Game One

I didn't write "Casey at the Bat," Ernest Lawrence Thayer did in 1888. But I thought it worth remembering after Game One of the American League Championship Series. I understand it's in the public domain, so here's your chance to enjoy it again.

 

The outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to the hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, “If only Casey could but get a whack at that—
We’d put up even money now, with Casey at the bat.”

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a hoodoo, while the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despisèd, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from five thousand throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It pounded on the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey’s manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey’s bearing and a smile lit Casey’s face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt ‘twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his
     shirt;
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance flashed in Casey’s eye, a sneer curled Casey’s lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the
     air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped—
“That ain’t my style," said Casey. “Strike one!” the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled
     roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore;
“Kill him! Kill the umpire!” shouted someone on the stand;
And it’s likely they’d have killed him had not Casey raised his
     hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey’s visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the dun sphere flew;
But Casey still ignored it and the umpire said, “Strike two!”

“Fraud!” cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered
     “Fraud!”
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles
     strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn’t let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey’s lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey’s blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favoured land the sun is shining bright,
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light;
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children
     shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.

The Trouble with Research

 My novel is not about the Middle East. But in researching it I came across a remarkable story that anyone who thinks about today’s Middle East should read.

Needing to improve on my high-school-level understanding of World War I and the subsequent peace conference in Paris, I bought and began consuming a library shelf or two of books about the Great War, how it began and the manner of its conclusion. I was especially interested in learning what kind of Allied reasoning had required the mutilation of Hungary. Unlike the punishment of Germany, the post-war dismemberment of Hungary seemed like nothing more than the fruit of Georges Clemenceau’s private stubbornness combined with his ignorance of eastern Europe. Unlike Germany, Hungary hadn’t eagerly prosecuted the war, though it was the Austro-Hungarian empire that launched the first attack. The Hungarian prime minister István Tisza was the only official among the Central Powers to oppose the war, arguing correctly that it would lead to a disastrous weltkrieg (world war). He appears to have been the first to use that term. But Hungary’s punishment by the Treaty of Trianon was far greater than Germany’s by the Treaty of Versailles.

The problem with pursuing such research is that it becomes so easy to go astray. Before I had resolved my Clemenceau question I happened to pick up a dog-eared, paperback copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s account of his role in organizing the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule—the same events portrayed in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”  While reading this, drawn in by Lawrence’s lyrical prose, I happened to hear a radio interview with an author who was saying that at the end of the first war the question of who would rule the Middle East had been decided in a five-minute conversation between the French prime minister Clemenceau and the British prime minister David Lloyd George. The book was titled Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. What he said sounded very much like my suspicion about what happened to Hungary. So I needed to know how reliable the author Scott Anderson was and how much he knew about Clemenceau. I found his book well researched and his Clemenceau-Lloyd George anecdote confirmed by the historian Margaret MacMillan in her detailed account of the peace conference, Paris 1919.

The remarkable five-minute conversation that sealed the future of the Middle East took place secretly in a London townhouse a year and a half before the Paris peace agreements were concluded, and it broke all the British promises made to the Arabs during their revolt against the Turks, a sad conclusion to the epic tale of the Arab struggle for self-rule. The result was a map drawn to suit European needs and ignore the tribal and sectarian concerns of the Arabs. We westerners shouldn’t wonder why Islamic extremists still focus their anger on us.

The view, which I gather is widely held, that a collection of self-important but small-minded European leaders blundered into the first World War for reasons that had more to do with self aggrandizement and fear of losing their power than with the welfare of their people seems a roughly accurate if over-simplified summary of the cause. The massive human slaughter they created was followed by a peace arrangement that ensured more world-wide war and tension, up to and including the recent beheadings in the Middle East. 

Such a Dog?

Michiko Kakutani in this morning's Times reviewed a new novel titled The Dog by Joseph O’Neill, poor fellow. She found nothing in it to like, nothing at all. The story she found static and shallow, unconcerned with large issues, and without emotional power. The narration was suffocating and the main character generic. “None of this,” she wrote, “is remotely interesting to the reader.”

