The Great American Novel (2 page)

Do not conclude, dear fans, from this or any GHI anecdote that he was buffoon, clown, fool, illiterate, sadist, vulgarian only; he also knew what he was doing. “Smitty,” he would say to me when he came in the morning to unlock the door of the safe in the White House basement where I had passed the night in an agony of alphabetizing and alliterating, “Smitty,” he would say, studying the State of the Union address whose inverted phrases and balanced clauses seemed at that moment to have cost me my sanity, “I envy you, you know that, locked away down here in blessed solitude behind six feet of sound-proof blast-proof steel, while just over your head the phone is ringing all night long with one international catastrophe after another. Know something, my boy? If I had it to do all over again—and I say this to you in all sincerity, even if I do not have the God-given gift to say it backwards and inside out—if I had it to do all over again, I'd rather be a writer than President.”

*   *   *

Waybackwhen, in my heyday (d.), when “One Man's Opinion” counted for something in this country—being syndicated as it was on the sports page of the Finest Family Newspapers (d.)—back when the American and the National Baseball Leagues existed in harmonious competition with the Patriot League (d.) and I traveled around that circuit for the Finest Family, whose
Morning Star
(the whole constellation, d.) was the daily tabloid in the seven Patriot League cities (I see now they are putting Sports Quizzes on cocktail napkins; how about this then, napkineers—
Query:
Which were the seven cities of the old P. League? What drunk has the guts to remember?), back before teams, towns, trusting readership simply vanished without a trace in the wake of the frauds and the madness, back before I was reduced to composing captions for sex-and-slander sheets (not unlike a Jap haiku genius working for the fortune cookie crumbs—in my prime, remember, I was master of that most disparaged of poetic forms, the headline), back before they slandered, jailed, blacklisted, and forgot me, back before the Baseball Writers' Association of America (to name a name, Mr. Chairman!) hired a plainclothesgoon to prevent me from casting my vote for Luke Gofannon at the Hall of Fame elections held every January just one hundred miles from this upstate Home of the D. (sixty-three home runs for the Ruppert Mundys in 1928, and yet Luke “the Loner” is “ineligible,” I am told—just as I am archaic in my own century, a humorous relic in my own native land, d as a doornail while still drawing breath!), back before years became decades and decades centuries, when I was Smitty to America and America was still a home to me, oh, about eleven, twelve thousand days ago, I used to get letters from young admirers around the country, expressing somewhat the same sentiment as the President of the United States, only instead of sardonic, sweet. O
so
sweet!

Dear Smitty, I am ten and want to grow up to be a sports righter two. It is the dream of my life. How can I make my dream come true? Is spelling important as my teacher say? Isn good ideas more important and loving baseball! How did you become so great? Were you born with it? Or did you have good luck! Please send me any pamphlets on being like you as I am making a booklit on you for school.

O sad! Too sad! The sight of my own scratchings makes me weep! How like those schoolchildren who idolized me I now must labor o'er the page! Sometimes I must pause in the midst of a
letter
to permit the pain to subside, in the end producing what looks like something scratched on a cave wall anyway, before the invention of invention. I could not earn passage into the first grade with this second childhood penmanship—how ever will I win the Pulitzer Prize? But then Mount Rushmore was not carved in a day—neither will the Great American Novel be written without suffering. Besides, I think maybe the pain is good for the style: when just setting out on a letter like the lower case w is as tedious and treacherous as any zigzag mountain journey where you must turn on a dime to avoid the abyss, you tend not to waste words with w's in them, fans. And likewise through the alphabet.

The alphabet! That dear old friend! Is there a one of the Big Twenty-Six that does not carry with it a thousand keen memories for an archaic and humorous, outmoded and out-dated and oblivion-bound sports-scribe like me? To hell with the waste! Tomorrow's a holiday anyway—Election Day at the Hall of F. Off to Cooperstown to try yet again. My heart may give out by nightfall, but then a' course the fingers will get their rest, won't they? So what do you say, fans, a trip with Smitty down Memory Lane?

