The Teachings of Don B. Page 7

  THE INAUGURATION

  Now that another splendid and charming and wise President has been elected, it is, in our judgment, not a moment too soon to begin worrying about the inauguration. The main point to be held in mind is that we want the pomp to be bang-up, and not marred by flaws. Many of these, in human form, can be minimized by the proper authorities ahead of time, if properly identified, before they begin to flaw everything. Some examples follow.

  Some people have a vicious and unnatural and disproportionate dedication to peace, which they don’t hesitate to display in the public streets, very often at times when everybody else is trying to be happy, such as at an inauguration. They should under no circumstances be allowed to ride, or even feed, the elephants.

  There are individuals who programmatically go against the current, even if that current is the main stream. They are likely to be wearing peculiar-looking clothes. They may even go so far as to offer you a dangerous drug. Be alert. We don’t want any of these individuals at the inauguration.

  Honest doubt is not, at present, an indictable offense. But it does damage and compromise the mood of joyous rejoicing and new creativity we wish to prevail, on this occasion. Honest doubt is difficult to stifle and shades rather quickly into dishonest doubt, which, if the doubter is doubting with others, is known as conspiracy.

  Some people are never satisfied, no matter what. They wear bitter black mourning and utter loud ululations, at conspicuous places along the line of march. Perhaps some large plants can be placed around them, so that other people can’t see them.

  Villains are a particular problem. It always makes an inauguration look tacky and déclassé if too many well-known villains are hanging about—this is especially true of the reviewing stand, the ball, and the private dinners. But before the villains are rounded up and put away, it is necessary to determine to which party they belong. They may be our villains.

  Worshipful admiration is permitted, and even encouraged. Too many of the same kind of worshipful admirers together in the same place is bad planning.

  The large contributor is a potential embarrassment. Careful thought is mandatory here. On the one hand he is very touchy about his placement and handling, and on the other, we don’t want people to think that . . . He should be positioned not too close to the throne, and not too far away.

  Yes, a display of armed might contributes to pomp—is pomp, in a sense—but it can be easily, easily misinterpreted. We recommend that not more than two divisions be employed, and that these not be our best divisions, but rather sort of sloppy and amateurish-looking—stouthearted men, but maybe not entirely persuaded. Not more than three dozen generals, please.

  THE ART OF BASEBALL

  Art is, at an important level, play, as theoreticians from Huizinga to Roger Caillois have pointed out. Art is a game in which it is possible to win, to lose, or to fight one’s way to an exhausting, desperate tie. So it is not surprising that a number of this century’s most famous artists were also, at odd moments in their careers, baseball players. As a kind of antidote to their labors in the studio or at the writing desk, these giant figures typically played for a season or two and then returned, refreshed, to their artistic pursuits. Curiously, they have left little trace in orthodox histories of the game. It is as if baseball’s chroniclers were frightened by these apparitions from another world, whose contributions to the sport were, very often, of a kind to provoke the denial mechanism familiar to readers of psychology texts.

  Recent research has, however, turned up some notable instances of the magical combination of art and baseball, a number of which are adduced here.

  T. S. ELIOT, SHORTSTOP

  T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is without doubt the most thoroughly studied, carefully annotated, and nitpickingedly commented-upon poem in the language. What has been missed (in a series of misreadings so horrendous as to be without parallel in the annals of quality lit. scholarship in this country) is that the poem is essentially about the St. Louis Browns of 1922, a team for which Eliot, back from Britain in that year, briefly starred at short.

  Eliot, it will be recalled, had been living in the United Kingdom since 1914 (he became a citizen in 1927). After the publication of Poems (1920), he felt that some creative impetus, some vital impulse, had leaked from his work. His solution was to return to the St. Louis of his youth and enlist for a hitch with the Browns, a fateful choice for poetry, as we shall see. The Browns played him at shortstop, and he astonished fans and teammates alike by presenting himself on the field wearing not only the standard St. Louis regalia but also a black bowler hat, to which he had added, in proper English fashion, a rolled umbrella of the same hue. These eccentricities were tolerated because young Tom never failed to render a heads-up performance; his sector of the diamond was, during his tenure, safe as houses.

