and with my weighty title there, editor at large, I urged Clay Blair, who ran things, to solicit a piece from Ring about the blacklist. Ring responded with a touching, sometimes very funny story that he called “The Great American Brain Robbery.” He explained, “With all these pseudonyms, I work as much as ever. But the producers now pay me about a tenth of what they did when I was allowed to write under my own name.”

Clay Blair lived far right of center, but Ring’s story conquered him, and he said, “Marvelous. Just one thing. He doesn’t say whether he was a member of the Communist Party. Ask him to put that in the story.”

“I won’t do that, Clay.”

“Why not?”

“He chose jail, rather than answer that question.”

“Then, if he still won’t, will he tell us why he won’t?”

Ring composed a powerful passage.

The impulse to resist assaults on freedom of thought has motivated witnesses who could have answered no to the Communist question as well as many, like myself, whose factual response would have been yes. I was at that time a member of the Communist party, in whose ranks I found some of the most thoughtful, witty and generally stimulating men and women in Hollywood, I also encountered a number of bores and unstable characters…. My political activity had already begun to dwindle at the time [Congressman J. Parnell] Thomas popped the question, and his only effect on my affiliation was to prolong it until the case was finally lost. At that point I could and did terminate my membership without confusing the act, in my own or anyone else’s head, with the quite distinct struggle for the right to embrace any belief or set of beliefs to which my mind and conscience directed me.

These words drove a silver stake into the black heart of the blacklist.

Ring won his first Oscar for Woman of the Year in 1942, and when he won his second, for M*A*S*H in 1970, numbers of his friends responded with cheering and tears of joy. The ceremony took place early in 1971, and Ring accepted the statuette with a brief speech. “At long last a pattern has been established in my life. At the end of every twenty-eight years I get one of these. So I will see you all again in 1999.”

Indeed. Early in the 1990s I lobbied a producer who had bought film rights to my book The Boys of Summer, to engage Ring for the screenplay. Ring, close to 80, worked tirelessly. A screenplay is a fictive work, and Ring moved a few days and episodes about for dramatic purposes. His scenario ended with the Brooklyn Dodgers winning the 1955 World Series from the Yankees and my account of that ballgame landing my byline on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune. The sports editor is congratulating me on a coherent piece when the telephone rings: My father has fallen dead on a street in Brooklyn; I am to proceed to Kings County Hospital and identify his body.

As I, or the character bearing my name, move toward the morgue, I bump into two beer-drunk Dodgers fans. One says, “What’s the matter with him?” The other says, “He’s sober. That’s the matter with him.” The body is there. It is my father’s body. Beer drunks behind us, my mother and I embrace. Fin.

I can only begin to suggest all that Ring’s scene implies. I would start with the point that winning the World Series is not the most important thing on earth, or even in Brooklyn. I was always careful not to embarrass Ring with praise, but here I blurted out, “This is the best bleeping screenplay I’ve ever read, Ringgold. Oscar III may come true in ’99.”

“Curious,” Ring said. “I seem to have had the same thought myself.”

The blacklisting bounders were now dead, but a new generation of Hollywood hounds refused to shoot Ring Lardner’s scenario. The grounds: “a father-son angle” was not commercial. “It worked in Hamlet,” Ring said, but to unhearing ears. And then we were talking about Ring writing a screenplay for a book I published in 1999 about Jack Dempsey and the Roaring Twenties. “Have to cut it back a bit,” Ring said. “Following your text would give us the first billion-dollar picture.”

Years ago, the critic Clifton Fadiman wrote that Ring Lardner Sr. was an unconscious artist and that his power proceeded from his hatred of the characters he created. Ring told me: “If my father hated anyone or anything, it was a critic like Fadiman. Unconscious artist? My father knew perfectly well how good he was and–better than anyone else–how hard it was to be that good.”

Ring Jr. knew the very same thing about himself. Or so I believe. Yeats writes, “The intellect of man is forced to choose/perfection of the life, or of the work.” As well as anyone in our time, my suddenly late friend Ring Lardner came pretty damn close to achieving perfection in both.