The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  In their defense, the Mundy boys claimed that they were only getting the best possible price for players who hadn’t more than another good season or two left in their bones anyway; they were clearing out dead wood, said they, to make way for a new Golden Era. Well, as it turned out, not a single one of the seven former Mundy greats for whom old Glorious’s heirs collected a cool half a million ever did amount to much once they left Port Ruppert, but whether it was due to advancing age, as the Mundy brothers maintained, or to the shock of being turned out of the park to which they had brought such fame and glory, is a matter of opinion.

  Luke the Loner didn’t even make it through one whole season as a Rustler. By August of ’32 he already had broken the league record for strike-outs—strike-outs they weren’t applauding him for either—and he who was reputed never to have thrown to a wrong base in his life, had the infielders scratching their heads because of his bizarre pegs from center. It seemed that shy, silent Luke, whom everybody had thought didn’t need much company outside of his thirty-eight-ounce bat, “the Magic Wand,” was just lost out there in the arid southwest, hopelessly homesick for the seaside park where he had played two thousand games in the Ruppert scarlet and white. Inevitably, the fans began to ride him—“Hey, Strike-out King! Hey, Hundred Thousand Dollar Dodo!” As the season wore on they called him just about everything under the sun—and the sun itself is no joke in Wyoming—and though he plugged along like the great iron man that he was, his average finally slipped to an even .100. “A thousand bucks a point, Gofannon—not bad for two hours a day!” He was on his way to the plate—in danger of slipping to a two-figure batting average—when the Rustler manager, believing that enough suffering was enough, and that the time had come to cut everybody’s losses, stepped to the foot of the dugout, and called in a voice more compassionate than any Luke had heard all year, “What do you say, old-timer, come on out and take a rest,” and a pinch-hitter was sent up in his place.

  A week later he was back in New Jersey on his cranberry farm. The legislature of the state, in special session, voted him New Jersey license plate 372 in commemoration of his lifetime batting average. People would look for that license plate coming along the road down there in Jersey, and they’d just applaud when it came by. And Luke would tip his hat. And that’s how he died that winter. To acknowledge the cheers from an oncoming school bus—boys and girls hanging from every window, screaming, “It’s him! It’s Luke!”—the sweetest, shyest ballplayer who ever hit a homer, momentarily took his famous hands from the wheel and his famous eyes from the road, and shot off the slick highway into the Raritan River. That so modest a man should die because of his fame was only one of the dozens of tragic ironies that the sportswriters pointed up in the mishap that took Luke’s life at the age of thirty-six.

  * * *

  The Mundys A.G. (after Gofannon) promptly dropped from the first division, and for the remaining prewar years labored to finish as high as fifth. If the fans continued to fill the stands almost as faithfully as they had in happier days, it was because a Rupe-it roota was a Rupe-it roota, and because in the Mundy dugout sat their esteemed manager, Ulysses S. Fairsmith, “Mister Fairsmith” as they called him always, whether “they” roasted in the bleachers, or lorded it over the entire game in the big magistrate’s chair of the Commissioner’s desk in Chicago. Even the Mundy brothers, who ran the franchise with as much nostalgia as a pair of cobras, were careful to call him Mister (to the world), though they considered him a relic about ready for the junk heap, and when they sold seven of their help for a five-pound bag of thousand dollar bills, kept him on the payroll so as to indicate their reverence for Port Ruppert’s Periclean past.

  And the cheap, cynical trick worked: seated in his rocking chair (“Fairsmith’s throne”) in the dugout, wearing his starched white shirt, silk bow tie, white linen suit, Panama hat, and that aristocratic profile off a postage stamp, and moving the defense around with the gold tip of his bamboo cane, the Christian gentleman and scholar of the game was enough to convince the rootas of that rabid baseball town that this heavy-footed, butterfingered nine had something to do with the Ruppert Mundys of a few years back, those clubs now known as “the wondrous teams of yore.”

