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Pafko at the Wall
"There's a long drive.
It's gonna be.
I believe.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant.
The Giants win the pennant."
-- Russ Hodges, October 3, 1951
On the fiftieth anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World," Don DeLillo reassembles in fiction the larger-than-life characters who on October 3, 1951, witnessed Bobby Thomson's pennant-winning home run in the bottom of the ninth inning. Jackie Gleason is razzing Toots Shor in Leo Durocher's box seats; J. Edgar Hoover, basking in Sinatra's celebrity, is about to be told that the Russians have tested an atomic bomb; and Russ Hodges, raw-throated and excitable, announces the game -- the Giants and the Dodgers at the Polo Grounds in New York. DeLillo's transcendent account of one of the iconic events of the twentieth century is a masterpiece of American sportswriting.
96 pages, Hardcover
First published October 9, 2001
About the author
Don DeLillo
90 books5,965 followersDonald Richard DeLillo is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, the complexities of language, art, the advent of the Digital Age, mathematics, politics, economics, and sports.
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
DeLillo was already a well-regarded cult writer in 1985, when the publication of White Noise brought him widespread recognition and the National Book Award for fiction. He followed this in 1988 with Libra, a novel about the Kennedy assassination. DeLillo won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Mao II, about terrorism and the media's scrutiny of writers' private lives, and the William Dean Howells Medal for Underworld, a historical novel that ranges in time from the dawn of the Cold War to the birth of the Internet. He was awarded the 1999 Jerusalem Prize, the 2010 PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction in 2010, and the 2013 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
DeLillo has described his themes as "living in dangerous times" and "the inner life of the culture." In a 2005 interview, he said that writers "must oppose systems. It's important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments... I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us."
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 243 reviews
February 18, 2024
I’ve read a couple of DeLillo novels and found them barely penetrable. There’s something about the way he strings sentences together that confuses me. Each sentence seems perfectly formed, but when he links them together I just seem to get lost. It took me three attempts to read Falling Man and when I finally did finish it I’m not sure I got it at all.
I may not be a huge fan of DeLillo's work but I am a sports fan. A big sports fan. I love accounts of epic sporting events and this novella promised to be just that. I’m a baseball novice but I had completed some research: I’d read up on the history of the ‘shot heard around the world’ and I’d watched a video capturing the event on You Tube. I’d also read some reviews of the book – some saying it’s the best baseball story ever written. I even went to the trouble of ordering a second hand copy from America as I couldn’t track down a copy in the UK (and I had no intention of buying a copy of that huge tome Underworld - this novella is actually the opening section of the book). Despite some trepidation, I had big hopes.
So were my hopes fulfilled or my worst fears confirmed? In truth, a bit of both. There were elements of the story I really liked (Cotter and Russ Hodges) and bits I didn’t (the Sinatra party sections). I’m sure many of the nuances passed me by and I thereby lost out to some degree but if I judge this simply as a story about a great sporting event I’d say it painted an effective picture and did provide a sense of the excitement surrounding the whole thing. It’s ok and I did enjoy it – but I can’t believe it’s the best baseball story ever written!
I may not be a huge fan of DeLillo's work but I am a sports fan. A big sports fan. I love accounts of epic sporting events and this novella promised to be just that. I’m a baseball novice but I had completed some research: I’d read up on the history of the ‘shot heard around the world’ and I’d watched a video capturing the event on You Tube. I’d also read some reviews of the book – some saying it’s the best baseball story ever written. I even went to the trouble of ordering a second hand copy from America as I couldn’t track down a copy in the UK (and I had no intention of buying a copy of that huge tome Underworld - this novella is actually the opening section of the book). Despite some trepidation, I had big hopes.
So were my hopes fulfilled or my worst fears confirmed? In truth, a bit of both. There were elements of the story I really liked (Cotter and Russ Hodges) and bits I didn’t (the Sinatra party sections). I’m sure many of the nuances passed me by and I thereby lost out to some degree but if I judge this simply as a story about a great sporting event I’d say it painted an effective picture and did provide a sense of the excitement surrounding the whole thing. It’s ok and I did enjoy it – but I can’t believe it’s the best baseball story ever written!
January 7, 2010
In what is essentially the prologue to Underworld that ran in Harper's in slightly different form, Pafko at the Wall describes the events of October 3, 1951, when the Giants came from behind to beat the Dodgers on Bobby Thomson's walk-off home run. This happened way before my time, but I remember hearing Russ Hodges's famous "The Giants win the pennant!" on reruns of MASH and various sports broadcasts and I had a friend named Bobby Thompson when I was kid. So it's an event that kinda sorta feels "alive" in my memories. I was aware it happened; I knew of its importance. It's there even though I wasn't.
But after reading DeLillo's evocation of the event, I almost feel as if I was there. In many respects, Pafko at the Wall is all scene. There's a ton of exposition rendered in lush style. Grandiose and overheated, but squarely in the moment. We see the events through close to a dozen characters, including Russ Hodges, Bobby Thomson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, among others. DeLillo hops from head to head and tells us what they see and hear and think and feel and it's all pretty marvelous.
That's not to say this isn't one hell of a self-indulgent piece of writing. There's a lot of riffing on baseball arcana, the advertisments contained in an issue of Life, and Hoover's fascination with details from Peter Breugel's The Triumph of Death, the kind of things that are wonderful to think about but awful to be bombarded with. DeLillo just loves tapdancing on that edge. This inclination to describe absolutely everything gets him into trouble every now and again, as with this sentence:
"You know those athletic jackets where the sleeves are one color and leathery looking and the body is a darker color and probably wool and these are the college colors of the team."
Well, no shit. This occasional tin ear for statements of the obvious is eclipsed by DeLillo's fondness for Joycean neologisms that compress a vast range of emotion into a sharp turn of phrase, such as "afterschool light." I read that, and I'm twelve all over again.
So, I'm curious to see how the prologue's style carries over to the rest of the novel, if its overheated grandiosity is intended to be a comment of some sort on the rest of the novel, it's characters, the era it describes, etc. of if that's just the way this novel unfolds. But there's something suspiciously "The Dead"-like about the prologue's last line, "It is all falling indelibly into the past," that I find perfectly irresistable.
But after reading DeLillo's evocation of the event, I almost feel as if I was there. In many respects, Pafko at the Wall is all scene. There's a ton of exposition rendered in lush style. Grandiose and overheated, but squarely in the moment. We see the events through close to a dozen characters, including Russ Hodges, Bobby Thomson, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, and J. Edgar Hoover, among others. DeLillo hops from head to head and tells us what they see and hear and think and feel and it's all pretty marvelous.
That's not to say this isn't one hell of a self-indulgent piece of writing. There's a lot of riffing on baseball arcana, the advertisments contained in an issue of Life, and Hoover's fascination with details from Peter Breugel's The Triumph of Death, the kind of things that are wonderful to think about but awful to be bombarded with. DeLillo just loves tapdancing on that edge. This inclination to describe absolutely everything gets him into trouble every now and again, as with this sentence:
"You know those athletic jackets where the sleeves are one color and leathery looking and the body is a darker color and probably wool and these are the college colors of the team."
Well, no shit. This occasional tin ear for statements of the obvious is eclipsed by DeLillo's fondness for Joycean neologisms that compress a vast range of emotion into a sharp turn of phrase, such as "afterschool light." I read that, and I'm twelve all over again.
So, I'm curious to see how the prologue's style carries over to the rest of the novel, if its overheated grandiosity is intended to be a comment of some sort on the rest of the novel, it's characters, the era it describes, etc. of if that's just the way this novel unfolds. But there's something suspiciously "The Dead"-like about the prologue's last line, "It is all falling indelibly into the past," that I find perfectly irresistable.
April 27, 2023
Pafko at the Wall is a novella fictokn tale about the October 3, 1951 game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, where the famous "Shot Heard Round the World" happened, and those who attended the game. You have well-known names, such as Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, J. Edgar Hoover; and others such as Russ Hodges, announcer for the Giants whose repeated screams of "the Giants win the pennant!," are well known to baseball fans. Then, you have the everyday folks in the stands and a young gate hopper, sneaking his way past the ticker booth to see the game without paying.
I really enjoyed this, with how the game was viewed by both celebs, everyday fans, and the kid, who has to be sure watch out that he isn't discovered and tossed out of the stadium. I liked the characterizations of these figures and what was going on with them all at the time. I felt I got to know them well. The plot is excellent, and DeLillo does a phenomenal job of creating the atmosphere and excitement of the game and the fans in attendance. It was just like being there. I highly recommend the audio version as well, which was read by Billy Crudup, Tony Shalhoub, and Zachary Levi.
I really enjoyed this, with how the game was viewed by both celebs, everyday fans, and the kid, who has to be sure watch out that he isn't discovered and tossed out of the stadium. I liked the characterizations of these figures and what was going on with them all at the time. I felt I got to know them well. The plot is excellent, and DeLillo does a phenomenal job of creating the atmosphere and excitement of the game and the fans in attendance. It was just like being there. I highly recommend the audio version as well, which was read by Billy Crudup, Tony Shalhoub, and Zachary Levi.
