LUKE RHINEHART: MY GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of George Cockcroft, who, as Luke Rhinehart wrote and was the main character in The Dice Man, appeared in the Guardian on November 27th; it had already appeared online but was bumped from the paper paper on the 26th by the death of Diego Maradona. If you missed it in either location, you can link to the online version here. 

It was a fascinating story to tell, and there were bits I had to leave out and some which had to be cut to fit the length I'd been assigned. I had, for example, started to discuss The Dice Man in terms of other works that play with probabilities; Philip K Dick's The Man In The High Castle, for example, about a decade earlier, had characters throwing the I Ching to decide their actions; Dick himself claimed to have plotted the book using the I Ching. Since Cockcroft's fictional protagonist is also the fictional author, I liked the comparison. But though I felt fairly confident that Cockcroft had likely read the novel, I couldn't really find any connection. Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association is about a man whose life is centered on running his own fictional baseball league whose results he finds using three dice,whose numbers read consecutively, offer probabilities through which his simulated games take place. And of course Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead begins with a coin being flipped again and again, with always the same probability of either heads of tales. But intriguing as these ideas were, and the way they might merge together, there was no way to speculate in a couple of lines!

The research was somewhat problematic too. I found several revealing interviews; Cockcroft, once he went public with his identity, could charm his interviewers, especially, as I say, when they visited him on his lakeside house in upstate New York (one of them marveled at being introduced to the peanut butter, olive and mayonnaise sandwich. . But sometimes there were differences in the stories, and it was exceedingly difficult to discover facts, about family, and where he taught, and sometimes when. With a good guess as to his mother's maiden name I did find his ancestor who was Chief Justice of the Vernont State Supreme Court, but I couldn't establish who the governor in his mother's family had been. I know he was at University de los Americas in Mexico City in the mid-Sixties and at Dowling College probably when it opened in 1968 in an old Vanderbilt mansion on Long Island. It might have been their programme in which he was teaching in Mallorca.

The story of his near-death at sea was cut; he actually had apologised to his wife and children for killing them before they were rescued by a freighter blown adrift. He had just bought the yacht with his savings, and was sailing it on vacation before bringing it back to Mallorca. The delay caused him to miss the first meeting with Mike Franklin, whose co-publisher was Shel Talmy, the producer of the Kinks and Who among others, who got cut from the obit, but if you're looking for first editions, the UK one is from Talmy-Franklin. 

His younger brother James was an interesting story himself: the brothers and their wives twice lived together, one of those times being in Mexico City. He was also a writer (of more than 30 books) and professor, and an activist, specializing in left-wing Latin American politics. He predeceased Cockcroft, but there was also an older sister, Patricia, also pre-deceased, who doesn't seem to have figured as deeply in their lives. I also tracked down (online) Tim Linthicum, who wound up an English professor and seems to show up in writers' circles in academia. 

But the most serious bit that was lost was my explanation of the start of The Dice Man, which I felt was necessary because although Rhinehart is a funny narrator, he is also a very self-centered and as Cockcroft said, "the colder harder part of George". The problem was the novel starts with Luke wanting to sleep with his best-friend's wife. So he rolls his die, and the one he rolls dictates that he should rape her, so he does. I wrote that, but it was changed to "have sex with her", which is in a way more accurate because it is a gray area: he goes to their flat, rings the bell, and tells her he is going to rape her. So she invites him in and tells him not to borrow her husband's bathrobe afterwards. The paper was averse to using the word rape because they had received a number of complaints after their obit of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, but again, to tell the story properly would have taken too long, and I then wanted to mention the very Fifties attitude this "if rape is inevitable lie back and enjoy it" scene represents.

I had never been a fan of the book particularly, but I found it an interesting look at an era that had already changed: Luke was like if Henry Miller had written the Jack Lemmon character from The Apartment crossed a bit of  Holden Caufield.I think Cockcroft was looking for something more existential, as his thesis on Kafka might show, but he's very much in Miller's tradition, that what I do, who I am, is important, even if I lie outside the world of societal expectation.

PHILIP ROTH: MY LAST WORD ESSAY

My essay about Philip Roth went out yesterday on the BBC Radio 4 obituaries programme Last Word. You can find it on the IPlayer here (it's the second item on the running order). When I pitched it to the programme the piece was titled "Philip Roth And The Great American Novel", but I was then asked to make it a bit more of an obituary: the extra material required some cutting, but it still ran a bit long. The producer, Neil George, had found the quotes he'd like to include; one of them as it happened, I'd already written into the script. He re-ordered a little of the material, and cut a few bits. But it worked nicely, I thought, as it was broadcast.

