Eric The Blue

Mark Harris

Though a baseball fan and a bookworm, I somehow made it into my 30s before I devoured Mark Harris's series of novels about Henry Wiggen, pitching star of the fictional New York Mammoths.  There are four installments, starting with The Southpaw (1953) and moving through Bang the Drum Slowly (1956) and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), before concluding with It Looked Like Forever (1979). 

The books invite comparison with Ring Lardner's You Know Me Al, which F. Scott Fitzgerald lamented on the ground that his friend was squandering his gift on "[a] boy's game, with no more possibilities in it than a boy could master, a game bounded by walls which kept out novelty or danger, change or adventure."  To which John Berryman, rising for the defense in his essay "The Case of Ring Lardner," replies:

Yogi Berra is a boy?  Lardner wrote about big leaguers largely: not boys, men, in danger every second of demotion to the minors, or focuses of national attention.  They were nowhere, and they will be nowhere.  Here they are, in continuous crisis, dramatized in the key plays Lardner describes so well. [Fitzgerald's view quoted above is taken from the same essay.]

I am on Berryman's side, and the Wiggen tetralogy makes it clear that Harris is, too.  At times he appears almost to be making Berryman's specific point, as when, near the end of It Looked Like Forever, he provides, on the occasion of the opening day of the 1971 season, a retrospective on the Mammoth players who took the field with Wiggen for his first opener in 1952.  The outfielding Carucci brothers have had a falling out over a business interest and no longer speak to one another.  Sid Goldman, the slugging first baseman, sought political office but lost every campaign he entered.  The middle infielders receive necessarily brief reviews:  "Ugly Jones, shortstop, dropped from sight.  Gene Park, second base, also dropped from sight."  Excepting the battery of Wiggen and Red Traphagen (who, like Harris, becomes a professor and writer), it seems that a gradual fade to gray is the best that can be hoped for:  "Lucky Judkins, center field, was soon traded away, played awhile else where, left baseball in 1957 and to the best of my knowledge lives in Oklahoma to the present day."  In the middle of the novel, more or less unconnected to anything happening at the time, Wiggen recalls how Coker Roguski, with whom he'd come up through the minor leagues to the Mammoths, had several years after retiring placed a phone call to the Wiggen residence while traveling near Wiggen's upstate New York home.  He accepted an offer to stop by for some reminiscing and a meal, but never arrived, never telephoned back, never sent an explanatory note, and never returned Wiggen's messages.  We're led to conclude that, off the sporting stage, quirkiness had evolved into full-blown mental illness.

English professor Harris very appropriately chose, as an epigraph for this last work on Henry Wiggen, Robert Frost's "Provide, Provide."  Is there, anywhere in American literature, a harder truth more memorably expressed than in the penultimate stanza?

In his professorial office Harris's interests included James Boswell and Saul Bellow.  He edited a one volume distillation of Boswell's Journal and wrote an idiosyncratic biography, Saul Bellow: Drumlin Woodchuck, the title of which alludes to another Frost poem.  One senses that the adventures of Henry Wiggen are inspired in part by the picaresque hero of a Bellow novel, "first to knock, first to enter," and that Harris conceived that the interest of his "baseball books" would be analogous to what some of us endlessly enjoy in the world recorded in Boswell's most famous book, a certain quality expressed by the editor of my college anthology as

the talk of a man, or rather of men, who have experienced broadly, read widely, observed and reflected on their observations, whose ideas are constantly brought to the test of experience, and whose experience is habitually transmuted into ideas.  The book is as large as life and as human as its central character.

I have learned recently of Harris's death and would like to conclude by setting down, as a sort of tribute, a few passages from the Wiggen books that seem to me to justify the comparison with the chief pleasure afforded readers of The Life of Johnson.

• Here, in Bang the Drum Slowly, is Wiggen reflecting while driving with his teammate, Bruce Pearson, who has just been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease, toward Pearson's Georgia home from the Mayo Clinic: "Actually you get over it fairly quick.  You might not think so, but it is true.  You are driving along with a man told he is dying, and yet everything is going on, the gas gage getting lower, the speedometer registering, cows nibbling in the field, birds singing, chickens crossing the road, clouds moving across the sky, and the sun coming up and going down.  It is still 27 miles to this place and 31 miles to that, and you keep getting hungry and you keep getting tired, and then you eat and then you sleep, and everything begins all over again."
• Fifteen years later, in a living room after a funeral in St. Louis, we find him reflecting on an altogether different topic: "[Beansy Binz] was extremely courteous to Patricia, and it occurred to me now and again that she might of took him to bed with her.  Why not?  He was only 30 years younger than her, and the older I grew the more I become aware of things that would of formerly surprised me."
• In between, in A Ticket for a Seamstitch, Harris had Wiggen take up Dr. Johnson's theme of themes, the vanity of human wishes, in this case connected in particular to the problem of matrimony.  The team's young catcher, having invented in his mind a picture of what a young female correspondent (the seamstitch) likely looks like, beats a hasty retreat when she appears in the flesh.  The lesson of the incident is driven home by the intellectual Red Traphagen, who opines, "Finally what Piney will find out is that there is no place on earth like earth, and he will find a woman less than perfect, and if he loves her all he can, and their children, too, that will be the nearest he can expect to the moon."

