The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  Students of Literatoor (as Hem was wont to mispronounce it) will have recognized the debt that I owe to Mr. Hawthorne of Massachusetts. Yes, this prologue partly derives from reading that lengthy intro to his novel wherein he tells who he is and how he comes to be writing a great book. Before embarking on my own I thought it wouldn’t hurt to study up on the boys Hem took to be the competition—for if they were his then they are mine now. Actually I did not get overly excited about the author’s adventures as boss of a deadbeat Salem Custom-House as he ramblingly relates them in that intro, but surely I was struck by the fact that like my own, his novel is based upon real life, the story of Hester Prynne being drawn from records that he discovered in a junk heap in a corner of the Custom-House attic. In that the Prynne-Dimmesdale scandal had broken two hundred years earlier, Hawthorne admits he had to “dress up the tale”—nice pun that, Nat—imagining the setting, the motives and such. “What I contend for,” Hawthorne says, “is the authenticity of the outline.” Well, what I contend for is the authenticity of the whole thing!

  Fans, nary a line is spoken in the upcoming epic, that either I heard it myself—was there, in dugout, bleachers, clubhouse, barroom, diner, pressbox, bus, and limousine—or had it confided to me by reliable informants, as often as not the parties in pain themselves. Then there are busybodies, blabbermouths, gossips, stoolies, and such to assist in rounding out reality. With all due respect to Hawthorne’s “imaginative faculty,” as he calls it, I think he could have done with a better pair of ears on him. Only listen, Nathaniel, and Americans will write the Great American Novel for you. You cannot imagine all I have heard standing in suspenders in a hotel bathroom, with the water running in the tub so nobody in the next room could tune in with a glass to the wall, and my guest pouring out to Smitty the dark, clammy secrets of the hard-on and the heart. Beats the Custom-House grabbag any day. Oh, I grant you that a fellow in a fix did not speak in Hester’s Boston as he did in Shoeless Joe’s Chicago—where the heinous hurler Eddie Cicotte said to me of the World Series game he threw, “I did it for my wife and kiddies”—but I wonder if times have changed as much as Nathaniel Hawthorne would lead you to believe.

  A more spectacular similarity between Hawthorne’s book and my own than the fact that each has a windy autobiographical intro that “seizes the public by the button” is the importance in both of a scarlet letter identifying the wearer as an outcast from America. Hawthorne recounts how he found “this rag of scarlet cloth,” frayed and moth-eaten, amidst the rubbish heaped up in the Custom-House attic. The mysterious meaning of the scarlet letter is then revealed to him in the old documents he uncovers. “On the breast of her gown,” writes Hawthorne of Hester, with admirable alliteration too, “in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.” A for “Adulteress,” at the outset; by the end of her life, says the author, many came to think it stood for “Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman’s strength.”

  Well, so too did a red cloth letter, this one of felt, appear on the breast of the off-white woolen warm-up jackets worn by the Mundys of the Patriot League—only their fateful letter was R. At the outset R for Ruppert, the team’s home; in the end, as many would have it, for “Rootless,” for “Ridiculous,” for “Refugee.” Fact is I could not but think of the Mundys, and how they wandered the league after their expulsion from Port Ruppert, when I heard my precursor’s description of himself at the conclusion to his intro. “I am,” wrote Hawthorne, “a citizen of somewhere else.” My precursor, and my kinsman too.

  2. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain

  Listening to Huckleberry Finn ramble on is like listening to nine-tenths of the baseball players who ever lived talk about what they do in the off season down home. The ballplayers are two and three times Huck’s age, and contrary to popular belief, most are not sired in the South like Huck, but hail from Pennsylvania—yet none of this means they care any the less for setting up housekeeping in the thick woods first chance they get, cooking their catch for breakfast and dinner, otherwise just being carried with the current in a comfy canoe, their sole female companion Mother N. Boys would be big leaguers, as everybody knows, but so would big leaguers be boys. Why, when a manager walks out to the mound to calm a pitcher in trouble, what do you imagine he tells him? “Give him the old dipsy-do”—? Not if he has any brains he doesn’t. If the pitcher could get the old dipsy to do he’d be doing it without being told. Know what the manager says? “How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al?” And if you think I am making that one up so as to link my tale to Twain’s (as I have already shown it to be linked to Hawthorne’s) if you think I am—as Huck Finn would have it—telling “stretchers” to falsify my literary credentials and my family tree, then I strongly advise you to read Pitching in a Pinch by Christy Mathewson, wherein the great Matty, as truthful in life as he was tricky on the hill, quotes the famous Giant manager and Hall of Famer John Joseph McGraw—as have I. How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al? Yes, that is the strategy they talk on the mound—same kind they talk on a raft!

