The Great American Novel (6 page)

“But that's only one man's opinion. Fella name a' Smith; first name a' Word.”

*   *   *

Nursing Ernest all day, I had been forced to compose the story in bits and half-bits, which accounts for why it is so weak on alliteration. As it says over the door to the Famous Writers' School in Connecticut: A Sullen Drunk Packing A Gat Is Not The Best Company For An Artist Finicky About His Style.

I read the story aloud to the telegraph operator, so I could balance up the sentences as I went along, writing the last paragraph right there on my feet in the Western Union office.

Then I turned to see Hem pointing the pistol at my belt.

“You stole that from me.”

“Stole what, Hem?”

“First you steal it and then what's worse you fuck it up.”

“Fuck what up, Hem?”

“My prose style. You bastards have stolen my prose style. Every shithead sportswriter in America has stolen my style and then gone and fucked it up so bad that I can't even use it anymore without becoming sick to my stomach.”

“Put down the pistol, Papa. I've been writing that way all my life and you know it.”

“I suppose I stole it from you then, Frederico.”

“That isn't what I said.”

“Hear that, bright boy?” Hem said to the baby-faced telegraph operator, who had his hands over his head. “That isn't what he said. Tell the bright boy who I steal my ideas from, Frederico.”

“Nobody, Hem.”

“Don't I steal them from a syndicated sportswriter in a hound's-tooth overcoat? Fella name a' Frederico?”

“No, Hem.”

“Maybe I steal them from the slit, Frederico. Maybe I steal them from a Vassar slit with a degree in High Literatoor,”

“They're your own, Hem. Your ideas are your own.”

“How about my characters. Tell bright boy here who I steal them from. Go ahead. Tell him.”

“He doesn't steal them from anybody,” I said to the kid. “They're his own.”

“Hear that, bright boy?” Hem asked. “My characters are my own.”

“Yes, sir,” said the telegraph operator.

“Now tell bright boy,” Hem said to me, “who is going to write the Great American Novel, Frederico? You? Or Papa?”

“Papa,” I said.

“Yes, sir,” said the telegraph operator, his hands still up in the air.

“So you think that's right?” Hem asked him.

“Sure,” the telegraph operator said.

“You're a pretty bright boy, aren't you?”

“If you say so, sir.”

“You know what I say, bright boy? If I have a message, I send it Western Union.”

The telegraph operator forced a smile. “Uh-huh,” he said.

“Sit down, bright boy.”

“Yes, sir.” And did as he was told.

Hem walked up and held the pistol to the telegrapher's jawbone. “To Messrs. Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, and James, in care of the Department of Literatoor, Vassar College, New York. Dear Illustrious Dead : The Great American Novelist,
c'est moi.
Signed, Papa.”

He waited for the last letter to be tapped out, then he turned and went out the door. Through the window I watched him pass under the arc-light and cross the street. Then because I am something of a prick too, I asked how much the telegram would cost, paid, and went on back to my slitless hotel room, never to see Ernest again.

Every once in a while I would get a Christmas card from Hem, sometimes from Africa, sometimes from Switzerland or Idaho, written in his cups obviously, saying more or less the same thing each time : use my style one more time, Frederico, and I'll kill you. But of course in the end the guy Hem killed for using his style was himself.

M
Y
P
RECURSORS
, M
Y
K
INSMEN
1.
The Scarlet Letter,
by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Well, I tend to agree with Hem—having now done my homework—that the men Miss Hester Prynne got herself mixed up with do not reflect admirably upon the bearded sex. But then make me out a list of a hundred who do? I count it a miracle that the lady didn't latch onto a lushhead as well. And yet, standard stuff as it may seem to a slum kid like myself to hear tell of a sweet young thing throwing away her life on a lout, there is something suspicious about a beautiful, brave, voluptuous, and level-headed slit such as Hester marrying a misshapen dryasdust prof easily three times her age (who undoubtedly had her posing in all sorts of postures in her petticoats in order for him to get it up, if up it would even go) and from him moving on to a “passionate” affair with that puny parson. Ten to one when they saddled up in the woods, it was Hester mounted the minister and not t'other way about. I admire the girl for her guts but have my doubts about any slit who savors sex with sadists and sissies. I only regret that this big black-eyed dish did not reside in the Boston area in the era of the Red Sox and Bees. I might have showed her something.

