Bang The Drum Slowly

"Mark Harris wrote four books where the main narrator is Henry Wiggin. The first one was called The Southpaw because he is a left-handed pitcher, who are baseball’s oddballs. It’s no coincidence the lefty’s signature pitch is called a screwball. Bang the Drum Slowly, which I think is his best book, is the second in the series. The first three were written in the fifties, and then he came back in 1979 with a book called It Looked Like Forever , in which the ageing Wiggin can’t throw as fast anymore, a metaphor for ageing. He is a bit like a character from a Ring Lardner story, and the tone is very much like Ring Lardner. Lardner wrote stories which were collected as You Know Me Al – letters written by a player to a friend back home. Wiggin is a sort of cracker barrel philosopher, not quite as smart as he thinks. This comes out best in Bang the Drum Slowly. His catcher, whose name is Bruce Pearson, is dim-witted and his team mates make fun of him. Wiggin finds out that Pearson is actually dying from Hodgkin’s disease and doesn’t want him to tell anybody. And Wiggin doesn’t break his trust, but he does start to integrate Pearson into the team. But the book is not about what the team does, it is about how we deal with life. Wiggin is always playing a card game with one of the coaches called Tegwar. They use it to baffle rookies and newcomers, and they teach Pearson what Tegwar is – it stands for The Exciting Game Without Any Rules. There aren’t any rules, they just make them up as they go along, and in a sense that is what life is. A lot of baseball novels have been made into movies, and there have been a lot of great baseball movies as well, but not that many good novels have translated into fine films. This one was made into a movie quite successfully with Robert De Niro as Pearson and Michael Moriarty as Henry Wiggin, even though Michael pitches with his right hand. Yes, it is really entertaining. It’s bittersweet, and what I really love are the silly things about it. For example, Henry Wiggin’s nickname on the team is “author” because he has written this book, but Pearson is so dim he thinks its “Arthur” and calls him that through most of the book. The novel ends with one of the best closing lines in American literature . After Pearson’s funeral, Wiggin says, “From here on in I rag nobody.”"