Mark Harris, whose died at 84 on May 30, was one of that legion of under-the-radar writers who for decades consistently turned out excellent novels that went as largely unsung as he did. His passing also would probably have gone largely unnoticed were it not for one particular novel, “Bang the Drum Slowly,” which happens to be about what was still known, at the time it was published in 1956, as the national pastime.
Many people consider it to be the best baseball novel ever. Even sports writers, who tend to sniff at any fiction being able to capture the perfection of baseball, praise it.
“Bang the Drum Slowly, by Henry W. Wiggen: Certain of His Enthusiasms Restrained,” to give it its full title, is even better than that other much-praised baseball novel, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural,” with its element of fantasy. (Harris did not like fantasy, especially in baseball.) It is at least as good as Robert Coover’s “The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop.,” which is about a fantasy game and, like Harris’ and all other good baseball novels, about something more than baseball.
Even at that, “Bang the Drum Slowly” might not be as well-known as it is were it not for the 1973 movie adaptation starring Michael Moriarty and Robert De Niro. Before that, it was the basis of a live CBS telecast on “The U.S. Steel Hour” in 1956 with Paul Newman and Albert Salmi. It also was adapted as a stage play.
It probably is the movie – along with the sentimentality in the story of a dying catcher – that pushes “Bang the Drum Slowly” out in front of the other novels in Harris’ series about Henry Wiggen, southpaw pitcher for the fictional New York Mammoths. The first in the series, 1953’s “The Southpaw: by Henry W. Wiggen: Punctuation Inserted and Spelling Greatly Improved,” and the third, “A Ticket for a Seamstitch, by Henry W. Wiggen: But Polished for the Printer” (1957), are equally as good as baseball novels.
In 1979, Harris made it a tetralogy with “It Looked Like For Ever.” (In a sense, there is a fifth Wiggen book, for he is the putative author of Harris’ 1952 biography of the poet Vachel Lindsay: “City of Discontent: An Interpretive Biography of Vachel Lindsay, Being Also the Story of Springfield, Illinois, USA, and of the Love of the Poet for That City, That State, and That Nation, by Henry W. Wiggen.”)
Such are vagaries of literary fate and fame. Harris wrote 13 novels (and five nonfiction works), some of which approach, perhaps match, the Wiggen three-bagger in their ruefully comic treatment of personal morality, social justice, love and friendship.
My own favorite is “Something About a Soldier” from 1957, about an intellectual, ineffectual draftee, Jacob Epstein, in the latter days of World War II.
Jacob cannot fit in. He is tripped up by his own desire to excel. “These qualities of excellence,” we read, “earned for him the name Chicken—-.”
He has other names, too. He enters the Army as Epp, a name he chose for job-application purposes but soon requests to change it back, a move that only confuses the Army and adds to his general impression as a screw-up. He has, after all, lost the 39 inductees he was supposed to escort to their first station. The mail clerk begins to call him Also, as in Also Known As Epp.
Jacob, the stereotypical earnest Jewish nebbish, is just the sort of soldier the Army can do without, which, after 121 days, it does. He is always talking, thinking, questioning: At What Specific Instant Does the Beer Bottle Open?
He undertakes a private, anonymous campaign against segregation in the armed forces. He ends up in the stockade for going AWOL for muzzy reasons, and develops an opposition to the “war effort” for reasons equally muzzy. He is shipped to the “nutward” and finally out of the Army.
It’s kind of sad that Jacob couldn’t fit in because he really likes the Army. On one of his train journeys in pursuit of some mad, noble goal, he carries with him a copy of Marion Hargrove’s wartime best-seller, “See Here, Private Hargrove,” which he laughs at uproariously “because that was how the Army was, a real comedy, very funny.”
An “Epplogue” to the book contains a shocker: Many years later he learns that all in his artillery battery were killed.
“Something About a Soldier” can be offered in evidence of the depth and range of Harris’ subject matter. It also illustrates something that Harris said in 1972, that essentially all his books are about him, the writer.
Like his soldier anti-hero, Harris also changed his name. He was born Mark Harris Finkelstein in Mount Vernon, N.Y., Nov. 19, 1922. His son Henry said he legally changed his name in the 1940s because he had been advised that his writing career would fare better “if he did not go by a Jewish name.”
Harris, too, served in the Army, 1943-44, notwithstanding his pacifist outlook, which is possibly reflected in Epstein’s conduct. After the war he worked as a journalist for newspapers, International News Service, Negro Digest and Ebony.
He received a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Denver in 1950 and ’51, respectively, and a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota in 1956. From the mid-
1950s on he taught at several universities, lastly Arizona State.
Harris said of his books that “they are about the one man against his society and trying to come to terms with his society, and trying to succeed within it without losing his own identity or integrity.” He might have said the same thing of himself.
Roger K. Miller is a freelance writer, reviewer and editor.
