Baby Got Books

In the DeLillo Papers, Part Two

Part One is here.

“He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful.” With this compact, beautiful, Whitmanian sentence Don DeLillo introduces Cotter Martin, a major character in “Pafko at the Wall/The Triumph of Death.” Cotter, a teenager from Harlem, has skipped school to watch the decisive third game of a playoff series between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers at the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ home stadium, on October 3, 1951.

Cotter can’t afford a ticket to the game so, with a group of fellow truants, takes a run at the entrance, jumps the turnstiles, and escapes a stadium cop. DeLillo achieves a slow-motion effect as he describes that action:

Then he leaves his feet and is in the air, feeling sleek and unmussed and sort of businesslike, flying in from Kansas City with a briefcase full of bank drafts. His head is tucked, his left leg is clearing the bars. And in one prolonged and aloof and discontinuous instant he sees precisely where he’ll land and which way he’ll run and even though he knows they will be after him the second he touches ground, even though he’ll be in danger for the next several hours—watching left and right—there is less fear in him now. …

Then you lose him in the crowd.

Cotter finds purchase in the left-field stands; Bill Waterson, a white businessman in his early forties, strikes up a conversation and a temporary friendship with him as they endure the game together. (Lost in the collective memory of the contest is the fact that the Giants misplayed balls in the field, made base-running mistakes and otherwise had a hell of a time generating any offense. They probably didn’t deserve to win the game, and up until the last pitch it seemed certain they wouldn’t. Cotter and Bill and all the other Giants fans there that day had to have felt like they were bleeding from a thousand cuts—until they didn’t.)

Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ‘Round the World,” the game-winning home run into the left-field seats—the most legendary home run in the history of Major League Baseball—sends Cotter, Bill, and dozens of other fans scrambling for the ball. Cotter emerges out of the scrum with it, but only after wrestling it away from Bill. Bill chases Cotter all the way back to Harlem in pursuit of the ball, pleading, “Hey Cotter buddy come on, we won this game together.” Hadn’t Bill shared his peanuts with the kid? Hadn’t they bonded at the game, almost as father and son? “I looked at you scrunched up in your seat and I thought I’d found a pal,” he says. “This is a baseball fan, I thought, not some delinquent in the streets. You seem to be dead set on disappointing me. Cotter? Because buddies sit down together and work things out.” But they don’t work it out. Bill makes a run at Cotter, Cotter eludes him (in a rough replay of the opening scene), and Bill goes home empty-handed.

In an early draft of the typed manuscript DeLillo has Bill yelling, “Don’t be so god damn all mighty nigger ish. Not with me, okay?” then catching himself and halfway apologizing: “Look at that now, Cotter. Aw Christ you made me say the word.” Everything in this subplot of the story has built toward that moment and that word. It had to have taken a monumental act of restraint for him to cross that section out with pencil, as he did. My jaw dropped several times while digging through DeLillo’s papers, but never so low and for so long as it did when I read this page of manuscript. The final draft is stronger for having left the word unsaid.

(Until recently no one knew conclusively what had really happened to the ball; within days of the home run dozens of people had contacted the Giants, each claiming to have it in their possession. This author claims to have solved the mystery. I’ll take a look at his book and get back to you.)

The ball shows up as a talisman at various points throughout Underworld. In an exceptionally rare interview that DeLillo gave to the New York Times on the occasion of Mark McGwire’s historic 62^nd tater in 1998 he said, “Every baseball carries with it the history of the game, in a mysterious way that you don’t find in football or tennis or basketball. People have scrambled over baseballs, fought over baseballs, and the wonderful mystery of the Bobby Thomson home-run ball is in part what prompted me to write ‘Underworld.’ If we knew who had that baseball, it’s possible I never would have begun work on the novel.”

In one of his research notebooks DeLillo sketched out Cotter’s (and the baseball’s) importance to what would become the novel’s structure:

“Cotter Martin

Break up account of the game and its aftermath—and distribute throughout book, so that Truman Cotter becomes a kind of underground figure. The unknown individual who has in his possession the baseball Thomson hit for a homer on Oct. 3, 1951—The Shot Heard Round The World.”

Even though Cotter ends up not being much of a presence in the rest of the finished novel, it’s hard not to fall in love with the kid. I like knowing that he seems originally to have been named Truman.

Here’s another note DeLillo wrote to himself:

“Everything is connected—the end—

in the computer

in the paranoid structure of cyberspace

But also in a series of human linkages, beginning in the Prologue with Russ Hodges’ voice connecting people to the drama of the game—and continuing throughout as various connections between characters are revealed, and as chapters themselves are linked

-coincidence, serendipity, happenstance

Everything after the Prologue is generated by the baseball

-Nick Shay’s ownership of ball

-Marvin Lundy’s search for ball

-Texas Highway Killer, who shoots the man who has the ball in his possession[.]”

I dug into the DeLillo Papers in the first place because I thought I knew where he’d originally gotten the idea for this story about the ball and wanted to see if I was right. I was excited to find his notes establishing how he conceived the ball’s place in the novel’s structure. But could I find the smoking gun I needed to prove my theory?

To be continued…

Authors, Books | Dr J | August 23, 2010 8:05 am

3 Comments

By Tim, August 23, 2010 @ 9:47 pm

“Everything after the Prologue is generated by the baseball” – dang. I’m going to have to go back and re-read the whole thing now.