Weeks 5 & 6: Robert Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association..."

For our second baseball novel of the semester, we're only jumping ahead sixteen years (from 1952 to 1968), however in terms of tone and style, these books are as wildly different from one another as the eras in which they were produced.  While Bernard Malamud's The Natural is a product of stoic postwar philosophy and a logical extension of the modernist prose style, Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association... revels in the burgeoning aesthetic movement that would come to be known as postmodernism.  You can already tell that by looking at their names alone, though as we'll see, for all their differences, the central conceit of baseball will provide both authors with a surprising amount of common ground.

The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. — there, I've said its full name once and now we can abbreviate at will! —is Robert Coover's second novel, following his 1966 début, The Origin of the Brunists and written concurrently with many of the daring, genre-defining short stories that would be published the following year in the collection Pricksongs and Descants: Fictions (you've already read one story from this volume, "McDuff on the Mound;" perhaps his most [in]famous story, "The Babysitter," is also found there).  For all of the stylistic play at work in the novel, it's is nonetheless a story of great character-centered emotion, particularly focused on the novel's titular hero and protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, a lonesome accountant by day who spends his evenings obsessively playing a tabletop baseball game of his own invention.  While such a lifestyle doesn't seem ripe for drama, you'd be surprised just how much can happen in only a short time.

While the UBA was appreciated in its own time, it's particularly interesting to read the novel through the modern frame of SABRmetrics, whose practitioners' actuarial attention to detail would put someone like Henry to shame (chalk it up to the difference between his era and our computer-dominated data landscape, perhaps?).  Nonetheless, much like The Natural, there's a sort of mythological overtone here — note that Henry's initials are close to JHWH, a Hebrew abbreviation for Yahweh in the Bible — and are our observations of a potential God complex in Henry (or the questions raised in our discussion of The Natural about whether one can control reality, change fate, etc.) so far off the mark when SABRmetrician Nate Silver can predict the outcomes of the past two presidential elections with startling accuracy simply by massaging the numbers?  

We'll divide our time with the UBA into three segments as follows:

• Tues. February 5: chapters 1-3
• Fri. February 8: chapters 4 & 5
• Tues. February 12: chapters 6-8

And here are some supplemental links that might be of interest to you:

• the original New York Times review of the novel
• a 2010 reappraisal of the book in the Times
• Coover isn't the only American novelist to envision a tabletop baseball game.  Beat Generation icon Jack Kerouac created his own game, which used cards instead of dice.  Read more about it in a Times article here, and don't miss the slideshow of images from the game here.

Weeks 3 & 4: Bernard Malamud's "The Natural"

Moving on from the minor leagues of Baseball's Best Short Stories, we'll begin our work in earnest with the first of five classic baseball novels (or five and a half, counting Delillo's novella Pafko at the Wall) that will constitute the majority of our work this term.  Our starting point on this barnstorming tour of American baseball literature, and the earliest book on our reading list, is Bernard Malamud's debut novel, The Natural (1952).

I mentioned in our discussion of Thurber's "You Could Look It Up" as a prefiguring of Eddie Gaedel's (in)famous at bat that there are certain colorful tales in baseball's history — like Gaedel, the Black Sox scandal, "the Shot Heard 'Round the World," or Ray Chapman's death — that have continually captivated the imaginations of writers, and The Natural, loosely based on Phillies 1B Eddie Waitkus, is another such story.  Like Waitkus, Roy Hobbs is a young player with seemingly boundless talents whose career is sidelined when he's shot by a mysterious stalker.  We catch up with him many years later on his path towards redemption, signing on with the New York Knights as their new right fielder, where he's quickly swept up by forces larger than himself.

Malamud stands, along with Philip Roth (whose The Great American Novel we'll be reading later in the semester) and Saul Bellow, as a major force among Jewish-American authors, as well as mainstream mid-century literature, and so it's not surprising that in The Natural we find not only echoes of the classic Greek tragic hero, but also a fairly detailed and innovative reframing of the myth of the Fisher King.  This Arthurian legend — which you might've encountered in T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" or Terry Gilliam's 1991 film of the same name — is centered around a wounded king whose kingdom is falling into disrepair due to his injuries.  While many knights come to attempt to heal him, only the chosen, Percival (or Parsifal), is capable of finding the holy grail and restoring order.  In The Natural, Knights manager Pop Fisher is the Fisher King, the pennant his grail and Roy his Percival (complete with his bat, "Wonderboy," as an ersatz Excalibur).  Asked about his motivation in mixing baseball and mythology in a 1975 Paris Review interview, Malamud observed that:

Baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered—with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. Incidentally, Keats said, "I am not a conceptual thinker, I am a man of ideas."

