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Eliot Asinof and the
Truth of the Game
 ALSO BY WILLIAM FARINA
AND FROM MCFARLAND

Chrétien de Troyes and the Dawn of Arthurian Romance (2010)

Perpetua of Carthage: Portrait of a Third-Century Martyr (2009)
Ulysses S. Grant, 1861–1864: His Rise from Obscurity to Military Greatness (2007)
De Vere as Shakespeare: An Oxfordian Reading of the Canon (2006)
Eliot Asinof and the
Truth of the Game
A Critical Study of the
Baseball Writings
WILLIAM FARINA

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Jefferson, North Carolina, and London
ISBN 978-0-7864-6302-2
softcover : acid free paper

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

British Library cataloguing data are available

© 2012 William Farina. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying
or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without permission in writing from the publisher.

On the cover: (foreground) Eliot Asinof, senior captain of the

baseball team at Lawrence High School in Cedarhurst, Long
Island, 1936 (background photograph by William J. Mahnken)

Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers

Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com
 To Phillip A. Farina
Brother, Coach, Friend
 Acknowledgments

Thanks yet again to Marion Buckley for urging me forward

in a good way. Thanks to Martin Asinof, John Sayles, and Jim
Bouton for generously offering their time and valuable insights.
Thanks to the staff of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American
History at the University of Texas at Austin for helping me sift
through Asinof ’s voluminous surviving papers and manuscripts.
Thanks to the staff at the Marathon County Public Library in
Wausau, Wisconsin, and the staff at the Hennepin County Library
in Minneapolis, Minnesota — your professionalism was contagious.
Thanks to Jeff Kisseloff for an important heads-up. Thanks to the
Central Wisconsin Baseball Hall of Fame for giving me timely
encouragement. Belated thanks to Ken Schrieber and Al Shinn
for teaching me important lessons in my youth about baseball and
about life.
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1

Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

1. An Egalitarian Battle Cry 11
2. No One Ever Got Rich 21
3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 30
4. A Preference for Antiheroes Over Heroes 40

Part II: Eight Men Out (1963)

5. The Unwelcome Truth, Everyman Style 49
6. Not Unlike the Black Sox Themselves 59
7. Nothing Left to Prove in Terms of Winning 69
8. “More Than a Game” 78

Part III: The Bedfellow (1967)

9. “A Big Free Bubbly Show” 87
10. “The Quintessence of All Our Self-Destructive Tendencies” 98
11. In Need of a Pick-Me-Up 107
12. Like an Ancient Chinese Curse 116

Part IV: Strike Zone (1994)

13. A Kind of Belated Redemption 125
14. “A Routine Complimentary Nod from One Pro to Another” 134

vii
viii Table of Contents

15. The Anatomy of a Slump 143

16. Outside the Bounds of Respectability 152

Part V: Off-Season (2000)

17. A Grotesque Compilation of Lies, Corruption, and Greed 161
18. “Then History Turned Sour” 170
19. A Few More Parting Shots 179
20. “The Heart and Soul of Racist America” 188

Conclusion 197
Appendix: A Timeline of the Life and Works of Eloit Asinof 203
Chapter Notes 209
Asinof Bibliography 235
Index 237
 Introduction

Ask anyone who has ever really played it: baseball is the finest athletic game
ever conceived.
— Eliot Asinof 1

No one has written about baseball with more authority, conviction, and
insight than the late Eliot Tager Asinof (1919–2008).2 The key factors behind
his unique accomplishment are, at minimum, threefold. First, Asinof was,
simply put, a highly talented writer who, over a 50-plus-year career, produced
a vast output of fiction, nonfiction, screenplays, and journalism covering the
full spectrum of modern American life — of which baseball and professional
sports were only one, significant aspect. Second, Asinof was — unlike almost
all other gifted authors who have tackled the subject of baseball — a former
minor league player who competed at a very advanced professional level before
turning to writing for a livelihood. Third, and often overlooked, is that Asinof
lived, by anyone’s standards, an impressively long, full, and interesting life
that informed all of his writings, including those about baseball, with a keen
perception, broad vision, and diversity of outlook that only the best of authors
seem to possess. This unusual combination of personal qualities places him
within a very select and elite group of American writers. By the time he pro-
duced at age 36 his first widely acknowledged masterpiece, the baseball novel
Man on Spikes (1955), he had acquired more experience in life and sports than
most ever possess throughout a lifetime. Nevertheless, this was just the begin-
ning in a long string of provocative works that would come to a halt only
with his death 53 years later, as he worked on an unpublished memoir.
In addition to his debut novel, Asinof wrote four other major works on
the subject of baseball, three of which (like his first effort) were novels. Man
on Spikes was and still is considered extraordinary for its time, not only for
being a brisk, entertaining read, but also for representing the first searing
indictment of professional baseball’s notorious reserve clause, some 20 years
before it was finally dismantled by legal arbitration in 1975. As “fiction” it has
stood the test of time, although readers are still often shocked at its vivid,

1
2 Introduction

rough insider’s view of the game, one not at all for the faint of heart or those
wishing to romanticize professional baseball into something which it is not.
Asinof ’s next baseball work was the classic nonfiction Eight Men Out (1963),
after 48 years still viewed by many as the definitive account of the 1919 Black
Sox Scandal and a quality benchmark for all sports literature in general. Later,
this book was turned into a critically acclaimed and commercially successful
motion picture by the same title (1988). Although Asinof ’s pioneering work
in this area is devoid of footnotes and bibliographies, its accuracy and hypo-
thetical reconstruction of events has held up amazingly well over time, despite
a constant discovery of new facts and information regarding the scandal itself.3
Asinof begins Eight Men Out with a modest preface in which he briefly explains
to readers how he went about finding and utilizing his source materials, includ-
ing personal interviews with surviving participants.4
Asinof ’s last three baseball books are less well known, unjustly and unde-
servedly so. Each poses profound questions for the thoughtful reader, perhaps
too complex to find a wide audience, but always deeply rewarding for those
willing to ponder such things. The Bedfellow (1967) came four years after
Eight Men Out and could not have more defeated audience expectations in
terms of what Asinof would write next. Apart from being pure fiction, the
novel deals not with the playing career of a major leaguer, but rather with
his post-playing career in the world of advertising. Add to that the main char-
acter and narrator being African American and heavy doses of autobiography
thrown in, and one gets a sense of how bold Asinof ’s departure was. Critics
and audiences were typically, and not surprisingly, confused at best.
It would be three decades before Asinof wrote another baseball book;
when he finally did, his taste for experimentation had not waned. Strike Zone
(1994) may be one of the most unusual American novels ever written. A col-
laboration with former Yankee bad boy and popular commentator Jim Bouton,
this story returns to the familiar gambling-corruption theme in sports, but
with a twist. Asinof and Bouton take turns writing alternating chapters, Asinof
from the viewpoint of a home plate umpire and Bouton from that of a pitcher.
The intriguing results are manifold, including an implied questioning of base-
ball’s ethical underpinnings and, by extension, the American way of life in
general. His last baseball novel, Off-Season (2000), published on the eve of
George W. Bush’s inauguration as president, is a fitting swan song to Asinof ’s
half century of musings on the national pastime. Its primary theme is race —
the Great American Odyssey, as it has been sometimes called — long after pro-
fessional sports became integrated and the issue was supposedly dead and
resolved as a national debate. Not so, poignantly argues the novelist in a brac-
ing work whose date of release could not have been timed better or worse,
depending on one’s point of view — better because the message was badly
needed and worse because it was a highly unfashionable one.
 Introduction 3

Although Asinof ’s baseball writings will be the focus of this study, his
voluminous non-baseball work is also worthy of close examination. His other
efforts will be cited whenever appropriate to highlight and underscore impor-
tant recurring themes in his five baseball books. For example, Asinof ’s 1919:
America’s Loss of Innocence (1991) provides crucial and valuable historical back-
drop to the World Series of that year, the same in which the author was born.
Bleeding Between the Lines (1979) lays out in horrific, autobiographical detail
Asinof ’s own defiant struggle amidst lawsuits and controversy to make any
money whatsoever from his most popular and best known work. Because
Eight Men Out is the author’s most famous book, there are more extensive
outside materials to draw upon, as well as the feature film by director John
Sayles, in which Asinof participated. In a similar fashion, all of Asinof ’s base-
ball and non-baseball writings often interweave to form a continuous thematic
narrative. To look at his five baseball volumes in a vacuum would be an inter-
pretive mistake that shall be carefully avoided within these pages. Although
more time will be spent covering Eight Men Out, Asinof ’s four baseball novels
will also be given extensive and near equal amounts of treatment, including
similar cross-references to his other non-baseball and non-sports work. The
end result will hopefully help to elevate Asinof ’s stature among his generation
of postwar American writers (a stellar group to be sure), as well as to encourage
more critical and popular attention for this highly underrated and too often
neglected literary artist.
Perhaps the biggest challenge in this project has been not to overly digress
into Asinof ’s turbulent and endlessly fascinating personal life. Instead, I have
presented only those biographical details that may shed light on his baseball
writings. The addendum, however, will include a timeline intermingling his
biography with his major published works. For example, Asinof ’s background
as a Jewish, blacklisted Hollywood screenwriter during the 1950s probably
had as much to do with his firebrand, rebellious style and choice of material,
as did his prior collegiate and minor league baseball experience. Notably, it
was learned from FBI files late in his life that Asinof ’s only “un–American
activity” had been to sign a petition favoring racial integration of the New
York Yankees — this was during the same era (the early 1950s), by which time
many other professional baseball teams had already done so.5 At his passing
in 2008, Asinof was still writing about social injustices witnessed in the U.S.
military during World War II while serving in the Aleutian Islands, over 60
years after the fact.6 This was a deeply driven and passionate writer, not a
syrupy or sentimental one. As he himself often humorously quipped, “I am
not now nor ever have been Isaac Asimov.”7
One thing that originally led me to this topic, one so ready for explo-
ration, was my temporary job relocation to Wausau, Wisconsin.8 This city
was home of the former Wausau Lumberjacks, a (Philadelphia Phillies) minor
4 Introduction

league team for which Asinof played outfield in 1941.9 Wausau would be his
last gig as an active professional ballplayer. Earlier during his playing career,
Asinof had fatefully befriended fellow Jewish teammate Mickey Rutner, a
promising, future major league player. As readily admitted by the novelist, it
was Rutner who provided inspiration for the “fictional” character Mike Kut-
ner, tragic hero of Man on Spikes. By the 1941 season’s end and in the aftermath
of Pearl Harbor, everyone was off to war. When Asinof returned from service,
he devoted himself more and more to writing, turning fully professional as
an author around 1950. Although many of Asinof ’s friends, associates, and
writer colleagues are now gone, some of those still living who knew and
worked with him have enthusiastically shared their personal reminisces of his
huge talent and bigger-than-life personality. In any event, the works speak
for themselves. To repeat, this study will not be strict literary biography,
although it might help to encourage such a worthy project in the future. Base-
ball fans, of course, should take interest in Asinof ’s playing and writing careers,
but the subject matter is suggestively much bigger than baseball. Both general
readers and academic specialists will hopefully find it interesting as well, espe-
cially those wanting to place the national pastime firmly within the larger
context of American society and culture.
Each of the four chapters in the five parts of this study (one for each
book) will follow an identical pattern.10 The first chapter in each part will
provide a publication history for the work and a synopsis, and discuss the
extent to which the book ties into Asinof ’s biography. The second chapter in
each part will deal with the book’s critical and popular reception, as well as
the aftermath of events — in the iconoclastic case of Asinof always a tempes-
tuous and combative sequence. The third chapter in each part will explore
the book’s themes as these relate to baseball and the overlapping worlds of
professional and amateur sports. The fourth and final chapter in each part
will broaden these thematic horizons to include America and the world. For
Asinof, baseball was always a harsh but accurate mirror of country and society.
To him, this is what made it worth writing about in the first place.
Asinof authored or co-authored a total of 15 published books, produced
over a lengthy writing career that spanned more than 50 years. Most of these
books, however, are not about baseball. He occasionally wrote about other
sports, but more frequently about non-sports topics. After quickly perusing
Asinof ’s surviving manuscripts and papers, I would estimate that approxi-
mately one-half of his total writings were sports-related, and of these, approx-
imately two-thirds were connected to baseball.11 By my arithmetic, this means
that approximately one-third of Asinof ’s life’s work was about baseball. The
half of his writings that are non-sports related might easily be dismissed as
the overly-ambitious musings of an aspiring intellectual, were it not for the
fact that some of these include extraordinary productions such as People vs.
 Introduction 5

Blutcher, Craig and Joan, The Fox Is Crazy Too, and Final Judgment. Other
timeless, full-length works such as Bleeding Between the Lines and 1919: Amer-
ica’s Loss of Innocence do include significant sections about baseball, but these
are presented only within the context of much broader, more universal con-
cerns. Asinof was far more than a sportswriter, and always resisted, with good
justification, any attempts by critics to pigeonhole him into that single cate-
gory. He wrote about important social issues and current events; he wrote
about modern history; he wrote about his own personal experiences in World
War II and then afterwards, as a screenwriter for early television and Holly-
wood movies. His published writings on other sports topics, including foot-
ball, golf, track and field, and tennis, are, like his baseball works, consistently
authoritative and engaging.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever produced a full-length
study on the works of Eliot Asinof, baseball-related or otherwise. For that
matter, precious little has been written about Asinof ’s work from a serious
literary standpoint. All of this is likely to change in the near future. The dis-
advantage of being first is that there are limited resources and secondary mate-
rial to draw upon. Above all, I hope to drive home the important point that
the best writing on any subject is always based on personal experience, which
is apparent to anyone who has ever both played the game competitively and
read Asinof ’s gritty, realistic meditations on it. What makes Asinof very
unusual (unique, in fact, among writers), is that as a young man before World
War II, he played two seasons of minor league baseball. His professional play-
ing experience is a big part of the reason Asinof ’s baseball books are so different
from others. Most baseball commentary is written by sportswriters who never
played the game themselves beyond sandlot level, if that. Asinof, on the other
hand, played with and against many great athletes who went on to the big
time. And he was not a bad player himself: a switch-hitting, left-handed-
throwing centerfielder with a lifetime professional batting average of .296.
He was also a Jewish kid from New York City. This was during the prewar
era which saw Hank Greenberg, a friend of the Asinof family, become the
very first Jewish American superstar of the sports world. Writing many years
later, Asinof said the main reason that he himself never made it to the majors
was that he just was not quite good enough, plus the war took away his four
best years. Add to this that he was a bit injury-prone and had a very short-
temper which often got him into trouble. After the war, however, when Asinof
decided to become a professional writer, he used his former playing experience
to produce some of the most realistic baseball books that have ever been writ-
ten.
Anyone who has ever played the game at high competitive levels knows
what it is like to pick up a baseball book, look at it, and think, “What are
they talking about? This is not real. This is fable.” With Asinof ’s works on
6 Introduction

the subject, however, one never has that problem. For Asinof, baseball is a
bruising contact sport — outfielders crash into walls while making catches, or
cross signals and crash into each other; base runners smash into catchers while
trying to score at home plate, teeth go flying, and players get carried away
on stretchers or, less seriously, sustain painful injuries but then get bandaged
up and go on playing; “chin music” is a routine part of the game; verbal
abuse from the stands and from opposing dugouts is off the charts; above all,
cheating and breaking the rules are fine as long as you can get away with it.12
Asinof ’s ball-playing characters have winning attitudes, simply because they
well know what it is like to experience success and victory. For Asinof, baseball
is not Charlie Brown stuff— it is the real deal, often times barbaric and sav-
age.
Some former professional ballplayers have written or co-written books,
and some of these are quite good. Names like Jim Bouton and Jim Brosnan
immediately come to mind; however, these are athletes who wrote perhaps a
few works at most. Asinof, by stunning contrast, made a living solely as a
professional writer for over half a century, writing about all sorts of things
and getting wide recognition for it. Before that, he played in the minor leagues,
which makes him an extremely rare commodity as an author, one to be treas-
ured, in fact. As for established professional writers making occasional forays
into the world of professional sports, the ubiquitous example of George Plimp-
ton immediately comes to mind. His very special case, however, will be com-
pared and contrasted to Asinof ’s legacy in the final Summation of this study.
Perhaps most unusual of all, Asinof ’s writing and playing careers did not
overlap, nor did he attempt to segue one into the other. On the contrary, his
writing career seemed to grow organically out his playing experience several
years after he had retired as a professional athlete. There was no premeditated,
master plan to it. Because his writing talent combined with a stellar university
education in the humanities, Asinof, along with his first editor, Vance Bour-
jaily (see Chapter 1), simply realized that he was probably far better equipped
and qualified to write about baseball than any of his literary competitors.
Asinof ’s athletic experience was not limited to two years playing baseball
in the minors. In 1939, when the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown first
opened, he was one of the local New York amateurs invited to participate in
ceremonial games specially organized for the grand opening.13 Then after the
war, he co-owned and managed the semipro Yonkers Indians for a couple
years — this was during the era of Jackie Robinson and racial integration (see
Chapter 1). Later, in 1959, while in Cuba working on a movie screenplay, he
was invited by Fidel Castro to help organize new baseball leagues there, an
offer which Asinof declined (see Chapter 2). During the 1960s, Asinof regularly
played softball in New York City, sometimes with former Yankees like Phil
Rizzuto (see Chapter 11). By the time he was in his mid–40s, Asinof began to
 Introduction 7

focus on his golf game, and quickly became a sensational amateur golfer; golf
was a sport at which he continued to excel well into his 80s. In addition to
being a good athlete, Asinof was an accomplished piano player, once hired
to interview jazz musician Lionel Hampton because of his musical knowledge
(see Chapter 2). He was a skilled carpenter who built his own his house in
upstate New York, the house that he lived in for last three decades of his life.
He was a competent tailor who came from a successful family of New York
clothiers. Recently, his friend and fellow baseball author Roger Kahn went on
record to say that he was a good cook as well.14 Truly, Eliot Asinof was a mod-
ern Renaissance man.
Students of the Chicago Black Sox may recall that no one was able to
write about the scandal for a long time because no one would talk about it.
All of the surviving participants were either too ashamed, too scared of retal-
iation from gangsters, or were just bad guys who would only talk for money,
then after getting paid tell a very tall tale. Asinof was finally able to break the
true story during the early 1960s mainly because he got former Black Sox
Happy Felsch to open up for a truthful, candid interview shortly before Felsch
died (see Chapter 5). Felsch, like Asinof, had been a centerfielder, and was
also a lifelong resident of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The fact that Asinof was a
former minor league outfielder who once played in Wausau probably helped
to break the ice with Felsch, as did their mutual love of telling off-color jokes.
In fact, Wisconsin has a number of interesting connections to the Black Sox
that one rarely hears about. For example, former White Sox Dickie Kerr, who
won two games pitching in the 1919 Series, had managed the Wausau Lum-
berjacks during the 1937 season. Also, Sox catcher Ray Schalk, before making
it to the majors and later the Hall of Fame, played minor league ball for the
old Milwaukee Brewers. Eddie Cicotte is said to have played outlaw ball in
Wisconsin after being banned from the game for his role in the 1919 scandal.15
These were all former Sox players that Asinof interviewed or at least tried to
interview with varying degrees of success.
For a quick summary of Asinof ’s intriguing biography, I refer readers to
the timeline. It is worth stressing and repeating, however, that the roots for
his qualitative success as an author can be found in the tremendous education
he received in his youth at higher learning institutions such as Swarthmore
College in Pennsylvania and Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was
exposed to some of the finest teachers and intellectuals of the New Deal era.
Although Asinof pulled good grades as a student, his youthful passion was
for baseball, an extracurricular activity in which he excelled during both high
school and college. For Asinof, good education plus baseball equaled, in the
long run, great baseball books pouring forth from his typewriter. Former
players’ union representative Marvin Miller was among the many who recog-
nized Asinof ’s outstanding achievement:
8 Introduction