February 18, 2024
خدا این آمریکایی ها رو از ما نگیره،یک داستانک با تم ورزشی هست که در واقع پیشگفتار رمان اصلی و معروف دان دلیلو به نام
Underworld
هست که سال ۲۰۰۱ منتشر شده است.
امید که دنیای زیرزمینی هم ترجمه بشود.
«اینها همه فرو میافتند در ورطه گذشتهای فراموش نشدنی...»
Underworld
هست که سال ۲۰۰۱ منتشر شده است.
امید که دنیای زیرزمینی هم ترجمه بشود.
«اینها همه فرو میافتند در ورطه گذشتهای فراموش نشدنی...»
November 30, 2020
A brilliant prologue to Underworld, DeLillo at his best. It is fun, well-written, and overall, just amazing!
July 19, 2014
I found this insufferable for the same reason I find most Delillo insufferable, his language is just too incantatory and too bloatedly self-important to really take seriously. He wants to attach profundity and portentousness to everything in sight. Baseball, Nuclear War, J Edgar Hoover, Peter Brughel, Frank Sinatra... everything becomes a part of this giant, humorously ritualized mythos, which would be fine, but unfortunately fiction needs to have more to it than the atmosphere of a catholic mass in old latin to really function (or at least is does for me). Delillo wants so desperately to be taken seriously, but his vague invocations make it obvious that he doesn't really even know what exactly he wants to be serious about. It seems like he wants to be a prophet of dread, anxiety, paranoia, really of modernity itself. Maybe instead of trying to be important he should just try to be a good fiction writer.
June 28, 2018
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.
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.
May 8, 2014
In general, my students hated Pafko. They called it pointless, disjointed, devoid of the action they expected of a "baseball story." I love the novella for the reasons they don't. It's not a baseball story, I tell them. It marks the nervousness of a nation, beginning to understand its obsession with distraction, while all the while teetering on the Cold War.
Puke on the shoes of Frank Sinatra from Gleason's greasy mouth was supposed to prepare my students for reading "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," but I think Hunter S. Thompson's bravado made them forget Delillo's sentimentalism quickly. The narrator's camera in Pafko flashes around the stadium like a kid with binoculars who wants to see the tiny melodramas concurrent to the action of the game -- a famous game, too. The action is in the small stories -- the sharing of peanuts, J. Edgar Hoover's transfixed eyes, a hoarse throat, a stolen piece of memorabilia, and the many walls Delillo puts up for us to face: Pafko's wall, the racial divide in Harlem, the tenuous line between peace and war.
Puke on the shoes of Frank Sinatra from Gleason's greasy mouth was supposed to prepare my students for reading "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," but I think Hunter S. Thompson's bravado made them forget Delillo's sentimentalism quickly. The narrator's camera in Pafko flashes around the stadium like a kid with binoculars who wants to see the tiny melodramas concurrent to the action of the game -- a famous game, too. The action is in the small stories -- the sharing of peanuts, J. Edgar Hoover's transfixed eyes, a hoarse throat, a stolen piece of memorabilia, and the many walls Delillo puts up for us to face: Pafko's wall, the racial divide in Harlem, the tenuous line between peace and war.
January 27, 2017
The escalating tension/energy/excitement, starting right around the halfway point, when it pushes from introduction and build-up toward the actual moment of Bobby Thomson's homerun is especially amazing and gripping.
Plus, Jackie Gleason vomiting what "seems to be...someone's taupe pajamas" and it "splashing freely" on Sinatra's "stout oxford shoes" was pretty much worth the read alone.
Plus, Jackie Gleason vomiting what "seems to be...someone's taupe pajamas" and it "splashing freely" on Sinatra's "stout oxford shoes" was pretty much worth the read alone.
August 2, 2015
An interesting piece on historical events tied together in a small space of time.
April 5, 2017
Pafko at the Wall is an interesting Novella that encapsulates many aspects of America. It is for one a retelling of "the shot heard around the world", one of the most famous baseball moments of all time. But even more than that, it is an in depth look into the attitudes and lives of Americans in the 1950s. There are characters from all walks of life, such as Cotter from the marginalized, Hoover from the government and Frank Sinatra from the entertainment world. Delillo blends all of these characters into one entity at the baseball game. During the game they are all united watching the same sport. If this novella is not about baseball, then it is about the diversity of America and the uniting power of baseball. This baseball game is one of the rare times that all walks of life in America were united under a singular cause.
April 5, 2017
I personally did not like the book, but that is because it wasn't entirely about baseball. It used the setting of a baseball game to describe certain characters at the game. DeLillo took a panoramic photograph at the game and then picked a few people to write about. I thought it was an interesting style to use in a novella and it worked. At times the read felt very slow, but overall there was enough baseball in the book to keep it moving. At the end of the book, DeLillo used the baseball to help illustrate the culture of the time and he did so in a sly manner. I would recommend this book to non-baseball fans, because baseball fans will be disappointed with the content of the novella.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 5, 2017
This book is interesting because while it's about baseball, there is so much more going on. It's about the anonymous faces of the fans. In this book there are musicians communicating with businessmen and comedians and then marginalized people communicating with the wealthy. It shows how big sports events can bring us together but then also tear us apart. Rather than being about the game of baseball, this story is about what happens outside of the game and in the crowds, providing a very interesting and realistic depiction of the sport.
April 29, 2012
Yesterday, Jonathan Schwarz was talking about how New York hasn't been the same since the Dodgers and Giants left. I didn't live here back then, but he claims it was perfect, so I'll have to to take his word for it. Anyway, I think that's something DeLillo is trying to get at with this story, a fictionalized account of the 1951 playoff between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants. Seven years after this game, both the Giants and the Dodgers would leave for California; the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field would both be turned into rubble.
DeLillo’s fictionalized account of the game is told through the points of view of a rotating cast of spectators, some of them real—J. Edgar Hoover, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Russ Hodges—and others imagined, mainly, Cotter Martin, a black schoolboy from Harlem who plays hookie, sneaks into the game by jumping the turnstile, and wrestles the winning ball away from a dogpile of other fans.
I first read Pafko at the Wall with the alternate ending, as the prologue to Underworld, where it’s titled, The Triumph of Death. It frames the rest of the book with what is meant to stand for the beginning of Cold War nuclear proliferation as J. Edgar Hoover receives news that the Russians have The Bomb. After hearing this, Hoover is showered with intact pages from Life Magazine mixed among the rest of the tickertape celebration. Two of the pages contain the Peter Bruges painting, an apocalyptic scene of carnage from which the prologue derives its title. The short lived post war peace is over. The nuclear arms race, and the fear and terror that would go with, have just begun.
Hoover, the painting, and news of the Soviet nuclear test remain, but the tone of the stand-alone novella is much more optimistic, much more upbeat, ending before Cotter’s ball can be stolen by his alcoholic father. Instead of the inevitable evil conquering good, we’re left with an image of a victorious underdog, and the takeaway is a feeling more of nostalgia than dread. The only dread is Cotter’s—of having to go to school the next day.
DeLillo’s fictionalized account of the game is told through the points of view of a rotating cast of spectators, some of them real—J. Edgar Hoover, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason, Russ Hodges—and others imagined, mainly, Cotter Martin, a black schoolboy from Harlem who plays hookie, sneaks into the game by jumping the turnstile, and wrestles the winning ball away from a dogpile of other fans.
I first read Pafko at the Wall with the alternate ending, as the prologue to Underworld, where it’s titled, The Triumph of Death. It frames the rest of the book with what is meant to stand for the beginning of Cold War nuclear proliferation as J. Edgar Hoover receives news that the Russians have The Bomb. After hearing this, Hoover is showered with intact pages from Life Magazine mixed among the rest of the tickertape celebration. Two of the pages contain the Peter Bruges painting, an apocalyptic scene of carnage from which the prologue derives its title. The short lived post war peace is over. The nuclear arms race, and the fear and terror that would go with, have just begun.
Hoover, the painting, and news of the Soviet nuclear test remain, but the tone of the stand-alone novella is much more optimistic, much more upbeat, ending before Cotter’s ball can be stolen by his alcoholic father. Instead of the inevitable evil conquering good, we’re left with an image of a victorious underdog, and the takeaway is a feeling more of nostalgia than dread. The only dread is Cotter’s—of having to go to school the next day.
May 7, 2019
журнальна версія суттєво відрізняється від книжкової: деякі другорядні персонажі отримали повноцінне життя, майже нічого не зникло, усі фрази перейшли в Underworld, хоч і не в Пролог. Дійсно, найкращий текст про бейсбол - поліфонічний і захоплений.
March 21, 2020
Beautiful
This is a beautiful story about a historic moment in baseball. Packing watches the ball as it soars over the wall, leaving the Dodgers behind.
This is a beautiful story about a historic moment in baseball. Packing watches the ball as it soars over the wall, leaving the Dodgers behind.
April 5, 2022
A masterpiece. DeLillo's writing is as miraculous as the subject of nearly perfect novella.
