Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

I’ve been reading baseball novels, lately. I picked up Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel this summer without knowing what it was but knowing I liked Philip Roth and that I would probably, eventually, read all of his books. Then, real life baseball got very exciting this fall in Los Angeles with the Dodgers playing great ball and taking the series against the Toronto Blue Jays. Looking to keep the baseball high going a little longer I thought I’d find a novel to read and that’s when I learned about Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly, said by many, as I did my research, to be the best baseball novel of them all. I had heard the title, and knew it as a movie (it’s been done as a play, too), but frankly, I didn’t even know it was about baseball. I knew it was supposed to be a tear jerker, and involved some kind of sport, but that was all.

I also learned that Bang the Drum Slowly is the second of four novels from the author all about the same character, a left-handed pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths named Henry Wiggen. So, I started with the first, The Southpaw, liked that quite a bit, and then read this. I’ll get to the other two soon.

The Southpaw is about Henry Wiggen’s signing as a professional ball player recruited out of Perkinsville, New York up through his rookie year in the big leagues, 1952. He has a great year. The Mammoths go all the way. Wiggen is named MVP. Harris writes the novel as though it is Wiggen himself writing his story over the winter break.

Bang the Drum Slowly comes three years later, starting in the winter of 1955. Wiggen followed his great rookie year with two not-so-great years. He’s still with the Mammoth’s but not the star he was. He married his girl, Holly, at the end of The Southpaw, and now they’re expecting a baby. Wiggen is selling insurance to make some extra cash. Because of his book being published the team has given him the nickname “Author”. The novel opens with Wiggen getting a worrying phone call from a teammate named Bruce Pearson, asking him to come to Rochester, Minnesota because he’s in the hospital. The novel never names the hospital but it’s clearly the Mayo Clinic. Bruce we remember from The Southpaw, was a catcher and Henry’s roommate, and Bruce, being rather dull and not a great player, has only Henry as a friend on the team. Henry flies out and learns that Bruce has been diagnosed with Hodgkins disease and will die sometime soon, or maybe later. There’s no treatment. And in fact, for nearly the rest of the novel Bruce doesn’t suffer any symptoms. But it’s a death sentence, nonetheless.

Henry drives with Bruce back down to Georgia, where Bruce is from. He hangs out a little with Bruce’s mother and father on their farm. He shares Bruce’s news over the phone with his wife, Holly, who eventually comes down from New York, but other than that Henry does his best to keep the diagnosis a secret not wanting to spoil Bruce’s chance to play ball. It isn’t until Chapter 5, page 62, that we finally get to baseball when Bruce and Henry show up at the Mammoth spring training camp in Aqua Clara, Florida. Henry holds off on signing his contract wanting more money, but also, once the money is negotiated, wanting to add a clause that protects Bruce by saying that if Bruce is ever sent down, or traded or sold to another team, that Henry must go with him. The manager, Dutch, objects, of course, to having his hands tied that way, but Henry insists and gets his way.

Now the novel shifts toward a more straightforward baseball story as we follow the Mammoths through their 1955 season. We wonder whether Henry is going to regain his star status. He has a bonus built into his contract if he wins more than fifteen games. There’s a minor thread about the first baseman, Sid Goldman who for much of the year looks to be on track to beat Babe Ruth’s record of most homers in a season. Bruce thinks he’s in love with a prostitute he likes to visit and when she learns that he’s dying and a has a big insurance policy (Henry sold it to him) there’s a plot about her trying to get herself named as the beneficiary. Holly has her baby, a girl she and Henry name Michelle after the manager of the farm team, Mike Mulrooney, that Henry played for before the bigs. Little by little more and more of the team begin to learn about Bruce’s situation and we see how the fact of mortality affects the team. They start to give Bruce more kindness and respect. And it doesn’t hurt that Bruce, despite his illness, ends up having a good year and being a benefit to the team.

The baseball is good. The novel is funny in places, not ever sad, exactly, but wistful. I didn’t cry, even when Bruce eventually gets too weak to play the final games of the season and dies just after the Mammoth’s win the series. But I was moved. It’s interesting to see how the men deal with their emotions and talk about death. It’s a smart book. And the writing is often beautiful while remaining true to Wiggen’s non-literary voice.