What follows is the final original script, with the obituary-additions included. I've marked some of the bits that didn't make the final cut in brackets. There were also some things I either cut from my first draft or didn't include because it was not a literary essay, or the discussion would have run too long, so I've included them as footnotes.

PHILIP ROTH AND THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL

Philip's Roth's literary career coincides nicely with my own adult reading life, and it was probably with adult reading in mind that sometime in 1969 I grabbed a copy of Portnoy's Complaint, his first book whose explicit frankness about sex, especially masturbation, made it a huge best-seller. It was also funny, but as a teen-aged student of literature I was not impressed. As the son of a Jewish mother myself, it may have cut too close to the  bone. (Audio: from Portnoy)

Soon after, I saw the film Goodbye Columbus, and went back to read Roth's 1959 novella which inspired the movie. Again funny, but also a sharp-edged dissection not just of Jewish families, but of the American Dream they pursued. It's about assimilation, snobbery, money and its uses. About the class structure of education and its value. It reflected Roth's own childhood in Newark's Jewish Weequahic section, contrasted with the ritzy suburb of Short Hills. And it's about love and sex. You didn't need a Jewish mother like mine to see how Neil Klugman and Brenda Patimkin's relationship was doomed. (1)  (Audio: Roth on GC).

In 1973 Roth published The Great American Novel. It wasn't. Set it the world of baseball, it wasn't even the Great Baseball Novel; {Bernard Malamud, Mark Harris and especially Robert Coover had beaten him to that}. But in its exuberance and self-conscious over-kill it was parodic comment on the burden of what Norman Mailer called 'the great bitch on one's shoulder', that feeling that any American writer, to be 'great' had to write THE book. Mailer battled the ghosts of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald, but even  conceded Moby Dick was American writing's Great White Whale. Roth seemed to be saying he would not chase that whale. And Joseph Heller had already written Catch 22. (2)

{Roth's Jewish comic act, a harsher Woody Allen, became less captivating}. (3) Critics castigated him as a self-hating Jew, pigeon-holing him in a literary ghetto. But his characters, striving for assimilation, transcended that. I could see easily, in Roth's Jewish fathers, echoes of my own Swedish dad, like Roth's the son of immigrants. Roth left Newark to attend the Waspy (white Anglo-Saxon protestant), Bucknell Colege. He went on to the University of Chicago, then became one of the first products of university writing programmes. (4)

He used the material of his life, and the lives of those he knew, as grist for his mill. His unhappy first marriage to Margaret Martinson; her tragic death later in a car crash. He was a novelist. He wrote. His writing, for better or worse, came first, subsumed his life.In the Seventies he created a fictional alter-ego Nathan Zuckerman and retreated into solipsism, taking his scalpel to writing itself. He never sought public acclaim, like Mailer or Gore Vidal; he didn't deal in journalism. But didn't The Great American Novel need to address a stage bigger than the writer's office or the neighbour's wife's bedroom? (5)

In The Counterlife in 1986, something changed. Roth took apart a story about Zuckerman, and told it from myriad angles. It seemed to free him to unleash Sabbath's Theatre, a bravura celebration of his own so-called faults. It won him his second National Book Award 35 years after Goodbye Columbus.

He was 62. In the space of 15 years he published 11 consistently fine novels. (6) When Fitzgerald said there were no second acts in American life, he could not have imagined this unprecedented run of autumnal success. The themes were familiar, his life was still material. His turbulent marriage to the actress Claire Bloom led to her writing a memoir, which Roth answered with vitriol in I Married A Communist. But he was also looking outward. In Operation Shylock the self-hating Jew turned the story of a Philip Roth impersonator in Israel into a riff on Jews making Europe great again. 

But the more he got away from himself, the better he got. In American Pastoral, his greatest novel, he created Swede Lvov, an answer of sorts to his almost exact contemporary John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom. The Swede's success in pursuing the American Dream gets tragically ambushed by the Sixties. I recognised Swede's daughter Merry as an alternate world version of Brenda Patimkin; I'd known women like her. Then In The Plot Against America, Roth created an alternate America, which many now see a prophetic.