May 21, 2020
The reason why I begrudgingly held onto Underworld with the claim of wanting to finish it, because its opening chapter was so beautifully told despite being about a subject I cared little for. I've formally admitted defeat to that novel, but this section remains untarnished in my memory.
October 11, 2023
Well it’s October…that time of year. As DeLillo writes, “Longing on a large scale is what makes history.” I missed the game, 1951, I was 2&1/2, so there’s that. Time to travel back in time, the crack of the bat, screams of the crowd [big shots, little shots] bedlam & paper, an American moment.
Pafko at the Wall delivers.
“This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.”
“All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their roomlets in the beaten streets.”
Cotter. “He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.” He’s made it inside the park.
Russ Hodges, the call of the game. “Russ feels lucky to be here. Day of days and he’s doing the game and it’s happening at the Polo Grounds—a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war. He thinks everybody who’s here ought to feel lucky because something big’s in the works, something’s building. Okay, maybe just his temperature.” … “ thinking of the time his father took him to see Dempsey fight Willard in Toledo and what a thing that was, what a measure of the awesome, the Fourth of July and a hundred and ten degrees and a crowd of shirtsleeved men in straw hats…”
Posed for battle. “Durocher on the dugout steps, manager of the Giants, hard-rock Leo, the gashouse scrapper, a face straight from the Gallic Wars, and he says into his fist, “Holy fuggin shit almighty.”
Big Shots in Attendance. “Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, drinking buddies from way back, and they’re accompanied by a well-dressed man with a bulldog mug, one J. Edgar Hoover. What’s the nation’s number one G-man doing with these crumbums? He likes to be around movie idols and celebrity athletes, around gossip-meisters such as Walter Winchell, who is also at the game today, sitting with the Dodger brass. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world, and Edgar responds to people who have access to this energy. He wants to be their dearly devoted friend provided their hidden lives are in his private files, all the rumors collected and indexed, the shadow facts made real.”
Play ball. “this five-ounce sphere of cork, rubber, yarn, horsehide and spiral stitching, a souvenir baseball, a priceless thing somehow, a thing that seems to recapitulate the whole history of the game every time it is thrown or hit or touched.”
Two fans. Cotter & Bill. “That’s the thing about baseball, Cotter. You do what they did before you. That’s the connection you make. There’s a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt’s wasting away in the hospital.” … “ Cotter likes this man’s singleness of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust. It’s the only force available against the power of doubt.”
Call of the Game. “this will turn out to be the only known recording of Russ’ famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” … “When the teams go to the top of the eighth he reports that they have played one hundred and fifty-four regular season games and two play-off games and seven full innings of the third play-off game and here they are tied in a knot, absolutely deadlocked, they are stalemated, folks, so light up a Chesterfield and stay right here.”
… “ Russ hears Harry Caray shouting into the mike on the other side of the blanket. Then they are both shouting and the ball is slicing toward the line and landing fair and sending up a spew of dirt and forcing Pafko into the corner once again. Men running, the sprint from first to third, the man who scores coming in backwards so he can check the action on the base paths. All the Giants up at the front of the dugout. The crowd is up, heads weaving for better views. Men running through a slide of noise that comes heaving down on them.” … “The hit obliterates the beat of the crowd’s rhythmic clapping. They’re coming into open roar, making a noise that keeps enlarging itself in breadth and range. This is the crowd made over, the crowd renewed.” … “Harry started shouting and then Pafko went into the corner and Russ started shouting and the paper began to fall. Paper is falling again, crushed traffic tickets and field-stripped cigarettes and work from the office and scorecards in the shape of airplanes, windblown and mostly white, and Pafko walks back to his position and alters stride to kick a soda cup lightly and the gesture functions as a form of recognition, a hint of some concordant force between players and fans, the way he nudges the white cup, it’s a little onside boot, completely unbegrudging—a sign of respect for the sly contrivances of the game, the patterns that are undivinable.” … “ They are banging on the roof of the booth. Russ says, “So don’t go way. Light up that Chesterfield. We’re gonna stay right here and see how big Ralph Branca will fare.” Yes. It is Branca coming through the dampish glow. Branca who is tall and stalwart but seems to carry his own hill and dale, he has the aura of a man encumbered. The drooping lids, leaden feet, the thick ridge across the brow. His face is set behind a somber nose, broad-bridged and looming.”
Some fans. “Shor looks at Gleason. He says, “Tell me you want to go home. What happened to let’s go home? If we leave now, we can beat the crowd.” … “Frank snatches a full-page ad for something called pasteurized process cheese food, a Borden’s product, that’s the company with the cow, and there’s a color picture of yellowish pressed pulp melting horribly on a hot dog. Frank deadpans the page to Gleason. “Here. This will help you digest.” … “Jackie sits there like an air traveler in a downdraft. The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars … here’s a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn’t know he was in this week’s Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason’s face. Here’s a Budweiser ad, pal. Not that Jackie’s in the mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings. Frank keeps putting pages in Gleason’s face. He tells him, “Eat up, pal. Paper clears the palate.”
Game. “When in steps Thomson. The tall fleet Scot. Reminding himself as he gets set in the box. See the ball. Wait for the ball. Thomson in his bent stance, chin tucked, waiting. Russ says, “One out, last of the ninth.” He says, “Branca pitches, Thomson takes a strike called on the inside corner.” He lays a heavy decibel on the word strike. He pauses to let the crowd reaction build. Do not talk against the crowd. Let the drama come from them. “Bobby hitting at two ninety-two. He’s had a single and a double and he drove in the Giants’ first run with a long fly to center.” … “Brooklyn leads it four to two.” He says, “Runner down the line at third. Not taking any chances.”
Hoover Enraptured. “Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he’s annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. Then his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin. Edgar has never seen a painting quite like this. It covers the page completely and must surely dominate the magazine. Across the red-brown earth, skeleton armies on the march. Men impaled on lances, hung from gibbets, drawn on spoked wheels fixed to the tops of bare trees, bodies open to the crows. Legions of the dead forming up behind shields made of coffin lids. Death himself astride a slat-ribbed hack, he is peaked for blood, his scythe held ready as he presses people in haunted swarms toward the entrance of some helltrap, an oddly modern construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor.” … “ he asks himself why a magazine called Life would want to reproduce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions. But he can’t take his eyes off the page.”
It Happens. “Not a good pitch to hit, up and in, but Thomson swings and tomahawks the ball and everybody, everybody watches. Except for Gleason who is bent over in his seat, hands locked behind his neck, a creamy strand of slime swinging from his lips. Russ says, “There’s a long drive.” His voice has a burst in it, a charge of expectation. He says, “It’s gonna be.” There’s a pause all around him. Pafko racing toward the left-field corner. He says, “I believe.” Pafko at the wall. Then he’s looking up. People thinking where’s the ball. The scant delay, the stay in time that lasts a hairsbreadth. And Cotter standing in section 35 watching the ball come in his direction. He feels his body turn to smoke. He loses sight of the ball when it climbs above the overhang and he thinks it will land in the upper deck.”
The Call. “Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, stadium-wide, hands and faces and shirts … and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone—it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” … “ A topspin line drive. He tomahawked the pitch and the ball had topspin and dipped into the lower deck and there is Pafko at the 315 sign looking straight up” … “ Branca on the mound in his tormented slouch. He came with a fastball up, a pitch that’s tailing in, and the guy’s supposed to take it for a ball. Russ is shouting himself right out of his sore throat, out of every malady and pathology and complaint and all the pangs of growing up and every memory that is not tender.” … “Paper falling everywhere. Russ knows he ought to settle down and let the mike pick up the sound of the swelling bedlam around him. But he can’t stop shouting, there’s nothing left of him but shout. He says, “Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands.” He says, “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy.” He says, “They’re going crazy.” … “Thomson circling the bases in gamesome leaps, buckjumping—he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time, and his breath comes so fast he doesn’t know if he can handle all the air that’s pouring in. He sees men in a helter-skelter line waiting at the plate to pummel him—his teammates, no better fellows in the world, and there’s a look in their faces, they are stunned by a happiness that has collapsed on them, bright-eyed under their caps.” … “Russ has got his face back into the mike. He shouts, “I don’t believe it.” He shouts, “I don’t believe it.” Russ is still shouting, he is not yet shouted out, he believes he has a thing that’s worth repeating. Saying, “Bobby Thomson hit a line drive into the lower deck…”
The Ball. “Next thing Cotter knows… He’s after the baseball now and there’s no time to ask himself why. They hit it in the stands, you go and get it. It’s the ball they play with…” … “And Cotter is under a seat handfighting someone for the baseball. He is trying to get a firmer grip. He is trying to isolate his rival’s hand so he can prise the ball away finger by finger. Cotter’s hands around the rival’s arm, twisting in opposite directions, burning the skin—it’s called an Indian burn, remember? One hand grinding one way, the other … Now he’s backing out, moving posthaste—he’s got the ball, he feels it hot…” In Pursuit. “ Their eyes meet in the spaces between rocking bodies, between faces that jut and the broad backs of shouting fans. Celebration all around him. But he is caught in the man’s gaze and they look at each other over the crowd and through the crowd and it is Bill Waterson”… “ Bill has lost his buckaroo grin. He barely shows an awareness that Cotter exists, a boy who walks the earth in high-top Keds. Cotter’s body wants to go. But if he starts running at this point, what ... “Hey Cotter I had my hand on that ball before you did.” Bill says this good-natured. He laughs when he says it” … The College Boy. “I’m in this too. I was the first one to grab ahold of the ball. Actually long before either one of you. Somebody hit it out of my hand.” Bill: “ “Who the hell are you anyway? What are you doing here?” … “ The college boy thought he was part of a team, it’s us against him. Now his eyes don’t know where to go. Bill says, “This is between my buddy Cotter and me. Personal business, understand? We don’t want you here. You’re ruining our fun.” … “ Hey Cotter now let’s be honest. You snatched it out of my hand. A clear case of snatch and run. But I’m willing to be reasonable. Let’s talk turkey. What do you say to ten dollars in crisp bills? That’s a damn fair offer...” … “ He looks at Bill, a flushed and panting man who has vainly chased along a railroad track for the five-oh-nine. Then he turns his back and walks slowly down the street. He begins to think about the game’s amazing end. What could not happen actually happened. He wants to get home, sit quiet, let it live again, let the home run roll over him, soaking it in … “Shit man, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”
Postgame. “They leave by way of the Dodger clubhouse and there’s Branca all right, the first thing you see, stretched facedown on a flight of six steps, feet touching the floor. He’s still in uniform except for shirt and cap… Next to Branca a coach sits in full uniform but hatless, smoking a cigarette. His name is Cookie. No one wants to catch Cookie’s eye. Al and Russ talk quietly. 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 ... This is the people’s history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to say. … gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen… All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted.”
