The Great American Novel (4 page)

“Smitty!”

“I see,” said Kuhn, nodding.

“I used to be a member of the Baseball Writers' Association of America myself, and until 1946 voted annually in these Hall of Fame elections. Then, as you may recall, I was slandered and jailed. Cast my vote in the very first election for Mr. Ty Cobb.”

“I see. For Cobb. Good choice.”

By now a crowd of geezers, gaffers, and codgers, including the six and ten puerile Methuselahs of my own party, are all pushing close to get a look at the Commissioner and the crackpot.

“And I am here,” I tell him, “to cast another vote today.” Here I extracted from my vest the small white envelope I had prepared the previous day and handed it to Mr. Bowie Kuhn.

To my astonishment, he not only accepted it, but behind those businessman's spectacles,
his eyes welled up with tears.

Well, fans, so did mine. So do they now, remembering.

“Thank you, Mr. Smith,” he said.

“Why, you're welcome, Commissioner.”

I could have burst right through my million wrinkles, I was so happy, and Kuhn, he couldn't tear himself away. “Where are you living these days?” he asked.

I smiled. “State Home for the Aged, the Infirm, the Despondent, the Neglected, the Decrepit, the Incontinent, the Senile, and the Just About Scared to Death. Life creeps in its petty pace, Commissioner.”

“Don't mind him, Mr. Kuhn,” someone volunteered from the crowd, “he was born that way.”

“Bats in the belfry, Commissioner. Too deep to operate.”

Haw-haw all around.

“Well,” said Kuhn, looking down at my envelope, “have a good day, Mr. Smith.”

“You too, Mr. Commissioner.”

And that was it. That was how easy it was to trick me into thinking that at long last the lying had come to an end! Shameful! At eighty-seven years of age, to be so gullible, so innocent! I might as well have been back mewling and puking, to think the world was going to right its ways because I got smiled at by the man in charge! And they call me embittered! Why, take me seriously for twenty seconds at a stretch, and I roll over like a puppy, my balls and bellyhairs all yours.

“My, my,” said the slit to the plainclothesgoon, “just give in a little to someone's d-e-l-u-s-i-o-n-s o-f g-r-a-n-d-e-u-r, and he's a changed person, isn't he?”

Well, sad to say, the slit spoke the truth. You don't often hear the truth introduced by “my, my” but there it is. Wonders never cease.

Also, in my own behalf, I think it is fair to say that after twenty years of struggling I had come to be something of a victim of exhaustion. When they are ranged against you,
every living soul,
then you might as well be down in the coal mines hacking at the walls with your teeth and your toenails, for all the impression that you make. There is nothing so wearing in all of human life as burning with a truth that everyone else denies. You don't know suffering, fans, until you know that.

Still and all, Kuhn took me in.

What follows is the list of players who,
according to
the BBWAA, received votes that day for the Hall of Fame.

In that to be elected requires mention on 75 per cent of the ballots, or 271 of the 361 cast (including my own, that is; according to the BBWAA it required only 270 out of 360), the electors issued this statement at about two in the afternoon: “Despite the heaviest vote in the history of the Hall of Fame balloting, the Baseball Writers' Association of America was unable to elect a candidate for enshrinement next summer.”

Oh, that set 'em to quacking! You should have heard those fools! How could they keep out Berra when back in '55 they'd let in Gabby Hartnett who was never half the catcher Yogi was! Wasn't half? Why he was twice't! Was! Wasn't! Same for Early Wynn: whoever heard of a three hundred game winner failing to be mentioned by one hundred and twenty electors (excluding me) when right over there is a plaque to Dazzy Vance who in all his career won less than
two
hundred. Next thing you know they will be keeping out Koufax and Spahn when they are eligible! Well, it took Rogers Hornsby six years to make it, didn't it—with a lifetime of .358! And Bill Terry and Harry Heilmann
eleven years apiece!
Meanwhile they are also arguing over Marion and Reese, which was better than the other and whether both weren't a darn sight better than Hall of Famer Rabbit Maranville. Oh what controversy! Tempers raging, statistics flying, and with it all
not a word from anyone about a single player who played for the Patriot League in their fifty years as a major league. Not a mention in the BBWAA's phony tabulations of my vote for Luke Gofannon.

