Mark Harris, who died in 2007, is best known, as this NYT obit indicates, as the author of a series of novels about a fictional major-league baseball pitcher, Henry Wiggen. There are four Wiggen books in all: The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), and It Looked Like Forever (1979). Bang the Drum Slowly is the most widely known, for it was made into a 1973 movie starring Michael Moriarty, of Law & Order fame, as Wiggen, and Robert DeNiro as his teammate Bruce Pearson, who is dying of Hodgkin's disease. Harris wrote the screenplay. I didn't know until looking things up just now that there is a local angle to a couple of these careers. Moriarty acted on the stage of the Guthrie Theatre here in Minneapolis for four seasons at the beginning of his career, and Harris took a PhD in American Studies at the University of Minnesota in 1956. It thus appears likely, from the dates, that at least portions of The Southpaw and Bang the Drum Slowly were written in Minneapolis.
Of the Wiggen books, my favorite is It Looked Like Forever, wherein Wiggen is unceremoniously released from the New York Mammoths after a 19-year, Hall-of-Fame-worthy career. At 39, he has bladder problems and blood in his seminal fluid--conditions, one might speculate, more apt to afflict the 57-year-old author than the 39-year-old professional athlete. The first three books, all published in the 1950s, describe World Series championships and the receipt of prestigious awards, but now, in a novel published in 1979, the mood is elegiac. The opening scene is set at the funeral of Dutch Schnell, manager of the Mammoths. Old ballplayers are in attendance and Wiggen notes their physical ailments. The book takes as its epigraph the poem ("Provide, Provide"), by Robert Frost, containing the lines "No memory of having starred/Atones for later disregard/Or keeps the end from being hard." A current prospect receives the following notice ("Patricia" is Patricia Moors, from the Mammoth's front office, with whom Wiggen once had a dalliance):
Beansy Binz was there. You would consider him a very new member of the family. He was a very fine left hand pitcher who signed for $400,000. He was going to be very good some day, but for the time being his money was more sensational than any pitching he done, and he was modest about it. I myself signed with the Mammoths in 1949 for $4,000 and a reasonably new automobile. "So you must be 100 times the pitcher I ever was," said I to Beansy.
"No," he replied, "that is what you call inflation." He took the whole idea of "family" very serious. He 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.
Wiggen himself takes the notion that the Mammoths are a family seriously enough to assume that he will be named the team's new manager. He isn't. To his surprise, it appears he isn't even considered for the position. So, while clear-eyed about Binsy and Patricia, Wiggen is not immune to the twinges and disappointments connected with middle-age's slow assault on youthful illusions, but he soldiers on spiritedly.
Harris was, besides a novelist, a literature professor with a special interest in James Boswell, whose sprawling and entertaining personal journal he condensed and published, in 1981, as The Heart of Boswell: Six Journals in One Volume. Boswell's place in English literature is secured by his Life of Samuel Johnson, about which Samuel Monk, the U of M's Johnson-Boswell man when Harris was a student, wrote:
The chief glory of the Life is the conversation, always dominated by Johnson but not at all a monologue. It is 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 like to imagine Harris wondering to himself whether he could write a book with similar virtues, only with a baseball player in the role of Johnson.
Comments