Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on a Restless Young Man on a Hot Summer Night)

“In the evening after supper George left the house and wandered in the neighborhood.  During the sultry days some of the storekeepers and their wives sat in chairs on the thick, broken sidewalks in front of the shops, fanning themselves, and George walked past them and the guys hanging out on the candy store corner.  A couple of them he had known his whole life, but nobody recognized each other.  He had no place special to go, but generally, saving it till the last, he left the neighborhood and walked for blocks till he came to a darkly lit little park with benches and trees and an iron railing, giving it a feeling of privacy.  He sat on a bench here, watching the leafy trees and the flowers blooming on the inside of the railing, thinking of a better life for himself.  He thought of the jobs he had had since he had quit school - delivery boy, stock clerk, runner, lately working in a factory - and he was dissatisfied with all of them.  He felt he should someday like to have a job and live in a private house with a porch, on a street with trees.  He wanted to have some dough in his pocket to buy things with, and a girl to go with, so as not to be lonely, especially on Saturday nights.  He wanted people to like and respect him.  He thought about these things often but mostly when he was alone at night.  Around midnight he got up and drifted back to his hot and stony neighborhood.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and short-story writer Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), “A Summer's Reading,” originally published in The New Yorker, September 22, 1956, collected in The Magic Barrel: Stories (1958)

Quote of the Day (Stephen Jay Gould, on the Stability Underlying ‘The Mythology of Baseball’)

“Nothing nourishes the mythology of baseball more than the stability that allows us to grasp the accomplishments of past legends because they played the same games under the same rules. I don’t know how to read the records of early basketball heroes who played in the age of the two-handed dribble and the center jump after each basket (and no slam dunks). But when Roger Maris chased and surpassed the greatest of all records in 1961, Babe Ruth’s 1927 mark of sixty home runs in a season, the whole nation watched during a summer of fascination—and understood. Moreover, although baseball is a team sport, all its actions can be dissected into components of personal contest (batter against pitcher, runner against fielder)—and individual performance therefore obtains an irreducible and measurable meaning. By contrast, achievements in other sports have no separable status, and myths about personal heroes cannot take similar root. Wilt Chamberlain once scored one hundred points in a basketball game—but only because his teammates decided to try the peculiar strategy, a grand joke really, of letting him take all the shots. (Does this theme of personal contest and achievement also help to explain why such a brutal activity as boxing also enjoys a substantial literature?)"—American geologist, biologist, historian of science—and lifelong baseball fan—Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002), “Dreams That Money Can Buy,” The New York Review of Books, Nov. 5, 1992

Unless it was under a different title, I did not see this piece in Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville, the posthumous collection of baseball essays by Stephen Jay Gould. The above paragraph is a good example of the author’s clear, even lively writing style and deep knowledge of his subject.

But its romanticism—a term that Gould did little to disclaim—may have already sounded dated by the time of his death, because of the use of the designated hitter in the American League and, we know now, the widespread prevalence of steroids in the 1990s and early ‘oughts.

Many fans like me have been watching other trends of the last two decades with concern bordering on disgust, including work-stoppage threats, batters’ lack of shame over strikeouts, defensive shifts, and the stress on strikeouts that may be taxing pitchers’ arms.

But in the last two seasons, COVID-19 has introduced new elements into games, such as placing men on second base during extra innings. To use an example that Gould might have appreciated: Under these conditions, how, then, can Gerrit Cole be compared with, say, Christy Mathewson?

More so than ever, I think, because of such changes, player statistics can only be compared with their immediate contemporaries rather than those in the past.

(Speaking of baseball “mythology”: the image accompanying this post shows Robert Redford as Roy Hobbs in the 1984 film The Natural. Though the movie adaptation changed quite a bit from Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel, the Hobbs character drew on elements of Babe Ruth, Bob Feller, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Ted Williams, Sal Maglie, and Eddie Waitkus, a Philadelphia Phillies first baseman shot and wounded in a hotel by a crazed female fan.)