aA

bB

cC

dD

eE

fF

gG

hH

iI

jJ

kK

lL

mM

nN

oO

pP

qQ

rR

sS

tT

uU

vV

wW

xX

yY

zZ

O thank God there are only twenty-six! Imagine a hundred! Why, it is already like drowning to go beyond capital F! G as in Gofannon! M as in Mundy! P as in Patriot! And what about I as in I? O for those golden days of mine and yore! O why must there be d for deceased! Deceit, defeat, decay, deterioration, bad enough—but d as in dead? It's too damn tragic, this dying business! I tell you, I'd go without daiquiris, daisies, damsels, Danish, deck chairs, Decoration Day double-headers, decorum, delicatessen, Demerol, democratic processes, deodorants, Derbys, desire, desserts, dial telephones, dictionaries, dignity, discounts, disinfectants, distilleries, ditto marks, doubletalk, dreams, drive-ins, dry cleaning, duck an montmorency, a dwelling I could call my own—why, I would go without
daylight,
if only I did not have to die. O fans, it is so horrible just being defunct, imagine, as I do, day in and day out

D  E  A  T  H

Ten days have elapsed, four in an oxygen tent, where I awoke from unconsciousness believing I was a premature infant again. Not only a whole life ahead of me, but two months thrown in for good measure! I imagined momentarily that it was four score and seven years ago, that I had just been brought forth from my mother; but no—instead of being a premature babe I am practically a posthumous unpublished novelist, ten days of my remaining God only knows how few gone,
and not a word written.

And worse, our philistine physician has issued an injunction: give up alliteration if you want to live to be four score and eight.

“Smitty, it's as simple as this—you cannot continue to write like a boy and expect to get away with it.”

“But it's all I've got left! I refuse!”

“Come now, no tears. It's not the end of the world. You still have your lists, after all, you still have your balance—”

Between sobs I say, “But you don't understand! Alliteration is at the foundation of English literature. Any primer will tell you that much. It goes back to the very beginnings of written language. I've made a study of it—it's true! There would have been no poetry without it! No human speech as we know it!”

“Well, they don't teach us the fundamentals of poetry in medical school, I admit, but they do manage to get something through our heads having to do with the care of the sick and the aged. Alliteration may be very pretty to the ear, and fun to use, I'm sure, but it is simply too much of a stimulant and a strain for an eighty-seven-year-old man, and you are going to have either to control yourself, or take the consequences. Now blow your nose—”

“But I
can't
give it up! No one can! Not even
you,
who is a literary ignoramus by his own admission. ‘Stimulant and strain.' ‘To control yourself or take the consequences.' Don't you see, if it's in every other sentence even
you
utter, how can I possibly abstain? You've got to take away something else!”

The doctor looks at me as if to say, “Gladly, only what else is left?” Yes, it is my last real pleasure, he is right …

“Smitty, it's simply a matter of not being so fancy. Isn't that all really, when you come down to it?”

“My God,
no!
It's just the opposite—it's as natural as breathing. It's the homiest most unaffected thing a language can do. It's the ornamentation of ordinary speech—”

“Now, now,”

“Listen to me for once! Use your ears instead of that stethoscope—listen to the English language, damn it! Bed and board, sticks and stones, kith and kin, time and tide, weep and wail, rough and ready, now or—”

“Okay, that's enough, now. You are working yourself into another attack, and one that you may not recover from. If you do not calm down this instant, I am going to order that your fountain pen and dictionary be taken away.”

I snarled in response, and let him in on a secret. “I could still alliterate in my head. What do you think I did for four days in the oxygen tent?”

“Well, if so, you are deceiving no one but yourself. Smitty, you must use common sense. Obviously I am not suggesting that you abstain from ever having two neighboring words in a sentence begin with the same sound. That would be absurd. Why, next time I come to visit, I would be overjoyed to hear you tell me, ‘Feelin' fit as a fiddle'—if it happens to be true. It is not the ordinary and inevitable accidents of alliteration that occur in conversation that wear down a man of your age, or even the occasional alliterative phrase used intentionally for heightened rhetorical effect. It's overindulgent, intemperate, unrestrained excursions into alliteration that would leave a writer half your age trembling with excitement. Smitty, while you were comatose I took the liberty of reading what you've been writing here—I had no choice, given your condition. My friend, the orgy of alliteration that I find on the very first page of your book is just outright ridiculous in a man of your age—it is tantamount to suicide. Frankly I have to tell you that the feeling I come away with after reading the first few thousand words here is of a man making a spectacle of himself. It strikes me as wildly excessive, Smitty, and just a little desperate. I wish I could tell you otherwise, but there's no sense pulling punches with an eighty-seven-year-old man.”