  But if the poet was brilliant, the Browns of 1922 were not, a circumstance that decisively influenced the major Eliot work to come. The internal evidence is overwhelming, as open-minded consideration of the following citations will demonstrate.

  Item. The poem’s very first line, “April is the cruellest month.” was originally “August is the cruellest month.” The allusion is to the dreadful set of games the Browns dropped to the Yanks, in St. Louis, in August 1922, a setback that effectively removed them from serious league competition. Ezra Pound, whose magisterial editing of the poem wrought it into the great cultural artifact that it is, successfully argued that everybody, not only in St. Louis but in the larger world as well, knew that August was a terrible month and that its use made the work far too accessible.

  Item: The line (in Part I) “Here is the man with three staves” is beyond cavil a foreshadowing of the movement toward the batter’s box of the awesome Babe Ruth—one can almost see the Bambino twirling a trio of bats as he stumbles plateward. Ruth had been suspended for the first month of the season (by Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first Commissioner of Baseball) for illegal barnstorming, but saw action against St. Louis, and the anxiety he inspired is everywhere present in the poem.

  Item: The line, in Part III, “I Tiresias, though blind . . . can see” is transparently umpire-related.

  Item: Also in Part III, the lines

  While I was fishing in the dull canal

  On a winter evening round behind the gashouse

  predict the Gashouse Gang of the mid-thirties, while the Fisher King himself is obviously George Sisler, the Browns’ heavy hitter (averaging over .400 that season), who felt that his exertions were imperfectly backed by his mates—the poignant

  Fishing, with the arid plain behind me

  makes this abundantly clear.

  Item: The line in Part V, “And bats with baby faces in the violet light,” is a direct response to a game that has gone into extra innings—into a hallucinatory twilight rife with peril. Would you throw a ball (at ninety miles an hour) at a bat with the face of a baby? No, you’d hesitate, and in fact, hesitation, here as elsewhere, is key in the Eliotic canon.

  One could go on, but why? The case is proved.

  DJANGO

  Few of us know more than one person named Django. It is, therefore, a virtual certainty that the Django who pitched for the Cardinals in the 1931 World Series (against the Philadelphia Athletics) was the three-fingered French gypsy jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, star of innumerable Hot Club of France discs in which he was paired with his still-living colleague, the elegant Stéphane Grappelli.

  Rumors of the time suggested that the Cards, scared to death of a Philly lineup that included Lefty Grove, Jimmie Foxx, and Mickey Cochrane, had smuggled the great Frenchman into the country inside a giant éclair used as a centerpiece for the daily luncheon buffet on the Cunard ship Queen Mary, then sailing from Le Havre on a twice-a-month schedule. Be that as it may, the redoubtable jazzman was a compelling presence on the field. “He put a lot of French on the ball,” recalls one contemporary observer. Django’s tridigital grip had much the same effect as that of any number of
pitcher’s dodges usually deemed illegal—chewing gum on the (then) horsehide, scarring the surface of the ball with the cutting edge of a saber concealed in the pantaloons. It was deadly to the hapless would-be hitter; the ball leaped upward two to four inches as it crossed the plate. St. Louis’s Pepper Martin, one of the heroes of the Series and a son of the sovereign state of Oklahoma, summed it up this way: “It was like having the Terrible Williamsons fix your road.” The reference was to a tribe of gypsies of the period who roamed Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas in a fleet of decrepit vehicles contracting to repair roadways—their asphalt tended to disappear in a light rain.

  Memories of Django’s days on the mound may be discerned in his tunes “Whiff,” “Forkball,” and “Pepper,” all available on Vox 3084.