  Till the day he died, Mister Fairsmith never set foot inside a ball park on a Sunday. Instead he handed over the reins to one of his trusted coaches so that he might keep the promise he had made to his mother back in 1888, when he went off as a youngster to catch for the Hartford team of the old National League. “Sundays,” his mother had said, “were not made for doubleheaders. You may catch six days a week, but on the seventh you shall rest.” From his rocking chair in the Mundy dugout, Mister Fairsmith often made pronouncements to the press that one would not have been surprised to hear from the pulpit. “If the Lord ever permitted birth to a natural switch-hitter,” he would say, for instance, in a characteristic locution, “it was Luke Gofannon.” In his early years as a manager, the pregame prayer was practiced in the Mundy clubhouse before the team took the field for the day. It was eventually discontinued when Mister Fairsmith discovered that the content of the prayers being offered up to God was nothing like what he had in mind when he instituted the ritual: mostly they were squalid little requests for extra-base hits, and pitchers asking the King of Kings to help them keep the fastball down. “Give me my legs, Lord,” went the prayer of one aging outfielder, “and the rest’ll take care of itself.” Still, he was kindly to the players, despite their frailties and follies, and never criticized a man in public for a mistake he had made on the field of play. Rather, he waited a day or two until the wound had healed a little, and then he took the fellow for dinner to a nice hotel, and at a table where they would not be observed, and in that gentle way he was revered for, he would say, “Now what about that play? Do you think you did that right?” If a pitcher had to be removed from the mound, Mister Fairsmith would always have a polite word to say to him, as he headed through the dugout to the showers; it did not matter if the fellow had just given up a grand-slam home run, or walked six men in a row, Mister Fairsmith would call him over to the rocker, and pressing the pitcher’s hand in his own strong, manly grip, say to him, “Thank you very much for the effort. I’m deeply grateful to you.”

  General Oakhart, of course, believed that the Mundy brothers’ plan to lease their ball park to the government was just the kind of preposterous innovation that the Ruppert manager could be counted on to oppose wholeheartedly. Vain though his plea had been, Mister Fairsmith had spoken so eloquently five years earlier against the introduction of nighttime baseball into the Patriot League schedule, that at the conclusion of the meeting of league owners to whom the address had been delivered, General Oakhart had released the text to the newspapers. The following day selections appeared on editorial pages all around the country, and the Port Ruppert Star ran it in its entirety in the rotogravure section on Sunday, laid out on a page of its own to resemble the Declaration of Independence. What particularly moved people to clip it out and hang it framed over the mantel, was the strength of his belief in “the Almighty Creator, Whose presence,” Mister Fairsmith revealed, “I do feel in every park around the league, on those golden days of sweet, cheerful spring, hot plenteous summer, and bountiful and benevolent autumn, when physically strong and morally sound young men do sport in seriousness beneath the sun, as did the two in Eden, before the Serpent and the Fall. Daytime baseball is nothing less than a reminder of Eden in the time of innocence and joy; and too, an intimation of that which is yet to come. For what is a ball park, but that place wherein Americans may gather to worship the beauty of God’s earth, the skill and strength of His children, and the holiness of His commandment to order and obedience. For such are the twin rocks upon which all sport is founded. And woe unto him, I say, who would assemble our players and our fans beneath the feeble, artificial light of godless science! For in the end as in the beginning, in the Paradise to come as in the Eden we have lost, it is not by the faint wattage of the ele
ctric light bulb that ye shall be judged, but rather in the unblinking eye of the Lord, wherein we are all as bareheaded fans in the open bleachers and tiny players prancing beneath the vault of His Heaven.”