  And since, admittedly, we are seeking out similitudes of all sorts twixt Twain’s microcosm and mine, what about Huck Finn’s sidekick, the runaway slave Nigger Jim? Who do you think he grew up to be anyway? Let me tell you if you haven’t guessed: none other than the first Negro leaguer (according to today’s paper) to be welcomed to the Hall of Fame, albeit in the bleacher section of the venerable, villainous institution: Leroy Robert (Satchel) Paige (see papers 2/11/71). In that Satchel Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, approximately four years before Sam Clemens died in Hartford, Connecticut, it is doubtful that the eminent humorist ever saw him pitch, except maybe with some barnstorming pickaninny team; what’s more to the point, he did not live to hear Satch speechify. If he had it would surely have delighted him (as it does Smitty in Sam’s behalf) to discover that the indestructible Negro pitcher who is said to have won two thousand of the two thousand and five hundred games he pitched in twenty-two years in the Negro leagues, is Huck’s Jim transmogrified.

  Just listen to this, fans, for sheer prophecy: “Jim had a hairball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything.” And this : “Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open, and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder … and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country.” With his hairball Jim could perform magic and tell fortunes—with his fastball, Satch once struck out Rogers Hornsby five times in a single exhibition game! But the proof of the pudding is the talking. Listen now to Satch, offering to humankind his six precepts on how to stay young and strong. Students of Literatoor, professors, and small boys who recall Jim’s comical lingo will not be fooled just because Satch has dispensed with the thick dialect he used for speaking in Mr. Twain’s book. Back then he was a slave and had to talk that way. It was expected of him. Satchel Paige’s recipe for eternal youth:

  1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

  2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

  3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

  4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain’t restful.

  5. Avoid running at all times.

  6. Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

  Now if this is not the hairball oracle who floated down the Mississippi with Huckleberry Finn, then someone is doing a pretty good imitation.

  Colored players started coming into the majors just when Smitty and the P. League were being escorted out the door, so I do not know firsthand how the white boys have managed living alongside them. I suppose there were those like pricky little Tom Sawyer, America’s first fraternity boy, who took childish delight in tormentin
g the colored however they could, and others, like Huck, more or less good-natured kids, who were confused as hell suddenly to be sharing dugout, locker room, and hotel bath with the dusky likes of Nigger Jim. Do you remember, students of L., when Huck tricks Jim into believing the crackup of their raft had occurred only in Jim’s dreams? And how heartbroken old Jim was when he discovered otherwise? “It was fifteen minutes,” says Huck, “before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn’t ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn’t do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn’t done that one if I’d ’a’ knowed it would make him feel that way.” It figures that more than a few ballplayers have by this time come around to Huck’s way of thinking, as he expresses it so sweetly here. But I expect, given what I know of that lot, that the leagues have still got their share of Tom Sawyers, who even under the guise of doing Jim good had himself the time of his sadistic little small-town life heaping every sort of abuse and punishment he could think of upon that shackled black yearning to be free of Miss Watson. Of course as of 2/11/71 the shackles are off poor Jim and he is not only free but in the Hall of Shame. That just leaves Gofannon in shackles, don’t it? The Patriot League, America, those are your niggers now, for when you are blackballed from baseball, then verily, you are the untouchables in these United States.

  Students of L. and fans, the story I have to tell—prefigured as it is in the wanderings of Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, and the adventures in ostracism of Hester Prynne, the Puritans’ pariah—is of the once-mighty Mundys, how they were cast out of their home ball park in Port Ruppert, their year of humiliation on the road, and the shameful catastrophe that destroyed them (and me) forever. Little did the seven other teams in the league realize—little did any of us realize, fella name a’ included—that the seemingly comical misfortunes of the last-place Mundys constituted the prelude to oblivion for us all. But that, fans, is the tyrannical law of our lives: today euphoria, tomorrow the whirlwind.

  Bringing us to our blood brother.

