The Great American Novel

by Philip Roth

  So the fatal, final step was taken: the incomparable Roland Agni, who had never wanted any more from life than that it should reward him with the dignity and honor commensurate with his talent, returned to don the uniform whose scarlet R—heretofore the initial letter of “Ridiculous” and “Refugee”—was now said to stand for “Ruthless” and “Revenge.”

  And it was ghastlier than ever. Winning every other game through a systematic program of hatred and loathing was worse even than losing them all through ineptness and stupidity. Enraged, his teammates were even more repulsive to Roland than they had been cowed and confused; at least then, in a weak moment, he could feel a little pity. But now they could not even step bareheaded to the top step of the dugout to listen to the National Anthem without hissing among themselves like a pack of venomous snakes—despicable bastards!

  “Fuckin’ Betsy Ross!”

  “Fuckin’ Francis Scott Key!”

  “Fuckin’ stripes!”

  “Fuckin’ stars!”

  And that was just the pregame vitriol. By the time nine innings had elapsed there was nothing around that had not been traduced and vilified by the Ruppert team, beginning of course with the opposing ballplayers, their parents, wives, sweethearts, and children, and proceeding right on down to the local transportation system and the drinking water. It did not let up for a moment, neither from the field nor the bench, and certainly not from the third-base coaching box, where No. 1⁄16, the most vengeful of the vengeful, could turn an opposing pitcher into a raving madman by saying what was more disgusting even than what Hothead used to whisper to the Southern boys about their moms—referring as it did, in O.K.’s case, to their little tiny daughters in kindergarten, girls just about the right size and shape, insinuated O.K., for a fella of his dimensions. Oh, could that vile little dwarf make those pitchers balk! Why, he could score a man all the way around from first on three well-timed remarks about some little bit of a girl just out of diapers.

  And could old Jolly Cholly make them bastards jump! Oh, did they go down when he threw that fast one back of their shoulder blades! “Know who that is out there?” Hothead would whisper to the batter with his face in the dust. “Tuminikar, that once killed a guy. Fella just about your size too.”

  “Tag ’em, Kid, right in the gazoo!” Nickname would shout across to third, and Heket—grinning sheepishly—would feint one way, and then, the old man’s revenge, slam the ball and the glove right up between the base runner’s thighs.

  “Yeeeeowwwwww!” cries the base runner.

  “Out!” cries the ump, even as the fans swarm on to the field screaming for Heket’s scalp, and the most aged of the Mundys swarm up out of the dugout, armed with two bats apiece to protect their decrepit brother.

  Inning after inning, day in and day out, Gil Gamesh sends his pitcher back out to the mound with only three words of instruction: “Knock somebody down.”

  “Who?”

  “Anybody. They live off your suffering, each and every one.”

  “Those dirty bastards!”

  “What right have they to be batting last all the time?”

  “The filthy pricks!”

  “Who are they to mock and ridicule you?”

  “They’re nobody! They’re nothin’!”

  “They’re worse than nothing, boys! They’re not Ruppert Mundys! They’re baseball players who don’t wear scarlet and gray! They’re Keepers, they’re Greenbacks, they’re fucking Tycoons!”

  “The filthy slimy shits!”

  “Ah, that’s the spirit! That’s my Mundanes! Cut his face, Nickname! Crush his balls, Kid! Defame his wife! Threaten his life! Calumniate his kids! I want blood! I want brawls! I want hate! I want a baseball team that nobody is ever going to laugh at again!”

  CHANSON DE ROLAND

  “The end justifies the means. All we’re trying to do out there is win a ballgame.”

  “But it ain’t a ballgame anymore—not by anybody’s standards!”

  “What then?”

  “It’s hatin’, threatenin’, and cursin’—it’s wantin’ to kill the other guy, wantin’ him dead—and that ain’t a game!”

  “Never heard of Ty Cobb, did you? Mugsy McGraw? Leo the Lip?”

