New Leaf July 2019 Discussion • The Natural by Bernard Malamud

[issybird]

Originally Posted by bfisher

Yes, one of the feelings I had reading this was Roy as Greek hero. He was The Natural (god-given talent); but set up to fail through his own flawed nature.

Yes. And we can't ignore Iris, the messenger of the gods, but Roy chose to ignore her (and her fat letter) until too late. I also have to assume that Iris's age, 33, is significant. But sometimes a cigar is just a smoke, and it's also possible that the window for being younger than Roy but old enough to be a grandmother was pretty small.

[Bookpossum]

On names and mythologies: Malamud certainly gives his characters names that are meant to convey meaning. issybird, I really liked your link between Harriet Bird, the canary, and Vogelman.

The name Roy of course indicates that he could have risen to the heights, but his moral faults meant that he could not do so. And the severe injury he sustained was from a silver bullet - something used to slay monsters. Maybe Harriet Bird saw sports stars in that light.

There was also the harking back to a happy time as a child in the woods, wandering with his dog. Memo destroyed that innocent part of him when he thought she knocked down a boy in the woods, driving his newly acquired car.

By the way, was that something that happened, where an individual player was given a huge pile of all sorts of gifts?

[Bookpossum]

There is a passage near the beginning of the book when Harriet has got on the train, and Roy, seeing her with the Whammer, had gone back to his sleeper and looked out of the window.

The forest stayed with them, climbing hills like an army, shooting down like waterfalls. As the train skirted close in, the trees leveled out and he could see within the woodland the only place he had been truly intimate with in his wanderings, a green world shot through with weird light and strange bird cries, muffled in silence that made the privacy so complete his inmost self had no shame of anything he thought there, and it eased the body-shaking beat of his ambitions.

Another mention of birds of course, and there is the Roman practice of observing the flight of birds to predict the future, to add to the mythological references.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by issybird

Pete Reiser and more.

But the one that's really spooky is that Malamud seems eerily prescient. Given that the book was published in 1952, it must have been essentially written by the playoffs in 1951. But especially given that the Knights must be the New York Giants, Roy is the Bobby Thompson that didn't happen.

Prescient indeed, as I think the pre-Roy Hobbs Knights seem like the hapless 1962 Mets.

Roy's HR off the clock makes me think of Darryl Strawberry's shot off the clock in St. Louis in 1985 when the Mets were fighting for the division lead and just missed. (There's a player who should have been among the greats of all time but fell way short, as did Doc Gooden.)

Regarding names--is Hobbs a nod to Thomas Hobbes, who characterized life in the natural state as "nasty, brutish, and short"?

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Catlady

Regarding names--is Hobbs a nod to Thomas Hobbes, who characterized life in the natural state as "nasty, brutish, and short"?

I had the same thought abut "Hobbs." Roy is, as Bookpossum said, a marker of his potential, while Hobbs described his origins, his reality. Ultimately his last name trumped his aspirational first name.

[astrangerhere]

Re: The Tragedy Aspect

Many of you have commented on the pros and cons on the tragedy of the story of Roy's life. I was more interested in the destroyed women left in the wake of the male athletes who have no problems describing their own flaws proudly.

Iris Lemon is ruined by a teenage pregnancy and then later by Roy's almost total abandonment after she breaks his slump. Memo Paris is ruined by literally all the men in her life. Pop drags her around like some kind of mascot and prostitutes her out to the men of the team to keep them happy. While Iris is a more sympathetic, wholesome character because she seems noble, Memo is clearly seeking someone to care for her. She clearly demonstrates symptoms of depression and manic tendencies. Her actions grow more and more desperate as the book progresses.

It is the women in the novel, more than the men, that to me show Malamud's early academic research. He wrote his thesis on Thomas Hardy. NOTHING ever ends well in Hardy, especially for women, so this was not an unforeseen conclusion.

Having said that, I also agree with the Gatsby-esque feel. Replace that blinking green light with the flashing scoreboard and you've got a great parallel.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Re: The Tragedy Aspect

Many of you have commented on the pros and cons on the tragedy of the story of Roy's life. I was more interested in the destroyed women left in the wake of the male athletes who have no problems describing their own flaws proudly.

Iris Lemon is ruined by a teenage pregnancy and then later by Roy's almost total abandonment after she breaks his slump. Memo Paris is ruined by literally all the men in her life. Pop drags her around like some kind of mascot and prostitutes her out to the men of the team to keep them happy. While Iris is a more sympathetic, wholesome character because she seems noble, Memo is clearly seeking someone to care for her. She clearly demonstrates symptoms of depression and manic tendencies. Her actions grow more and more desperate as the book progresses.

It is the women in the novel, more than the men, that to me show Malamud's early academic research. He wrote his thesis on Thomas Hardy. NOTHING ever ends well in Hardy, especially for women, so this was not an unforeseen conclusion.

Having said that, I also agree with the Gatsby-esque feel. Replace that blinking green light with the flashing scoreboard and you've got a great parallel.

Oh, I had been going to bring up Malamud's attitude toward women. I somewhat agree and somewhat disagree with you. Great call on Hardy, by the way.

