The Great American Novel Read Online Free

appeal. Because when that happens, you can kiss the fart goodbye. They will cheapen and degrade it until it is on a level with Mom’s apple pie and our flag. Mark my words: as soon as some scoundrel discovers there is a profit to be made off of the American kid’s love of the fart, they will be selling artificial farts in balloons at the circus. And you can just imagine what they’ll smell like too. Like everything artificial.
    Yes, fans, as the proverb has it, verily there is nothing like a case of fecal impaction to make an old man wax poetic about the fart. Forgive the sentimental meandering.
    And specially, from every shires ende
    Of AMERICA to COOPERSTOWN they wende
    The holy BASEBALL HEROES for to seke,
    That hem hath holpen whan that they were SIX. *
    For the ambulatory among my fellow geriatrics here our annual trip to Cooperstown is something very like the kind of pilgrimage Chaucer must have been writing about. I won’t go into the cast of characters, as he does, except to say that as I understand it, his “nine and twenty” were not so knowledgeable in matters of religion as you might at first expect pilgrims to be who are off to worship at a holy shrine. Well, so too for the six and ten it was my misfortune to be cooped up with on the road to Cooperstown, and then all afternoon long at the Baseball Museum and Hall of Fame. Ninety-nine per cent of their baseball “memories,” ninety-nine per cent of the anecdotes and stories they recollect and repeat are pure hogwash, tiny morsels of the truth so coated over with discredited legend and senile malarkey, so impacted, you might say, in the turds of time, as to rival the tales out of ancient mythology. What the aged can do with the past is enough to make your hairs stand on end. But then look at the delusions that ordinary people have about the day before yesterday.
    Of course, in the way of old men—correction: in the way of all men—they more or less swallow one another’s biggest lies whole and save their caviling for the tiniest picayune points. How they love to nitpick over nonsense and cavil over crap all the while those brains of theirs, resembling nothing so much as pickles by this time, soak on in their brine of fantasy and fabrication. No wonder Hitler was such a hit. Why, he might still be at it, if only he’d had the sense to ply his trade in the Land of Opportunity. These are three homo sapiens, descendants of Diogenes, seeking the Truth: “I tell you, there was so a Ernie Cooper, what pitched four innings in one game for the Cincinnatis in 1905. Give up seven hits. Seen it myself.” “Afraid you are thinking of Jesse Cooper of the White Sox. And the year was 1911. And he pitched himself something more than four innings.” “You boys are both wrong. Cooper’s name was Bock. And he come from right around these parts too.” “Boggs? Boggs is the feller what pitched one year for the Bees. Lefty Boggs!” Yes, Boggs was a Bee, all right, but the Cooper they are talking about happened to be named Baker. Only know what they say when I tell them as much? “Who asked you? Keep your brainstorms for your ‘book’! We are talking fact not fiction!” “But you’re the ones who’ve got it wrong,” I say. “Oh sure, we got it wrong! Ho-ho-ho! That’s a good one! Get out of here, Shakespeare! Go write the Great American Novel, you crazy old coot!”
    Well, fans, I suppose there are those who called Geoffrey Chaucer ( and William Shakespeare, with whom I share initials) a crazy coot, and immoral, and so on down the line. Tell them what they do not wish to hear, tell them that they have got it wrong, and the first thing out of their mouths, “You’re off your nut!” Understanding this as I do should make me calm and philosophical, I know. Wise, sagacious, and so forth. Only it doesn’t work that way, especially when they do what they