1 Entering the Narrative It wasn't much at first, a brief diversion rising from the ranked columns of the daily paper. The story concerned the 40th anniversary of a famous ballgame played in New York in 1951. I read the piece, sipping my morning coffee, and even remembered where I'd been, age 14, when the game's sky-high climax occurred. But the minute I finished reading, I forgot it all. There were other stories, other preoccupations, another day to confront beyond the breakfast reverie. The newspaper with its crowded pages and unfolding global reach permits us to be ruthless in our forgetting. But a few weeks later it all came back. I found myself thinking about the event in a different way, broadly, in history, as an example of some unrepeatable social phenomenon, and I couldn't shake the impact of the game's great finish -- the burst of jubilation in the old Polo Grounds and throughout much of the city when Bobby Thomson of the Giants hit the game-winning home run. Don DeLillo is the author of "Libra," "White Noise" and other novels. His latest, "Underworld," is about to be published by Scribners.

I went to the basement of a local library to find a news account of the game. I did not have a clear motive. I had a curiosity, an intuition. I located the appropriate reel of filmed text, slid it onto the spindle and nudged the speed switch. This was history in the microwave, the news pages speeding across the screen in a black-and-white blur. When I slowed the movement and found the date I wanted, I looked at the screen for some time, feeling a detached fascination, a clash of impulses, really -- I think I was trying to be objective in the face of something revealed, an unexpected connection, a symmetry that seemed to be waiting for someone to discover it. Front page of The New York Times. Oct. 4, 1951. A pair of mated headlines, top of the page. Same typeface, same size type. Each headline three columns wide, three lines deep. Giants capture pennant -- this was the dramatic substance of the first headline. Soviets explode atomic bomb -- this was the ominous threat of the second. What did I see in this juxtaposition? Two kinds of conflict, certainly, but something else, maybe many things -- I could not have said at the time. Mostly, though, the power of history. This is what kept me fixed to the swivel chair, eyes on the screen but not really looking anymore, staring past the page or into it. A fiction writer feels the nearly palpable lure of large events and it can make him want to enter the narrative. The passionate mastering of documentary material is a bracing cure for the self-spiralings and unremitting inwardness that a long novel can inflict on a writer. And the prospect of recovering a nearly lost language, the idiom and scrappy slang of the postwar period, the writer's own lifetime but misted, much of it, in deep distance -- what manias of anticipated pleasure this can summon. A language to reinvigorate the senses. A subject of strong and absorbing proportions. These were feelings that would come, eventually. At the moment, in the library basement, just a small numb hush. A sense of history. The home run that won the game -- soon to be known, vaingloriously, as "The Shot Heard 'Round the World" -- had found its vast and awful counterpoint. A Russian mushroom cloud. 2 Fame and Waste It was a painter, Willem de Kooning, who said: "It's a certain burden, this Americanness. If you come from a small nation, you don't have that. ... I feel sometimes an American artist must feel like a baseball player or something -- a member of a team writing American history." Novelists don't feel like team members. But the sweeping range of American landscape and experience can be a goad, a challenge, an affliction and an inspiration, pretty much in one package. The novel can be a foolhardy form, bristling with risk. It is dynamic, ambitious and power-haunted. It draws the best young talent. It places an abundance of means at the writer's disposal, all conducive to foul-up. It has shaped, for better or worse, the novelist's self-lionizing nature and his potential for overreach and excess. And it has lately grown desperate for attention. Maybe it is the evanescent spectacle of contemporary life that makes the novel so nervous. Things flash and die. A face appears, a movie actor's, say, and it seems to be everywhere, suddenly; or it is an entire movie that's everywhere, with enormous feature stories about special effects and global marketing and tie-in merchandise; or it is just an individual's name that haunts every informational nook, and you can't figure out who the person is inside the name or what the context is that gave such abrupt prominence to the name, but it never actually matters and this is the point. The fame-making apparatus confers celebrity on an individual in a conflagration so intense that he or she can't possibly survive. The quick and pitiless end of