New Leaf July 2019 Discussion • The Natural by Bernard Malamud

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum.

Victoria, I suppose Malamud is saying that "I am the master of my fate and the captain of my soul". We can't always help what happens to us in terms of accidents (or homicidal maniacs shooting us) but we can help what we do with what has happened. Roy seems to have stayed that kid of 19-20 in terms of maturity and judgement. He hasn't grown and learned from his life in the intervening years.

Bookpossum I agree that Malamud is talking about self-determination and the choices Roy & the others made.

But he painted such a vivid picture of life too. Bump’s behaviour was bullying and cruel, and yet none of the players stood up to him. Sam and Bump both died in violent freak accidents. The fans had no loyalty and were down right nasty. Max/Memo / Judge / Gus - were out for number one. Sam’s/Pop’s/Bump’s/Roy’s / dreams were futile, etc. And the story was littered with other tragedies, such as Roy’s parents, Harriet, etc

The feeling he conveyed was “everything is futile”; or life is meaningless. Which contradicts the message of being masters of our own fate. The ‘moral’ and the ‘feeling’ seem to diverge.

[Catlady]

I never thought of the story as being set in any actual historical time frame, such that the opening scenes would have been in 1935-ish and the return in 1950-ish. I think the changes in baseball that began to come fast and furious in the 1960s make the story seem less timeless than it would have otherwise. Malamud couldn't have foreseen the moves to the West Coast, the expansion teams, big-money contracts, free agency, all of which make his setting seem quite quaint.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by Victoria

Bookpossum I agree that Malamud is talking about self-determination and the choices Roy & the others made.

But he painted such a vivid picture of life too. Bump’s behaviour was bullying and cruel, and yet none of the players stood up to him. Sam and Bump both died in violent freak accidents. The fans had no loyalty and were down right nasty. Max/Memo / Judge / Gus - were out for number one. Sam’s/Pop’s/Bump’s/Roy’s / dreams were futile, etc. And the story was littered with other tragedies, such as Roy’s parents, Harriet, etc

The feeling he conveyed was “everything is futile”; or life is meaningless. Which contradicts the message of being masters of our own fate. The ‘moral’ and the ‘feeling’ seem to diverge.

This. It's all ultimately meaningless in Malamud's view.

Iris ends up hit by a foul ball and pregnant--that's her reward for virtue? Bump is killed in a freak accident when he tries to play ball the right way. Roy is destroyed despite his epiphany and his effort to do the right thing. Malamud seems to be saying the universe is going to dump on you no matter what you do. What follows from that is, why bother to try to act morally? Why not just grab what you can, do what you want--the universe is going to get you anyway.

This is too bleak for me. I would be less bothered by Roy's downfall if he deliberately struck out and lost the game--then I could agree that his fall was deserved. But it kills me that he tried at the end and got not even a little bit of redemption.

I think I'll stick with the movie version.

[CRussel]

Originally Posted by Bookpossum

Charlie, you mentioned listening to the book a second time to pick up more.

Yes, I think it will repay the effort. I'm not sure I enjoyed it enough to be willing to, but I'm sure I'd get some new insights in concert with the discussion here.

Charlie.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by CRussel

That's probably why I abandoned Hardy in my teens and never wanted to go back! Honestly, I'm not much of a fan of tragedy, except the Shakespearean versions.

Same here. Tess of the D’Urbervilles was enough for me. I’d place Albert Camus on the same list.

Originally Posted by issybird

Aha! Another rather odd aspect. I think we can take the book as occurring in roughly 1950. But Malamud, deliberately I think, gives Tuesday, October 1, as the date of the deciding game, which places it out of time. The last Tuesday, October 1 was 1946, which is too early. The next Tuesday, October 1 was in 1957, after publication. But I digress.

My real point is that a scant five years after the war, it's as if it didn't happen.

How interesting! The quality of timelessness definitely comes through.

[CRussel]

And yes, why a Mercedes-Benz? Totally not what I would think right for New York in 1952. Though they did make a name for themselves with the gull-wing 300-SL, but that wasn't until 1954 at the earliest. A Cadillac or Lincoln would have been more fitting.

[Victoria]

Originally Posted by Catlady

This. It's all ultimately meaningless in Malamud's view.

Iris ends up hit by a foul ball and pregnant--that's her reward for virtue? Bump is killed in a freak accident when he tries to play ball the right way. Roy is destroyed despite his epiphany and his effort to do the right thing. Malamud seems to be saying the universe is going to dump on you no matter what you do. What follows from that is, why bother to try to act morally? Why not just grab what you can, do what you want--the universe is going to get you anyway.

This is too bleak for me. I would be less bothered by Roy's downfall if he deliberately struck out and lost the game--then I could agree that his fall was deserved. But it kills me that he tried at the end and got not even a little bit of redemption.

I think I’ll stick with the movie version.