  Several of the owners present were heard by the General to whisper “Amen,” at the conclusion to this speech; among them was the new owner of the Kakoola Reapers, whiskey magnate Frank Mazuma, whose plan to install floodlights in Reaper Field had been the occasion for Mister Fairsmith’s address. As it happened, not only did the amen-ing Mazuma go ahead to initiate nighttime baseball that very season in Kakoola—with the result that his club led the league that year in strike-outs, errors, and injuries—but in defiance of an anti-radio ban signed by all the Patriot League owners, including Mazuma’s predecessor, began to broadcast the Reaper home games on the local station, which he also bought up with his bootleg billions and christened KALE. And, to the surprise of those who had drafted the antiradio ban in great panic some years earlier, Mazuma’s broadcasts, rather than cutting further into dwindling gate receipts, seemed, like those bizarre night games, to increase local interest in the Reapers, so that the following season attendance went up a full fifteen per cent, even though the team continued to occupy seventh place one day and eighth the next.

  To General Oakhart, needless to say, the idea that people could sit in their living rooms or in their cars listening to an announcer describe a game being played miles and miles away was positively infuriating. Why, the game might just as well not be happening, for all they knew! The whole thing might even be a hoax, a joke, something managed with some clever sound effects and a little imagination and an actor who was good at pretending to be excited. What was there to stop radio stations in towns without ball clubs from making up their own teams, and even their own leagues, and getting people at home all riled up, telling them home runs were being knocked out of the park and records being broken, when all the while there was nothing going on but somebody telling a story? Who was to say it might not come to that, and worse, if there promised to be a profit in it for the Frank Mazumas of this profit-mad world?

  Furthermore, you could not begin to communicate through words, either printed or spoken, what this game was all about—not even words as poetical and inspirational as those Mister Fairsmith was so good at. As the General said, the beauty and meaning of baseball resided in the fixed geometry of the diamond and the test it provided of agility, strength, and timing. Baseball was a game that looked different from every single seat in the ball park, and consequently could never be represented accurately unless one were able to put together into one picture what every single spectator in the park had seen simultaneously moment by moment throughout an entire afternoon; and that included those moments that in fact accounted for half the playing time if not more, when there was no action whatsoever, those moments of waiting and hesitation, of readiness and recovery, moments in which everything ceased, including the noise of the crowd, but which were as inherent to the appeal of the game as the few climactic seconds when a batted ball sailed over the wall. You might as well put an announcer up in the woods in October and have him do a “live” broadcast of the fall, as describe a baseball game on the radio. “Well, now, folks, the maples are turning red, and there goes a birch getting yellow,” and so on. Can you imagine nature-lovers sitting all huddled around a dial, following that? No, all radio would do would be to reduce the game to what the gamblers cared about: who scored, how much, and when. As for the rest—the playing field with its straight white foul lines and smooth dirt basepaths and wide green band of outfield, the nine uniformed athletes strategically scattered upon it, their muscles strung invisibly together, so that when one moved the rest swung with him into motion … well, what about all that, which, to the General, was just about everything? Sure you could work up interest even in a bunch of duffers like the Kakoola Reapers by reporting their games “live” over the radio, but it might as well be one team of fleas playing another team of fleas, for all such a broadcast had to do with the poetry of the great game itself.

  * * *

  The General’s meeting with Mister Fairsmith reminded him of nothing so much as his tragic interview nearly ten years earlier with Mike the Mouth Masterson, after the great umpire had lost his sense of reality. Where, oh where would it end? The best of the men he knew, the men of principle upon whom he had counted for aid and support—either dead, or gone mad. Would no one of sanity and integrity survive to carry on the great traditions of the league? Would he have to war alone against the vulgarians and profiteers and ignoramuses dedicated to devouring the league, the game, the country—the world? Glorious Mundy, Luke Gofannon, Spenser Trust, all in the grave; and from last report (a news item in a Texas paper) Mike Masterson still traversing the country with a blackboard on his back, hanging around the sidelines at sandlot baseball games demanding “justice.” Oh, the times were dark! A Jew the owner of the Greenbacks! Spenser Trust’s eccentric widow owner of the Tycoons! A bootlegger gone “straight” the owner of the Reapers! And now Ulysses S. Fairsmith, clear out of his mind!