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on His Attitude Toward Heroes)

"I have not given up on heroes. I simply use heroic qualities in small men."—American short-story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), quoted in Philip Davis, Bernard Malamud: A Writer's Life (2007)

Flashback, October 1919: ‘Black Sox’ Scandal Marks Change in Baseball

When the Cincinnati Reds won their best-of-nine in the World Series against the Chicago White Sox, few fans could have imagined that the contest would still be remembered a century later. But then again, few would have thought that America’s Pastime could be tarnished by gamblers and players willing to “throw” the games.

The “Black Sox” scandal, for all intents and purposes, represents a dividing line between early baseball and how it would be played throughout the rest of the 20^th century. Baseball had been touched by gambling before, but never had a substantial part of any team been so complicit nor the stakes so high.

A full narrative of this black mark on the game is beyond the scope of a limited blog post such as this one. Suffice it to say that it richly earned the description by Douglass Wallop, best known for the novel The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant (quickly adapted into the hit Broadway musical Damn Yankees): “a labyrinth, an incredible maze of double-crosses upon double-crosses, of broken promises, of guileless stupidity among the players, of artful, cruel deceit among those who manipulated them—gamblers, baseball executives, and public officials alike."

Not long after the end of the series, White Sox owner Charles Comisky got wind of the scheme. But rather than dismantle a potentially championship squad, he only chose to punish the plot’s ringleader on the team, Chick Gandil, by him a contract without a raise. The others in on the scheme were also offered raises, with three—including the team’s best hitter, “Shoeless Joe” Jackson—given large ones.

Long-festering suspicions, initially fanned by Chicago sportswriter Hugh Fullerton, were given renewed force late in the 1920 season, when another betting scandal on a meaningless August Chicago Cubs-Philadelphia Phillies game prompted an inquiry into events from the year before. After weeks of stories that violated the cardinal rule of grand-jury secrecy, indictments were handed down against the eight players that the press had taken to calling “the Black Sox.”

By that time, the scandal compelled team owners previously reluctant to act against gamblers on their teams lest it harm their squads to establish the office of commissioner, or “czar,” of baseball to reestablish trust in the game. For the next two decades, the job was filled by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a judge highly regarded for his integrity who also happened to be a Chicago Cubs fan.

The acquittal of the Chicago eight might have led other people to reinstate them, however reluctantly. But expulsions of players in the minor-league Pacific Coast League in another betting scandal—individuals who had also escaped conviction—gave Landis the precedent he needed to banish the Black Sox for life.

Landis’ stated religious and political views predisposed him against anyone involved with gambling, but ambiguous circumstances could allow him room to maneuver. After credible reports emerged that future Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker had conspired to throw a game between their teams in 1919, Landis ruled that the pitcher making the accusation was driven by a personal grudge, and Cobb and Speaker were allowed to finish their careers. It is interesting to note, however, that neither player—each blessed with considerable knowledge of the game—ever served in their retirement as either a manager or front-office executive.

Owners might have sometimes chaffed against the complete autonomy they had been forced to give Landis when they hired him, but his integrity allowed the game to benefit from the explosion of interest in the game that followed the emergence of Babe Ruth as an everyday slugger. After his death, none of his successors would be allowed to operate so independently, and the commissioner’s office increasingly became a tool of the owners.

The fallout of the scandal was such that betting on baseball—and, by extension, association with gamblers—became, in effect, the specter haunting the sport. Just how damaging that could be was seen in 1989, when Pete Rose ended up banned from the sport for betting on the team he managed, the Cincinnati Reds.

Even before that, the baseball community shuddered when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended the Detroit Tigers’ Denny McLain for half the season for participating in a bookmaking operation. 

Kuhn’s statement to the contrary, it also appeared that the outcome of the 1967 American League campaign—a pennant race in which the Tigers lost to the Boston Red Sox—may have been affected when a mobster broke the two-time Cy Young Award winner’s toes, sidelining him for the crucial last few weeks of the season.

