The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  “Because,” replied the venerable Mundy manager, “the Lord is not concerned with the Phillies or the A’s.”

  “Boy, aren’t they unlucky! They’ve just got the Devil looking after them—so they get to stay where they are, poor bastards! Pardon my Shakespeare, sir, but why Port Ruppert instead of Brooklyn? They have got a deep water harbor there too, you know. Almighty God could have cleared the Dodgers out of Ebbets Field to make way for the Army—why in hell didn’t He! Why were the Mundys chosen!”

  “They have been chosen…”

  “Yes?”

  “Because they have been chosen.”

  “They have been chosen because Glorious Mundy is dead and his heirs are scoundrels! Mammon, Mister Fairsmith, that is who is behind this move! The love of money! The worship of money! And what is more disgusting, they cloak their greed in the stars and stripes! They make a financial killing and call it a patriotic act! And where is God in all this, Mister Fairsmith! Where is He when we need Him!”

  “He works in mysterious ways, General.”

  “Maybe, sir, maybe—but not this mysterious. That He should stoop to the Mundy brothers to do His business for Him is something even I am reluctant to accept—and I have never hidden the fact that I am not a particularly devout person. Frankly I think you do a serious disservice to God’s good name with this kind of irresponsible talk about mysterious ways. And since I’ve come this far, I want to go further. I want you to straighten me out on something, just so we know where we stand. Are you actually sitting there, without blinking an eye, and suggesting to me that there is some sort of similarity between the Mundys of Port Ruppert, New Jersey, and the ancient Hebrews of the Bible?”

  Mister Fairsmith said, “In the words of our great friend, Glorious Mundy, ‘Baseball is this country’s religion.’”

  “True, that was Glory’s splendid way of putting it. But surely it is going a little overboard to start comparing a sorry second division club like yours to the people of Israel. And yourself, if I am following this analogy correctly, yourself here to Moses, leading them out of Egypt. Really, Mister Fairsmith, a proper respect for your own achievement is one thing, but does this make sense to you? Now I realize all you have been through in the last year. I have the greatest sympathy with what you have had to endure over the last decade from the Mundy brothers. I have the deepest sympathy for the way you have been treated by the Emperor of Japan. I hate the son of a bitch, and I didn’t even know him. But frankly, even taking all of that into consideration, I cannot let you get away with spouting religious hogwash that is going to destroy this league!”

  Mister Fairsmith only looked more beatific; the trial and tribulation in which he put so much stock was getting off to an excellent start.

  Wearily, the General said, “Look, it’s as simple as this, skipper: no good can come of a big league ball club playing one hundred and fifty-four games a year on the road. And I am going to do everything within my power to prevent it.”

  To which the Mundy manager, hell-bent on deliverance, replied, “General Oakhart, let my players go.”

  2

  THE VISITORS’ LINE-UP

  THE ’43 MUNDYS

  SS

  Frenchy Astarte

  2B

  Nickname Damur

  1B

  John Baal

  C

  Hothead Ptah

  LF

  Mike Rama

  3B

  Wayne Heket

  RF

  Bud Parusha

  CF

  Roland Agni

  P

  Jolly Cholly Tuminikar

  P

  Deacon Demeter

  P

  Bobo Buchis

  P

  Rocky Volos

  P

  Howie Pollux

  P

  Catfish Mertzeger

  P

  Chico Mecoatl

  UT

  Specs Skirnir

  UT

  Wally Omara

  UT

  Mule Mokos

  UT

  Applejack Terminus

  UT

  Carl Khovaki

  UT

  Harry Hunaman

  UT

  Joe Garuda

  UT

  Swede Gudmund

  UT

  Ike Tvashtri

  UT

  Red Kronos

  2

  A distressing chapter wherein the reader is introduced to each member of the 1943 Mundy starting line-up as he steps up to the plate, and comes thus to understand why Americans have conspired to remove all reminders of such a team from the history books; their records recounted more fully than on the back of the bubble gum cards. Containing much matter to vex the ordinary fan and strain his credulity, which is as it must be, in that real life is always running away with itself, whereas imagination is shackled by innocence, delusion, hope, ignorance, obedience, fear, sweetness, et cetera. Containing that which will move the compassionate to tears, the just to indignation, and the cruel to laughter.

  “BATTING FIRST and playing shortstop, No. 1: FRENCHY ASTARTE. ASTARTE.”