"Die early and avoid the fate," advised the speaker in Frost's poem.  Fans of Mark Harris may be glad that he lived if anything too long, and died, having written many fine books, not until May 30, 2007, of complications of Alzheimer's Disease.

The second ace problem

Near the end of Lady Luck, Warren Weaver poses what he calls "the problem of the second ace," which he takes from Martin Gardner's Scientific American Book of Mathematical Puzzles and Diversions.  You are playing bridge, and one of the other players, having inspected her cards, announces, "I have an ace."  What is the probability that she has another ace?

This must be the ratio of the probability that she has more than one ace to the probability that she has at least one ace.  Let us just horse it and calculate the probabilities of having any possible number of aces.

[Horse it.]

Probability of having no ace [P(0)] turns out to be about 0.3038; P(1) is about 0.4388; P(2) about 0.2135; P(3) about 0.0412; and P(4) about 0.0026.  We said the answer to the original problem is given by [P(2) + P(3) + P(4)]/[1 - P(0)], which, plugging in our values and pushing the right buttons on a calculator, we learn is just about exactly 0.37-- the answer, says Weaver, supplied by Gardner. 

There is a twist to the problem that is more interesting.  A few hands later, the same player announces that she has the ace of spades.  Now what is the probability that she has another ace?  Gardner says it goes up--from 0.37 to 0.56.  Weaver seems skeptical.  After puzzling it over, I conclude that the statement "I have the ace of spades" is ambiguous in a way that "I have an ace" is not.  The rule for saying "I have an ace" must be: if you have an ace, say so; if you have no ace, say nothing.  Similarly, the rule for saying "I have the ace of spades" could be: if you have the ace of spades, say so; if you don't have the ace of spades, say nothing.  I'll call this "rule 1."  Then again the rule could be, for example: if you have no ace, say nothing; if you have one ace, say "I have the ace of [name the suit in which you hold the ace]"; and, if you have more than one ace, say "I have the ace of [name at random one of the suits in which you hold an ace]."  I'll call this "rule 2."

Now, having set out all that, let's return to the bridge player who says "I have the ace of spades."  I think Gardner is right, and that the probability she has a second ace is indeed 0.56, if the player has applied "rule 1."  If on the other hand she says she has the ace of spades after applying "rule 2," I think the probability she has another ace is 0.37, just as it was after she said "I have an ace."  What do you think? 

Putting probability aside, this little episode, if I am right about how to analyze it, shows how much "disagreement" is really just linguistic confusion.  Suppose a philosophy professor, having in mind the scope of Aristotle's system, declares

Aristotle was a catholic thinker

and one of her students, thinking the issue had to to with membership in the Church of Rome, replies

No, he was not!

It only seems that the professor and her student disagree about Aristotle, and in the same way it may only seem that Weaver and Gardner disagree about the solution to "the problem of the second ace."

Paradise boring

In a recent New Yorker review of a new translation, by Robert and Jean Hollander, of Dante's Paradiso, Joan Acocella undertakes to explain why some people might find the work--well, boring.  It has to do with a certain "lack of shading" that is necessarily an aspect of Heaven.  To make her point she quotes Benedetto Croce, author of The Poetry of Dante (1921), who observed that for us "it is only possible to imagine concrete joy, born of grief and destined to return to grief."  What does one make of the Christian virtues--faith, hope and charity--when there is nothing to put them up against?  It isn't easy making Heaven's monochrome interesting, but Dante, "an utterly convinced medieval Christian," charged ahead despite this obstacle.  He had a realistic expectation of readers who would be interested in receiving information about not only "stinking Hell" but "saints in Paradise."  Acocella wryly observes that she would not risk a vote on this proposition today.

As a sort of gloss on this aspect of her review, I present some lines from Wallace Stevens, who appears to confirm Acocella's hunch:

Is there no change of death in paradise?
Does ripe fruit never fall?  Or do the boughs
Hang always heavy in that perfect sky,
Unchanging, yet so like our perishing earth,
With rivers like our own that seek for seas
They never find, the same receding shores
That never touch with inarticulate pang?

