The Southpaw Read online

  The Southpaw

  Mark Harris

  Copyright

  The Southpaw

  Copyright © 1953 by Mark Harris

  Cover art to the electronic edition copyright © 2012 by RosettaBooks, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  Electronic edition published 2012 by RosettaBooks LLC, New York.

  ISBN e-Pub edition: 9780795325342

  DEDICATION

  Holly says that many a man will write a book and then dedicate it to somebody. I said okay. I said I would dedicate it to the 100,000,000 boobs and flatheads that swallowed down the whole lies of Krazy Kress in his column of last September 30, 1952. The main reason I wrote this book was for their benefit in the first place, so they would have my side of the story, which is the true side, and not Krazy’s which is more or less of a lie from start to finish.

  But Holly said no. She said you cannot dedicate a book simply to “100,000,000 boobs and flatheads.” She said it would be best to pick out somebody that never believed Krazy to begin with, somebody that knows me for what I am no matter what. “Think of somebody that would never throw you a curve come thick or thin,” she said.

  So I lit on Donald and Britta Wetzel. Donald is a writer, 1 of the best, and Britta is an up and coming painter. They have 1 kid, name of David Richard Wetzel. This book is dedicated to the 3 of them.

  Contents

  Introduction

  Special Warning To All Readers!!!

  Official Roster

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  INTRODUCTION

  You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, but that ain’t no matter.

  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 1885

  First off I must tell you something about myself, Henry Wiggen, and where I was born and my folks.

  The Southpaw, 1953

  How I relished my sensation of mischief when, composing The Southpaw, I took many relaxing liberties with the English language—having “a broke leg,” for example, or “You have saw an outfielder start after a fly ball.” Yet I had always been, as I still am, the most respectful student of English. By the time I began to absorb Henry Wiggen I had immersed myself in three demanding programs in literature at two universities. I had published two proper books. I was ready to relax a little, to abandon my grammatical values, to tell things in Henry Wiggenese after ten years of the most correct academic writing:

  Then the train slows and you got to be quick…. They just slow to a creep, and if you’re an old man or woman or if you got a broke leg or something of the sort I don’t know how you get off…. You just throw your bags clear and you swing down off on the cement platform, and you fall away the way the train is going, and then you go back for your bags. Now you are in Perkinsville.

  The last time I come by train through Perkinsville it was a rainy night and the platform was slick and I damn near skidded when I hit the cement. You have saw an outfielder start after a fly ball on wet grass and how he skids before his spikes take hold. That was how I skidded on the wet platform. But nothing come of it. It was midnight or after, and it was quiet on the square, and I cut across past the Embassy Theater and down past Borelli’s barber shop where I remember a long time ago they had a big picture of Sad Sam Yale hanging over the coat-hooks. But they have since took down the picture of Sam and put up 1 of me. Now my picture is took down, too, and the space is bare.

  Next to Borelli’s is Fred Levine’s cigar store where you can get most any magazine, in particular magazines like “The Baseball Digest” and “Ace Diamond Tales” and such newspapers as “The Sporting News” and 1,000 other things.

  That deep reader who so nimbly leaped from the train in pursuit of his suitcases was Henry Whittier Wiggen, a southpaw baseball player who had just pitched his first glorious winning summer season of big-league baseball for the New York Mammoths.

  He was then twenty-one years old and I was thirty.

  Now after the passage of time he remains twenty-one years old and I am eighty.

  Oddly, scenes of Perkinsville as Henry relates them in The Southpaw exist in my mind as having been located not at all in Perkinsville, N.Y., but in Mount Vernon, N.Y., where I was born, attended schools, and played all team sports in season, baseball especially, as hard as I could. I have never seen Perkinsville. It does not exist.

  Borelli’s barber shop and Fred Levine’s cigar store are real enough and visible to my mind, but they are in Mount Vernon under slightly different names to protect the innocent. The Embassy Theater continued to exist under its own name: in the Embassy we boys dreamed our American futures as we saw them in the powerful films and sensational screen stars of the 1930s, and all this for ten cents on Saturday afternoon.

  A photograph of Sad Sam Yale hung above the coat-hooks in Borelli’s barber shop. It also hung for years over Henry’s bed.

  “You may not believe it,” Henry confesses in The Southpaw,

  but I used to talk to that picture. Practically every night when I went to bed I looked up at Sam and I said, “Well, Sam, I am 19 years old and we are off to spring training.” I thought 19 was awful old. The bed becomes a car to me, and I shoved over behind the wheel and opened the door and left Sam in, and I would say, “You got your glove and shoes and all?”

  He would say, “How is that great left arm of yours, Henry old boy?”

  “Never better,” I would say. “How many games do you think we ought to win between us this coming year?”