The cultural impact of the “Black Sox” scandal was also considerable. Since the late 1980s, audiences have focused squarely on the tarnished World Series through two film adaptations: John Sayles’ Eight Men Out (from a nonfiction account by Eliot Asinof) and Kevin Costner’s Field of Dreams (from W. P. Kinsella's novel Shoeless Joe).

But two earlier novels used these controversial games as a symbol of the corruption of American innocence. Bernard Malamud’s first novel, The Natural (1952), ends with Roy Hobbs not only striking out with the pennant on the line, but also with slugger being greeted outside a courthouse by a street urchin with “Say it ain’t so, Roy”—an unmistakable echo of another real-life youngster who begged the White Sox’s Jackson, “Say it ain’t so, Joe.”

The name of Hobbs’ team, the New York Knights, hints at the mythological overtones of Malamud’s modern allegory. Hobbs is consumed by a quest, a dream, as is F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.

Not long after making the acquaintance of his new neighbor, narrator Nick Carraway is startled when this “elegant young roughneck” tells him privately that the eccentric figure to whom he has just been introduced is “the man who fixed the World Series back in 1919.”

Carraway’s mind boggles at the thought: “I remembered, of course, that the World’s Series had been fixed in 1919, but if I had thought of it at all I would have thought of it as a thing that merely happened, the end of some inevitable chain. It never occurred to me that one man could start to play with the faith of fifty million people —with the single-mindedness of a burglar blowing a safe.”

Meyer Wolfsheim, the character who sparks these thoughts, was based on Arnold Rothstein, a New York underworld figure who denied any connection to the World Series fix. While Fitzgerald surely would have banked on the association that astute readers of the time would have made between the real and fictional characters, he was also after larger game.

After all, if a game created on a beautiful field could be tarnished, what chance for the “transitory vision” of the New World glimpsed by Dutch sailors in the novel’s elegiac conclusion?

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Anti-Semitism and the ‘Unpolitical Man’)

"There's no such thing as an unpolitical man, especially a Jew. You can't be one without the other, that's clear enough. You can't sit still and see yourself destroyed."—American short-story writer and novelist Bernard Malamud (1914-1986), The Fixer (1966)

As a teenager, few books left a deeper impression on me than Bernard Malamud’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about a Jewish handyman or “fixer” unjustly arrested on suspicion of murder of a Christian boy in Czarist Russia. An ordinary man with no prior interest in politics, Yakov Bok becomes, by necessity, all too aware of injustice—and, through his refusal to give up, ennobled in his struggle to prove his innocence.

Though set in pre-Communist Russia, The Fixer had obvious applications to the U.S.—not merely in the casual but widespread anti-Semitism in this country throughout the last century, but more virulently, in a deep, tragic miscarriage of justice: the lynching of Jewish factory owner Leo Frank, for a crime he did not commit—the 1913 murder of his 13-year-old employee Mary Phagan in Atlanta. 

Malamud’s novel was not just an examination of prejudice, particularly anti-Semitism, but a call to action against it wherever it appeared. That lesson needs to be re-learned today in this country. Many of us desperately want relief from the shrieking outrage of political partisans on cable news and social media, but I’m afraid it’s a useless cause. 

Whether we like it or not, we are being called to make a stand, as John Adams, at the time of the American Revolution, did when he wrote, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy." These days, we have to make war against hatred. As much as I want to, no matter how hard I try to turn away from the outrage of the day abetted by the White House, it finds me. The times leave us no choice.

Atlanta Constitution editor Ralph McGill, in a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial on the bombing of a temple in his city 60 years ago, could not have been more precise in tracing the origins of this act of terror—and how, like a deep moral stain, it could—and did—spread: 

“You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe.”

Charlottesville…Pittsburgh…Which city will be next? More important, who will be held to account for encouraging this real “American carnage”?

Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on the Awesome Power of ‘The Natural’)

“Wonderboy flashed in the sun. It caught the sphere where it was biggest. A noise like a twenty-one gun salute cracked the sky. There was a straining, ripping sound and a few drops of rain spattered to the ground. The ball screamed toward the pitcher and seemed suddenly to dive down at his feet. He grabbed it to throw to first and realized to his horror that he held only the cover. The rest of it, unraveling cotton thread as it rode, was headed into the outfield.”— Bernard Malamud, The Natural (1952)

This past summer marked the 65^th anniversary of the first novel by Bernard Malamud. When it was turned into a vehicle for Robert Redford in 1984, The Natural was given a happy ending.

I’m normally a stickler for staying as close to original source material as possible, but I didn’t mind in this case. At the time, baseball had been hit with a series of drug scandals. No, not performance-enhancing drugs, but a performance-detracting one: cocaine, which afflicted several members of the Kansas City Royals in the early 1980s and, in 1985, burst out, in even more spectacular fashion, at the Pittsburgh Drug Trials, which ensnared such stars as Keith Hernandez, Tim Raines, and Dale Berra.

So, I was in an acquiescent mood in the 1980s when Malamud’s dark warning of the corruption of innocence was turned into the kind of optimistic, life-affirming film that Frank Capra once made. Since then, it has become not only one of my two favorite baseball films (vying with Bull Durham), but also one of my favorite movies, period.

I was surprised, then, as I began to write this post, to discover that, in nearly an entire decade of blogging, I had written only glancingly about The Natural before. One day, perhaps on the 35^th anniversary of its release, I may well write about the movie at the length it deserves.

But the book itself weaves its own magic, and one of the ways it does so, as seen in the quote I used here, is in evoking the mythological aspects of baseball. 

“Wonderboy”— the bat of Roy Hobbs, desperate to make the most of perhaps his only shot at the big leagues—endows the improbable 35-year-old rookie with the same kind of astonishing power that Excalibur afforded King Arthur.  He has, to his team’s amazement, obeyed the offhand command of his manager Pop to “rip the cover off the ball.” Through one swing of the bat, he has changed the entire climate of the game—even the New York “Knights” miserable season to date—with his Thor-like presence.

I thought of Hobbs’ amazing highs and lows in the ensuing season as I followed the fortunes of Aaron Judge (pictured) this year. It’s appropriate that the New York Yankee rookie occupies right field, once the domain of Babe Ruth—perhaps as close to a mythological figure as baseball has ever produced. 

As of this writing, Judge has not only surpassed the major league rookie record for home runs, but also The Bambino’s mark for the most HRs in franchise history at home for a single season. Judge has even been heavily associated with a phrase evocative of the Thor-like Hobbs: “exit velocity.”

Slumping is another way that Judge resembles Hobbs. Malamud is very shrewd on the utter helplessness that the best baseball minds feel in the wake of a slugger’s doldrums, which can consume a contender as much as a power surge can lift them. Judge had his own epic meltdown after the All-Star Game, when Yankee fans such as myself worried that pitchers had discovered and exploited a fatal flaw at the plate.

More recently, Judge has righted himself, resuming something like his home run pace of the first half. It’s going to be interesting to see if he can keep carrying the team (like Hollywood’s Hobbs) or if he will falter in the end (like Malamud’s). Baseball prodigies, like Greek deities, sometimes prove all too humanly fallible in the end.

(Photo of Aaron Judge in a Yankee game against the Baltimore Orioles, taken Sept. 7, 2017, by Keith Allison from Hanover, Md.)