But leave it to Huckleberry Finn to state the problem most memorably:

Then [the Widow Douglas's sister, Miss Watson] told me all about the bad place, and I said I wished I was there.  She got mad, then, but I didn't mean no harm.  All I wanted was to go somewheres; all I wanted was a change, I warn't particular. . . .  Now she had got a start, and she went on and on and told me all about the good place.  She said all a body would have to do there was to go around all day long with a harp and sing, forever and ever.  So I didn't think much of it.

I don't think much of it, either.

Another power outage

Here is another in my series on the fatuous ejaculations of the preening wingnuts over at Powerline.  In a post entitled "The Left's Most Intractable Problem," John Hinderaker writes:

Modern leftism has always been anti-religious at its core.  The three great intellectual movements of the nineteenth century, founded by Marx, Darwin and Freud, were all rebellions against the European religious tradition.  Marx sought to secularize history, Darwin to secularize biology, and Freud to secularize human nature.  All three movements pretended to be scientific, but in reality were pseudo-science.  Hostility to religion was their essence and their motivation.

You have to admire the ease and precision with which he summarizes a rather considerable chunk of intellectual history.  Of course it helps to be glib and full of rot.  I will inform my curious readers if, in a subsequent post, Hinderaker ever divulged the identity of the heathenish mathematician responsible for having secularized the calculus.

Lady Luck

I've been reading Warren Weaver's Lady Luck, an old classic in the field of probability and statistics.  Since it was written for the "nontechnical" reader, and there aren't too many people with an amateur's interest in its subject, you probably haven't heard of the book. I'm here to say that it is informative, interesting, and, potentially, profitable.  Lady Luck would be worth incalcuably more than its price at Amazon if it only persuaded you not to go to the casino or buy lottery tickets.  But, as I have mentioned elsewhere (May 22 and May 28), the solutions to probabilistic problems are often profoundly counter-intuitive, which brings into view the possibility that the clever may invent betting games that friends and acquaintances will be eager to play despite the fact that they cannot win.

For example, you might find it rewarding to recruit people willing to play the following game:

You'll need a table filled with numeric information, such as is found all the time nowadays in Excel spreadsheets.  The numbers should refer to things that can be counted--people, dollars, ballots, etc.  (For reasons that will become obvious, the game would not be "fair" if played, say, with the batting averages of baseball players, or the values of the natural logarithmic function for the first hundred integers greater than 2.)  Naturally the first digit of each number in the data set will be one of the first nine counting numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9.  The game is to bet on which number turns up.  There are nine possibilities, but to be "generous" you offer to play without odds and to pay on 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9--that is, on five of the nine possibilities, or on fractionally more than 55% of the presumably random results.  Your opponent pays only on 1, 2, 3, and 4, and, to be yet more generous, you offer to let him select the data, only with the sensible stipulation that he may not inspect it beforehand.

Suppose he chooses the number of registered voters in Minnesota, by county, on November 1, 2006.  If you click here and count, you should be persuaded that, despite your evident generosity, this game is very much in your favor: indeed if the bets were all one dollar you would be $31 to the good by the time the game had been played for all 87 Minnesota counties.  Perhaps you suspect that I had to look high and low to find data tilted so much in favor of the player winning on 1, 2, 3 and 4.  I assure you I merely selected a table that was near at hand, but there is no reason to take my word for it.  Conduct your own experiments. 

The fact is, as Weaver patiently explains, that the first digits of random numbers are not evenly distributed.  It is hard to get your mind around why this should be so but, with Weaver's assistance, I'll try.  Let us suppose you are filling a hat with all the counting numbers and then at some point leaving off to play the game with all the numbers that are so far "in play."  After the first nine are in the hat, you would win 4 and lose 5.  Notice, however, that you would win the next 40 in a row, so that when the hat has 49 items you would win almost 90% of the bets.  Then you would lose the next 50 and be back down to 4 out of every 9.  This pattern continues through all the powers of 10: the proportion of the numbers n and under starting with 1, 2, 3 or 4 oscillates between 4/9 (near 10, 100, 1000, etc.) and about 8/9 (near 49, 499, 4999, etc.).  Since 0.4444 is very much closer to 0.5 than is 0.8888, you may begin to suspect that, notwithstanding appearances, the game we are considering is indeed very much in favor of the bettor who wins "only" on 1, 2, 3 and 4. 

