The Natural by Bernard Malamud

After I finished The Caravaggio Shawl, the Samuel Steward mystery that I had borrowed from the library, I planned to walk over to the library and return it. That was Friday, which is also the day I write my sermons, lately at the library. Now that Jim is retired and home all day it’s hard for me to concentrate sitting in the apartment while he’s there, too. Friday was also the day that the Dodgers had their parade downtown celebrating their World Series win against the Yankees on Wednesday. I was looking forward to the parade, and I thought I might even get to see a little of it as the route started at City Hall and finished in front of the library. But walking over to the library that morning the crowds were already gathering, and huge, and the street in front of the library was completely closed off. Not able to get into the library from the front entrance, I thought I’d try the back. Getting there required walking several blocks around street closures and through thick crowds. By the time I got to the corner of 6th and Olive where I could turn to walk back toward the library, I realized I was a half a block from my club and decided I’d go there to write instead.

Because I never got to the library that day, I was unable to return The Caravaggio Shawl or to check out something new, so that evening, when I was wanting to start a new novel, I was limited to something from my own bookcase. I don’t own a lot of books, just four or five shelves of fiction, almost all of which I’ve already read and keep only because I loved it and think I might want to read it again sometime. So I went looking for something to read, and with the just completed World Series in mind was attracted to The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I had a paperback edition, a seventh printing dated 1966. It’s a used copy with “William M. Clements, Bryce Hospital, Chaplain’s Dept” written in the front cover. Bryce Hospital is a psychiatric facility in Alabama. Bill Clements was my professor of Pastoral Care at Claremont. I must have bought the book at a used book sale when I was in seminary between 1995 and 1998, but I know I first read The Natural many years earlier than that. The paperback fell apart in my hands as I read. The novel is from 1952.

Roy Hobbs is the natural. We meet him at age nineteen. He’s a young ballplayer, recruited by a scout, Sam Simpson, who discovered him playing ball somewhere out west (Idaho is implied). Sam is taking Roy by train to Chicago to try out for the Cubs. The book begins with an opening chapter titled, “Pre-Game”. The next section is titled “Batter Up!”. After that, the book is divided into chapters but unnumbered and untitled.

“Pre-Game” starts on the train. A young woman alone boards the train at one stop and Roy is immediately attracted to her, but she ignores him. Roy and Sam meet a couple of guys in the club car, Max Mercy, a sportswriter, sitting with Walter (the Whammy) Whambold, an American League MVP hitter. They’re reading in the newspaper about a serial killer, a woman, who kills star athletes by shooting them with silver bullets. Max teases the Hammer: “She’s knocked off a crack football boy, and now an Olympic runner. Better watch out, Whammer, she may be heading for a baseball player for the third victim” (p. 19). The train makes an extended stop to meet a doctor. Somebody had telegrammed ahead saying there was someone sick on the train. While they wait to get going again, Roy and Sam and others get off the train and check out a carnival that’s set up near the tracks. Roy wins prizes at a baseball throw. The Whammer comes up having won big at a batting cage. He’s got Harriet Bird on his arm, the woman who had boarded the train earlier and ignored Roy. The guys set up a competition, betting that Roy can strike out the Whammer. He does, but injures Sam, catching, who takes a fastball to his abdomen. They get back on the train with the doctor never having found the person who was supposedly sick. Now Harriet pays attention to Roy. Sam dies on the train of a raging fever, it’s implied he was the sick guy the doctor came to see in the first place. The chapter ends in Chicago. Roy is at the hotel when he gets a phone call from Harriet Bird inviting him to come to her room. He goes down to her. She greets him seductively and asks, “Roy, will you be the best there ever was in the game?” He answers, “That’s right” (p.40). She shoots him.

The rest of the novel takes place fifteen years later, all in the final two-thirds of one season of baseball. Roy is thirty-four. He’s survived the shooting but never made it to the big leagues. Now he’s been picked up for a fictional New York team called the “Knights.” The manager is “Pops” Fisher. Pops is desperate for the Knights to win a pennant, but it doesn’t seem likely. The team is in a slump. They’ve got one star player, “Bump” Bailey, but he’s not enough to carry the team and isn’t too interested in doing anything except look out for himself. Bump has a girlfriend, Memo Paris, Pops’ niece. Pops keeps Roy on the bench, deeming he’s too old to play.

Finally, in desperation, “On the morning of the twenty-first of June” Pops puts Roy into the game as a pinch hitter for Bump who made a bonehead play in the outfield. Pop tells Roy to, “Knock the cover off of it” (p. 79). Roy does exactly that in a thrilling scene, where Roy not only hits a home run and the ball comes unraveled, but it begins to rain and the game is called. The drought is over both literally, and for the Kinghts.

Bump ups his game to try to take the glory back from Roy but plays foolishly and ends up slamming himself into the outfield wall. He’s taken to the hospital and dies. Memo is grief-stricken, but Roy taken with her and Bump gone, starts to pursue her. Roy goes to the club owner, Judge Goodwill Banner to ask for a raise but the Judge refuses. Max Mercy, who think he knows Roy from somewhere but can’t place him, introduces Roy to a gambler named Gus Sands, who is also friendly with Memo, though much older than her. Roy can’t exactly figure out their relationship but is jealous of the attention she gives him.

The fans celebrate, “Roy Hobbs Day”. They shower him with gifts, including a car. Roy invites Memo to take a drive with him and surprisingly she agrees. They drive out toward the beach. She’s still ambivalent to his attention, and moody. She takes over the wheel and driving in the dark maybe hits a boy or his dog and won’t go back to check. She’s bad news, but Roy is still into her.