  Jean-Paul Astarte (TR, BR, 5′10″, 172 lbs.), French-Canadian, acquired in unusual deal late in 1941 from Tokyo team of Japan in association with Imperial Japanese Government—the only player ever traded out of his own hemisphere (and the only player ever traded back). Began career in twenties, down in Georgia, thence to Havana in the Cuban League, Santiago in the Dominican League, finally Caracas. It began to look as though the French-speaking boy out of the freezing North was destined in the end to play for the Equator—but no, misery is never so orderly in its progression; it wouldn’t be real misery if it was. Early in the thirties, when baseball boomed in Japan, he was traded to Tokyo by way of the Panama Canal; there he played shortstop for nearly a decade, dreaming day in and day out of his father’s dairy farm in the Gaspé. When news reached him in the fall of ’41 that he was to be traded once again, he just somehow assumed it would be to Calcutta; he did not understand a word his Japanese owner was telling him (anymore than he had understood his Spanish owner or his American owner when they had called him in to say au revoir) and actually started in weeping at the prospect of playing ball next with a bunch of guys talking it up in Hindi and running around the bases in bedsheets. Oh, how he cursed the day he had donned a leather mitt and tried to pretend he was something other, something more, than a French-Canadian farmboy! Why wasn’t what was good enough for the father good enough for the son? At sixteen years of age, with those powerful wrists of his, he could do a two-gallon milking in five minutes—wasn’t that accomplishment enough in one life? Instead he had had dreams (what Canadian doesn’t?) of the great stadiums to the south, dreams of American fame and American dollars … He boarded the boat with the Japanese ticket in one hand and his bag full of old bats and berets in the other, fully expecting to come ashore in a land of brown men in white dresses, and wound up instead (such was Frenchy’s fate) being greeted at the dock by something he could never have expected. “Welcome, Monsieur! Welcome to Port Ruppert!” The famous Ulysses S. Fairsmith, the greatest manager in the game! Mon Dieu! It was not India he had reached, but America; like Columbus before him, he was a big leaguer at last.

  How come? Simple. The Mundy brothers, into whose laps a million tons of scrap metal had dropped, had traded directly with Hirohito, a penny a pound, and (shrewd afterthought) a shortstop to fill the hole that would be left in the Mundy infield when the war started up in December. Yes, there was literally nothing the Mundy brothers didn’t have the inside dope on, including the bombing of Pearl Harbor. That’s what made them so successful. “Tell you what,” they were reported to have said to the eager Emperor of Japan, “throw in the shortstop from the Tokyo club, and you got yourself a deal, Hirohito.” Thus did they kill two birds with one stone, and God only knows how many hundreds of American soldiers.

  Unfortunately the Most Valuable Player in the Far East found the majors rather
different from what he had been imagining during his years of exile. For one thing, he was now thirty-nine, a fact of some consequence when you were hitting against carnivorous two hundred pounders instead of little rice-eaters about the size of your nephew Billy. It was weeks before he got his first Patriot League hit: seven, to be exact. Then there was that throw to first. How come they kept beating out for hits what used to be outs back in Asia? How come the fans booed and hooted when he came to the plate—when they used to cry “Caramba!” in Venezuela and “Banzai!” in the Land of the Rising Sun? Why, here in the Big American leagues of his dreams, he was even more of a foreigner than he had been in Tokyo, Japan! There he was an all-star shortstop, white as Honus Wagner and Rabbit Maranville—white as them and great as them. But here in the P. League he was “Frenchy” the freak.

  In ’42 he batted .200 for the Mundys, just about half what he’d batted halfway around the globe, and he led the shortstops in the three leagues in errors. His specialty was dropping high infield flies. The higher the ball was hit, the longer it gave him to wait beneath it, thinking about Japan and the day he would return to Tokyo and stardom.

  It was Frenchy’s error in the last game of the ’42 season (and the last game ever played in Mundy Park), that sent two Rustler runners scampering home in the ninth, and knocked the Mundys into last. At the time, finishing half a game out of the cellar or right down in it didn’t make much difference to his teammates—by the end of that first wartime season, all those old-timers wanted from life was not to have to push their bones around a baseball field for the next six months. And Frenchy too was able to live with the error by thinking of it as a mere one seventy-fifth of the mistakes he had made out on the field that year—until, that is, word reached him in snowbound Gaspé (as strange to him now as steamy Havana once had been, for his father was dead, as were all the cows he used to know there as a boy) that the last-place Mundys had been booted out of Mundy Park and henceforth would be homeless.