There is no scarcity of baseball books. For almost a century publishers have marketed
baseball novels, essays, commentary, biographies, “as told to” autobiographies, and
much more. With rare but notable exceptions, these works have been less than literary
gems for a variety of reasons. Prominent among these reasons is the failure to deal with
reality — the tendency to ignore facts and instead give credence to mythology and
management handouts.16
As to style, the editors of Sport magazine, in praising his illuminating
1980 interview of Willie Stargell, noted that “Asinof ’s writing has the same
kind of qualities he found in Stargell — dignity and class.”17 Indeed, the same
holds true for all of his credited output from beginning to end, even those
collaborative works which he appears to have held in relatively low esteem
such as Strike Zone and 10-Second Jailbreak. It seems that, as a literary artist,
Asinof was incapable of producing mediocrity, possibly because he had been
forced to do so much of that during his early years as a screenwriter, sometimes
anonymously and others as an assumed front for those who had been black-
listed.18
This study was undertaken because, thus far, Asinof ’s literary legacy has
been underappreciated. It is hoped that more deliberate and comprehensive
works on the same subject matter will appear in the future. The selected list
of Asinof ’s miscellaneous baseball writings at the end of this study makes no
pretense at comprehensiveness. It merely represents what I happened to
encounter during the course of my research. No doubt there is more published
material out there; there is certainly much more yet to be published, both
sports-related and non-sports-related. Asinof ’s surviving papers and manu-
scripts are currently housed at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History
at the University of Texas at Austin, where I had the privilege and pleasure,
with considerable help from staff, to go through boxes and boxes of fascinating
documents. Most of these unpublished materials are undated and many are
unsigned. Although Asinof ’s written legacy currently appears to be in good
hands, I urge a systematic and disciplined reorganization of these papers be
undertaken, especially since there are obviously so many unpublished works
amongst these that are probably quite worthy of publication.19 While I was
able to find time and money to travel to various locales such as Austin,
Chicago, Wausau, and Minneapolis, I was unable to visit (or, in some cases,
revisit) many Asinof shrines such as New York City, Ancramdale, Cedarhurst,
Moultrie, Swarthmore, Williamstown, and Cooperstown. Based on my pre-
vious book projects, I have found that personal travel to relevant sites usually
sheds new light upon otherwise obscure literary work. This is yet another
reason why this particular study should ideally represent only the beginning
of a longer and more serious investigation into Asinof ’s eventful life and exten-
sive, invaluable catalogue.
Despite his longevity and vast output, there is evidence that Asinof would
 Introduction 9

have gone on to produce even more significant works, had he lived to do so.
After his death in 2008, Asinof ’s son, Martin, remarked, “He [Eliot] was
writing right up to the end.”20 This tends to be yet another distinctive trait
of the greatest authors who, more often than not, are compelled to create by
seemingly external forces, as opposed to having any personal choice in the
matter. Such writers are seized by the Muses, as the ancients used to say.
Among his papers are countless notes, outlines, treatments, sketches, and pro-
posals that never apparently came to fruition. It is also obvious that Asinof
frequently wrote “on spec,” beginning and completing full-length works before
he had been paid or even hired to do so — typically a big no-no for professional
writers. This is another indication that once the inspiration got a hold of him,
he had little control of himself as an artist, except to write down that which
was inside of him. Published works of his that did make it to the light of day
clearly demonstrate that he had valuable things to say and teach, whether it
be in the official guise of fiction or nonfiction. Now all that we, the reading
public, have left of him is a paper trail. Since Asinof ’s passing, director John
Sayles spoke for many of us when he said, “We miss him a lot.”21
This page intentionally left blank
 PART I: MAN ON SPIKES (1955)

An Egalitarian Battle Cry

As it was with Mickey Rutner, so it was in Man on Spikes, with its hero,
Mike Kutner. He was used, victimized by the system that made up its own
reasons to exploit his talents. He is, then, like so many of us in all walks of
life, an unsung hero who never makes it. Everyone knows that life isn’t fair.
What remained for me, the writer, was to make sense of it. I had found a
theme that dominated most of my work for years to come.
— Eliot Asinof 1

Any serious baseball fan who came of age during the 1970s will vividly
recall the raging controversy surrounding major league baseball’s reviled reserve
clause and the highly publicized Curt Flood litigation that forcefully ushered
it into the public consciousness. Although Flood eventually lost his case before
the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972, Flood vs. Kuhn, this proved to be a pyrrhic
victory for team owners because of the negative publicity generated. Accord-
ingly, within three years the reserve clause had been dismantled through legal
arbitration between the owners and the recently-formed players’ union. With
this gain for the players came free agency and a new era of completely different
problems and abuses. At the time, however, even many knowledgeable fans
reacted to the Flood lawsuit with bewilderment. Many asked, what was a
reserve clause? Simply stated, it was the long-standing rule that a professional
baseball player was the exclusive property of the team originally signing him
and could never play for another team unless traded or released. This
entrenched system, which existed only in baseball and no other professional
sport, was often and rightfully compared to serfdom or slavery. Other pro-
fessional sports did not have it; only baseball. Today, a mere 35 years after
the fact, in an era of pampered and overpaid athletes, it is hard to imagine
such a system. Indeed, many baseball fans born after the 1960s are either
unaware that it ever existed or fail to appreciate its former stranglehold on
the players. In 1955, 15 years before Curt Flood sued major league baseball,
a 36-year-old aspiring writer had his debut novel published, dealing head on
with the exact same divisive issue. It was the very first of its kind, and a great
book quite apart from its social prescience. In the words of the former players’

11
12 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

union representative and Curt Flood lead attorney Marvin Miller, “Man on
Spikes ... marks Mr. Asinof as one of the few writers ahead of his time ... a
prophet — with honor.”2
Despite all of Asinof ’s renowned intelligence and moral principles, he
did not originally set out to write the definitive novel exposing the injustices
of the reserve clause; quite the opposite, in fact. He started out as a professional
player himself who, by his own candid admission, played for little else than
adolescent passion for the game, and certainly not for the money.3 After enjoy-
ing an outstanding baseball
career at the high school,
collegiate, and semipro lev-
els, the 21-year-old Asinof
signed on for consecutive
years in 1940 and 1941 to
play in the Philadelphia
Phillies organization; first,
briefly with the Moultrie
(Georgia) Packers, and
then the following summer
for the Wausau (Wiscon-
sin) Lumberjacks. He was
a left-handed, switch-hit-
ting outfielder, which is to
say he batted left-handed
most of the time.4 In a total
of 56 minor league games
and 216 at bats, Asinof
hit .296 with six doubles,
one triple, no home runs,
17 RBIs, and six stolen
bases. 5 Thirty-five years
later he assessed his own
baseball talent as “barely
above the bottom rung....
For an outfielder, I didn’t
Asinof as a young boy, early 1920s, possibly at Coney have the power. If it weren’t
Island. During his childhood, Asinof would meet for the war, I might have
his idol Babe Ruth, then at the height of his fame gone to Double A.”6 After
and living in the same neighborhood as the Asinof his strangely abortive 1941
family (see Chapter 13). Their meeting would leave
a lasting impression on the future author, who some season in Wausau (see Part
eight decades later would bestow the name “Babe” IV of this study), Asinof
on his faithful golden retriever. and millions of other
 1. An Egalitarian Battle Cry 13

young men were off to World War II. He never played professionally again
but would continue to dabble in amateur baseball and softball as player, man-
ager and owner until the 1960s, by which time he was writing professionally
full time, eventually becoming one of America’s most renowned commentators
on the national pastime.7
Shortly before turning professional during the 1940 season, Asinof met
the man who would first inspire him to write about baseball: Milton “Mickey”
Rutner (1920–2007).8 Rutner and Asinof were briefly teammates in a profes-
sionally sponsored amateur league of New York and New England college
players recruited because of their promising major league potential.9 Both
were Jewish during an era in which Hank Greenberg had only recently proved,
to the consternation of many, that Jews could be great baseball players. The
initial association of Rutner and Asinof did not last long; when manager Bill
Barrett (a former Red Sox outfielder) got wind that two Jews were on his
roster, he quickly trimmed it down to one, keeping Rutner, the more base-
ball-talented of the two.10 Rutner, still attending St. John’s University, con-
tinued playing in amateur summer league that season, while the recently
college-graduated Asinof was invited to try out with the Phillies and soon
after wound up being sent to their farm team in remote Moultrie, Georgia.
The following year (in 1941), Rutner signed with the “other” Philadelphia
team, Connie Mack’s Athletics, and was assigned to their farm team in Win-
ston-Salem (North Carolina) where he began a long, frustrating (and war-
interrupted) career later immortalized by Asinof ’s first novel.
As a player, Rutner’s statistics do not belie Asinof ’s portrayal of him (via
the fictional Mike Kutner) as a good, rugged, dedicated athlete. The apex of
Rutner’s career came at the end of the 1947 season when he was called up for
12 major league games with the A’s, his proverbial baseball cup of coffee. He
hit .250, including one home run (coincidentally, against the Chicago White
Sox), then was sent back down to the minors, where he spent the rest of his
professional playing days before retiring at age 34 after the 1953 season.11 Apart
from losing his potentially four best seasons to World War II, Rutner suffered
a proliferation of bad luck that is the inevitable fate of most minor league
baseball players. He was a third baseman, and the A’s during that era already
had an outstanding third baseman, Hank Majeski.12 As for Rutner, he was
popular in the minor league cities where he played, as well as a very good
hitter (lifetime batting .295), hence profitable for the team organization to
keep him right where he was.13 And of course there was anti–Semitism, still
rampant throughout the 1950s.14 Happily, Asinof saw Rutner play one of his
dozen major league games at Yankee Stadium in late 1947, in which Rutner
performed very well. The two men then had a beer together afterwards.15
Thus the long process continued in which Rutner the ballplayer would even-
tually become Asinof ’s first baseball writing muse.
14 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

In spite of all the bad breaks, a player of Rutner’s caliber certainly could
have spent much more time in the majors than he did, had it not been for
the then extant reserve clause, which legally tied him in perpetuity to the
Athletics, while other professional clubs pined for a decent third baseman. By
the time Rutner and Asinof had their drink together in the fall of 1947, Rutner
was in high spirits but Asinof was quite different as a person than when the
two had last seen each other before the war. Though still involved with the
game on an amateur and semipro level, Asinof was now searching for a more
permanent place in the world. Like others, the war had certainly changed
him; but what had especially changed him was his interim exposure to people
like Dashiell Hammett, I. F. Stone, and Hank Greenberg.16 In short, for him
there was now much more to life than baseball. His experiences on Adak
Island alone had seen to that. While Kutner’s baseball career would after 1947
begin a depressing, downward slide, Asinof ’s upward trajectory as a writer
would initiate in a tentative manner. The hated reserve clause, something the
two men had most certainly never thought about previously within the con-
texts of their playing careers, would later become a central focus of their next
conversations during the early 1950s.
Apart from his superb education, Asinof ’s origins as a writer (as he
described it) dated back to his college years. Later he recalled with embar-
rassment how one of his freshman papers at Williams College had been held
up to the class by the professor as a good example of bad writing, though his
name went politely unmentioned.17 The real humiliation, though, came when
famed American poet Robert Frost visited Williams around that same time
and invited students to submit their poems for his perusal. With typical chutz-
pah, Asinof entered an earnest 12-line baseball poem expressing the joy of
playing, his first recorded original work. Frost read the poem, momentarily
stared at the future author of Eight Men Out, then pronounced: “It’s a pop
fly, son.”18 All humor aside, the fact that a freshman jock would even bother
to write a poem for Frost’s review reflected, if nothing else, a certain confidence
level. More important, the fact that Asinof did not permanently give up writ-
ing after receiving such a slam showed an impressive amount of determination.
At university he would be exposed to the likes of noted historian Frederick
Schuman, who taught at Williams, and Clair Wilcox, who taught Keynesian
economics at Swarthmore College where Asinof transferred after his freshman
year.19 During Asinof ’s senior year (1940), Wilcox took the entire class to
screen the newly released John Ford classic film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s
The Grapes of Wrath, then invited the class back to the professor’s home for
tea and discussion (see Chapter 4).20 Such was the soaring caliber of idealism
to which the young future author was exposed. It certainly helped to lay the
groundwork for Asinof ’s identification of the reserve clause as a target of social
critique in his first novel.
 1. An Egalitarian Battle Cry 15

In addition to an exemplary formal education, by the time he left the

service in 1946, Asinof had also received informal indoctrination into the finer
points of journalism (and life) from noteworthies like I. F. Stone and Dashiell
Hammett. In reference to Asinof ’s repeated (and sometimes humorous) indig-
nation at social injustices within the military, Asinof was informed by a
third party, “Yeah, he [Hammett] said it was too damn bad you weren’t a
writer.” By Asinof ’s own admission, Hammett’s remark “lingered in memory
to be used when I needed it. When the war ended, I began to nurse fantasies
about setting it all down.” This, he added, did not come immediately to pass
in part due to sheer intimidation caused by recently released postwar novels
such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead.21 As things turned out,
Asinof ’s first, tentative forays as a professional writer would not be about his
strange tour of duty on Adak Island during the war, but rather the national
pastime. Baseball, education, social conscience, writing — the four ingredients
had now been instilled into a single individual. All that remained was for
these separate elements to be unified by that same writer into an enduring lit-
erary work.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Asinof returned to New York,
lived in Yonkers, joined the family clothing business, married, had a child,
and seems to have temporarily forgotten about writing. Below these conven-
tional appearances, however, it was obviously apparent that he belonged to a
different breed, both for better and for worse. For starters, he kept connections
to baseball, briefly co-owning a semipro team (the Yonkers Indians) in the
New York Metropolitan Baseball Association before it folded, due in large
part to major League competition from the new medium of television.22 He
also stayed in touch with Mickey Rutner, whose professional playing career
was by then going into decline. Most tellingly, Asinof could not pull himself
away from the liberal humanist world in which he had been educated. He
found himself frequenting Broadway during one of its most exciting periods,
attending premier works by Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Maxwell
Anderson, and Elmer Rice.23 His politics went against the grain. According
to his own account, it was while attending a fund-raiser for third-party pres-
idential candidate (and former FDR vice president) Henry Wallace in 1948
that he met his future wife, Jocelyn Brando (1919–2005), sister of Marlon
Brando.24 Instead of marrying a nice “wealthy Jewish” girl — the type “of
prospective wife I’d long since learned to run away from”— Asinof first lived
with, then (in 1950) wed Jocelyn, a professional stage actress and future Hol-
lywood starlet.25 Their only child, Martin Asinof, was born in 1952. The
courtship was conducted around the same time Jocelyn performed in the hit
Broadway play Mister Roberts, while her brother Marlon was simultaneously
making an international name for himself in A Streetcar Named Desire. Almost
needless to say, this was not the type of union calculated to win approval
16 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