  3. Moby Dick, by Herman Melville

  Moby Dick is to the old whaling industry (d.) what the Hall of Fame and Museum was supposed to have been to baseball: the ultimate and indisputable authority on the subject—repository of records, storehouse of statisticians, the Louvre of Leviathans. Who is Moby Dick if not the terrifying Ty Cobb of his species? Who is Captain Ahab if not the unappeasable Dodger manager Durocher, or the steadfast Giant John McGraw? Who are Flask, Starbuck, and Stubb, Ahab’s trio of first mates, if not the Tinker, Evers, and Chance of the Pequod’s crew? Better, call them the d.p. combination of the Ruppert Mundys—d.p. standing here for displaced person as well as double play—say they are Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, and Big John Baal, for where is the infield (and the outfield, the starters and relievers, the coaches, catchers, pinch-runners and pinch-hitters) of that peripatetic Patriot League team today, but down with the bones and the timbers of the Moby Dick-demolished Pequod, beneath “the great shroud of the sea.” Their remote Nantucket? Ruppert. Their crazed and vengeful Ahab? Manager Gil Gamesh. And their Ishmael? Yes, one did survive the wreck to tell the tale—an indestructible old truth-teller called me!

  Gentle fans, if you were to have bound together into a single volume every number ever published of the baseball weekly known as The Sporting News, as well as every manual, guide, and handbook important to an understanding of the game; if you were to assemble encyclopedic articles describing the size, weight, consistency, color, texture, resiliency, and liveliness of the baseball itself, from the early days when the modern Moby Dick-colored ball was not even mandatory and some teams preferred using balls colored red (yes, Mr. Chairman, not white but red!), to the days of the “putting-out system” of piece labor, wherein baseballs were hand sewn by women in their homes, then through to the 1910’s when A.G. Spalding introduced the first cork-centered baseball (thus ending the “deadball” era) and on to 1926, when the three leagues adopted the “cushion cork center” and with it the modern slug-away style of play; if you were to describe the cork forests of Spain, the rubber plantations of Malaysia, and the sheep farms of the American West where the Spalding baseball is born, if you were to differentiate between the three kinds of yarn in which the rubber that encases the cork is wrapped, and remark upon the relative hardness of that wrapping over the decades and how it has determined batting vs. slugging averages; if you were to devote a chapter to “The Tightness of the Stitching,” explaining scientifically the aerodynamics of the curveball, or any such breaking pitch, how it is affected by the relative smoothness of the ball’s seams and the number of seams that meet the wind as it rotates on its axis; and then if from this discussion of the ball, you were to take a turn, as it were, with the bat, noting first the eccentric nineteenth-century variations such as the flattened bat that Wright designed to facilitate bunting, and the curved-barrel bat in the shape of a question mark invented by Emile Kinst to put a deceptive spin upon the struck ball (enterprising Emile! cunning Kinst!), and thence moved on to describe the manufacture out of hickory logs of the classic bat shaped by Hillerich and Bradsby, the first model of which was turned in his shop by Bud Hillerich himself in 1884—the bat that came to be known to the world of men and boys as “the Louisville Slugger”; if you were by way of a digression to write a chapter on the most famous bats in baseball history, Heinie Groh’s “bottle bat,” Ed Delehanty’s “Big Betsy,” Luke Gofannon’s “Magic Wand,” and those bats of his that Ty Cobb would hone with a steer bone hour upon hour, much as Queequeg, Tashtego, and Dagoo would care lovingly for their harpoons; if then you were to write a chapter on the history of the baseball glove, recounting how the gloves of fielder, first-baseman, and catcher have evolved from the days when the game was played bare-handed, first into something resembling an ordinary dress glove, then into the “heavily-padded mitten,” of the 1890’s, the small webbed glove of the twenties, and finally in our own era of giantism, into the bushel-basket; if you were to describe the process by which Rawlings manufactures baseball shoes out of kangaroo hide, commencing with the birth of a single fleet-footed kangaroo in the wilds of Western Australia and following it through to its first stolen base in the majors; if you were to recount the evolutionary history of the All-Star game, beanballs, broadcasting, the canvas base, the catcher’s mask, chewing tobacco, contracts, doubleheaders, double plays, fans, farm systems, fixes, foul balls, gate receipts, home runs, home plate, ladies day, minor leagues, night games, picture cards, player organizations, salaries, scandals, stadiums, the strike zone, sportscasters, sportswriters, Sunday ball, trading, travel, the World Series, and umpires, you would not in the end have a compendium of American baseball any more thorough than the one that Herman Melville has assembled in Moby Dick on the American enterprise of catching the whale. I would not be surprised to learn that his book ran first as a series in Mechanix Illustrated, if such existed in Melville’s day, so clear and methodical is he in elucidating just what it took in the way of bats, balls, and gloves to set yourself up for chasing the pennant in those leagues. Today some clever publisher would probably bring out Moby Dick as one of those “How To Do It” books, providing he left off the catastrophic conclusion, or appended it under the title, “And How Not To.”