Roy has a slump of his own. Pops benches him and then tells him he’ll only play him if Roy gives up his personal handmade bat, “Wonderboy” that he made from a lighting struck tree as a boy. Roy refuses to give up his bat. Then on an away game, in Chicago, a truck driver tells Roy that he promised his sick boy that Roy would hit a homer for him. In the final inning Pop relents and lets Roy hit with Wonderboy. Roy takes two strikes and then a woman in the stands rises from her seat in a show of confidence in him. Earlier, Roy had been attracted to Memo, with her red hair, dressed in black to mourn Bump Bailey, and wondered how he would feel if the colors were reversed (pp. 87-88). Roy doesn’t notice but this woman, dark hair in a red dress, is exactly the opposite woman he wondered about (p. 147). He gets his homer.

He also gets the woman’s name and number and calls her. Her name is Iris Lemon. They have a date together where they drive out to the lake. He asks about her standing up and she says, “Because I hate to see a hero fail. There are so few of them” (p. 154). She’s Roy’s age, but already a grandmother from a teen-aged encounter that changed her life. She and Roy swim together in the lake, warm up around a campfire, and make love. But her being a grandmother turns him off.

The team, back on track, make it to the end of the season in great shape. “With three last ones to play against the lowly Reds, the Knights looked in. The worst that could possibly happen to them was a first-place tie with the Pirates–if the Pirates won their three from the Phils and the Knights lost theirs to the Reds–a fantastic impossibility the way Roy was mauling them” (pp. 178-179). But Memo sets up a premature celebration at the hotel. Roy gets deathly sick from eating too much and is hospitalized. At first they think it’s his appendix but when they get him on the operating table they see all the scars from being shot and they realize his guts are more messed up than a simple operation could fix. The doctor tells him he’ll be well enough to play the final game of the season (The Pirates win their three, and the Knights, without Roy, lose theirs, so there’s a tie-breaker) but continuing to play next season would kill him. The Judge comes to the hospital with an offer for Roy to throw the final game. Roy, realizing his career is over, accepts the deal.

During the game Roy gets a few chances to hit and plays badly in ways that don’t reveal he’s trying to lose. Iris shows up and Roy hits her with a foul ball. He rushes to her and she reveals she’s pregnant, whispering, “win for our boy” (p. 225). Roy goes in again. He breaks his bat, Wonderboy on a foul ball. His final at bat, he strikes out.

The final chapter Roy buries the broken halves of Wonderboy in the outfield, then he confronts the Judge and Gus Sands in their office where they’re laughing about the money they won. Memo is there, too, sneering that she never cared for him. “You filthy scum, I hate your guts and always have since the day you murdered Bump” (p. 236). Roy throws back the money he received and storms out into the night, his career, and life, ruined.

It’s a great book. I first read it maybe forty years ago when I read several baseball-related books; this one (made into a movie in 1984), Shoeless Joe by W. P. Kinsella (made into the movie Field of Dreams in 1989) and Eight Men Out by Eliot Asinof (made into a movie in 1988) about the black sox scandal. The writing is first-rate. It’s filled with great stories. The baseball scenes are suspenseful. When I was younger I remember feeling turned-off by the tragedy of it, not understanding why the first part of the story had to end with Roy getting shot, and disgusted with the older Roy for falling in with Memo who is clearly a bad influence and a distraction from his goal of success on the field. As an older man now, I understand Malamud’s point about the random tragedies of life and how our human flaws bring on our own downfall.

I know the first time I read it I totally didn’t get the references to the Parsifal legend, which I didn’t know about then. This time, the legend was in the forefront of my consciousness having just attended a performance of Wagner’s Parsifal at the Munich opera in July so I noticed it immediately. Roy Hobbs is the Parsifal character. He emerges from the forest, which is described in the opening train sequences as endless. Pops Fisher is Amfortas, the Fisher King, who presides over a barren wasteland, waiting for a hero to appear and restore the land. Pops presides over the Knights. His never-healing wound is a case of “athlete’s foot on my hands” (p. 46). Wonderboy is the spear, or staff, that Amfortas lost and Parsifal returns to him. Roy fails, though, because he isn’t the pure innocent he needs to be. He’s seduced by Memo, and then seduced further by the Judge’s offer to throw the game. He’s too attached to his own pride in becoming the “best there ever was in the game.” He rejects Iris’ pure-hearted love. He’s not the hero, Iris think he is.

The book, though realist, includes numerous dreams and scenes that feel like they might be fantasies, adding to the overall quality of legend or fable. The novel begins with Roy Hobbs dreaming of a golden baseball. Later in the opening chapter Sam dreams of coming across a baseball game of “twelve blond-bearded players, six on each side” (p. 17) terrific players who vanish when he tries to recruit them. Sam dreams again later in the chapter, and Roy, too. After joining the Knights there’s a scene where Roy and Bump exchange hotel rooms so Bump can cheat on Memo and then Roy thinks he’s dreaming as a woman visits him in the dark and they make love – in reality it’s Memo thinking that Roy is Bump, as Roy discovers later. A scene where Max Mercy takes Roy to dinner at a nightclub and they meet up with Memo and Gus Sands ends with Roy performing a series of magic tricks at the table that seems a fantasy but turns out to be real as Roy later explains to Memo that he learned how to perform magic during his fifteen years away from baseball and borrowed the props for the tricks from one of the nightclub performers. It still feels like a fantasy, though. And the whole scene of Roy and Memo’s nighttime drive to the beach feels like a fantasy with it never being quite clear whether they actually hit a child and his dog or not.