such a person's career is inherent in the first gathering glimmers of fame. This is how time is collapsed. And this is how the larger cultural drama of white-hot consumption and instant waste is performed in individualized terms, with actors playing themselves. The fast-forward nature of the decade is an apt subject for a novelist. But the novel itself, the old, slow water-torture business of invention and doubt and self-correction, may seem to be wearing an expiration date that takes effect tomorrow. The microwave, the VCR remote, the telephone redial button and other time-collapsing devices may make us feel that our ordinary household technology reflects something that flows through the deep mind of the culture, an impatient craving for time itself to move faster. In a period of empty millennial frenzy, we may begin to see a precious integrity in the documents of an earlier decade or century. As a writer who has customarily searched out his subjects in the more or less immediate present, I found a curious antiquity in news film and audiotapes recorded less than 50 years ago, at the hinge of the atomic age. Newsreel footage of Bobby Thomson's home run resembles something of World War I vintage. But the shakier and fuzzier the picture, the more it lays a claim to permanence. And the voice of the announcer, Russ Hodges, who did the rapturous radio account of the game's final moments, is beautifully isolated in time -- not subject to the debasing process of frantic repetition that exhausts a contemporary event before it has rounded into coherence. Thomson and Hodges are unconsumed. And the work a novelist may do in examining the recent or distant past may strike him as similarly blessed, at least in theory, at the outset, before the book becomes recalcitrant in his hands or, later, before the hypermarket squeezes it off the shelves.

Illustration by Josh Gosfield 3 Counterhistory Sometime after I emerged from the library basement, I learned that a certain picturesque foursome had been present at the ballgame in question. Jackie Gleason, Frank Sinatra, Toots Shor and J. Edgar Hoover. Three roistering night owls and one strait-laced man of the law. Sportsmen and cronies who wouldn't want to deny themselves the aura of such a high-profile event. Hoover's name was a surprise, the kind of lucky find that makes a writer believe he is astrologically blessed. I used the ballgame as a prologue to what would eventually become a long novel, "Underworld," and it was Hoover's presence on the scene that enabled me to bring news of the Soviet atomic test into the Polo Grounds and to set an early tone for the shifting conflicts I hoped to examine. And the three other men, in their Irish, Italian and Jewish combustibility and their working-class backgrounds, became a collective herald of themes and characters that would flow through the novel proper. When history offers up shiny gifts, the novelist begins to see the rightness of his enterprise. But how right is it actually? Doesn't a fiction writer necessarily distort the lives of real people? Possibly not as much as the memoirist does, intentionally, or the biographer, unintentionally. That's the easy answer. The deeper reply begins with a man who distorted the lives of real people as a matter of bureaucratic routine. J. Edgar Hoover makes several appearances in "Underworld." He is not one of the central characters. These people are all inventions, whole or partial, issuing from the author's memory and imagination, from the small gathered fragments of overheard voices and random faces glimpsed in the street. Hoover is a disinvention, real, conjectured, gambled on, guessed at. Hoover in his taut and raging selfhood. Hoover in his impregnability, an incitement to the novelist's perennial effort to detect the hidden nature of things. Fiction will always examine the small anonymous corners of human experience. But there is also the magnetic force of public events and the people behind them. There is something in the novel itself, its size and psychological reach, its openness to strong social themes, that suggests a matching of odd-couple appetites -- the solitary writer and the public figure at the teeming center of events. The writer wants to see inside the human works, down to dreams and routine rambling thoughts, in order to locate the neural strands that link him to men and women who shape history. Genius, ruthlessness, military mastery, eloquent self-sacrifice -- the coin of actual seething lives. Against the force of history, so powerful, visible and real, the novelist poses the idiosyncratic self. Here it is, sly, mazed, mercurial, scared half-crazy. It is also free and undivided, the only thing that can match the enormous dimensions of social reality. It is almost inevitable that the fiction writer, dealing with this reality, will violate any number of codes and contracts. He will engineer a swerve from the usual arrangements