Living With Books
HICKS, GRANVILLE
LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Fine New Novel by Mark Harris and Collected Stories of J. F. Powers Having greatly enjoyed Mark Harris's new novel, Bang the Drum Slowly (Knopf, $3.50), I...
...LIVING WITH BOOKS By Granville Hicks A Fine New Novel by Mark Harris and Collected Stories of J. F. Powers Having greatly enjoyed Mark Harris's new novel, Bang the Drum Slowly (Knopf, $3.50), I have been catching up with his earlier work...
...In the latter development, he is aided by three persons: his father, a baseball player himself but never merely a baseball player...
...Fritz, who serves as narrator, is surely one of the best realized cats in all literature, but he also provides an admirable point of view for the observation of ecclesiastical intrigue...
...But I have got hold of City of Discontent, his biography of Vachel Lindsay, and The Southpaw, to which the new novel is in a sense a sequel...
...I still haven't read his first novel, Trumpet to the World, published in 1946 when he was 24 years old...
...The character at the center is Bruce Pearson, Henry's roommate, who has been told that he is suffering from an incurable disease...
...The drama is on the mild side: Father Fabre plots with the concentration of a field marshal for the table he wants: Father Malt's cat becomes a symbol of victory and defeat...
...If you haven't read The Southpaw, try to read it before you read Bang the Drum Slowly...
...Bang the Drum Slowly tells how Henry learned another lesson, but it is not his story in quite the way The Southpaw was...
...Indeed, these stories have, as good stories must, the air of absolute inevitability: one feels that this is the way things happened, and that is all there is to it...
...Paradoxical as it may sound, there is a close relationship between Harris's Vachel Lindsay and his Henry Wiggen...
...Harris's ballplayer, however, is a good deal more of a person than Lardner's, and Harris allows him a considerable range...
...Good as The Southpaw is, it gets some of its effects by the amassing of details, whereas Bang the Drum Slowly goes straight to the mark without a wasted word...
...Of Lindsay's weaknesses, both as man and as poet, he is completely aware, but he finds greatness in his refusal to conform and in his loyalty to his own ideals and dreams...
...Two other stories, the title story and "A Losing Game," also portray the struggles, so limited in scope and yet so intense, that go on within a rectory...
...The Prince of Darkness, J. F. Powers is more often than not concerned with Catholic clergymen...
...Bruce is...
...and just enough of them, to make you feel at home...
...and Father Fabre, who simply wants a table to put his typewriter on, are so appealingly human that the reader is immediately put at his ease...
...Having disarmed you, Powers moves quietly into his story, simply taking for granted the customs peculiar to the institution he happens to be writing about, and as he goes he lets you see deeper and deeper into his characters...
...Dawn" makes of a trivial occurrence an issue that tries a priest's soul...
...The book is an attempt to reclaim a certain area of what Van Wyck Brooks would call "our usable past," and the area Harris works on has been much neglected in recent years...
...In the end, Harris leads us, just as Morris and Gold do, to a breath-taking awareness of the mysterious potentialities of the human spirit...
...Some of the people in the book, to be sure, have gone a long way toward being dehumanized, and the process of dehumanization a process, needless to say, that does not go on only in big league baseball is the real subject of the book...
...Zeal" tells of an ardent priest and a rather worldly bishop, and I am afraid that one's sympathies are all with the bishop...
...I am sure that he loves the game, and yet he realizes how intricately it is involved with elements in American life specialization, ballyhoo, ruthless competition, the worship of money, to name but a few that he despises...
...I wouldn't know, of course, but I would be willing to bet that Harris is as near right as a human being can be in his account of what baseball players do and say and think and feel...
...an elderly neighbor, an astronomer named Aaron Webster, who proudly carries individualism to the extremes of eccentricity...
...we simply find ourselves looking into the dark corners where the foibles and weaknesses are hidden away--this man's vanity, that man's ambition...
...Henry can be funny intentionally as well as unintentionally...
...Despite these bulwarks, Henry yields a good deal of ground in the course of the season, but in the end he triumphantly asserts himself...
...or appears to be, the dumb ballplayer of the stereotypes...
...What he tries to suggest is Henry Wiggen's idea of a style suitable for publication, and at times this gives a humorously stilted effect, a little like that which Ring Lardner exploited in You Know Me, Al...
...There are only two stories in which the Church as an institution does not play a part, and these, though written with great skill, seem a little less original and distinctive than the others...
...Successful as The Southpaw is as a novel about baseball, it isn't merely that...
...Only on second thought do we appreciate the control and precision that make Powers one of our finest short-story writers...
...In "The Devil Was the Joker.'" an intense and pureminded young man, an erstwhile candidate for the priesthood, is brought into contact with a racket that flourishes on the margin of the Church...