(Quote of the Day (Bernard Malamud, on Writing as a Jewish American ‘For All Men’)

I’m an American, I’m a Jew, and I write for all men. A novelist has to, or he’s built himself a cage. I write about Jews, when I write about Jews, because they set my imagination going. I know something about their history, the quality of their experience and belief, and of their literature, though not as much as I would like. Like many writers I’m influenced especially by the Bible, both Testaments. I respond in particular to the East European immigrants of my father’s and mother’s generation; many of them were Jews of the Pale as described by the classic Yiddish writers. And of course I’ve been deeply moved by the Jews of the concentration camps, and the refugees wandering from nowhere to nowhere. I’m concerned about Israel….Sometimes I make characters Jewish because I think I will understand them better as people, not because I am out to prove anything. That’s a qualification. Still another is that I know that, as a writer, I’ve been influenced by Hawthorne, James, Mark Twain, Hemingway, more than I have been by Sholem Aleichem and I. L. Peretz, whom I read with pleasure. Of course I admire and have been moved by other writers, Dostoyevsky and Chekhov, for instance, but the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience. I wrote for those who read.”— Bernard Malamud interviewed by Daniel Stern in “Bernard Malamud, The Art of Fiction No. 52,” The Paris Review, Spring 1975

You can truly understand the vicissitudes of literary reputations when you consider the reviews of Adam Begley’s new biography of John Updike, which frequently have noted that the late man of letters could sure use a boost among critics these days. The fact that such a fate could befall the prolific and accomplished Updike—long a ubiquitous presence, and only dead five years—makes you appreciate the rather sorry posthumous fate of Bernard Malamud, with nowhere near his output and dead 28 years now. Several years ago, his daughter Jenna, a psychiatrist, came out with a biography in which she frankly admitted to the hope of bringing him back to where he was in the late Seventies: i.e., spoken as one of the "big three" postwar voices of Jewish America, along with Saul Bellow and Philip Roth.

Janna Malamud Smith’s 2006 bio, My Father is a Book, doesn’t seem to have done the trick, but the time might be right now for her father’s rising critical stock. Anniversaries, for instance, concentrate readers’ and publishers’ attention. Today, as it happens, marks the centennial of the birth of the novelist-short story writer in Brooklyn. Right on time come two volumes from the Library of America—Novels and Stories of the 1940s and 1950s and Novels and Stories of the 1960s—that, in effect, admit him to the American literary pantheon. Now, hopefully, more readers will approach him in the same spirit of astonished delight as Flannery O'Connor, who wrote a friend in 1958: "I have discovered a short-story writer who is better than any of them, including myself. Go to the library and get a book called The Magic Barrel by Bernard Malamud."

Longtime readers of this blog might recall my prior post on the novel that won Malamud the Pulitzer Prize, The Fixer. But really, I don’t think that comes close to exhausting all that might be written about his carefully calibrated, exquisite prose; his compassion for his suffering characters and suffering humanity as a whole; and his quiet sense of irony and humor.

Malamud’s quote above comes cocooned in all kinds of irony. In the interview from which it came, he spoke of how protégé Philip Roth needed to stop writing so obsessively about his troubled first wife. Roth indeed followed that advice that year: his My Life as a Man, a thinly veiled exorcism of that matrimonial disaster.

Yet you can also practically hear the note of exasperation in Malamud’s voice when he says: “the point I’m making is that I was born in America and respond, in American life, to more than Jewish experience.” The best reminder of that is an apprentice novel that, over the years, has become one of his best known: The Natural (1952).

For more than three decades, my admiration for Robert Redford’s Capraesque film adaptation has led me to avoid what I have long known to be Malamud’s far more somber take on baseball. Now, however, I may be in the mood for the original. 

At a basic psychological level, Malamud can probably tell much about why athletes such as Barry Bonds and Alex Rodriguez could misuse their many, pure gifts to spoil America’s pastime. More broadly, its dominant literary conceit—Roy Hobbs’ New York Knights as a counterpart to King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table—can enable us understand the short-lived promise of the Camelot that held sway in the Kennedy White House within a decade of the novel’s publication—as well as why its collapse, amid treachery and tragedy, has proved so traumatic.

Short-story writer-critic Cynthia Ozick gave the correct response to her own question about whether Malamud was "an American Master": "Of course. He augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations....He wrote about the plentitude and unity of the world."