Review: Pafko at the Wall

Pafko at the Wall by Don DeLillo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is at least the third time I’ve read this. The first was when it appeared in Harper’s magazine in 1992 as the first-ever “portfolio” extended piece they published. (Now they do them once every three months.)

The second time was when I read all of Underworld, where this appears as the opening segment. That turned me into a DeLillo fan, something I had not been when all I’d read was White Noise. I thought then, and see no reason to think otherwise, that Underworld was one of the great novels of the late 20th century, a flat-out masterpiece.

I’m reading this again now for a particular and focused purpose. I’m trying to find baseball novels that explore the link between fandom and some larger faith. It’s for a class that my friend Will and I are planning to teach next spring.

If I weren’t looking, I might not see anything along those lines. As Underworld makes clear, this is primarily about the role of history in shaping us. Bobby Thomson’s 1951 home run to win the pennant marked an instant when all of post-war America – celebrities like Gleason and Sinatra, policy-shapers like J. Edgar Hoover, businessmen, kids, Blacks, and whites – came together in a shared experience.

As Mao II, written just before, makes clear, there’s also a concern with the power of crowds, with what happens to people when they blend into some larger formation. As a set piece, this is all about the crowd, about a collective hope that the Giants can win the impossible game.

But since I am looking for notions of fandom as a kind of faith, I do find them, and I don’t think I’m imagining them. We get it bluntly in a few places, for instance when our 14-year-old African-American protagonist Cotter admires what his seeming friend Bill has to say about believing the Giants can still win it. “Cotter likes this man’s singles of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust. It’s the only force available against the power of doubt.” (48)

We also get a sense of the religious, at least in passing. At the moment when Thomson hits his home run, for instance, the Giants manager Leo Durocher goes into a strange dance that DeLillo describes in religious terms. “The manager stands and spins, he is spinning with his arms spread wide – maybe it’s an ascetic rapture, some kind of Sufi exercise, they do it in a mosque in eastern Turkey.” (60)

And then there’s also the strange sub-plot of Hoover catching a stray bit of magazine someone has torn out and let float. It turns out to be a reproduction of Breughel’s “The Triumph of Death,” and Hoover can’t put it down. It’s a great DeLillo moment to have Hoover dwell on a notion of hell as everyone around him experiences a peculiar and fleeting heaven, but I don’t it’s a stretch to read it that way.

At a fuller level, then, I see a way to read this novella as a description of a kind of perfect moment, an instant of innocence and magic that briefly redeems the squalor of the crowd (Hoover alone absent from the elect). It helps to know the history of Thomson’s home run before reading this, to know it as a moment that lived in the memory of a generation coming to adulthood a couple years too late to have participated in World War II.

The end of this, and forgive me if it’s somehow a SPOILER, deals with Cotter trying to hold onto the ball that he’s caught. DeLillo doesn’t tell us, but the later parts of Underworld make clear – as does cultural memory – that the Thomson ball is one of the great lost artifacts of the American 20th century. It would be a highlight of the Hall of Fame or the making of any restaurant that could display it.

As I see it, Cotter has found a totem, something that carries the residue of the redemptive power of the home run. For one ecstatic moment, everyone together experienced the power of Thomson’s bringing the Giants back from the near-dead to the heights of winning the pennant. He wants to hold onto it despite Bill’s offer of close to $20. He knows, without being to articulate it, that he’ll never experience anything so transformative – anything so, for lack of a better word, holy – again.

If that sounds like I’m forcing it, consider what Toots Shor says to Sinatra when Sinatra starts to complain about Gleason’s having just vomited all over his feet. “Let me get to the point. This is an all-time memory. This is a thing I’ll never forget in my normal life span except you’re ruining my memory in advance by standing her with your hands flapped out saying, ‘My shoe.’ “

Or, even more directly, consider the evidence of the final paragraphs of the story, as Giants announcer Russ Hodges – whose “the Giants have won the pennant” cry is one of the most famous baseball calls of all-time – reflects as the stadium remains in bedlam and the confetti swirls around him. “Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power.” (70)

All in all, this certainly holds up on a third reading, and I’m hungry now to read all of Underworld again. There are many reasons to read it; maybe fandom as a metaphor for some larger spiritual hunger is one of them.


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