Agreed! I think the book’s worldview is basically existentialist, whether that was Malamud’s conscious intent or not. (Or even nihilistic )

[Bookworm_Girl]

From what I've read on line, this book is typical of his more famous works. Basically his books are about suffering and the continuation of that suffering through the plot. His characters are mostly men and Jewish, usually from Brooklyn. They have a profession where they work hard and toil away. They walk the line of poverty and go from one calamity to the next.

While it was very interesting to read this book because I like the added subject matter of baseball, I don't think I shall read any more of his works. Too depressing for me.

I also read that books with antihero characters were popular in the 1950s through mid-1960s. Perhaps that explains why I don't read much from this time period.

The comparison to Hardy was very insightful. I still have lingering negative memories of reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a teenager,. I've never remembered exactly why other than it was assigned in school and not by choice.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by issybird

But nobody deserves the bad breaks handed out unevenly by the universe. Roy was unlucky, yes, but not uniquely unlucky, and he had his chance at redemption at that. In mythology, Iris is the messenger of the gods; in this case, Iris was the messenger from the gods, but Roy ignored her until too late.

Timing! Hubris and irony: Roy had his chance when he was blasting the foul balls at Otto; that his epiphany only came after he misfired and struck Iris ("Christ! Another one!") was his tragedy, but he brought it on himself - which is one of the markers of tragedy.

I found a quote where Roy reflects:

"I never did learn anything out of my past life, now I have to suffer again."

[issybird]

I don't think we've mentioned Doc Knobb yet; what about him? I think he ties into comments made by Bookpossum and Catlady.

Bookpossum has referred to Roy's lack of growth after his shooting, that he remains essentially a boy. I think Doc Knobb reinforces this impression as applied to all the players, as he serves explicitly to pacify the players, to keep them in a state of delayed childhood.

"It's Doc Knobb." The catcher looked sleepy.

"What's he do?"

"Pacifies us."

The players were attentive, sitting as if they were going to have their pictures snapped. The nervousness Roy had sensed among them was all but gone. They looked like men whose worries had been lifted, and even Bump gave forth a soft grunt of contentment.

Just like an infant or toddler, in fact.

I think Malamud is suggesting that these men, notorious losers as a team, are losing because they refuse to be adult. Why should their worries be lifted? Isn't a large part of living as a fully-developed, grown person dealing with strife, real-life strife as opposed to the manufactured strife of a ball game? For once Roy's instincts are spot-on, as he refuses to be hypnotized and lose his agency.

This ties into Catlady's comment:

Originally Posted by Catlady

Malamud couldn't have foreseen the moves to the West Coast, the expansion teams, big-money contracts, free agency, all of which make his setting seem quite quaint.

I think that's the big difference between the game then and now. Back then, it was essentially grown men who continued to play a boy's game for less than a bare living, as most of them had to find something else to do in the off-season. It was a kind of perpetual arrested development. Now, of course, baseball is a serious business. Even journeyman players in the majors make a lot of money, they spend the off-season keeping in shape, and even though what they do is still characterized as "playing," it's related only in form to the playing that a child does.

I don't see this story as quaint but as timeless, but I do think that today's baseball couldn't be the motif to carry the themes Malamud is exploring.

[Bookpossum]

Instead of falling into a swoon when they learned there was to be no further hypnosis, the team played its best ball in weeks.

That whole Doc Knobb thing was rather odd I thought, but I suppose it was just another form of team-building. The quote above followed immediately on from when Pop "canned" Doc Knobb after he suggested that Pop should be hypnotised too. He considered the hypnosis to be "hocus pocus", so why was it happening?

I think your suggestion about the men refusing to be adults is right, issybird. One of the worst examples of childishness is Bump's bullying, which gets completely out of hand after the room swap and Roy's unexpected visit by Memo.

The rest of the team laugh at what is done to Roy, presumably because if he's doing it to Roy, he isn't doing it to one of them. I was reminded of schoolkids, sychophantically following and obeying the school bully.

[CRussel]

I'd call that more than just "childishness", frankly. One of the things I found really, really hard to read in this book was the bullying, "justified" by calling it practical jokes. Bump was a nasty bully, and the rest of the team were enablers. My least favourite type of males, frankly.

[Bookpossum]

Mine too! I meant childish in the sense that men who behave like this, apart from being nasty, are appallingly immature. They are covering up their own inadequacies by attacking others.

[issybird]

I thought "pacifies" in the passage quoted above an odd choice; surely it's unlikely (and long) in the context of a ballplayer's vocabulary? But it evokes "padifiers," i.e., a baby's dummy in British, and heightens the impression of a bunch of sleepy, stupefied infants.

I agree about the bullying; the clubhouse operates under the worst of playground rules, even to Pop's and Roy's standoff regarding Wonderboy. As an aside, Pop lived up to his adult moniker at the end, when he took the responsibility for games lost while Roy was benched. It's a level of insight that the other characters don't achieve.