Baby Got Books

In the DeLillo Papers, Part Three

Part One is here. Part Two is here.

Jim Bouton’s Ball Four is known as the first “tell-all” book about professional sports—in this case, baseball—but it’s much more than that. First published in 1970, it told the story of Bouton’s efforts during the 1969 season to resurrect his pitching career with the expansion Seattle Pilots—a team that was so ill-fated that it left Seattle after one season and became the Milwaukee Brewers.

Bouton displayed an irreverent, even subversive, sense of humor and an absolutely original view of the world around him, not to mention some serious “stuff” as a writer. There are good reasons for the book’s popularity and staying power. A lot of what he wrote in 1970 is conventional wisdom among modern fans, but it was considered radical then. Many readers then would have said to themselves, “What?! I thought baseball players visited sick kids in hospitals in their free time. This doesn’t sound like the guys I’ve read about in the sports section.” Bouton portrayed his fellow ballplayers as dumb, juvenile, moral degenerates. But he also made them seem like a lot of fun, and if you’ve ever wished you could be one of them, you’ll want that even more after reading Ball Four.

Most famously, Bouton pulled the curtains back and exposed ballplayers’ illicit practices like popping “greenies” (amphetamines, which many ate on game days the way some people eat altoids) and “beaver shooting” (if you don’t know what that means, I’m not going to be the one to tell you). I had also thought that he introduced the world to the term “road beef,” but in re-reading the book for this post I see that I was mistaken in thinking he had used that charming turn of phrase. Bouton did allude to players’ infidelities on the road, but ironically, it looks like it may have been that Cervantes of the Weight Room Jose Canseco who first used it in print, at least in the baseball context. (Again, if you don’t know what this refers to, you’ll have to find out from someone else.)

What I’m trying to tell you is that the book is a fun read, and it made a splash in the culture beyond the shallow pool of baseball literature. For better or worse, it quickly became iconic. There is no chance whatsoever that Don DeLillo didn’t read it before he wrote “Pafko at the Wall.” None. As you’ll see, I can’t prove that, but I know it.

Ball Four is full of observations and asides that don’t necessarily have anything in common with anything else in the book. Here’s one (which is sandwiched between two separate anecdotes about throwing batting practice) from page 25 of my twentieth anniversary edition:

When I was a kid I loved to go to Giant games in the Polo Grounds. And a little thing that happened there when I was about ten years old popped into my mind today. There was a ball hit into the stands and a whole bunch of kids ran after it. I spotted it first, under a seat, and grabbed for it. Just as I did, a Negro kid also snatched at it. My hand reached it a split second before his, though, and I got a pretty good grip on it. But he grabbed the ball real hard and pulled it right out of my hand. No complaint, he took it fair and square. I thought about it afterward, about what made him able to grab that ball out of my hand. I decided it had to do with the way we were brought up—me in a comfortable suburb, him probably in a ghetto. I decided that while I wanted the ball, he had to have it.

Sound familiar? DeLillo had to have gotten the idea for Cotter Martin and Bill Waterson and their experience with the ball—which, as we’ve seen, forms the very connective tissue of Underworld as DeLillo conceived it from the very beginning—from Ball Four. Had to have. I know that, but I went to the Ransom Center to see if I could prove it.

DeLillo’s notebooks include a long running list of the books he consulted in the course of his research for Underworld. The “Pafko at the Wall” section of this hand-written bibliography includes sixteen books about baseball (mostly New York Giants fans’ memoirs about the team), four audio or videotapes, eight books on Harlem (e.g., Charles Mingus’s autobiography, Beneath the Underdog, and Aaron Siskind, Harlem Photographs, 1932-1940), and biographies of Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, and Pieter Breughel. But no Ball Four.