  SONTAG AT FIRST

  The distinguished novelist and critic Susan Sontag sparkled for Chicago for a single season, that of 1959. Sontag played college ball under trying circumstances at the University of Chicago, a school noted for many years for not having a football team—it’s often forgotten that the place didn’t have a baseball team, too. Undeterred, Sontag and a group of similarly baseball-mad graduate students formed the notorious Grind League, which played its games in the vast heating tunnels under the university’s South Side campus. A White Sox scout, trying to ransom his son from the Physics Department, where the boy had unwisely lingered for thirteen years on the track of unnilhexium (an artificial radioactive transuranium element not actually produced until 1974, at Berkeley, as it happened), opened the wrong door one night and blundered into a game. Transfixed by the dark-haired beauty’s luminous activities at first, he inked her to a Sox pact immediately.

  Plagued as she was by baseball’s shameless (and continuing) prejudice against women on the field, Sontag was forced to appear with her hair firmly pinned up under her cap, and not under her own name: she is listed on the rosters of the time as S. Sunday. Fans remember with particular clarity that her stance in the infield was that of one thinking, fist deeply buried in the right cheek, little sidelong glances at the man at bat—the picture of one dreaming of Gregory Bateson and the double bind she intended to place on said man at bat were he so fortunate as to make it to Sack No. 1.

  In later years, her well-known essay on “Firstness” incorporated her Windy City experience. The 1959 Sox went to the Series with high hopes, three handy outfielders, Jim Landis, Jim Rivera, and Al Smith, and such standouts as Luis “Base Thief of Baghdad” Aparicio, but lost to the Dodgers in six games. “Firstness,” its twin themes excellence and loss, is an extended meditation on being first, first obstacle to the runner’s progress (involvement in the agon in a negative, life-denying manner), while, paradoxically, granted the first opportunity to lift one’s group (and by extension, mankind) toward apotheosis.

  A footnote to the above: at the 1967 International PEN Conference at Bled, Yugoslavia, Sontag was observed autographing a worn first baseman’s glove for Yurio Kawabata, the celebrated Japanese rare-glove dealer.

  TWO DUTCHMEN

  Willem “Big Bill” de Kooning swings perhaps the biggest brush in the contemporary art world, and his hard-charging, go-for-broke style at the easel has long been a matter of wonderment and green envy among his colleagues. How much his tour with the Dodgers influenced the Dutch master is a question oft debated, in Manhattan brasseries and East Hampton gin mills alike. This is one of those mysteries which resist the closest critical attention. Did the painter learn at least a part of his ferocious attack during his time with Brooklyn, or did he bring same to Ebbets Field already fully formed? What sticks in memory, in any case, is an amazing duel with a countryman and fellow painter in August 1939.

  It was the year Piet Mondrian, another Netherlander, was taking a sabbatical from the purity of his severely geometric canvases to pitch for Cincinnati. The great Neoplasticist had insisted on designing his own uniform, a splendor of large red and blue and yellow rectangles immaculately placed against stark white. When de Kooning’s moment at the plate came round, the two artists glared at each other in friendly fashion across the 18.4 meters separating them.

  “Piet,” yelled de Kooning, anent the uniform, “the red, it’s too close to the yellow.”

  “Bill,” Mondrian shouted back, “how would you know?”

  “A child could see it,” de Kooning answered, choking his bat.

  “Bill,” Mondrian announced calmly and clearly, “that’s my space you’re leaning all over.” And he dusted the Rotterdamer’s breastbone with a pay-attention pitch that sent Big Bill reeling backward into the Reds’ catcher, Ernie Lombardi.

  On the next pitch, Mondrian went through his windup (a spectacular affair, given the uniform) and released a perfect strike. De Kooning took a mighty cut and missed. Mondrian’s third pitch was low, but within the parameters; de Kooning let it pass him by for a second strike. The doughty Abstract Expressionist was by now visibly irritated, and he rapped the plate with his stick in a way that could not be mistaken for amiability. Mondrian’s next pitch was squarely on the invisible line dividing inside from outside, and de Kooning stepped into it with a set of shoulders made massive by decades of paint hurling. The ball rose in the air like a mortar shell, and Kurt Schwitters,* the Cincinnati centerfielder, went back, back, back for it, thrust up his arm, and lost it by a good twelve feet. De Kooning trotted round the bases to extravagant applause, and Mondrian, long after the other players had left the park, was discovered with a tape, in the fading light of an Ohio evening, measuring the diamond in an attempt to prove that the diamond, not his sense of where to place what, had been at fault.

