Assorted Prose (16 page)

But a sombre undercurrent persisted. Cartier’s wore her strands of dull-gold tinsel like an old woman wearing a mourning shawl. The beards of the Santa Clauses along the street looked transparently false—shiny, ill-fitted appendages of nylon. In the old days, it seemed to us, the Santa Claus beards bristled like the coats of badgers and were as soft as the fleece of lambs. This year, they are palpably pretense; the party must go on. At Rockefeller Center, the tree is hung with two-dimensional balls, and the greenery in the center of the mall is confused with strange artifacts of white and silver wire—giant jack-in-the-boxes, outsize alphabet blocks, huge mock toys. The effect is not entirely fortunate. We kept seeing the green shrubbery through the wire constructions and wondering which we were meant to believe in—which was Christmas and which was Nature.

We walked across the street to St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It alone, on all the festive Avenue, seemed totally convinced. We had never so closely observed the central doors, which are usually open or obscured by darkness. The six bronze figures on them we had assumed to be iconographically standard, indistinguishably Biblical. This was not so, and for those as inexcusably unobservant as we are, we will list them, left to right, top to bottom. On the doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, in full-relief figures about a yard high, are St. Joseph, Patron of the Church; St. Patrick, Patron of This Church; St. Isaac Jogues, Martyr and First Priest in New York; St. Frances X. Cabrini, Mother of the Immigrant; Ven. Kateri Tekakwitha, Lily of the Mohawks; and Mother Elizabeth Seton, Daughter of New York. The Lily of the Mohawks, with her stoic face, her Indian headband, and her Christian cross, seemed peculiarly relevant to the gently forlorn metropolitan flux around us. We do not often
enough, perhaps, think of ourselves as successors of the Indians—subsequent tenants, as it were, of a continuing mystery. We went inside the cathedral. A Mass was in progress, and it was well attended. At side altars, banks of candles glowed and wavered like crowds of female shoppers. At the front altar, the priest, the back of his white chasuble shining, seemed the lone passenger on a splendid, house-shaped boat afloat before our eyes. Bells rang. People knelt. Again bells rang. The kneelers rose; the noise of their rising merged with the shuffle and scrape of footsteps around us, in the rear of the cathedral.

Outside on the street, Christmas did seem to have solidified. Cool sunlight was falling unruffled through the wind, and, looking at the crowds, we realized what the difference is this year. People are not determined to be jolly; they do not feel obligated to smile. From the sudden death of our young President, Americans may in time date a great physiognomic discovery: a human face may refuse, or fail, to smile and still be human.

January 1965

T
HE DEATH
of T. S. Eliot deprives the English-speaking world not of a literary master—he exists in his work and will continue to exist—but of a cultural presence that united two literatures and extended the venerable tradition of the presiding poet-critic into the present time. He was our Dryden, our Coleridge, our Arnold; and as long as he was alive our literature seemed in some sense restrained from the apocalyptic formlessness and obscenity that it seeks. Eliot’s peculiar authority derived from his own participation in this century’s despair; he was a veteran of anarchy who elected to rule, a great conservative containing a thorough radical. What was most peculiar about his authority, perhaps, was how generally it was acknowledged, considering the modesty, in both tone and bulk, of his production. He was like Valéry in the weight his silences borrowed from the penetration of his utterances. Of the many makers of modern literature, he was the most penetrating, and it is this gift of penetration that makes his poems so strangely unforgettable and his
critical judgments, beneath their circumspection, so shockingly right. He had (an optional virtue for writers) an inability to write other than the truth—we mean, of course, the truth as he felt it—so that even the pallor and whimsey of the later plays are rendered supportable by a final earnestness. As a poet, he belongs not with the great verbal impresarios, like Shakespeare and Joyce, but with those great who, like Donne and Wordsworth, arrive in one’s imagination somewhat hobbled by an awkward honesty. Like Valéry, Eliot won, for his austerity and precision, that intensity of respect which passes into love. Unlike Valéry, he won it from a people, the English, who customarily reward genial copiousness. If, in the atmosphere of public veneration that attended his old age, in the hundreds of American classrooms where his passionate and enigmatic lines were dutifully charted, there was something stale and falsely official, Eliot’s sly gray image evaded incrimination. In trying to frame that image, we see it triangulated by three poets whom he had considered well. We mention, for metrical power, Milton. For impeccability, Marvell. And, for paternal elusiveness, Edward Lear.

