"Oh to be a center fielder, a center fielder--and nothing more!"
--love song of Alexander Portnoy in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint
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Philip Roth died last week. Philip Martin wrote a version of this column when Roth announced his retirement in 2013.
Philip Roth is dead. He will write no more forever, he will not subject himself to the private panics of his trade, he will not issue forth another novel to be dissected and chewed over and ignored by an America increasingly indifferent to the sort of work people like him do.
Yet Roth lives. In my head.
That's what a writer can do. Insinuate himself--implanting a voice not quite our own into interior conversation. Reading is a form of telepathy, and there is value in running the long thoughts of others through our brains, if only to blow out the carbon and test the scales. "Is that true?" You ask yourself. "Could it be?"
Maybe there is something pleasing in the balance, in the swing of the sentences, in the shine and spark of the well-wrought line. Some writers dazzle and confound, others take up residence in the mind and live there forever, or at least for as long as the mind is around, so you begin to take them for granted. You absorb them.
I regret there will be no new Philip Roth to consume, just as I am sorry there will be no new Scott Fitzgerald or Donald Harington or John Updike or Eudora Welty or Saul Bellow. I am sorry Bob Lancaster has retired. But we have what they have left us, and enough new books are piled on tabletops and desks to last me.
Roth showed me around New Jersey and introduced me to his gang, the boys who ate no ham. I have followed him like I've followed box scores since I was 14 or so, before genuinely understanding the implications of Alexander Portnoy's confessions. It wasn't Portnoy's Complaint or Goodbye, Columbus I first picked up, but 1973's The Great American Novel.
The Great American Novel is probably one of the least remembered and most easily dismissed of Roth's books, but it has a crazy charm about it, and it's understandable why it is some people's favorite. I first picked it up because it was ostensibly about baseball--it is alongside Dan Jenkins' Semi-Tough and Dead Solid Perfect in the first rank of American comic novels about sports.
Much of it is written in the form of a seasonal memoir--not unlike Jim Brosnan's The Long Season or Jim Bouton's Ball Four--by a sportswriter (Word "Smitty" Smith) assigned to follow the Ruppert Mundys, who turn out to be the worst team in baseball history, through their miserable 1943 season. Decimated by World War II which has deprived them of most of their able-bodied players, the Mundys are comprised of over-the-hill veterans and castoffs, with a 14-year-old second baseman and a one-armed outfielder (based on Pete Gray, an amputee who played left field for the St. Louis Browns in 1945). Making matters worse, the Mundys were required to play all 154 of their games on the road after their home stadium was requisitioned for the war effort.
Given all this, it's understandable that they struggled to a 20-134 record. (Though they did have an 11-game win streak, spurred by the consumption of genetically modified Wheaties synthesized by a teenage fan. So Roth, in the 1970s, imagined the use of PEDs in the 1940s.)
Then in 1944, after their sainted manager dies, the Babylonian American Gil Gamesh, who years before had his promising pitching career curtailed when he purposefully fired a fastball into an umpire's bow tie, takes over the reins of the team. Gamesh is actually a Russian agent who has sworn vengeance on the league that banned him for life after convincing his players that they're being oppressed by the capitalist system (and building them into a winning team by having them abandon ideals of fair play).
A congressional committee holds hearings which result in the imprisonment of 10 of the Mundys, the dissolution of the Patriot League and (shades of Barry Bonds) the redaction of all Patriot League records from history. Even the cities and towns that hosted the league's teams--Terra Incognito, Wyo., among them--are forced to change their names. Port Ruppert, the erstwhile home of the Mundys, becomes Roth's hometown Newark.
And so The Great American Novel becomes a comment--a jeremiad--on American political paranoia and our national habit of forgetting inconvenient history. While not exactly graceful (the book begins with the line "Call me Smitty," an allusion that signals the relative slightness of the literary parody) it is raucous and a little smutty. Later I would discover that most of Roth's work inclines more to Henry than Bill James; I would come to admire the technicality of his sentences and the way he drew so precisely from life. But I first loved Roth the comedian. He is my Lenny Bruce, and I mourn him.
I mourn writers. I mourn that imaginary long-ago time when people cared deeply about books, when adults discussed Kurt Vonnegut and John Cheever at cocktail parties. But nostalgia is an hallucinogenic drug.
That was a time when we were not so afraid to offer ourselves to earnest enthusiasms, when snark and smug superiority--removing oneself from the arena of ideas--were not the conventions to which people defaulted.
It was probably never fashionable to admit to caring very much about things. The unregenerate pose of rock 'n' roll predates Marlon Brando-style pre-emptive rebellion. People have always clucked and judged and shamed and attempted to leverage the superstitious fear of others. Maybe literature really is dead. Maybe people really are mean and stupid as the politicians pretend. Maybe we have always been this way. Maybe there was never a golden age.
But I remember one. And what you remember you keep alive.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
www.blooddirtangels.com
Editorial on 05/27/2018