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THE GREAT AMERICAN BASEBALL NOVEL  Novelist Philip Roth in the world of baseball... |
Philip Roth's baseball book has never been surpassed
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
Don’t call me Ishmael.
It took me some two years to sail through Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and I still haven’t recovered. Ever since, I have felt that every novel with the exception of “Catcher in the Rye” could be improved if it were shorter.
Philip Roth wrote that “‘Moby Dick' is to the whaling industry 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.”
Philip Roth is back in
the public prints again these days because of his hot new novel,
”The Plot Against America.”
And that is a reminder to me anew that Roth wrote a novel that
is the "Moby Dick" of baseball novels. If “Moby
Dick” told me more about whaling than I ever wanted to know,
Roth’s “The Great American Novel” probably turned
off the literary crowd because it is full of inside baseball
and riffs on baseball history, one of the rip-roaring burlesques
of American literature. And yes, it is too long, too.
Roth utilizes baseball and the homeless Ruppert Mundys team of the Patriot League to deal with the corrupting power of rhetoric and America’s loss of innocence. Where Mark Twain used Huckleberry Finn to spin tall tales, Roth has an alliterative-brilliant sports writer, Word Smith, relate the madcap history of the now forgotten Patriot League.
Ah, what a glorious cynic Word Smith is. On the reminiscences of Hall of Famers, he says, “Ninety-nine per cent of their baseball memories, 99 per cent of the anecdotes and stories they collect and repeat are pure hogwash, tiny morsels of truth, so coated over with discredited legend and senile malarkey, so impacted you might say, in the turds of time, as to rival tales out of ancient mythology.”
The Mundys include a 14-year-old second baseman named Nickname Damur because he is forever in search of a good nickname; a one-legged catcher, Hothead Ptah, who has a terrible temper and abuses hitters at the plate claiming that it is his right of free speech to say whatever he wants about them, and a 52-year-old first baseman, the oldest man in the league, who takes naps between innings when his team is at bat.
Roth grabs hold with madcap
alliteration in the opening paragraph of the prologue. It reads:
“Call me Smitty. That’s what everybody else called
me--the ball players, the bankers, the bareback riders, the baritones,
the bartenders, the bastards, the best-selling writers, the bicyclists,
the big game hunters, (Hem the exception) the billiard champs,
the bishops, the blacklisted, the black marketers, the blonds,
the bloodsuckers, the bluebloods, the bookies, the Bolsheviks
(some of my best friends, Mr. Chairman-and what of it!) the bombardiers,
the bootblacks, the bootlicks, the bosses, the boxers, the Brahmins,
the brass hats, the British, the broads, the broadcasters, the
bronco-busters, the brunettes, the black bucks down in Barbados,
the Buddhist monks in Burma, one Bulkington, the bullfighters,
the bullthrowers, the burlesque comics and the burlesque stars,
the bushmen, the bums and the butlers. And that’s only the
letter B, fans, only one of the Big Twenty-Six.”
Whew.
Taking off from Bill Veeck’s celebrated midget, Eddie Gaedel, Roth introduces the heroic, pint-sized Bob Yamm with:
“The entire nation took not only brave Bob Yamm to its heart, but all American midgets with him, a group previously unknown to the vast majority of their countrymen. Until Bob Yamm’s entrance into baseball, how many Americans had even taken a good long look at a midget, let alone heard one speak? How many Americans had ever taken a meal with a midget, or exchanged ideas with one? What did midgets eat anyway? And how much? Where did they live? Did midgets marry, and if so, whom? Other midgets? What did midgets do for entertainment? Religion? Clothes? To all these questions the ordinary, full-grown man in the street had to confess his ignorance; either he knew nothing whatsoever about the American midget, or what was worse, shared the general misconception that they were people of dubious morality and low intelligence, belonging to no religious order, befriended only by the sleaziest types, and constitutionally unable to rise in life about the station of bellhop, if that.”
Whew.
This book was written in 1973 but his statistical whiz of a character, Isaac Ellis, comes up with a pitching strategy that is close to becoming a reality in big league baseball today. He says, “Instead of removing pitchers randomly and haphazardly, start with a relief pitcher who works approximately two innings, follow with a starting pitcher who goes approximately five innings and finish up with a second relief pitcher.
Why not?
Roth freely acknowledges his debt to Lawrence Ritter’s classic, “The Glory of Their Times,” among others. He extends the grasp of baseball he displayed in the immortal segment describing Portnoy with Duke Snider’s glove in “Portnoy’s Complaint.” As I said before, the book probably was dismissed by the literary establishment because it is too inside-baseball, rather than esoteric whaling, for many aesthetes.
I confess that when I sent off a column about the book to Roth in 1984, I was pleased to receive a note from him that said, “I owe you a drink, and probably dinner, too. You reminded me of a book I loved writing…”
And yes, let it be recorded
here that on pages 250 and 251 of the hard-cover edition Roth
recorded the greatest appreciation ever of the three-base hit,
the triple.
©2004 by Stan Isaacs. The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA, incorporating
a photo of Philip Roth.
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