Brittle Innings:
Outfielders or Outsiders
by Elizabeth Hand
I reviewed Michael Bishop’s brilliant, sui generis novel Brittle Innings when it first appeared in 1994. At that time I wrote, “I wish I’d written it.” Rereading it nearly two decades later, I’m even more staggered by Bishop’s achievement.
In Brittle Innings, Bishop takes on a subject as big and complex and difficult to categorize as the unforgettable Henry “Jumbo” Clerval, the central and most riveting character in a novel that has many: the dark heart of America itself. After a brief preamble, we find ourselves in Tenkiller, Oklahoma, June 1943, embarking on a journey as improbable and absorbing as Huck Finn’s, narrated by a character Huck might well have taken up with if he’d found himself playing minor league baseball during the Second World War.
That narrator would be Danny Boles, seventeen and afflicted with a stammer, a talented shortstop with Cherokee blood who’s looking to get the hell out of Tenkiller. Danny’s age and speech impediment keep him from being cannon fodder, so his chance to get out of Dodge arrives when he’s offered a position with the Highbridge (Georgia) Hellbenders, a farm team that prides itself on being the “Terror of the CVL,” the Chattahoochee Valley League. The Hellbenders’ owner, Jordan “Mister JayMac” McKissic, offers Danny seventy-five-dollars a month, along with room and board, and the golden opportunity to play in
“. . . a small town league, with a pitiful ‘C’ training classification, but we make it in spite of the war because we’re the hardest-
playing saps anywhere and flat-out beaucoups of fun to watch.”
Indeed they are. The Hellbenders lineup reads like the cast list from a lost Damon Runyon sandlot epic: Quip Parris, Clarence “Trapdoor” Evans, Sweet Gus Pettus, Percy “Double” Dunnagin, Junior Heggie. Their rivals in the CVL include the LaGrange Gendarmes, the Marble Springs Seminoles, the Cottonton Boll Weevils, and the Opelika Orphans. Bishop’s dialogue throughout is also Runyonesque, in particular the fulsome exhortations of Mister JayMac.
“Mostly, we’ve lost to total mediocrities and also-rans. Were I given to worry, I’d be a total ruin. But I’ve long since taken to heart the scriptural counsel that anxious thought adds not a minute to our lives, and I sleep like a babe in swaddling clothes.”
“Jesus,” Hoey said, not exactly reverently.
“Selah,” Mister JayMac said. “I’ve prayed and I’ve rounded up these fresh-faced youths.”
“Glory!” Quip Parris said. “What if they’re bums, sir?”
Mister JayMc smiled. “If yall wanted aiggs, would I foist on you scorpions?”
Danny is, for all appearances, one of these fresh-faced youths. But he’s now utterly mute, following a violent rape aboard the train from Tenkiller to Highbridge. Still, he’s no less a misfit than some of his clowning teammates. And he certainly can’t hold a candle to Jumbo Hank Clerval, the booming, seven-foot giant with “a Frenchified accent” who becomes Danny’s roommate at the Hellbenders’ boarding house. When he first meets Clerval, Danny thinks, “His face was out of alignment somehow, like a pumpkin cut in two and put back together wrong.” And, then, a little later:
His hair was greasy black, with a shock of silver-white in the middle of his lumpy forehead and streaks of nickel-gray around his mangled-looking ears. Cripes, I thought, if you staggered into him in a pitch-black street, the fella’d give you about twelve quick heart attacks. Even the overhead lights and the ragging of his fellow Hellbenders couldn’t hide his weirdness. I was ugly, but this guy’d been put together in a meat-packing plant by clumsy blind men.
But Jumbo’s a hell of a first baseman, and he has a hell of a story to tell, in the journal he eventually shares with Danny, as the two become friends and confidantes during the Hellbenders’ short season under the broiling Georgia sun.
At the commencement of my new life, as throughout my old one, bitter cold scant afflicted me. I preferred it to the warmth of summer, responding to it as an assemblage of pistons, flywheels, and cogs respond to lubrication. My chief hindrance lay not in meteorological conditions, but in the body of my dead creator . . .
It is Michael Bishop’s astonishing achievement to braid these two voices seamlessly within one narrative, alternating between Clerval’s logbook of his journeys back to what we quaintly call civilization, and Danny’s play-by-play account of the Hellbenders barnstorming through the Chattahoochee Valley.
It would have been very easy for such an ambitious and genre-bending work to have ended up as nothing more than an intriguing hybrid, ungainly as Jumbo himself. But in rereading Brittle Innings I found myself once again so deeply immersed in Bishop’s vision of a lost America that I was startled to look down and realize I was staring at a page. I truly can’t recall another book that so beautifully and deftly captures the American home front during World War II.
But for all its exuberance and memorably larger-than-life characters, this isn’t a nostalgic evocation of America-at-War. One of the novel’s set pieces features a game between the Hellbenders and the Splendid Dominican Touristers, a barnstorming team from the Negro American League, and throughout his novel Bishop doesn’t shy away from confronting the rifts between the white players and their black counterparts, in particular the tragic figure of Darius Satterfield.
Baseball may be the playing field on which the exuberant characters of Brittle Innings make their bids for sandlot stardom, but this isn’t really a novel about outfielders. It’s a novel about outsiders: voiceless Danny; doomed Darius; questing, noble Jumbo Clerval, still embarked upon his centuries-long quest to determine where genuine humanity resides: that elusive spark we call a soul. Brittle Innings isn’t just a great baseball novel, or a great literary novel, or a great science fiction novel. It’s a great American novel. And, yes, I wish I’d written it.