Why then did she write the review? And why did the Times put it on the front of The Arts section—or indeed anywhere in the paper? Why did they think readers would be interested in a book she found so totally boring? Aren’t most boring books ignored and left to die of neglect?

If the Times reviewed it because O’Neill’s previous book Netherland had been warmly received in 2008, was it necessary to torpedo his new one so thoroughly and leave the landscape littered with its wreckage? It makes one wonder about motives. At least, that might explain why some authors do not read reviews.

Now comes the Sunday Book Review section on August 7 with its front page devoted to a review of the same book, The Dog, but written by novelist Lawrence Osborne who quite liked it.

He found the narrator “wrapped up in an erudite and deliciously comic game of cat and mouse with a world that will never reward him or even treat him fairly.” He found the “mad lingo...exquisite and wonderfully overcooked....Perhaps,” he added, “it’s well beyond the ken of your average New York lawyer.”  (Or book critic?)

“With a consummate elegance,” Osborne concluded, “The Dog turns in on itself in imitation of the dreadful circling and futility of consciousness itself. Its subplots go nowhere, as in life. But, unlike life, its wit and brio keep us temporarily more alive than we usually allow ourselves to be.”

Contrast that concluding sentence of Osborne’s with Kakutani’s last sentence:

“Alas, in The Dog, the narrator barely budges from his unhappy little cocoon, and there are no captivating characters...to alleviate his spiral of self-pity—or the reader’s boredom.”

So, there you have it: The Dog is either elegant and witty or unbearably awful.  

Telling the Painful Part

In the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Bob Timberg and I worked together in The Baltimore Sun’s Washington Bureau. He covered the White House, arguably the most challenging and visible of the bureau’s regular assignments, and became one of the most respected reporters in town.

That was remarkable only because of his unique burden. Bob’s face and hands had been painfully disfigured by burn scars that often caused strangers to look away. His friends knew he’d hit a land mine in Vietnam, but neither he nor we talked about it. The war had been over for fifteen years and Bob, it seemed, had put it behind him without anger or bitterness. An amiable, thoughtful, and energetic colleague, he devoted himself to uncovering stories no one else had, including many connected to the Iran-Contra scandal.  

In quiet moments, though, I confess I wondered what rage must simmer behind that mask, what he felt about the war and his contemporaries who had refused to go and felt righteous about it. And I wondered how he had overcome the physical and psychic scars of his war to build such a successful career.

Now, twenty-four years later, he has told us in a gutsy and brutally honest memoir titled Blue-Eyed Boy.

Timberg, a handsome Naval Academy graduate, was a Marine first lieutenant delivering a payroll near Da Nang in January 1967 when the track vehicle he was riding on suddenly threw him up on a cloud of flame that wiped out his future.

He wrote about it reluctantly, he says in the Prologue, “to remember how I decided not to die. Not to let my future die.”  He has published three other highly regarded books, posted a successful 30-year career in newspapers, and edited a prestigious military journal, but he calls the decision to reclaim his future his “most significant achievement.”

In his very personal telling I found this long and arduous journey, the rebuilding of his life, his face, and his earning capacity, an emotionally difficult tale to read but one impossible to put aside. He endured thirty-five surgeries—one on his eyelids without anesthesia—a monstrous depression, and the stares of children and adults, then returned to a culture that hated his war and disdained and abused those who fought it.

But there’s neither self-pity nor self-praise here. He frankly describes his role in destroying marriages to two loving and loyal women and the anger he felt toward those contemporaries who “relied on world-class duplicity to avoid duty in Vietnam. And then claimed the moral high ground.”

The voice is authentic Timberg. You can hear it in the Prologue:

“ ‘Reclaimed my future’ has a bullshit, self-help-book sound that I hate,” he writes. “Don’t worry, I won’t resort to it again, at least I don’t think I will. But I know there is something true here, something real and fragile...something essentially human about what I fought my way through.”

We’re all the richer for his having the courage and generosity to share it. Everyone with a stake in war—and that’s all of us, whether Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, or the next one—should read Blue-Eyed Boy. 

Land of Easy Living

This osprey appeared on our neighbor's dock one fine morning looking like the conductor of an all-gull orchestra. Eventually the gulls left, but he stayed for seven and a half hours. He didn't leave until, as we walked toward him in the late afternoon to see if he had been wounded, he peacefully went home to the green light at the end of the dock.

