The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  D E A T H

  Ten days have elapsed, four in an oxygen tent, where I awoke from unconsciousness believing I was a premature infant again. Not only a whole life ahead of me, but two months thrown in for good measure! I imagined momentarily that it was four score and seven years ago, that I had just been brought forth from my mother; but no—instead of being a premature babe I am practically a posthumous unpublished novelist, ten days of my remaining God only knows how few gone, and not a word written.

  And worse, our philistine physician has issued an injunction: give up alliteration if you want to live to be four score and eight.

  “Smitty, it’s as simple as this—you cannot continue to write like a boy and expect to get away with it.”

  “But it’s all I’ve got left! I refuse!”

  “Come now, no tears. It’s not the end of the world. You still have your lists, after all, you still have your balance—”

  Between sobs I say, “But you don’t understand! Alliteration is at the foundation of English literature. Any primer will tell you that much. It goes back to the very beginnings of written language. I’ve made a study of it—it’s true! There would have been no poetry without it! No human speech as we know it!”

  “Well, they don’t teach us the fundamentals of poetry in medical school, I admit, but they do manage to get something through our heads having to do with the care of the sick and the aged. Alliteration may be very pretty to the ear, and fun to use, I’m sure, but it is simply too much of a stimulant and a strain for an eighty-seven-year-old man, and you are going to have either to control yourself, or take the consequences. Now blow your nose—”

  “But I can’t give it up! No one can! Not even you, who is a literary ignoramus by his own admission. ‘Stimulant and strain.’ ‘To control yourself or take the consequences.’ Don’t you see, if it’s in every other sentence even you utter, how can I possibly abstain? You’ve got to take away something else!”

  The doctor looks at me as if to say, “Gladly, only what else is left?” Yes, it is my last real pleasure, he is right …

  “Smitty, it’s simply a matter of not being so fancy. Isn’t that all really, when you come down to it?”

  “My God, no! It’s just the opposite—it’s as natural as breathing. It’s the homiest most unaffected thing a language can do. It’s the ornamentation of ordinary speech—”

  “Now, now,”

  “Listen to me for once! Use your ears instead of that stethoscope—listen to the English language, damn it! Bed and board, sticks and stones, kith and kin, time and tide, weep and wail, rough and ready, now or—”

  “Okay, that’s enough, now. You are working yourself into another attack, and one that you may not recover from. If you do not calm down this instant, I am going to order that your fountain pen and dictionary be taken away.”

  I snarled in response, and let him in on a secret. “I could still alliterate in my head. What do you think I did for four days in the oxygen tent?”

  “Well, if so, you are deceiving no one but yourself. Smitty, you must use common sense. Obviously I am not suggesting that you abstain from ever having two neighboring words in a sentence begin with the same sound. That would be absurd. Why, next time I come to visit, I would be overjoyed to hear you tell me, ‘Feelin’ fit as a fiddle’—if it happens to be true. It is not the ordinary and inevitable accidents of alliteration that occur in conversation that wear down a man of your age, or even the occasional alliterative phrase used intentionally for heightened rhetorical effect. It’s overindulgent, intemperate, unrestrained excursions into alliteration that would leave a writer half your age trembling with excitement. Smitty, while you were comatose I took the liberty of reading what you’ve been writing here—I had no choice, given your condition. My friend, the orgy of alliteration that I find on the very first page of your book is just outright ridiculous in a man of your age—it is tantamount to suicide. Frankly I have to tell you that the feeling I come away with after reading the first few thousand words here is of a man making a spectacle of himself. It strikes me as wildly excessive, Smitty, and just a little desperate. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but there’s no sense pulling punches with an eighty-seven-year-old man.”

  “Well, Doctor, much as I welcome your medical school version of literary criticism, you have to admit that you are not exactly the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Besides, it is only the prologue. I was only opening the tap, to get the waters running.”

