Achilles in Left Field
The Natural.
By Bernard Malamud.
Harcourt, Brace. 237 pp. $3.00.
The fact that a book touches something deep in us is no guarantee that it will be a good book; but the trouble with serious contemporary fiction in general is its neglect of the ordinary nerves which continue to be the most sensitive ones. Bad art has been allowed to monopolize the thunderbolts which once belonged as a matter of course to writers who knew better what to do with them. When a film about the Marines, no matter how stupid it may be, ends with “The Halls of Monte-zuma” throbbing in the background as John Wayne and company go forward staunchly to defend the Good, everyone feels a chill stealing up his spine. Whether or not this is a valuable chill depends on how the writer uses it; like all forms of power, a knowledge of what to appeal to in the reader can be used or abused. But it would be difficult to guess from high-brow modern fiction or criticism, with their constant emphasis on knowledge and ideas, that intelligent people are capable of responding to fire-engines, anthems, soldiers, or baseball players at all.
Consequently, the appearance of an intelligent novelist who finds it possible to say something about a popular—“mass”—phenomenon through the medium of a popular literary form is a very healthy sign. Bernard Malamud’s The Natural is the first serious novel we have had (after Ring Lardner’s You Know Me Al`) about a baseball player. “Serious” means simply that the book appeals to a wider range of emotions and ideas than those which hang on winning or losing the game. But the fact that The Natural at the same time preserves and revitalizes so much of the “traditional” baseball story is the best thing about it. Mr. Malamud brings back the cocksure rookie who finally beats his way up, convinces the skeptics, transforms the team single-handed from a last-place club into a pennant contender, and breaks a few records while he’s at it. In the absence of the European concern with class, this type of hero is one of our substitutes for the Young Man from the Provinces, and he interests us as Julien Sorel and Rastignac would, even if they were not characters in great novels. Plenty of the sheer melodrama of baseball turns up in The Natural too. The novel abounds in last-minute home runs that save the day, three-and-two pitches, agonizing play-offs, etc. etc.
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Nevertheless, though Mr. Malamud has written an exciting baseball story which throws new light on responses we usually take for granted, he does not succeed in achieving that synthesis of the popular and the serious at which he aims.
The third ball slithered at the batter like a meteor, the flame swallowing itself. He lifted his club to crush it into a universe of sparks but the heavy wood dragged, and though he willed to destroy the sound he heard a gong bong and realized with sadness that the ball he had expected to hit had long since been part of the past.
The incident being described is a contest between a young pitcher on his way up to the major leagues and a great hitter on his way down. Mr. Malamud is fully aware of the possibilities of a battle between the generations. But he does not let us see them directly; instead he turns on his eloquence to let us know that he knows that something primitive and elemental is going on here, a struggle of cosmic grandeur betwen two superhuman warriors. The effect of such prose is rather to interfere with his intention than to reinforce it. At his best moments, he allows the qualities he perceives in baseball to speak for themselves, as in the fine scene at the end of the book where a first-rate pitcher, overcome by the tension of a play-off game, faints while facing the greatest batter in the league, and for once Mr. Malamud’s prose stays tight and clear, giving the force of his story a fair chance to communicate itself fully. Unhappily, however, the passage quoted above is Mr. Malamud’s more characteristic note.
This defect we find cropping up in different ways all through The Natural. Mr. Malamud suggests that baseball is the American way of providing for needs which our culture generally refuses to satisfy. The heroic, nobility and endurance, a battle in which no one loses but somebody wins—such needs have nowhere else to go for nourishment except the local ball park. But the ball park in itself is not enough for the writer. Having offered us in Roy Hobbs a typical baseball-story hero, Mr. Malamud associates him with an era in which heroes were a good deal more at home than they are now. The Natural is loaded with Homeric parallels and suggestions of myth—overloaded in fact. Roy uses a bat that flashes golden in the sun (the wood comes from a tree struck by lightning—the weapon forged by Hephaestus); in a slump he is made to seem like Achilles brooding in his tent; the fainting pitcher mentioned above reminds us of Hector running from Achilles; and there is even a Thersites railing from the bleachers at the Achilles in left field.
All this amounts to a commendable effort to say that baseball is much more important than it seems to be. Using Homer, however, is not only too easy a way to do it, but also a misconception of what intelligence and seriousness of purpose demand from a writer. It is, I think, the same misconception which is responsible for Mr. Malamud’s readiness to slip from a vigorous and sharp prose style into vague poeticality whenever his “meaning” collides with his narrative. The habit of symbolizing everything, from baseball bats to men and women, and of multiplying allusions to the point where they begin to crowd out reality altogether, is one of the more unfortunate legacies bequeathed by Joyce and Eliot to contemporary writers. And because this by now worn-out “advanced” convention has bred an indifference to simple realities and ordinary experience in our fiction, it is necessary that criticism, while encouraging the enterprise represented by The Natural, should carefully point out where and why it has failed.
