BIOGRAPHY: Joe DiMaggio: The Long VigilBy Jerome Charyn. Yale University Press, 146pp. $24
IN HIS ESSAY How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart, David Foster Wallace suggests that one of the reasons we find top athletes so compelling is that they embody the comparison-based achievement that we (he was speaking particularly of Americans) revere. They appeal to our twin obsession with competitive superiority and hard data.
“Plus they’re beautiful . . . There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.” A top athlete, in performance, is “that exquisite hybrid of animal and angel”. Naturally, we want to know these demigods. We want to know what was going through their minds during that game-winning free throw or penalty kick, as 40,000 people screamed. But telling us is what they are almost invariably unable to do.
Perhaps, Wallace suggests, athletes tend to be so "stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination" because what is going through their minds at those crucial moments is in fact " nothing at all". It may be only the ungifted among us who are able to articulate the gift we lack, while "those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must, perforce, be blind and dumb about it – and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence".
Jerome Charyn's Joe DiMaggio: The Long Vigilattempts to delineate the genius of the legendary New York Yankees centre fielder. Charyn also aims to reclaim Joltin' Joe from his detractors, those who would reduce DiMaggio to a friendless, crass money-grubber.
Charyn is the author of 30 novels, as well as memoirs, short stories and works of nonfiction. He grew up in the Bronx, under the spell of Yankee Stadium and its heroes, including DiMaggio, and he has great sympathy for the man he watched diminish himself by morphing, through his role as an advertising spokesman, into Mr Coffee. Charyn describes DiMaggio as “almost autistic”, and forgives him the fact that his dignity and steely sense of purpose deserted him once he walked off the field.
Joe DiMaggio, whom non-Americans may recall less for his on-field prowess than from Simon Garfunkel's 1968 single Mrs Robinson,was born in California in 1914, the eighth child of Italian immigrants. He was a high-school dropout who joined the Yankees in 1936, arriving "like a lightning bolt in the middle of the Great Depression". By 1941, a sense of foreboding was in the air, as the country moved towards war. People were hungry for an unambiguous hero, and DiMaggio was it. That year, he had his famous 56-game hitting streak.
In 1943, he enlisted in the army air force, but he never saw combat, the three-year hiatus from the big leagues serving instead as precursor to what life post-Yankees would bring: self-estrangement and a sense of lost purpose.
Though he had one of his best seasons in 1948, DiMaggio’s career after the war was plagued by injuries and inconsistency. Dorothy, a showgirl he’d married in 1939, had divorced him. In 1951, having led the Yankees to 10 pennants and nine World Series, he retired from the game. With no real imagination and little education, distrustful and without curiosity, DiMaggio was stranded.
A sense of purpose returned in the form of Marilyn Monroe, and much of Charyn’s book is taken up with this love story. Their 1954 marriage lasted only 274 days, and was a disaster from the get-go. DiMaggio wanted Monroe to give up Hollywood and sit at home eating TV dinners with him; on occasion he was violent. As for Monroe, she was already in love with Arthur Miller when she married DiMaggio. But, according to Charyn, Monroe roused DiMaggio from his torpor, forcing him to look and to feel, while DiMaggio was the only man in her life who did not use her or feed off her fame.
Monroe used him, it seems, and after she left him – a period during which DiMaggio had private detectives follow her while he attended Marilyn impersonator acts and slept with the wannabes – she would occasionally call on him when she needed an escort in New York. When her marriage to Miller fell apart and she ended up in a psychiatric ward in 1961, it was DiMaggio who flew to her rescue.
Monroe had apparently agreed to remarry DiMaggio shortly before she died of an overdose, in 1962. Charyn, in recounting these melodramas, sometimes sounds like a B-movie script: “Marilyn was no pussycat waiting to be punished by her Owl. She didn’t need Arthur Miller. She could have stayed with the Jolter if she had really wanted to be knocked around. She hadn’t forgotten the Big Guy.”
Their plan to remarry hardly strikes the reader as a good idea, and Charyn’s summation may be sadly accurate: “Perhaps the Jolter was only fooling himself, and his second marriage to Marilyn would have been as disastrous as the first, but at least he would have been alive.” That “at least” is an indication of what DiMaggio’s life was like. He came to resemble a “moody cash cow”, interested only in money, though what others have called greed Charyn calls “a phantomatic quest for recognition when he couldn’t really redefine himself”.
By 1999, when DiMaggio died from lung cancer and pneumonia, he was “a distinctly American icon . . . not only because baseball is our pastime but because the game itself was once linked with the nation’s innocence and ambition”.
Although I am American, baseball has never quite thrilled me. I have always, however, felt in it the power of nostalgia, its way of seeming still to belong to a clearer, less complicated era. The steroid scandal of recent years – "as if we dreamt of a whole country of Babe Ruths, forgetting that there had been only oneBabe, oneMantle, oneDiMaggio" – did not diminish my affection, because my affection is for the symbolic rather than the real. It is linked to what David Halberstam meant when he called baseball a "binding national myth".
Charyn’s book is a contribution to that mythology, and if he sometimes goes over the top – DiMaggio “followed her into the inferno of a madhouse and escaped with his blond Eurydice in his arms” – he is sincere in his affection and generous in his assessments, and the book will give pleasure to those who fill with fever when baseball season is upon us.
Molly McCloskey is a novelist, essayist and short story writer. Her most recent book is Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother,a memoir about her brother's schizophrenia