  “But they ain’t nothin’ compared to this! And that’s only three. This is a whole team that’s gone crazy! And you goadin’ and goadin’ em, till one day they is goin’ to take the ump and rip him into little pieces! It’s got to stop, Mr. Gamesh! Why do they have to hate the whole country? Even Cobb didn’t do that! And Leo Durocher don’t go around cursin’ Abraham Lincoln and Valley Forge! What does that have to do with baseball?”

  “Hatred makes them brave and strong—it’s as simple as that.”

  “But it ain’t brave or strong—it’s just stupid! They are just a bunch of stupid fellers to begin with, and all you are doin’ is makin’ them stupider!”

  “And what was so smart about being in last?”

  “I ain’t sayin’ it was smart—it was just right. That’s where they belong!”

  “And you, where do you belong? Let me tell you, Roland. Away where they put the rest of you guys who go around trading in phony breakfast foods.”

  “But they weren’t mine. Who told you that?”

  “Who do you think?”

  “But he’s the one who made ’em, the little Jew! Did he tell you that, too? He made ’em, not me!”

  “But you’re the one who dropped them in their breakfast bowls, All-American Boy.”

  “But I had to.”

  “Tell it to the Commissioner, Roland, tell it to General O. Or would you prefer me to?”

  “No! No!”

  “Then keep your clean-cut ideas to yourself, Roland—underneath me? That’s Babylonian, Star, for understand. The Mundys are fourth in the league—and without the benefit of your clean-cut advice.”

  “But they don’t deserve to be fourth!”

  “What about all that winning, Roland?”

  “But they don’t deserve to be winning!”

  “And who does in this world, Roland? Only the gifted and the beautiful and the brave? What about the rest of us, Champ? What about the wretched, for example? What about the weak and the lowly and the desperate and the fearful and the deprived, to name but a few who come to mind? What about losers? What about failures? What about the ordinary fucking outcasts of this world—who happen to comprise ninety per cent of the human race! Don’t they have dreams, Agni? Don’t they have hopes? Just who told you clean-cut bastards you own the world anyway? Who put you clean-cut bastards in charge, that’s what I’d like to know! Oh, let me tell you something, All-American Adonis: you fair-haired sons of bitches have had your day. It’s all over, Agni. We’re not playing according to your clean-cut rules anymore—we’re playing according to our own! The Revolution has begun! Henceforth, the Mundys are the master race!”

  * * *

  “Ellis.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Ellis, why did you tell the skipper about them Wheaties? Nobody’s supposed to know.”

  “Nobody’s supposed to know what, Agni? That Mr. Perfect isn’t Mr. Perfect after all?”

  “He’s goin’ to blackmail me!”

  “Not if you keep your clean-cut mouth shut, Roland.”

  “But this ain’t baseball anymore at all! This is worse than last year even! Him and his hatin’ and you and your charts—you two are destroyin’ the game!”

  “Let’s say we’re changing things.”

  “But it’s all wrong! A Jew at first, a dwarf at third—whoever heard of coaches like that! You can’t even catch a ball, Isaac! All you know is numbers! To you we’re just pieces of arithmetic! Somethin’ you can multiply and divide—and to him, to him we’re wild savages! We’re somethin’ that you open the cage and let ’em out to run wild! It’s gotta stop, Isaac!”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because—this ain’t the time-honored way!”

  “Neither was feeding them
‘Jewish Wheaties’ the time-honored way. But you did it.”

  “But I had to!”

  “In order to be the hero you are, right, Golden Boy?”

  “Oh, why is everybody against me bein’ great—when I am! Why does everybody hate me for somethin’ I can’t help! It ain’t my fault I was born superior!”

  “Well, maybe the same holds true for the inferior, Roland.”

  “But I ain’t tellin’ them not to be inferior. That is their right! Only give me mine! Instead there is this plot to beat me down!”

  “Poor little .370 hitter.”

  “But if I wasn’t always goin’ crazy with this here team, I could hit more! I could be a .400 hitter—instead they’re drivin’ me mad!”

  THE SHOT HEARD ROUND THE LEAGUE

  Then, fans, it was over: Roland Agni was dead and the Mundys were no more.