“Well, Doctor, much as I welcome your medical school version of literary criticism, you have to admit that you are not exactly the Pulitzer Prize Committee. Besides, it is only the prologue. I was only opening the tap, to get the waters running.”

“Well, it still seems needlessly ostentatious to me. And a terrible drain on the heart. And, my friend, you cannot write a note to the milkman, let alone the Great American Novel, without one of them pumping the blood to your brain.” He took my hand as I began to whimper again—he claims to have read “One Man's Opinion” as a boy in Aceldama. “Here, here, it's only for your good I tell you this…”

“And—and how's about reading alliteration, if I can't write it?”

“For the time being, I'm going to ask you to stay off it entirely.”

“Or?”

“Or you'll be a goner. That'll be the ballgame, Smitty.”

“If that's the case, I'd
rather
be dead!” I bawled, the foulest lie ever uttered by man.

Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages.

So said Chaucer back in my high school days, and a' course it is as true now as then.

And specially, from every shires ende

Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,

The holy blisful martir for to seke,

That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

That is copied directly (and laboriously I assure you) from the famous Prologue to his immortal (and as some will always say, immoral)
Canterbury Tales.
I had to copy it only so as to get the old-fashioned spelling correct. I can still recite the forty-odd lines, up to “A Knight ther was,” as perfectly as I did in tenth grade. In fact, in the intervening million years—not since Chaucer penned it, but since I memorized it—I have conquered insomnia many a night reciting those dead words to myself, aloud if I happened to be alone, under my breath (as was the better part of wisdom) if some slit was snoring beside me. Only imagine one of them bimbos overhearing Smitty whaning-that-Aprille in the middle of the night! Waking to find herself in the dark with a guy who sounds five hundred years old! Especially if she happened to think of herself as “particular”! Why, say to one of those slits—in the original accent—“The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote,” and she'd kick you right in the keester. “There are some things a girl won't do, Mr. Word Smith, not even for dough! Good
bye
!” On the other hand, to do women justice, there is one I remember, a compassionate femme with knockers to match, who if you said to her, “So priketh hem nature in hir corages,” she'd tell you, “Sure I blow guys in garages. They're human too, you know.”

But this is not a book about tough cunts. Nat Hawthorne wrote that one long ago. This is a book about what America did to the Ruppert Mundys (and to me). As for
The Canterbury Tales
by Geoffrey Chaucer, I admit that I have by now forgot what it all meant, if ever I knew. I'm not just talking about the parts that were verboten either. I take it from the copy that I have before me, borrowed on my card from the Valhalla Public Library, that those “parts” are still taboo for schoolkids. Must be—they are the only ratty-looking pages in an otherwise untouched book. Reading with the help of magnifying glass and footnotes, I see (at nearly ninety) that it is mostly stuff about farting. Little devils. They have even decorated the margin with symbols of their glee. Appears to be a drawing of a fart. Pretty good one too. Kids love farts, don't they? Even today, with all the drugs and sex and violence you hear about on TV, they still get a kick, such as we used to, out of a fart. Maybe the world hasn't changed so much after all. It would be nice to think there were still a few eternal verities around. I hate to think of the day when you say to an American kid, “Hey, want to smell a great fart?” and he looks at you as though you're crazy. “A great what?” “Fart. Don't you even know what a fart is?” “Sure it's a game—you throw one at a target. You get points.” “That's a dart, dope. A
fart.
A bunch of kids sit around in a crowded place and they fart. Break wind. Sure, you can make it into a game and give points. So much for a wet fart, so much for a series, and so on. And penalties if you draw mud, as we called it in those days. But the great thing was, you could do it just for the fun of it. By God, we could fart for hours when we were boys! Somebody's front porch on a warm summer night, in the road, on our way to school. Why, we could sit around a blacksmith's shop on a rainy day doing nothing but farting, and be perfectly content. No movies in those days. No television. No nothin'. I don't believe the whole bunch of us taken together ever had more than a nickel at any time, and yet we were never bored, never had to go around looking for excitement or getting into trouble. Best thing was you could do it yourself too. Yessir, boy knew how to make use of his leisure time in those days.”