from, say, a conservative, orthodox Jewish viewpoint (or any other conservative
viewpoint, for that matter). It would be just a short matter of time before
Asinof ’s half-hearted façade of subdued business respectability, such as it ever
was, would completely crumble, but to the permanent benefit of the future
reading public.
By 1950, Asinof was, in his own words, “thirty years old with a history
of failures and totally without portfolio.” Then things began to happen. After
a bewildered, frightened moment of traveling disorientation in Butler, Penn-
sylvania, he suddenly informed wife and family that he was leaving the cloth-
ing business because he did not want to become “like that dying salesman,
Willie Loman.” Instead, he announced, “I’m going to write”26 The next two
years were financially lean as Asinof attempted to phase into his new chosen
career, and famous brother-in-law Marlon was apparently among family mem-
bers who questioned the wisdom of the move.27 Asinof ’s wife, on the other
hand, not only approved and encouraged him, but provided ideas and contacts
as well. “Jocelyn was marvelously supportive,” he recalled many years later.28
After having dozens of original spec teleplays rejected, and thanks to a tip
from a poker buddy, Asinof made contact with NBC producer-director Larry
Schwab, who paid him $400 to draft (in three weeks) a 30-minute horror
script for the live television series Lights Out. The broadcast was a technical
fiasco, but this was through no fault of the writer, and Asinof “began to make
a decent living” churning out what he deemed occasionally insipid plays for
live TV, as did many otherwise fine American writers from that period. Then
in 1952, without warning, Asinof, his wife, and just about everyone else in
the entertainment industry who supported liberal political causes or refused
to name names, or could not financially afford to buy their way out of trouble,
were blacklisted into unemployment (see Chapter 9).29
During this same start-up period of literary activity, Asinof touched base
again with his disillusioned old teammate Mickey Rutner, and thus began
the genesis of his first serious work, a baseball short story ironically titled
“The Rookie”— ironic because Rutner was a 27-year-old minor league veteran
when he was finally allowed to play his first big league game. Asinof ’s “Mike
Kutner” is age 35, one year older than the real-life Rutner was when he retired
from professional ball. Asinof submitted his first draft for consideration by
the respected and accomplished Lebanese-American novelist, playwright and
critic Vance Bourjaily (1922–2010), then editor of the New York literary jour-
nal Discovery. Once again, Asinof found his fledgling work in the hands of a
master — this time one slightly younger than himself but far more savvy. Bour-
jaily invited Asinof into his apartment for a personal interview, only to deliver
a withering critique and suggest that he return to the clothing business. Asinof
later remarked that he would have turned to drink had he been a drinker;
instead he planted himself on a bench in Central Park, watched kids play
 1. An Egalitarian Battle Cry 17

baseball, and rewrote his short story line by line.30 Three weeks later, he
resubmitted it to Bourjaily, who immediately called back, challenging him
with, “All right, El, who wrote it?” After some additional minor editing,
Asinof was paid $125, not long after he had been blacklisted out of television
work. Thus Asinof ’s first “serious” literary piece, “The Rookie,” was eventually
published by Discovery in 1955, appearing alongside works in the same series
by the likes of Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and William Styron.31
Fortunately for Asinof, he was still able to earn additional income after
blacklisting by writing puff pieces for movie fanzines. This enabled him to
continue his quest to produce more elevated works. Once again, Asinof turned
to Bourjaily, who astutely suggested a novel be built around “The Rookie.”
The short story was itself about an aging minor leaguer allowed one short
stint in the majors, but, when given a crucial chance, fails to deliver in the
most frustrating and heartbreaking manner imaginable.32 Anyone who has
ever played the game at an advanced level, successfully or unsuccessfully, can
recognize the emotions and thoughts of the story’s tragic hero, from whose
point of view the story is told.33 Moreover, the tale is written in such a way
that even non-baseball players or non-athletes can appreciate, though unlikely
to appeal to any unrealistic, imaginary notions about the game that a non-
player might harbor. Bourjaily the editor clearly recognized this unusual, dis-
tinctive quality in Asinof ’s writing style. He encouraged Asinof by correctly
observing that even good novels about the sport were nothing more than “a
skillful collage of baseball myths.” Knowing that Asinof had first-hand expe-
rience in the minors, Bourjaily added: “Melville could never have written
Moby Dick if he hadn’t actually lived as a whaler.”34 Then came a crucial
exhortation: “Baseball fiction seems to be all fluff and fable.... This could be
something real. Only you can do this!”35 Asinof was off to the races. It took
him one year of writing and rewriting. When finished, Bourjaily passed judg-
ment: “I can’t tell you how good it is. You really caught the feel of it, El.”
After yet another year of editing and shopping the manuscript around,
McGraw-Hill published the novel titled Man on Spikes in the spring of 1955.36
A great American work of fiction, one condemning major league baseball’s
long-established reserve clause, had finally been produced.
Man on Spikes is still, after 55 years, a joy to read, but not in a sentimental
or escapist manner. Almost any experienced ballplayer will vouch for its real-
ism. Prior to this, the closet thing to a truly realistic baseball novel had been
The Southpaw (1953) by Mark Harris (1922–2007), a fine work that Asinof
had previously read several times, but in terms of lifelike representation of
the game (and its economics) does not begin to compare with the physical
grit, inherent unfairness, and psychological warfare portrayed in Man on
Spikes.37 This is not surprising since Harris, unlike Asinof, never played base-
ball at advanced competitive levels. Asinof incorporated “The Rookie” as the
18 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

novel’s final, climactic chapter, but tweaked it with minor revisions, adding
a coda of redemption and hopefulness, whereas the original short story ended
in a mood of despair.38 Asinof ’s game vision consists of far more than hitting
home runs; for him, baseball is a sport of vicious, bruising physicality. Not
only does the bat strike the ball, players slam into each other, sometimes
intentionally, and are knocked senseless in the process. Athletes put up with
pain, insults, and low pay in order to pursue their dream or simply because
they know of no other way of life. In Man on Spikes, the hero Mike Kutner
ultimately fails at his single shot in the big leagues, but in the end gets back
the girl — namely, his wife, whom he has been in danger of losing due to the
strain baseball has put on their marriage. There is also closure with the talent
scout who originally signed Kutner to professional baseball 16 years previous,
who repeatedly and firmly insists, “You ain’t a failure.”39
The character of Kutner himself is drawn in dignified detail, both in
appearance and personality. No mention of Jewish ethnicity is made; instead
Kutner wears glasses, which is held against him throughout his career, despite
his playing excellence, since good natural eyesight is widely perceived a
ballplayer’s most crucial asset. This becomes the novelist’s symbol for anti–
Semitism. Kutner, challenging a black teammate, holds up his glasses, exclaim-
ing: “See these stinking things? ... I got troubles of my own.”40 Compounding
this disadvantage, Kutner is neither tall in stature nor a prolific home run
hitter during a post–Ruth era in which big sluggers dominated headlines and
bolstered gate receipts.41 It is interesting to note that both Mickey Rutner and
Asinof were less than physically imposing, although Rutner — like his fictional
counterpart — was well-built and quite capable of hitting home runs.42 In the
revamped story, Kutner declares to himself, “Frig ’em all, big and small,” an
egalitarian battle cry that would continue to reappear in Asinof ’s later work.43
This was also the personal mantra of Mickey Rutner.44 Indeed, during the
course of the tale, Kutner admirably takes on just about everyone regardless
of standing or class, from the lowest, drunkenly obnoxious fan to the highest
executives of a venal team ownership. Regarding Kutner’s irrepressible, com-
bative scrappiness, one is more reminded of his literary creator than of the
real-life Mickey Rutner, who apart from possessing a ferociously competitive
spirit on the playing field, appears to have otherwise been a relatively mild-
mannered person.45
From a technical writing standpoint, Man on Spikes is as impressive as
its complicated and previously unexplored subject matter. Fourteen total
chapters are each written from a different character’s point of view. This jour-
nalistic device of multiple viewpoints had been used by other novelists in the
past, but to utilize it for a sports book was unprecedented. This mosaic,
Rashomon-like effect creates a kind of hyper-reality.46 The reader sees the big
picture in a way that individuals normally cannot. Three chapters are written
 1. An Egalitarian Battle Cry 19

from the viewpoints of women — the hero’s wife, sister, and mother; all con-
vincingly, another sure sign of the novelist’s talent. Another chapter is brac-
ingly written from the standpoint of an African American player (“The
Negro”), during an era in which African American players were grudgingly
being allowed into major league baseball. The first of Asinof ’s many troubled
father-son relationships (“The Father”) is vividly portrayed in yet another
chapter. The central theme of the novel, however, is graphically laid out in
the chapter titled “The Commissioner,” as the gross injustice of the reserve
clause, a descriptor used sparingly by Asinof, becomes painfully clear as it
gradually victimizes the novel’s hero. The scenario shows not only a thorough
knowledge of the game, but of the business world behind the game as well.
A mere baseball fan or good writer alone could not have created it.
The chapter which most foreshadows Asinof ’s future work, however, is
“The Negro.” Baseball literary critic Richard Peterson observed that in Man
on Spikes “the issue of race does become a crucial part of a remarkably balanced
and intimate study of the various forces at play in the life of a professional
baseball player.”47 After Eight Men Out (1963), the theme of race, both in and
out of baseball, moves front and center for the remainder of his writing career.
This aspect will be more fully discussed in Parts III–V of this study. Many
years later (in 2001), and nearly half a century after he had written “The
Negro,” Asinof would still write in exasperation, “Nor have race problems in
professional ball, even after integration, been explored. Why haven’t these
horrors been written about from a black player’s point of view?”48 Social issues
aside, “The Negro” is also of special interest because of its disturbing biog-
raphical allusions to Asinof ’s own playing career. It contains no fewer than
two full episodes of an outfielder’s worst nightmare — colliding with a team-
mate while both try to catch a fly ball.49 On June 25, 1941, while playing right
field for the Wausau Lumberjacks, Asinof ’s professional baseball career came
to an abrupt and mysterious end after he smashed into a centerfielder team-
mate while pursuing a catch. Similar to Man on Spikes, in which Kutner
crosses signals with his African American teammate, the ball was dropped by
the newly installed centerfielder after the collision. This in turn sparked an
opposing rally that eventually lost the game for Wausau.50 After that fateful
game, Asinof, despite having a good season (batting .296), was never seen
again on the team roster (see Chapter 15). Reading these wrenching, fright-
ening passages, it is clear that they came from the writer’s personal experi-
ence.51
As the year 1955 progressed, though blacklisted and impoverished, Eliot
Asinof had finally arrived as an American author of exciting note. While his
blacklisted status would soon be lifted (in rather bizarre manner), the next
five years would see an entirely new phase in his career, one producing little
of long-lasting literary note, but much in terms of skill and acumen, partic-
20 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

ularly on the business end of writing. It would also lay the foundation for his
next masterpiece, Eight Men Out, as well as all other works that followed.
This next phase, however, required a major relocation. In 1955, like so many
other artists of his generation, Asinof and his family pulled up their New York
roots and moved west to Hollywood. There, the commercial prospects for
both Asinof and his wife appeared more promising.
 2

No One Ever Got Rich

In the immediate aftermath of Man on Spikes being published in 1955,

its author learned what he may have already long suspected, that writing great
American novels does not necessarily pay the bills; in fact, more often than
not, it does not. Artistically, the work was an auspicious beginning for its cre-
ator. Financially, however, it was certainly not enough to support a wife and
child. To accomplish this (barely), Asinof found himself chasing down reluc-
tant celebrities and churning out fluff for movie fanzines. On top of this, he
(along with his actress wife) had been blacklisted, ruling out television — dur-
ing that particular era the best career opportunity for writers — as a source of
revenue. If he wanted to go on producing serious works — and if there was
ever a writer with serious ambitions it was Eliot Asinof— he would have to
go to wherever the grass was green, as often phrased in the world of business.
Such an approach was needed simply to bring home the “bacon” rather than
sitting around “picking” his nose, as Asinof ’s famous brother-in-law Marlon
Brando crudely put it to him around the same time.1 Controversial and hard-
hitting as its subject matter may have been, Asinof ’s groundbreaking and
barely fictionalized story did not put the plight of the professional baseball
player on the map of popular awareness. In this respect, suing major league
baseball, as did Curt Flood 15 years later, proved a much better way to get
the public’s attention, than to write a great American novel on the same topic.
The good news was that book reviewers adored Man on Spikes, as well
they should have. Accolades were plentiful and criticism practically nil. John
Lardner, son of Ring Lardner who had covered the Black Sox Scandal a gen-
eration earlier, writing for The New York Times gushed that Asinof ’s debut
effort was “a plain and honest book, the first realistic novel I can remember
having read.”2 Lardner added that the narrative was “an eloquent, moving
account.”3 Writing for the New York Post, respected American novelist James
T. Farrell noted that the book “conveys a genuine love for the game.”4 Farrell
expressed his “hope that all baseball fans who like to read books will read
Man on Spikes.”5 Pausing here, it is noteworthy that Farrell’s words of approval
came from a writer who had himself entertained the idea of doing a book on

21
22 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

the Black Sox Scandal, but voluntarily stepped aside, allowing Asinof to do
the same, plus magnanimously gave his younger colleague extensive, helpful
notes and a list of contacts (see Chapter 5). Awed by the unprecedented realism
for a baseball novel, John Hutchens of the New York Herald Tribune wrote:
“This is the way it must be down there.”6 Such critical praise has been steady
throughout the years. Roger Kahn, author of the nostalgic masterpiece The
Boys of Summer (1972) and often himself named among the very best writers
on the national pastime, listed Man on Spikes as among the top “Golden
Dozen” baseball literary works ever written.7 More recently, academics spe-
cializing in baseball literature such as Richard Peterson still rank Asinof ’s first
novel as among the very best of its genre, noting “its balance ... and insight,”
as well as its “its accurately detailed and comprehensive vision of the life and
career of a baseball player.”8 Attorney Marvin Miller, who probably did more
than any single individual to destroy the reserve clause, observed that Man
on Spikes, as “a work of fiction, is infinitely more true than the vast bulk of
nonfictional books that have been published.”9 As gratifying as such approval
must have been, Asinof, in typical fashion for him, most relished positive
feedback received from former professional players, especially the story’s real-
life hero, Mickey Rutner, who exclaimed, “Wow, El, it’s a damn good book!”10
Future Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, retiring as a player the same year that Man
on Spikes was published, wrote a personal letter of commendation, found
among Asinof ’s papers after his death.11
To this outside reader, though, perhaps the most dramatic testament to
the book’s outstanding quality came from none other than “Yankee Clipper”
Joe DiMaggio, long since retired as player (in 1951). DiMaggio was inducted
into Cooperstown the same year (1955) that Asinof ’s debut novel was released,
a period witnessing DiMaggio’s short, stormy marriage to Marilyn Monroe
publicly disintegrate. A few years later, by which time Asinof ’s own marriage
to Jocelyn Brando had crumbled as well, the two men were introduced at a
hotel by one of DiMaggio’s hanger-on sportswriter acquaintances. According
to Asinof ’s son, Martin, while making introductions the sportswriter com-
pletely botched pronunciation of the still relatively unknown author’s name
with something akin to “Joe, this is Mr. ‘Assneff,’ who would like to meet
you,” then walked away. DiMaggio, however, extended his huge hand and
gracefully responded, “It’s nice to meet you, Eliot.” DiMaggio informed the
thrilled novelist that he had read and admired Man on Spikes, then proceeded
to sincerely commiserate with him on what it was like (for both of them) to
have been formerly married to Hollywood starlets.12 This was the beginning
of a friendship between the two that lasted the rest of DiMaggio’s life.
Arguably the most remarkable aspect of this story is that DiMaggio, one of
the greatest baseball players in history, had read Asinof ’s tale of a perceived
failed career and admitted to liking it quite a bit. Even Joe DiMaggio, despite
 2. No One Ever Got Rich 23

all of his peerless accomplishments, and like any other experienced athlete,
occasionally knew the taste of defeat; moreover, he recognized and fully appre-
ciated an honest, accurate portrayal of this feeling when he saw it on the
printed page.
About the same time that Man on Spikes was being received by a startled
or indifferent baseball reading public, his blacklisted status in the television
industry was lifted through a series of circumstances that could not have been
more improbable or laced with irony. At a New York social gathering, Asinof
was approached by a producer of the CBS Sunday morning religious show,
“Look Up and Live.” The producer urgently explained that someone compe-
tent was needed on short notice to interview Jazz musician Lionel Hampton,
just returning from concert tour in the Holy Land.13 Asinof explained that he
would love to do the interview but had been blacklisted. The impatient pro-
ducer responded that the sponsoring NCCC (National Council of Churches
of Christ) would intervene with the network and “go to bat” for him. A few
days later, Asinof was allowed to conduct the interview and received full
credit. Whether this reversal occurred solely through pure benevolence of the
NCCC, or greed simply trumped stupidity, we are not prepared to say. For
certain, however, is that is that within a few short months, Asinof ’s writing
career for both television and film had been reactivated. On July 17, 1955,
NBC’s Goodyear Television Playhouse broadcast a one-hour live dramatiza-
tion of Man on Spikes, with an ad hoc cast featuring Ned Glass, Robert Morse,
Warren Stevens, Janet Ward, and Bill Zuckert.14 Asinof received credit for the
screenplay, and about this same time, with family in tow, he was flying out
to Hollywood to work on a projected feature film adaptation of the novel.15
He would spend the next four years working as a mostly uncredited screen-
writer in the Southern California film industry, during the late 1950s still a
prosperous enterprise and good graduating step for aspiring writers with accu-
mulated television credentials.
As things turned out, Asinof made a temporary living in Hollywood,
but not by writing baseball scripts. A feature film version of Man on Spikes
never happened because soon after its author arrived in California, industry
executives decided that baseball films, especially those with themes grounded
in reality, were sure money losers.16 The most notorious precedent was Fear
Strikes Out (1957), starring Anthony Perkins (before his stardom in Hitchcock’s
Psycho), portraying the real-life Jimmy Piersall and his heroic struggle against
bipolar disorder while playing for the Boston Red Sox.17 In an age during
which the Dodgers were preparing to leave Brooklyn and the Giants, upper
Manhattan, it seems movie-going baseball fans were in no mood for this sort
of thing. Years later, other attempts would be made to update Man on Spikes
either for television or the big screen. In 1963–1964, in the immediate wake
of his critical success with Eight Men Out, Asinof prepared a dramatization
24 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

