PARTISAN REVIEW
469
to fashion a pure fable, a
likely story
in which resemblances to life are
wholly factitious and the invented life is entirely autonomous and arti–
ficial. Along with his fake beings and events he introduces real ones:
Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt; Judge Landis, the long-time commis–
sioner of baseball ; the Depression ; World War II. The intention may
be to set fact and myth, history and imagination, in a relationship whose
outcome will be the reader's increased consciousness of the ways they
mingle and may be confused with one another.
If
this is so, there is something self-defeating in Roth's method, an
aesthetically destructive principle deriving, the internal evidence sug–
gests, from his hunger for Swift-like political commentary. There is a
discontinuity, as there isn't in Swift, between his inventions and his
opinions, between what he has imagined and what he thinks he
know~
about reality. The book's "real" elements, for all their sporadic presence,
tend, like the intrusion of documentary film segments into fictional
cinema or into plays, to undermine the creations, which come to feel
coerced into being instead of freely imagined, dragooned for the pur–
poses of political or social satire. The further result is that the historically
factual elements seem to be present for the establishment of a con–
vincingness, an authenticity that the fictional ones have been unable
to achieve on their own.
( I don't mean to suggest that those historical beings and events
aren't themselves made fictional in a sense by being incorporated into
an invented narrative. But precisely because they are present in a story
that itself pretends to be historical, to have "really" happened, a reader
can't help putting them back outside the story, where things
really did
happen.
And this is to the detriment of the fiction, which needs the
power not of actuality but of imaginative truth.)
Yet this isn't all there is to say.
If
Roth's book doesn't work
in its
broadest outlines and procedures,
its
incidental (and at times more than
incidental) qualities are deserving of much respect. When he is im–
mersed in the self-contained world of baseball itself, having for the mo–
ment relinquished his attempt to force it into the service of his political
tendentiousness, his writing often becomes relaxed, surehanded, evoca–
tive. He has written elsewhere of his youthful "infatuation" with the
game, how it could move him to "ecstasy and tears" and how
its
"lore,"
its "cultural power . . . suspensefulness . . . heroics . . . language and
mythic sense of itself" went to compose the "literature of my boyhood."
At times the book takes on the nature of a return, through the strategies
of formal literature, to that splendid state of enthusiasm for baseball as
a naive realm of expressiveness.
