The Great American Novel (1973) is one of Philip Roth’s lesser known, more disheveled novels, though it remains one of the best baseball novels ever written. It’s the story of the Rupert Mundys, a big-league baseball team that spent World War II perpetually on the road once the military took over its home field. Because it’s Roth, it’s also the story of baseball in the American imagination as Roth imagines America, which tends to be closer to the reality of America than the stud-spangled fantasy the rest of us invent for ourselves. It’s baseball as a sport of contact with its own mythologies and those of America’s literary gods and libidinous obsessions — Melville, Hemingway, Hawthorne, bigotry, anti-communism, sex (“But this is not a book about tough cunts,” Smitty writes in his prologue. “Nat Hawthorne wrote that one long ago”). The book is difficult to follow in parts, but it’s meant to be. It’s a baseball game in hardcovers (or softcovers, if you want the savings.) As in a baseball game, preferably not on cacophonous ESPN, your mind can wander off and return without missing more than peanut shavings. When something more riveting does happen than tales of balls and pop-ups, Roth seizes you by the eyeballs and doesn’t let go. Here’s one of those gems. Early in the book Smitty (“Call me Smitty” is the book’s whale of an opening line) goes on one of his Whitmanesque soliloquies—about farts. Read it out loud. It’s worth every sound and anything else your senses care, for nostalgia’s sake, to imagine. —PT
Kids love farts, don’t they? Even today, with all the drugs and sex and violence you hear about on TV, they still get a kick, such as we used to, out of a fart. Maybe the world hasn’t changed so much after all. It would be nice to think there were still a few eternal verities around. I hate to think of the day, when you say to an American kid, “Hey, want to smell a great fart?” and he looks at you as though you’re crazy. “A great what ? ““Fart. Don’t you even know what a fart is? ““Sure it’s a game—you throw one at a target. You get points.” “That’s a dart, dope. A fart. A bunch of kids sit around in a crowded place and they fart. Break wind. Sure, you can make it into a game and give points. So much for a wet fart, so much for a series, and so on. And penal-ties if you draw mud, as we called it in those days. But the great thing was, you could do it just for the fun of it. By God, we could fart for hours when we were boys! Somebody’s front porch on a warm summer night, in the road, on our way to school. Why, we could sit around a blacksmith’s shop on a rainy day doing nothing but farting, and be perfectly content. No movies in those days. No television. No nothin’. I don’t believe the whole bunch of us taken together ever had more than a nickel at any time, and yet we were never bored, never had to go around looking for excitement or getting into trouble. Best thing was you could do it yourself too. Yessir, boy knew how to make use of his leisure time in those days.”
Surprising, given the impact of the fart on the life of the American boy, how little you still hear about it; from all appearances it is still something they’d rather skip over in The Canterbury Tales at Valhalla High. On the other hand, that may be a blessing in disguise; this way’ at least no moneyman or politician has gotten it into his head yet to cash in on its nostalgic appeal. Because when that happens, you can kiss the fart good-bye. They will cheapen and degrade it until it is on a level with Mom’s apple pie and our flag. Mark my words: as soon as some scoundrel discovers there is a profit to be made off of the American kid’s love of the fart, they will be selling artificial farts in balloons at the circus. And you can just imagine what they’ll smell like too. Like everything artificial.
Yes, fans, as the proverb has it, verily there is nothing like a case of fecal impaction to make an old man wax poetic about the fart. Forgive the sentimental meandering.
—From The Great American Novel, by Philip Roth (Holt, Reinehart and Winston, 1973), pp. 12-13.
Darrell Smith (NortonSmitty) says
OK Pierre, it’s official. It took a fart column to convince me you’ve washed the taste of Cox out of your mouth. A good one too, worth committing to memory.
I was wondering what would happen to you. I saw no new stuff on Candides blog for a while and haven’t bought a NJ since I opened my Sunday paper to find Cal Thomas, but I knew you’d be updating your resume. As much as I appreciated your focused and barely suppressed anger on the editorial page, It’s good to see this side of you. It’s hard to be bitter when you’re contemplating the consequences of an underestimated anal discharge.
Nice to see you too emigrated here to Flagler Beach, or as I like to call it, Mayberry by the Sea. Hard to believe that in the vast liberal media empire there isn’t a bidding war for your services. Must be the French taint. Or you couldn’t pass on the opportunity to live in The Last Town In America With All White Garbage Men. (Not a racial comment, just observin’) I’m sure it won’ be for long.
Anyhoo, welcome. If you get out into the local watering holes I’d like to buy you a drink for all the times I’ve read one of your editorials and startled the ol’ lady at breakfast shouting HellYea and pumping my fist. I’m the older distinguished gentleman….. OK, I’m the fat older miserable biker bastard, half bald Viet Nam vet with a ponytail. I know that describes basically all of Florida, But a few things that will identify me: 1. I’ll be riding a cherry silver Norton Commando Interstate, I’ll be arguing politics (loudly and outnumbered), and if it’s late I’ll either be loudly quoting Manly Poetry (Kipling, Robert Service) and threatening anybody who tries to sneak away before I’m done, or else telling fart jokes.
Look for the bike in front of Finns, Rossi’s or sometimes the Gold Lion. They won’t let me in the DAV or Poor Walts since I told them I would go down on Jane Fonda on top of the Viet Nam Memorial Wall before I would shake William Westmorelands hand. Go figure.
E-mail me at [email protected] and I’ll be following you here. Good luck and don’t lose all of the anger.
” Inside every human breast, there lies a fund of hatred, envy anger, rancor and malice. Accumulating like venom in a serpents tooth, awaiting only an opportunity to vent itself. And then, to rage and storm like a Demon unchained…”
Comes in handy.
Smitty
Richard Cummings says
Roth’s writing in this passage is sophomoric at best. It is tedious and superficial, utterly without merit. His criticisms of America, while valid, are not well-done. The over-commercialism of the country is belabored to the point of redundancy. Roth is fortunate to have so many immature readers, infantile leftists and unsophisticated drones, who lap up his trivia as if it were profound. “Call me Smitty” as a send up of Melville is childish and derivative. The tragedy is how America got to Roth from Melville. Roth’s success is derived from the very same commercialism he laments and parodies. But I will give this to Roth. He has gotten away with it to the point that Harold Bloom, that gigantic grotesque, considers him to be America’s greatest writer. Those who think that Roth is America’s greatest writer also consider Bloom to be its greatest critic. This is the kind of ignorance that undermines America’s credibility as a center of culture instead of the tiresome and pathetic bastion of hypocrisy it has become.
Pierre Tristam says
Richard, let me know when your Allan Bloom Society is up and running.