  “Well, it still seems needlessly ostentatious to me. And a terrible drain on the heart. And, my friend, you cannot write a note to the milkman, let alone the Great American Novel, without one of them pumping the blood to your brain.” He took my hand as I began to whimper again—he claims to have read “One Man’s Opinion” as a boy in Aceldama. “Here, here, it’s only for your good I tell you this…”

  “And—and how’s about reading alliteration, if I can’t write it?”

  “For the time being, I’m going to ask you to stay off it entirely.”

  “Or?”

  “Or you’ll be a goner. That’ll be the ballgame, Smitty.”

  “If that’s the case, I’d rather be dead!” I bawled, the foulest lie ever uttered by man.

  Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

  So said Chaucer back in my high school days, and a’ course it is as true now as then.

  And specially, from every shires ende

  Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

  The holy blisful martir for to seke,

  That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

  That is copied directly (and laboriously I assure you) from the famous Prologue to his immortal (and as some will always say, immoral) Canterbury Tales. I had to copy it only so as to get the old-fashioned spelling correct. I can still recite the forty-odd lines, up to “A Knight ther was,” as perfectly as I did in tenth grade. In fact, in the intervening million years—not since Chaucer penned it, but since I memorized it—I have conquered insomnia many a night reciting those dead words to myself, aloud if I happened to be alone, under my breath (as was the better part of wisdom) if some slit was snoring beside me. Only imagine one of them bimbos overhearing Smitty whaning-that-Aprille in the middle of the night! Waking to find herself in the dark with a guy who sounds five hundred years old! Especially if she happened to think of herself as “particular”! Why, say to one of those slits—in the original accent—“The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,” and she’d kick you right in the keester. “There are some things a girl won’t do, Mr. Word Smith, not even for dough! Goodbye!” On the other hand, to do women justice, there is one I remember, a compassionate femme with knockers to match, who if you said to her, “So priketh hem nature in hir corages,” she’d tell you, “Sure I blow guys in garages. They’re human too, you know.”

  But this is not a book about tough cunts. Nat Hawthorne wrote that one long ago. This is a book about what America did to the Ruppert Mundys (and to me). As for The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, I admit that I have by now forgot what it all meant, if ever I knew. I’m not just talking about the parts that were verboten either. I take it from the copy that I have before me, borrowed on my card from the Valhalla Public Library, that those “parts” are still taboo for schoolkids. Must be—they are the only ratty-looking pages in an otherwise untouched book. Reading with the help of magnifying glass and footnotes, I see (at nearly ninety) that it is mostly stuff about farting. Little devils. They have even decorated the margin with symbols of their glee. Appears to be a drawing of a fart. Pretty good one too. Kids love farts, don’t they? Even today, with all the drugs and sex and violence you hear about on TV, they still get a kick, such as we used to, out of a fart. Maybe the world hasn’t changed so much after all. It would be nice to think there were still a few eternal verities around. I hate to think of the day when you say to an American kid, “Hey, want to smell a great fart?” and he looks at you as though you’re crazy. “A great what?” �
�Fart. Don’t you even know what a fart is?” “Sure it’s a game—you throw one at a target. You get points.” “That’s a dart, dope. A fart. A bunch of kids sit around in a crowded place and they fart. Break wind. Sure, you can make it into a game and give points. So much for a wet fart, so much for a series, and so on. And penalties if you draw mud, as we called it in those days. But the great thing was, you could do it just for the fun of it. By God, we could fart for hours when we were boys! Somebody’s front porch on a warm summer night, in the road, on our way to school. Why, we could sit around a blacksmith’s shop on a rainy day doing nothing but farting, and be perfectly content. No movies in those days. No television. No nothin’. I don’t believe the whole bunch of us taken together ever had more than a nickel at any time, and yet we were never bored, never had to go around looking for excitement or getting into trouble. Best thing was you could do it yourself too. Yessir, boy knew how to make use of his leisure time in those days.”

