The Great American Novel Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  1. Home Sweet Home

  2. The Visitors’ Line-Up

  3. In the Wilderness

  4. Every Inch a Man

  5. The Temptation of Roland Agni

  6. The Temptation of Roland Agni (continued)

  7. The Return of Gil Gamesh; or, Mission from Moscow

  EPILOGUE

  BOOKS BY PHILIP ROTH

  COPYRIGHT

  To Barbara Sproul

  … the Great American Novel is not extinct like the Dodo, but mythical like the Hippogriff …

  Frank Norris, The Responsibilities of the Novelist

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The baseball strategy credited to Isaac Ellis in chapters five, six, and seven is borrowed in large part from Percentage Baseball by Earnshaw Cook (M.I.T. Press, 1966).

  The curve-ball formula in chapter five was devised by Igor Sikorsky and can be found in “The Hell It Doesn’t Curve,” by Joseph F. Drury, Sr. (see Fireside Book of Baseball, Simon and Schuster, 1956, pp. 98–101).

  The tape-recorded recollections of professional baseball players that are deposited at the Library of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and are quoted in Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times (Macmillan, 1966) have been a source of inspiration to me while writing this book, and some of the most appealing locutions of these old-time players have been absorbed into the dialogue.

  I also wish to thank Jack Redding, director of the Hall of Fame Library, and Peter Clark, curator of the Hall of Fame Museum, for their kindness to me during my visits to Cooperstown.

  P. R.

  PROLOGUE

  CALL ME SMITTY. That’s what everybody else called me—the ballplayers, the bankers, the bareback riders, the baritones, the bartenders, the bastards, the best-selling writers (excepting Hem, who dubbed me Frederico), the bicyclists, the big game hunters (Hem the exception again), the billiards champs, the bishops, the blacklisted (myself included), the black marketeers, the blonds, the bloodsuckers, the bluebloods, the bookies, the Bolsheviks (some of my best friends, Mr. Chairman—what of it!), the bombardiers, the bootblacks, the bootlicks, the bosses, the boxers, the Brahmins, the brass hats, the British (Sir Smitty as of ’36), the broads, the broadcasters, the broncobusters, the brunettes, the black bucks down in Barbados (Meestah Smitty), the Buddhist monks in Burma, one Bulkington, the bullfighters, the bullthrowers, the burlesque comics and the burlesque stars, the bushmen, the bums, and the butlers. And that’s only the letter B, fans, only one of the Big Twenty-Six!

  Why, I could write a whole book just on the types beginning with X who have called out in anguish to yours truly—make it an encyclopedia, given that mob you come across in one lifetime who like to tell you they are quits with the past. Smitty, I’ve got to talk to somebody. Smitty, I’ve got a story for you. Smitty, there is something you ought to know. Smitty, you’ve got to come right over. Smitty, you won’t believe it but. Smitty, you don’t know me but. Smitty, I’m doing something I’m ashamed of. Smitty, I’m doing something I’m proud of. Smitty, I’m not doing anything—what should I do, Smit? In transcontinental buses, lowdown bars, high-class brothels (for a change of scenery, let’s move on to C), in cabarets, cabanas, cabins, cabooses, cabbage patches, cable cars, cabriolets (you can look it up), Cadillacs, cafés, caissons, calashes (under the moon, a’ course), in Calcutta, California, at Calgary, not to be confused with Calvary (where in ’38 a voice called “Smitty!”—and Smitty, no fool, kneeled), in campaniles, around campfires, in the Canal Zone, in candlelight (see B for blonds and brunettes), in catacombs, rounding the Cape of Good Hope, in captivity, in caravans, at card games, on cargo ships, in the Caribbean, on carousels, in Casablanca (the place and the movie, wherein, to amuse Bogey, I played a walk-on role), in the Casbah, in casinos, castaway off coasts, in castles (some in air, some not), in Catalonia (with Orwell), Catania, catatonia, in catastrophes, in catboats, in cathedrals, in the Catskills (knaidlach and kreplach with Jenny G.—I taste them yet!), in the Caucasus (Comrade Smitty—and proud of it, Mr. Chairman!), in caves, in cellars, in Central America, in Chad, in a chaise longue (see under B burlesque stars), in chalets, in chambers, in chancery, in a charnel house (a disembodied voice again), in Chattanooga (on Johnny’s very choo-choo), in checkrooms, in Cherokee country, in Chicago—look, let’s call it quits at Christendom, let’s say there, that’s been Smitty’s beat! Father confessor, marital adviser, confidant, straight man, Solomon, stooge, psychiatrist, sucker, sage, go-between, medicine man, whipping boy, sob sister, debunker, legal counselor, loan service, all-night eardrum, and sober friend—you name it, pick a guise, any guise, starting with each and every one of the Big Twenty-Six, and rest assured, Smitty’s worn that hat on one or two thousand nights in his four score and seven on this billion-year-old planet in this trillion-year-old solar system in this zillion-year-old galaxy that we have the audacity to call “ours”!