Billy Bruton! Jackie Jensen! Wally Moon! Outfielders who did not even bat .300 lifetime, who would have had to
pay
their way into Mundy Park in the days of the great Gofannon, and there they are with five votes between them for the Hall of Fame! I was near to insanity.

What was it put me over the top? Why did I hurl my cane and collapse in a heap on the floor? Why had they to hammer on my heart to get it going again? Why have I been bedridden all these days and ordered off alliteration for the remainder of my life? Why wasn't I calm and philosophical as befits a man of my experience with human treachery and deceit? Why did I curse and thunder when I know that writing the Great American Novel requires every last ounce of my strength and my cunning? Tell me something (I am addressing only men of principle) :
What would you have done?

Here's what happened: Commissioner Kuhn appeared, and when reporters, photographers, and cameramen (plus geezers) gathered round to hear his words of wisdom, know what he said? No, not what this sentimental, decomposing, worn-out wishful thinker was pleading with his eyes for Kuhn to say—no, not that the BBWAA was a cheat and a fraud and disgrace for having failed to announce the vote submitted for Luke Gofannon of the extinguished Patriot League. Oh no—wrongs aren't righted that way, fans, except in dreams and daytime serials. “The fact that nobody was elected,” said the Commissioner, “points up the integrity of the institution.” And if you don't believe me because I'm considered cracked, it's on TV film for all to see. Just look at your newspaper for January 22, 1971—before they destroy that too.
The integrity of the institution.
Next they will be talking about the magnanimity of the Mafia and the blessing of the Bomb. They will use alliteration for anything these days, but most of all for
lies.

*   *   *

After fighting a sail for forty-five minutes off the Florida coast and finally bringing it in close enough for the fifteen-year-old Cuban kid who was our mate to grab the bill with his gloved hands, pull it in over the rail, and send it off to sailfish heaven with the business end of a sawed-off Hillerich and Bradsby signed “Luke Gofannon,” my old friend (and enemy) Ernest Hemingway said to me—the year is 1936, the month is March—“Frederico”—that was the hard-boiled way Hem had of showing his affection, calling me by a name that wasn't my own—“Frederico, you know the son of a bitch who is going to write the Great American Novel?”

“No, Hem. Who?”

“You.”

They were running the white pennant up now, number five for Papa in four hours. This was the first morning the boats had been out for a week, and from the look of things everybody was having a good day, though nobody was having as good a day as Papa. When he was having a good day they didn't make them any more generous or sweet-tempered, but when he was having a bad day, well, he could be the biggest prick in all of literature. “You're the biggest prick in all of literature,” I remember telling him one morning when we were looking down into the fire pit of Halemaumau, Hawaii's smoldering volcano. “I ought to give you to the goddess for that one,” said Hem, pointing into the cauldron. “That wouldn't make you any less of a prick, Hem,” I said. “Lay off my prick, Frederico.” “I call 'em like I see 'em, Papa.” “Just lay off my prick,” he said.

But that day in March of '36, our cruiser flying five white pennants, one for each sail Hem had landed, and Hem watching with pleasure the mullet dragging on his line, waiting for number six, it seemed you could have said anything in the world you wanted to Papa about his prick, and he would have got a kick out of it. That's what it's like when a great writer is having a good day.