  Surprising, given the impact of the fart on the life of the American boy, how little you still hear about it; from all appearances it is still something they’d rather skip over in The Canterbury Tales at Valhalla High. On the other hand, that may be a blessing in disguise; this way at least no moneyman or politician has gotten it into his head yet to cash in on its nostalgic appeal. Because when that happens, you can kiss the fart goodbye. They will cheapen and degrade it until it is on a level with Mom’s apple pie and our flag. Mark my words: as soon as some scoundrel discovers there is a profit to be made off of the American kid’s love of the fart, they will be selling artificial farts in balloons at the circus. And you can just imagine what they’ll smell like too. Like everything artificial.

  Yes, fans, as the proverb has it, verily there is nothing like a case of fecal impaction to make an old man wax poetic about the fart. Forgive the sentimental meandering.

  And specially, from every shires ende

  Of AMERICA to COOPERSTOWN they wende

  The holy BASEBALL HEROES for to seke,

  That hem hath holpen whan that they were SIX.*

  For the ambulatory among my fellow geriatrics here our annual trip to Cooperstown is something very like the kind of pilgrimage Chaucer must have been writing about. I won’t go into the cast of characters, as he does, except to say that as I understand it, his “nine and twenty” were not so knowledgeable in matters of religion as you might at first expect pilgrims to be who are off to worship at a holy shrine. Well, so too for the six and ten it was my misfortune to be cooped up with on the road to Cooperstown, and then all afternoon long at the Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. Ninety-nine per cent of their baseball “memories,” ninety-nine per cent of the anecdotes and stories they recollect and repeat are pure hogwash, tiny morsels of the truth so coated over with discredited legend and senile malarkey, so impacted, you might say, in the turds of time, as to rival the tales out of ancient mythology. What the aged can do with the past is enough to make your hairs stand on end. But then look at the delusions that ordinary people have about the day before yesterday.

  Of course, in the way of old men—correction: in the way of all men—they more or less swallow one another’s biggest lies whole and save their caviling for the tiniest picayune points. How they love to nitpick over nonsense and cavil over crap all the while those brains of theirs, resembling nothing so much as pickles by this time, soak on in their brine of fantasy and fabrication. No wonder Hitler was such a hit. Why, he might still be at it, if only he’d had the sense to ply his trade in the Land of Opportunity. These are three homo sapiens, descendants of Diogenes, seeking the Truth: “I tell you, there was so a Ernie Cooper, what pitched four innings in one game for the Cincinnatis in 1905. Give up seven hits. Seen it myself.” “Afraid you are thinking of Jesse Cooper of the White Sox. And the year was 1911. And he pitched himself something more than four innings.” “You boys are both wrong. Cooper’s name was Bock. And he come from right around these parts too.” “Boggs? Boggs is the feller what pitched one year for the Bees. Lefty Boggs!” Yes, Boggs was a Bee, all right, but the Cooper they are talking about happened to be named Baker. Only know what they say when I tell them as much? “Who asked you? Keep your brainstorms for your ‘book’! We are talking fact not fiction!” “But you’re the ones who’ve got it wrong,” I say. “Oh sure, we got it wrong! Ho-ho-ho! That’s a good one! Get out of here, Shakespeare! Go write the Great American Novel, you crazy old coot!”

  Well, fans, I suppose there are those who called Geoffrey Chaucer (and William Shakespeare, with whom I share initials) a crazy coot, and immoral, and so on down the line. Tell them what they do not wish to hear, tell them that they have got it wrong, and the first thing out of their mouths, “You’re off your nut!” Understanding this as I do should make me calm and philosophical, I know. Wise, sagacious, and so forth. Only it doesn’t work that way, especially when they do what they did to me ten days ago at Cooperstown.

  * * *

  First off, as everyone knows, the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown was founded on a falsehood. No more than little George Washington said to his father, “Dad, it is I, etc.,” did Major Abner Doubleday invent the game of baseball on that sacred spot. The only thing Major Doubleday started was the Civil War, when he answered the Confederate Beauregard by firing the first shot from Fort Sumter. Yet, to this day, shout such “heresy” in the bleachers at a Sunday doubleheader, and not only will three out of four patrons call you crazy, but some self-styled authority on the subject (probably a Dad with his Boy—I know the type) will threaten your life for saying something so awful in front of innocent kids.