  To be sure, the devout and pious ways of Mister Fairsmith had always struck the General as somewhat excessive (if useful), and frankly he had even considered him somewhat “touched” twenty years back, when he circumnavigated the globe, bringing baseball to the black and yellow people of the world, many of whom had never even worn long pants before, let alone a suit with a number on the back. This excess of zeal (and paucity of common sense) had very nearly cost him his life in the Congo, where he rubbed a tribe of cannibals the wrong way and missed the pot by about an inch. On the other hand, no one could fail to be impressed by the job of conversion he had done in Japan. Single-handedly, he had made that previously backward nation into the second greatest baseball-playing country in the world, and after his 1922 visit to Tokyo, had returned every fall with two teams of American all-stars to play in Japanese cities, large and small, and teach the little yellow youngsters along the way the fine points of the game. They loved him in Japan. The beautiful Hiroshima ball park was called “Fairsmith Stadium”—in Japanese of course—and when he appeared at a major league game in Japan, everyone there, players as well as fans, bowed down and accorded him the respect of a member of the imperial family. Hirohito himself had entertained Mister Fairsmith in his palace as recently as October of 1941—giving no indication, of course, that only two months later, on a quiet Sunday morning, while Christian America was at its prayers, he was going to deal the Mundy manager the most stunning blow of his life by attacking the American fleet anchored at Hawaii. And how could he? For a year now the Mundy manager had suffered an agony of bewilderment and doubt: how could Hirohito do this to Mister Fairsmith, after all he had done for the youngsters of Japan?

  “If it is the will of the Lord,” said Mister Fairsmith, haggard and wispy from his year of despair, yet with bold blue eyes made radiant by the pure line of malarkey he had sold himself, “if such is the will of the Lord, to send forth the Mundys into the wilderness until the conflagration is ended, who am I to stand opposed?”

  “Now, Mister Fairsmith,” said the General, suppressing a desire to give the old gent a good shake and tell him to come to his senses, “now, that is of course a very catchy way to put it, Mister F.—‘wander in the wilderness.’ But if I may take exception, it looks to me more like an endless road trip that is being proposed for these boys. And to my way of thinking, that is far from a good thing for anyone. Such an injustice would test the morale of even the best of teams. And let’s face the facts, unpleasant as they may be: despite your managerial expertise”—such as it used to be, said the General, sadly, to himself—“this is no longer a first division club. To speak bluntly, they look to me to be pretty good candidates for the cellar as it is. Wayne Heket, John Baal, Frenchy Astarte, Cholly Tuminikar—they are no longer what they were, and have not been for some time now.”

  “Which is why the Lord has chosen them.”

  “How’s that? You had better expla
in the Lord’s reasoning to me, sir. On the basis of the logic I studied at the academy forty years back, I can’t seem to make head nor tail of it.”

  “They are to be restored to their former greatness.”

  “Wayne Heket is? He can’t even bend down to tie his shoelaces as it is. Tell me, how is he going to be made great again?”

  “Through trial and tribulation. Through suffering,” said Mister Fairsmith, ignoring the General’s predictable secularist sarcasm, “they shall find their purpose and their strength.”

  “And then again maybe not. With all due respect to the Lord and yourself, I think that as President of the league I have to prepare myself for that possibility as well. Sir, in my humble opinion, this is just about the worst thing that has happened to this league since the expulsion of Gil Gamesh. I tell you, Ford Frick and Will Harridge couldn’t be happier. They have been eyeing our best players for years—they have been waiting for close to a decade for this league to collapse, so they could just sign up our stars and divide this baseball-loving country between themselves. Nothing could please them more than for the players coming home from the war to have just two major leagues they can play for instead of three. Look, you have got an inside pipeline to the Lord, Mister Fairsmith; maybe you can tell me what it is He has against the Patriot League, if He is the one behind sending the Mundys on the road. Why didn’t the Lord choose Boston, and make the Bees or the Red Sox homeless? Why didn’t he choose Philadelphia, and send the Phillies or the A’s into the wonderful wilderness?”