The main character in “ American Pastoral,” Swede Levov, is an ace first baseman, the hero of his high school. Roth’s sense of baseball as a more perfect microcosm of reality informed his fiction.
“Through baseball,” Roth wrote in an essay for the Times, in 1973, “I came to understand and experience patriotism in its tender and humane aspects, lyrical rather than martial or righteous in spirit, and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not quite so easily be sloganized.” The game “was a kind of secular church,” Roth continued, “that reached into every class and region of the nation and bound us together in common concerns, loyalties, rituals, enthusiasms, and antagonisms.” The sport embodied the country’s unattained ideals. For him, baseball was never just baseball-it was a theatre for the energies of American life. I had been primed to react this way because I had read Philip Roth. Baseball, eloquent of the lost pastoral, revealed to me its elegiac shape. There’s nothing he can do to save himself. I have forgotten many of the things I learned, but I will not forget that a ball caught in the field does not need to be thrown to first base in order to tag the batter out-it’s curtains for him, no matter how fast he runs.
There were five of us from my left, I processed basic explanations of the scoreboard, and, from my right, a statistical, almost Talmudic stream of mythography about the diamond. In Milwaukee last month, I had the chance to go to a Brewers game, where I bought a bratwurst and cheese curds and sat in the sunshine deliberating over whether getting the “baseball experience” required me to pay attention to baseball. Photograph by Lars Tunbjork / Agence VU / Redux
Philip Roth saw baseball as a more perfect microcosm of reality, a vision that informed his fiction.
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