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Baseball811.pptLecture 8:
Bernard Malamud’s The Natural
Bernard Malamud’s The Natural
Published in 1952, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” ranks with “Shoeless Joe” as one of the two greatest baseball novels ever written and that from a critical standpoint is arguably the best. The novel was made into a highly successful film in 1984 with Robert Redford in the starring role as Malamud’s protagonist, Roy Hobbs.
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Bernard Malamud
Malamud, born in New York, was as unlikely a writer of an award-winning baseball novel as Kinsella. With Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, Malamud is one of the three great Jewish novelists of the second half of the twentieth century. He is best known for such novels as “The Assistant” (1957) and “The Fixer” (1967) which portray the plight of Jews in mid-century New York and Soviet controlled Russia respectively. He wrote “The Natural” while he was teaching freshman composition at Oregon State College, a school whose English department he ridiculed in his one academic novel, “A New Life,” which was published when he left OSC (now Oregon State University) in 1961.
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Malamud
After leaving Oregon, Malamud accepted a teaching position at Bennington College in Vermont where he remained for the rest of his professional life. While at Bennington, he wrote “Rembrandt’s Hat” (1973), “The Tenants” (1971), “Dubin’s Lives” (1979), and “God’s Grace” (1982). He died of a heart attack in 1986.
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Malamud
He [Frank] asked her [Helen] what book she was reading.
"The Idiots. Do you know it?"
"No. What's it about?"
"It's a novel."
"I'd rather read the truth," he said.
"It is the truth."
From Malamud’s “The Assistant”
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The Story
Roy Hobbs is The Natural, a brash19-year old baseball player whom the gods have favored with extraordinary athletic gifts, which they have however tempered with the curse of excessive pride. As the novel opens, he is on board a train to Chicago with Sam Simpson, the scout who discovered him. Their fellow passengers include Max Mercy, a famous sportswriter, Walter "Whammer" Wambold, a Ruthian slugger, and Harriet Bird, a mysterious beauty. At an unscheduled stopover, Sam bets Max that Roy can strike out The Whammer on three pitches. Roy succeeds, but the consequences are tragic for Sam, and ultimately for Roy. Malamud sets Roy up as a knight errant, his bat a lance, sallying forth to do battle, but Harriet Bird distracts him from his quest, and Roy pays a horrible price.
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The Story
Fifteen years later, Roy shows up in the dugout of the New York Knights and tells manager Pop Fisher that he's their new outfielder. Pop is initially reluctant to utilize this unlikeliest of rookies, particularly because his dishonest partner in ownership of the Knights, Judge Goodwill Banner, has been foisting lousy players on him all season, hoping that if he can drive the team into the ground Pop will be forced to give up his share of the team. But fate intervenes and Roy is soon leading the Knights to a league pennant. The team's sudden surge is particularly meaningful to Pop, a former player himself who made a costly misplay, "Fisher's Flop," that cost his team a World Series. For Pop the pennant would redeem this blunder.
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The Story
Over the course of the season Roy gets involved with Pop's lovely niece, Memo, and her friend, the gambler Gus Sands. Eventually his desire for Memo, and his need for sufficient money to keep her in the style she desires, once again leads him astray from his quest. Though he finally strives to redeem himself, and Pop, it is too late; the gods reveal that he has lost their favor when his hand hewn bat, Wonderboy, shatters in the final game of the season. The natural gifts, which he has squandered pursuing, women, fame, and fortune, and the tool forged for him by the gods, Wonderboy, his Excalibur, desert him in his moment of trial. He is proven unworthy.
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Say It Ain’t So
In the end, after he throws the bribe money into Goodwill Banner’s face, Roy takes to street where he realizes, “I never did learning anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again.” In short, as Earl Wasserman notes in assessing Malamud’s novel, “The Natural” weaves “both real and mythic, particular and universal, ludicrous melodrama and spiritual probing – Ring Lardner and [Carl] Jung” into a rich fabric of betrayal, hopes, and a pointless human tragedy.
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Structure and Meaning
In The Natural, Malamud weaves the Arthurian legend, the Homeric epic, numerous actual incidents from baseball history, and a surprisingly Puritan morality into a literary masterpiece, a uniquely American myth. Roy Hobbs is an American Everyman, seeking greatness, encountering evil and disillusionment, and finally making peace with himself and with the world in which he is forced to live with whatever dignity he is able to salvage.
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The Baseball Legacy
All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say, 'There goes the greatest
hitter who ever lived'.
-Ted Williams
“I want to be the best who ever was in the game.”
- Roy Hobbs
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Eddie Waitkus
Roy’s shooting by Harriet Bird is directly modeled on a 1949 incident when Phillie first baseman Eddie Waitkus was shot in a hotel room by a deranged young woman who had been obsessed with for years.
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Interpretation
The book tells the story of the world's most ill-fated ballplayer. From his destruction as a young man at the hands of a woman who first seduces than almost mortally wounds him when she shoots him in her hotel room, to his cynical return to the game fifteen years later, Malamud dangles the possibility of his success which proves to be just out of his reach. We root for Roy, convincing ourselves that it is not hopeless and we follow him from one disaster to another.