  Unlucky Astarte! Because of my error, he thought, that made us come in last! Because at that moment, his mind hadn’t been on Ruppert finishing seventh in the P. League, but Japan finishing first in the war! Yes, Japan victorious fiber alles … Japan conquering America, conquering Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field, Mundy Park … Yes, waiting beneath what was to have been the last fly ball of the ’42 season, he had been envisioning opening day of 1943—Hirohito throwing out the first pitch to a Ruppert team of tiny Orientals, with the exception of himself, the Most Valuable Player in an Imperial Japanese world …

  Oh, if ever there was a player without a country, it was the Mundy lead-off man, who forever afterwards believed himself and his traitorous thoughts to have caused the expulsion from Port Ruppert. Was Frenchy the loneliest and unhappiest Mundy of them all? A matter of debate, fans. In the end, he was their only suicide, though not the only Mundy regular to meet his Maker on the road.

  * * *

  “Batting second and playing second base, No. 29: NICKNAME DAMUR. DAMUR.”

  Nickname Damur (TR, BR, 5′, 92 lbs.) could run the ninety feet from home to first in 3.4 seconds, and that was about it. At fourteen he was the youngest player in the majors, as well as the skinniest. The joke was (or was it a joke?) that the Mundy brothers were paying him by the pound; not that the boy cared anything about money anyway—no, all he seemed to think about from the moment he joined the team in spring training, was making a nickname for himself. “How about Hank?” he asked his new teammates his very first day in the scarlet and white, “don’t I look like a Hank to you guys?” He was so green they had to sit him down and explain to him that Hank was the nickname for Henry. “Is that your name, boy—Henry?” “Nope. It’s worse … Hey, how about Dutch? Dutch Damur. It rhymes!” “Dutch is for Dutchmen, knuckle-head.” “Chief?” “For Injuns.” “Whitey?” “For blonds.” “How about Ohio then, where I’m from?” “That ain’t a name.” “Hey—how about Happy? Which I sure am, bein’ here with you all!” “Don’t worry, you won’t be for long.” “Well then,” he said shyly, “given my incredible speed and all, how about Twinkletoes? Or Lightning? Or Flash!” “Don’t boast, it ain’t becomin’. We wuz all fast once’t. So was everybody in the world. That don’t make you special one bit.” “Hey! How about Dusty? That rhymes too!”

  But even when he himself had settled upon the nickname he wouldn’t have minded seeing printed beneath his picture on a bubble gum card, or hearing announced over the loud speaker when he stepped up to bat, his teammates refused to address him by it. Mostly, in the beginning, they did not address him at all if they could help it, but just sort of pushed him aside to get where they were going, or walked right through him as though he weren’t there. A fourteen-year-old kid weighing ninety-two pounds playing in their infield! “What next?” they said, spitting on the dugout steps in disgust, “a reindeer or a slit?” In the meantime, Damur began tugging at his cap every two minutes, hoping they would notice and start calling him Cappy; he took to talking as though he had been born on a farm, saying “hoss” for horse and calling the infield “the pea patch,” expecting they would shortly start calling him Rube; suddenly he began running out to his position in the oddest damn way—“What the hell you doin’, boy?” they asked. “That’s just the way I walk,” he replied, “like a duck.” But no one took the hint and called him Ducky or Goose. Nor when he chattered encouragement to the pitcher did they think to nickname him Gabby. “Shut up with that noise, willya?” cried the pitcher—“You’re drivin’ me batty,” and so that was the end of that. Finally, in desperation, he whined, “Jee-zuz! What about Kid at least?” “We already got a Kid on this club. Two’s confusin’.” “But he’s fifty years old and losin’ his teeth!” cried Damur. “I’m only fourteen. I am a kid.” “Tough. He wuz here before you wuz even born.”

  It was Jolly Cholly Tuminikar, the Mundy peacemaker and Sunday manager, who christened him Nickname. Not that Damur was happy about it, as he surely would have been, dubbed Happy. “‘Nickname’ isn’t a nickname, it’s the name for a nickname. Hey—how about Nick? That’s the nickname for nickname! Call me Nick, guys!” “Nick? That’s for Greeks. You ain’t Greek.” “But whoever heard of a baseball player called Nickname Damur?” “And whoever heard a’ one that weighed ninety-two pounds and could not endorse a razor blade if they even asked him to?”