for NBC’s short-lived Richard Boone Show but the production never materi-
alized, probably due to the series being cancelled after one season.18 Thirty
years later, in 1994, Asinof also prepared another screenplay for a movie version
starring Vincent Spano, veteran of John Sayles’ films, but this project too was
shelved.19 Asinof himself consistently never expressed anything but disdain
for the film industry, quoting the Hollywood proverb that screenwriters were
“schmucks with typewriters,” and that “movies were not works of literary
quality but manipulations of adolescent images.” He quickly added, however,
that “it was no great strain to be a whore when the pay was so good.”20
A footnote to the long, strange journey of Man on Spikes as an adapted
stage dramatization came on January 15, 1964, when an uncredited teleplay
titled “Channing: Swing for the Moon” was broadcast as an episode in ABC’s
popular TV series The Best Years.21 It was written by Asinof, and told the story
of college baseball player Eddie Martin, whose professional playing aspirations
are discouraged by his older brother Frank, a successful businessman.22 In the
last, crucial game of the season, Eddie strikes out like Mike Kutner in Man
on Spikes, but is signed to a big league contract nonetheless by a scout for the
Chicago White Sox (named Durkin Fain, as in the novel) who still perceptively
recognizes Eddie’s talent and drive. Also of interest is the coach’s name, Wally
Gilbert (portrayed as a 40-something ex-big leaguer), who was the real-life
coach of Asinof in Wausau, Wisconsin, and who receives praise from Asinof
in his writings. Though not a dramatic masterpiece by anyone’s standards,
Swing for the Moon reflects Asinof ’s continuing interest in the same themes
that he first explored with Man on Spikes. It was probably written to help pay
bills during the strenuous period in which he was researching and drafting
Eight Men Out.23
Asinof ’s four-year adventure in Hollywood during the late 1950s had
little direct bearing on his baseball writing, but did pave the way in many
respects for his seminal literary output the following decade. Most of his
work, a good portion consisting of uncredited treatments and outlines, was
reportedly completed for stock Westerns and crime thrillers, at that time the
two reigning commercial genres, both for television and movies. For a person
who had just written the finest novel about the American national pastime,
the transition would have been a big artistic step down, but understandable
given economic realities, combined with Asinof ’s favorite theme of the little
guy trying to buck the system, one so profoundly explored in Man on Spikes.
It would also allow him as a writer to get his feet wet with broad themes
touching on genuine or mislabeled outlaws in society, as well as complex,
dysfunctional familial relations, both of which would feature prominently in
his later works. Perhaps most importantly, these Hollywood years gave Asinof
his first close encounter with the lucrative commercial end of writing for
video, along with all of its pleasant and not-so-pleasant aspects. While never
 2. No One Ever Got Rich 25

reputed for great business acumen, Asinof seems to have left California with
a firm appreciation for both the advantages and pitfalls of attempting to turn
any serious literary work into mass movie entertainment. The pay may have
been good, but his desire to produce something of lasting quality appears to
have become stronger than ever.
Asinof ’s tenure in Hollywood came to an abrupt end in early 1959, not
by choice, but rather through necessity and circumstance.24 First, his employ-
ment was terminated by Harry Cohn at Columbia Pictures for writer insub-
ordination, i.e., not writing exactly what he was told to write all of the time.25
Then, while working on a Warner Brothers team to concoct a screenplay for
the Western Yellowstone Kelly (1959)— a vehicle originally intended for John
Wayne and director John Ford — Asinof proposed a scene in which a furious
Wayne character punches out a villainous Indian’s horse (!) after recognizing
a friend’s scalp decorating the same mount. This identical scenario had in fact
been earlier suggested to him by writer Burt Kennedy, who eventually received
screenwriting credit for the film. Three days later, Asinof was summoned to
the front office, where he was personally fired by Jack Warner for having dared
to suggest that the Duke would strike an animal.26 In a final, ironic twist of
events, both Wayne and Ford bowed out of the project before the film was
made.27 Unlike Asinof ’s first book editor Vance Bourjaily, men like Jack
Warner and Harry Cohn were not interested in nurturing literary talent, let
alone indulging experimentation by their hired hands.
Concurrent with Asinof ’s demise as a full-time Hollywood writer during
the late 1950s came the final dissolution of his marriage with Jocelyn Brando.
Although Jocelyn (despite the shadow of brother Marlon) went on to enjoy
a long career in the movies and television, this did not appear to be the cause
of the breakup (“I would not blame Hollywood for that,” Asinof emphasized
many years later).28 Rather than try to analyze the details of personal lives for
those now departed, it seems more constructive for purposes of this study to
look at how Asinof the writer viewed marriage within the context of his works.
How much of this thematic treatment reflected his own views and feelings
we can only guess; however, it is safe bet that a significant element of personal
experience was injected. Such analysis is not for the purpose of passing judg-
ment, but rather for possible benefit of future readers, as the author himself
no doubt intended. In Man on Spikes, written some five years before the couple
broke up, Chapter 11 (“The Wife”) is written convincingly from the viewpoint
of the ballplayer’s Griselda-like spouse. Briefly summarized, the player’s wife
attends a crucial minor league game in which her husband’s performance will
supposedly determine his promotion to the majors, endures the insufferable
company of rival player’s wives, and watches her husband play magnificently.
She then discovers that the team owner’s nephew, who is supposed to be scout-
ing the game, was not even in the ball park, but rather out carousing on the
26 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

town. As things transpire, the owner’s by now repulsive nephew is interested

in her, not her husband. The chapter ends with the wife weighing various
options and consequences — a true analogy for Hollywood and big business
in general. Asinof ’s astringent 1967 novel The Bedfellow would dwell upon
similar disturbing themes and the potential destructive overlap between mar-
riage and career (see Part III of this study).
With the simultaneous breakdown of his marriage and employment with
Warner Brothers, Asinof made his way back home to New York, lured by,
among other things, the prospect at creating teleplays for up-and-coming
David Susskind’s Talent Associates (see Chapter 5).29 Before settling into a
new lifestyle, however, Asinof experienced yet another strange interlude in
his professional writing career. At the urging of an agent friend, Asinof flew
on short notice from New York to Havana to assist in rehabilitating a poorly
written screenplay about the recently triumphant Cuban Revolution. To his
astonishment and terror, he was upon arrival ushered into the presence of
dictator Fidel Castro, who, over strenuous objections from his advisors, sur-
prisingly allowed Asinof to work solo. Later it came to Asinof ’s attention,
from the dictator himself no less, that Castro the baseball enthusiast had some-
how been well aware of Asinof ’s status as a former player.30 Quickly ascer-
taining that he was the only person involved in the project with any
competency whatsoever, Asinof did his part, stayed on for a while as tourist,
then prudently returned home. When the film was finally released in 1961
(eventually titled Rebellion in Cuba, starring Lon Chaney, Jr.), it had been
retooled into “a grotesque counterrevolutionary piece of trash,” with Asinof ’s
name thankfully omitted from the credits.31 While this bizarre episode surely
did nothing to improve Asinof ’s confidence in the movie industry, it did
demonstrate that, even before writing Eight Men Out, he had achieved a
notable degree of credibility both as a writer and former athlete.
Perhaps one way to better understanding how a writer like Asinof fit into
public perceptions of that time is to compare the aesthetic of his first novel
to popular baseball art around the same period. Recently, this author attended
several thought-provoking exhibits at the highly regarded Leigh Yawkey
Woodson Art Museum in Wausau, Wisconsin, the city where Asinof happened
to play minor league baseball in 1941, about a decade before he switched
careers to become an author. Most recently featured was the work of cartoonist
Charles Schultz (1922–2000), an exact contemporary of Asinof ’s whose comic
strip series Peanuts was immeasurably successful and widely appreciated. Pro-
duced over the course of a half century, almost identically the same period
(1950–2000) in which Asinof wrote about baseball, the Peanuts franchise also
mirrored populist attitudes towards the game via the endless but charming
misadventures of Schultz’s characters. Schultz’s artistic vision of baseball is
fondly sentimental, whimsical, and poignant, overlaid with comedic delusions
 2. No One Ever Got Rich 27

of grandeur — in short, the antithesis of Asinof ’s view of the game from Man
on Spikes and later works. For Asinof the former minor leaguer, grandeur was
no illusion; he knew and remembered all too well what it was like to play,
excel, and win, as well as to lose. For him, this was reality. For the hapless
characters in Peanuts, reality is imagining success but never possessing the
ability to achieve it (the spirit is willing, but the body says no, as athletes
sometimes joke). All of us can relate to these feelings in many endeavors, but
it is much harder to relate for anyone who ever competed and won baseball
games at advanced levels. Schultz, by his own candid admission, never played
ball beyond the sandlot level, and he drew what he was familiar with — that
is why it is great art, but not very informative about the game itself. To give
just one example, readers will search the Peanuts strip in vain looking for left-
handed players, an otherwise ever-present factor in more competitive stages
of the sport.
Another traveling exhibit at the Woodson featured the work of the pro-
lific, but often underrated American painter Norman Rockwell (1894–1978),
perhaps best known for his cover art in the Saturday Evening Post, executed
over the course of 47 years (1916–1963), more or less the same period leading
up to Asinof ’s creation of Eight Men Out.32 Although this particular exhibit
did not feature any of Rockwell’s delightful baseball-themed work, these
images have become iconic in the American consciousness, and for good rea-
son. Like Asinof, Rockwell was born in New York City (but a generation ear-
lier), and eventually settled in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, not far from
Asinof ’s beloved Ancramdale in upstate New York, nor from Asinof ’s fresh-
man alma mater, Williams College. Unlike Asinof, the gangly, un-athletic
Rockwell was never a ballplayer, but shared the younger man’s combative,
restless spirit. His versatile (and often misunderstood) work as a commercial
artist, well-exemplified by his baseball paintings, show a similar, unromantic
realist’s view of the sport, although Rockwell (again, unlike Asinof ) always
added a surface overlay of popular appeal that made him very successful, as
well as widely misinterpreted or worse, dismissed by snobbish critics. Looking
beyond this surface, however, one discovers a shrewd appreciation for the
same subtle contradictions and absurdities in baseball that Asinof would put
into book form about the same time that an elderly Rockwell was winding
down his output.
Curiously, one of Rockwell’s later and possibly most famous baseball
painting for the Post bears the same title of Asinof ’s first short story, “The
Rookie,” which in turn evolved into the climatic chapter of Man on Spikes.
Rockwell’s The Rookie (1957), also known as Red Sox Locker Room, portrays
what many believe to be the arrival of 19-year-old pitcher Mickey McDermott
at Fenway Park on April 24, 1948, as dubious old veteran teammates, including
a sinister-looking Ted Williams, examine him like a newly delivered piece of
28 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

fresh meat.33 Both players and non-players have been understandably

entranced by the image ever since it was unveiled. Asinof ’s “Rookie” Mike
Kutner is of course much older, more experienced, and not a pitcher, but the
dog-eat-dog foreboding mood of skepticism is identical.
The same parallels apply with Rockwell’s other baseball masterpieces:
the raw amateur passion of Gramps at the Plate (1916) and Son and Father:
Baseball Dispute (1962); the elasticity of game rules in Choosin’ Up (1951); the
behind-the-scenes shenanigans of 1949’s The Three Umpires (also known as
Game Called Because of Rain or Bottom of the Sixth); the Don Quixote-like
intensity from 100th Year of Baseball (1939). This latter work, created to com-
memorate the dedication ceremony for the Baseball Hall of Fame, calls to
mind Asinof ’s recruited participation as an amateur player in organized fes-
tivities held that season at Doubleday Field in Cooperstown.34 Arguably the
most riveting of all Rockwell’s baseball images, however, and one surely appre-
ciated by Asinof (along with all fans of the game), is The Dugout (1948), freez-
ing for all time a humiliating rout of the Chicago Cubs by the hosting Boston
Braves on May 23 of that same year. The dejected bat boy, the embarrassed
coaching staff, the vulgar heckler from the stands — Rockwell perfectly cap-
tures it all. The painting is a miraculous achievement for someone who never
played, and yet had a sharp eye for revealing character detail in sport with
plenty of such details to offer. Unlike Asinof, however, Rockwell found a
mass audience by pretending to be cute and harmless, which in the case of
the prickly and personally elusive Rockwell could not have been further from
the real truth.
Returning to baseball as described by the written word, Asinof ’s ambigu-
ous, critical view of game as portrayed in Man on Spikes, as in all of his later
work, has always been rejected by the masses but embraced by a discerning
few, especially those readers who have played baseball at a professional or
semiprofessional level. Thirty years after being kicked out of Hollywood, and
60 years after having been recruited to play on Doubleday Field as part of
the original dedication ceremonies, Asinof was honored by the Baseball Hall
of Fame in 1999 by being invited as the keynote speaker during the 11th Annual
Cooperstown Symposium. Anticipating this event, Man on Spikes was re-
released the previous year (1998) in a compelling new edition by Southern
Illinois University Press (with a Foreword by Marvin Miller), in what can
only be described as a public service.35 SIU Press would also release Asinof ’s
compelling last baseball novel, Off-Season, the following year in 2000 (see
Part V of this study). No one may have ever gotten rich off Asinof ’s first
major work of fiction (at least, in the financial sense), but its extensive fan
base remains devoted, extending all the way to Cooperstown and beyond.
The latest, somewhat revealing chapter in the long journey of Asinof ’s
baseball “rookie” theme came in 2002, with the commercially successful Dis-
 2. No One Ever Got Rich 29

ney film release of The Rookie— no relation to the 1953 short story by Asinof,
or to Norman Rockwell, for that matter. Disney’s Rookie (starring Dennis
Quaid) tells the true-life story of left-handed pitcher Jim Morris, a Texas high
school baseball coach who, at aged 35, began a two-year major league career
with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 1999–2000, the same period in which Asi-
nof was being honored at Cooperstown and his last baseball novel being
released to a mostly indifferent or snide public reception. The Morris story
made good, uplifting Hollywood material. Victimized by bad breaks in his
younger days, a much more mature athlete was compelled by his player-
students and encouraged by his wife to try out for the big leagues. To the sur-
prise of many (and notwithstanding financial hardship), he pulled it off.
Morris was (and is) a baseball Cinderella Man and inspirational role model
for us all. The problem is that his journey was highly exceptional, and not
very informative for aspiring young athletes interested in what really is likely
to happen to them in the world of professional baseball, both on and off the
playing field. For that kind of all too real story, one must turn to a different
kind of inspirational story, that of Mickey Rutner and his “fictional” coun-
terpart Mike Kutner, a story yet to be given feature film treatment, and pos-
sibly never. What the elderly Rutner or Asinof thought of the Disney film is
unknown. With his return to New York City in 1959, however, Asinof began
his own journey, a trek eventually leading to the creation of Eight Men Out,
a work that did ultimately end up on the big screen in quality form for every-
one to see and discuss, deny or embrace.
Thus ended the 1950s for Eliot Asinof. Man on Spikes, despite its success
among critics and former athletes who liked to read, languished, temporarily
went out of print, and was for some time nearly forgotten. During the late
1970s, a quarter century after having pioneered the subject matter, Asinof
would return to the theme of the aging rookie who would give anything for
a shot at the majors. His nonfiction story, or rather exposé, “The Secret Life
of Rocky Perone” (see Chapter 3), would, like his profile of Mickey Rutner’s
career, draw upon strange-but-true material for its inspiration. The reserve
clause that had wreaked havoc with Rutner’s major league ambitions, however,
had by 1979 been permanently discarded. By then, much different (and in
some ways, much bigger) issues had arisen, not only with major league base-
ball, but with all of professional sports. The same problems had in fact, been
inherent in the game from its very beginnings and, looking beyond the fictional
veneer, were strongly hinted at within Asinof ’s first novel. With Rocky Perone,
these previously implied questions would begin to move to the forefront of
public visibility. Once again, though, unfortunately, there seemed to be a
limited number of readers willing or able at the time to fully appreciate the
dilemma.
 3

