Posted on by rjonakait

Support Your Friendly Library

There weren’t books in my house growing up. There was reading material, however. Two newspapers were delivered daily, and a third came once a week. There were magazines. I think the parents subscribed to Reader’s Digest. I read some of its articles, but mostly I went to the anecdotes and jokes. There were many other magazines that came from friends of my mother’s who passed when they were through with them—Life, Look, Redbook, Ladies Home Journal. And I exaggerate when I say no books were in the house. There was an encyclopedia and a few textbooks that seemed as if they had from my father’s high school days, but there were not the kind of books a second grader who discovered he liked reading wanted.

            I soon found the public library. It may have been a mile from the house, but in those days, a mile was nothing. A two-story building with the adult section on the entrance floor and the youth books upstairs. I fell in love with two series: Freddy the Pig books and what I thought of as orange biographies. I don’t remember much about the Freddy tales, but the biographies were so labeled in my mind because they all had orange covers. Of appropriate length for a third grader, they were hero books with an emphasis on the childhoods of Thomas Edison or Andrew Jackson, but they also contained enough about the subject’s adulthoods for me to learn much about history. I believe that these books have stayed with me, forming much of my background knowledge about various personages and historical eras.

            Perhaps because I was shy, I read constantly, even while walking to and from school. It was not long before I felt I had exhausted the offerings of the children’s section of the local public library.  Luck befell me in the person of Miss Dahlberg, my sixth-grade teacher. She recognized my dilemma and went with me to the public library. I don’t remember at what age one qualified to take books out of the adult section, but it certainly was not the sixth grade. Miss Dahlberg talked with library directors, and then some higher-up  library directors. She knew how to hold her ground. (None of us kids would have been surprised. We all knew she had been a WAC during WWII and had even parachuted out of a plane!) What had been rigid rules for the library were no match for her, and I walked out with a library card that granted me adult privileges.  (Actually, inked on it was “Adult Priviledges.” Miss Dahlberg knew how to be gracious in victory. She noted the misspelling and told me that it would not matter, and we left the library.)

            This golden card allowed me to enter a new stage in my reading. There was no one to tell me what were good books or what books they had enjoyed. I certainly did not then read book reviews. Instead, I would walk the stacks, read jacket copy, read a few paragraphs or pages and then used gut intuition to take out books. Thus, the reading at this stage was random. Only years later did I gain direction and would perhaps read one Hemingway or Fitzgerald after the other.  Well, there was one direction that came before that. I was soon at the age where there was an interest in male-female relationships, and I would spend many hours skimming books back in the shelves looking for some sort of sex scene, but I seldom checked such books out.

            I remember little of what I read from these directionless days except, perhaps, for The Mouse that Roared, and its sequels, by Leonard Wibberley. The Cold War satire was a delight, a precursor in my mind to Dr. Strangelove, but like that movie, it also hit my emerging views that the powerful– whether the military, political, corporate, or social–were to be distrusted. If I had then talked about books with others, I would have insisted that all read it.

            The other book I remember from that period was different in that I did not stumble across it—From Here to Eternity by James Jones. I am not sure how I became aware of the book; even if I had read about books, I would have been too young when the book was published, or even when the movie of it came out, for it to have registered with me. But somehow a half dozen years or so after its publication, I decided I wanted to read it, and I went looking for it on the shelves of the Mead Public Library. I did not find it, and then I learned that in that staid period the book was too explosive or controversial to be allowed on the shelves. A potential reader had to ask for it at the front desk. I did, and this caused consternation. No one apparently wanted to be the one responsible for corrupting this youth by giving him this book, but I insisted that the library had granted me “adult priviledges.” After much discussion behind closed doors, the book was produced, and I was allowed to check it out. Perhaps the library staff did not want to take on Miss Dahlberg again.

            This was the first adult book that mesmerized me. The beach scene famous from the movie was not the real draw. The sprawling narrative was captivating, but it was the character of Robert E. Lee Prewitt that totally grabbed me—a Hamlet, a Tony Zale, a Miles Davis, a Kierkegaardian zen figure, a lover, a friend, an anti-authoritarian, a patriot. Of course I was not alone in these reactions, but I did feel that the character talked especially to me.

            Life moved on, and I went off to college. Now a library was different. It was a research institution, not a place for browsing to find material to fill up my idle hours. I said good-bye to the kind of library that had helped form me. Now I did what had once been a radical act for me; I bought books and rather than checking them out of libraries.

