The Books: Baseball: A Literary Anthology; from God’s Country and Mine, by Jacques Barzun

On the essays shelf (yes, there are still more books to excerpt in my vast library. I can’t seem to stop this excerpts-from-my-library project. I started it in 2006!)

NEXT BOOK: Baseball: A Literary Anthology

Some of the essays in the Baseball Literary Anthology are about real events, real players, actual games. But then there are some pieces that are more meditations on the game itself. The following excerpt is one of THOSE. If you know baseball really well, then maybe such meditations are … redundant? Or maybe they hit some sort of sweet spot, because the writer is gifted enough to actually put something inchoate into words. That’s how I feel about the words below.

Jacques Barzun was born in France. He grew up in a home filled with visiting artists (including the great Stefan Zweig!), which had to impact his later interests in culture and history. His father had visited the United States during WWI, and was very impressed with America, its go-get-em-ness, its optimism, its work ethic, very different from French culture. Barzun’s dad decided his son needed to be educated in the United States. Jacques was only 12 years old, but off he went to a prep school – first – one that poured its students, via gigantic funnel, into Columbia University. He ended up being a professor at Columbia, teaching history courses, running the “Great Books course” with Lionel Trilling (oh, for a time-machine).

He wrote and edited over 40 books, on diverse topics: medicine, William James, Berlioz (he was an expert on Berlioz), culture in general as it related to history, psychiatry and … baseball. (This is the kind of education that no longer exists in the United States, because everything has been boiled down into specialization. Once upon a time, you weren’t considered educated if you hadn’t at least READ the “Great Books.” I agree. #sorrynotsorry.)

Now what is interesting about the piece below is that it is from Barzun’s 1954 book about his adopted country, a book called God’s Country and Mine: a Declaration of Love Spiced with a Few Harsh Words, which should tell you his point of view. Barzun was an immigrant, and as we know (or we should) – immigrants often see the nation with more clarity (and sometimes more affection) than American citizens, born and bred here. This was the case with Barzun. It was America that gave him the opportunities he needed in order to become what he became. It was America that opened its doors to him. He came from a destroyed culture – what many saw (in Europe and elsewhere) as a culture rotting from within. (The 20s and 30s in Europe were a spectacle of decay, with monstrous ideologies rising up from the ruins.) America hadn’t fought a war on her own soil, and so there was a freshness and openness there that didn’t exist in Europe. (Current generations, bred on anti-Americanism, resist this interpretation but that just means they reject the historical record. Or they’re so convinced of the unreliability of any narrative, that they discount anything that doesn’t line up with their beliefs. Should we then discount Barzun’s affection as delusional? But … we can learn from ANYTHING, if we’re open and curious. Always a mistake to close your mind. No exceptions.)

Baseball was one of Barzun’s long-standing passions. There’s a really fun production number in the musical Ragtime (based on the novel by E.L. Doctorow) that shows the members of all the immigrant populations in New York – plus regular old citizens – plus the “Negroes” (in the terminology of the day) – swarming into a baseball stadium. And unlike the gentlemanly cricket of the “old world,” baseball features profanity, and name-calling, and horrifying racist epithets, flung around by every single person in those stands. And it’s all part of the fun, and it’s all part of letting off steam. The game may be elegant and geometrical, but it unleashes violent passions, passions that are contained in the structure of the game. So an immigrant can scream, “You dirty Mick!” “Throw that Kike out!” and etc., and there are no repercussions. (It reminds me of something I read in a memoir written by an Iranian who had moved to America. He loved going to soccer games back in Iran, because it was an atmosphere of freedom, and people could scream epithets against the government – and in the roar of the crowds – you were safe.) In Ragtime, the free-wheeling insult-heavy behavior of the people of all races/religions in the bleachers was an eye-opening experience for the little white boy who attends the game with his father in Ragtime – and indicative of the “leveling” experience of being a sports fan. No wonder an immigrant would be fascinated by that aspect of baseball. (It exists, too, in the more modern version of international soccer/rugby/football – although often the hostility in the stands turns murderous, xenophobic, etc. See Bill Buford’s terrifying book Among the Thugs or Ryszard Kapuscinski’s brilliant essay “The Soccer War,” included in the book of the same name – The Soccer War.)

So Barzun writing about baseball is fascinating: he knows the game, but he can SEE it in a fresh way, because he didn’t imbibe it from his first breath. He’s also a hell of a writer, so there’s THAT as well. He can look at the well-known game and describe it, not just the plays, but what the plays (and the rules) SAY about not only the game, but America itself. He is refreshingly uncynical. Cynicism is often seen as the mark of intelligence. Such a boring (and incorrect) attitude. Once again, as I keep saying in other posts, because I can’t help it and it comes up every other day: can’t people accept more “both/and” in their lives, instead of constantly gravitating towards “either/or”?

