Except that Buckner’s error did not determine the outcome of the World Series for one little reason, detailed above but all too easily forgotten. When Wilson’s grounder bounced between Buckner’s legs, the score was already tied! (Not to mention that this game was the sixth and, at worst for the Sox, the penultimate game of the Series, not the seventh and necessarily final contest. The Sox could always have won Game Seven and the entire Series, no matter how the negotiations of God and Satan had proceeded over Bill Buckner as the modern incarnation of Job in Game Six.) If Buckner had fielded the ball cleanly, the Sox would not have won the Series at that moment. They would only have secured the opportunity to do so, if their hitters came through in extra innings.
We can easily excuse any patriotic American who is not a professional historian, or any casual visitor for that matter, for buying into the canonical story of the Alamo—all the brothers were valiant—and not learning that a healthy and practical Bowie might have negotiated an honorable surrender at no great cost to the Texian cause. After all, the last potential eyewitness has been underground for well over a century. We have no records beyond the written reports, and historians cannot trust the account of any eyewitness, for the supposed observations fall into a mire of contradiction, recrimination, self-interest, aggrandizement, and that quintessentially human propensity for spinning a tall tale.
But any baseball fan with the legal right to sit in a bar and argue the issues over a mug of the house product should be able to recall the uncomplicated and truly indisputable facts of Bill Buckner’s case with no trouble at all, and often with the force of eyewitness memory, either exulting in impossibly fortuitous joy, or groaning in the agony of despair and utter disbelief, before a television set. (To fess up, I should have been at a fancy dinner in Washington, but I “got sick” instead and stayed in my hotel room. In retrospect, I should not have stood in bed.)
The subject attracted my strong interest because, within a year after the actual event, I began to note a pattern in the endless commentaries that have hardly abated, even fifteen years later—for Buckner’s tale can be made relevant by analogy to almost any misfortune under a writer’s current examination, and Lord only knows we experience no shortage of available sources for pain. Many stories reported, and continue to report, the events accurately—and why not, for the actual tale packs sufficient punch, and any fan should be able to extract the correct account directly from living and active memory. But I began to note that a substantial percentage of reports had subtly, and quite unconsciously I’m sure, driven the actual events into a particular false version—the pure “end member” of ultimate tragedy demanded by the canonical story “but for this.”
I keep a growing file of false reports, all driven by requirements of the canonical story—the claim that, but for Buckner’s legs, the Sox would have won the Series, forgetting the inconvenient complexity of a tied score at Buckner’s ignominious moment, and sometimes even forgetting that the Series still had another game to run. This misconstruction appears promiscuously, both in hurried daily journalism and in rarefied books by the motley crew of poets and other assorted intellectuals who love to treat baseball as a metaphor for anything else of importance in human life or the history of the universe. (I have written to several folks who made this error, and they have all responded honorably with a statement like: “Omigod, what a jerk I am! Of course the score was tied. Jeez [sometimes bolstered by an invocation of Mary and Joseph as well], I just forgot!”)
For example, a front-page story in USA Today for October 25, 1993, discussed Mitch Williams’s antics in the 1993 Series in largely unfair comparison with the hapless and blameless Bill Buckner:
Williams may bump Bill Buckner from atop the goat list, at least for now. Buckner endured his nightmare Oct. 25, 1986. His Boston Red Sox were one out away from their first World Series title since 1918 when he let Mookie Wilson’s grounder slip through his legs.
Or this from a list of Sox misfortunes, published in the New York Post on October 13,1999, just before the Sox met the Yanks (and lost, of course) in their first full series of postseason play:
Mookie Wilson’s grounder that rolled through the legs of Bill Buckner in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. That happened after the Red Sox were just one out away from winning the World Series.
For a more poetic view between hard covers, consider the very last line of a lovely essay written by a true poet and devoted fan to introduce a beautifully illustrated new edition of the classic poem about failure in baseball, Casey at the Bat:
Triumph’s pleasures are intense but brief; failure remains with us forever, a mothering nurturing common humanity. With Casey we all strike out. Although Bill Buckner won a thousand games with his line drives and brilliant fielding, he will endure in our memories in the ninth inning of the sixth game of a World Series, one out to go, as the ball inexplicably, ineluctably, and eternally rolls between his legs.
But the nasty little destroyer of lovely canonical stories then pipes up in his less mellifluous tones: “But I don’t know how many outs would have followed, or who would have won. The Sox had already lost the lead; the score was tied.” Factuality embodies its own form of eloquence; and gritty complexity often presents an even more interesting narrative than the pure and archetypal “end member” version of our canonical stories. But something deep within us drives accurate messiness into the channels of canonical stories, the primary impositions of our minds upon the world.
To any reader who now raises the legitimate issue of why I have embellished a book about natural history with two stories about American history that bear no evident relevance to any overtly scientific question, I simply restate my opening and general argument: human beings are pattern-seeking, story-telling creatures. These mental propensities generally serve us well enough, but they also, and often, derail our thinking about all kinds of temporal sequences—in the natural world of geological change and the evolution of organisms, as well as in human history—by leading us to cram the real and messy complexity of life into simplistic channels of the few preferred ways that human stories “go.” I call these biased pathways “canonical stories”—and I argue that our preferences for tales about directionality (to explain patterns), generated by motivations of valor (to explain the causal basis of these patterns) have distorted our understanding of a complex reality where different kinds of patterns and different sources of order often predominate.