A Purist Baseball Outlook

If one had never read any of Asinof ’s works, it might be easy in hindsight
to dismiss Man on Spikes as a fictional relic of its period, an interesting though
quaint condemnation of professional baseball’s reserve clause before its loom-
ing abolishment and little more than that. Reading the novel over three
decades after the reserve clause was eliminated, however, belies this oversim-
plification. For one, the exact term “reserve clause” is used sparingly by the
novelist, although its grave ramifications are spelled out a number of times,
including by the hero’s unapologetic team owner and a helpless commissioner
of major league baseball (“The Commissioner”). The latter tries unsuccessfully
to reign in owner greed, which unfortunately has continued in full force long
after Free agency was established. The 1950s omnipresence of team owner
dominance over the players certainly drives the plot, but it does not completely
define the story. Much, much more is at work in the tale of Mike Kutner than
mere legalisms; Kutner is as much a victim of his own insatiable ambitions
as of externally imposed injustices. For these reasons, the book holds up
stronger than ever when read today. No wonder then, that general appreciation
for Man on Spikes has slowly but steadily increased since its original publication
in 1955, perhaps even more so after the official demise of the reserve clause
in 1975.
During the mid–1970s came the true beginnings of unfettered Free
agency in professional baseball, within various grades and categories. The
long-term economic effects on the game have been well-documented, are
obviously apparent to any casual fan, and need little additional commentary
here. Bottom line: teams that can afford to pay high salaries to the best players
tend to win, while those which cannot tend to lose. Moreover, this dynamic
is never a static one; it changes from year to year. Oftentimes, a club will field
a World Series champion, but cannot afford to sustain the championship for
more than a year or two, especially if athletes demand raises or bonuses for
their outstanding performances. Such has long been true for all professional
team sports in general (especially football and basketball); but baseball, one
of the oldest, and in many ways, most conservative of American pastimes,

30
 3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 31

Asinof, seated fourth from left, possibly age 19, as a member of the Swarthmore
College baseball team, circa 1939. As a senior he would become a team captain. A
1940 yearbook reads: “The powerful hitting of Ellie Asinof marks him as a certainty
at either the outfield or first base.” Upon graduation, Asinof would sign with the
Philadelphia Phillies and play briefly for the Moultrie (Georgia) Packers (courtesy
Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College).

was the last to give in to inevitable pressures of the marketplace. Usually (but
not always), profitability depends on fan attendance, which often depends of
winning, which typically depends on high salaries, which in the end can
destroy profitability, not to mention fan loyalty if star players continuously
switch clubs with every passing season. Worse, some fans eventually have the
resentful realization that their erstwhile heroes earn more in one year than
they will ever earn in a lifetime.1 Those who excuse this disparity by arguing
that a professional athlete’s window of marketability is only a few years seem
to forget that wealth accumulated early in adulthood, unless squandered, is
often sustainable throughout a lifetime. Even when not sustainable, these
salaries are quite high and seem out of proportion to the fans paying for
tickets. The players may be like any other young entrepreneurs trying to make
a fortune, but the big question remains: what is their true value to society?
Are these athletes really worth what they are paid by the owners? All of this,
of course, seems a long way from the Mickey Rutner story which inspired
Asinof to write his first novel; yet, given that Rutner was certainly worth far
more than what he was paid, then the next hard question naturally becomes,
what exactly was he worth as a player, both comparatively as a professional
athlete and in relation to the rest of us?
32 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

It is noteworthy that since the advent of free agency in major league

baseball, there have been no teams to win the World Series more than two
consecutive years.2 The last franchise to win three consecutive titles was the
Oakland Athletics of 1972–1974 (the last three years of the reserve clause),
and by coincidence, the direct descendent of the very same franchise for which
Mickey Rutner played most of his professional career. Admittedly, Asinof ’s
beloved New York Yankees have dominated post-season play during the Free
agency era, thanks mainly to the uninhibited spending of late owner George
Steinbrenner, but even this dominance has come in cycles, without more than
two consecutive World Series championships at a time.3 The Oakland team
of the early 1970s, on the other hand, was the last of the true great baseball
dynasties, bound together forcibly by still-extant official policies and despite
a shared loathing of their owner (the late Charles O. Finley), not unlike the
animosity felt by the 1919 Black Sox towards their owner, Charles A.
Comiskey. Had it not been for Free agency, the Oakland team would have
surely gone on to win more titles; indeed, the Yankees immediately took
advantage by raiding the Oakland roster for stars like Catfish Hunter and
Reggie Jackson, luring them away with bigger paychecks. Thus Hunter and
Jackson traded Finley for Steinbrenner as their boss. There is a personal con-
nection here. Charles O. Finley lived in my home town of LaPorte, Indiana,
where I played high school baseball at the time. In nearby Comiskey Park in
Chicago, I witnessed the Athletics play (and dominate) during their heyday;
then I saw them, practically overnight, scatter to the winds when no longer
slavishly bound to lower pay and abhorred management. It was a stark lesson
for an 18-year-old player and fan to observe.
With the demise of the reserve clause in 1975, one would have thought
that Asinof was finished with the aging baseball rookie theme as a writer.
Instead, within four years he produced a short piece titled “The Secret Life
of Rocky Perone,” published by Sports Illustrated on June 18, 1979. Based on
the thought-provoking, true-to-life case of Richard Pohle, “Rocky Perone”
tells the story of a marginal player who in 1974 successfully masqueraded his
advanced age and true identity to obtain a single-day successful shot, not in
the majors, but rather, in the minor leagues. Pohle is no Mickey Rutner being
oppressed by the injustices of the reserve clause or the inequities of racial inte-
gration. “Rocky Perone” is instead Asinof ’s sober meditation on the foibles
and moral frailties of professional baseball players — and by extension, all pro-
fessional athletes. In typical, controversial style for Asinof, he reports a factual
story in a journalistic manner by utilizing a first person narrative voice (that
of Pohle-Perone), thus creating a true sense of author (and reader) empathy
for the protagonist, despite that person’s willful deceptions against almost
everyone he encounters. In short, the 36-year-old Pohle (one year older than
Asinof ’s “fictional” rookie Mike Kutner), after a long but very unlucky career
 3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 33

playing amateur ball, with help from his shrink, modern cosmetics (including
a wig) to conceal his age, and a more exotic, marketable identity (that of an
Australian import), momentarily earns a playing spot in the San Diego farm
system with the Walla Walla (Washington) Padres.4 In addition to his solid
playing ability, Pohle-Perone, before trying out, diligently scouts the scouts
beforehand, carefully avoiding the “smart ones,” which proves not too difficult
in the mindless world of sports. During his professional debut with Walla
Walla, Pohle is immediately found out and once again sent packing, but not
before getting a base hit, a walk, stealing a base, and making some good plays
in the field. In effect, “Rocky Perone” plays too well, draws attention to him-
self, and is busted for it.
Like most of Asinof ’s previous heroes or antiheroes (most notably, Garret
Brock Trapnell from his 1976 nonfiction work, The Fox Is Crazy Too), Pohle
is profiled by Asinof the writer as a sympathetic, even at times, likeable con
artist. Ultimately, Pohle is a “cheater cheating cheaters,” to borrow the Asinof ’s
oft-quoted phrase from Abe Attell, the man who helped organize the 1919
World Series fix.5 Like some of the Black Sox — indeed, as Asinof himself once
did as a young ballplayer — Pohle assumes a completely new identity in order
to continue playing the game. Like the “fictional” Mike Kutner from Man on
Spikes, Pohle is too old, too small in stature, and too lacking in long-ball
power to get a fair shot at the pros. Unlike Kutner, however, Pohle does not
battle an entrenched reserve clause or, for that matter, ever entertain much
hope to play in the majors. Instead, he combats old-fashioned age discrimi-
nation in the job market, combined with the insatiable greed of owners and
publicists who have little regard for true playing talent. Above all, it becomes
painfully apparent that Pohle is all too eager to compromise any would be
ideals in order to obtain his stated objective, to “go into the record books” as
a professional ballplayer. He feels no guilt whatsoever in deceiving fans, team-
mates, and team management, because his talent justifies his presence on a pro-
fessional playing field, which otherwise would be denied if he played it straight.
Asinof ’s conscience-rattling account ends with a (by then) 41-year-old Pohle
plotting his next professional comeback, while solemnly pledging, “This time
I’m not going to get caught.”6 As a literary work, Asinof ’s “Rocky Perone” is
pure delight, containing all of the author’s trademark verve, sass, and wit.
At the time of writing “Rocky Perone” Asinof was almost 60 years old,
temporarily worn out by his debilitating legal struggles with David Susskind,
and probably beginning to feel like time was unfairly passing him by. At first
glance, one might view the Richard Pohle story as a lark, a one-time detour,
or a coda on this particular subject matter for Asinof, but closer examination
reveals that the aging rookie theme was near and dear to his heart throughout
his writing career. The talented but ambitious and overaged rookie up against
an entrenched, unjust system, reserve clause or no reserve clause, would con-
34 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

tinue to fascinate him. It also seemed to easily go hand in hand with Asinof ’s
consistent hostility towards the negative influence of capital and marketing
on the integrity of the professional game, as sourly noted in Man on Spikes
by the old scout Durkin Fain:
So here he was again, with the familiar assignment that insulted his love for the
game. Baseball was getting to be big business these days, not like it used to be
when he played ball. Gradually, it was moving into the hands of the big-money
syndicates, the promoters. Anybody could run a ball club ... all you needed was a
couple million bucks, and a flare for publicity stunts.... The old scout felt a growing
antagonism for the new philosophy, the new baseball; and it jarred his relationship
with the great game.7
At the very center of the Mike Kutner or Rocky Perone stories lies not the
reserve clause, but rather a professional enterprise dominated by “the big-money
syndicates,” “the promoters,” and a “new philosophy,” as summarized by Asinof
in his first novel, all comparatively alien to the national pastime in its earlier,
pre–1919 incarnations. Also at the center of these stories, however, lies the pro-
fessional athlete’s irrepressible ambition and competitive spirit, typically will-
ing to make any sacrifice or compromise whatsoever in order to achieve its goals.
As for feature film adaptations and possible mass audience exposure, nei-
ther “Rocky Perone” nor Man on Spikes has yet to make it to the big screen in
the true sense. On July 27, 2010, a seven-minute entry titled The Secret Life
of Rocky Perone was made at the L.A. Short Film Festival, but Asinof received
no writing credit, unlike his credited 1955 television adaptation of Man on Spikes
for the Goodyear Playhouse.8 The closest Hollywood has ever come touching
this kind of subject matter was in 2002 with the far more benign and con-
ventionally inspirational treatment of the Jim Morris story as dramatized in
The Rookie (see Chapter 2). Hollywood executives may be right about one
thing, though: general audiences are probably not quite ready to face the grim
realities of a more typical and far more widespread minor league experience,
one so faithfully depicted in Asinof ’s “fiction”— stories in which the lines
between reality and imagination are blurred and barely distinguishable.
The new baseball “philosophy” coined by Asinof— that money trumps
all — one so demonized in his works, did not of course have its beginnings in
the post–World War II era or even the post–World War I era of 1919. It was,
in the author’s view, a gradual process, rapidly accelerating at intervals includ-
ing the two postwar periods of the 20th century. It had its true roots deep in
the American psyche and American way of life, and was reflected by values
of the players and fans, as much as the values of owners whom they often
secretly envied. Perhaps one better way to try and understand Asinof ’s view
of the system is to examine the state of baseball during and leading up to the
era in which he himself played professionally in 1940–1941. The between-
wars period into which he was born and came of age (1919–1941) reflected a
 3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 35

very interesting historical interlude for baseball in which the game quickly
went from being a disreputable gambler’s racket to a mythological national
pastime symbolic of America’s strengths and virtues as it entered World War
II. In addition to being dominated by the Ruth-Gehrig-DiMaggio triumvirate
of Asinof ’s beloved New York Yankees, the most striking new feature of pro-
fessional baseball during that time period was the invention and development
of the minor league farm system. Thanks to the creative genius and unfettered
foresight of Branch Rickey, baseball’s first general manager in the modern
sense of the job title, the St. Louis Cardinals became the National League’s
premier franchise.9 Other major league teams, including the Yankees, followed
suit, and those that did not found themselves quickly reduced to second divi-
sion status. This was the same milieu in which Asinof developed as a player
and played professionally, experiencing first hand, for better and for worse,
the clumsy and still evolving start-up farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies
organization, via the Moultrie Packers and Wausau Lumberjacks.
In a pivotal chapter titled “The Commissioner” from Man on Spikes,
Asinof dramatizes the anticlimactic showdown between Mike Kutner’s
unscrupulous team owner, Jim Mellon, and a nameless, pawn-like commis-
sioner of baseball. The commissioner tries to go to bat for Kutner’s career,
only to find himself alternatively laughed and sneered at by one of the men
who pay his salary:
[Commissioner] “It’s bad for the players — like Kutner. It’s bad for the other
clubs — like Philly.”
[Mellon] “But it’s damn good for me!” Mellon laughed. “Like I said, it wins pen-
nants.”
[Commissioner] “And it’s bad for baseball!” The Commissioner’s voice was louder
than he wished.
[Mellon] “That’s the sour grapes department, Commissioner. Everybody wants to
win pennants and they all got farm organizations. It’s a good system. Anyone can
win in it. That’s America, Commissioner, free enterprise and all that. But, then,
maybe you got some suggestions in mind?”
[Commissioner] “I’ve stated them: a freer interchange of ballplayers, especially to
the clubs that need them the most.”
[Mellon] “You wouldn’t attack the reserve clause, would you? Even the ballplayers
don’t do that. Take away the reserve clause and the players become free agents.
It’d be like anarchy. The rich clubs would gobble up all the good ones.”
The Commissioner almost rose from his chair.
[Commissioner] “Who’s got them now, Jim?” he shouted. “The poor clubs?”10

Big money had of course always ruled professional baseball from the
beginning. Even with the reserve clause still in existence, deep-pocketed own-
ers could out bonus their competitors with respect to signing new talent; then
36 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

after a contract had been signed, the new player was more or less owned by
the team, lock, stock, and barrel. By the late 1970s, with the reserve clause
officially dismantled, wealthy clubs still enjoyed huge bidding advantages on
free agents, but now had less long-term control over players unless their con-
tracts specified otherwise.
In one sense, the new Free agency system was more up front and less
apologetic about the power of money. After all, by the 1980s, greed had become
good. Free-spending franchises were now capable of building championship
teams overnight, and athletes with potentially strong box office appeal could
now earn paychecks far beyond the capabilities and wildest dreams of most
Americans. These guiding principles applied forcefully to all professional
sports, not only baseball. Lost in the transition were team stability, owners’
patience in building franchises, players’ patience in working their way up the
ranks, and, some would say, overall fan loyalty. Money now had to be made
fast by everyone involved. Branch Rickey, the general manager who built,
player by player, some of the most legendary baseball clubs in history, the
visionary who created the minor league farm system into which a young Eliot
Asinof and Mickey Rutner were signed, would barely recognize today’s busi-
ness model for the game. In retrospect, Asinof ’s “Rocky Perone,” written in
1979 but describing events on the eve of Free agency in 1974, anticipated
today’s situation by making unfettered athlete ambition and ownership drive
for fast profits the two prime motivators of human behavior in the professional
version of the game. His two post-reserve clause baseball novels (Strike Zone
and Off-Season) would also later touch upon this same theme to some degree.
The situation had been considerably different when Asinof was a minor
league player, as surely was his perception of the system. The 1941 season in
particular, the last before World War II broke out, would have been especially
influential on any baseball player who participated in it, as did Asinof in
Wausau, his last year in the minors. In 1941, the year in which the Brooklyn
Dodgers finally made it to the World Series for the first time (as the Dodgers),
they were only to be beaten in frustrating manner by their crosstown rivals,
the near invincible New York Yankees.11 Interestingly 1941 was also the year
that saw Joe DiMaggio’s exciting 56-game hitting streak and Ted Williams’
incredible .406 batting average, both still seemingly unapproachable records
for the modern books. In brief, it was a good year for hitters, and the 21-
year-old Asinof, himself a pretty good minor league hitter, would have likely
been inspired by their examples. Asinof also had the uplifting example of his
personal acquaintance with future Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, by that
time firmly established as the first Jewish superstar of major league baseball.
It was a heady time to be a ballplayer, especially a Jewish one; moreover, it
is tempting to speculate that many of Asinof ’s fictional characters have ele-
ments of actual people that he knew from this period. For example, his favor-
 3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 37

able portrayal in Man on Spikes of “The Old Ballplayer” Herman Cruller may
partially represent his 1941 Wausau veteran coach, player-manager Wally
Gilbert, a former major leaguer with whom he seems to have had a good rela-
tionship.12 Likewise, the novelist’s highly unflattering characterization of “The
Manager” Lou Phipps might have a bit of Asinof ’s Moultrie skipper George
Jacobs, with whom he had a short, stormy association in 1940.13
Just as historical people and events from the pre–World War II era (in
addition to Mickey Rutner himself ) are likely represented in Asinof ’s Man
on Spikes, within those pages are found Asinof ’s philosophy of the game, his
view of the ideal player or baseball credo, if you will. To the great delight of
discerning baseball enthusiasts everywhere, Asinof— despite his boyhood idol
worship of Babe Ruth — was not a proponent of the modern long ball power
game. Instead, from his first short story to his very last baseball novel, Asinof
lauded the proverbial inside game or “scientific baseball,” as it is described by
“The Scout” in his first novel.14 In this approach to baseball, speed, stealth,
consistency, character and intelligence — not home runs — are a winning team’s
best friends. It is not unlike the baseball philosophy of Branch Rickey himself.
Such a view should not be surprising coming from one who as a player seems
to have possessed similar qualities and did not tend to hit home runs.15 It may
well have also been the view of former Philadelphia Athletics star pitcher
George Earnshaw, like Asinof, a Swarthmore College alumnus, who, while
fire chief of Swarthmore after his retirement from the pros, recruited the
recently graduated Asinof to join the Phillies’ farm system.16 Readers of Man
on Spikes may be catching a glimpse of Earnshaw’s crusty personality and
purist baseball outlook as “The Scout” Durkin Fain who signs Mike Kutner
to his first professional contract. Fain has little regard for the new-style, Babe
Ruth wannabes, even as his boss, team owner Jim Mellon, berates him:
Look, Fain. Baseball has changed since you played it. It’s the goddamn long ball
they want now. If a man can belt ’em that far, he goes up. The clever boys can
only wave at the damn apple as it disappears over the wall. That’s baseball today.
It just ain’t a little man’s game.17
Fain’s visceral response to his boss’s directive is one that he dare not vocalize:
One trouble was that the big hitters were everybody’s meat. Find any rawboned
kid who could blast the apple a mile and you’d wait in line with the other scouts
to get him, dangling the ever-increasing checks before him, promising him the
world if he’d come to papa. It was no longer scouting; it was a crazy kind of super-
salesmanship.18
As for the owner Mellon’s justification of giving the customers what they want,
Fain expresses (at least in his thoughts), even more contempt:
Sure, they blamed it all on the public. The public wants the long ball! It recently
had its taste of the great Babe Ruth and his sixty home runs in a season. It seemed
38 Part I: Man on Spikes (1955)