Students of Literatoor (as Hem was wont to mispronounce it) will have recognized the debt that I owe to Mr. Hawthorne of Massachusetts. Yes, this prologue partly derives from reading that lengthy intro to his novel wherein he tells who he is and how he comes to be writing a great book. Before embarking on my own I thought it wouldn't hurt to study up on the boys Hem took to be the competition—for if they were his then they are mine now. Actually I did not get overly excited about the author's adventures as boss of a deadbeat Salem Custom-House as he ramblingly relates them in that intro, but surely I was struck by the fact that like my own, his novel is based upon real life, the story of Hester Prynne being drawn from records that he discovered in a junk heap in a corner of the Custom-House attic. In that the Prynne-Dimmesdale scandal had broken two hundred years earlier, Hawthorne admits he had to “dress up the tale”—nice pun that, Nat—imagining the setting, the motives and such. “What I contend for,” Hawthorne says, “is the authenticity of the outline.” Well, what
I
contend for is the authenticity of the whole thing!

Fans, nary a line is spoken in the upcoming epic, that either I heard it myself—was
there,
in dugout, bleachers, clubhouse, barroom, diner, pressbox, bus, and limousine—or had it confided to me by reliable informants, as often as not the parties in pain themselves. Then there are busybodies, blabbermouths, gossips, stoolies, and such to assist in rounding out reality. With all due respect to Hawthorne's “imaginative faculty,” as he calls it, I think he could have done with a better pair of ears on him. Only
listen,
Nathaniel, and Americans will write the Great American Novel for you. You cannot imagine all I have heard standing in suspenders in a hotel bathroom, with the water running in the tub so nobody in the next room could tune in with a glass to the wall, and my guest pouring out to Smitty the dark, clammy secrets of the hard-on and the heart. Beats the Custom-House grabbag any day. Oh, I grant you that a fellow in a fix did not speak in Hester's Boston as he did in Shoeless Joe's Chicago—where the heinous hurler Eddie Cicotte said to me of the World Series game he threw, “I did it for my wife and kiddies”—but I wonder if times have changed as much as Nathaniel Hawthorne would lead you to believe.

A more spectacular similarity between Hawthorne's book and my own than the fact that each has a windy autobiographical intro that “seizes the public by the button” is the importance in both of
a scarlet letter
identifying the wearer as an outcast from America. Hawthorne recounts how he found “this rag of scarlet cloth,” frayed and moth-eaten, amidst the rubbish heaped up in the Custom-House attic. The mysterious meaning of the scarlet letter is then revealed to him in the old documents he uncovers. “On the breast of her gown,” writes Hawthorne of Hester, with admirable alliteration too, “in fine red cloth, surrounded with an elaborate embroidery and fantastic flourishes of gold thread, appeared the letter A.” A for “Adulteress,” at the outset; by the end of her life, says the author, many came to think it stood for “Able; so strong was Hester Prynne, with a woman's strength.”

Well, so too did a red cloth letter, this one of felt, appear on the breast of the off-white woolen warm-up jackets worn by the Mundys of the Patriot League—only their fateful letter was R. At the outset R for Ruppert, the team's home; in the end, as many would have it, for “Rootless,” for “Ridiculous,” for “Refugee.” Fact is I could not but think of the Mundys, and how they wandered the league after their expulsion from Port Ruppert, when I heard my precursor's description of himself at the conclusion to his intro. “I am,” wrote Hawthorne, “a citizen of somewhere else.” My precursor, and my kinsman too.

2.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
by Mark Twain

Listening to Huckleberry Finn ramble on is like listening to nine-tenths of the baseball players who ever lived talk about what they do in the off season down home. The ballplayers are two and three times Huck's age, and contrary to popular belief, most are not sired in the South like Huck, but hail from Pennsylvania—yet none of this means they care any the less for setting up housekeeping in the thick woods first chance they get, cooking their catch for breakfast and dinner, otherwise just being carried with the current in a comfy canoe, their sole female companion Mother N. Boys would be big leaguers, as everybody knows, but so would big leaguers be boys. Why, when a manager walks out to the mound to calm a pitcher in trouble, what do you imagine he tells him? “Give him the old dipsy-do”—? Not if he has any brains he doesn't. If the pitcher could get the old dipsy to do he'd be doing it without being told. Know what the manager says? “How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al?” And if you think I am making that one up so as to link my tale to Twain's (as I have already shown it to be linked to Hawthorne's) if you think I am—as Huck Finn would have it—telling “stretchers” to falsify my literary credentials and my family tree, then I strongly advise you to read
Pitching in a Pinch
by Christy Mathewson, wherein the great Matty, as truthful in life as he was tricky on the hill, quotes the famous Giant manager and Hall of Famer John Joseph McGraw—as have I. How many quail did you say you shot when you were hunting last fall, Al? Yes, that is the strategy they talk on the mound—same kind they talk on a raft!