I chose my two stories on purpose—Bowie’s letter and Buckner’s legs—to illustrate two distinct ways that canonical stories distort our reading of actual patterns: first, in the tale of Jim Bowie’s letter, by relegating important facts to virtual invisibility when they cannot be made to fit the canonical story, even though we do not hide the inconvenient facts themselves, and may even place them on open display (as in Bowie’s letter at the Alamo); and, second, in the tale of Bill Buckner’s legs, where we misstate easily remembered and ascertainable facts in predictable ways because these facts did not unfold as the relevant canonical stories dictate.
These common styles of error—hidden in plain sight, and misstated to fit our canonical stories—arise as frequently in scientific study as in historical inquiry. To cite, in closing, the obvious examples from our canonical misreadings of the history of life, we hide most of nature’s diversity in plain sight when we spin our usual tales about increasing complexity as the central theme and organizing principle of both evolutionary theory and the actual history of life. In so doing, we unfairly privilege the one recent and transient species that has evolved the admittedly remarkable invention of mental power sufficient to ruminate upon such questions.
This silly and parochial bias leaves the dominant and most successful products of evolution hidden in plain sight—the indestructible bacteria that have represented life’s mode (most common design) for all 3.5 billion years of the fossil record (while Homo sapiens hasn’t yet endured for even half a million years—and remember that it takes a thousand mill
ion to make a single billion). Not to mention that if we confine our attention to multicellular animal life, insects represent about 80 percent of all species, while only a fool would put money on us, rather than them, as probable survivors a billion years hence.
For the second imposition of canonical stories upon different and more complex patterns in the history of life—predictable distortion to validate preferred tales about valor—need I proceed any further than the conventional tales of vertebrate evolution that we all have read since childhood, and that follow our Arthurian mythology about knights of old and men so bold? I almost wince when I find the first appearance of vertebrates on land, or of insects in the air, described as a “conquest,” although this adjective retains pride of place in our popular literature.
And we still seem unable to shuck the image of dinosaurs as born losers vanquished by superior mammals, even though we know that dinosaurs prevailed over mammals for more than 130 million years, starting from day one of mammalian origins. Mammals gained their massively delayed opportunity only when a major extinction, triggered by extraterrestrial impact, removed the dinosaurs—for reasons that we do not fully understand, but that probably bear no sensible relation to any human concept of valor or lack thereof. This cosmic fortuity gave mammals their chance, not because any intrinsic superiority (the natural analog of valor) helped them to weather this cosmic storm, but largely, perhaps, because their small size, a side-consequence of failure to compete with dinosaurs in environments suited for large creatures, gave mammals a lucky break in the form of ecological hiding room to hunker down.
Until we abandon the silly notion that the first amphibians, as conquerors of the land, somehow held more valor, and therefore embody more progress, than the vast majority of fishes that remained successfully in the sea, we will never understand the modalities and complexities of vertebrate evolution. Fish, in any case, encompass more than half of all vertebrate species today, and might well be considered the most persistently successful class of vertebrates. So should we substitute a different canonical story called “there’s no place like home” for the usual tale of conquest on imperialistic models of commercial expansion?
If we must explain the surrounding world by telling stories—and I suspect that our brains do stick us in this particular rut—let us at least expand the range of our tales beyond the canonical to the quirky, for then we might learn to appreciate more of the richness out there beyond our pale and usual ken, while still honoring our need to understand in human terms. Robert Frost caught the role and necessity of stories—and the freedom offered by unconventional tales—when he penned a premature epitaph, in 1942, as one of his brilliant epitomes of deep wisdom:
And were an epitaph to be my story
I’d have a short one ready for my own.
I would have written of me on my stone:
I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.
4
The True Embodiment of Everything That’s Excellent
ON DECEMBER 8, 1889, THE DAY AFTER THE TRIUMPHANT premiere of The Gondoliers, their last successful collaboration, W.S. Gilbert wrote to Sir Arthur Sullivan, in the generous tone so often expressed in his letters, despite the constant tension of their personal relationship: “I must again thank you for the magnificent work you have put into the piece. It gives one a chance of shining right through the twentieth century with a reflected light.” John Wellington Wells, the eponym of their first successful full-length comic opera The Sorcerer (1877), employed a “resident djinn” who could “prophesy with a wink of his eye, peep with security into futurity.” But we usually don’t ascribe similar skills to his literary progenitor.
Yet, with the opening of Mike Leigh’s Topsy Turvy5—a wondrous evocation of this complex partnership, the Victorian theatrical world, and the nature of creativity in general, all centered on the composition and first production of The Mikado, Gilbert and Sullivan’s greatest and most enduring hit, in 1885—Gilbert’s short note to Sullivan can only recall his initial characterization of Mr. Wells’s djinn as “a very small prophet who brings us unbounded returns.” For this film, opening in New York just a few days before our millennial transition, surely marks the fulfillment of Gilbert’s predictions for endurance to this very moment.