  O what a race we are, fans! What a radiant, raffish, raggedy, rakish, rambunctious, rampaging, ranting, rapacious, rare, rash, raucous, raunchy, ravaged, ravenous, realistic, reasonable, rebellious, receptive, reckless, redeemable, refined, reflective, refreshing, regal, regimented, regrettable, relentless, reliable, religious, remarkable, remiss, remorseful, repellent, repentant, repetitious (!!!!), reprehensible, repressed, reproductive, reptilian, repugnant, repulsive, reputable, resentful, reserved, resigned, resilient, resistant, resistible, resourceful, respectable, restless, resplendent, responsible, responsive, restrained, retarded, revengeful, reverential, revolting, rhapsodical, rhythmical, ribald, rickety, ridiculous, righteous, rigorous, riotous, risible, ritualistic, robustious (adj. Archaic or Humorous [pick ’em], meaning “rough, rude or boisterous,” according to N.W.), roguish, rollicking, romantic, rompish, rotten, rough-and-ready, rough-and-tumble, rough-housing, rowdyish, rude, rueful, rugged, ruined, rummy (chiefly Brit. don’cha know. Slang odd; queer), rundown, runty, ruthless race!

  A’ course that’s just one man’s opinion. Fella name a’ Smith; first name a’ Word.

  * * *

  And just who is Word Smith? Fair enough. Short-winded, short-tempered, short-sighted as he may be, stiff-jointed, soft-bellied, weak-bladdered, and so on down to his slippers, anemic, arthritic, diabetic, dyspeptic, sclerotic, in dire need of a laxative, as he will admit to the first doctor or nurse who passes his pillow, and in perpetual pain (that’s the last you’ll hear about that), he’s not cracked quite yet: if his life depended on it, the man in the street could not name three presidents beginning with the letter J, or tell you whether the Pope before this one wore glasses or not, so surely he is not about to remember Word Smith, though it so happened old W.S. cracked a new pack of Bicycles with more than one Chief Exec, one night nearly brought down the republic by cleaning out the entire cabinet, so that at morn—pink peeking over the Potomac, you might say—the Secretary of the Treasury had to be restrained by the Secretary of the Interior from dipping his mitt in the national till to save his own shirt at stud, in a manner of speaking.

  Then there are the Popes. Of course no poker, stud, straight, or draw, with Pontiffs, other than penny ante, but rest assured, Smitty here in his heyday, kneepans down on terra firma, has kissed his share of rings, and if no longer up to the
kneeling-down, still has starch enough left in these half-palsied lips for tasting the papal seal and (if there should be any takers) touching somewhat tumescent flesh to the peachier parts of the softer sex, afore he climbs aboard that sleeper bound for Oblivion. Chucklin’: “George, what time she due at Pearly Gates?” Shufflin’: “Don’ you worry none, Mistuh Smitty, I call ya’ in time fo’ you to shave up and eat a good heffy breakfass’ fo’ we gets dere.” “If we gets there, George. Conductor says we may all be on a through train, from what he hears.” “Tru’? To where, Mistuh Smitty? De end of de line?” (Chorus behind, ahummin’ and astrummin’, “Tru’ train, tru’ train, choo-choo on tru’, I wanna choo-choo on home widout delay!”) “Seems there isn’t any ‘end’ to this line, George.” Scratchin’ his woolly head: “Well, suh, day don’ say nuttin’ ’bout dat in de schedule.” “Sure they do, old George, down in the fine print there: ‘Stops only to receive passengers.’” “Which tru’ train dat, Mistuh Smitty?” “Through train bound for Oblivion, George.” “‘Oblivion’? Dat don’t sound lak no stop—dat de name of a little girl!” (“Tru’ train, tru’ train, lem-me choo-choo on home!”)