“She pulled the trigger (thrum of bull fiddle). The bullet cut a silver line across the water. He sought with his bare hands to catch it, but it eluded him and, to his horror, bounced into his gut. A twisted dagger of smoke drifted up from the gun barrel. Fallen on one knee he groped for the bullet, sickened as it moved, and fell over as the forest flew upward, and she, making muted noises of triumph and despair, dancer on her toes around the sickened hero.”
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Interpretation
As Roy Hobbs pursues his immortality in the house of baseball, he is stopped at every turn by circumstances, by events, by his own flawed choices. Malamud achieves an almost Greek tragic element to his novel - Hobbs, brought low by, in part, perhaps, his own hubris, is still a strongly sympathetic character, and we watch his life tumble around him with spasms of pain. He has numerous victories within the story, but all are on the field. His victorious moments off it are all fleeting, or quickly made hollow by what happens to him.
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Interpretation
The greatest achievement of the novel, however, is that we still believe, right up until the end, that Roy could make it - that there might be redemption for him. He stumbles, falls, falls again, but he is like the proverbial frog in the math problem, trapped in a well. For every three feet up, he falls two feet back, but that's still a foot of progress at each hop.
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Interpretation
“Malamud has done something which—now that he has done it!—looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology.”
Alfred Kazin
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A Contemporary “Natural”
Some years ago, the aifted Atlanta Brave rookie, Jeff Francoeur, was compared to the movie version of Roy Hobbs by teammate Tim Hudson. When told that in the novel, Hobbs strikes out, Francoeur laughed, “that’s why books suck.” Happily, many other players have read and understand Roy’s ordeal. Houston’s Collin McHugh, a key in their best season in years during 2015 and a player with whom I worked when he was with the Mets, could often be found sitting in his clubhouse reading serious literature.
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Novels into Film
A very substantial number of the novels and works of non-fiction have been made into theatrical films, many of which have been commercial successes. The novels we are studying are among them, and there are those who would argue that the artistic value of the films surpasses that of the original. This is particularly true of Shoeless Joe (Field of Dreams), though a similar case cannot be made for The Natural.
Film in its purest form is an art form, though a very different one from fiction or works of musical or painting. For one thing, by definition, it combines various art forms and thus is a multi-dimensional artistic medium. For another, the cost of making a major motion picture demands that the producer and director cater not just to that small subset of our population who enjoy good novels, music, and works of art, but a much wider audience who may be less sophisticated in their understanding of art.
Novels into Film
The serious filmmaker thus faces a complex problem: one must be true to the artistic media and still sell a product. The fact that movie companies are typically vertical organizations – that a film production company is usually a conglomerate with a variety of different products, only one of which is film, is very different than a publishing house or a record company. And the people who run these conglomerates are often more concerned with the profitability of a film than with its artistry. But film does provide us with a ready-made opportunity to examine the difference between real art and products designed simply to sell.
Novels into Film
Most films are formulaic and are designed to make us feel good by playing to the most fundamental of our emotions. They aim to please us so that we leave the theatre feeling all “warm and fuzzy.” The formula works in just about every film genre – the domestic drama, the western movie, science fiction, and yes, sport. In fact, films about sports offer filmmakers a ready made opportunity for formulaic construction. They champion the underdog who rises from obscurity and overcomes a raft of obstacles before winning the game, the pennant, the championship. And they chronicle the heroic lives of individuals we want to need to emulate, to admire.
Film as Formula
Consider, for example, the following films that are not based upon novels, but follow the afore-described formulaic construction:
Rudy
Rocky – all five of them
Hoosiers
Miracle
Fever Pitch
Cinderella Man
Any Given Sunday
Slap Shot
Football, basketball, hockey, boxing – sport films cover the whole waterfront and irrespective of the sport, the message is the same. The underdogs triumph; they win the big game, the big match. They make us feel good. And the filmmaker uses every device available – music, color, character, to captivate us.
Film as Formula: The Natural
With works of pure fiction like Rocky, one can argue that this is nothing more than good, clean fun. Real life stories like Rudy and Miracle taken on a bit of added meaning for us, since, after all, they did happen. But when we come to a film like The Natural, it’s – as they say- a whole different ballgame. Indeed, the film almost totally undercuts Malamud’s artistic vision and turns the most serious and penetrating baseball novel ever written into what, for lack of a better term, is simple “schlock.” Robert Redford is no Roy Hobbs and Hobbs’ final home run and subsequent return to his rural roots is at total odds with Malamud’s character whose life is a total failure.
Film as Formula
With works of pure fiction like Rocky, one can argue that this is nothing more than good, clean fun. Real life stories like Rudy and Miracle taken on a bit of added meaning for us, since, after all, they did happen. But when we come to a film like The Natural, it’s – as they say- a whole different ballgame. Indeed, the film almost totally undercuts Malamud’s artistic vision and turns the most serious and penetrating baseball novel ever written into what, for lack of a better term, is simple “schlock.” Robert Redford is no Roy Hobbs and Hobbs’ final home run and subsequent return to his rural roots is at total odds with Malamud’s character whose life is a total failure.
Baseball Films
Early baseball films like Babe Ruth and Pride of the Yankees could celebrate real-life baseball heroes, even though the facts about the Babe and Lou Gehrig might have been at odds with how they are portrayed on the screen. But with the demise of the baseball hero as a cultural icon, more modern films like Major League, For Love of the Game, Bull Durham and The Natural chronicle the lives of fictional heroes who don’t share the flaws of real-life ballplayers