Best baseball novel of all? Well maybe. It’s hard to compare. For thrilling baseball I actually think The Southpaw had better play by play. For literary merit I’d give the prize to The Natural. But there are so many that I’ve enjoyed over the years: The Dreyfus Affair, W. P. Kinsella’s The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and Shoeless Joe (which became the movie Field of Dreams). But I give this novel the nod for elevating the baseball novel into a deeper dimension without losing the connection to the real play of the game itself.

I did want to highlight one aspect of the novel because I’m always attuned to the way mid-century novels deal with homosexuality. When Henry insists during his contract negotiation that he and Bruce must be taken as a pair but won’t say why, the manager speculates that they might be a romantic couple. He says:

“What is up between you 2? A roomie is a roomie, Author, not a Siamese brother fastened at the hip. I do not understand this a-tall, and I will investigate it. I will run it down to the end of the earth. Are you a couple fairies, Author? That cannot be. It been a long time since I run across fairies in baseball, not since Will Miller and another lad that I forget his name, a shortstop, that for Christ sake when they split they went and found another friend. This is all too much for me” (p. 80).

One of the other teammates notices how protective of Bruce Henry has become and starts to tease him.

“No!” said Joe. “No! No! What are you 2 anyway? Are you Romeo and Juliet?” (p. 127).

A couple of pages later Joe is still at it:

“Every time he seen us he said, “Romeo and Juliet,” and I laughed, and after he said it about 20,000 times I said, “Joe, I will leave you in on a little secret. After the first 20,000 times a joke stops being funny all of a sudden.” But he kept on, and when he called me “Romeo” I called him “Grandfather,” which he is proud to be except if you say it that certain way, and he stopped for a couple days then called me “Romeo” again, and I said, “Romeo was a great lover, Joe. Are you jealous? If you are so jealous, Joe, I believe you can buy these little pills give you back your pep in bed you lost when you were young like me,” and he said, “You mind your tongue, boy, and be careful how you rag you elders” (p. 131)

Then a couple of other players start in giving it worse to the slow-witted Bruce. “Horse and Goose picked it up, calling him “Juliet” and raking up all the oldest gags in the world…” (p. 132) and then the name-calling fades away in the general teasing of the team.

But because Dutch drops the name of one of the gay players he knew about, “Will Miller”, I was curious to see if he was an actual player. It turns out there were several ballplayers with that name, Harris probably invented the name precisely because it is so common, but one Will Miller seemed a likely candidate and led me to another fun fact.

William Francis Miller played professional ball from 1935 to 1940. He had only one major league appearance: October 2, 1937 when he pitched for the St. Louis Brown’s in a loss to the Chicago White Sox. In 1938 he played for a minor league team in Los Angeles called The Hollywood Stars. He died in 1982. There’s no hint of him being gay but according to Wikipedia: “During his baseball career, he was noted for his good looks.”

But the Hollywood Stars, it turns out, played with the Pacific Coast League from 1926 to 1957, and their stadium, Gilmore Stadium, on the corner of Beverly and Fairfax was located just a few blocks from my new apartment. Now there’s a parking lot beside the CBS television studios where the stadium stood before it was torn down in 1952. The Gilmore family made a bunch of money in the early years of the 20th century when they struck oil on their large dairy ranch near the La Brea tarpits while drilling for water. They established the still-thriving Farmer’s Market, and the Gilmore drive-in where the mall called the Grove is today. The owner of the Hollywood Stars for a few years was Robert H. Cobb, the owner of the Brown Derby restaurant chain (and originator of the Cobb salad), who brought in several movie stars as investors. I have an additional connection to the Gilmore family as the apartment I just moved out of in downtown Los Angeles was owned by Tom Gilmore.

The title, “Bang the Drum Slowly”, by the way, comes from the cowboy ballad “The Streets of Laredo”, that one of the ballplayers sings toward the end of the novel:

“O bang the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the dead march as they carry me on,
Put bunches of roses all over my coffin,
Roses to deaden the clods as they fall.” (p. 224)