  Smitty! Prophet to porters, padre to pagans, peacemaker for polygamists, provider for panhandlers, probation officer to pickpockets, pappy to parricides, parent to prostitutes, “Pops” to pinups, Paul to pricks, plaintalker to pretenders, parson to Peeping Toms, protector to pansies, practical nurse to paranoids—pal, you might say, to pariahs and pests of every stripe, spot, stigma, and stain, or maybe just putty in the paws of personae non gratae, patsy in short to pythons. Not a bad title that, for Smitty’s autobio.

  Or how’s about Poet to Presidents? For ’twasn’t all billiards on the Biggest Boss’s baize, sagas of sport and the rarest of rums, capped off with a capricious predawn plunge in the Prez’s pool. Oh no. Contract bridge, cribbage, canasta, and casino crony, sure; blackjack bluffer and poker-table personality, a’ course, a’ course; practiced my pinochle, took ’em on, one and all, at twenty-one; suffered stonily (and snoozed secretly) through six-hour sieges of solitaire, rising to pun when they caught me napping, “Run out of patience, Mr. P.?”; listen, I played lotto on the White House lawn, cut a First Child for Old Maid in the Oval Office on the eve of national disaster … but that doesn’t explain what I was there for. Guessed yet how I came to be the intimate of four American presidents? Figured me out? Respectful of their piteous portion of privacy, I call them henceforth ABC, DEF, GHI, and JKL, but as their words are public record, who in fact these four were the reader with a little history will quickly surmise. My capital concern?

  I polished their prose.

  GHI, tomb who I was closer than any, would always make a point to have me in especially to meet the foreign dignitaries; and his are the speeches and addresses upon which my influence is most ineradicably inked. “Prime Minister,” he would say—or Premier, or Chairman, or Chancellor, or General, or Generalissimo, or Colonel, or Commodore, or Commander, or Your Excellency, or Your Highness, or Your Majesty—“I want you to meet the outstanding scribbler in America. I do not doubt that you have a great language too, but I want you to hear just what can be done with this wonderful tongue of ours by a fellow with the immortal gift of gab. Smitty, what do you call that stuff where all the words begin with the same letter?” “Alliteration, Mr. President.” “Go ahead then. Gimme some alliteration for the Prime Minister.” Of course it was not so easy as GHI thought, even for me, to alliterate under pressure, but when GHI said “Gimme” you gam, get me? “The reason they call that ‘elimination,’ Prime Minister, is on account of you leave out all the other letters but the one. Right, Smit?” “Well, yes, Mr. President, if they did call it that, that would be why.” “And how about a list for the Prime Minister, while you’re at it?” “A list of what, Mr. President?” “Prime Minister, what is your pleasure? This fella here knows the names of just about everything there is, so take your choice. He is a walking dictionary. Fish, fruits, or flimflam? Well now, I believe I just did some myself, didn’t I?” “Yes, you did, Mr. President. Alliteration.” “Now you go ahead, Smitty, you give the Prime Minister an example of one of your lists, and then a little balance, why don’t you? Why, I think I love that balance more than I love my wife. Neither-nor, Smitty, give him neither-nor, give him we cannot-we shall not-we must not, and then finish him off with perversion.” “Perversion, sir, or inversion?” “Let’s leave that to the guest of honor. Which is your preference, Your Honor? Smitty here is a specialist in both.”

  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