Oh, To Be A Center Fielder
Philip Roth kept this framed photo of the Brooklyn Dodgers in a guest bedroom at his CT residence.
Philip Roth’s lifelong devotion to baseball can be so insightful, so welcomed in his novels, and that’s certainly the case during Alexander Portnoy’s brilliant, funny, forever controversial monologue with his psychoanalyst in Portnoy’s Complaint.
Alex wants the doctor to know what it was like being a center fielder on his softball team, the Seabees A.C., a team that meant everything to Alex. He was too anxious a hitter to make his high school team, he says. The tryout coach inquired if he didn’t need glasses “and then sent me on my way.”
“Thank God for the Seabees A.C.! Thank God for center field! Doctor, you can’t imagine how truly glorious it is out there, so alone in all that space…Do you know baseball at all? Because center field is like some observation post, a kind of control tower, where you are able to see everything and everyone, to understand what’s happening the instant it happens, not only the sound of the struck bat, but by the spark of movement that goes through the infielders in the first second that the ball comes flying at them; and once it gets beyond them, ‘It’s mine,’ you call, ‘it’s mine’ and then after it you go. For in center field, if you can get to it, it is yours.”
Alex’s scenario takes on the vibe of a pro game, what it’s like “standing nice and calm—nothing trembling, everything serene—standing there in the sunshine,” loose like his hero Dodger Duke Snider, waiting under a high fly ball.
Alex makes the catch, the third out, and heads in, shooting the ball to the opposing team’s shortstop coming out onto the field, and without breaking stride, goes “loping in all the way, shoulders shifting, head hanging, a touch pigeon-toed, my knees coming slowly up and down in an altogether brilliant imitation of The Duke. Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game!”
When his time comes to bat, Alex knows how to raise the bat above his shoulders, flex and loosen his shoulders, step in to the batter’s box, take a called strike “which I have a tendency to do, it balances off nicely swinging at bad pitches…”
The point is, he says is that he has mastered every detail so “that it is simply beyond the realm of possibility for any situation to arise in which I do not know how to move, or where to move, or what to say or leave unsaid…And it’s true, is it not? – incredible, but apparently true – there are people who feel in life the ease, the self-assurance, the simple and essential affiliation with what is going on, that I used to feel as the center fielder for the Seabees? Because it wasn’t, you see, that one was the best center fielder imaginable, only that one knew exactly, and down to the smallest particular, how a center fielder should conduct himself. And there are people like that walking the streets of the U.S. of A? I ask you, why can’t I be one! Why can’t I exist now as I existed for the Seabees out there in center field! Oh, to be a center fielder, a center fielder – and nothing more!”
Please join our Philip Roth Book Club dialogue on Portnoy’s Complaint with literary critic and author Steven Sampson, Sep 9, 1 p.m. EST. The Zoom link will get posted as we get closer to the date.