so easy to win games that way. There was a dramatic finality to it that any child-
mind could understand. There it goes, up and out, sailing over the outfielders,
miles out of reach, into the bleacher bedlam and that hysterical adulation! It doesn’t
matter that Babe Ruth could have won more games with a timely, well-placed
bunt or tap through that crazy, unbalanced infield. Fain often argued that the
great Babe would execute such a simple maneuver only to show how clever he
actually was. Baseball had become less a question of winning games than the way
you won them.19
Asinof ’s invocation of his childhood hero Babe Ruth (through the voice
of Fain) has a special poignancy within this context.20 Given the great tragedy
of the Bambino not being allowed to coach after his playing days were over,
despite his obvious capacity and desire to do so, makes even Ruth himself
appear to be the ultimate victim of the very system that he arguably saved
single-handedly in wake of the Black Sox Scandal.21 As becomes apparent in
the very first chapter of Man on Spikes, true connoisseurs of the game must
always make heavy allowance for the far less idealistic (and more realistic)
version of the sport — one driven first and foremost by the marketing efforts
and “supersalesmenship” of promoters and owners.
This element of baseball idealism was present in Asinof ’s writing from
the moment he first sat down to his typewriter. In the original published ver-
sion of his short story “The Rookie,” Mike Kutner kneels in the on-deck
circle during his major league debut and watches with growing disgust a
younger rookie batting ahead of him:
And this was a bonus baby. Red Schalk, the new-type ballplayer. They had handed
him sixty thousand dollars for being a high-school hero, for hitting .400 against
seventeen-year-old pitchers. Sixty Gs for merely signing his name!22
Schalk, after being completely fooled with two strikes, is fortuitously hit by
a pitch, setting the stage for Kutner’s subsequent, bitter failure at the plate.
In the end, the less worthy ballplayer makes it to the big leagues and stays,
while the more deserving is sent packing because of bad breaks, a corrupt sys-
tem, and one bad swing. The Mike Kutner story thus becomes a baseball
morality tale for the aspiring professional player: talent and hard work are not
always enough — in fact, more often than not, talent and hard work are simply
not enough, through no fault of the player. Most minor leaguers, no matter
how deserving, never make it to the majors; conversely, many undeserving
ones do often make it, however briefly.
If Asinof ’s sports message in Man on Spikes seems like a total downer,
most former professional players, even the unassailable likes of Joe DiMaggio
(see Chapter 2), have recognized the hard and profound truth of this theme.
As for the “scientific baseball” most appreciated by true lovers of the game, it
can never be taken for granted because neither the owners nor the fans demand
it. If a truly great player does happen to make it to the big time, and does
 3. A Purist Baseball Outlook 39

happen to play very well without hitting home runs, then it should be appre-
ciated all the more, because it has come to pass in spite of these things. If that
player happens to be the likes of Ty Cobb, admiration of whom off the playing
field is very dubious proposition, then all the more reason to fully appreciate
the multifaceted skills such a person was able to display in competition. In
the next chapter, we shall endeavor to show how Asinof ’s purist vision of the
national pastime, as reflected in Man on Spikes, with all of its tragedies and
triumphs, clearly point towards bigger unresolved issues in American society,
completely outside the world of sports. At its central core (it may well be
argued), Man on Spikes is not really about baseball, but instead, about these
much larger philosophical questions.
 4

A Preference for Anti-Heroes

Over Heroes

But talent alone was no guarantee, for there were too many dumbheads along
the way hunting for lousy reasons to smother it.
— Asinof, Man on Spikes1

During my final years as an amateur ballplayer in Michigan City, Indiana,

I was most fortunate to have as coach a former minor leaguer named Al Shinn
who, in addition to being a very fine player-manager, took special interest in
me at a time in life when I needed such attention. As my four-year collegiate
baseball career had been remunerative but far from satisfactory, my late mother
advised me to keep on playing ball until my active playing days ended on a
positive note.2 It proved excellent advice. In Al, I met a person who, like
myself, played strictly for fun and diversion, without any grandiose ambitions
or hidden agendas. Under his tutelage, I became the best ballplayer within
my capabilities, before happily hanging up my spikes at age 24, although by
this point in my life I was far more concerned with surviving law school rather
than playing baseball.3 It also so happened that Al, in his own younger playing
days (during the 1950s), like Asinof ’s friend Mickey Rutner, had his own
tough experiences with the still-extant reserve clause. In a five-year minor
league career, mostly in the Brooklyn Dodgers’ organization, Al was a terrific
hitting first baseman and outfielder (like Asinof ) who, over five professional
seasons (1952–1956) batted .322 lifetime, and with power (41 home runs) to
boot.4 He never got a shot at the majors, however, because the Dodgers during
that era had the great Gil Hodges at first base, as well as consistently successful
teams, winning the World Series in 1955, the very same year that Asinof ’s
Man on Spikes was released. Had it not been for the reserve clause, Al Shinn,
like Mickey Rutner, would have surely had good opportunity to play for other
major league teams more urgently needing his services. But Al was never one
to complain about these things, at least not in public. It occurred to me at
the time (circa 1980), that under the then relatively new free agency system,

40
 4. A Preference for Anti-Heroes Over Heroes 41

Al would probably have gotten a shot at the majors, unlike Asinof ’s friend
Mickey Rutner, as well as his fictional counterpart, Mike Kutner, who both
got to play, however briefly, in the big time.
The obvious implication here is that the fictional or real-life experiences
of ballplayers portrayed by Asinof in Man on Spikes are far more typical than
not. That is a big part of the reason why it packs such a wallop for former
players who read it. Moreover, Asinof ’s visceral realism — one so firmly rooted
in his personal career and people that he met along the way — extends way
beyond the realm of archaic legalisms such as the reserve clause. At its very
heart, and as conspicuously displayed in subsequent works such as “The Secret
Life of Rocky Perone” (see Chapter 3), the story of Mickey Rutner delves into
universal, non-sports related themes such as labor-management relations and
aspirations for wealth and fame in a free society. By extension, these issues
include the inherent limits of hero worship and whoever we may happen to
chose as our role models in life. In this regard, baseball literary critic Richard
Peterson observed that Man on Spikes is “an exception among conventional
baseball novels, where the game of baseball is often a reflection of life, where
the baseball dream routinely transforms players into heroes and legends, and
where baseball’s readers can indulge their romantic fantasies while picking up
lessons on the value of moral conduct and the virtue of having a good heart.”5
Readers may not pick up Man on Spikes to be edified, but they end up being
edified in spite of themselves, whether they want to or not. As in all great novels,
this is achieved through entertainment, rather than preaching or sermonizing.
One is naturally inclined to ask exactly where and how Asinof acquired
this tendency as a writer, one setting him so distinctly apart from most of his
contemporaries. The answer probably lies in the years of his early adulthood
during the 1930s and 1940s. At Swarthmore College in 1940, the year in which
he both graduated with honors and captained the collegiate baseball team,
Asinof had the extra good fortune to study under Clair Wilcox (1898–1970),
one of the most illustrious Keynesian economists of the New Deal era.6 Rather
than get upon a soap box and pontificate on socioeconomic issues, Wilcox
invited his entire class, Asinof included, out on the town in Philadelphia to
screen the then newly released film adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes
of Wrath, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda.7 After the movie,
Wilcox brought the class back to his home for a late night discussion about
the movie while his wife served tea. Asinof later recalled, “I learned a lot
about what America was like that night ... I’ve never forgotten”8 According
to his memoir, another key phase in his education came a couple years later
during the war while stationed in the Aleutian Islands and working with
Dashiell Hammett in journalism. It was here that he first learned to both
think and write about social injustices (see Chapter 8).9 Man on Spikes would
pour forth from his typewriter about a decade later.
Other documents randomly have
different content
 CHAPTER V
ONLY A SIMPLE SERVICE