Sex, Death and America are the great themes of American literature; Roth now wove them together. He transcended his own story, but that 'big book' never came. I don't think he intended it to. But to my great surprise and pleasure, his late novels Indignation and The Humbling came full circle back to the America of Goodbye Columbus, as if it were unchanged, except the writer. (7) And his final book, Nemesis, returned to the days when polio threatened, randomly, as death always does, all of us children.

No writer prepared us so well for his passing. (Audio: Roth on retirement) Announcing his retirement, Roth said he'd like one last big idea. But he didn't need a Great American Novel as validation. Nor a Nobel Prize, after Bob Dylan pipped him (8). As he also said, he'd done the best he could with what he had. And that was great in itself.

Footnotes

(1) You could tell by the casting! Richard Benjamin gets Ali MacGraw? Get outta here. The same year she played Jewish here, McGraw also played Italian in Love Story, which subsumed Goodbye Columbus. But this time Waspy Ryan O'Neil gets the ethnic girl. So she dies. Mike Nichols should have directed Goodbye Columbus.
(2)  I left out the comment on other baseball novels because it was off-topic, but you really should read Coover's The Universal Baseball Association, which was published in 1968 and which I am sure influenced Roth's book. I'm also sure Roth's book was a parody, not of the literature itself, as much as the quest. It's better than many people affect to believe. He throws a lot in, like Melville, but the Patriot League isn't quite the Pequod. But I don't think he was actually trying to write TGAN; though most of the critics assumed he was. I also don't believe he came close in those early years. Also, I'm not saying Catch 22 actually is the Great American Novel, though it may be the best of its generation. 

(3) The Roth/Allen comparison is obvious: Roth was a novelist who used Jewish comedy, Allen a comic who wrote stories as well as writing and directing movies. We could argue for pages about which came first, Roth's novel The Breast or the breast section of Allen's movie Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (both in 1972). Certainly Portnoy had opened the door. But there's another link: Richard Benjamin. Actually Mia Farrow. After breaking up with Woody, Mia 'dated' (as they say) Roth--their houses in Connecticut were probably not that far apart. Mia then published a memoir of her own, shades of Claire Bloom. That year, Woody's film Deconstructing Harry, a more vicious and Jewish riff on Bergman's Wild Strawberries  featured a Philip Roth-like novelist who makes barely disguised fiction out of his life. And Benjamin, who starred in the movie of Portnoy's Complaint as well as Goodbye Columbus, got cast as one of Harry's alter-ego characters, Allen's version of Roth's Zuckerman if you will. Meow.

(4) Roth taught at a number of the early creative writing programmes, and his early stories (which as best I can see have never been collected) appeared in literary magazines (and political ones like Commentary) before making the jump to Esquire and the New Yorker.

(5) One could try an essay on the way creative writing programmes tend to write about writers and teachers somewhat disproportionately and how Roth reflects this. 

(6) This was the hardest part of the essay to write. I'm convinced about the turning point, but the next two books Deception and Shylock, are really still working out bits of The Counterlife. It may have just been aging, the acquisition of gravitas. Look at the contrast in his photos. Up to this point I'd agree with those who find Roth's work repetitive, not challenging, very much inward looking. It had its moment. But starting with Sabbath's Theatre I'd argue each of his novels is brilliantly controlled (even the seeming chaos of Sabbath's, and his status as a major writer (as opposed to one known for Portnoy) is cemented by them.

(7) Indignation is a campus novel, set in the early 50s, with all the class differences and sexual double-standards of Goodbye Columbus. Although The Humbling offended some readers when its aging actor protagonist has an affair with the lesbian daughter of two of his friends, the way 'Mike', the woman, feels compelled to hide the relationship from her parents reminded me one last time of Brenda Patimkin. I also didn't address the misogyny of which Roth stands accused. Here the accusation might be 'self-hating man', because he is so straight-forward about the men's weakness and fear of women, and the way it is inculcated in them. This may be a more generous analysis than some would give.

(8) First Arthur Miller, then Roth. Though I'm not sure his world view is Nobelesque, in the sense of the kind of idealism Alfred sought, but then, was Pinter's? I wonder if Joni Mitchell will pip Margaret Atwood?