            That pattern remained for decades. It only altered when I started spending summers in the Poconos and finally became a regular patron of the Barrett Friendly Library. It is smaller than my hometown one, but it has a similar feel. Of course, libraries have changed since my youth. Many still go to that library for books, but now many also come to use the computers, but even this latter group really come to the library for the reasons I did. I didn’t have books at home, and they do not have books and computers at their home.  Recently I read about a county out West that had slashed its already low taxes more and as a result was closing its public library. I felt a despair for the place and a grief for all the kids there who did not have access to books and computers.

Owning computers, I am one who goes to the library for the books, and the library has brought back some of my old browsing ways. I don’t wander the general fiction and nonfiction shelves as I would have in olden days. Instead, I browse the bookcases of “new releases,” an often generous ascription in this small library because a volume can remain “new” for over a year. At the beginning of summer, I concentrate on the nonfiction and biography sections. While on occasion I spot a title that I have heard about from elsewhere, most of the books are previously unknown to me. I just look for topics that I might find interesting, and since the collections are diverse, this has led to varied subjects. One year from the library I read about class and poverty in America, a North Korean pilot who defected, the CIA, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the connection between corporate America and a form of Christianity, surfing, modern China, and a Jesuit traveling in the Holy Land.

 I feel like this library has returned me full circle to reading habits I had when still in Wisconsin public schools, but more important, it has reminded me of how important the library was in my formation and how important it must still be for the many who are raised in homes without the resources that too many of us just take for granted. A long time ago I had vowed that if I ever published a book, I would make a donation to my childhood library, and both events eventually happened. Now the wife and I have given money to the Friendly Library, and of course, I urge you to support a local library—volunteer or donate money, or both.

Posted on by rjonakait

The Shot Heard ‘Round the World (concluded)

          The writings by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith about Bobby Thomson’s dramatic home run turned my thoughts to Don DeLillo’s remarkable novel, Underworld, which I had read twenty years earlier. It is not an easy book, or at least it was not for me. I started the book and gave up. A few years later, I picked it up again, this time finishing it, realizing that I had just read something extraordinary.

Don DeLillo’s Underworld starts with a set piece about that mythic baseball playoff game won by Bobby Thomson’s home run in the bottom of the ninth, and echoes of it recur throughout the novel. A few years ago, I thought of DeLillo’s portrayal of that day again in an unlikely place—waiting in line at Kennedy airport for a flight to Rome. I found myself in conversation with the man behind me who was a professor at a university in Naples. He told me that his specialty was Italian-American literature. I had heard of many academic concentrations, but never of this one. I asked what authors interested him and he mentioned Richard Russo. I was somewhat taken aback. When I have read Russo, I only thought that I was reading an American novel, not an Italian-American one. His list did not include Mario Puzo, but he praised John Fante, an author I had never heard of. (Because of this conversation, I have since read Fante’s Bandini Quartet­, which I had trouble finding. My copy was shipped from England. These novels are quite good, and I should thank him for putting me on to them.) He went on to talk about DeLillo, and I asked him about his reaction to Underworld. He was effusive. I asked if he had trouble understanding that baseball game at the beginning of the book, and he gave a charming smile and chortled that he did not have a clue about what was going on. I did not try to explain. There is something so peculiarly American about that baseball game that I did not think a few minute’s conversation on the topic could accomplish much with a foreigner, and, furthermore, while I did feel that the game had some sort of significance besides its mere outcome, I was not sure why.

          Finally, after reading about the game by Doris Kearns Goodwin and Red Smith, I read for the third time DeLillo’s take on it, and I began to understand at least some of the reasons why that playoff lives in American consciousness. Perhaps every moment in American history is some sort of watershed, but this game encapsulated aspects of American history and past culture and foretold changes that were to come.

          In 1951, baseball provided a peaceful connection to the past. “You do what they did before you,” DeLillo says. The Bobby Thomson game was played at a time when America was thinking it could put the sacrifice and horrors of World War II behind it and carry forward a peaceful world. Baseball reminded us of that past. DeLillo has Gil Hodges, a Brooklyn player in that game, say the Polo Ground is “a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war.”

          Baseball also then resonated with a wide swath of Americans, or at least American males. Red Smith, writing a few years after the game, noted that almost every American male had played some version of baseball, whether it was baseball itself, or softball, stickball, five hundred, punch ball, kickball, or myriad other games. In 1951, it was America’s sport and somehow represented a perpetually youthful America. DeLillo writes about Thomson that “he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time. . . .”