Mrs. Elstree took the card that the maid brought her. She started up,
mechanically touched her hair—which was of the feathery and fluffy
kind—and her dress, with the woman's instinct to see that
everything was in order: the quick colour rose to her cheek—perhaps
from the heat of the fire. 'Yes,' she said, 'I am at home.' She was
sitting beside the fire in the drawing-room of Armorel's flat. It was a
cold afternoon in March: outside, a black east wind raged through
the streets; it was no day for driving or for walking: within, soft
carpets, easy-chairs, and bright fires invited one to stay at home.
This lady, indeed, was one of those who love warmth and physical
ease above all other things. Actually to be warm, lazily warm,
without any effort to feel warmth, afforded her a positive and
distinct physical pleasure, just as a cat is pleased by being stroked.
Therefore, though a book lay in her lap, she had not been reading.
It is much pleasanter to lie back and feel warm, with half-closed
eyes, in a peaceful room, than to be led away by some impetuous
novelist into uncomfortable places, cold places, fatiguing places.
She started, however, and the book fell to the floor, where it
remained. And she rose to her feet when the owner of the card
came in. The relict of Jerome Elstree was still young, and grief had
as yet destroyed none of her beauty. She looked better, perhaps, in
the morning—which says a great deal.
'Alec?' she murmured—her eyes as soft as her voice. 'I thought you
would come this afternoon.'
'Are you quite alone, Mrs. Elstree?' he asked with a look of warning.
'Quite, Mr. Feilding. And, since the door is shut, and we are quite
alone—why—then——' She laughed, held out both her hands, and
put up her face like a child.
He took her hands and bent to kiss her lips.
'Zoe,' he said, 'you grow lovelier every day. Last night——' He kissed
her again.
'Lovelier than Philippa?'
'What is Philippa beside you? An iceberg beside a—a garden of
flowers——'
'There is beauty in icebergs, I have read.'
'Never mind Philippa, dear Zoe. She is nothing to us.'
'I don't mind her a bit, Alec, if you don't. If you begin to mind her
—— But we will wait until that happens. Why are you here to-day?'
'I have come to call upon Mrs. Elstree, widow of my poor friend
Jerome Elstree.'
'Ce pauvre Jerome! The tears come into my eyes'—in fact, they did
at that moment—'look!—when I think of him. So often have I spoken
of his virtues and his untimely fate that he has really lived. I never
before understood that there are ghosts of men who never lived as
well as ghosts of the dead.'
'And I came to call upon your charge, Miss Rosevean.'
'Yes'—she said this dubiously, perhaps jealously—'so I supposed.
Why did you send me here, Alec? You have always got some reason
for everything. There was no need for my coming—I was doing as
well as I expect to do.'
The young man looked about the room without replying to this
question.
'Someone,' he said presently, 'has furnished this room who knows
furniture.'
'It was Armorel herself. I have no taste—as you know.'
'And how do you get on with her? Are you happy here, Zoe?'
'I am as happy as I ever expect to be—until——'
'Yes, yes,' he interrupted, impatiently. 'You like her, then?'
'I like her as much as I can like any woman. You know, Alec, I am
not greatly in love with my own sex. If there were no other women
in the world than just enough to dress me, get my dinner, and keep
my house clean, I should not murmur. Eve was the happiest of
women, in spite of the difficulties she must have had in keeping up
with the fashion. Because, you see, she was the only woman.'
'No doubt. And now tell me about this girl.'
'She is rich. To be rich is everything. Money makes an angel of every
woman. When I was eighteen, and first met you, Alec, I was rich.
Then you saw the wings sticking out visibly one on each shoulder,
didn't you? They are gone now—at least,' she looked over her
shoulder, 'I see them no longer.'
'I heard she was rich. Where did the money come from?'
'It has been saving up for I don't know how long. The girl is only
twenty-one, and she has about thirty thousand pounds, besides all
kinds of precious things worth I don't know how much.'
'Jagenal told me she was comfortably off—"comfortably," he said—
but—thirty thousand pounds!'
'The mere thought of so much makes your eyes glow quite
poetically, Alec. Write a poem on thirty thousand pounds. Well, that
is what she has, and all her own, without any drawbacks: no nasty
poor relations—no profligate brothers—to nibble and gnaw. She has
not either brother or sister—an enviable lot when one has money.
When one has no money a brother—a successful brother—might be
useful.'
'And how do you get on with her?'
'I think we do pretty well together. But my post is precarious.'
'Why?'
'Because the young woman is pretty, rich, and masterful. It is a
curious thing about women that the most masterful soonest find
their master.'
'You mean that she will marry.'
'If she gets engaged, being rich, she will certainly marry at once.
Until she marries I believe we can get on together, because she is
totally independent of me. This afternoon, for example, she has
gone out to look at pictures somewhere, with a girl she has picked
up somehow—a girl who writes.'
'But, my dear Zoe, you must look after her. Don't let her pick up girls
and make friendships. You are here to look after her. I hoped that
you would gain her complete confidence—become indispensable to
her.'
'Oh! that is why you sent me here? Pray, my dear Alec, what can
Armorel be to you?'
'Nothing, dear child,' he replied, patting her soft hand, 'that will
bring any discord between you and me. But—make yourself
indispensable and necessary to her.'
'You will tell me, I dare say, presently, what you mean. But you don't
know this young islander. Necessary to me she is, as you know.
Necessary to her I shall never become. We have nothing in common.
I can do nothing for her at all, except go out to theatres and
concerts and things in the evening. Even then our tastes clash. I like
to laugh; she likes to sit solemnly with big eyes staring—so—as if
she was receiving inspiration. I like comic operas, she likes serious
plays; I like dance music, she likes classical music; I like the fool's
paradise, she likes—the other kind, where they all behave so well
and are under no illusions. In fact, Armorel takes herself quite
seriously all round. Of course, a girl with such a fortune can take
herself anyhow she pleases.'
'She knows how to dress, apparently. Most advanced girls disdain
dress.'
'But she is not an advanced girl. She is only a girl who knows a great
deal. She is not in the least emancipated. Why, she still professes
the Christian religion. She is just a girl who has set herself resolutely
to learn all she can. She has been about it for five years. When she
began, I understand that she knew nothing. What she means to do
with her knowledge I have not learned. She talks French and
German and Italian. You have heard her play? Very well: you can't
beat that. You shall see some of her drawings. They are rather in
your style, I think. A highly cultivated girl. That is all.'
'A female prig? A consciously superior person?'
'Not a bit. Rather humble-minded. But masterful and independent.
Where she fails is, of course, in ordinary talk. She can't talk—she can
only converse. She doesn't know the pictures and painters, and
poets and novelists of the day—she doesn't know a single person in
society. She doesn't know any personal history at all. And she
doesn't care about any. That is Armorel.'
'I see,' he replied thoughtfully. 'Things will be difficult, I am afraid.'
'What things? Oh! there is another point in which she differs from
people of society.'
'Yes?'
'When you and I, dear Alec, think and talk of people, we conclude
that they are exactly like ourselves—do we not? Quite worldly and
selfish, you know. Everyone with his little show to run for himself.
Now, Armorel, on the other hand, concludes that everyone is like—
not us—but herself. Do you catch the difference? There is a
difference, you know.'
'Sometimes, Zoe, I seem not to understand you. But never mind.
Under your influence——'
'I have no influence at all with her. I never shall have.'
'But, my dear Zoe, why are you here? I want you—I repeat—to
exercise an overwhelming influence.'
'Oh! It is impossible. Consider—you who know me so well—how can
I influence a girl who is always seeking after great things? She wants
everything noble and lofty and pure. She has what they call a great
soul—and I—oh! Alec, you know that I belong to the infinitely little
souls. There are a great, great number of us, but we are very
contemptible.'
'Let us think,' he replied. 'Let us contrive and devise some way——'
'Enough about Armorel. Tell me now about yourself.'
'I am always the same.'
'You have come, perhaps, this afternoon,' she murmured softly, 'to
bring me some new hope—Oh! Alec—at last—some hope?'
'I have no new hope to give you, child.'
Both sat in silence, looking into the firelight.
'It is seven years—seven years,' said Zoe, 'since I had my great
quarrel with Philippa. She was eighteen then—and so was I—I
charged her with throwing herself at your head, you know. So she
did. So she does still. Why, the woman can't conceal, even now, that
she loves you. I saw it in her eyes last night, I saw it in her attitude
when she was talking to you. She swore after the row we had that
she would never speak to me again. But you see she has broken
that vow. I was eighteen then, and I was rich, a good deal richer
than Philippa ever will be. When you and I became engaged I was
twenty-one. That is four years ago, Alec. Yet, a year or two, and the
girl you were—engaged to—will be thin and faded. For your sake,
my dear boy, I hope that you will not keep her waiting very much
longer before you present her to the world.'
'My dear child, could I help the smash that came—the smash and
scandal? When the whole town was ringing with your father's smash
and his suicide, and the ruin of I don't know how many people, was
that the moment for us to step forward and take hands before the
world?'
'No; you certainly could not. As a man of the world, you would have
been justified in breaking off the thing—especially as it was only a
day or two old.'
'I could not let you go, Zoe,' he said, with a touch of real tenderness.
'I was madly in love.'
'I think you were, Alec. I really think that at the time you were truly
and madly in love. Else you would never have done a thing of which
you repented the next day.'
'I have never repented, dear Zoe—never once.'
'Perhaps you calculated that something would be saved out of the
smash. Perhaps, for once in your life, you never calculated at all
upon anything. Well—I consented to keep the thing a secret.'
'You know that it was necessary.'
'You said so. I obeyed. But four years—four years—and no prospect
of a termination. Consider!' She pleaded as she had spoken before,
in the same soft, caressing, murmuring tone.
'I do consider, Zoe. You can have your freedom again. I have no
right——'
'Nonsense! My freedom? It is your own that you want. My freedom?'
she repeated, but without raising her voice. 'Mine? What could I do
with it—now? Whither could I turn? Do not, I advise you, think that I
will ever while I live restore your freedom to you.'
'I spoke in your own interest, believe me.'
'I am now what you have made me. You know what that is. You
know what I was four years ago.'
'I have advised you, it is true.'
'No; you have led me. At the moment of my greatest trouble you
made me break away from my own people, who were sorry for my
misfortunes, and would have kept me among them in my own circle.
There was no reason for me to leave them. The wreck of my father's
fortune was not imputed to me. You persuaded me to assert my own
independence, and to go upon the stage, for which I was as well
fitted as for the kingdom of heaven.'
'I hoped—I thought—that you would succeed.'
'No; what you hoped and intended was to keep me in your power.
You would not let me go, and you could not—or would not——'
'Could not, my child. I could not.'
'For four years I have endured the humiliations of the actress who is
a failure and can only take the lowest parts. You know what I have
endured, and yet—— Oh! Alec, your love is, indeed, a noble gift!
And now, for your sake, I am here, playing a part for you. I am the
young widow of the man who never existed. I make up a hundred
lies every day to a girl who believes every word—which makes it
more disgraceful and more horrible. When one knows that she is
disbelieved it is different.'
'Zoe, you know my position.'
'Very well, indeed. You live in a little palace. You keep your man-
servant and your two horses. You go every day into some kind of
good society——'
'It is necessary: my position demands it.'
'Your position, my friend, has nothing to do with it. If you stayed at
home every evening just as many copies of your paper would be
sold. You spend all this money on yourself, Alec, because you are a
selfish person and indulgent, and because you like to make a great
show of success.'
'You do not understand.'
'Oh, yes, I do! You paint lovely pictures, which you sell: you write
admirable stories and excellent verses—at least, I suppose they are
admirable and excellent. You put them into a paper which is your
own——'
'Yes—yes. But all these things leave me as poor as I was four years
ago.'
He got up and stood before the fire, looking into it. Then he walked
across to the window and gazed into the street. Then he returned
and looked into the fire again. This restlessness may be a sign that
something is on a man's mind.
'Zoe,' he said at length, without looking at her, 'your impatience
makes you unjust. You do not understand. Things have come to a
crisis.'
'What kind of a crisis?'
'A financial crisis. I must have money.'
'Then go and make it. Paint more pictures: write more poetry. Make
money, as other men do. It is very noble and grand to pretend that
you only work when you please; but it isn't business, and it isn't
true.'
'Again—you do not understand. I must have money in a short time,
or else——'
'Else—what may happen, Alec?' She leaned forward, losing her
murmuring manner for the first time.
'I may—I must—become bankrupt. That to me signifies social ruin.'
'You have something more to say. Won't you say it at once?'
'If I can get over this difficulty it will be all right—my anxieties over. I
thought, Zoe, when I sent you here, that, with a girl rich, mistress of
her own, of age, it would be easy for you to wind yourself into her
confidence and borrow—or beg, or somehow get what I want out of
her. To borrow would be best.'
'How much do you want? Tell me exactly.'
'I want, before the end of next month, about 3,000l. Say, 3,500l.'
'That is a very large sum of money.'
'Not to this girl. Make her lend it to you. Make up some story. Beg it
or borrow it—and——' he laid his hand upon her shoulder, but she
made no movement in reply; he stooped and kissed her head, but
she did not look up. 'Zoe—I swear—if you will do this for me, our
long and weary waiting shall be at an end. I will acknowledge
everything. I will give up this extravagant life: we will settle down
like a couple of honest bourgeois: we will live over the shop if you
like—that is, the publishing office of the paper.' He took her hand
and raised it to his lips, but she made no response.
'Would she ever get the money back again?'
'Perhaps. How can I tell?'
'Even for the bribe you offer, Alec, I am afraid I cannot do it.'
'We will try together. We will lay ourselves out to attract the girl, to
win her confidence. Consider. She is alone. She is in our hands——'
'Yes, yes. But you do not know her. Alec, if I cannot succeed, what
will you do?'
'I must look out for some girl with money and get engaged to her.
The mere fact of an engagement would be enough for me.'
'Yes,' she said quickly, 'it would have to be. Will you get engaged to
—to Philippa?'
'No; Philippa will only have money at the death of her father and
mother—not before. Philippa is out of the question.'
'Is there nobody among all your fine friends who will lend you the
money?'
'No one. We do not lend money to each other. We go on as if there
were no money difficulties in the world, as well as no diseases, no
old age, no dying. We do not speak of money.'
'Friendship in society has its limits. Yes; I see. But can't you borrow
it in the usual way of business people?'
'I should have to show books and enter into unpleasant
explanations. You see, Zoe, the paper has got a very good name,
but rather a small circulation. Everybody sees it, but very few buy it.'
'And so you heard of Armorel, and you thought that here was a
chance. You say to me, in plain words: "If you get this money, there
shall be an end of the false position." Is that so?'
'That is exactly what I do say and swear, Zoe. It is a very simple
thing. You have only to persuade the girl to lend you this money, or
to advance it, or to invest it by your agency—or something—a very
simple and easy thing. You love me well enough to do me such a
simple service.'
'I love you well enough, I suppose,' she replied sadly, 'to do
everything you tell me to do. A simple service! Only to deceive and
plunder this girl, who believes us all to be honourable and truthful!'
'Oh, we shall find a way—some way—to pay her back. Don't be
afraid. And don't go off into platitudes, Zoe—you are much too
pretty—and when it is done, and you are openly, before the world
——'
'I know you well enough to know how much happiness to expect. I
am a fool. All women are fools. Philippa is a fool. And I've set my
foolish heart on—you. If I fail—if I fail'—her words sank to the
softest and gentlest murmur—'you are going to cast about for an
heiress, and you will get engaged to her, and then—then—we shall
see, dear Alec, what will happen then.' She sat up, her cheek fiery,
and her eyes flashing, though her voice was so soft. 'Hush!' she
whispered. 'I hear Armorel's step!'
They heard her voice as well outside, loud and clear.
'Come to my own room,' she said. 'What you want is there. This
way.'
'It is the girl with her—the girl who writes. They have gone into her
own room—her boudoir—her study—where she works half the day.
The girl lives with her brother, close by.'
They listened, silent, with hushed breath, like conspirators.
'Poor Armorel!' said Zoe. 'If she only knew what we are plotting! She
thinks me the most truthful of women! And all I am here for is to
cheat her out of her money! Don't you think I had better make a
clean breast and ask her to give me the money and let me go?'
'Begin to-day,' said Alec. 'Begin to talk about me. Interest her in me.
Let her know how great and good——'
'Hush!'
Then they heard her voice again in the hall.
'No—no—you must come this evening. Bring Archie with you. I will
play, and he shall listen. You shall both listen. And then great
thoughts will come to you.'
'Always great thoughts—great thoughts—great pictures,' Zoe
murmured. 'And we are so infinitely little. Brother worm, shall we
crawl into some hole and hide ourselves?'
Then the door opened, and Armorel herself appeared, fresh and rosy
in spite of the cold wind.
'My dear child,' said Zoe softly, looking up from her cushions, 'come
in and sit down. You must be perishing with the east wind. Do sit
down and be comfortable. You met Mr. Feilding last night, I believe.'
The visitor remained for a quarter of an hour. Armorel had been to
see a certain picture in the National Gallery. He talked of pictures
just as, the night before, he had talked of music: that is to say, as
one who knows all the facts about the painters and their works and
their schools: their merits and their defects. He knew and could talk
fluently the language of the Art Critic, just as he knew and could talk
the language of the Musical Critic. Armorel listened. Now and then
she made a remark. But her manner lacked the reverence with
which most maidens listened to this thrice-gifted darling of the
Muses. She actually seemed not to care very much what he said.
Zoe, for her part, lay back in her cushions in silence.
'How do you like him?' she asked, when their visitor left them.
'I don't know; I haven't thought about him. He talks too much, I
think. And he talks as if he was teaching.'
'No one has a better right to talk with authority.'
'But we are free to listen or not as we please. Why has he the right
to teach everybody?'
'My dear child, Alec Feilding is the cleverest man in all London.'
'He must be very clever then. What does he do?'
'He does everything—poetry, painting, fiction—everything!'
'Oh, you will show me his poetry, perhaps, some time? And his
pictures I suppose we shall see in May somewhere. He doesn't look
as if he was at all great. But one may be wrong.'
'My dear Armorel, you are a fortunate girl, though you do not
understand your good fortune. Alec—I am privileged to call him Alec
—has conceived a great interest in you. Oh, not of the common love
kind, that you despise so much—nothing to do with your beaux yeux
—but on account of your genius. He was greatly taken with your
playing: if you will show him your pictures he will give you
instruction that may be useful to you. He wants to know you, my
dear.'
'Well,' said Armorel, not in the least overwhelmed, 'he can if he
pleases, I suppose, since he is a friend of yours.'
'That is not all: he wants your friendship as a sister in art. Such a
man—such an offer, Armorel, must not be taken lightly.'
'I am not drawn towards him,' said the girl. 'In fact, I think I rather
dislike his voice, which is domineering; and his manner, which seems
to me self-conscious and rather pompous; and his eyes, which are
too close together. Zoe, if he were not the cleverest man in London,
I should say that he was the most crafty.'
Zoe laughed. 'What man discovers by experiment and experience,'
she murmured, incoherently, 'woman discovers at a glance. And yet
they say——'
 CHAPTER VI
THE OTHER STUDIO

The Failure was at work in his own studio. Not the large and lofty
chamber fitted and furnished as if for Michael Angelo himself, which
served for the Fraud. Not at all. The Failure did his work in a simple
second-floor back, a chamber in a commonplace lodging-house of
Keppel Street, Bloomsbury. Nowhere in the realms of Art was there a
more dismal studio. The walls were bare, save for one picture which
was turned round and showed its artistic back. The floor had no
carpet: there was no other furniture than a table, strewn and littered
with sketches, paints, palettes, brushes: there were canvases
leaning against the wall: there was a portfolio also leaning against
the wall: there was an easel and the man standing before it: and
there was a single chair.
For three years Roland Lee had withdrawn from his former haunts
and companions. No one knew now where he lived: he had not
exhibited: he had resigned his membership at the club: he had gone
out of sight. Many London men every year go out of sight. It is quite
easy. You have only to leave off going to the well-known places of
resort: very soon—so soon that it is humiliating only to think of it—
men cease asking where you are: then they cease speaking of you:
you are clean gone out of their memory—you and your works—it is
as if the sea had closed over you. There is not left a trace or a sign
of your existence. Perhaps, now and then, something may revive
your name: some little adventure may be remembered: some frolic
of youth—for the rest—nothing: Silence: Oblivion. It does, indeed,
humiliate those who look on. When such an accident revived the
memory of Roland Lee, one would ask another what had become of
him. And no one knew. But, of course, he had gone down—down—
down. When a man disappears it means that he sinks. He had gone
out of sight: therefore he had gone under. Yet, when you climb, you
can never get so high as to be invisible. Even the President, R.A., is
not invisible. Again, the higher that a balloon soars, the smaller does
it grow; but the higher a man climbs up the Hill of Fame the bigger
does he show. It is quite certain that when a man has disappeared
he has sunk. The only question—and this can never be answered—
is, what becomes of the men who sink? One man I heard of—also,
like Roland, an artist—who has been traced to a certain tavern,
where he fuddles himself every evening, and where you may treat
with him for the purchase of his pictures at ten shillings—ay, or even
five shillings—apiece. And two scholars—scholars gone under—I
heard of the other day. They now reside in the same lodging-house.
It is close to the Gray's Inn Road. One lives in the garret, and the
other occupies the cellar. In the evening they get drunk together and
dispute on points of the finer scholarship. But this only accounts for
three. And where are all the rest?
Of Roland Lee nobody knew anything. There was no story or scandal
attached to him: he was no drinker: he was no gambler: he was no
profligate. But he had vanished.
Yet he had not gone far—only to Keppel Street, which is really a
central place. Here he occupied a second floor, and lived alone.
Nobody ever called upon him: he had no friends. Sometimes he sat
all day long in his studio doing nothing: sometimes he went forth,
and wandered about the streets: in the evening he dined at
restaurants where he was certain to meet none of his old friends. He
lived quite alone. As to that rumour concerning opium, it was an
invention of his employer and proprietor. He did not take opium. Day
after day, however, he grew more moody. What developments might
have followed in this lonely life I know not. Opium, perhaps: whisky,
perhaps: melancholia, perhaps. And from melancholia—Good Lord
deliver us!
One thing saved him. The work which filled his soul with rage also
kept his soul from madness. When the spirit of his Art seized him
and held him he forgot everything. He worked as if he was a free
man: he forgot everything, until the time came when he had to lay
down his palette and to come back to the reality of his life. Some
men would have accepted the position: there were, as we have
seen, compensations of a solid and comfortable kind: had he chosen
to work his hardest, these golden compensations might have run
into four figures. Some men might have sat and laughed among
their friends, forgetting the ignominy of their slavery. Not so Roland.
His chains jangled as he walked; they cut his wrists and galled his
ankles: they filled him with so much shame that he was fain to go
away and hide himself. And in this manner he enjoyed the great
success which his employer had achieved for his pictures. To arrive
at the success for which you have always longed and prayed—and to
enjoy it in such a fashion. Oh! mockery of fate!
This morning he was at work contentedly—with ardour. He was
beginning a picture from one of his sketches: it was to be another
study of rocks and sea: as yet there was little to show: it was
growing in his brain, and he was so fully wrapped in his invention
that he did not hear the door open, and was not conscious that for
the first time within three years he had a visitor.
She opened the door and stood for a moment looking about her. The
bare and dingy walls, the scanty furniture, the meanness of the
place, made her very soul sink within her. For they cried aloud the
story of the painter.
For five long years she had thought of him. He was successful: he
was rising to the top of the tree: he was conquering the world—so
brave, so strong, so clever! There was no height to which he could
not rise. She should find him splendid, triumphant, and yet modest—
her old friend the same, but glorified. And she found him thus, in
this dingy den—so low, so shabby! Consider, if she had risen while
he was sinking, how great was now the gulf between them! Then
she stepped into the room and stood beside the artist at his easel.
'Roland Lee,' she whispered.
He started, looked up, and recognised her. 'Armorel!' he cried.
Then, strange to say, instead of hastening to meet and greet her,
and to hold out hands of welcome, he stood gazing at her stupidly,
his face changing colour from crimson to white. His hair was
unkempt, she saw; his cheeks worn; his eyes haggard, with deep
lines round them; and his dress was shabby and uncared for.
'You have not forgotten me, then?' she said.
'Forgotten you? No. How could I forget you?'
'Then are you pleased to see me? Shake hands with me, Roland
Lee.'
He complied, but with restraint. 'Have you dropped from the clouds?'
he asked. 'How did you find me here?'
'I met your old friend Dick Stephenson. He told me that you lived
here. You are no longer friends: but he has seen you going in and
coming out. That is how I found you. Are you well, Roland?'
'Yes, I am well.'
'Does all go well with you, my old friend?'
'Why not? You see—I have got a magnificent studio: there is every
outward sign of wealth and prosperity: and if you look into any art-
criticisms you will find the papers ringing with my name.'
'You are changed.' Armorel passed over the bitterness of this
speech. 'You are a little older, perhaps.' She did not tell him how
haggard and worn he looked, how unkempt and unhappy.
'Let me see some of your work,' she said. The picture on the easel
was only in its very first stage. She looked about the room. Nothing
on the walls but one picture with its face turned round. 'May I look
at this?' She turned it round. It was the picture of herself, 'The
Princess of Lyonesse,' the sketch of which he had finished on the last
day of his holiday. 'Oh!' she cried, 'I remember this. And you have
kept it, Roland—you have kept it. I am glad.'
'Yes, I have kept the only picture which I can call my own.'
'Was I like that in those days?'
'You are like that now. Only, the little Princess has become a tall
Queen.'
'Yes, yes; I remember. You said, then, that if I should ever look like
this, you would be proved to be a painter indeed. Roland, you are a
painter indeed.'
'No, no,' he said; 'I am nothing—nothing at all.'
'We were talking—when you made this sketch—of how one can grow
to his highest and noblest.'
'I have grown to my lowest,' he replied. 'But you—you——'
'What has happened, my friend? You told me so much once about
yourself—you taught me so much—you put so many new things into
my head—you must tell me more! What has happened?'
'Nothing.'
'Why are you here in this poor room? I have been to studios in Rome
and Florence, and Paris and Vienna: they are lovely rooms, fit for a
man whose mind is always full of lovely images and sweet thoughts.
But this—this room is not a studio. It is an ugly little prison. How can
light and colour visit such a place?'
'It explains itself. It proclaims aloud—Failure—Failure—Failure!'
'This picture is not Failure.'
'My name is unknown. I work on like a mole under ground. I am a
Failure. You have seen Dick Stephenson. What did he say of me?'
'He said that you must have left off working. But you have not.'
'What does it matter how much or how long a Failure goes on
working?'
'Have you lost heart, Roland?'
'Heart, and hope, and faith. Everything is lost, Armorel!'
'You have lost your courage because you have failed. But many men
have failed at first—great men. Robert Browning failed for years. You
were brave once, Roland. You were able to say that if you knew you
were doing good work you cared nothing for the critics.'
'You see, Dick was right. I no longer do any work. I never send
anything to the exhibitions.'
'But why—why—why?'
'Ask me no more questions, Armorel. Go away and leave me. How
beautiful and glorious you have grown, child! But I knew you would.
And I have gone down so low, and—and—well, you see! Yes. I
remember how we talked of growing to our full height. We did not
think, you see, of the depths to which we might also drop. There are
awful depths, which you could never guess.'
He sank into the chair, and his head dropped.
Armorel stood over him, the tears gathering into her eyes.
'Roland,' she laid her hand upon his shoulder—there is no action
more sisterly—'since I have found you I shall not let you go again. It
is five years since you went away. You will tell me about yourself,
when you please. I have a great deal to tell you. Don't you
remember how sympathetic you used to be in the old days? I want a
great deal more sympathy now, because I am five years older, and I
am trying so much. I want you to hear me play—you were the first
who ever praised my playing, you know. And you must see my
drawings. I have worked every day, as I promised you I would. I
have remembered all your instructions. Come and see your pupil's
work, my master.'
He made no reply.
'You live too much alone,' she went on. 'Dick Stephenson told me
that you have given up your club, and that you go nowhere, and
that no one knows how you live. You have dropped quite away from
your old friends. Why did you do that? You live in this dismal room
by yourself—alone with your thoughts: no wonder you lose courage
and faith.' She opened the portfolio and drew out a number of the
sketches. 'Why,' she said, 'here are some of those you made with
me. Here is Castle Bryher—you in the boat, and I on the ledge
among the sea-weed under the great rock—and the shags in a row
on the top: and here is Porth Cressa—and here Peninnis—and here
Round Island. Oh! we have so many things to talk about. Will you
come to see me?'
'You had better leave me alone, Armorel,' he said. 'Even you can do
no good to me now.'
'When will you come? See—I will write down my address. I have a
flat, and it is ever so much better furnished than this, Sir. Will you
come to-night? I shall be at home. There will be no one but Effie
Wilmot. Oh! I am not going to talk about you, but about myself. I
want your praise, Roland, and your sympathy. Both were so ready—
once. Will you come to-night?'
'You will drive me mad, I think, Armorel!'
'Will you come?'
He shook his head.
'I have got to tell you how I became rich, if you will listen. You must
come and hear my news. Why, there is no one but you in all London
who knew me when I lived on Samson alone with those old people.
You will come to-night, Roland?' Again she laid her hand upon his
shoulder. 'I will ask no questions about you—none at all. You will tell
me what you please about yourself. But you must let me talk to you
about myself, as frankly as in the old days. If you have got any
kindly memory left of me at all, Roland, you will come.'
He rose and lifted his shameful eyes to hers, so full of pity and of
tears.
'Yes,' he said; 'I will do whatever you tell me.'
 CHAPTER VII
A CANDID OPINION