THE FIVE BEST BASEBALL NOVELS: THE BROWSER INTERVIEW

NOTE: About a year ago, I did an essay for BBC Radio 4's Open Book, about baseball novels. You can link to that post here, but the IPlayer link has disappeared, so I will try to find my original script and reprint it. 

Shortly after doing Open Book, I was interviewed by The Browser, a literary website, and asked to pick my five favourite baseball novels, something the structure of the Open Book essay hadn't allowed. I went to look at that interview, but it too seems to be suffering from the internet's missing link disease. Luckily, I had the website's rough draft of the interview available, so, with a few small amendations, I offer it here...

Michael Carlson on Baseball Novels

Why do you think that baseball forms the basis for so many great American novels?

In a sense it is because baseball symbolises something that was at one point an idealised version of American life. Today I think it is an idealised version of a fantasy American life which is pastoral, honest, competitive and entertaining. But the more important reason is that baseball recreates the quotidian nature of existence. Baseball is an everyday game. They play one hundred and sixty-two games a year but at the end of each one you win or you lose and then you start over, unlike real life. So it gives you a vast canvas on which to paint an equivalent of real life, but one that is more dramatic each day and builds to a more dramatic climax as the season comes to an end.

What do you personally enjoy so much about the game?

I think baseball is the most interesting game because of its variations on a simple theme. It is almost like an enclosed table game in that you have a very simple structure within which myriad possibilities take place over and over again. It is also the only sport I can think of that puts an individual confrontation into the middle of a team game. Even more so than something like cricket, you have this battle between the pitcher and the hitter which is the centre piece of the game. But within that you also have a team sport. If you look at Japanese baseball, for example, they take the team sport part of it much more seriously than the Americans do and they look at it as a team sport in the sense that we might look at American Football or soccer as being a sport where you have to cooperate with all nine players together. I worked for Major League Baseball for four years and during that time I got a lot of exposure to baseball players and I was constantly fascinated by the depth within the game, the vast amount of information I just didn't know about it.

I know you could have chosen from any number of books about baseball so what made you pick, Robert Coover’s, Universal Baseball Association?

This is my favourite of all the baseball books and I actually think it is one of the great novels of its period. Coover is one of the most interesting but practically ignored novelists of that period. He was writing what we now call metafiction in the 60’s alongside people like John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. What I love about the book is the idea that someone who is a rather nondescript and average person uses baseball as a way of elevating himself into being the creator of a universe

For those who haven’t read the book what is going on to allow him to do that?

He has invented a simulation game of baseball --these existed in the days before fantasy sport which is a different thing. Fantasy sport is more or less asset stripping the statistics of the game. But the simulation games existed because baseball is the best sport for them, because it is so well documented statistically. The way they generally work is on probabilities out of a thousand and so in some games you would roll three dice to get a three digit number (a one in a thousand probablilty) and you would then use number charts to get a result which would reflect the baseball statistics. That is what happens in Waugh's game.

Waugh has his own teams and players and when the son of one of the great players of all time comes along as an exciting rookie, Henry – the character-- rolls his dice and rolls his dice again and the charts say something bad happens. And at that point as the creator of the universe he is forced to make a decision! But, I don’t want to give it all away.

Yet as a character Henry is a normal, not very exciting accountant.

Yes. He is someone who goes to bars every night when he is not playing his baseball game. He has a very depressing relationship with a woman who we might describe as a floozy but he lives within his baseball fantasy. The full title of the book is, The Universal Baseball Association Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop and if you look at what J Henry Waugh anagrams into it becomes obvious what Coover is doing by calling him Jahweh which of course is the Hebrew unspeakable name for god. I went back and looked at the original review of the book in the New York Times, by Wilfrid Sheed who was a very good writer himself and he said, “Not to read this because you don't like baseball is like not reading Balzac because you don't like boarding houses. Baseball provides as good a frame for dramatic encounter as any. The bat and ball are excuses. Baseball also involves a real subculture, a tradition, a political history that were, in some sense, preordained, …... That the players and fans might be shadows in the mind of a Crazy Accountant up there is not only believable but curiously attractive.”

 

I think he is absolutely right, and idea of God as a crazy accountant makes as much sense as any other. This book most definitely deserves to be read even if you are not a big fan of baseball. There is a mythic element to baseball because in effect it is a pursuit of dreams, but not just the dreams of the player. You can look at it almost as a science fiction novel but it is prescient in the sense that fantasy baseball has taken over the sports fans universe. He is a wonderful writer in complete control of what he is doing.