that bind a figure in history to what has been reported, rumored, confirmed or solemnly chanted. It is fiction's role to imagine deeply, to follow obscure urges into unreliable regions of experience -- child-memoried, existential and outside time. The novel is the dream release, the suspension of reality that history needs to escape its own brutal confinements. Fiction does not obey reality even in the most spare and semidocumentary work. Realistic dialogue is what we have agreed to call certain arrays of spoken exchange that in fact have little or no connection with the way people speak. There is a deep density of convention that allows us to accept highly stylized work as true to life. Fiction is true to a thousand things but rarely to clinical lived experience. Ultimately it obeys the mysterious mandates of the self (the writer's) and of all the people and things that have surrounded him all his life and all the styles he has tried out and all the fiction (of other writers) he has read and not read. At its root level, fiction is a kind of religious fanaticism, with elements of obsession, superstition and awe. Such qualities will sooner or later state their adversarial relationship with history. It is also true that power and renown tend themselves to diminish the distance between fact and fiction. A person sufficiently original and lustrous inspires his own transcendence, his space-launch out of strictly historical levels and his reimagining in fiction, myth, fairy tale and cartoon. Not so lustrous was Richard Nixon, but he functioned nonetheless in the glow of prodigious power and seemed in his unique and ghost-haunted way to carry into the public discourse such personal themes as loneliness, vindictiveness and acute suspicion. And in "The Public Burning," by Robert Coover, Nixon exceeds the limits of plausible experience -- Nixon, the Marx Brothers, Betty Crocker and the atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, all minced together and rematerialized in the textured paranoia that replaces history and marks an epoch's direst and deadest end. Ultimately the writer will reconfigure things the way his own history demands. He has his themes and biases and limitations. He has the small crushed pearl of his anger. He has his teaching job, his middling reputation and the one radical idea he has been waiting for all his life. The other thing he has is a flat surface that he will decorate, fitfully, with words. Language can be a form of counterhistory. The writer wants to construct a language that will be the book's life-giving force. He wants to submit to it. Let language shape the world. Let it break the faith of conventional re-creation. Language lives in everything it touches and can be an agent of redemption, the thing that delivers us, paradoxically, from history's flat, thin, tight and relentless designs, its arrangement of stark pages, and that allows us to find an unconstraining otherness, a free veer from time and place and fate. The language of a novel -- E.L. Doctorow's "Ragtime," say -- can be so original and buoyant that it necessarily transforms the past. The tonal prose creates its own landscape, psychology and patterns of behavior. It is stronger than the weight-bearing reality of actual people and events. It has a necessary existence, while the source material is exposed as merely contingent. In "Ragtime," history and mock history tool along together. They form a kind of syncopated reality in which diverse human voices ultimately come into conflict with a single uninflected voice, the monotone of the state, the corporate entity, the product, the assembly line. In this novel, language is a democratic experiment. The novelist does not want to tell you things you already know about the great, the brave, the powerless and the cruel. Fiction slips into the skin of historical figures. It gives them sweaty palms and head colds and urine-stained underwear and lines to speak in private and the terror of restless nights. This is how consciousness is extended and human truth is seen new. 4 The Eros of Language The past is great and deep. It can make a writer expansive, open him to perspectives and emotions that his own narrower environment has failed to elicit. Language is the sensuous breath on which the fiction writer carries his generosity of feeling. Language exposes the past to painterly textures. There is pleasure to be found, the writer's, the reader's, in a version of the past that escapes the coils of established history and biography and that finds a language, scented, dripping, detailed, for such routine realities as sex, weather and food, for the ravel of a red thread on a woman's velvet sleeve. History, whatever its blood woes, is subject to infiltration by the novelist's isolated pleasure, the lonely, deep, intimate and unspoken satisfaction he takes in putting words together. To open up the sentence, to loosen the screws of