The Natural (1952). Content and Description

Malamud published seven novels. Considering his ongoing concern with the lives of American Jews, his first novel is his most anomalous. It has nothing to do with Jewish life, immigrants, and the complexities of relations among ethnic groups in urban America. Yet, The Natural is probably the best known of his books, certainly today the best selling of his novels, though the explanation has much to do with its 1984 incarnation as a film starring Robert Redford, a version in which much of what made Malamud’s book powerful was filtered out and its ending almost reversed.

Malamud’s own professorial appearance and his stories of students and schlemiels may make his interest in baseball, the subject of The Natural, seem odd, but his childhood in Brooklyn prepared him for it; as he told Daniel Stern, “As a kid, for entertainment I turned to the movies and dime novels. Maybe The Natural derives from Frank Merriwell”—a Yale- educated hero of virtuous endeavor and crime detection as well as baseball, football, and other sports, much loved in magazine and dime novel form by American boys—“as well as the adventures of the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field” (43).

In The Natural he created a rich plot that contained elements of a Frank Merriwell-type figure, Roy Hobbs, who lacks Frank’s firmness and comes to grief through cruel fate and his own weaknesses, a life similar to Babe Ruth’s, seriocomic fantastic events reminiscent of the American tall-tale tradition, and a mythic substrate indebted to Jessie Weston’s From Ritual to Romance.

The central story is of a hero brought low by human weaknesses, including overweening ambition and misplaced love. Roy Hobbs first appears, a naive young ballplayer, on a train headed for the big city, accompanied by his mentor, Sam Simpson, an aging baseball scout who has discovered Roy, whose enormous skills promise some redemption for his futile life. At a stop along the way Whammer Wambold, the reigning home-run king, shows off for a mysterious girl called Harriet Bird, and Roy, stung by insults to Sam, strikes him out on three straight pitches.

This proves disastrous not only because his third pitch wounds Sam fatally but also because he turns Harriet Bird’s attentions from the Whammer to him; she, a sort of Fury who shoots outstanding athletes, having induced Roy to state that he will be the best ever, shoots him in a Chicago hotel.

This is the overture to the novel. When Roy appears again, he is a worn version of his youthful self, almost too old to be a player, who joins the dreadful New York Knights. Denied a chance to play by the petulant manager, he finally gets into a game and wins it by literally knocking the cover off the ball. He becomes a hero for the Knights, particularly after Bump Bailey, their previous star, stung by his rivalry, kills himself. Roy falls in love with Bump’s girl, Memo Paris, though she is clearly trouble; after a brief affair with a clearly good woman, Iris Lemon, he rejects her for the faithless and treacherous Memo.

Roy is surrounded by a nefarious crew including Memo; Max Mercy, an interfering sportswriter who was on the train the day he struck out the Whammer; and Judge Banner, the sinister owner of the Knights. His appetites for success, for Memo, for money, for everything at once, get him into trouble, as he gambles recklessly and eats obsessively, eventually winding up in the hospital with abdominal damage. Lured on by Memo, he accepts a bribe to throw the crucial game, and though he changes his mind, he fails and is disgraced nonetheless, his career at an end, his life a failure. As the novel ends, a small boy asks him, “Say it ain’t true, Roy”—echoing the “Say it ain’t so, Joe” associated with the disgraced White Sox gambler Shoeless Joe Jackson.

The Natural is, in one way, about the destruction of innocence. The Roy of the beginning is almost unbelievably provincial. Though without arrogance, he is also without guile, and his ready admission that he will be the best ever invokes his punishment from Harriet Bird. Even years later he is still a relative innocent, unable to understand (for instance) Memo Paris’s complexity and unreliability. The worst are full of passionate intensity, and Roy is no match for them.

There is an archetypal athlete’s story here, too, that of the unsophisticated man who gets too much too soon and is undone by a goddess figure. Kevin Baker invokes other baseball lives: Pistol Pete Reiser, a Dodger who (like Bump Bailey) ran into walls, though not fatally; Eddie Waitkus, also shot by a woman in a hotel room; and Babe Ruth, whose overeating produced a bellyache that affected the outcome of a game (xi). In his dislike for the press and the fans Roy follows Ted Williams. He becomes unpleasant with success and, one might argue, displays hubris that predicts if not ensures his downfall.