It had squalled for a week in Florida. The managers were bawling to the Chamber of Commerce that next year they would train in the Southwest and the players were growing fat on beer and lean on poker and the wives were complaining because they would go North without a sunburn and at night it got so cold that year that I slept in my famous hound's-tooth raglan-sleeve overcoat, the one they called “a Smitty” in the twenties, after a fella name a', I believe. My slit was a waitress at a Clearwater hotel with a degree in Literatoor from Vassar. All the waitresses that year had degrees in Literatoor from Vassar. They'd come South to learn about Real Life. “I've never slept in bed before with a fifty-two-year-old sportswriter in a hound's-tooth raglan-sleeve overcoat,” my Vassar slit informed me. I said, “That is because you have never been in Florida before during spring training in a year when the temperature dropped.” “Oh,” she said, and wrote it in her diary, I suppose.

Now she was measuring Hem's sail. “It's a big one,” she called over to us. “Seven foot eight inches.”

“Throw it back,” said Hem and the Vassar slit laughed and so did the Cuban kid who was our mate that year.

“For a waitress with a degree in Literatoor,” Hem said, “she has a sense of humor. She will be all right.”

Then he took up the subject of the Great American Novel again, joking that it would probably be me of all the sons of bitches in the world who could spell cat who was going to write it. “Isn't that what you sportswriters think, Frederico? That some day you're going to get off into a little cabin somewhere and write the G.A.N.? Could do it now, couldn't you, Frederico, if only you had the Time.”

During that week of squall in March of that year Hem would talk till dawn about which son of a bitch who could spell cat was going to write the G.A.N. By the end of the week he had narrowed it down to a barber in the basement of the Palmer House in Chicago who knew how to shave with the grain.

“No hot towels. No lotion. Just shaves with the grain and washes it off with witch hazel.”

“Any man can do that, can write the Great American Novel,” I said.

“Yes,” said Hem, filling my glass, “he is the one.”

“How is he on the light trim?” I asked.

“Not bad for Chicago,” Hem said, giving the barber his due.

“Yes,” I said, “it is a rough town for a light trim where there are a lot of Polacks.”

“In the National League,” said Hem, “so is Pittsburgh.”

“Yes,” I said, “but you cannot beat the dining room in the Schenley Hotel for good eats.”

“There is Jimmy Shevlin's in Cincinnati,” Hem said.

“What about Ruby Foo's chop suey joint in Boston?”

“Give me Lew Tendler's place in Philadelphia,” said Hem.

“The best omelette is the Western,” I said.

“The best dressing is the Russian,” Hem said.

“Guys who drink Manhattans give me the creeps.”

“Liverwurst on a seeded roll with mustard is my favorite sandwich.”

“I don't trust a dame who wears those gold sandals.”

“Give me a girl who goes in swimming without a bathing cap if a slit has to hold my money.”

“I'd rather kill an hour in a newsreel theater than a whorehouse.”

Yes, over a case of cognac we could manage to touch upon just about every subject that men talk about when they're alone, from homburgs to hookers to Henry Armstrong … But always that year the conversation came around to the G.A.N. Hem had it on his brain. One night he would tell me that the hero should be an aviator; the next night an industrialist; then a surgeon; then a cowboy. One time it would be a book about booze, the next broads, the next Mother Nature. “And to think,” he said, on the last night of that seven-day squall, “some dago barber sucking on Turns in the basement of the Palmer House is going to write it.” I thought he was kidding me again about the barber until he threw his glass into the window that looked onto the bay.

Now he was telling me that I was going to write it. It seemed to me a good compliment to ease out from under.

“Gladly, Hem,” I said, thinking to needle him a little in the process, “but I understand that they wrote it already.”

“Who is this they, Frederico?”

“The slit says Herman Melville wrote it. And some other guys, besides. It's been done, Papa. Otherwise I'd oblige.”

“Hey, Vassar,” he called, “get over here.”

Of course the slit was very impressed with herself to be out sailfishing with Hem. She liked to hear him calling her “Vassar.” She liked me calling her “Slit.” It was a change from what they called her at home which was “Muffin.” The first time she'd burst into tears but I told her they both meant the same thing anyway, only mine was the more accurate description. The truth is I never knew a girl worth her salt who did not like being called a slit in the end. It's only whores and housewives you have to call “m'lady.”