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Mr. Malamud is truer to the inherent purpose of his book when he finds the elements of myth, not in ancient Greece, but in the real history of baseball: Roy’s team, the New York Knights, have the old Brooklyn Dodgers in them, complete with a Babe Herman kind of outfielder; Roy, like Lou Gehrig in a famous incident, hits a home run after promising a kid in a hospital that he would; several of the fans are based on well-known Ebbets Field characters, among them Hilda Chester with her cow bell. But the best instance of an intelligent reliance on the actual mythos of baseball is in the last scene of the novel, where Mr. Malamud comes very close to the synthesis we are looking for.
Though Roy is supposed to be a typical hero, he does something that neither Achilles nor a character in a John R. Tunis story could conceivably do—he accepts a bribe. The measure of Mr. Malamud’s ability to get at our ordinary responses to baseball as soon as he forgets to be eloquent and erudite lies in the very real pain we experience as Roy throws the play-off game; when a kid Outside the stadium pleads with him to “Say it ain’t so!” he voices perfectly our protest and our misery. Mr. Malamud, of course, did not invent the little boy. The incident supposedly happened to Shoeless Joe Jackson after it was revealed that the Chicago White Sox had thrown the 1919 World Series with the Cincinnati Reds, and it has all the earmarks of true legend. The anguished little kid catches up the despair of a great many people whose whole world looked as if it might topple merely because a group of professional athletes turned out to be dishonest.
Why the despair? Mr. Malamud has the answer when he makes one of his characters explain that she hates to see a hero fail because “there are so few of them.” Indeed there are few of them, even fewer today than there ever were. And the reason for this is not, I think, that we are a lesser age than any other, but that we are a more wary one. The sins of King David never compelled the ancient Hebrews to cut him down to size, nor did Achilles’ childishness prevent the Greeks from seeing him as a hero. According to the thesis of Joseph Wood Krutch (in The Modern Temper) our suspicion of heroes is ascribable to the decline of Christianity and the work of Darwin and Freud. But today I think there is a simpler explanation to hand. The last twenty years have offered terrifying evidence that while modern man is by no means incapable of believing in heroes—indeed he may even be more prone to hero-worship than the Elizabethans ever were—hero-worship can have catastrophic effects. It is not for nothing that the art of debunking has been developed to perfection in America; as if to reassure ourselves that we don’t have to go overboard the moment an idol is set up in the square, We commission some newspaper to publish a photograph of its clay feet.
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Of course, we pay for these precautions by seeing ourselves mostly in relation to what is ordinary about our great men, rarely to what is extraordinary. But the need for heroes to define and direct our aspirations persists, and perhaps it is a good thing that we should satisfy it in a less dangerous area than politics. The essence of a hero is that he must embody convincingly the ideals of his culture, and he must do so not in fiction but in life where something important—it doesn’t really matter what—is felt to be at stake. Baseball players seem to be the only public figures who have succeeded in filling the bill, and for this reason the game is probably the one public institution that has been spared by the debunkers, even by those most cynical of men, the sports reporters. (In The Natural those who are engaged in trying to pull the hero down are all figures of evil.) The players are given the highest public respect, at the price of behaving as no one else is expected to behave—not even a candidate for the vice-presidency. For example, it would never occur to a baseball fan that Pete Reiser was a sucker for ruining his career by playing too hard; that he did so is considered his fate and his glory.
The game, in short, holds up to the children in this country—and to their parents—the most concrete evidence that fierce competition is no justification for breaking the rules; that extraordinary effort for which you don’t necessarily get time-and-a-half is still both desirable and mandatory, and that honesty is not a mere figment of a Sunday school teacher’s imagination. Which is only to say what Mr. Mala-mud has perceived: that baseball, at least as an educational institution, has much in common with epic and tragedy. But this is not all. Baseball gives people the chance to engage their feelings without fear of being cheated, and so they respond, naturally enough, with a gratitude that is almost fanatic. A regime of the most rigorous codes and controls has been sanctioned in the major leagues to make sure that Joe Jackson’s little boy never emerges out of legend into fact again; the results have justified the precautions: and no player for thirty years now has been caught taking a bribe.
Morally, baseball is what we all would love politics to be—a beautiful abstraction whose clarity is unspoiled by the contradictions that bog us down in life. Oversimplified but true within its limits, the game doesn’t so much teach us about life as enforce the beliefs without which living is a hopeless business. So if we are wondering what ever happened to the groundlings who sat through four and a half hours of Shakespeare and then came back for more, perhaps the place to look is not only in the local movie theater but in the bleachers during a Sunday doubleheader.