punctuation and syntax. Small tactics, seemingly, but carrying clear reverberation. In "Underworld," I searched out the word-related pleasures of memory. The smatter language of old street games and the rhythms of a thousand street-corner conversations, adolescent and raw. The quirky language of baseball and the glossy adspeak of Madison Avenue. And what rich rude tang in the Italian-American vulgate, all those unspellable dialect words and derivations of the lost Bronx, and what stealthy pleasure to work out spellings, and how surely this range of small personal recollection served to quicken and enlarge the language that ensued. Small tactics, minor maneuvers. I used lowercase letters for such trademarked terms as Styrofoam, Velcro, Plexiglas -- but why? I didn't realize until the book was nearly done that I wanted to unincorporate these words, subvert their official status. In a novel about conflict on many levels, this was the primal clash -- the tendency of the language to work in opposition to the enormous technology of war that dominated the era and shaped the book's themes. The writer sets his pleasure, his eros, his creative delight in language and his sense of self-preservation against the vast and uniform Death that history tends to fashion as its most enduring work. 5 The Final Iconic Flash You're watching a video-tape of hooded men emerging from a bank and they move with a certain choreographed flair, firing virtuoso bursts from automatic weapons, and you wonder if they are repeating a scene from a recent movie, the one that disappeared overnight when the weekend gross was flat, and the tape is played and replayed, exhausting all the reality stored in its magnetic pores, and then another tape replaces it, a car chase through a startled suburb, and the culture continues its drive to imitate itself endlessly -- the rerun, the sequel, the theme park, the designer outlet -- because this is the means it has devised to disremember the past. Or you're staring at the inside of a convenience store on a humdrum night in July. This is a surveillance video with a digital display that marks off the tenths of seconds. Then you see a shuffling man with a handgun enter the frame. The commonplace homicide that ensues is transformed in the image-act of your own witness. It is bare, it is real, it is live, it is taped. It is compelling, it is numbing, it is digitally microtimed and therefore filled with incessant information. And if you view the tape often enough, it tends to transform you, to make you a passive variation of the armed robber in his warped act of consumption. It is another set of images for you to want and need and get sick of and need nonetheless, and it separates you from the reality that beats ever more softly in the diminishing world outside the tape. Against these flashes, these lonely fleeting images, against the ritual arrangement of these serial replays, events and documents of the past have a clarity and intactness that amount to a moral burnish. A Mathew Brady photograph, a framed front page -- "Men Walk on the Moon." These things represent moments of binding power. They draw people together in ways that only the most disastrous contemporary events can match. We depend on disaster to consolidate our vision. The light of history is aloof and awesomely regal. The final flash of the half-century -- the final iconic fury -- belongs to the fireball and mushroom cloud of the nuclear bomb. The test explosion that was announced the day the Giants won the pennant was code-named Joe 2 (for Stalin) by United States intelligence. It occurred in Kazakhstan, a plutonium bomb that measured roughly 25 kilotons. I was sitting in a dentist's chair when Thomson hit the homer. The radio was on and the announcer's sudden vivid pitch, the sheer sweet vehemence of his joy brought the people in the office and the waiting room to a salvo of cheers and shouts. All I could do was sit there and smile, my mouth tight with appliances. The dentist and his chair did not find their way into the novel that would flow, decades later, from the shared elation of that moment. But other things would. The glaze of wicker seats on subways, the woman who rapped a coin on the window to call her kid in to dinner, the bike riders on summer nights racing toward the spray of the open hydrant, the voices of friends and the barely seen gestures of total strangers -- retrieved, remarkably, in the sensuous drenching play of memory. This is the lost history that becomes the detailed weave of novels. Fiction is all about reliving things. It is our second chance.



There is pleasure to be found, the writer's, the reader's, in a version of the past that escapes the coils of established history and biography and that finds a language, scented, dripping, detailed, for such routine realities as sex, weather and food, for the ravel of a red thread on a woman's velvet sleeve.

Sunday, September 7, 1997