  He would say, “Well, 25 for me and 20 for you,” and then he would laugh and I would laugh and we would argue about who was the best pitcher in baseball, me or him, and laugh and joke and zoom along at 60, and all the people along the way would look at us and say, “There goes Henry Wiggen and Sad Sam Yale off to spring training. Notice how friendly they look. They are probably great friends, them 2.”

  Somewhere in about that point I drifted off to sleep. But I must of begun that trip with Sam 1,000 times at least over the years. This is the first time I ever told a soul.

  One morning in 1943, when I too was twenty, I rode off to army life in a City of Mount Vernon “G” bus, which conveniently paused in front of our house on Lincoln Avenue. Family and friends waved me away.

  My sister, Martha, who was eleven years younger than I, stood among the delegation seeing me off. She was certain that I would be killed in the war. That morning she cried all the way to school. This she told me many years afterward.

  Martha was left-handed. Eventually, of course, and as a direct result of my
knowledge of my sister, I created Henry Wiggen left-handed and called his book The Southpaw. “He was a left-hander in a right-handed world.” So ran the publisher’s advertisement. My sister Martha was the first left-handed person whom I had known to be a victim of her handedness. But where was justice here? It was not her fault that she was a lefty. All she asked when she graduated from high school and went to work was a beginner’s job with the telephone company, but because she was left-handed, she was denied the work. I was stung, as Martha was, by the gross unfairness of this decision against her. The event hit home for me, fired my indignation. How could such senseless discrimination exist?

  But I had not heard the last of injustice. When I was in the army other ideas soon crossed my mind, the most important of which, I believe, was one which many people in the United States are undoubtedly tired of hearing. We still grapple with the so-called race question. Black people, white people, segregation. This was all new to me, down South where I was shipped, this segregation, and all this discussion of the relationship between the races.

  I had not heard this matter much discussed in Mt. Vernon. But now the whole army, or at least the boys of my barracks, were mentioning blacks and telling me how unworthy black people were in every department of life. Thereafter every barracks where I was lodged was dominated by young white men who far into the night reviled the black race. This was the first I had heard so close to me of this deep prejudice. Indeed, back home the black people of Mount Vernon didn’t seem to be aware that so many white people hated them so irrationally. Black women of Mount Vernon came and worked for my mother. Other black women came and worked for my grandmother. The outstanding athlete of our high school was a black fellow named Eddie Williams, whom everyone admired. Besides Eddie we had perhaps ten or twelve black students among the several hundred students at A. B. Davis High.

  Home in Mount Vernon, I had lately begun to emerge as a sort of writer. I wrote news and gossip for the Davis Hi-News, and I composed short timely passages privately ridiculing everyone except myself and my friends. But now, in the army in Georgia, I embarked upon something distinctly different. I no longer cared to amuse people. Rather, I undertook to write a novel whose hero was a black soldier. I recognized how trivial my earlier writing had been. Everything I had ever written now struck me as pointless. Wasn’t it our enemy, Germany, who thought of itself as the land of the Master Race? Therefore America too was Hitlerian. My whole barracks was a Nazi encampment.

  I sent the manuscript of my novel to a publisher in New York, who assigned me to an editor named Walter Pistole. It was Walter who discovered a title for my book which fit it well. We called it Trumpet to the World, from Othello. Desdemona speaks: “That I did love the Moor to live with him, My downright violence and storm of fortunes may trumpet to the world.” Yes, I wanted the world to hear what I was thinking. I wanted to trumpet to the world things I thought we should hear. My publisher and other people at work at the publishing house warned me that I was young and dogmatic, possessing excessive zeal. I suppose there was no doubt about it. But I had had no idea that many of my thoughts had preceded me into society.

  To this day I see my title, vivid on the bright yellow jacket of the book, which the publisher manufactured and sent to me.

  As a student at Denver University, working for a master’s degree in writing, and with the G.I. Bill to encourage me, I wrote a biography of Vachel Lindsay. (“Vachel” rhymes, Lindsay said, with “Rachel,” not with “satchel.”) My direction as a writer had begun to reveal itself. In my writing I created heroes I admired. My first hero had been Willie Jim Ingram, the Georgia boy, central character of Trumpet to the World. My second hero was to be Vachel Lindsay, poet of Springfield, Illinois, born down the street from the home of Abraham Lincoln. My third hero, whom I had not yet imagined, was to be Henry Wiggen, baseball player, pitcher for the New York Mammoths.

  My wife Josephine and I had “discovered” Vachel Lindsay, so to speak, in Springfield, in 1946, where Josephine was a reporter for International News Service. I was employed in the same work for the same company in St. Louis.