And since, admittedly, we are seeking out similitudes of all sorts twixt Twain's microcosm and mine, what about Huck Finn's sidekick, the runaway slave Nigger Jim? Who do you think he grew up to be anyway? Let me tell you if you haven't guessed: none other than the first Negro leaguer (according to today's paper) to be welcomed to the Hall of Fame, albeit in the bleacher section of the venerable, villainous institution: Leroy Robert (Satchel) Paige (see papers 2/11/71). In that Satchel Paige was born in Mobile, Alabama, approximately four years before Sam Clemens died in Hartford, Connecticut, it is doubtful that the eminent humorist ever saw him pitch, except maybe with some barnstorming pickaninny team; what's more to the point, he did not live to hear Satch speechify. If he had it would surely have delighted him (as it does Smitty in Sam's behalf) to discover that the indestructible Negro pitcher who is said to have won two thousand of the two thousand and five hundred games he pitched in twenty-two years in the Negro leagues, is Huck's Jim transmogrified.

Just listen to this, fans, for sheer prophecy: “Jim had a hairball as big as your fist, which had been took out of the fourth stomach of an ox, and he used to do magic with it. He said there was a spirit inside of it, and it knowed everything.” And this : “Strange niggers would stand with their mouths open, and look him all over, same as if he was a wonder … and he was more looked up to than any nigger in that country.” With his hairball Jim could perform magic and tell fortunes—with his fastball, Satch once struck out Rogers Hornsby
five times
in a single exhibition game! But the proof of the pudding is the talking. Listen now to Satch, offering to humankind his six precepts on how to stay young and strong. Students of Literatoor, professors, and small boys who recall Jim's comical lingo will not be fooled just because Satch has dispensed with the thick dialect he used for speaking in Mr. Twain's book. Back then he was a slave and had to talk that way. It was expected of him. Satchel Paige's recipe for eternal youth:

1. Avoid fried meats which angry up the blood.

2. If your stomach disputes you, lie down and pacify it with cool thoughts.

3. Keep the juices flowing by jangling around gently as you move.

4. Go very light on the vices, such as carrying on in society. The social ramble ain't restful.

5. Avoid running at all times.

6. Don't look back. Something might be gaining on you.

Now if this is not the hairball oracle who floated down the Mississippi with Huckleberry Finn, then someone is doing a pretty good imitation.

Colored players started coming into the majors just when Smitty and the P. League were being escorted out the door, so I do not know firsthand how the white boys have managed living alongside them. I suppose there were those like pricky little Tom Sawyer, America's first fraternity boy, who took childish delight in tormenting the colored however they could, and others, like Huck, more or less good-natured kids, who were confused as hell suddenly to be sharing dugout, locker room, and hotel bath with the dusky likes of Nigger Jim. Do you remember, students of L., when Huck tricks Jim into believing the crackup of their raft had occurred only in Jim's dreams? And how heartbroken old Jim was when he discovered otherwise? “It was fifteen minutes,” says Huck, “before I could work myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger; but I done it, and I warn't ever sorry for it afterward, neither. I didn't do him no more mean tricks, and I wouldn't done that one if I'd 'a' knowed it would make him feel that way.” It figures that more than a few ballplayers have by this time come around to Huck's way of thinking, as he expresses it so sweetly here. But I expect, given what I know of that lot, that the leagues have still got their share of Tom Sawyers, who even under the guise of doing Jim good had himself the time of his sadistic little small-town life heaping every sort of abuse and punishment he could think of upon that shackled black yearning to be free of Miss Watson. Of course as of 2/11/71 the shackles are off poor Jim and he is not only free but in the Hall of Shame. That just leaves Gofannon in shackles, don't it? The Patriot League, America, those are your niggers now,
for when you are blackballed from baseball, then verily, you are the untouchables in these United States.