Tuesday with Another Voice

Today's voice belongs to
Guest Columnist
Jonathan Price

How is a major league pitcher like William Faulkner?

We are now in the postseason of baseball, and we, if we watch television, will see many games and many pitchers. Baseball is supposedly an American game, and one that can go on forever, and during this forever the watcher's mind tends to wander. Mine certainly does, into unchartered territories and strange metaphors and comparisons.
One of them I've been thinking about recently is how the dilemma of a pitcher extends to the dilemma of others whose life is both, in some sense like so many of ours, public and private. Baseball can be a metaphor for life, but only if you are granted a certain amount of poetic license. Grant me some, though like pitchers and prizewinning writers, a blogger may also fail.
    What the pitcher constantly confronts is the phenomenon of failure. And in the case of major league ball, public failure. It's hard to think of a baseball game—there are some of course—in which the first pitcher is not removed. In fact, there was a game last night, a striking anomaly, in which the pitcher was removed in the first inning before he had even given up a run. Rare as that may be, the pitcher is frequently removed. And he is removed publicly. At some point in the game, usually around the sixth or seventh inning, the pitcher watches his manager trudge slowly to the mound (it's never a run, always a fairly leisurely walk, and that makes the spectacle of it even more public), place a seemingly affectionate arm around his shoulder, say something to him (which the public never hears), and then take the ball away. To be given to yet another pitcher. In some games you can watch a pitcher for one side be removed five to seven times.
    The pitcher may not have demonstrably failed, he may not (yet) have lost the game; nevertheless, given the spectacle and what it entails, this can hardly be a pleasant experience. The pitcher must occasionally or even frequently think about it as he goes through the innings, though obviously dismissing it from his thoughts for minutes and even hours at a time. But he knows, because baseball is a game of statistics, that at some point in the following innings, he is likely to give up a hit, or a run, or a home run, or walk too many batters, or give up so many runs—though often just one may be sufficient—that his team loses the game. He knows it's at least possible that his next pitch may turn into a home run.
    So a pitcher is intimately acquainted with failure and its possibility and, in the case of his removal, its public demonstration. A pitcher may wish his earned run average would be 0.00, but by the end of the season, no pitcher's is. By comparison, similarly, a hitter may wish his batting average to be 1.000, but it doesn't take long for it to descend from such a height. From inside, perhaps the pitcher knows that, prepare as he might, work out as he might, hone his mechanics and concentrate on each pitch as he might, no one gives 100% all the time; and also knows that when it's clear he hasn't or doesn't or isn't tonight, he will be removed in a public spectacle, he will have to give up the ball.

Baseball recognizes that failure, to some degree and over time, is inevitable, that life is about change and loss, and that continuing with these pursuits is learning how to deal with these phenomena.
    And Faulkner, and many other great writers knew and know this too, know that writing doesn't come out perfect and must be revised, but no one can revise it infinitely. Faulkner has observed, discussing writers, that "all of us failed to match our dreams of perfection." He has also discussed the series of failures in his iconic work The Sound and the Fury:

I tried first to tell it with one brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section One. I tried with another brother, and that wasn't enough. That was Section Two. I tried the third brother, because Caddy was still to me too beautiful and too moving to reduce her to telling what was going on, that it would be more passionate to see her through somebody else's eyes, I thought. And that failed and I tried myself —the fourth section—to tell what happened, and I still failed.

    This novel, too, initially failed. In fact most of its first edition, some hundreds of copies, was remaindered to Faulkner himself after publication. By the 1940s when Malcolm Cowley published his Portable Faulkner, hardly any of his works were in print. Nevertheless, Faulkner had not stopped writing, and eventually his works received public recognition and eventually he received the Nobel Prize in Literature.
    Similarly, humiliating as removal might seem to be, few major league pitchers actually give up. In fact, they usually make it intact to their next starts. Life, despite its failures, is often a process of renewal. But it's important to recognize both poles of this phenomenon. And to think of this the next time you're involved in some project, or doing what you think of as a normal and repeated and professional activity...and your boss or some co-worker or your wife sidles up to you and places an arm around your shoulder and whispers into your ear.
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Copyright © 2012 by Jonathan Price