Echoing Ring

BANG THE DRUM SLOWLY (243 pp.)--Mark Harris--Knopf ($3.50).

It was Ring Lardner who made the first serious attempt in fiction to find out if baseball players are people. His answer in the You Know Me, Al stories could be boiled down to yes, with reservations. Now, 40 years later, both sportswriters and novelists seem to have fewer reservations. In Bernard Malamud's The Natural (TIME, Sept. 8, 1952), there was the mystical intimation that major-leaguers might even have souls. In Bang the Drum Slowly, Novelist Mark (The Southpaw) Harris modestly stays closer to the bag. Look, he says, they are human, and their hearts can hurt as much as a spiked foot.

The man whose plight uncovers compassion in Bang the Drum Slowly is Catcher Bruce Pearson. He is a baseball and football tramp. His near illiteracy was no handicap at a Southern university, but with the Mammoths, one of the New York big league teams, he is strictly a marginal player: a positive handicap to the pitcher, endowed only with a real passion for pasting the ball. Next to visiting prostitutes, Bruce's favorite off-diamond pastime is sitting at hotel windows and spitting into the street. What fascinates Bruce is the fact that, when spitting from on high, he can put a curve on it.

Bruce is more victim than hero, the means whereby Pitcher Henry Wiggen, the narrator of Bang, can make his point that ballplayers belong to the fraternity of men. Bruce has Hodgkin's disease, and any moment may be his last. That is why Ace Pitcher Wiggen makes it part of his contract that Bruce must be kept on with the Mammoths as long as he is. That is why the players who had got their kicks out of riding the dumb catcher suddenly expose hidden reserves of tenderness and simple decency. There is one bad apple, and that is Katie, the beautiful prostitute with whom Catcher Bruce is in love. Unlike the cliche harlot of fiction, she is as short of compassion as Bruce is of IQ. Only when she learns that he is dying will she agree to marry him, and then only on condition that she become the beneficiary of Bruce's insurance policy. As the catcher's insurance agent as well as his friend (Wiggen's off-season job is selling policies), the pitcher foils Katie.

Catcher Pearson dies, but by that time Narrator Wiggen and Author Harris have made their point: scratch a ballplayer and you find a human being, a taxpayer, a batter in the game of life whose exhilaration at pitching a shutout or swatting a homer with the bases full is apt to be balanced at any time by an ignominious strikeout or a sad walk to the showers. As the theme of a novel, this carries its own banality if only because no decent reader would want to quarrel with it. What makes Bang the Drum Slowly unique in current fiction is Author Harris' mastery of his offbeat scene. His charr:ters all talk alike, and so the dialogue begins to sound monotonous, but basically the talk is natural, larded with casual humor, earthiness and more than a touch of locker-room obscenity. If the characters are no more than onedimensional, it is a dimension that Harris has measured with his heart as well as his eye and ear. It is true that Author Harris' major success lies in stirring up reminders of Ring Lardner, but it is equally true that not many people now writing can do that much.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.