Bang the Drum Slowly by Mark Harris

First published: 1956

Type of work: Social realism

Themes: Sports, friendship, health and illness, and death

Time of work: 1955

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Perkinsville, New York; Rochester, Minnesota; Bainbridge, Georgia; Aqua Clara, Florida; and New York City

Principal Characters:

• Henry W. Wiggen, the narrator, star pitcher for the New York Mammoths
• Bruce Pearson, Henry’s roommate, the third-string catcher
• Holly Webster Wiggen, Henry’s wife
• Katie, a Manhattan prostitute whom Bruce loves
• Dutch Schnell, the Mammoths’ hard-bitten manager
• Goose Williams, an aging catcher who taunts Bruce
• Piney Woods, a young, undisciplined catcher and potential star

The Story

Henry Wiggen, star pitcher for the New York Mammoths, is peacefully spending the off-season in his hometown of Perkinsville, New York, when he receives a telephone call from Bruce Pearson, a substitute catcher and his roommate during the season, summoning him to Rochester, Minnesota. Leaving Holly, his pregnant wife, Henry drives to the Mayo Clinic to learn that Bruce is suffering from Hodgkin’s disease, an incurable ailment. Henry then takes Bruce to the home of the catcher’s parents in Bainbridge, Georgia. Henry decides not to tell Dutch Schnell, the Mammoth manager, or any of his teammates about Bruce’s illness, knowing that a sick third-string catcher would immediately be cut from the team. Bruce, a football star in college and a World War II veteran, is not one of Dutch’s favorites to begin with, since he has never come close to living up to his potential, seemingly never taking baseball seriously.

At spring training in Aqua Clara, Florida, Henry holds out for a salary increase and forces the team’s management to add a clause to his contract specifying that Bruce must be on the same team with him; neither can be traded or sold without the other being included. Dutch is furious that Henry will not explain this action. Henry tries to rehabilitate Bruce as a player by convincing him that he is not dumb and teaching him to think for the first time in his career. As the season progresses, Henry works hard to keep Bruce from getting married to Katie, a Manhattan prostitute who has her eyes on the benefits of the insurance policy Henry has sold his friend. (Henry’s sidelines are selling insurance to other major leaguers and writing books about his baseball experiences.)

Henry finally discloses Bruce’s illness to veteran catcher Goose Williams to stop him from mercilessly taunting their simpleminded teammate, who has always been the butt of others’ jokes. Henry teaches Bruce the card game Tegwar (an exciting game without any rules) so that he can be in on a gag at someone else’s expense for the first time in his life. Bruce handles his predicament better than Henry, who one night takes out his frustrations on his hotel room. Shortly afterward, his daughter, Michelle, is born.

Dutch notices that Bruce is finally paying attention to the finer points of baseball and makes him the starting catcher. The irony of a dying man’s achieving his goal at last is underscored when Bruce’s mother suddenly dies. As the season progresses, Katie grows more desperate. She will not marry Bruce until she is made his beneficiary, but Henry is determined that the money will go to Bruce’s father. Katie threatens to inform Henry’s insurance company of his refusal to accede to his client’s wishes, and when this fails, she offers him a five-thousand-dollar bribe.

Because Goose cannot keep a secret, eventually all the Mammoths, including Dutch, know about Bruce. Henry is relieved that he can share his burden and happy that his friend is allowed to remain with the team. The Mammoths, who have been feuding among themselves all season, become united through Bruce’s illness and go on to win the World Series. Yet Bruce’s deteriorating condition forces him to return to Georgia before the series is over, and he dies shortly afterward. Henry is the only Mammoth at the funeral.

Context

Bang the Drum Slowly is the second of four Henry Wiggen novels by Mark Harris. In the first, The Southpaw (1953), Henry progresses from cocky, naive teenager to young baseball star, committing numerous blunders along the way but learning from his mistakes. In the third, A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1956), Henry helps young catcher Piney Woods learn about baseball and life. It Looked Like For Ever (1979) finds Henry unable to retire after nineteen seasons because the youngest of his four daughters has never seen him play in person.

The Henry Wiggen saga depicts the protagonist’s moral education. Henry in The Southpaw is an innocent in the tradition of the hero of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). His naivete and overconfidence keep getting him into trouble, but his basic if untutored intelligence allows him to grow from his encounters with a world more complicated than his upbringing in a small upstate New York town has led him to anticipate. Harris shows Henry as he learns about sex, racial prejudice, the pressures of big-time sports, marriage, and all the complexities of adulthood. Yet the novels are never didactic. The tone is primarily comic as unsophisticated Henry narrates his story in a colorful vernacular reflecting the American culture of his time.

Bang the Drum Slowly is considered one of the best of the many notable baseball novels. While it eschews the mythical side of baseball emphasized in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural (1952), Robert Coovers’ The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968), Jerome Charyn’s The Seventh Babe (1979), and W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe (1982), it and The Southpaw effectively present a realistic, unsentimental picture of the day-to-day life of a major leaguer, filled with boredom, temptations, personality conflicts, slumps, and heroics. The Henry Wig-gen saga is an outstanding example of the coming-of-age tradition in American literature. As Henry makes the awkward, often painful transition from youth to experience, Bruce’s illness and slow death are a major contribution to his maturity, teaching him the importance of standing up for and making sacrifices for one’s friends.

Bibliography

Fimrite, Ron. “Fiction in a Diamond Setting: Mark Harris’s Novels Sparkle with Hard-Edged Realism.” Sports Illustrated 73 (October 15, 1990): 117-122. A biographical and critical profile of Mark Harris. The models for some of the characters in Bang the Drum Slowly are discussed. Fimrite details the evolution of serious literature on baseball and asserts that until the publication of Harris’s The Southpaw, baseball literature consisted of mostly “fairy tale” boy’s books written by fabulists. Fimrite also notes the influence of Ring Lardner and Mark Twain on Harris’s baseball books.

Harris, Mark. Best Father Ever Invented: The Autobiography of Mark Harris. New York: Dial Press, 1976. In his autobiography, written during the 1960’s and published in 1976, Harris portrays himself as depressed over his work, categorizing his earlier baseball novel, The Southpaw, as “facile realism in a facile style.” A fascinating early self-portrait of a writer who has since come to terms with himself and his writing.

Harris, Mark. Diamond: Baseball Writings of Mark Harris. New York: Donald I. Fine, 1995. A collection of baseball writings by Harris spanning 1946 through 1993. Provides an illuminating view into Harris’s devotion to the game and the evolution of his thinking on numerous topics. Also included is Harris’s screenplay of the movie version of Bang the Drum Slowly.

Lavers, Norman. Mark Harris. Boston: Twayne, 1978. Lavers provides a critical and interpretive study of Harris, with a close reading of his major works, a solid bibliography, and complete notes and references.