Baby Got Books

In the DeLillo Papers, Part One

I had to drive through Austin last month, and I arranged my trip so that I could spend a few hours in the archives of the Harry Ransom Center on the campus of the University of Texas. If the HRC isn’t the most important English-language literary archive in the world, it’s close. I went there to nose around in Don DeLillo’s papers, hoping to find a smoking gun that would prove a pet theory of mine—more about which in a future post.

DeLillo published a novella under the title “Pafko at the Wall” in Harper’s in 1992. Intrigued by the cover photo, I bought the magazine off of a supermarket newsstand in Chapel Hill, N.C., and devoured it. “Pafko at the Wall” instantly became one of my favorite pieces of writing anywhere, and it still is. It later showed up as “The Triumph of Death,” the prologue to DeLillo’s 1997 master opus Underworld. In the years since I’ve tried to put a finger on why I love this story so much. For starters, the writing is incredible; I’d put the first sentence right up there with “Call me Ishmael” in the annals of great American letters. It also has to do with the characters who show up in it—historical figures, to be sure, but I always figured that DeLillo had to have made up their being together in the same place (New York City’s Polo Grounds, the home of the baseball Giants) at the same time (on the the last day of the 1951 season, when the Giants finished a three-game series against the Brooklyn Dodgers to decide who would play the New York Yankees in that year’s World Series). How else could you explain a story in which Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover take in a ballgame together? That’s way too far-fetched to have really happened–or so I had always assumed.

It has race relations as a major subplot. That’s kind of my thing.

It obviously didn’t hurt that it takes an iconic moment in baseball history as its subject, or at least its backdrop. For a guy whose nickname on the high school baseball team was “Team Geek”—because, according to my teammates, it was unheard of for a baseball player to read books—literary fiction riffing on baseball history was pretty much a hanging curve down the middle of the plate. (Not that I could ever have done much with a non-metaphorical curveball, hanging or otherwise, anyway–which, if we’re telling the truth, probably does more to explain the nickname.)

My trip to the Ransom Center allowed me to examine DeLillo’s research materials and first drafts for “Pafko at the Wall.” The research he did was voluminous. It includes a hand-written transcript of Russ Hodges’s radio call of Bobby Thomson’s game-deciding home run, much of which ended up in “Pafko/Triumph” verbatim, and photocopies of the next day’s New York Times, in which one-half of the front page covers Thomson’s “Shot Heard Round the World” and the other half reports on a successful Soviet nuclear test. (If you’ve read the novella, you know that this worked its way into another subplot in the story.) It includes a photomontage of scenes from an unidentified season’s spring training—clipped from a magazine, possibly Look—inscribed “From Philip Roth.”

It includes an obituary of Donnie Moore, the California Angels pitcher who never recovered mentally from a decisive home run he served up in the 1986 playoffs, alongside stories about Ralph Branca, the Dodgers pitcher who served up the game-winning homer in 1951, but made his peace with it. DeLillo wrote this note to himself in a cheap spiral notebook: “Branca was able to survive the crushing defeat because he was white—given every chance to be the celebrated figure. Compare with Donnie Moore, who killed himself after giving up a home run in a key game.”

I especially enjoyed DeLillo’s notes on contemporary issues of Life Magazine; I assume he browsed through them to help compose a mental snapshot of New York in the fall of 1951, because many of the notes are on advertisements. DeLillo notices a report in the September 24, 1951 issue on the Robinson-Turpin prize fight that took place at the Polo Grounds, not because he was interested in boxing but because the article mentions gate-crashers–again, more about this in a future post, but it’s easy to see how he worked this small detail into the plot of “Pafko/Triumph.” Even more revealing was his response to a spread in the October 1, 1951 issue of the magazine on a touring exhibition from Madrid’s Prado Museum that had opened in New York. Here’s his reaction to one painting that’s featured in the magazine in particular:

“’The Triumph of Death’

Breugel

↓

tumbrels, skulls

wasted landscape

burning ships

pale horses

the magazine is

LIFE [by which I imagine he’s saying, “This is supposed to be life magazine, for cryin' out loud.”]

thoroughly unpleasant painting

shrouded skeletons

dogs nibbling on corpses[.]”

Another notebook entry says this illustration “dominates the magazine” and a third describes a detail from the painting: “Death on a slatribbed hack with scythe driving the living into a projecting anteroom that resembles the entrance to the subway.”

If you’ve read the novella, you know that DeLillo gives exactly these thoughts to the least likable character in the story when the character is confronted with exactly this magazine illustration. I found it utterly fascinating that DeLillo would have the fictional J. Edgar Hoover share his, the nonfictional DeLillo’s, thoughts. It takes a big man and a magnanimous author to imagine Hoover sharing one’s opinions about anything, much less art criticism.

To be continued…

Books | Dr J | August 16, 2010 7:56 am

7 Comments

By Tim, August 16, 2010 @ 9:35 am

Love this post on about 30 levels, but I’d like some more context about the Branca/Moore comparison. What’s he saying? Branca was given the chance to atone while Moore would have been demonized on the basis of race?
By Dr J, August 16, 2010 @ 10:55 am

I think that’s part of it. Part of it has to do with just the two different personalities: why was Branca happy-go-lucky enough to get past this monumental disappointment? (By the time DeLillo wrote the novella, Branca and Thomson were making a lot of money by signing autographs together at baseball memorabilia shows.) Part of it has to do with the difference between the 1980s and the 1950s: Moore’s disappointment would have been replayed on television a million times within a week of its occurrence, whereas Branca’s just slipped immediately into the mists of legend. But a lot of it, I think, is the simple observation that in America it’s easier to be white than black.
By Tim, August 16, 2010 @ 10:57 am

You need to read The Last Hero, the new Aaron biography (review coming soon).
By Dr J, August 16, 2010 @ 11:05 am

I do need to read that. I’ve also just found a new book about the Thomson home run ball.
By Tim, August 16, 2010 @ 12:09 pm

It was pretty much a straight line between Delillo and my reading of this book:
http://www.babygotbooks.com/2006/12/13/the-echoing-green/