I must confess to a personal reason for pleasure in this renewed currency and attention for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan—a baker’s dozen of comic operas (the music to a fourteenth has been lost), now often dismissed as the silliest and fustiest of (barely) surviving Victorian oddments, and a genuine embarrassment to anyone with modern intellectual pretensions. But I may now emerge from decades of (relative) silence to shout my confession that I love these pieces with all my heart, and that I even regard them as epitomes of absolute excellence for definable reasons that may help us to understand this most rare and elusive aspect of human potential.
In my latency at ages ten to twelve, Gilbert and Sullivan became the passion of my life. I would save my nickels and dimes for several months until I accumulated the $6.66 needed to buy the old London recordings of each opera at Sam Goody’s. I listened so often, with a preadolescent capacity for rote retention, that I learned every word and note of the corpus by pure imbibition, without a moment of conscious effort. (I could not expunge this information now, no matter how hard I might try, even though I can’t remember anything learned last week—another anomaly and paradox of our mental lives.)
This phase ended, of course—and for the usual reasons. At age 13, I watched Olivia de Havilland as Maid Marian (playing against Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood, of course)—and the sight of her breasts through white satins focused and hardened my dawning recognition of fundamental change. (In one of the great fulfillments of my life, I met Miss de Havilland a few years ago, looking as beautiful as ever in the different manner of older age. I told her my story—although I confess that I left out the part about the breasts, rather than the whole persona, as my inspiration. She was very gracious; I was simply awestruck.) So I abandoned my intensity for Gilbert and Sullivan, but I have never lost my affection, or forgotten a jot or tittle of the writ.
I have thus lived, for several decades, in the ambiguity of many Savoyards: feeling a bit sheepish, even apologetic, given my vaunted status as a card-carrying intellectual, about my infatuation for this prototypical vestige of lowbrow entertainment imbued, at best, with middlebrow pretensions. Two major themes fueled my fear that this continued affection could only represent a misplaced fealty to my own youth, based on a refusal to acknowledge that such unworthy flowers could only seem glorious before the realities of life spread like crabgrass through the splendor of adolescent turf.
First, some of Gilbert’s texts do strike a modern audience as silly and forced—as in the seemingly endless punning on “orphan” versus “often” in The Pirates of Penzance, though no worse, really, or longer for that matter, than the opening dialogue about cobbling in Julius Caesar, with its similar takes on “soul” versus “sole” and “awl” versus “all.” Perhaps the whole corpus never rises above such textual juvenility. Creeping doubt might then generate a corresponding fear that most of Sullivan’s music, however witty and affecting to the Victorian ear, must now be downgraded as either mawkish (as in his “Lost Chord,” once widely regarded as the greatest song ever written, but now forgotten), or pompous (as in his “Onward Christian Soldiers”).
Second, evidence of declining public attention might fuel these fears about quality. While scarcely extinct, or even moribund, Gilbert and Sullivan’s works have surely retreated to a periphery of largely amateur performance, spiced now and again by an acclaimed, but transient, professional foray, often in highly altered form (Joseph Papp’s rock version of The Pirates of Penzance, or the revival of a favorite from the 1930s, The Hot Mikado, in the ultimate historical venue for terminations, Washington, D.C.’s Ford’s Theater). England’s D’Oyly Carte Opera, Gilbert and Sullivan’s original company, performed for more than one hundred years, but expired about a
decade ago from a synergistic mixture of public indifference and embarrassingly poor performances. And America’s finest professional troupe, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, seems to mock this acknowledged decline in status by their own featured acronym of GASP.
And yet, despite occasional frissons of doubt, I have never credited these negative assessments, and I continue to believe that the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan prevailed over a vast graveyard of contemporary (and later) works—including the efforts of such truly talented composers as Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg—because they embody the elusive quality of absolute excellence, the goal of all our creative work, and the hardest of human attributes to nurture, or even to define.
Peter Rainer, reviewing Topsy Turvy for New York magazine, intended only praise in writing, “The beauty of Gilbert and Sullivan’s art, which is also its mystery, is that, gloriously minor, it’s more redolent and lasting than many works regarded as major.” But we will never gain a decent understanding of excellence if we continue to use this standard distinction between major and minor forms of art as our primary taxonomic device.
We live in a fractal world, where scales that we choose to designate as major (a great tenor at the Metropolitan Opera, for example) hold no intrinsically higher merit than styles traditionally judged as vernacular or minor (a self-taught banjo player on a country porch, for example). Each scale builds a corral of exactly the same shape to hold all progeny of its genre; and each corral reserves a tiny corner for its few products of absolute excellence. To continue this metaphor, a magnified photo of this corner for a “minor” art cannot be distinguished from the same corner for a “major” art seen through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. And if these two photos, mounted on a wall at the same scale, cannot be told apart, then we must seek a different criterion for judgment based on the common morphology of scale-independent excellence.
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