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Having discovered a hero, then, Mr. Malamud goes on to try to rediscover the literary genre in which the hero once flourished—tragedy. But here again he is none too successful. We have already seen the consequences of Mr. Malamud’s uncritical acceptance of the bad habits of ambitious modern fiction. Here his failure throws light on the limitations and dangers of an impulse to do something serious with worn-out popular conventions.
To write tragedy you need not only a sense of the heroic (shared by the writer and his audience), but an idea of Fate as well. Mr. Malamud makes overtures both to the conception of Fate as the doom drawn upon the hero’s head by his great pride, and to that Shakespearean sense of Fate which Bradley described as a conspiracy of character and circumstance. Twice Roy Hobbs boasts that he will be “the greatest there ever was in the game,” and twice disaster follows—the first time in the shape of a crazy young girl (“certainly a snappy goddess”) who goes around shooting boastful athletes with silver bullets as if to remind them that human beings are really ghosts. But this is merely a warning; Roy survives the silver bullet, though wasting fifteen precious years before he can come up to the major leagues and do what he has to do (i.e., be “the greatest there ever was in the game”). He has ignored the warning, or rather he isn’t intelligent enough to interpret the “snappy goddess” as a warning; like a mere baseball player unacquainted with Greek tragedy, Roy looks upon the shooting as a terrible stroke of bad luck which will and power can overcome (the sense we get of Roy’s tremendous, all-encompassing will is a genuine achievement of Mr. Malamud’s art, and the best means he employs to give whatever depth there is to Roy’s heroism). Final destruction must come to him just at the dizzy pinnacle of success.
In spite of the careful attempts to reinforce the idea of Fate through the cosmic imagery which dominates the book, and through the constant stress on the superstitions which surround baseball, the idea remains too abstract to be effective: the connection between Roy’s pride and his disasters comes out only as a weak suggestion, and would go completely unnoticed without the support of Greek tragedy in the background.
Moreover, convincing though Roy is, he remains far too simple a figure to be interesting as well. Mr. Malamud sees nothing in him but will and appetite—the third Platonic horse, Reason, is missing altogether (in street clothes, Roy “loses the quality of a warrior” and looks “like any big muscled mechanic or bartender on his night off”). We are all sick to death of the intellectual hero, but the answer is not to deprive your hero of even the slightest trace of mind—we have had more than enough of that tendency too. And in the end it is Roy’s simplicity that destroys the tragic dimension of the novel. Though Mr. Malamud would like us to think that his hero’s defect is a classic case of hubris, his failure to make the sense of pride concrete in any way is a tip-off that he no more believes in the tragedy of pride than we do. Apart from will, the only other quality of Roy’s character that comes alive in the book is appetite. Appetite, nothing more, is Roy’s tragic flaw; so long as his will remains in the service of his genius as a ballplayer (i.e., the hero part of him), Roy is safe; but the minute it gets behind his appetite either for food or for sex, the circumstances which destroy him come flying in the door.
Like his lust for home runs, Roy’s yen for food and sex is of epic proportions. Early in the book, he falls in love with a girl named Memo, who is carrying the torch for a dead outfielder. Memo has a touch of Niobe in her constitution, as well as a strong flavor of Penelope, but neither of these delicate ingredients can disguise the tang of the gunmoll. Mr. Malamud uses her to point up the opposition between Roy’s unenlightened appetites and the hero in him, but she looks for all that as if she would be much more at home in a James M. Cain novel. And then there is Iris Lemon, a grandmother before her time (another symbol: The Mother squared, we might say), who suddenly decides that she is in love with Roy because he too has suffered.
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The truth is that Mr. Malamud’s impulse to do something with popular conventions has betrayed him into choosing the wrong ones. The cheap and gaudy treatments of women and sex that are the hallmark of so much contemporary fiction cannot be transmuted simply by making them into symbols; there must be life and grace in the conventions to begin with if the serious writer is to find something valuable to draw out of them. For lack of this, and because of other artistic flaws and misconceptions, The Natural remains a loose mixture of clichés (both of the high- and the low-brow variety) with the authentic.
It would be a great pity if Mr. Malamud were to allow himself to go on chasing phantoms, for we badly need a writer who realizes that the “high-brow” “low-brow” distinction in American culture has done great harm on all sides. Many of us still have to learn that though we may not all be high-brows, there is always more of the low-brow in us than we are willing to admit or able to expel; nor is it desirable that we should expel it even if wè could. Our response to baseball is not different in kind from our response to Dostoevsky or to the stock-in-trade of our lives. Until we learn this, we shall continue to fail to be affected by either in the way that counts.
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