Pafko at the Wall delivers.
“This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.”
“All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their roomlets in the beaten streets.”
Cotter. “He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence.” He’s made it inside the park.
Russ Hodges, the call of the game. “Russ feels lucky to be here. Day of days and he’s doing the game and it’s happening at the Polo Grounds—a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war. He thinks everybody who’s here ought to feel lucky because something big’s in the works, something’s building. Okay, maybe just his temperature.” … “ thinking of the time his father took him to see Dempsey fight Willard in Toledo and what a thing that was, what a measure of the awesome, the Fourth of July and a hundred and ten degrees and a crowd of shirtsleeved men in straw hats…”
Posed for battle. “Durocher on the dugout steps, manager of the Giants, hard-rock Leo, the gashouse scrapper, a face straight from the Gallic Wars, and he says into his fist, “Holy fuggin shit almighty.”
Big Shots in Attendance. “Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and Toots Shor, drinking buddies from way back, and they’re accompanied by a well-dressed man with a bulldog mug, one J. Edgar Hoover. What’s the nation’s number one G-man doing with these crumbums? He likes to be around movie idols and celebrity athletes, around gossip-meisters such as Walter Winchell, who is also at the game today, sitting with the Dodger brass. Fame and secrecy are the high and low ends of the same fascination, the static crackle of some libidinous thing in the world, and Edgar responds to people who have access to this energy. He wants to be their dearly devoted friend provided their hidden lives are in his private files, all the rumors collected and indexed, the shadow facts made real.”
Play ball. “this five-ounce sphere of cork, rubber, yarn, horsehide and spiral stitching, a souvenir baseball, a priceless thing somehow, a thing that seems to recapitulate the whole history of the game every time it is thrown or hit or touched.”
Two fans. Cotter & Bill. “That’s the thing about baseball, Cotter. You do what they did before you. That’s the connection you make. There’s a whole long line. A man takes his kid to a game and thirty years later this is what they talk about when the poor old mutt’s wasting away in the hospital.” … “ Cotter likes this man’s singleness of purpose, his insistence on faith and trust. It’s the only force available against the power of doubt.”
Call of the Game. “this will turn out to be the only known recording of Russ’ famous account of the final moments of the game. The game and its extensions. The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.” … “When the teams go to the top of the eighth he reports that they have played one hundred and fifty-four regular season games and two play-off games and seven full innings of the third play-off game and here they are tied in a knot, absolutely deadlocked, they are stalemated, folks, so light up a Chesterfield and stay right here.”
… “ Russ hears Harry Caray shouting into the mike on the other side of the blanket. Then they are both shouting and the ball is slicing toward the line and landing fair and sending up a spew of dirt and forcing Pafko into the corner once again. Men running, the sprint from first to third, the man who scores coming in backwards so he can check the action on the base paths. All the Giants up at the front of the dugout. The crowd is up, heads weaving for better views. Men running through a slide of noise that comes heaving down on them.” … “The hit obliterates the beat of the crowd’s rhythmic clapping. They’re coming into open roar, making a noise that keeps enlarging itself in breadth and range. This is the crowd made over, the crowd renewed.” … “Harry started shouting and then Pafko went into the corner and Russ started shouting and the paper began to fall. Paper is falling again, crushed traffic tickets and field-stripped cigarettes and work from the office and scorecards in the shape of airplanes, windblown and mostly white, and Pafko walks back to his position and alters stride to kick a soda cup lightly and the gesture functions as a form of recognition, a hint of some concordant force between players and fans, the way he nudges the white cup, it’s a little onside boot, completely unbegrudging—a sign of respect for the sly contrivances of the game, the patterns that are undivinable.” … “ They are banging on the roof of the booth. Russ says, “So don’t go way. Light up that Chesterfield. We’re gonna stay right here and see how big Ralph Branca will fare.” Yes. It is Branca coming through the dampish glow. Branca who is tall and stalwart but seems to carry his own hill and dale, he has the aura of a man encumbered. The drooping lids, leaden feet, the thick ridge across the brow. His face is set behind a somber nose, broad-bridged and looming.”
Some fans. “Shor looks at Gleason. He says, “Tell me you want to go home. What happened to let’s go home? If we leave now, we can beat the crowd.” … “Frank snatches a full-page ad for something called pasteurized process cheese food, a Borden’s product, that’s the company with the cow, and there’s a color picture of yellowish pressed pulp melting horribly on a hot dog. Frank deadpans the page to Gleason. “Here. This will help you digest.” … “Jackie sits there like an air traveler in a downdraft. The pages keep falling. Baby food, instant coffee, encyclopedias and cars … here’s a picture of Sinatra himself sitting in a nightclub in Nevada with Ava Gardner and would you check that cleavage. Frank didn’t know he was in this week’s Life until the page fell out of the sky. He has people who are supposed to tell him these things. He keeps the page and reaches for another to stuff in Gleason’s face. Here’s a Budweiser ad, pal. Not that Jackie’s in the mood to scan a magazine. He is sunk in deep inertia, a rancid sweat developing, his mouth filled with the foretaste of massive inner shiftings. Frank keeps putting pages in Gleason’s face. He tells him, “Eat up, pal. Paper clears the palate.”
Game. “When in steps Thomson. The tall fleet Scot. Reminding himself as he gets set in the box. See the ball. Wait for the ball. Thomson in his bent stance, chin tucked, waiting. Russ says, “One out, last of the ninth.” He says, “Branca pitches, Thomson takes a strike called on the inside corner.” He lays a heavy decibel on the word strike. He pauses to let the crowd reaction build. Do not talk against the crowd. Let the drama come from them. “Bobby hitting at two ninety-two. He’s had a single and a double and he drove in the Giants’ first run with a long fly to center.” … “Brooklyn leads it four to two.” He says, “Runner down the line at third. Not taking any chances.”
Hoover Enraptured. “Edgar Hoover plucks a magazine page off his shoulder, where the thing has lighted and stuck. At first he’s annoyed that the object has come in contact with his body. Then his eyes fall upon the page. It is a color reproduction of a painting crowded with medieval figures who are dying or dead—a landscape of visionary havoc and ruin. Edgar has never seen a painting quite like this. It covers the page completely and must surely dominate the magazine. Across the red-brown earth, skeleton armies on the march. Men impaled on lances, hung from gibbets, drawn on spoked wheels fixed to the tops of bare trees, bodies open to the crows. Legions of the dead forming up behind shields made of coffin lids. Death himself astride a slat-ribbed hack, he is peaked for blood, his scythe held ready as he presses people in haunted swarms toward the entrance of some helltrap, an oddly modern construction that could be a subway tunnel or office corridor.” … “ he asks himself why a magazine called Life would want to reproduce a painting of such lurid and dreadful dimensions. But he can’t take his eyes off the page.”
It Happens. “Not a good pitch to hit, up and in, but Thomson swings and tomahawks the ball and everybody, everybody watches. Except for Gleason who is bent over in his seat, hands locked behind his neck, a creamy strand of slime swinging from his lips. Russ says, “There’s a long drive.” His voice has a burst in it, a charge of expectation. He says, “It’s gonna be.” There’s a pause all around him. Pafko racing toward the left-field corner. He says, “I believe.” Pafko at the wall. Then he’s looking up. People thinking where’s the ball. The scant delay, the stay in time that lasts a hairsbreadth. And Cotter standing in section 35 watching the ball come in his direction. He feels his body turn to smoke. He loses sight of the ball when it climbs above the overhang and he thinks it will land in the upper deck.”