  Fifty-five thousand Kakoolians were already in their seats when the Ruppert team came out for batting practice on the Fourth of July 1944. All around the P. League now the sight of the Mundys emerging from their dugout set the spectators’ mouths to foaming, but nowhere did the resentment reach such a pitch even before the first pitch as in Kakoola, in part, of course, because the ingenious Kakoola entrepreneur was always on hand to get the day’s frenzy under way—“Renegades! Roughnecks! Rogues! Rapscallions! Rowdies”—but also because Gamesh’s snarling, scowling nine was still the bunch that had crippled Doubloon and blinded Bob Yamm, and sold the Reapers that one-armed lemon named Parusha.

  (Afterwards, when that day’s tragedy was history, the editorialists around the nation were to lament this “climate of hatred” that had gripped the city of Kakoola on “the fateful Fourth” and prepared the way for the bloodshed—though Mayor Efghi was quick to remind the papers that it was not a Kakoolian who had pulled the trigger, but “a deranged, embittered loner … whose barbarous and wanton act is as repugnant to Kakoolians as it is to civilized men the world over.”)

  When the visitors departed the clubhouse that day for the pregame workout, one Mundy stayed behind. Seated before his locker wearing only his support, he was as striking and monumental a sufferer as any sculptor had ever hewn from stone. “What am I to do? Go home again? No, no,” he realized, “you can’t go home again. Who ever heard of anybody great going home—who ever heard of a great man who lived with his mom and his dad!” Oh, he could just see himself, lying there in his bedroom till his hair turned white and his teeth fell out, his high school trophies and that year in the majors all he had to prove that he would have been and should have been the greatest center-fielder of all time. He could just imagine those meals at the family dinner table, himself ninety and his father a hundred and twenty-five. “No man is an island unto himself, Roland.” “But they were not men!” “All ballplayers are men, Roland. The Ruppert Mundys were ballplayers. Therefore the Ruppert Mundys are men.” “But all ballplayers are not men. Some are freaks and bums!” “But freaks and bums are men. The freak and the bum are your brothers, my son.” And would it be any better down in the town? “See that one there, with the cane and the beard. That’s old Roland Agni. Let him be a warning to you, children.” “Why, what’d he do wrong, Mommy?” “He never thought about others, that’s what, only about himself and how wonderful he was…”

  Roland was drawn from the horrible vision of a lifetime of paternal reprimand and unjust obscurity by the strange conversation coming from the clubhouse entryway. What the hell language was that anyway? It wasn’t German, it wasn’t Japanese—he knew what they sounded like from the war movies. What was that language then—and who was talking it anyway?

  When he peered around the row of lockers he saw a stolid little man wearing a big padded blue suit conversing with the manager of the Ruppert Mundys. Gamesh had his eyes riveted to the foreigner’s face, a face broader than it was long and heavily padded, like the suit. The stranger was holding a baseball bat at his side. He handed it to Gamesh, Gamesh saluted, and the man in the suit was gone.

  That was all he heard and saw, but it left the center-fielder reeling.

  Then Gamesh saw him.

  “You again? What are you sulking about now, Goldilocks? Who excused you from batting practice, Big Star?”

  “That—that was Russian!” Agni cried.

  “Get out on the field, Glamor Puss, and fast.”

  “But you were talkin’ Russian to that man!”

  “That man, Agni, happened to be my uncle from Babylonia, and what we were talking was pure, unadulterated Babylonian. Now get your immortal ass out on the ball field.”

  “If it was your uncle, why did you salute him?”

  “Respect, Roland—ever hear of it? All Babylonians salute their uncles. Don’t you know ancient history, don’t you know anything except what a star you are?”

  “But—but why did he give you a bat?”

  “Jesus, what a question! Why shouldn’t he? Don’t Babylonians have kids? Don’t Babylonian kids like autographs, too?”

  “Well, sure, I guess so…”

  “You guess so…” snorted Gamesh, that master of intimidation. “Here,” he said, handing Agni a pen to finish him off, “ink your famous monicker—be the first on your team. And then get out of here. You’ve got hitting to do. You’ve got hating to do. And loathing, God damn it! Oh, we’ll make a Mundy out of you yet, Mr. All-American Boy!”