The Moon is Written

In the much-too-long time since last I reported, I have not only finished the first draft of the novel, but completed three major revisions, some of them with the help of very perceptive readers. Was it necessary to abandon the blog to finish the novel? It seems that, for me at least, it was. In any event, that is the way it worked, and I don’t believe I could have done it otherwise. My apologies to those who hoped for more regular postings, but there’s good news. Now that the manuscript is finished there’s time to blog, and blog I will—about what happened in the intervening time (was it really two years?) and what’s happening now.

Stay tuned. More to come. 

Santorum's Choice

It was an odd place, historically speaking, for Rick Santorum to make this particular speech. If his campaign did not know the history of it, they are incompetent. If they did know and chose Herrin, Illinois, anyway they should explain.

Herrin was the site of a brutal massacre of strikebreakers in 1922, an event in which 23 men died and which President Harding called a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country."

Santorum, who has grown fond of presenting his candidacy as one of historic necessity, cites the Constitution and the Civil War as comparable moments of urgency. Yesterday without mentioning Herrin’s bloody history he issued there a ringing call to action.

 Exhorting his crowd to remember the Constitution writers’ pledge of “our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor,” he told his audience that “your honor is on the line.” The torch of freedom the patriots passed down could go out, he warned, “if we are not successful in this election...if you walk out of here and not just vote for me, but you actually do the duty of freedom: actually work hard, call your friends, post this up on Facebook, tweet about it, write about it....”

Herrin and Williamson County are not like the rest of Illinois. Paul Angle, in his 1992 book Bloody Williamson, wrote that in this county murder "was no novelty" but an indigenous condition. Historically, dating to before the Civil War, it was a place of blood vendettas, vigilante lawlessness, quick tempers, sudden violence, racist lynching, Klan rule, massacres, kangaroo courts, and corrupt government. 

Here is an account of the massacre, excerpted from my unpublished memoir Murder He Wrote:

On the morning of June 22, 1922, just outside of Herrin an army of 500 striking miners and their sympathizers surrounded the Southern Illinois Coal Company compound on the edge of a new strip mine whose owner had broken a strike agreement.

All night there was shooting as company guards and strikebreakers took cover behind railroad ties and empty coal cars. Two union miners and one of the guards died, and explosions destroyed the mine's water supply. At dawn the besieged strikebreakers sent out a guard with a cook's apron tied to a broomstick offering surrender if they would be allowed to leave safely. A voice replied, "Come on out and we'll get you out of the county." As they were marched down the road toward Herrin's rail station the pro-union mob grew angrier and began shooting prisoners one at a time, starting with the mine superintendent. Someone who arrived in a car at that moment, later identified as a union officer named Hugh Willis, told the mob leaders not to shoot prisoners on the road but to take them into the woods and "kill all you can."

When the mass of prisoners approached a barbed wire fence and tried to climb over one got hung up, someone fired a pistol unleashing a wild volley of more gunfire. In the resulting slaughter nineteen men died. Some were hanged from trees. Some were pursued and executed. Wounded men crying for mercy or water were kicked and shot in the head. Several had their throats cut. Others were urinated upon as they lay dying. A Chicago newspaperman who tried to give water to one victim was threatened with a cocked rifle and a warning: "Keep away, God damn you!"

The horror of the Herrin Massacre galvanized the nation. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called it "the most brutal and horrifying crime that has ever stained the garments of organized labor." In the U.S. Senate it was compared with German atrocities in the recent war. President Harding called it a "shocking crime" that "shamed and horrified the country" and asked for legislation to allow punishment of such "barbarity" in federal instead of state courts.

Thirteen men were indicted and divided into two groups for trial. Eight of them in the Williamson County jail were given fans against the heat, a Victrola and phonograph records for entertainment, and home-cooked dinners. After all thirteen of them were found not guilty in spite of positive identification of the killers, State's Attorney Delos Duty announced he would pursue it no further.

"I tried to convince two juries . . .," he said. "I'm not complaining, but it's a hopeless proposition."

To paraphrase another Rick: Of all the towns, in all the counties, in all the states to make that speech, Santorum chose Herrin, Illinois.