  Indeed, so slight was he, that on the opening day of the ’43 season, a base runner barreling into second knocked Nickname so high and so far that the center-fielder, Roland Agni, came charging in to make a sensational diving two-handed catch of the boy. “Out!” roared the field umpire, until he remembered that of course it is the ball not the player that has to be caught, and instantly reversed his decision. The fans, however, got a kick out of seeing Nickname flying this way and that, and when he came to bat would playfully call out to him, “How about Tarzan? How about Gargantua?” and the opposing team had their fun too, needling him from the bench—“How about Powerhouse? How about Hurricane? How about Hercules, Nickname?” At last the diminutive second-sacker couldn’t take any more. “Stop it,” he cried, “stop, please,” and with tears running down his face, pleaded with his tormentors, “My name is Oliver!” But, alas, it was too late for that.

  Nickname, obviously, had no business in the majors, not even as a pinch-runner. Oh, he was swift enough, but hardly man enough, and if it was not for the wartime emergency, and the irresponsibility of the Mundy brothers, he would have been home where he belonged, with his long division and his Mom. “How about Homesick?” the sportswriter Smitty whispered into the boy’s ear, a month after the ’43 season began, and Nickname, black and blue by now and batting less than his own weight, threw himself in a rage upon the famous columnist. But what began with a flurry of fists ended with the boy sobbing in Smitty’s lap, in a wing chair in a corner of the lobby of the Grand Kakoola Hotel. The next day, Smitty’s column began, “A big league player wept yesterday, cried his heart out like a kid, but only a fool would call him a sissy�
��”

  Thereafter the fans left off teasing Nickname about his size and his age and his name, and for a while (until the catastrophe at Kakoola) he became something like a mascot to the crowds. Of course, being babied was the last thing he wanted (so he thought) and so under the professional guidance of Big John Baal, he took to the booze, and, soon enough, to consorting with whores. They called him whatever he wanted them to. In sleazy cathouses around the league they called him just about every famous ballplayer’s nickname under the sun—all he had to do was ask, and pay. They called him Babe, Nap, Christy, Shoeless, Dizzy, Heinie, Tony, Home Run, Cap, Rip, Kiki, Luke, Pepper, and Irish; they called him Cracker and Country and King Kong and Pie; they even called him Lefty, skinny little fourteen-year-old second baseman that he was. Why not? It only cost an extra buck, and it made him feel like somebody important.

  * * *

  “Batting in third position, the first baseman, No. 11, JOHN BAAL. BAAL.”

  Big John (TR, BL, 6′4″, 230 lbs.), said never to have hit a homer sober in his life, had played for just about every club in the league, including the Mundys, before returning to them in ’42, paroled into the custody of their benevolent manager. Baal joined the club after serving two years on a five-year gambling rap—he’d shot craps after the World Series with the rookie of the year, and wiped the boy out with a pair of loaded dice. Not the first time John had walked off with somebody else’s World Series earnings, only the first time they caught him with the shaved ivories. In prison Big John had had the two best seasons of his life, earning the ironic appellation (coined, of course, by Smitty) “the Babe Ruth of the Big House.” With Big John in the line-up, Sing Sing beat every major prison team in the country, including the powerful Leavenworth club, and went on to capture the criminal baseball championship of America two consecutive seasons after nearly a decade of losing to the big federal pens stocked with hard-hitting bootleggers. Inside the prison walls a Johnny Baal didn’t have to put up with the rules and regulations that had so hampered him throughout his big league career, particularly the commandment against taking the field under the influence of alcohol. If a slugger had a thirst around game time, then his warden saw that it was satisfied (along with any other appetite a robust man might develop), because the warden wanted to win. But out in society, you couldn’t get past the dugout steps without some little old biddy in a baseball uniform sniffing you all over for fear that if you blew on their ball with your sour mash breath, you might pop open the stitching and unravel the yarn. Consequently, aside from his criminal record, the only record Big John held outside of prison was for the longest outs hit in a single season. Christ, he clouted that ball so high that at its zenith it passed clear out of sight—but as for distance, he just could not get it to go all the way, unless he was pickled.