The Call. “Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, stadium-wide, hands and faces and shirts … and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone—it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” … “ A topspin line drive. He tomahawked the pitch and the ball had topspin and dipped into the lower deck and there is Pafko at the 315 sign looking straight up” … “ Branca on the mound in his tormented slouch. He came with a fastball up, a pitch that’s tailing in, and the guy’s supposed to take it for a ball. Russ is shouting himself right out of his sore throat, out of every malady and pathology and complaint and all the pangs of growing up and every memory that is not tender.” … “Paper falling everywhere. Russ knows he ought to settle down and let the mike pick up the sound of the swelling bedlam around him. But he can’t stop shouting, there’s nothing left of him but shout. He says, “Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands.” He says, “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy.” He says, “They’re going crazy.” … “Thomson circling the bases in gamesome leaps, buckjumping—he is forever Bobby now, a romping boy lost to time, and his breath comes so fast he doesn’t know if he can handle all the air that’s pouring in. He sees men in a helter-skelter line waiting at the plate to pummel him—his teammates, no better fellows in the world, and there’s a look in their faces, they are stunned by a happiness that has collapsed on them, bright-eyed under their caps.” … “Russ has got his face back into the mike. He shouts, “I don’t believe it.” He shouts, “I don’t believe it.” Russ is still shouting, he is not yet shouted out, he believes he has a thing that’s worth repeating. Saying, “Bobby Thomson hit a line drive into the lower deck…”
The Ball. “Next thing Cotter knows… He’s after the baseball now and there’s no time to ask himself why. They hit it in the stands, you go and get it. It’s the ball they play with…” … “And Cotter is under a seat handfighting someone for the baseball. He is trying to get a firmer grip. He is trying to isolate his rival’s hand so he can prise the ball away finger by finger. Cotter’s hands around the rival’s arm, twisting in opposite directions, burning the skin—it’s called an Indian burn, remember? One hand grinding one way, the other … Now he’s backing out, moving posthaste—he’s got the ball, he feels it hot…” In Pursuit. “ Their eyes meet in the spaces between rocking bodies, between faces that jut and the broad backs of shouting fans. Celebration all around him. But he is caught in the man’s gaze and they look at each other over the crowd and through the crowd and it is Bill Waterson”… “ Bill has lost his buckaroo grin. He barely shows an awareness that Cotter exists, a boy who walks the earth in high-top Keds. Cotter’s body wants to go. But if he starts running at this point, what ... “Hey Cotter I had my hand on that ball before you did.” Bill says this good-natured. He laughs when he says it” … The College Boy. “I’m in this too. I was the first one to grab ahold of the ball. Actually long before either one of you. Somebody hit it out of my hand.” Bill: “ “Who the hell are you anyway? What are you doing here?” … “ The college boy thought he was part of a team, it’s us against him. Now his eyes don’t know where to go. Bill says, “This is between my buddy Cotter and me. Personal business, understand? We don’t want you here. You’re ruining our fun.” … “ Hey Cotter now let’s be honest. You snatched it out of my hand. A clear case of snatch and run. But I’m willing to be reasonable. Let’s talk turkey. What do you say to ten dollars in crisp bills? That’s a damn fair offer...” … “ He looks at Bill, a flushed and panting man who has vainly chased along a railroad track for the five-oh-nine. Then he turns his back and walks slowly down the street. He begins to think about the game’s amazing end. What could not happen actually happened. He wants to get home, sit quiet, let it live again, let the home run roll over him, soaking it in … “Shit man, I don’t want to go to school tomorrow.”
Postgame. “They leave by way of the Dodger clubhouse and there’s Branca all right, the first thing you see, stretched facedown on a flight of six steps, feet touching the floor. He’s still in uniform except for shirt and cap… Next to Branca a coach sits in full uniform but hatless, smoking a cigarette. His name is Cookie. No one wants to catch Cookie’s eye. Al and Russ talk quietly. 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 ... This is the people’s history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours. And fans at the Polo Grounds today will be able to say. … gassy old men leaning into the next century and trying to convince anyone willing to listen… All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted.”
August 27, 2022
The Giants win the pennant!
April 8, 2021
I rate this as the best piece of sports writing I've ever read, and yes that includes DFW's Roger Federer as Religious Experience. I first read it as part of Underworld, and found that 90% of the best writing in that enormous book was in this short novella spliced throughout it. Here are my favourite sections - the writing so good it turns sport into a symphony:
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful. It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each. Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
...
They are waiting nervously for the ticket holders to clear the turnstiles, the last loose cluster of fans, the stragglers and loiterers. They watch the late-arriving taxis from downtown and the brilliantined men stepping dapper to the windows, policy bankers and supper club swells and Broadway hotshots, high aura’d, picking lint off their mohair sleeves. They stand at the curb and watch without seeming to look, wearing the sourish air of corner hangabouts. All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their room-lets in the beaten streets. They are at the curbstone, waiting. Their eyes are going grim, sending out less light. Somebody takes his hands out of his pockets. They are waiting and then they go, one of them goes, a mick who shouts Geronimo ...
Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a headlock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time—everything’s at the same time—he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It’s a witless form of flight with bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other’s back and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screwups ... The shout of the motley boys comes banging off the deep concrete. Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence ...
He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely—knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer in his runner’s heart—that he is uncatchable. Here comes a cop in municipal bulk with a gun and cuffs and a flashlight and a billy club all jigging on his belt and a summons pad wadded in his pocket. Cotter gives him a juke step that sends him nearly to his knees and the hot dog eaters bend from the waist to watch the kid veer away in soft acceleration, showing the cop a little finger-wag bye-bye. He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim. He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life—the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing. He runs at quarter speed craning to see the rows of seats, looking for an inconspicuous wedge behind a pillar. He cuts into an aisle in section 35 and walks down into the heat and smell of the massed fans, he walks into the smoke that hangs from the underside of the second deck, he hears the talk, he enters the deep buzz, he hears the warm-up pitches crack into the catcher’s mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet’s tail of secondary sound. Then you lose him in the crowd.
...
Peanut vendor’s on his way up the aisle and headed over to the next section when he spots Cotter and drops a knowing smile. The kid thinks here comes trouble. This gatemouth is out to expose him in some withering way. Their glances briefly meet as the vendor moves up the stairs. In full stride and double-quick he dips his hand for a bag of peanuts and zings it nonchalant to Cotter, who makes the grab in a one-hand blur that matches the hazy outline of the toss.
...
The crowd noise breaks above them, a chambered voice rolling through the hollows in the underbody of the stadium. Now this, he thinks. The sun’s own heat that swallows cities.
...
Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, stadium-wide, hands and faces and shirts, bands of rippling men, and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone—it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” A topspin line drive. He tomahawked the pitch and the ball had topspin and dipped into the lower deck and there is Pafko at the 315 sign looking straight up with his right arm braced at the wall and a spate of paper coming down. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”
Yes, the voice is excessive with a little tickle of hysteria in the upper register. But it is mainly wham and whomp. He sees Thomson capering around first. The hat of the first-base coach—the first-base coach has flung his hat straight up. He went for a chin-high pitch and cold-cocked it good. The ball started up high and then sank, missing the facade of the upper deck and dipping into the seats below—pulled in, swallowed up—and the Dodger players stand looking, already separated from the event, staring flat into the shadows between the decks. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” The crew is whooping. They are answering the roof bangers by beating on the walls and ceiling of the booth. People climbing the dugout roofs and the crowd shaking in its own noise. Branca on the mound in his tormented slouch. He came with a fastball up, a pitch that’s tailing in, and the guy’s supposed to take it for a ball. Russ is shouting himself right out of his sore throat, out of every malady and pathology and complaint and all the pangs of growing up and every memory that is not tender. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”
Four times. Branca turns and picks up the rosin bag and throws it down, heading toward the clubhouse now, his shoulders aligned at a slant—he begins the long dead trudge. Paper falling everywhere. Russ knows he ought to settle down and let the mike pick up the sound of the swelling bedlam around him. But he can’t stop shouting, there’s nothing left of him but shout. He says, “Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands.” He says, “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy.” He says, “They’re going crazy.”
He speaks in your voice, American, and there’s a shine in his eye that’s halfway hopeful. It’s a school day, sure, but he’s nowhere near the classroom. He wants to be here instead, standing in the shadow of this old rust-hulk of a structure, and it’s hard to blame him—this metropolis of steel and concrete and flaky paint and cropped grass and enormous Chesterfield packs aslant on the scoreboards, a couple of cigarettes jutting from each. Longing on a large scale is what makes history. This is just a kid with a local yearning but he is part of an assembling crowd, anonymous thousands off the buses and trains, people in narrow columns tramping over the swing bridge above the river, and even if they are not a migration or a revolution, some vast shaking of the soul, they bring with them the body heat of a great city and their own small reveries and desperations, the unseen something that haunts the day—men in fedoras and sailors on shore leave, the stray tumble of their thoughts, going to a game.
...