  PASSION

  Finally, it must be kept in mind that the traffic between art and baseball is not a one-way street. Gifted athletes venture onto the terrain of the artist almost as often as the reverse is the case. A memorable instance: in 1977 the multitalented Billy Martin exhibited, at the posh Pace Gallery on Manhattan’s Fifty-seventh Street, a startling series of junked refrigerator doors smashed into likenesses of his patron, George Steinbrenner. The critics gave Martin high marks for surface tension, structural integrity, originality in choice of materials, and use of the sledge, but most of all for passion, without which neither art nor baseball would signify at all.

  * Schwitters, the German collagist, spent much of his early career in Switzerland and learned his baseball in Basel, where it is called Baselball.

  GAMES ARE THE ENEMIES OF BEAUTY, TRUTH, AND SLEEP, AMANDA SAID

  I was playing Password, Twister, Breakthru, Bonanza, Stratego, Squander, and Gambit. And Quinto, Phlounder, Broker, Tactics, and Stocks & Bonds. All at once. On the floor. It was my move. When I play alone, it is always my move. That is reasonable. I kneel first on one side of the board, then the other. I think a bit. I examine my move to make sure it is the correct move. I congratulate myself. Then I hobble to the next board, on my knees.

  The floor of my study is covered with game boards, and there are boards in the bedroom, the kitchen, the bath. Conestoga, the Game of the Oregon Trail. Gettysburg, Stalingrad, Midway, D-Day, U-Boat, Bismarck, and Waterloo. Le Mans. Management, Verdict, and Dispatcher. Merger, the Game of Stock Manipulation in the Automobile Industry. Qubic, the 3-D Tic Tac Toe Game. My move. It is my move when I depart for the office in the morning and my move when I return at night. I move before, during, and after dinner, hobbling from board to board. It is my move when I go to bed and my move when I awake.

  I extended an arm in its yellow vinyl smoking jacket. I moved. Then I hobbled around to the other side of the board to evaluate the move from the point of view of my opponent. A foolish move. Now I was in a position to destroy myself. Should I destroy myself?

  Then the bell rang. It was Amanda. She was in tears. “Amanda,” I said. “What is it?” She was wearing a tent dfess, two-ply brown canvas with a tent-peg trim. Her eyes were full of sparklers and tears.

  “Oh, Hector,” she said. “You are the only one who can help me. Something awful—”

  “Is it t
he same old thing?”

  “No,” she said. “It is a new thing. It is the worst thing you can imagine.”

  “Come,” I said. “Stay with me. Take this buffalo robe and wrap it around your tent dress. And have a shot of this apricot brandy, and sit down here in this comfortable chair in front of the thermostat.”

  “I was playing Afrika Korps,” she said. “You know Afrika Korps. A re-creation of the famed exploits of Field Marshal Rommel. You command the actual units and introduce the original divisions, brigades, and regiments at the actual time of their arrival, according to the actual historical situation.”

  “I know. One is given an opportunity to display one’s generalship, strategic grasp, and tactical sense.”

  “Right,” Amanda said, knocking back a bit of the brandy. “Well, when I came home this evening—Hector, I can’t describe it! An entire Army Group had mixed itself up with the pieces from my Water Polo game. And the battleships from Midway have drifted into the Verdict box, and all the stock shares from Merger, the Game of Stock Manipulation in the Automobile Industry, are scrambled up with the counters from Depression, and—Hector, why am I playing all these games? Card games, word games, board games, educational games, and games people play? What is it, Hector? Is there something strange about me? Am I some kind of a creepy nut freak? I seem to spend all my time—”

  I took her hand with its four-inch orange, yellow, and blue papier-mâché Fish & Game Commission ring.

  “Amanda,” I said. “You are not alone. Everyone is playing these games. Everyone I know.” I took her to the window and opened it. We stuck our heads out into the papier-mâché night. “Listen, Amanda.”