Next up you have chosen, Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris which stars Henry Wiggin who has been described as America’s best-known fictional baseball player.

Mark Harris wrote four books where the main narrator is Henry Wiggin. The first one was called The Southpaw because he is a left handed pitcher, and they are baseball's oddballs. It's no coincidence the lefty's signature pitch is called a screwball! Bang the Drum Slowly, which I think is his best, is the second in the series. The first three were written in the 50’s and then he came back in 1979 with a book called It Looked like Forever in which the aging Wiggin can't throw as fast anymore, and losing your fastball is a wonderful metaphor for aging.

What is Wiggin like as a character?

He is a bit like someone from a Ring Lardner story. And the tone is very much like Ring Lardner. Ladner wrote stories which were collected as You Know Me Al, letters written by a player to a friend back home. Wiggin's a sort of cracker barrel philosopher, not quite as smart as he thinks. This comes out best in Bang the Drum Slowly. What happens is that his catcher, whose name is Bruce Pearson, is kind of dim witted and his teammates make fun of him. Wiggin finds out that Pearson is actually dying from Hodgkin’s disease and Pearson doesn’t want him to tell anybody. And Wiggin doesn’t break his trust but what he does do is to start to integrate Pearson into the team.

But, the book is not about what the team does, it is about how we deal with life. Wiggin is always playing a card game with one of the coaches called Tegwar and they use it to baffle rookies and newcomers and they teach Pearson what Tegwar is. Tegwar actually stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. There aren’t any rules, they just make them up as they go along and in a sense that is what life is.

What is really interesting is that a lot of baseball novels have been made into movies and there have been a lot of great baseball movies as well, but not that many novels have translated into fine films. This one was made into a movie quite successfully with Robert De Niro as Pearson and Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggin even though Michael pitches with his right hand! When the book came out it was done on television for the US Steel Hour, (note: which were hour long live dramas, broadcast from 1953-1963) and it had Paul Newman as Wiggin and Albert Salmi as Pearson. I have never been able to find a tape to watch but I think it would be fascinating as well.

For all the reasons you have just given this is widely regarded as one of the best books in baseball fiction.

Yes, it is really entertaining. It’s bittersweet and what I really love are the silly things about it. For example Henry Wiggin’s nickname on the team is “Author” because he has written this book but Pearson is so dim he thinks its “Arthur” and calls him that through most of the book. The book ends with one of the best closing lines in American literature. Wiggin after Pearson’s funeral says, “From here on in I rag nobody.”

Wise words. Your next choice takes us to Mexico with Mark Winegardner’s first novel, The Veracruz Blues.

This book came out in 1997 and isn’t particularly well known. But I like it an a lot and wanted to include it ahead of some of the better known books. It's set in the Mexican League, which was run by two Mexican industrialists, the Pasquel brothers, and in 1946 they had a dream. The brother in charge was Jorge Pasque, and he wanted to go into competition with Major League Baseball. So they started offering big money to steal players from the gringo Majors.

Presumably they wanted to set up the league as a status thing.

Yes it was a status thing and baseball is a big sport in Mexico, not to the level of soccer but it is still big. Winter leagues in Mexico had always attracted Major League players so they decided to upgrade the Mexican League. What’s interesting from Winegardner’s point of view is that the league is integrated like winter baseball was in the Caribbean so you have black players coming down from the States who were Major League calibre players but of course barred by the pre-Jackie Robinson apartheid. And then the white players who jump to the Mexican league get barred from going back to Major League Baseball, for violating the reserve clause in their contracts, and one of them, Danny Gardella filed a law suit against the League which was kind of a pre-cursor to all the antitrust suits that have gone on in the last thirty years or so. He lost his law suit.

What were the reserve clause and antitrust exemptions?

The reserve clause dates to the early years of baseball. In January 1903, the American and National Leagues united to form Major League Baseball. They included a "reserve clause" in their contracts (as had already been National League practice for 25 years), which bound athletes to the teams that first signed them. If they refused to sign a new contract, the old one simply rolled over, and it, of course included a reserve clause too. In effect, players were indentured servants. They could be released, sold or traded, but they couldn't simply sign with new teams when their contracts expired. It was obviously a restraint of trade, but after Major League Baseball saw off the challenge of the Federal League in 1914, Congress exempted them from anti-trust laws, so the reserve clause stood for another 60 years.

