[As part of this
summer’s
beach reading, I had the chance to revisit and engage more deeply with Dennis
Lehane’s The Given Day (2008),
one of the most compelling and effective recent historical novels. In this
series, I’ll share a handful of histories that this fiction helps us better
remember; share your nominees for great historical fictions, new or old, for a
boundary-blurring crowd-sourced weekend post!]
On Babe Ruth,
symbolism, and race in America.
There’s no doubt
that sports can bring out the worst as well as the best in us, and that sports fandom does so with particular force. But even those of us who have experienced hateful
sports rivalries are likely to be shocked when we read about the death threats (among other horrific attacks) that Hank Aaron faced as he approached and then passed Babe Ruth’s all-time home run record. This
wasn’t Jackie Robinson, breaking baseball’s color barrier and changing a still-segregated
society nearly thirty years earlier; this was simply a very talented baseball
player finishing a very succesful baseball career, one that had landed him at the top of the record books.
And yet something about the combination of his race and identity with those of
the iconic legend he was eclipsing led to some of the ugliest expressions of
which we Americans and humans are capable.
The moment and
those expressions tell us a great deal about racism in America, and it would
likely be a mistake to focus our analyses on any other side to those histories.
But at the same time, I do believe that if Aaron had been approaching a Lou
Gehrig record, or a Joe DiMaggio record, or a Ty Cobb record, or any other
legendary player, the responses might not have been quite so vitriolic. There’s
just something about the Babe in the collective consciousness of a number of
American sports fans, or rather a few related somethings: his literally and
figuratively larger than life status, the way in which he was already a myth of sorts before he became one after his career was done; his
concurrent representation of an earlier era in baseball and sports and America, one that likely couldn’t help but feel
to many fans contrasted with the world of professional sports in Aaron’s 1970s;
and, yes, the way in which each of those histories was made possible in large
part because Ruth played in a segregated league, competing with only a portion of his era’s best ballplayers.
It’s with all of those different sides to Ruth, his era, and history in
play that Dennis Lehane creates a series of bravura sequences interspersed with
the main narratives throughout his early 20th century historical
novel The Given Day (2008). One of Lehane’s two co-protagonists is an
African American ballplayer named Luther Laurence, and Lehane opens his novel
with a set-piece in which Ruth and some of his fellow professional players (en
route from one 1918 World Series site to the other) encounter Luther and other
African American players, leading to a pickup game that is at once color-blind
and yet ultimately as segregated as the rest of society. Ruth reappears in a
few additional set-pieces later in the novel, always bringing with him the same
uneasy combination of baseball and society, mythic ideals and gritty realities.
Some reviewers critiqued the Ruth sections as tangential to the book’s main
narratives, which is true enough—but they make great use of the Ruth mythos,
illustrating one more time how much this larger than life figure can say and do
in our national conversations and stories.
Next Given Day connection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Historical
fictions you’d highlight? Share for the weekend post, please!
No comments:
Post a Comment