  Lindsay had written many poems, often in the spirit of his crusading for urgent social, political, and aesthetic ideals. For several years he had traveled widely over the United States, reciting his powerful poems for public audiences. Many of his poems were rhythmical, musical, often loud, written to be recited by many voices at once, lending themselves to excitement among audiences for whom some of his poetry had keen political implications. Lindsay was enormously prolific. Some of his most memorable or best-known of his poems are these: “The Chinese Nightingale,” “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight,” “Springfield Magical,” “The Leaden-Eyed,” “On the Building of Springfield,” “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken,” “The Ghosts of the Buffaloes,” “Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,” “General William Booth Enters Into Heaven,” “The Booker Washington Trilogy.”

  I felt myself identifying with Lindsay. I had begun to understand the struggle to write well and to merge my struggle with issues of conscience. I thought to write Vachel Lindsay’s biography. Book-writing had come to seem to me the only work worth doing. I became so excited by the thought of writing the biography of Vachel Lindsay that I somewhat impulsively quit my job in St. Louis and moved to Springfield.

  Inexperienced as I was I expected to wrap up this job in weeks; months perhaps. Would I have begun this tough task had I known the long way ahead, the complex poetry I had yet to begin to understand, and the struggle I would need to wage for friendship and support among the friends and relations of the late Vachel Lindsay?

  My status as a student seemed to make my biographical work harder, not easier. I was reading and writing and teaching and conducting research all at once. The book about Lindsay, which I had begun in 1946, I did not soon complete. The more I learned about my task the more I was tempted to find answers to everything I thought I knew. The manuscript I submitted to the English Department was hardly done, even as late as 1951, when I presented it to the faculty. Although my book was still unfinished, it was at five hundred pages nevertheless formidable enough to encourage several professors at Denver University to read it and discuss it with me. In May they declared me worthy to receive a master’s degree in English.

  Master I may have been, and Josephine the master’s partner. Our baby Hester was six months old, our Denver days had come to their end, and our plan was to travel to Minneapolis for American Studies at the University of Minnesota. Our money was low. I was restless to write. I often began to write a novel, but it faded and dropped off the table into nothing.

  On September 21, 1950, at the beginning of our final school year at Denver, I began to write a novel about a baseball player. I wrote “7 pages on my baseball novel,” my diary reports, ceased briefly, soon resumed, and encountered every day a new outlook and a new accent for the charming left-handed boy who lived in non-existent nearby Perkinsville.

  It was the news of Jackie Robinson’s coming to baseball’s big leagues that had turned my attention to baseball. Truly the event was, in my mind at least, a historic occasion. America’s national game now could be said to have become national. Robinson played in 1946 for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ minor-league affiliate at Montreal. In 1947 he rose from the minors to the majors, where he played for the Dodgers for ten seasons. He was enormously successful as an individual star, as an inspiration to his teammates, and to countless other Americans. During Robinson’s decade at Brooklyn his team won five pennants and one World Series.

  I felt that something I had dreamed had come true. I had played a small part in this triumph of justice. In Trumpet to the World my Willie Jim wrote a letter to his son: “I will teach you to plant yourself square under a fly ball. Perhaps in all your life you will learn nothing so well as you will learn to play baseball. By the time you are a young man black men will play baseball in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh and Washington and St. Louis, and crowds will cheer them for what they do, not noticing their c
olor in the heat of play.”

  When Jackie Robinson entered our national life he was thereafter forever on my mind. (The names of baseball players of the year 1951 had already entered my current book, City of Discontent—from twentieth-century baseball I had borrowed Hatten, Hibben, Newcombe, Haney, and Slaughter for nineteenth-century Illinois.)

  I found a little job: summer employment. Josephine and I exchanged our daily roles. She accepted work at the Denver University Press, and I remained at home with our baby and my typewriter. I had agreed with my friend Halina Silverman that I would work for her as a counselor at a summer camp sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of Denver. The salary was as sufficient as it was urgent: $210 for the summer, $245 if enrollment permitted. It would pay our way to Minneapolis, and settle us a bit once we were there.

  Our training for camp began with orientation of the counselors. I participated in orientation. I ate cook-outs by the fire, I sang songs, and I learned many children’s games. But my mind was often absent. I soon saw that I could not at the same time become a camp counselor and write forward on a book whose challenge increased as the days flew by.

  But if I were to resign from the camp I would seriously inconvenience my dear friend Halina. Even so, Halina permitted me to leave before I had set my eyes on a single camper.

  I remained at home with our baby and my typewriter. When the baby slept, my manuscript advanced. I plunged forward. By the end of July I had written through page 467, telling my diary on July 26 that “I think I will now have to stop writing while we rent the house and get started on the big moving job.”

  Twenty-five years later in an autobiographical note I recalled our departing in the following way: “We left Denver on Monday, August 6—Josephine, baby, and I. All we owned was in the car. The most valuable article by far was the developing manuscript of the book soon called ‘The Southpaw.’”

  One day in 1953, shortly before Publication Day for The Southpaw, I visited with John Maloney in his office at the Bobbs-Merrill Company in New York. John had been editor for my book, and now our work was done. John said, “I’m anxious to see what the world makes of it.”