Baseball is just a game, but it could feel more momentous. DeLillo writes, “The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” And a particular game could feel as if it fit into the tide of American history. Russ Hodges’s producer says about Thomson’s home run, “Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or something.”

          We readers of Underworld know, however, what its characters did not: that the dominance of baseball was going to fade. A column by Red Smith makes that point. He had driven to Florida for baseball’s spring training, where many major league baseball teams prepared for the regular season. He said that once on these drives he had seen baseball and all those other games being played by men and boys in the various towns along his route, but now he no longer did. DeLillo foreshadows this change by having the broadcasters ask how one is to explain the 20,000 empty seats in the stadium. The sport’s hold on America was still strong, but it was waning.

The 1950s was the beginning of many changes to America, and the famous playoff stood on that cusp. Looking back at that game, there seems to be a time up until Thomson’s home run and a different time afterwards, and DeLillo creates scenes in the grandstands that indicate changes soon to come. No one knows, as far as I know, what happened to the baseball Thomson hit once it landed in the left field seats, but in DeLillo’s telling one Cotter Martin wrests it away from others scrambling for the ball and leaves the park with it. Cotter, an African American youth, has sneaked into the ballpark and is seemingly befriended by a white man seating nearby. Of course, almost all Americans in 1951 knew that a major change in our race relations had occurred only a few years before when the major leagues’ color barrier was broken when the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson, who played in the famous game. A few know that the next scheduled batter after Thomson was Willie Mays, who would not have been playing if that color bar had not been bashed. In 1951, it may have seemed that we were finally making great peaceful strides towards resolving our racial problems. Bill Waterson, the white man talking with the black kid in the novel, seems to capture that, but we readers know that racial peace and resolution faced many violent episodes after 1951 and still has not been reached.

Emmitt Till and the Birmingham church bombings, snapping dogs and firehoses, bus boycotts and many killings were soon to come. And DeLillo has Waterson turn creepy towards Cotter. The white man wants the baseball that the boy has fought for. Bill yells at Cotter that he is going to get the ball and threatens violence. He chases Cotter out of the stadium and through the surrounding streets, and Cotter is only safe with his new possession when he makes it into the black Harlem that was not far from the Polo Grounds.

The game also stood on the cusp of a great change in American mass culture: the rise of network TV. The coast-to-coast broadcast of the game was itself a harbinger of that, but DeLillo signals it in another way. He has Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor, and J. Edgar Hoover together in attendance. (I do not know if Sinatra, Gleason, and Shor were at the game, but I know Hoover was there.) They joke and drink, but Gleason keeps saying that he should be at rehearsal for “The Honeymooners,” an icon of 1950s television that was to air for the first time in two days.

But something else happened on the very day of Thomson’s home run that would greatly change America. Until 1951, Americans had been little bothered by the thought that they might be killed at home by a foreign government, but on October 3, 1951, the same day as the famous playoff game, the Soviet Union exploded its first atomic bomb. We learn that fact when a message is delivered to Hoover informing him of that blast. After that October day, Americans could never again safely tuck themselves into bed the way they had before. The always present strain of paranoia in American now had a much firmer basis, and that paranoia was going to dominate the U.S. in coming years.

An apocalypse was now palpably possible, and DeLillo, a master of portraying American paranoia, has sheets of Life magazine float down from the upper deck onto Hoover. Those pages contain a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s panoramic painting of apocalyptic slaughter. Hoover becomes mesmerized by the images of incredible agony, and the painting and its horrific portrayals recur again and again in the novel.

We want that baseball game to be a kind of unifying experience. DeLillo has Russ Hodges, the Giants announcer, think “this is another kind of history. He thinks [the fans] will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with a protective power. . . . Isn’t it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping of strategies of eminent leaders, generals steely in their sunglasses—the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?” The game may have been memorable, but almost instantly it was only a memory. This prologue concludes with a drunk in a raincoat running the bases who leaves his feet to slide into second base: “All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things to come. . . . It is all falling indelibly into the past.”

DeLillo had first published his depiction of the baseball game as a magazine piece before the book was written. He titled the piece “Pafko at the Wall.” (Andy Pafko was the Dodgers left fielder who watched the ball sail over his head into the stands.) When DeLillo placed this piece as the beginning portion of Underworld, he re-titled it as “The Triumph of Death.”