Thank you. So the book includes some real life characters?

Yes – Gardella is a character in the book and so is Pasquel. It's based on real events, but narrated by a fictional sports writer named Frank Bullinger, and through him we meet other real people in it including Ernest Hemingway, down in Mexico for the bullfights, or the fishing, I forget which. Hemingway pops up in a lot of fiction these days! Winegardner is really exploring issues of racism and issues of capitalism that make the whole story interesting. There is the whole forced servitude issue that baseball players were faced with in the 1940’s. And you see this effort to get a better deal for themselves using these crazy Mexican tycoons. Mark Winegardner is an interesting writer. Recently he has been doing Godfather sequels which is kind of a hiding to nothing but he does them quite well!

So did the players who went to Mexico and were then barred realise that was a possibility?

They realised it would probably happen but they thought they would be able to get back into the Major League again. And some were older players being offered more money than they were likely to make in the entire rest of their careers. The most famous of them was Sal Maglie who was known as “the barber” for the way he pitched inside and 'shaved' players. He was a pitcher for The Giants. It wouldn't be until the 1970s, when Marvin Miller and the players union got the owners agree to binding arbitration, that they finally did away with the reserve clause, creating modern free agency.

Harry Stein's, Hoopla looks at one of the biggest scandals in baseball history.

This book is really overlooked. It deals with the Black Sox scandal in 1919. But there is a very good nonfiction book called Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof which deals with the same subject. So this book was kind of lost particularly when John Sayles made his film of Eight Men Out which is one of my favourite baseball movies. John Sayles by the way has written a baseball book called, Pride of the Bimbos which is worth reading too, as is Asinof's baseball novel, Men In Spikes.

What happened in 1919?

Some of the players from The Chicago White Sox accepted money from gamblers to throw the World Series, hence the name Black Sox. In the end, despite resevations and second thoughts, and in the face of threats by gangsters, they lost the series to Cincinnati Reds. A couple of years later, after being acquitted in court, eight of the players were banned for life by the new Commissioner of Baseball, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The White Sox at the time were considered the best team in baseball by far.

The fix is also one of the themes of W. P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe, which got made into the movie Field of Dreams. Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best player on that Black Sox team. Harry Stein's novel is told from two points of view. One point of view is another fictional journalist, Luther Pond who provides the backdrop to the corrupt nature of baseball in those days and the corrupt nature of Chicago in those days. The other chapters are narrated by Buck Weaver who was one of the players on the team. Although he didn’t throw any games himself he was barred from baseball because he knew about it and didn’t tell anyone.

Do you think there is still corruption going on in baseball?

Not game-fixing, but there is the whole issue of steroid abuse, for example. Some things never change within the sport. The money is a lot bigger these days, so gamblers couldn't really afford to make it worthwhile, but remember Pete Rose was barred from the game simply because he bet on games. The cheating that still goes on in baseball is sometimes referred to as gamesmanship. Taking steroids wasn't against the rules of the game, but it is against the spirit of the game (and against the law, of course, without a prescription!). I think baseball is the only sport in America where we still consider the spirit of the game to be important. When the British say, “it‘s not cricket” it is that same idea. No-one would ever say anything is against the spirit of American Football. It’s interesting because if you think of the film, Field of Dreams – there is a speech in the movie which is delivered by James Earl Jones about how baseball stands for everything good in American life. But, he is saying it about a bunch of guys that threw the World Series! So there is certain contradiction that Kinsella and the movie makers never came to terms with and this is brought out by Harry Stein who is something of a contrarian writer. He wrote a very interesting book a few years later about how he became a right wing Republican after growing up a Leftist. And that attitude is what gives this book a certain edge. I like the book a lot; he is a fine writer.

Your final choice, The Natural by Bernard Malamud is a baseball classic which was first published in 1952.

This was a tough call because I decided to pick a couple of lesser known books, so when it came to choosing which one of the real baseball classics to go for it was between The Natural and Philip Roth’s Great American Novel. Roth and Malamud share concerns about Jewishness and Americanism as well. I think The Natural wins it simply because Roth's is a very exuberant book and in some ways an essay about literature. If anyone has readThe Art of Fielding, that draws very heavily on Roth.