They are waiting nervously for the ticket holders to clear the turnstiles, the last loose cluster of fans, the stragglers and loiterers. They watch the late-arriving taxis from downtown and the brilliantined men stepping dapper to the windows, policy bankers and supper club swells and Broadway hotshots, high aura’d, picking lint off their mohair sleeves. They stand at the curb and watch without seeming to look, wearing the sourish air of corner hangabouts. All the hubbub has died down, the pregame babble and swirl, vendors working the jammed sidewalks waving scorecards and pennants and calling out in ancient singsong, scraggy men hustling buttons and caps, all dispersed now, gone to their room-lets in the beaten streets. They are at the curbstone, waiting. Their eyes are going grim, sending out less light. Somebody takes his hands out of his pockets. They are waiting and then they go, one of them goes, a mick who shouts Geronimo ...
Cotter sees the first jumpers go over the bars. Two of them jostle in the air and come down twisted and asprawl. A ticket taker puts a headlock on one of them and his cap comes loose and skims down his back and he reaches for it with a blind swipe and at the same time—everything’s at the same time—he eyes the other hurdlers to keep from getting stepped on. They are running and hurdling. It’s a witless form of flight with bodies packed in close and the gate-crashing becoming real. They are jumping too soon or too late and hitting the posts and radial bars, doing cartoon climbs up each other’s back and what kind of stupes must they look like to people at the hot dog stand on the other side of the turnstiles, what kind of awful screwups ... The shout of the motley boys comes banging off the deep concrete. Cotter thinks he sees a path to the turnstile on the right. He drains himself of everything he does not need to make the jump. Some are still jumping, some are thinking about it, some need a haircut, some have girlfriends in woolly sweaters and the rest have landed in the ruck and are trying to get up and scatter. A couple of stadium cops are rumbling down the ramp. Cotter sheds these elements as they appear, sheds a thousand waves of information hitting on his skin. His gaze is trained on the iron bars projected from the post. He picks up speed and seems to lose his gangliness, the slouchy funk of hormones and unbelonging and all the stammering things that seal his adolescence. He is just a running boy, a half-seen figure from the streets, but the way running reveals some clue to being, the way a runner bares himself to consciousness, this is how the dark-skinned kid seems to open to the world, how the bloodrush of a dozen strides brings him into eloquence ...
He comes down lightly and goes easy-gaiting past the ticket taker groping for his fallen cap and he knows absolutely—knows it all the way, deep as knowing goes, he feels the knowledge start to hammer in his runner’s heart—that he is uncatchable. Here comes a cop in municipal bulk with a gun and cuffs and a flashlight and a billy club all jigging on his belt and a summons pad wadded in his pocket. Cotter gives him a juke step that sends him nearly to his knees and the hot dog eaters bend from the waist to watch the kid veer away in soft acceleration, showing the cop a little finger-wag bye-bye. He surprises himself this way every so often, doing some gaudy thing that whistles up out of unsuspected whim. He runs up a shadowed ramp and into a crossweave of girders and pillars and spilling light. He hears the crescendoing last chords of the national anthem and sees the great open horseshoe of the grandstand and that unfolding vision of the grass that always seems to mean he has stepped outside his life—the rubbed shine that sweeps and bends from the raked dirt of the infield out to the high green fences. It is the excitement of a revealed thing. He runs at quarter speed craning to see the rows of seats, looking for an inconspicuous wedge behind a pillar. He cuts into an aisle in section 35 and walks down into the heat and smell of the massed fans, he walks into the smoke that hangs from the underside of the second deck, he hears the talk, he enters the deep buzz, he hears the warm-up pitches crack into the catcher’s mitt, a series of reports that carry a comet’s tail of secondary sound. Then you lose him in the crowd.
...
Peanut vendor’s on his way up the aisle and headed over to the next section when he spots Cotter and drops a knowing smile. The kid thinks here comes trouble. This gatemouth is out to expose him in some withering way. Their glances briefly meet as the vendor moves up the stairs. In full stride and double-quick he dips his hand for a bag of peanuts and zings it nonchalant to Cotter, who makes the grab in a one-hand blur that matches the hazy outline of the toss.
...
The crowd noise breaks above them, a chambered voice rolling through the hollows in the underbody of the stadium. Now this, he thinks. The sun’s own heat that swallows cities.
...
Russ feels the crowd around him, a shudder passing through the stands, and then he is shouting into the mike and there is a surge of color and motion, a crash that occurs upward, stadium-wide, hands and faces and shirts, bands of rippling men, and he is outright shouting, his voice has a power he’d thought long gone—it may lift the top of his head like a cartoon rocket. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” A topspin line drive. He tomahawked the pitch and the ball had topspin and dipped into the lower deck and there is Pafko at the 315 sign looking straight up with his right arm braced at the wall and a spate of paper coming down. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”
Yes, the voice is excessive with a little tickle of hysteria in the upper register. But it is mainly wham and whomp. He sees Thomson capering around first. The hat of the first-base coach—the first-base coach has flung his hat straight up. He went for a chin-high pitch and cold-cocked it good. The ball started up high and then sank, missing the facade of the upper deck and dipping into the seats below—pulled in, swallowed up—and the Dodger players stand looking, already separated from the event, staring flat into the shadows between the decks. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.” The crew is whooping. They are answering the roof bangers by beating on the walls and ceiling of the booth. People climbing the dugout roofs and the crowd shaking in its own noise. Branca on the mound in his tormented slouch. He came with a fastball up, a pitch that’s tailing in, and the guy’s supposed to take it for a ball. Russ is shouting himself right out of his sore throat, out of every malady and pathology and complaint and all the pangs of growing up and every memory that is not tender. He says, “The Giants win the pennant.”
Four times. Branca turns and picks up the rosin bag and throws it down, heading toward the clubhouse now, his shoulders aligned at a slant—he begins the long dead trudge. Paper falling everywhere. Russ knows he ought to settle down and let the mike pick up the sound of the swelling bedlam around him. But he can’t stop shouting, there’s nothing left of him but shout. He says, “Bobby Thomson hits into the lower deck of the left-field stands.” He says, “The Giants win the pennant and they’re going crazy.” He says, “They’re going crazy.”
January 14, 2017
National Book Award finalist (within Underworld)
Briefly: A microcosm of fandom
“Pafko at the Wall” presents a well-crafted trek into the experience of what is likely the second most famous ballgame of all time. As such, it rightly focuses not on the excitement of the game itself—knowing its readers will know the outcome in advance—but on the crowd and the pure experience of a ballgame.
DeLillo’s focus is on what it means to be a fan. He writes, “Russ [Hodges, the broadcaster] feels lucky to be here. Day of days and he’s doing the game and it’s happening at the Polo Grounds—a name he loves, a precious echo of things and times before the century went to war. He thinks everybody who’s here ought to feel lucky because something big’s in the works, something’s building… When you see a thing like that, a thing that becomes a newsreel, you begin to feel you are a carrier of some solemn scrap of history.” Throughout the novella, Russ is one of the “true fans” who understands baseball and its meaning. He, along with the hooky-playing Cotter and Bill the businessman, understand baseball for what it means. They know the importance of the game—“The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.”
As a foil to these true fans, DeLillo presents a luxury box with four celebrities, who with the exception of Toots Shor don’t truly understand the game. J. Edgar Hoover, Frank Sinatra, and Jackie Gleason are all too self-absorbed and grounded in the “real world” to understand the love of the game—highlighted in the fact that they don’t fully see Bobby Thomson’s famous home run.
All of these events are buttressed by DeLillo’s startling juxtaposition of “the shot heard round the world” with the other shot it shared the front page with the next day—a secret Soviet testing of an atomic bomb. DeLillo succeeds in drilling down into the human psyche, past the well-known clichés, to highlight the strange but true fact that it’s the baseball shot and not the nuclear one that has stood the test of time. And he offers not critique, but rather celebrates that fact.
“Pafko at the Wall” is a novella ripe for analysis and deeper meaning, written with the crispness of a true literary author.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 12, 2011
DeLillo begins his novella with the line, "He speaks in your voice, American." Throughout the course of this sleek, condensed narrative, the author challenges his readers to examine the American voice. The mythology of baseball explodes in a crescendo of refuse, all the while underscored by the destructive power of atomic energy. DeLillo examines the reality of historical events, making us wonder if our emotions are the result of nothing more than good narration. It may be hard to find this book on the shelf, but it's worth tracking down such a brilliant snippet of DeLillo's narrative prowess.
March 10, 2017
I love this novella. It is a faces in the crowd treatment of the "shot heard round the world" game when Bobby Thomson took Ralph Branca deep for a three run homer in the bottom of the ninth to win the NL pennant in 1951 at the old Polo Grounds. DeLillo's story features Russ Hodges, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, Jackie Gleason, Toots Shor and various New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodger players and coaches.
Among three principal subplots, the best is about a teenager from Harlem who skips school and winds up grabbing the homerun ball hit by Thomson. He is chased by a threatening middle-aged white guy who wants the ball too.
Among three principal subplots, the best is about a teenager from Harlem who skips school and winds up grabbing the homerun ball hit by Thomson. He is chased by a threatening middle-aged white guy who wants the ball too.