The most interesting feature of the novel is not its use of familiar baseball topoi but its mythic underpinnings, which have been much discussed. They include magic, from Roy’s superhuman feats at the park to an unexplained moment in a nightclub where he pulls silver dollars from a bookie’s nose, a herring from Max Mercy’s mouth, and a bunny from Memo’s purse. The language and detail of the novel insist on the mythic background. For instance, the opposing pitcher looking in “saw Roy, in full armor, mounted on a black charger” (225).

There are important thematic details, from Roy’s royal name, to his joining the Knights, to the name of their manager, Pop Kingfisher (i.e., Fisher King), and Roy’s success in healing the wounded Pop, resurrecting the dying Knights, and bringing rain to a wasteland (his first hit produces a three-day downpour), to his descent into the underworld, the gambling den staffed with masked devils. He has a miraculous weapon, Wonderboy, a bat he made for himself from a lightning- struck tree; with it, he is invincible, but as his powers fail, “Wonderboy resembled a sagging baloney” (140), and the end is near when Wonderboy splits during the climactic game, before Roy (like Mighty Casey) strikes out.

This patterning of a baseball story on the Holy Grail legend might mean only that Malamud sees heroes in both realms. Iris Lemon, whose name and nature leave her somewhat outside the Grail story, tells Roy that she hates to see a hero fail and that “it’s their function to be the best and for the rest of us to understand what they represent and guide ourselves accordingly” (148). Roy obtusely misunderstands her notion of heroism as being about breaking records, just as he crudely misunderstands Iris in other ways.

When asked why he employed the mythology in The Natural, Malamud responded: Because baseball flat is baseball flat. I had to do something else to enrich the subject. I love metaphor. It provides two loaves where there seems to be one. Sometimes it throws in a load of fish. The mythological analogy is a system of metaphor. It enriches the vision without resorting to montage. This guy gets up with his baseball bat and all at once he is, through the ages, a knight—somewhat battered—with a lance; not to mention a guy with a blackjack, or someone attempting murder with a flower. You relate to the past and predict the future. I’m not talented as a conceptual thinker but I am in the uses of metaphor. The mythological and symbolic excite my imagination. (Stern 52)

Through metaphor and myth Malamud’s baseball novel can appeal to readers for whom sports are trivial and make Roy Hobbs—who is, after all, a limited man, coarse, uneducated, brutal, thoughtless, given to bad decisions, cruel to the woman who loves him and abject to the one who hates him, whom Fortune has made the best pitcher and, later, the best hitter in the world—a hero like Percival or Roland, and his failure to get a hit in a baseball game a tragedy.

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Do you consider The Natural tragic? That is, does Roy Hobbs’s downfall have the kind of significance appropriate to that genre? Is he a satisfactory tragic hero?

2. Are the female characters credible to you, or is it the case that they function schematically—femme fatale, avenging Fury, redeeming angel, and so on? Which of them seems most convincingly developed?

3. The Natural mixes mythological matter with naturalistic detail. How important is the baseball information? Would the novel be accessible to a reader who knew, or cared, nothing about baseball?

4. What are some of the meanings of natural that could illuminate Malamud’s choice of title?

5. Consider other modern novels founded on base- ball—Robert Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., Mark Harris’s Bang the Drum Slowly, W. P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe, Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel, Douglass Wallop’s The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant—and ponder why baseball, rather than football or Nascar racing or the NBA, is the literary subject par excellence in the United States.

6. F. Scott Fitzgerald declared that “there are no second acts in American lives.” Does that claim (whether you think it is true or not) illuminate Roy Hobbs’s quest after his first disaster and its outcome?

7. Must greatness in one dimension be purchased by deficiency somewhere else? Consider Roy Hobbs’s intellectual mediocrity, his indefatigable pursuit of the wrong woman, and his cruelty to Iris Lemon. Are these the price of unequaled baseball skill? How does the flawed hero of The Natural compare with, say, Achilles in The Iliad or Sir Lancelot?