I found in these notebooks the seeds that bloomed into the story of Gleason puking on Sinatra, the description of a drunk running the bases as he’s chased by security guards, and the blizzard of impromptu confetti that instantaneously followed Thomson’s homer (a piece of which forces Hoover to contemplate “The Triumph of Death”), among many others. The notebooks leave a trail of bread crumbs back to the book or newspaper column that gave DeLillo the initial idea for every one of those elements of the story. So how could he have left Bouton out?

I wouldn’t be much of a DeLillo fan if I didn’t appreciate a good conspiracy theory. If I had more energy for this I’d try to spin one. But I’m pretty sure he simply read Ball Four when it came out and something clicked when he read that passage; he filed it away mentally and accessed it when he wrote “Pafko” and, since he didn’t need to look at Ball Four again as part of his research—because he’d already internalized the story or some such—he didn’t include it in his notebooks.

So I left Austin without proving my theory, but I doubt that I would have enjoyed my time spent with the DeLillo papers any more than I did if I had found the evidence I sought. Watching Don DeLillo’s creative process unfold was literally thrilling for me. If you’ve read this far, you’d probably find it just as exciting as I did, so I recommend you try it: Find out where your favorite author’s papers are archived, make arrangements to go there, and immerse yourself for a while. You’ll go home thinking that the novelist is every bit as much an artist as Breughel or Mingus was, and I think you’ll redouble the pleasure you get from reading him or her.

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Editor’s note and DBF plug: Talk with author J. Todd Moye at the Decatur Book Festival, this Saturday at 12:30 PM about baseball, DeLillo, Tar Heels basketball — and his new book, Freedom Flyers: The Tuskegee Airmen of World War II.

See you there.

Authors, Books | Dr J | August 31, 2010 8:14 am

3 Comments

By Dr J, August 31, 2010 @ 11:25 am

Special DBF-related voyeuristic nugget: Because I am nosy, while in the archives I also read several of young (pre-Corrections) Jonathan Franzen’s letters to DeLillo. Franzen says in one of the letters that he struck up the correspondence because he saw a letter from DeLillo to his friend Dave taped to Dave’s refrigerator, so he knew that DeLillo was friendly to young novelists. (Dave = David Foster Wallace.)
Franzen was working on an essay about the state of the novel for the New York Times Magazine, and he wrote to DeLillo periodically to complain about the compromises the magazine’s editors were asking him to make. He finally took the essay to Harper’s Magazine, where it was published as “Perchance to Dream” in 1996. He tells DeLillo that the experience has made him determined never to make a compromise again when it comes to his writing. Had she known that, Oprah could have saved herself a big headache.
By Tim, August 31, 2010 @ 1:27 pm

That is a fantastic nugget. I need to figure out who my favorite author is and figure out who has his/her letters and visit. (Hmmm. Who has Dave E’s papers?)
By bjkeefe, September 11, 2010 @ 6:57 pm

I looked at some of the Google results for “road beef,” and at first, I was going to take you to task for saying Canseco had originated the phrase.

However, the results from long ago appear to be an artifact of (1) the archaic f-for-s substitution and (2) more worryingly, the Google’s OCR’s inability to recognize that “roaft beef” is not “road beef.”

Nonetheless, this bit from 1761 is worth passing along, I think, at least for those who enjoy juvenile double-entendre-ing as much as I do. It’s from p212 of “The London magazine, or, Gentleman’s monthly intelligencer, Volume 30.”
["Road" instead of Roaft" purposely left in. -bjk]

Air, A lovely Lafs, &c.

Road Beef ! belov’d by all mankind,
If I was doom’d to have thee,

When drefs’d and garnifh’d to my mind,
And fwirhming in thy gravy,

Not all thy country’s force combin’d,
Shou’d from my tury fave thee.

Renown’d Sir Loin, ofttimes decreed
The theme of Englifh ballad,

E’en kings on thee have joy’d to feed,
Unknown to Frenchman’s palate.

O how much doth thy tafte exceed
Soup-meagre, frogs, and fallad.

(Link.)