The Art of Life

When I first opened The Art of Fielding, an American novel that happens to be about baseball (and that happens to have been written by a Harvard alum, Chad Harbach), it was 2 A.M. in the middle of a school week, during what Shakespeare might have called a “long, dark night of the soul,” if Shakespeare had cared about the angst of college students. Fortunately for me, Harbach does. I skipped sleep and meals to read the book straight through.
America’s love of the Baseball Parable has always been inscrutable to me. When, for example, Chief Justice John Roberts uses the first day of his confirmation hearing to argue that judges are like “umpires,” and that judicial restraint is warranted because “nobody ever went to a ball game to see the umpire,” I stare blankly. Can’t we do better? I think, a bit stupidly. Must we Americans reduce weighty judicio-moral issue to the language of balls and sticks?
This garden variety alienation — from one’s own fellow Americans, from one’s own damn language — is partly why I care so much about Harbach’s novel. His book is an act of transposition: he takes the democratic language of baseball and places it into that undemocratic argot of “contemporary fiction,” where authors schooled at elite universities (like Harbach) write for readers trained at the very same places (like me). Reading The Art of Fielding is thus like looking across America, and into a mirror, at once.
The story centers on a shy and preternaturally graceful shortstop named Henry Skrimshander, who was recruited to play baseball at Westish College, a “slightly decrepit liberal arts school on the western shore of Lake Michigan.” Henry’s performance is exceptional. He ties the all-time record for errorless games in a college career, and then — and, of course, there’s an “and then” — with one wild throw, he hits and nearly kills a teammate, and finds that his marvelously unselfconscious gifts have abandoned him. He can’t seem to throw straight again.
We learn that Henry suffers from what Harbach calls “the paradox of baseball.” “You loved it,” Harbach tells us, “because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about The Human Condition.” And yet, if baseball is an art, Harbach says, to succeed at it, “you had to become a machine.” In baseball, beauty is in the shaving off of millimeters. Its beauty is the unfreedom of our search for perfection.
In the heat of Henry’s own “dark night of the soul” he realizes the problem. “All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever…” Henry’s affliction is called “growing up.” After Westish College, that beautiful promise of baseball – the promise that we might become perfect if only we practice hard enough – is set ablaze by the chaos of life.
Thus my manic night of reading. The problem of baseball is the problem of Harvard: despite being hard, it actually makes success too easy. We’re told where to throw the ball and that everyone will cheer as we run around the bases. The hard part about life, as Henry discovers, is that none of this is actually true.
So my own addition to the Baseball Parable genre is this: baseball isn’t life, and that’s why it matters.
Photo Credit: cmduke, Flickr