Malamud's is sort of a perfect mythic take on baseball in which he plays with the myth of the Fisher King and the Holy Grail.His character Roy Hobbs is a Parceval or Lancelot and he succumbs to corruption. The movie tacks on a happy ending which isn’t there in the book which kills what is a pretty good movie although Robert Redford really is too old for the role although he plays it rather well! The book ends exactly the way you expect those myths to end and he is brought down by his own hubris.

It came out in 1952 and a couple of years later a novel called, The Year the Yankees lost the Pennant came out which became the musical, The Damn Yankees. I think that was inspired by Malamud because it retells the Faust story as a baseball story. But, Malamud’s novel is much richer and deeper than that one. What is also interesting is that Malamud was born in Brooklyn just like Roth was but of immigrant parents. To people in that generation baseball was a major means of assimilation in American culture. You find that in all kinds of writing about the immigrant experience. The way to become American was to learn baseball.

Why do you think that the National Football League has become more popular than baseball?

As I said at the beginning I think baseball reflects an American ideal which is now an American fantasy. Football reflects what America really is.

Which is?

Mechanised, militaristic, violent, obsessive, not pastoral and not relaxed. This has been exacerbated by television and media. Dan Delillo wrote a story called Pafko at the Wall about the famous 1951 playoff game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. The story reappeared as the opening segment of his novel Underworld which is a great book. As a novel itself it would be a great analysis of what baseball means to America. But, he also wrote a novel called End Zone which in effect says that the reason that we are in the Vietnam War is because we love American Football! And oddly enough Robert Coover wrote a novel about Richard Nixon called, Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? Which was basically about Nixon’s failures as a football player and with his sex life. He was a scrub in college but never quit. He would drive Pat Nixon to dates with other men when he was first trying to date her!

When did football become popular in the States?

College football was always a big thing, but not a pastime, like baseball. Pro football was a fringe thing, in the industrial north, on autumn Sundays. The first big thing was the 1958 NFL championship game, the first to finish with sudden-death overtime. Then the New York Times and CBS reported on 'The Violent World of Sam Huff', the New York Giants' linebacker. It really began taking over from baseball with the Kennedys who were big touch football players, and of course with the advent of television it was discovered that American Football fits the television screen better than any sport.

Do you think there are better baseball novels out there than the ones about American Football?

Definitely. And the reason for that is that although there are some very good novels about football and boxing and some other sports they tend to be more about the sport itself. They use the sport to show the characters of the people in them. But even non-fiction about baseball has more depth. The best baseball novels tend to be about something bigger than the sport. They are using baseball simply as a metaphor for life itself.

BEST BASEBALL NOVELS: THE BROWSER INTERVIEW

Literally a follow-up to the Radio 4 Open Book essay in April (you can link to the posting about that here) I did on baseball novels, here's an interview on my favourite baseball novels I did with The Browser which has just gone online, you can link to it here. It goes into a bit more depth and, because it wasn't necessarily aimed at an audience unaware, if not resistent, to baseball per se, it allowed me to include a couple of books I like a lot, but which generally don't appear on such lists.

Just to shortcut the process, the five are The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Proprietor by Robert Coover, Bang The Drum Slowly by Mark Harris, The Natural by Bernard Malamud, The Veracruz Blues by Mark Winegardner, and Hoopla by Harry Stein.

MARK HARRIS: THE LOST GUARDIAN OBIT

NOTE: Here's another obituary, written for the Guardian in 2007, but not published, probably because the centrality of baseball to Harris' appeal seemed a little outre, if not inconsequential, to them. Oddly, cricket has never spawned a sub-genre of literature the way baseball has. But as you will see, although the Wiggen novels are impressive, and Bang The Drum Slowly remains one of the best baseball, indeed sports, movies, Harris' credentials went far beyond that. I found the copy when I was filing an obit of another somewhat negelected novelist, Donald Harington, to the paper today, look for it soon.

Although he wrote 18 books, including novels, memoirs, and literary criticism, Mark Harris, who has died aged 84, will be remembered best for four novels narrated by Henry Wiggen, a left-handed baseball pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. No sport has been transformed into more lasting literature, and, with the arguable exception of boxing, into better films, than baseball; Harris is unique in that his most famous novel, Bang The Drum Slowly is considered one of the very best set in the world of baseball, and its film adaptation, for which he wrote the screenplay, routinely features near the top of lists of successful sports movies.