  Only today who cares about how to catch a whale in the old-fashioned, time-honored, and traditional way? Or about anything “traditional” for that matter? Today they just drop bombs down the spouts to blow the blubber out, or haul the leviathans in with a hook, belly-up, those who’ve been dumb enough to drink from the chamberpot that once was Melville’s “wild and distant sea.” How’s that for a horror, Brother Melville? Not only is your indestructible Moby Dick now an inch from extinction but so is the vast salt sea itself. The sea is no longer a fit place for habitation—just ask the tunas in the cans. Two-thirds of the globe, the Mother of us all, and according to today’s paper, the place is poisoned. Yes, even the fish have been given their eviction notice, and must pack up their
scales and go fannon—which is just baseball’s way of saying get lost. Only there is no elsewhere as far as I can see for these aquatic vertebrates to go fann or fin in. The fate that befell the Ruppert Mundys has now befallen the fish, and who, dear dispensable fans, is to follow?

  Let me prophesy. What began in ’46 with the obliteration of the Patriot League will not end until the planet itself has gone the way of the Tri-City Tycoons, the Tri-City Greenbacks, the Kakoola Reapers, the Terra Incognita Rustlers, the Asylum Keepers, the Aceldama Butchers, the Ruppert Mundys, and me; until each and every one of you is gone like the sperm whale and the great Luke Gofannon, gone without leaving a trace! Only read your daily paper, fans—every day news of another stream, another town, another species biting the dust. Wait, very soon now whole continents will be canceled out like stamps. Whonk, Africa! Whonk, Asia! Whonk, Europa! Whonk, North, whonk, South, America! And, oh, don’t try hiding, Antarctica—whonk you too! And that will be it, fans, as far as the landmass goes. A brand new ballgame.

  Only where is it going to be played? Under the lights on the dark side of the Moon? Will Walter O’Malley with his feel for the future really move the Dodgers to Mars? There is no doubt, Mr. O’M., that you cannot beat that planet for parking, but tell me, has your accountant consulted your astrophysicist yet? Are you sure there are curves on Mars? Will pitchers on Venus work in regular rotation in temperatures of five hundred degrees? And fly balls hit into Saturn’s rings—ground-rule doubles or cheap home runs? And what of the historic Fall Classic and the pieties thereof—plan to rechristen it the Solar System Series, or do you figure eventually to go intergalactic? Only when you get beyond the Milky Way, sir, do they even have October? Better check. And hurry, hurry—there is much scheming and bullshitting and stock-splitting to be done, if you are to be ready in time for the coming cataclysm. For make no mistake, you sharp-eyed, fast-talking, money-making O’Malleys of America, you proprietors, promoters, expropriators, and entrepreneurs: the coming cataclysm is coming. The cushy long-term lease has just about run out on this Los Angeles of a franchise called Earth—and yes, like the dinosaur, like the whale, like hundreds upon hundreds of species whose bones and poems we never even knew, you too will be out on your dispossessed ass, Mr. and Mrs. Roaring Success! Henceforth all your games will be played away, too. Away! Away! Far far away! So then, farewell, fugitives! Pleasant journey, pilgrims! Auf Wiedersehen, evacuees! A demain, d.p.s! Adios, drifters! So long, scapegoats! Hasta mañana, émigrés! Pax vobiscum, pariahs! Happy landing, hobos! Aloha, outcasts! Shalom, shalom, shelterless, shipwrecked, shucked, shunted, and shuttled humankind! Or, as we say so succinctly in America, to the unfit, the failed, the floundering and forgotten, HIT THE ROAD, YA BUMS!