Youth in the London lodging-house! Youth quite poor—youth

ambitious—youth with a possible future—youth meditating great
things! Walk along the streets of Lodging-land—there are miles of
such streets—and consider with trembling that the dingy houses
contain thousands of young people—boys and girls—who have come
to the city of golden pavements to make—not a fortune, unless that
happens as well—but their name. In the long struggle before the
lowest rung of the ladder is reached they endure hardness, but they
complain not. Everything is going to be made up to them in the
splendid time to come.
Something more than a year ago two such young people came up
from the country, and found shelter in a London lodging-house,
where they could work and study until success should arrive. They
were boy and girl, brother and sister—twins. They had very little
money, and could afford no more than one sitting-room. Therefore,
one worked in the sitting-room and the other in a bedroom, because
their occupations demanded solitude. The one in the sitting-room
was the girl. She was engaged in the pursuit of poetry: she made
verses continually, every day. Unless she was reading verse, she was
either making, or polishing, or devising verses. Of all pursuits in the
world this is at once the most absorbing and the most delightful. It
is also, with the greater part of these who follow it, the most
useless. Thomas the Rhymer sits down and takes his pen: it is nine
of the clock. He considers: he writes: he scratches out: he writes
again: he corrects again: after ten minutes or so, he looks up. It is
three in the afternoon: the luncheon hour is past: the morning is
gone: all he has to show for the six golden hours, when an account
of them is demanded, will be a single stanza of a ballade. And
perhaps not a single editor will look at it. To Effie Wilmot, the girl-
twin, thus engaged morning after morning, the hours become
moments and the days minutes. The result and outcome of her
labours you have already learned. But she was young, and she lived
in hope. A few more weeks, and the great man, her patron, would
have satisfied that whim of wishing to be thought a poet of society.
Strange that one who painted pictures of such wonderful beauty,
who wrote such charming stories in such endless variety—stories
quaint and bizarre, stories pathetic, stories humorous—should so
condescend! What could a few simple verses—such as hers—do to
increase his fame? However, that was nearly over. She felt quite
happy and light-hearted: as happy as if, like other poets, she was
writing things that would appear with her own name: she pursued
the light and airy fancies of her brain, capturing one or two, chaining
them in the prison of her rhymes, which, of course, were set to the
old-new tunes affected by the little poets of the day. If they have got
no message to deliver, they can at least come on the stage and
repeat over again the old things clad in dress revived. We can keep
on dressing up in the poet's habit until the poet himself shall come
along.
Effie worked on, sitting at the window. Poets can work anywhere,
though, of course, they ought to sit habitually on the sides of hills,
with hanging woods and mountain-streams and waterfalls. But they
can work just as well in a mean London lodging, such as this where
Effie sat, looking out, if she looked through the curtain, upon a most
commonplace street. We can all—common spirits as well as poets—
rise above our streets and houses and our dingy setting—otherwise
there would be no work done at all. Nay, if we were all cockered up,
and daintily surrounded with things æsthetic and artistic and
beautiful, I believe we should be so happy that nobody would ever
do anything. The poet would murmur his thoughts in indolent rhyme
by the fireside: the musician would drop his fingers among the
notes, echoing faintly and imperfectly the music in his soul—all for
his own enjoyment: the story-teller would tell his stories to his wife:
the dramatist would make plots without words for his children to act:
the painter would half sketch his visions and leave them unfinished.
Art would die.
No such temptations were offered to Effie. The æsthetic movement
had not touched that ground-floor front. The shaky round table
stood under the flaring gas which every night made her head ache;
the chiffonier contained in its recesses the tea and sugar and bread
and butter, and, when the money ran to such luxuries, her jam or
her honey or her oranges. There was one easy-chair and one arm-
chair; and before the window a small square table, which had, at
least, the merit of being firm; and at this she wrote. Everybody
knows this kind of room perfectly.
The poetic workshop is always kept locked. No poet ever tells of the
terrific struggles he has to encounter before he finally subdues his
thought and compels it to walk or run in double harness of rhythm
and rhyme. No poet ever confesses how he sometimes has to let
that thought go because he cannot subdue it—nay, the same
discomfiture has been reported of those who, like M. Jourdain, speak
in prose. And no poet ever shows, as a painter will readily show us,
the first sketch, the first rough draft of a poem, the unfinished lines,
the first feeble attempts at the rhythmic expression of a great
thought. Let us respect the mystery of the craft—have we not all
dabbled in verse and essayed to play upon the scrannel-pipe?
It was towards noon, however, that Effie was disturbed by the arrival
of a visitor. The event was so unusual—so unprecedented even—that
no instructions had ever been given to the lodging-house servant in
the art of introducing callers. She therefore opened the door, and
put in her head—'A gentleman, Miss'—and went downstairs, leaving
the gentleman to walk in if he pleased.
'You, Mr. Feilding?' Effie cried, springing to her feet. 'Oh! This is,
indeed——'
The great man took her hand. 'My dear child,' he said, 'I have been
thinking over our conversation of the other day. I am, of course, only
anxious to be of service to you and to your brother, and so I thought
I would call.' He was quite magnificent in his fur-lined coat, and he
was very tall and big, so that he seemed to fill up the whole room.
But he had an unusual air of hesitation. 'I thought,' he repeated,
'that I would call. Yes——'
The girl sat with her hands in her lap, waiting.
'You remember what I told you about—the—the verses which you
sometimes bring me——'
'Oh! Yes. I remember. It is so kind of you, Mr. Feilding, so very kind
and noble——' For the moment the dazzling prospect of seeing her
verses acknowledged as her own in place of seeing them adopted by
the Editor, made her believe that none but a truly noble person could
do such a thing.
'I mean to begin even sooner than I had intended. It is true that
when I took your verses I made them my own by those little touches
and corrections which, as you know very well, distinguish true poetry
from its imitation'—It was not until he was gone that Effie
remembered that not a single alteration had ever been made. So
great is the power of the human voice that for the moment she
listened and acquiesced, subdued and ashamed of herself—'At last,
my young friend, the time for alteration and improvement is past.
You can now stand alone—your verses signed—if, of course, we
remain, as I hope, on the same friendly relations.'
'Oh!' she murmured.
'Enough. We understand each other. Your brother, you told me, is at
work on a play—a romantic drama.'
'Yes. He has finished it. He has been at work upon it for two years,
thinking of nothing else all day.'
Mr. Feilding nodded approval.
'That is the way,' he said heartily, 'to produce good work. Perfect—
absolute—devotion—regardless of any earthly consideration. Art—Art
—before all else. And now it is done?'
'Yes; he is copying it out.'
'Effie'—he suddenly changed the subject—'you have never told me
of your resources. Tell me! I do not ask out of idle curiosity. That
you are not rich I know——'
'No, we are not rich. We have a little—a thousand pounds apiece—
and we have resolved to live on that, and on what we can get
besides, until we have made our way. We have no rich relations to
help us. My father is a country clergyman with a small living. We
came to town so that Archie could get treatment for his hip. He is
better now, and we shall stay altogether if we can only hold on.'
'A thousand pounds each. That is seventy pounds a year, I suppose?'
'Yes. But during the last twelve months you have given me a
hundred pounds for my verses—three pounds for every poem, and
there were thirty-three altogether in the volume—"Voices and
Echoes," you know.'
The poet who had published these verses did not change colour or
show any sign of emotion in the presence of the poet who had
written them. He nodded his head. 'Yes,' he said, 'on a hundred and
seventy pounds a year you can live—on seventy you would starve.
Where is your brother?'
'He works in his bedroom. It is the room behind, on the same floor.
My room is upstairs.'
'He requires, I suppose, good food, wine, and certain luxuries?'
'When we can afford them. Since you took my verses we have been
able to buy things.'
'Your money is well expended. I should like to see your brother,
Effie.'
'I will take you to him,' she said. But she hesitated and blushed. 'Oh!
Mr. Feilding, Archie knows nothing about the—the volumes, you
know! He sees only the verses in the paper. And he only knows that
you have been so kind as to take them. Don't tell him anything else.'
'Your secret, Effie,' he replied generously, 'is safe with me. He shall
not know it from my lips.'
She thanked him. Again, it was not until he was gone that Effie
remembered that he could not possibly reveal that fact to her
brother.
She led him into the room, at the back of which was her brother's
study and bedroom as well.
Her brother might have been herself, save for a slight manly growth
upon the upper lip, and for the pale cheek of ill health. The same
large forehead overhanging the face, eyes sunken but as bright as
his sister's, the same sensitive lips were his. A finer face than his
sister's, and stronger, but not so sweet. Beside his chair a pair of
crutches proclaimed that he was a cripple. Before him was a table,
at which he was writing. There were on the table, besides his writing
materials, a number of little dolls, some of which were arranged in
groups, while others were lying about unused. He was copying his
finished play: as he copied it he played the scenes with the dolls and
spoke the dialogue. The dolls were his characters: there was not a
single scene or change of the grouping which this conscientious
young dramatist had not rehearsed over and over again, until every
line of the dialogue had its own stage picture, clear and distinct in
his mind.
'You are Mr. Feilding?' he asked, rising with some difficulty. 'I have
heard so much of you from Effie. It is a great honour to have a call
from you.'
'I take a deep interest,' the great man replied, 'in anything that
concerns Miss Effie Wilmot. I have been able—I believe you know—
to give her some assistance and advice in her work. Oh!'—he waved
his hand to deprecate any expressions of gratitude—'I have done
very little—very little indeed. Now, about yourself. I learn from your
sister that you have ambitions—you would become a dramatist?'
'I have no other ambition. It is my only dream.'
'A very good dream indeed. And you have made, I am told, a start—
a maiden effort—a preliminary flight to try your wings. You have
written your first attempt at a play?'
'Yes. It is here. It is finished.'
'Tell me, briefly, the plot.'
Some young dramatists mar their plot in getting it out. This young
man had taken the trouble to write out first a rough outline of his
piece and next a complete scenario with every situation detailed.
These he read to his visitor one after the other.
'Yes,' said Mr. Feilding, when he had finished; 'there is something in
the idea of the play. Perhaps not a completely novel motif. A good
deal might be said as to the arrangement of the scenes. And one or
two of the characters might—but these are details. Remains to find
out how the dialogue goes. Will you read me a scene or two?'
The dramatist read. As he read he might have observed in the eyes
of his listener a growing eagerness, as of one who vehemently
yearns to get possession of something—his neighbour's vineyard, for
example, or his solitary ewe lamb. But the reader did not observe
this. He was wholly wrapped in his piece: he threw his soul into the
reading: he was anxious only that his words and his situations
should produce the best effect upon his hearer.
'Yes, yes; your dialogue, unhappily, shows the want of skill common
to the beginner,' said Mr. Feilding, when he had finished. 'It will have
to be completely rewritten. As it stands now, the play would be
simply killed by it, in spite of the situations, which, with some
alterations, are really pretty good—pretty good for a first effort.'
'You don't think, then—that——' the dramatist's voice broke down.
Consider: for two long years he had done nothing but cast, recast,
write, rewrite this play. He had dreamed all this time of success with
this play. And now—now—the very first critic—and that the most
accomplished man of the day—no less than Mr. Alec Feilding—told
him that the play would not be received unless the dialogue was
entirely rewritten. He could not rewrite the dialogue. It was a part of
himself. As well ask him to remake his own face or to reconstruct his
legs. His face fell: his cheeks grew pale: his eyes filled with unmanly
tears.
'I am truly sorry, believe me,' said the critic, 'to throw cold water on
your hopes. I have been myself an aspirant. Yet'—he hesitated in his
kindliness—'why encourage illusive expectations? The play as it is—I
say, as it is only—must be pronounced totally unfit for the stage. No
manager would think of it for a moment.'
'Then I may as well throw it on the fire? And all my work wasted!'
'Nay—not wasted. Good work—true work—is never wasted. You
ought to have learned much—very much—from this two years'
labour. And, as for putting it into the fire'—he laughed genially—'I
believe I can show you a better way than that. Look here, Archie—I
call you by your Christian name because I have so often talked
about you: we are old friends—I should be really sorry to think that
you had actually lost all your time. Give me this play: I will take it—
skeleton, scenario, dialogue—all, just as it is—the mere rough,
crude, shapeless thing that it is. I will buy it of you—useless as it is.
I will give you fifty pounds down for it, and it shall become my
property—my own, absolutely. I shall then, perhaps, recast and
rewrite the play from beginning to end. When I have made a play
out of it worth putting on the stage—when, in short, I have made it
my own play—I may possibly bring it out—possibly. Most likely,
however, not. There's a chance for you, Archie, such as you will
never get again! Fifty pounds down—think of that! Fifty pounds!'
The dramatist laid his hand, for reply, upon his papers.
'If it should ever be brought out,' this good Samaritan went on, 'you
will come and see it acted. What a splendid lesson it will be for you
in the art of writing drama!'
The dramatist's fingers tightened on his manuscript.
'Of course you must consider your sister,' the considerate critic
continued. 'She has been able to make a few pounds of late, having
been so fortunate as to attract the interest of... one who is not
wholly without influence. Should that interest fail or be withdrawn
you might have—both of you—to suffer much privation. The luxuries
which you now enjoy would be impossible—and——'
'Oh, you kill me!' cried the unfortunate youth.
'Shall I leave you for the present? My offer is always open—on the
condition of secrecy—one is bound to keep business transactions
secret. I will leave you now. There is no hurry. Think it over carefully
and send me an answer.'
He went out and shut the door. The young dramatist, I am ashamed
to say, fell to tears and weeping over the destruction of his hopes.
'Effie,' said Mr. Feilding, 'I have talked with your brother. He has read
some of the play to me——'
'And you think?' she asked him eagerly.
He shook his head mournfully. 'The boy has much to learn—very
much. Meantime, the play itself is worthless—quite worthless.'
'Oh! Poor boy! And he has built so much upon it.'
'Yes—they all do at the outset. Mind, Effie, he is a clever boy: he will
do. Meantime, he must study.'
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