The Southpaw by Mark Harris

First published: 1953

Type of plot: Comic social morality

Time of work: 1952

Locale: New York City; other locations have been given the fictitious names of Perkinsville, New York; Agua Clara; and Queen City

Principal Characters:

• Henry Wiggen, the unlettered narrator and principal character, a cocky left-handed pitcher who plays for the New York Mammoths and who grows up in the course of the novel
• Pop, his father, the driver of the Perkinsville school bus and a semiprofessional baseball player
• Aaron Webster, a well-educated, eighty-year-old astronomer, Pop’s friend and neighbor
• Holly Webster, Aaron’s niece, the girl next door, Henry’s sweetheart and later his wife
• Patricia Moors, the daughter of wealthy Lester T. Moors, Jr., the owner of the New York Mammoths
• “Sad Sam” Yale, a star left-handed pitcher and Henry’s boyhood idol
• Dutch Schnell, the team manager, whose principal aim is to win baseball games
• Red Traphagen, the catcher and team intellectual, who studied at Harvard
• Perry Simpson, a black infielder, who rooms with Henry

The Novel

Much of the action in The Southpaw concerns the experiences of Henry Wiggen, a young left-handed pitcher, after he joins the New York Mammoths and becomes part of their fight to win the pennant in the year 1952. Henry Wiggen relates his experiences in his own language, and his viewpoint is emphasized in the novel’s full title: The Southpaw, by Henry W. Wiggen: Punctuation Freely Inserted and Greatly Improved by Mark Harris. Born in Perkinsville, a small town in upstate New York, Henry Wiggen, like the entire town, is devoted to baseball. When he discovers that the local library has books on baseball, he works his way through a series of “How to Play Baseball” books as well as a series of adventure books about Sid Yule, a thinly disguised version of Henry’s idol, the great left-handed pitcher Sam Yale. After joining the Mammoths and becoming acquainted with Sam, Henry frequently alludes to passages in Sam Yale—Mammoth, a book that lauds clean living and obedience to authority, supposedly written by Sam. Sam finally suggests that Henry have his father send him the book.

When Sam reads the book which he is supposed to have written, he comments to Henry that it is “horseshit,” qualifying that judgment with the observation that the book is all right for most kids because they do not “aim very high.” Sam’s words are filtered through Henry’s grammatical constructions: “Those that aim high when they get there finds out that they should of went somewhere else.” Henry pretends to agree, but Sam discounts Henry’s assumed sophistication:

It will take you 15 years to find out. You get so you do not care. It is all like a ball game with nobody watching and nobody keeping score and nobody behind you. You pitch hard and nobody really cares.

In addition to revealing that he did not write the book that Henry has been reading and rereading once a week for years, Sad Sam tells Henry that the actual author of the book is Krazy Kress, a corrupt sportswriter with a series of angles for making money out of everything from benefit dinners to tours to Korea for entertaining the troops. These revelations inspire Henry to write The Southpaw, in which he sets out to tell the true story of baseball.

The action of The Southpaw centers on Henry’s gradual recognition of the emptiness of Sam Yale, the corruption of Krazy Kress, and the lack of humanity of Dutch Schnell, manager of the Mammoths. Henry’s coming of age occurs when he refuses either to apologize for or to retract the statement “Leave us forget Korea,” which Krazy Kress uses as the focal point for a column attacking Henry. Henry rejects the false position of entertaining the troops, who are fighting a war in which he does not believe. Patricia Moors, the wealthy owner’s daughter, tries to intimidate Henry by telling him that he owes it to the “organization” to respond to the column. Henry refuses to bow to the pressure and in so doing accepts the responsibility for his individuality and asserts a personal morality.

The story of the maturation of Henry Wiggen could have become sentimental, but this ostensibly simple story of a boy’s development is interlaced with arresting descriptions of baseball games. Harris succeeds in making the reader care about the fortunes of the team, the outcome of games, the success or failure of the players. During his youthful binge of reading baseball stories, Henry happens upon those of Ring Lardner and comments that the stories do not “amount to much, half his stories containing women in them and the other half less about baseball then what was going on in the hotels and trains. He never seemed to care how the games came out.” In contrast, the games themselves are brilliantly described in The Southpaw, engaging the reader in the play-by-play. The juxtaposition of the excitement of the game with Henry’s growing awareness of what goes on in “hotels and trains” turns The Southpaw into a triumph of comic realism. Because this baseball novel takes a profound look at social mores, it is as memorable and thought-provoking as it is amusing.