September 5, 2007
This story -- the opening chapter of "Underworld"-- is a dizzying collage of Cold War Americana that plays out against the backdrop of the famous Giants-Dodgers playoff of 1951. (Think "The Shot Heard 'Round The World.") As the game is played, Frank Sinatra, Jackie Gleason and J. Edgar Hoover share a field box, a young black kid from Harlem named Cotter Martin jumps the turnstiles and eventually gets his hand on the famous ball, and the Soviets get ready to test a nuclear weapon. Intense is an understatement. Now if I could only finish "Underworld."
June 27, 2011
Yes, yes, I know this is the prologue to Underworld, but since I've heard so much about the prologue itself, I've decided this will be my first foray into DeLillo.
ETA: I come to find that this is not the *original* version of Pafko at the Wall (published in Harper's in 1971); rather, it's the version that appeared as the prologue of Underworld.
It costs $16.00 and some change to subscribe to Harper's for a year; I may do it, just so I can read the archived pages at their website - because that's just the kind of nerd I am.
ETA: I come to find that this is not the *original* version of Pafko at the Wall (published in Harper's in 1971); rather, it's the version that appeared as the prologue of Underworld.
It costs $16.00 and some change to subscribe to Harper's for a year; I may do it, just so I can read the archived pages at their website - because that's just the kind of nerd I am.
January 18, 2015
This is just a small part of DeLillo's massive Underworld (which I couldn't get through; my bad)... and it is absolutely pitch perfect (unlike Ralph Branca's pitch). If you don't know who Ralph Branca is, this book is not for you.
February 1, 2024
It is all falling indelibly into the past.
You can call me an audiobook skeptic. I prefer to read the words on the page myself, to dictate my own pace, pause on certain words, pick through my own history for resonant precedents as I compare notes with the author. Traipsing through at my own desultory gait is much the pleasure of the hobby for me. To follow another reader’s auditory shaping of plot and dialogue and diction feels like being pulled along, driven forward, on a sightseeing tour of a country I know only by reputation. I may have thought I wanted to go there…but not like this. There are exceptions: for one, Nick Offerman’s readings of Wendell Berry, pairing the former’s spare midwestern mellifluousness with the author’s natural wisdom to accompany my 30 minutes’ office commute down a two-lane forested road. My receptiveness to the Offerman-Berry combo led me deeper into the Hoopla catalog, to this gem: Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi, and Tony Shalhoub performing DeLillo’s Underworld prologue, subsequently turned into the novella Pafko at the Wall. I was a fool. This recording does not destroy the magic of DeLillo’s prose—it enhances it. Perhaps given my proximity to Underworld, a book I read less than a year ago and whose awesome power I responded to enthusiastically (my rave), I was destined to embrace this audiobook, but even so, its merits are self-evident. These guys absorb and savor DeLillo’s polyphonic observations, his bebop changes in scale, tone, and tempo; they feel the moment he describes: they fit voice to personality, they register ambivalences of emotion and multiplicities of timbre, they get into the spirit of the event; the earthiness of the Polo Grounds in 1951 issues from their lips like a patois they’ve preserved many years for the occasion. Toots Shor, Sinatra, Gleason, Cotter Martin: all the real and the fictional characters you envisaged on the page are given a second life through the trio’s vocal gifts. I dare you not to smile as Shalhoub’s voice grows more hysterical and sandpapery as Hodges bellows “I don’t believe it!” for the eleventh time, or not to laugh along with Levi as he tries in vain to keep it together during the producer’s Speedy Gonzales joke. This isn’t a single, monotone voice enunciating perfectly in a soundproof studio. It’s a give-and-take performance before a live audience who joins in the fun, giving it a symmetry that DeLillo would appreciate, since Pafko is partly about the eerie subterranean frequencies that performers and mass audiences share in the making of a historical moment. The participants bring the tale forward—“You had to be there!”—into their own discrete lives, striving to keep that shared history alive even as our annihilating postirony present consigns the past to oblivion.
It is all falling indelibly into the past: eight words I can still richly recall nearly a year later. Why? Besides being a powerful summation of the book’s theme, and a summary of its basic structure, the line’s internal balance is constructed to loop, like a mantra or a sacred chant that brings the sayer back to first things. Shalhoub’s recitation brought this into focus for me. The three linked alliterative-assonant word pairs hang in an a-b-a letter-sound pattern. The line gathers force in rhyme and echo, before suddenly collapsing into permanence. You feel the past as a settled and nonnegotiable thing, a monument sitting smack-dab in the center of town. Toward it all things must turn. Say the line slowly once and again, roll it around on your tongue, hold the sonic cone to your ear like Nabokov, who would have been envious—or listen to Tony Shalhoub grip and eject each syllable for just the right effect, achieving that frisson of dread premonition, that ability to freeze, stretch, and flesh out a privileged moment, that could be called DeLillo’s signature feat. It is some kind of magic trick, a spell cast by mere words, just a guy with a pen who sees and senses more deeply than most ever will. And now a piece of it has been reproduced by three guys on microphones, who keenly appreciate all these facets of DeLillo’s art, and my skepticism has fallen away. This is one for the record books.
You can call me an audiobook skeptic. I prefer to read the words on the page myself, to dictate my own pace, pause on certain words, pick through my own history for resonant precedents as I compare notes with the author. Traipsing through at my own desultory gait is much the pleasure of the hobby for me. To follow another reader’s auditory shaping of plot and dialogue and diction feels like being pulled along, driven forward, on a sightseeing tour of a country I know only by reputation. I may have thought I wanted to go there…but not like this. There are exceptions: for one, Nick Offerman’s readings of Wendell Berry, pairing the former’s spare midwestern mellifluousness with the author’s natural wisdom to accompany my 30 minutes’ office commute down a two-lane forested road. My receptiveness to the Offerman-Berry combo led me deeper into the Hoopla catalog, to this gem: Billy Crudup, Zachary Levi, and Tony Shalhoub performing DeLillo’s Underworld prologue, subsequently turned into the novella Pafko at the Wall. I was a fool. This recording does not destroy the magic of DeLillo’s prose—it enhances it. Perhaps given my proximity to Underworld, a book I read less than a year ago and whose awesome power I responded to enthusiastically (my rave), I was destined to embrace this audiobook, but even so, its merits are self-evident. These guys absorb and savor DeLillo’s polyphonic observations, his bebop changes in scale, tone, and tempo; they feel the moment he describes: they fit voice to personality, they register ambivalences of emotion and multiplicities of timbre, they get into the spirit of the event; the earthiness of the Polo Grounds in 1951 issues from their lips like a patois they’ve preserved many years for the occasion. Toots Shor, Sinatra, Gleason, Cotter Martin: all the real and the fictional characters you envisaged on the page are given a second life through the trio’s vocal gifts. I dare you not to smile as Shalhoub’s voice grows more hysterical and sandpapery as Hodges bellows “I don’t believe it!” for the eleventh time, or not to laugh along with Levi as he tries in vain to keep it together during the producer’s Speedy Gonzales joke. This isn’t a single, monotone voice enunciating perfectly in a soundproof studio. It’s a give-and-take performance before a live audience who joins in the fun, giving it a symmetry that DeLillo would appreciate, since Pafko is partly about the eerie subterranean frequencies that performers and mass audiences share in the making of a historical moment. The participants bring the tale forward—“You had to be there!”—into their own discrete lives, striving to keep that shared history alive even as our annihilating postirony present consigns the past to oblivion.
It is all falling indelibly into the past: eight words I can still richly recall nearly a year later. Why? Besides being a powerful summation of the book’s theme, and a summary of its basic structure, the line’s internal balance is constructed to loop, like a mantra or a sacred chant that brings the sayer back to first things. Shalhoub’s recitation brought this into focus for me. The three linked alliterative-assonant word pairs hang in an a-b-a letter-sound pattern. The line gathers force in rhyme and echo, before suddenly collapsing into permanence. You feel the past as a settled and nonnegotiable thing, a monument sitting smack-dab in the center of town. Toward it all things must turn. Say the line slowly once and again, roll it around on your tongue, hold the sonic cone to your ear like Nabokov, who would have been envious—or listen to Tony Shalhoub grip and eject each syllable for just the right effect, achieving that frisson of dread premonition, that ability to freeze, stretch, and flesh out a privileged moment, that could be called DeLillo’s signature feat. It is some kind of magic trick, a spell cast by mere words, just a guy with a pen who sees and senses more deeply than most ever will. And now a piece of it has been reproduced by three guys on microphones, who keenly appreciate all these facets of DeLillo’s art, and my skepticism has fallen away. This is one for the record books.
June 15, 2023
Pafko At The Wall represents a climactic moment in American sports, the 3rd & decisive game of the 1951 New York Giants vs. Brooklyn Dodgers playoff series at the old Polo Grounds in Manhattan, won by the Giants on a dramatic 9th inning home run by Bobby Thomson, with the winner to face the Yankees in yet another inter-borough New York World Series.
It was a more innocent time, just a few years after the end of WWII, an age when most baseball games were still played during the day & when radio gave voice to the proceedings on the field far more than television, with many fans waiting for "late editions" of their local afternoon paper to check the box scores of their favorite teams.