I don't think your assessment of Iris Lemon is essentially accurate. She could have been ruined by her teenage pregnancy, but she's the sterling example of someone who (I can't resist) made lemonade out of the lemon handed to her life. She kept her daughter, raised her, and loved her. She triumphed. She did what Roy could have done. Now, her tragedy is that just as she's seen her daughter off, happily, and thinks she entering into her own time at long last, she gets blindsided by another pregnancy. Will she triumph again, or will this one defeat her?

And Memo I think is an accurate and not atypical representation of a sports groupie, mid-20th century. With no agency of her own, she's looking to latch onto any man who'll give her the life she wants. Did the men ruin her or is she complicit in her own ruin? I'd argue the latter.

Also, you've left out the third woman, Harriet Bird. I think in some ways she's the most interesting of the three even though we know the least about her. I see her as someone who not only refused to be crushed by domineering athletes in particular and by the repression of women in general by literally shooting down the shining avatars of that repression. She exercised the most agency of all, if pointless and ultimately self-defeating.

[Catlady]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

Iris Lemon is ruined by a teenage pregnancy and then later by Roy's almost total abandonment after she breaks his slump. Memo Paris is ruined by literally all the men in her life. Pop drags her around like some kind of mascot and prostitutes her out to the men of the team to keep them happy. While Iris is a more sympathetic, wholesome character because she seems noble, Memo is clearly seeking someone to care for her. She clearly demonstrates symptoms of depression and manic tendencies. Her actions grow more and more desperate as the book progresses.

I was thinking of the women as either madonna (Iris) /whore (Memo, Harriet, Roy's mother). Their function in the novel seems to be either to nurture men or to destroy them.

[Bookpossum]

I think that Iris was the most mature and decent character in the book. She could have been Roy's salvation, but he was too shallow and immature to realise it.

Somewhere upthread, issybird commented on the oddness of Memo's name. I was wondering about the name for which it could be an abbreviation, and recalled coming across someone many years ago whose name was Memory. Perhaps she was attractive to Roy because in some way she reminded him of his mother. Harriet also it would seem. I just did a search of the book for the word "mother", and came up with the following from early on in the book when he was talking to Harriet:

Her eyes were sad. He felt a curious tenderness for her, a little as if she might be his mother (That bird.) and tried very hard to come up with the answer she wanted—something you said about LIFE.

[Bookworm_Girl]

Iris is the first person that Roy feels comfortable with and at ease to tell about his past and what happened. They also go swimming in the lake that could have been a symbolic cleansing. I recall a scene where he rests with his head in her lap, that makes me think of her mothering or nurturing him.

Memo is the anti-Iris. I agree that she was complicit in her ruin. She's not naive. She's calculating and manipulative, climbing that ladder with greed and in the end she gets to the top with Judge and we know what his principles are. I think that Pop had genuine regrets that he brought her around the team and is disappointed in her behavior.

Her name is more difficult to interpret. In Memo, the first syllable "Me" stands out to me because I think she was very self-centered. Paris is a foreign location, maybe intended to seem exotic with her attractiveness to men. I have no idea when Paris was named the City of Love.

[Bookpossum]

Yes, Paris would certainly be seen as exotic (and no doubt erotic too). Memo seemed to be pretty much incapable of love, and I agree, she is the antithesis of Iris. Roy, the poor sap, doesn't recognise a good woman when he has his chance with her, even though as you say, Bookworm_Girl, she is the first person in whom he felt able to confide his past. That alone should have told him something.

Right at the end of the book after he has had his showdown with Gus Sands, the Judge and Memo:

... he fought his overwhelming self-hatred. In each stinking wave of it he remembered some disgusting happening of his life.

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

I see just a glimmer of redemption for him in that moment of self-realisation. Sadly it was probably too late for him to be forgiven by Iris for his betrayal of her and of the game.

[issybird]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

Her name is more difficult to interpret. In Memo, the first syllable "Me" stands out to me because I think she was very self-centered. Paris is a foreign location, maybe intended to seem exotic with her attractiveness to men. I have no idea when Paris was named the City of Love.

I read Paris as referring to the mythological Paris, Prince of Troy, whose elopement with Helen of Sparta caused the Trojan War and the eventual downfall of Troy. But the best names work on several levels; it seems as if Catlady and I were off-base with our interpretation of "Hobbs", which means horse and combines with "Roy" (king) to suggest the chivalric knight (Knight, that is). Wonderboy is Excalibur (that part I got on my own ).

The name Wonderboy is explicit in its own terms, though. It makes you (or at least me) wince a bit when it's a name used by a grown man. But the "boy" says it all; baseball is a young man's game and youth will always conquer age eventually. Wonder boys get old, are wounded and pass on, just as Roy had to bury his own Wonderboy in left field.

[Catlady]

Why did the pitching phenom (1) have a special bat and (2) become a hitting phenom for his second chance?

[Bookpossum]

You are talking about Roy I take it? I too wondered about that, because we saw him as being a pitcher in Pre-Game, but then always as a batter or fielder in Batter-Up. Presumably he was equally talented in both areas.

[Bookpossum]

On Wonderboy - I agree issybird, it's a pretty childish sort of name for a man in his thirties to apply to his bat - it was also of course very symbolic that it split in two after he had agreed to lose. In fact, a bit heavy-handed in the symbolism department I felt.