Bang The Drum Slowly
Bang The Drum Slowly was written in 1956 and is the second in a series of 4 works by Mark Harris which feature Henry Wiggen, a star left-handed pitcher for the New York Mammoths baseball team. I first read it in 1959 when I was 13 years old and I've read it again several times since.
It may not really be "a baseball book". The foreword
is a quote from "The Huge Season" by Wright Morris:
"
.. 'a book can have Chicago in it and not be about Chicago,'
.[He held up another book with Hemmingway's name on the spine], 'There's a prizefighter in it but it's not about a prizefighter';
'Is it about the sun rising?' I asked,
'Goddam if I know what it's about,' he said."
But it's a book about people who are baseball players. The story evolves through their lives and the events of a baseball season. So it's an atmosphere that baseball lovers can relate to.
Bruce Pearson is a young third string catcher with the Mammoths. He's an unsophisticated country boy from a small town in Georgia who is completely out of place in a big city like New York. He has no friends on the team and his team mates only pay attention to him when they make fun of him. He has an abundance of raw talent, but he doesn't make a contribution.
Bruce is the focus of the book because he is dying; well, we're all dying, but he's dying soon.
It's the middle of winter and Henry Wiggen gets an early morning phone call from Pearson. Of course he's surprised because he and Pearson aren't close. No one on the team is close to Bruce. Pearson wants Henry to come to the Mayo clinic in Minnesota to pick him up and drive him home to Georgia.
Bruce has just been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease (which in 1956 was not curable). Henry's wife, Holly, is pregnant with their first child and he has no interest in Rochester, Minnesota in wintertime, but he goes. That's the kind of person Henry...
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