Ticket for a Seamstitch by Mark Harris

This is the third in a series of four novels by Mark Harris featuring the left-handed pitcher Henry Wiggen. I especially wanted to read the second, and most note-worthy Bang the Drum Slowly, but I thought I’d go ahead and read all four in the order they were written. And I’m glad I did, as, so far, all three have been very good, with the first and this one equally as good as the second.

Wiggen’s story begins in The Southpaw, which gives us a little of Henry’s early days in Perkinsville, NY, and then getting recruited to the New York Mammoths: spring training in Aqua Clara, Florida, then most of a year with the farm team called the Queen City Cowboys, then called up to the majors and his full, successful rookie year, 1952.

Bang the Drum Slowly takes place a few years later. Wiggen is an established member of the Mammoths but having suffered a few off years after his debut. Like The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly covers a full year of baseball, we’re up to 1955, but this is also the story of Wiggen’s friendship with a catcher on the team, Bruce Pearson, who is diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease during the winter break and plays that year in the face of his incurable cancer. Pearson doesn’t show much sign of illness and actually has a very good year, until the end, so the drama is more about the baseball itself, and whether and how the rest of the team eventually learns the truth and how they all react to this formerly mostly ignored player, and to their suddenly forced confrontation with mortality. It’s good stuff.

Ticket for a Seamstitch takes place the following year. Like the previous two novels, it’s narrated and supposedly written by Wiggen himself, who has picked up the nickname “Author” among his teammates after his book about his rookie year came out. The edition I read (University of Nebraska Press 1956 and 1957) includes a long preface by Mark Harris titled, “Preface: Easy Does It Not.” Harris tells the story of how the book came to be. Life magazine contacted Harris and asked him if he happened to have a Henry Wiggen short story available for the July 2, 1956 edition of the magazine. Harris did not, but floated an idea, which the editors liked, so Harris was given a small advance and started to write. He finished the story, sent it in, and received back a very complimentary reply with some (according to Harris) very helpful notes for revision and encouragement to let the story expand as it needed to. Harris did so, sent the expanded version back to Life but now the Senior Editor rejected it. Harris then sent the manuscript to Knopf who published it as a book.

Interesting to know, but the real point of Harris’ preface is for him to carp a little about the story that Life publishes in place of his Henry Wiggen story and to bemoan what that choice says about the state of literature and readership in mid-century America. Life publishes an excerpt of a soon-to-appear novel by an author named William Brinkley (who also happens to be an Assistant Editor at Life, a bit of nepotism that Harris complains about only in passing). The novel, which Harris doesn’t name but is clearly Don’t Go Near the Water, goes on to spend several weeks on the best-seller list and is made into a movie the following year. Harris despises Brinkley’s writing. He calls it easy reading, thus the subtitle of his preface. He criticizes this kind of writing, Brinkley being the current example, for asking nothing of its readers. In order to give the reader everything they need as obviously and simply as possible the “easy-reader” author forces the characters into saying things no one would ever actually say, over-explaining and stating explicitly background that they and everyone in the room already knows, and relying on authorial descriptions to telegraph subtext and motivation that an engaged reader ought to be able to pick up for themselves. There’s a bit of sour grapes in this, of course, but as a writer who plans to embark on his own novel later this year, I found Harris’ recommendation for aspects of good writing to be very compelling and helpful.

And then, post-preface, we get to Harris’ novel itself. The writing, I should say right away, is first-rate. It’s not complicated or obscure in the way of Faulkner, to use one of Harris’ examples of a writer that insists a reader do their half of the job, but Faulkner’s style wouldn’t be in the character of Henry Wiggen. Wiggen writes plainly, slangily. And although each of Harris’ novels credits Wiggen on the title page along with “polished for the printer by Mark Harris” Harris leaves in Wiggen’s occasional mis-used homophone (“sow” when he means “sew” for instance, in this novel) or malapropism. The style is closer to Hemingway in its straight-forward simplicity, to use another example of a skillful author from Harris’ preface, but the book I kept thinking of was Catcher in the Rye. Holden Caulfield and Henry Wiggen are about the same age, at the same mid-50s time, in the same New England and New York setting with about the same level of education so it’s not surprising they share a voice. In any case, Wiggen’s narration is a pleasure to read.

The story is simple. Just before opening day of the 1956 season, Wiggen receives a piece of fan mail from a girl out West, a seamstitch, who calls him her hero and who wants to make a trip out to New York to see Wiggen in person at the July 4 game. She asks Wiggen to buy her a ticket and send it to her. Wiggen is married and uninterested, but his roommate, Piney Woods, a catcher that we remember from the previous novel is intrigued, so he responds to the girl and, being the romantic type, starts to develop a fantasy about this girl he hasn’t seen but might meet in a few months. The novel then takes two parallel tracks. The baseball season begins and after losing the opening day game Wiggen starts to win every game he pitches and some begin to speculate that he could beat the record for most consecutive regular season wins by a pitcher. (Carl Hubbell still owns that record at 16, set in the 1936 season. He went on to win 8 more in the first two months of the ’37 season). Meanwhile we learn, through long letters she occasionally mails, about the girl from the West’s slow trip across country and we watch Piney’s fantasy develop as he reads and re-reads her letters and sticks up drawings he makes on to the wall of the hotel room he shares with Wiggen picturing how he imagines she looks.

The girl eventually shows up and she isn’t what Piney imagined. In his disappointment, he flees the scene and Wiggen ends up escorting her to the Automat for dinner and sitting with her during the opening game of the July 4 double-header before he has to go down to the field to warm up for the second game which would be number 16 in a row if he wins.

It’s a good story, well-written, as I’ve said, but is it a novel? This is the same discussion I had with myself a few years ago when I was reading a collection called “Short Novels of the Masters” including selections like Mann’s Death in Venice,  Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych, and James’ The Aspern Papers. Length is one defining factor, though a short novel is usually called a novella. But novel, it seems to me, needs to contain secondary characters and side-stories that expand the world and central scope of the narrative. A Ticket for a Seamstitch barely qualifies on length or depth. It’s only 143 small-sized pages with fairly large type. I read it in one evening. And there are just the two stories of Piney’s fantasy romance and Wiggens’ attempt for the pitching record. You might call it a novel, but it is very small, much smaller than the previous two Wiggen books in the series.

But that is merely a didactic issue. Whatever you call it, novel, novella, long short-story, it’s a worthy read. I was happy to give it my readerly participation and recommend it to you.

I thought for a laugh that I would read William Brinkley’s Don’t Go Near the Water, but it actually doesn’t look like that much fun, so I don’t think I’ll bother.