The Characters

Henry Wiggen, the narrator and central figure in The Southpaw, belongs to the tradition of naïve and semiliterate narrators represented most notably by Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn. Henry consistently uses the Arabic numerals “1” and “2” for one and two, “then” for than, “could of” for could have, and “leave” for let. He reports the conversations he has with other people in his own dialect; the characters and what they say are always filtered through Henry’s perceptions and vocabulary. In The Southpaw, this insistent narrative frame distances the reader from the events taking place and from Henry’s assessments of them. Early in the novel, Henry blithely and approvingly quotes Leo Durocher’s statement that “nice guys do not win ball games,” a sentiment preserved in American slang as “nice guys finish last.” By the end of the novel, Henry Wiggen recognizes, although he is unable to articulate it, that being a “nice guy” may be more important than winning.

In The Southpaw, Harris is especially successful in creating memorable characters. Dutch Schnell, the hard-boiled manager of the Mammoths, serves as a touchstone for understanding the motivation and values of the other characters. Schnell, as Henry observes, is “a great manager” whose “first and only aim in life is winning ball games.” Henry explains the kind of man Dutch is without making moral judgments:

There is nothing Dutch will not do for the sake of the ball game. If he thinks it will help win a ball game by eating you out he will eat you out. . . . If it is money you need he will give you money. And if he has no further need for you he will sell you or trade you or simply cut you loose and forget you.

Schnell is ruthless, but he is a winner, and, as Henry astutely perceives, there is a lot of Dutch Schnell in all the Mammoths. Even Sam Yale and Red Traphagen, whatever they say, play ball not only for the money but also for the glory of winning.

Red Traphagen, the intellectual of the team, learned his Spanish at Harvard University and perfected it in the Spanish Civil War. With more than a glance at the Ernest Hemingway hero, Red talks during the playing of the national anthem, ridicules the notion that any of the fans are free, and insists that few of them are brave.

In a discussion of whether they would become ballplayers if they had it to do over again, Dutch naturally says that he would. Sad Sam Yale, the epitome of self-interested disillusionment, says that he would not. Red, however, voices the worst assessment of their motivations: “There ain’t a man on this bus that could eat like he eats in any other line of work. . . . It is better than eating somebody’s crap in a mine or a mill or a farm or an office. It is the gold we are after.” Red’s insistence upon economic motivations, his ostensible pragmatism, masks a deep cynicism. Later, Henry sarcastically thanks Red for backing him up when he challenges Dutch about playing him when ill; Red replies that Dutch will never lose and that, young and single, Henry can afford to take risks. It is not surprising that Mike Mulrooney, manager of one of the Mammoth’s farm teams, warns Henry against listening to Red Traphagen and Sam Yale off the field. Sam Yale, the disillusioned star, and Red Traphagen, the cynical intellectual, have not come to terms with the Dutch Schnell in themselves, the desire for glory that even the naïve Henry recognizes and acknowledges.

Critical Context

The Southpaw was the first of four novels by Mark Harris featuring Henry Wiggen; the others are Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), and It Looked Like for Ever (1979). Of the four, the first two are by far the most highly regarded.

In The Southpaw, Harris transforms elements common to “baseball books” and “juvenile sports series” into a serious novel. While Harris does examine the drive to win, to achieve, within the context of professional baseball, his analysis of contemporary values and morals is fully applicable to business, entertainment, or any other profession. Dutch Schnell, Sad Sam Yale, and many other characters in The Southpaw are found in any walk of life.

Henry Wiggen, the narrator of The Southpaw, is not so typical. He is a left-handed pitcher, a left-hander in a right-handed world. Comparison with two other young heroes in American fiction is illuminating: Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, fictional characters who have become part of our culture.

Like Huck Finn, Henry is a naïve narrator. The matter of race is raised obliquely in The Southpaw as it is in the The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). It is worth noting that this book was first published in 1953, two years before the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregation in the public schools was unconstitutional. Henry’s roommate, Perry Simpson, a black infielder, is not allowed to stay with the team in certain cities. Henry does not preach about race, but the reader is insistently asked to question the social mores that turn Perry, a black man, into a second-class citizen only because of his color.

Henry Wiggen, unlike Holden Caulfield, is not presented as a victim of society. Henry is finally a more admirable figure morally than Holden Caulfield, the victim and child, helpless in the face of a society for which he feels no responsibility. Indeed, from a moral perspective, Henry is much closer to Huck Finn; he is never “precious.”

Because The Southpaw was initially classified as a “baseball book,” it was slow to receive the serious and thoughtful attention it merits, but, with Bang the Drum Slowly, it is now widely acknowledged as a novel which transcends its genre.

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. Fimrite details the evolution of serious literature on baseball and asserts that until the publication of The Southpaw, baseball literature consisted of mostly “fairy tales” 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 The Southpaw as “facile realism in a facile style.” It is 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.