The novel was the second to feature Wiggen, introduced as the author of The Southpaw (1953). Left-handed pitchers are baseball’s eccentrics; it is telling that their signature pitch, a reverse-breaking curve, is called a ‘screwball’. Harris’ (and Wiggen’s) style was influenced by the baseball fiction of Ring Lardner, particularly You Know Me, Al, but on publication he was often compared to Bernard Malamud, whose The Natural had appeared the previous year. But where Malamud was recasting myth, Harris used the quotidian nature of the baseball season to reflect everyday life, and the baseball team to mirror society.He once explained that ‘the society of boy games is a miniature of the larger society of men and business,’ and that some writers understood that and some did not.

Bang The Drum Slowly appeared in 1956 (that's a 1956 shot of Harris from Sports Illustrated above) and was immediately adapted for television with Paul Newman playing Wiggen and Albert Salmi as his dim-witted and much-ridiculed catcher Bruce Pearson, who thinks Wiigen's nickname 'Author' is actually 'Arthur'. In the film, Michael Moriarty, looking every inch a pitcher, played Wiggen, while Robert De Niro, less convincing with his baseball mechanics, was endearing as Pearson, whom Wiggen discovers is suffering from terminal Hodgkins disease. With Wiggen orchestrating Pearson’s acceptance, the catcher blossoms and the team wins. Harris downplays the baseball melodrama in favour of wryly comic insights expressed best when Wiggen initiates Pearson into the card game ‘TEGWAR’, The Exciting Game Without Any Rules’, and eventually allow him to win. After Pearson’s death, Wiggen meditates on what he has learned: ‘from here on in, I rag nobody’.

Concerns with prejudice, peace, and justice permeate Harris books. His characters are often trapped between worlds, an echo of his own life story. Born Mark Harris Finkelstein in the New York suburb of Mount Vernon, he changed his name legally after serving in the army in 1943-44, advised that he would have a better chance at a writing career without such an obviously Jewish surname. He worked in New York on the short-lived left-wing daily PM, and for International News Service,then in Chicago for Black Digest and Ebony. His first novel, Trumpet To The World (1946) is about a struggling black writer who marries a rich white woman.

While working as a magazine writer, he earned bachelors and masters degrees in English at the University of Denver, and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota in 1956. While studying at Denver he wrote City Of Discontent, (1952) an off-beat study of both the poet Vachel Lindsay and his home city of Springfield, Illinois. After Wiggen’s third book, A Ticket For A Seamstitch (1957), Harris turned to more mainstream novels, with perhaps his best book, Something About A Soldier (1957). Its protagonist, Jacob Epp, (ne Epstein), is disillusioned by both the war and by racial injustice. He goes AWOL, and winds up in prison writing out his process of self-discovery. Sixteen years later, confronted with the Vietnam war, Harris wrote Killing Everybody (1973), a more diffuse and much darker work, focussed on parents who’d lost their son in the war.

Harris often used narrators to highlight his seemingly-natural style of humour. Wake Up Stupid (1959) and its sequel, Lying In Bed (1984) take the formof letters written by Lee Youngdall, a novelist/teacher/boxer whose character bears obvious parallels with Harris’ own. The eponymous protagonist of The Goy (1970) keeps a life-long journal detailing the conflicts which follow his marrying a Jewish woman. Harris’ own journal-memoirs, Mark, The Glove Boy or The Last Days of Richard Nixon (1964) and Twenty-One Twice (1966) anticipated the blurring of the line between novel and non-fiction by writers like Norman Mailer and Robert Coover (himself the author of the novel The Universal Baseball Association). He maintained his playfulness in a more formal autobiography, The Best Father Ever Invented (1976).

Harris’ baseball non-fiction was collected in Diamond (1994) and his short-stories in The Self-Made Brain Surgeon (1999). He maintained a parallel career as an English professor, including twenty-two years at Arizona State, where he retired in 2002. He published another eclectic work of criticism, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck in 1980. The previous year, the final Wiggen novel, It Looked Like Forever chronicled the now-39 year old pitcher trying to cope with the loss of his fastball. As a metaphor for the aging process, many writers have done worse. He died a month after breaking his hip and contacting pneumonia, from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He is survived by his wife of more than sixty years, Josephine, two sons and a daughter.

Mark Harris (Finkelstein)
Born 19 November 1922, Mount Vernon, NY
Died 30 May 2007 Santa Barbara, California