We'll read The Natural in three installments, as follows:

• Fri. January 25: introduction, pgs 3-107 
• Tues. January 29: pgs 108-185
• Fri. February 1: pgs 186-230

Weeks 2 & 3: Baseball's Best Short Stories

Moving on from "Casey at the Bat," we'll ease into the larger novels that will make up the bulk of our work this term by spending a few classes reading shorter baseball fiction by a wide array of authors.  The majority of the stories will be found in Paul D. Staudohar's anthology, Baseball's Best Short Stories, and you should be fine using either the older version or the recent reissue pictured here.

Our challenge here, and throughout the term, will be two-fold: to respond to these writings as literature and as literature about baseball.  In terms of the latter, we might appreciate a writer's thoughtful (or skillfully obscure) handling of baseball subject matter/lingo/etc. or the way in which the game and its players are used to embody larger symbolic meanings and lessons; however we shouldn't forget that while we're (hopefully) having fun talking about our national pastime, we should still be engaged in serious and detailed literary analysis.

Page numbers below are for the earlier edition of BBSS, and a few external links are provided:

• Tues. January 15: Ring Lardner, "Alibi Ike" (49), "My Roomy" (149), "Horseshoes" (221); James Thurber, "You Could Look It Up" (117)
• Fri. January 18: Michael Chabon, "Smoke" (133); Stuart Dybek, "Death of a Right Fielder" (355); A.E. Housman, "To an Athlete Dying Young" [link]; Max Apple, "Understanding Alvarado" [PDF]
• Tues. January 22: Garrison Keillor, "What Did We Do Wrong?" (211); Chet Williamson, "Ghandi at the Bat" (277); Kimball McIlroy, "Joe, the Great McWhiff" (303); T.C. Boyle, "The Hector Quesadilla Story" (375)

Friday, Jan. 11: Casey at the Bat

We'll start our work this term by looking at one of the fundamental works of baseball literature, and probably your first exposure to writing about baseball, Ernest L. Thayer's classic "Casey at the Bat."  Originally published under the nickname "Phin" in the San Francisco Examiner in June 1888 — and with the much grander title, "Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888" — Thayer's poem is one of the first and finest examples of writing inspired by America's burgeoning national pastime.  As the longer title implies, "Casey" is no mere tall tale, but a fairly detailed account of the sport in the late 19th century and a caricature of Mike "King" Kelly, one of the sport's first rich superstars, whose contract was purchased from Chicago by Boston for the princely sum of $10,000.

Nonetheless, as a uniquely American version of ancient Greek tragedy, "Casey" has captivated generations of readers and inspired numerous adaptations and homages.  We'll consider a few of them alongside the original for our first proper class:

• Ernest L. Thayer, "Casey at the Bat" (Baseball's Best Short Stories, 1)
• Frank DeFord, "Casey at the Bat" (written for Sports Illustrated to honor the poem's centenary) (BBSS, 5)
• Robert Coover, "McDuff on the Mound" [PDF]
• Grantland Rice, "Casey's Revenge" (a 1907 sequel of sorts) [link]

Course Description

For more than 150 years, baseball has not only been our national pastime, but also a source of inspiration for some of this country’s finest writers. As we endure another dormant winter, awaiting the promise of spring and a new season on the diamond, we’ll explore the very best that baseball’s literary canon has to offer, from classic novels (Malamud’s The Natural, Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association…, Delillo’s Pafko at the Wall, Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Roth’s The Great American Novel and Harbach’s The Art of Fielding), to short fiction, poetry and even experimental hybrids. Along the way, we’ll consider the meaning and metaphors baseball gives to our ordinary lives and the lessons offered by its heroes and tragedies.