...In his new book of short stories...
...The Presence of Grace (Doubleday, $2.951, as in its predecessor...
...he can be perceptive, as in his description of Bruce's family in Georgia...
...He does this, so far as I can see, by using just the right details...
...but there are signs that he is growing up, and it is quite clear that he has not forgotten the lesson he learned in the summer of 1952...
...When Bruce's secret is shared only by a few, it is a divisive force, nearly ruining the team, but, as the knowledge spreads, it brings the team together again...
...I suspect, grew out of the author's ambivalent attitude toward big league baseball...
...Henry becomes a hero, not in copybook terms and not in sports column terms but in strictly human terms, and through him Harris demonstrates the heroic potentialities of our species...
...Whatever the Church may mean to him, he is able to look at it as an institution administered by fallible human beings...
...he knows how to conjure away any stiffness or feeling of unfamiliarity the reader may have...
...I know now, beyond any question, that Harris is one of the important young writers...
...In most ways, he is the same old Henry, cocky, articulate but only semi-literate, taking great pleasure in his dual success as pitcher and author...
...One understands more clearly what Harris is doing after reading City of Discontent...
...Using a considerable amount of fictionalized narrative, never as embroidery but always as interpretation, he shows Lindsay as the natural-born dissenter, the man who clings to his special vision at all costs...
...and he can be very touching...
...As I know from experience, you can enjoy the second book without having read the first, but having read Bang the Drum Slowly took the edge off my enjoyment of The Southpaw...
...and the astronomer's niece, Holly, whom Henry eventually marries...
...He is married, and his wife is expecting a baby...
...There is plenty of evil, but, he feels, there is also good, and so he takes this conceited kid, whose only asset seems to be his left arm, and shows that he has intelligence and decency and in Bang the Drum Slowly loyalty and compassion...
...As Henry takes pleasure in pointing out, it was published as a quarter book costing 35 cents, but the paperback edition, issued by Permabooks, is hard to locate...
...In the new book, Henry is three years older than he was in The Southpaw, a veteran now, somewhat disconcerted to discover how many of the men on the team are younger than he...
...Moreover, if I had read the first book, I would have taken a special satisfaction in the realization that the second represented a great advance in craftsmanship...
...He doesn't know how to do anything but play ball, and he doesn't do that really well because he refuses to use his brains...
...I do not means that Powers goes in for dramatic revelations...
...As one who can successfully ignore all baseball except, perhaps, the deciding game of a tight World Series I was astonished to discover that I was intensely interested in what happened to the more or less mythical Mammoths in 1952...
...But it is drama, and one is moved by it...
...For one thing, he is like them in his mastery of the vernacular style, though of course he handles it in his own way...
...Father Malt, feeding his cat and fumbling with his hearing aid...
...It can't be, because Harris never forgets that ballplayers are human beings...
...I am happy to find here the two stories about a rectory cat Death of a Favorite" and "Defection of a Favorite" that first appeared in the New Yorker...
...I hope the publishers will get it back on the stands...
...From here on in, I rag nobody...
...Powers not only uses his material without self-consciousness...
...While he is becoming a first rate pitcher, Henry Wiggen is also becoming an individual...
...Like any other institution, it has its conflicts and crises, and the men who serve it are not free from professional deformation...
...And Bruce, no longer the butt of everybody's jokes, has his most successful season...
...But the reversal is never mechanical: it always grows out of a deeper perception of character...
...Here he not only tells the unhappy story of Vachel Lindsay's life but presents the poet as the embodiment of important values...
...He is the only Catholic writer I know who can write about the Church with complete unself consciousness, simply making the best of the material it offers him...
...It offers wonderful opportunities for the observation of human nature, and Powers is just the man to make the most of them...
...But it isn't the rightness that excites me...
...Harris reminds me in certain ways of two other novelists about whom I have written in The New Leader-Wright Morris and Herbert Gold...
...I have the strongest possible sense that this is the real thing...
...I care about what happens to the Mammoths because Harris compels me against my will, or at any rate against my expectation to identify myself with them...
...it's the feeling of being inside...
...Often the drama does not develop quite as one has expected: In "The Presence of Grace...
...In The Southpaw, Henry Wiggen tells how he got into big league baseball at the age of 20 and describes his first season with the New York Mammoths...
...Henry sums up Bruce's story and the lesson he learns from it in the last paragraph: "He was not a bad fellow, no worse than most and probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance, when they laid off long enough...
...the old pastor unexpectedly wins our admiration, as in "The Devil Was the Joker" the salesman of religious specialties wins our sympathy...
...Henry...
...What happens to the team as the news of Bruce's fate leaks from player to player, and what happens to Bruce as a result of the changed attitude toward him, is Harris's theme...
Vol. 39 • March 1956 • No. 13