F
ENWAY
P
ARK
, in Boston, is a lyric little bandbox of a ballpark. Everything is painted green and seems in curiously sharp focus, like the inside of an old-fashioned peeping-type Easter egg. It was built in 1912 and rebuilt in 1934, and offers, as do most Boston artifacts, a compromise between Man’s Euclidean determinations and Nature’s beguiling irregularities. Its right field is one of the deepest in the American League, while its left field is the shortest; the high left-field wall, three hundred and fifteen feet from home plate along the foul line, virtually thrusts its surface at right-handed hitters. On the afternoon of Wednesday, September 28th, 1960, as I took a seat behind third base, a uniformed groundkeeper was treading the top of this wall, picking batting-practice home runs out of the screen, like a mushroom gatherer seen in Words-worthian perspective on the verge of a cliff. The day was overcast, chill, and uninspirational. The Boston team was the worst in twenty-seven seasons. A jangling medley of incompetent youth and aging competence, the Red Sox were finishing in seventh place only because the Kansas City Athletics had locked them out of the cellar. They were scheduled to play the Baltimore Orioles, a much nimbler blend of May and December, who had been dumped from pennant contention a week before by the insatiable Yankees. I, and 10,453 others, had shown up primarily because this was the Red Sox’ last home game of the season, and therefore the last time in all eternity that their regular left fielder, known to the headlines as
TED, KID, SPLINTER, THUMPER, TW
, and, most cloyingly,
MIS
T
ER
W
ONDERFUL
, would play in Boston. “
WHAT WILL WE DO WITHOUT TED? HUB FANS ASK
” ran the headline on a newspaper being read by a bulb-nosed cigar smoker a few rows away. Williams’ retirement had been announced, doubted (he had been threatening retirement for years), confirmed by Tom Yawkey, the Red Sox owner, and at last widely accepted as the sad but probable truth. He was forty-two and had redeemed his abysmal season of 1959 with a—considering his
advanced age—fine one. He had been giving away his gloves and bats and had grudgingly consented to a sentimental ceremony today. This was not necessarily his last game; the Red Sox were scheduled to travel to New York and wind up the season with three games there.

I arrived early. The Orioles were hitting fungos on the field. The day before, they had spitefully smothered the Red Sox, 17–4, and neither their faces nor their drab gray visiting-team uniforms seemed very gracious. I wondered who had invited them to the party. Between our heads and the lowering clouds a frenzied organ was thundering through, with an appositeness perhaps accidental, “You
maaaade
me love you, I didn’t wanna do it, I didn’t wanna do it.…”

The affair between Boston and Ted Williams was no mere summer romance; it was a marriage, composed of spats, mutual disappointments, and, toward the end, a mellowing hoard of shared memories. It fell into three stages, which may be termed Youth, Maturity, and Age; or Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis; or Jason, Achilles, and Nestor.

First, there was the by now legendary epoch
¹
when the young bridegroom
came out of the West and announced “All I want out of life is that when I walk down the street folks will say ‘There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.’ ” The dowagers of local journalism attempted to give elementary deportment lessons to this child who spake as a god, and to their horror were themselves rebuked. Thus began the long exchange of backbiting, bat-flipping, booing, and spitting that has distinguished Williams’ public relations.
²
The spitting incidents of 1957 and 1958 and the similar dockside courtesies that Williams has now and then extended to the grandstand should be judged against this background: the left-field
stands at Fenway for twenty years have held a large number of customers who have bought their way in primarily for the privilege of showering abuse on Williams. Greatness necessarily attracts debunkers, but in Williams’ case the hostility has been systematic and unappeasable. His basic offense against the fans has been to wish that they weren’t there. Seeking a perfectionist’s vacuum, he has quixotically desired to sever the game from the ground of paid spectatorship and publicity that supports it. Hence his refusal to tip his cap
³
to the crowd or turn the other cheek to newsmen. It has been a costly theory—it has probably cost him, among other evidences of good will, two Most Valuable Player awards, which are voted by reporters
⁴

—but he has held to it. While his critics, oral and literary, remained beyond the reach of his discipline, the opposing pitchers were accessible, and he spanked them to the tune of .406 in 1941.
⁵
He slumped to .356 in 1942 and went off to war.

In 1946, Williams returned from three years as a Marine pilot to the second of his baseball avatars, that of Achilles, the hero of incomparable prowess and beauty who nevertheless was to be found sulking in his tent while the Trojans (mostly Yankees) fought through to the ships. Yawkey, a timber and mining maharajah, had surrounded his central jewel with many gems of slightly lesser water, such as Bobby Doerr, Dom DiMaggio, Rudy York, Birdie Tebbetts, and Johnny Pesky. Throughout the late forties, the Red Sox were the best paper team in baseball, yet they had little three-dimensional to show for it, and if this was a tragedy, Williams was Hamlet. A succinct review of the indictment—and a fair sample of appreciative sports-page prose—appeared the very day of Williams’ valedictory, in a column by Huck Finnegan in the
Boston American
(no sentimentalist, Huck):