  Thirty-two was the number chiseled into the wood at the butt end of the bat, but Roland Agni had only to lift it in his right hand to know that it did not weigh a gram over thirty-one ounces. An ounce of bat was missing. Somewhere it was hollow.

  He reeled again, but not so the Soviet terrorist and saboteur could see.

  * * *

  Even from deepest center, Agni followed the skipper’s every movement down in the dugout: he watched him use it as a pointer to move his infield around, watched him hammer with it on the dugout floor to rattle the Kakoola hitters, watched between pitches when he rested his chin on the flat end, as though it were a bat and he were a manager like any other. For six full innings the center-fielder kept one eye on the game and the other on Gamesh—with that great pair of eyes, he could do it—and then at the top of the seventh, a Damur foul zinged back into the Mundy dugout, and when the players went scrambling, Agni landed like a blockbuster in the manager’s lap.

  “Hey! Give that here!” snarled Gamesh. “Hey—!”

  But on the very next pitch, Nickname drew a walk; Terminus, pinch-hitting for the pitcher, moved up to the plate; and Roland, who according to the Isaac Ellis Rotation Plan (and with the reluctant permission of his father) batted first, leaped from the dugout to the on-deck circle, swinging round and round over his head the bat he had wrested from the Mundy manager with all the strength in his body, the bat that was missing an ounce.

  Now rarely during that season did the Mundy manager step onto the field if he could help it; he had his reasons—and they were to prove to be good ones. To remove a pitcher from the game, he sent the Jewish genius out to the mound, and to talk to the batters he had the notorious Ockatur waddle on down from the third-base coaching box. Those two misfits gave a crowd plenty to holler about, without Gamesh (who was of course the Mundy they had turned out to see and to censure—though his popularity had plummeted, the charisma held) running the risk of liquidation.

  But now the threatening notes that he had been receiving daily since opening day must have seemed to him as nothing beside the danger of discovery by the incomparable center-fielder, whose demoralization and incipient derangement (any inning now, Gamesh reported daily to his superiors) had fit precisely into his sinister timetable. So he called for time and came up out of the Mundy dugout as though to talk strategy with Terminus at home plate. What a Fourth of July treat for that crowd! At the sight of the cadaverous Mundy manager, wearing on his back the number he had made infamous a decade earlier, the Reaper fans roared as only they could. There he was at last, the hero who spoke to them of rage, ruination, and rebirth, a white Jack Jo
hnson, a P. League Jesse James—the martyred intransigent, the enviable transgressor, and something too of the resurrected who had died for their sins and returned.

  At home plate, Gamesh took Applejack Terminus aside to tell the fifty-two-year-old to remember to keep his eye on the ball, then headed back to the Mundy dugout by way of the on-deck circle, the crowd raving on all the while. With Gamesh looming over him, Roland remained down on one knee, the fingers of his right hand curled like a python around the handle of the Babylonian’s bat.

  “Okay, Champ,” said the manager, clapping him lightly on the back, “give it here and go back down and get your own.”

  “Communist! Dirty Communist!”

  “Tsk, tsk. What sort of language is that for a clean-cut lad from a big middlewestern state?”

  “True language!” said the center-fielder, and opening his clenched left fist, showed Gamesh that he had the goods on him at last. “It’s all clear now—you traitor!”

  “What’s clear, Roland? To me you sound confused, boy.”

  “That you’re a spy, a secret Soviet spy! Just like Mrs. Trust warned me about!”

  “Now what on earth are you holding in your hand, Rollie?”

  “Film! A tiny little roll of secret film!”

  “Where’d you buy it, from some dirty old pervert downtown? Tsk, tsk, Roland Agni.”

  “I got it out of this here bat! You know that! By unscrewin’ the bottom of the bat! And out it dropped, right in my hand!”

  “Play ball!” the umpire called. “You gave ’em their thrill, Gil—they’ve seen your frightenin’ mug—now let’s play the game!”