What author Don DeLillo does in this rephrasing of the moment of Thomson's home run, "the shot heard round the world", is to populate the audience with a fictional character named Cotter who jumped the turnstile to gain free entry, placing him in the leftfield grandstand where Thomson's home run ball was to land. He also inserts some other more high-profile characters in the prime box seats, J. Edgar Hoover, restaurateur Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra & Jackie Gleason among them.
Were they in fact present that afternoon? I am not opposed to this embedding of contemporary figures who may or may not have shared this memorable game in adjacent seats. As E.L. Doctorow said when questioned if the characters in Ragtime had really ever met, he responded, "they have now!" Writers of fiction are permitted certain liberties not available to others.
And as the game proceeds, Hoover frets about the USSR's planned perfidy to destroy the west, while also carrying in his suit pocket the image of Bruegel's painting, "The Triumph of Death", with the FBI head focusing on nuclear devastation & sensing an "apparitional force". Meanwhile, Gleason is felled by his ballpark meal of beer & hotdogs, vomiting at a pivotal moment in the game.
This is a time well before designated hitters, pitch-clocks, phantom runners staged at 2nd base in extra-inning games, decades before long-term contracts worth more than the GNP of some countries.
Instead, it is an age when a fellow born in Glasgow, Scotland named Bobby Thomson hit his historic home run off a "poor-luck loser" named Ralph Branca, the 15th of 17 children, whose uncle was murdered at Majdanek concentration camp & whose aunt died at Auschwitz. These were working class guys with limited portfolios playing at a game that offered them possibilities to be found nowhere else.
Counterposed with what happens in the box seats, there is a fight in the leftfield stands over Thompson's home run ball, featuring the fellow who had evaded Polo Grounds security & ushers who pursued him. DeLillo collates periods of time & classes of people in this inventive novella.
And the Dodgers Andy Pafko, standing helplessly in left field as the ball sails over his head somehow becomes a symbolic figure, along with Branca, as one New York team is exalted & the other vanquished, all in an instant.
Amidst the repeated exclamations of radio announcer Russ Hodges, "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant", Delillo tells us that:
*Within my review are a newspaper photo of the moment when Bobby Thomson connected with the baseball + the images of the Giants' Thomson and also pitcher Ralph Branca & outfielder Andy Pafko of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
**My online-purchased hardcover copy of Pafko at the Wall bears the stamp: "Discarded From The Nashville Public Library" but I have used a 1954 Pafko (Topps #79) baseball card from my boyhood (said to be worth $100) as a bookmark within the book.
It was a more innocent time, just a few years after the end of WWII, an age when most baseball games were still played during the day & when radio gave voice to the proceedings on the field far more than television, with many fans waiting for "late editions" of their local afternoon paper to check the box scores of their favorite teams.
What author Don DeLillo does in this rephrasing of the moment of Thomson's home run, "the shot heard round the world", is to populate the audience with a fictional character named Cotter who jumped the turnstile to gain free entry, placing him in the leftfield grandstand where Thomson's home run ball was to land. He also inserts some other more high-profile characters in the prime box seats, J. Edgar Hoover, restaurateur Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra & Jackie Gleason among them.
Were they in fact present that afternoon? I am not opposed to this embedding of contemporary figures who may or may not have shared this memorable game in adjacent seats. As E.L. Doctorow said when questioned if the characters in Ragtime had really ever met, he responded, "they have now!" Writers of fiction are permitted certain liberties not available to others.
And as the game proceeds, Hoover frets about the USSR's planned perfidy to destroy the west, while also carrying in his suit pocket the image of Bruegel's painting, "The Triumph of Death", with the FBI head focusing on nuclear devastation & sensing an "apparitional force". Meanwhile, Gleason is felled by his ballpark meal of beer & hotdogs, vomiting at a pivotal moment in the game.
This is a time well before designated hitters, pitch-clocks, phantom runners staged at 2nd base in extra-inning games, decades before long-term contracts worth more than the GNP of some countries.
Instead, it is an age when a fellow born in Glasgow, Scotland named Bobby Thomson hit his historic home run off a "poor-luck loser" named Ralph Branca, the 15th of 17 children, whose uncle was murdered at Majdanek concentration camp & whose aunt died at Auschwitz. These were working class guys with limited portfolios playing at a game that offered them possibilities to be found nowhere else.
Counterposed with what happens in the box seats, there is a fight in the leftfield stands over Thompson's home run ball, featuring the fellow who had evaded Polo Grounds security & ushers who pursued him. DeLillo collates periods of time & classes of people in this inventive novella.
And the Dodgers Andy Pafko, standing helplessly in left field as the ball sails over his head somehow becomes a symbolic figure, along with Branca, as one New York team is exalted & the other vanquished, all in an instant.
Amidst the repeated exclamations of radio announcer Russ Hodges, "The Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant", Delillo tells us that:
People are climbing lampposts on Amsterdam Avenue, tooting car horns in Little Italy. Isn't it possible that this midcentury moment enters the skin more lastingly than the vast shaping strategies of eminent leaders, generals in their steely sunglasses--the mapped visions that pierce our dreams?Pafko At The Wall serves as a kind of outtake from from a larger DeLillo novel, Underworld, but more than that, it stands as a time-defining moment in America, lesser in national importance than the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, or the attack on the Twin Towers & the Pentagon but still a consequential frame of reference for those alive when it happened.
This is a thing that will pulse in the brain come old age, double vision & dizzy spells--that surge sensation, the leap of a people already standing, that bolt of noise & joy when the ball went in, a thing to keep us safe in some undetermined way.
*Within my review are a newspaper photo of the moment when Bobby Thomson connected with the baseball + the images of the Giants' Thomson and also pitcher Ralph Branca & outfielder Andy Pafko of the Brooklyn Dodgers.
**My online-purchased hardcover copy of Pafko at the Wall bears the stamp: "Discarded From The Nashville Public Library" but I have used a 1954 Pafko (Topps #79) baseball card from my boyhood (said to be worth $100) as a bookmark within the book.
April 2, 2019
Bagi seorang yang tak paham dengan olahraga softbal. Agak sulit mengikuti kisah pada bagian olahraganya. Begini, di US, olahraga ini memang seperti didewakan. Setiap orang bisa benar-benar menghentikan aktivitas mereka hanya untuk menyaksikan tayangan pertandingan. Bisa juga terjadi pertengkaran hanya karena mendukung tim tertentu. Sama seperti posisi sepak bola di Indonesia. Namun, di US memang lebih parah. Semua orang baik perempuan maupun lelaki, benar-benar mengerahkan perhatian mereka pada layar televisi. Nah, Don DeLillo ini yang ternyata sudah menyambet banyak penghargaan. Merekam sejarah dalam olahraga di abad 20. Disertai dengan fakta sejarah lainnya yang dikemas dengan unik.
Pernah menonton film Vantage Point? Jadi, penggambarannya hampir sama sepert film tersebut. Setiap tokoh dan pergeserannya yang halus bahkan cenderung bagus peralihannya ini. Memiliki sudut pandang yang sama dalam satu kejadian. Yaitu, pada pertandingan softbal antara Giant dengan Dodgers. Ada Cotters yang bolos sekolah demi menonton pertandingan. Ada pula dari sudut pandang Edgar yang tengah berpikir, bagaimana reaksi masyarakat ketika membaca fakta bahwa UniSoviet membuat bom nuklir. Kemudian berganti lagi ke beberapa artis papan atas seperti Frank Sinatra.
Semua yang dimuat di sini benar-benar memang terekam dalam sejarah. Namun, menariknya adalah Don DeLillo ini bukan warga US. Namun, berhasil menggambarkan secara mendetil mengenai kondisi saat itu. Itulah yang membuat banyak orang memuji kehebatannya ini. Bagi kalian yang belum pernah membaca karyanya, jangan sampai terlewat. Karena, memang isinya menarik. Meski alurnya cukup lambat, tapi tidak membuat bosan karena bikin penasaran.
Pernah menonton film Vantage Point? Jadi, penggambarannya hampir sama sepert film tersebut. Setiap tokoh dan pergeserannya yang halus bahkan cenderung bagus peralihannya ini. Memiliki sudut pandang yang sama dalam satu kejadian. Yaitu, pada pertandingan softbal antara Giant dengan Dodgers. Ada Cotters yang bolos sekolah demi menonton pertandingan. Ada pula dari sudut pandang Edgar yang tengah berpikir, bagaimana reaksi masyarakat ketika membaca fakta bahwa UniSoviet membuat bom nuklir. Kemudian berganti lagi ke beberapa artis papan atas seperti Frank Sinatra.
Semua yang dimuat di sini benar-benar memang terekam dalam sejarah. Namun, menariknya adalah Don DeLillo ini bukan warga US. Namun, berhasil menggambarkan secara mendetil mengenai kondisi saat itu. Itulah yang membuat banyak orang memuji kehebatannya ini. Bagi kalian yang belum pernah membaca karyanya, jangan sampai terlewat. Karena, memang isinya menarik. Meski alurnya cukup lambat, tapi tidak membuat bosan karena bikin penasaran.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
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