  My quarrel with Cooperstown, however, is over nothing so inconsequential as who invented the game and where. I only draw attention to the longevity of this lie to reveal how without conscience even the highest authorities are when it comes to perpetuating a comforting, mindless myth everyone has grown used to, and how reluctant the ordinary believer, or fan, is to surrender one. When both the rulers and the subjects of the Holy Baseball Empire can sanctify a blatant falsehood with something supposedly so hallowed as a “Hall of Fame,” there is no reason to be astonished (I try to tell myself) at the colossal crime against the truth that has been perpetrated by America’s powers-that-be ever since 1946. I am speaking of what no one in this country dares even to mention any longer. I am speaking of a chapter of our past that has been torn from the record books without so much as a peep of protest, except by me. I am speaking of a rewriting of our history as heinous as any ordered by a tyrant dictator abroad. Not thousand-year-old history either, but something that only came to an end twenty-odd years ago. Yes, I am speaking of the annihilation of the Patriot League. Not merely wiped out of business, but willfully erased from the national memory. Ask a Little Leaguer, as I did only this past summer. When I approached, he was swinging a little bat in the on-deck circle, ironically enough, resembling no one so much as Bob Yamm of the Kakoola Reapers (d.). “How many big leagues are there, sonny?” I asked. “Two,” he said, “the National and the American.” “And how many did there used to be?” “Two.” “Are you sure of that now?” “Positive.” “What about the Patriot League?” “No such thing.” “Oh no? Never heard of the Tri-City Tycoons? Never heard of the Ruppert Mundys?” “Nope.” “You never heard of Kakoola, Aceldama, Asylum?” “What are those?” “Cities, boy! Those were big league towns!” “Who played for ’em, Mister?” he asked, stepping away from me and edging toward the bench. “Luke Gofannon played for them. Two thousand two hundred and forty-two games he played for them. Never heard his name?” Here a man took me by the arm, simultaneously saying to the boy, “He means Luke Appling, Billy, who played for the White Sox.” “Who are you?” I asked, as if I didn’t know. “I’m his Dad.” “Well, then, tell him the truth. Raise the boy on the truth! You know it as well as I do. I do not mean Luke Appling and I do not mean Luke ‘Hot Potato’ Hamlin. I mean Luke Gofannon of the Ruppert Mundys!” And what does the Dad do? He puts a finger to his temple to i
ndicate to this little brainwashed American tyke (one of tens of millions!) that I am the one that is cracked. Is it any wonder that I raised my cane?

  * * *

  You can look in vain in the papers of Friday, January 22, 1971, for a mention of the vote I cast the previous day at the annual balloting for baseball’s Hall of Fame. But the fact of the matter is that I handed it personally to Mr. Bowie Kuhn, so-called Commissioner of Baseball, and he assured me that it would be tabulated along with the rest by the secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. WELL, MR. BOWIE KUHN IS A LIAR AND THE HALL OF FAME SHOULD BE NAMED THE HALL OF SHAME.

  Of course, the plainclothesgoon they hire especially to keep an eye on me during these annual election day visits greeted our contingent at the Museum door pretending to want to do no more than make us gentlemen at home. “Well, if it isn’t the senior citizens from over Valhalla way. Welcome, boys.”

  Oh yes, we are treated like royalty at Cooperstown! How they love “the elderly” when they behave like boys! Choir-boys. So long as the only questions we ask have to do with Bock Baker and Lefty Boggs, everything is, as they say over there, “hunky-dory.”

  “Greetings, Smitty. Remember me?”

  “I remember everything,” I said.

  “How you feeling this year?”

  “The same.”

  “Well,” he asked of the pilgrims in my party, “who you boys rooting for?”

  “Kiner!”

  “Keller!”

  “Berra!”

  “Wynn!”

  “How about you, Mr. Smith?”

  “Gofannon.”

  “Uh-huh,” said he, without blinking an eye. “What did he bat again lifetime? I seem to have forgotten since you told me last year.”