It turns out that the proportion of numbers with a first significant digit of n or less is not, as almost everyone would suppose, n/9, but is given rather by the base 10 logarithm of n + 1.  So the precise probability of winning a single bet in our game is the log of 5, or 0.69897--essentially 70%.  Since the log of 4 is equal to about 0.6, you could, as a fall back proposal when dealing with a potential foe who seems suspicious of your generosity, offer to pay on 4 in addition to 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.  Your winnings will steadily accrue but with not quite the same alacrity.  Weaver fiendishly suggests that, when your foe is tired of losing, you could propose a switch to the phone book: he wins when the first nonzero digit after the dash is a 1, 2, 3 or 4, while big-hearted you now offers to win "only" on the comparatively rare occurrences of 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

Sopranos

My wife and I have been renting and watching, in systematic fashion, the 86 hour-long episodes of The Sopranos.  We are now just about through the third of the show's seven seasons, so there is still a lot to look forward to. 

It's not entirely an accident that this new pastime of ours commenced at the time of all the buzz surrounding the airing of the last episode earlier this summer.  Neither of us ever paid for HBO, but for a month several years ago something went seriously wrong with my cable and suddenly almost every number on the clicker brought into my apartment the C-Span book channel.  No ESPN, no Bravo, no CNN, no Twins' baseball games on TV, but literally twenty or thirty simultaneous author interviews being conducted by that earnest bald guy.  There was another symptom: without having ordered it or paid for it, I got HBO on one of the few channels not airing book reports, and I immediately began eating my Sunday suppers with the Sopranos.  I saw four or five episodes from what I now recognize as the latter part of the second season (in one Janice, having suffered a fist to the face from her fiance Richie Aprile, caps him in their kitchen, then calls in Tony for assistance; the subsequent clean-up and body disposal is reminiscent of famous scenes from Pulp Fiction and Fargo).  The problem then was fixed, not in response to any complaint of mine, and after a period of withdrawal I was content again with Sunday night baseball on ESPN.  Nevertheless I had had a taste, and when, once married, my wife and I started frequenting video stores, my eye fell longingly on the cases of Sopranos episodes in the TV section.  My appetite was whetted by a couple Sopranos elegies I came across--David Remnick in The New Yorker and Geoffrey O'Brien in The New York Review--and on the third or fourth supplication my wife relented.  Now she's a fan, too.

What's wonderful about The Sopranos?  Let's go to the only place I've touched down, the death of Richie Aprile at the hand of his fiancee.  The shocking violence, the grim practicalities that need addressing in its immediate aftermath--I could perhaps have spoken of a certain affinity with Macbeth as well as with some recent movies.  Though powerful on its own, its context in the series imbues the scene with at least the suggestion of an undercutting action that exhilirates me.  The Sopranos, Tony and Carmela, had in the recent past hosted an engagement party at their McMansion for Richie and Janice.  At the party Richie and Janice had in turn spoken, with evident ardor, of their love and devotion to each other--how fortunate they felt, in middle age, to have found each other again.  The stock phrases, including I think "soul mate," were duly deployed.  They were busy with plans for decorating their dream house, another McMansion, and indeed an argument over the associated expenses precipitated the paroxysm of domestic violence that ends Richie's life.  What other television show dares even to hint at the underside of the blind swooning optimism that characterizes so much of American life, including most especially the part of it reflected in TV land?  Maybe Richie's violent end overstates the case.  Very well.  Consider the marriage between Tony and Carmela Soprano, the host and hostess of that engagement party:  the quotidian unease, dissatisfaction, and restlessness of the partners, every intermittent upswing a prelude to more disenchantment instead of a real improvement in their relations.

But the dim view of marriage is only the start of it.  The Sopranos doesn't just hint at the dark underside of life, it fixes its level gaze upon it, even revels in it.  O'Brien calls attention to the "staggering number of scenes set in hospital rooms, retirement homes, and funeral parlors."  Cancer deaths outnumber garrotings and the title of one episode, "Another Matchstick," refers to the wasting human body.  O'Brien identifies the likely source of this subject matter when he explains that the show's creator, David Chase, has worked in television for his entire adult life, with writing credits for such shows as The Night Stalker, The Rockford Files, and Northern Exposure. He quotes from an interview in which Chase renders his informed judgment on network television:

I loathe and despise almost every second of it....  I considered network TV to be propaganda for the corporate state....  [Northern Exposure] ram[med] home every week the message that "life is nothing but great," "Americans are great," and "heartfelt emotion and sharing conquers everything."

One senses in The Sopranos a rush of release that may well have been as exhilirating for the creator as the result has been for the show's devoted viewers.