There’s a DeToqueville-ish vibe to this: describing America and baseball to (presumably) a European audience.

I love his interpretation of the role of the shortstop. And the observation about the “World Series,” which, honestly, even as an American who grew up loving baseball, never occurred to me before. (I also love, in a later section, not excerpted below, Barzun’s description of football, and why it doesn’t appeal to him as much: “To watch a football game is to be in prolonged neurotic doubt as to what you’re seeing. It is more like an emergency happening at a distance than a game.” Now I don’t know about you, but that’s FUNNY to me.)

Excerpt from Baseball: A Literary Anthology, edited by Nicholas Davidoff. From God’s Country and Mine, by Jacques Barzun

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game – and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams. The big league games are too fast for the beginner and newspapers don’t help. To read them with profit you have to know a language that comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice. Here is scholarship that takes effort on the part of the outsider, but it is so bred into the native that it never becomes a dreary round of technicalities. The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experienced in the fall of ’51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers, from whom the league pennant was snatched at the last minute, give us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like. Baseball is Greek in being national, heroic, and broken up in the rivalries of city-states. How sad that Europe knows nothing like it! Its Olympics generate anger, not unity, and its interstate politics follow no rules that a people can grasp. At least Americans understand baseball, the true realm of clear ideas.

That baseball fitly expresses the powers of the nation’s mind and body is a merit separate from the glory of being the most active, agile, varied, articulate, and brainy of all group games. It is of and for our century. Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world. The idea of baseball is a team, an outfit, a section, a gang, a union, a cell, a commando squad – in short, a twentieth-century setup of opposite numbers.

Baseball takes its mystic nine and scatters them wide. A kind of individualism thereby returns, but it is limited – eternal vigilance is the price of victory. Just because they’re far apart, the outfield can’t dream or play she-loves-me-not with daisies. The infield is like a steel net held in the hands of the catcher. He is the psychologist and historian for the staff – or else his signals will give the opposition hits. The value of his headpiece is shown by the iron-mongery worn to protect it. The pitcher, on the other hand, is the wayward man of genius, whom others will direct. They will expect nothing from him but virtuosity. He is surrounded no doubt by mere talent, unless one excepts that transplanted acrobat, the shortstop. What a brilliant invention is his role despite its exposure to ludicrous lapses! One man to each base, and then the free lance, the trouble shooter, the movable feast for the eyes, whose motion animates the whole foreground.

The rules keep pace with this imaginative creation so rich in allusions to real life. How excellent, for instance, that a foul tip cuffed by the catcher gives the batter another chance. It is the recognition of Chance that knows no argument. But on the other hand, how wise and just that the third strike must not be dropped. This points to the fact that near the end of any struggle life asks for more than is needful in order to clinch success. A victory has to be won, not snatched. We find also our American innocence in calling “World Series” the annual games between the winners in each big league. The world doesn’t know or care and couldn’t compete if it wanted to, but since it’s us children having fun, why, the world is our stage. I said baseball was Greek. Is there not a poetic symbol in the new meaning – our meaning – of “Ruth hits Homer”?

Once the crack of the bat has sent the ball skimmiting left of second between the infielder’s legs, six men converge or distend their defense to keep the runner from advancing along the prescribed path. The ball is not the center of interest as in those vulgar predatory games like football, basketball, or polo. Man running is the force to be contained. His getting to first or second base starts a capitalization dreadful to think of: every hit pushes him on. Bases full and a homer make four runs, while the defenders, helpless without the magic power of the ball lying over the fence, cry out their anguish and dig up the sod with their spikes.

But fate is controlled by the rules. Opportunity swings from one side to the other because innings alternate quickly, keep up spirit in the players, interest in the beholders. So does the profusion of different acts to be performed – pitching, throwing, catching, batting, running, stealing, sliding, signaling. Blows are similarly varied. Flies, Texas Leaguers, grounders, baseline fouls – praise God the human neck is a universal joint! And there is no set pace. Under the hot sun, the minutes creep as a deliberate pitcher tries his feints and curves for three strikes called, or conversely walks a threatening batter. But the batter is not invariably a tailor’s dummy. In a hundredth of a second, there may be a hissing rocket down right field, a cloud of dust over first base – the bleachers all a-yell – a double play, and the other side up to bat.