The Sun Field: A Novel (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Sun Field: A Novel David Thomas Holmberg Heywood Broun. The Sun Field: A Novel. 1923. Introduction by Darryl Brock. New York: Rvive Books, 2008. 142 pp. Paper, $14.00. In one of the most famous and defining remarks on modernity, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1863, “by ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” This duality of modernity, its being both “contingent” and “eternal,” resonates beyond just definitions of modernity, and indeed Baudelaire’s definition echoes throughout the multiple and varied modernisms that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. These reverberations are felt in Heywood Broun’s 1923 novel, The Sun Field, when Judith Winthrop, the narrator George Wallace’s sometimes girlfriend, explains that she wept when New York Yankees slugger John “Tiny” Tyler made a game saving, one-handed catch because “I think the man who caught that ball created the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. No sculptor ever achieved anything like that arm and shoulder of his when he reached out for the ball. . . . It’s just that fugitive thing he created this afternoon.” Judith is in love with the brilliant but fleeting aesthetic beauty of a single moment, with the contingency that always accompanies sports. George, however, takes the realist view, arguing that “he isn’t a romantic symbol or anything like that. He’s a person. A ball player and a good one. Not quite as good as he was a few seasons ago but still hanging [End Page 164] on.” Judith wants the catch to mean something, even if that something is fugitive, but George believes only in the man himself; it is a debate between aestheticism and realism, with a bare-handed catch in left field, the “sun field,” as its subject. Judith and George’s argument over the modernist aesthetics of Tiny Tyler’s catch is at the center of Broun’s recently republished modernist novel; a fascinating, remarkably fresh, and funny story about a love triangle between a former baseball writer (George), his intellectual and strong-willed girlfriend (Judith), and a Babe Ruth-like slugger (Tiny Tyler), complete with nearly matching biography and statistics. The narrative action develops out of Judith’s aesthetic obsession with Tiny, which ultimately leads, among other things, to a marriage, some fights, and a World Series. And at times disorienting metafictionality seeps through the novel, as elements of the narrative unmistakably parallel Broun’s own life, even if Broun—writing as George—argues that The Sun Field “isn’t really an autobiographical novel.” Although Broun and George, his narrator-double, share much of their biographies (both were “born” in the late 1880s; and although Broun worked as a newspaper man and sports reporter for several different New York papers, beginning in the 1910s and continuing well into the late ’20s, George only briefly pursued this career), this is nowhere more evident than in their wives. The fictional Judith Winthrop is—like Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale—an ardent feminist and free-thinking wit, and shares with baseball the focus of the novel. Broun knew many of the baseball players of his day (in the introduction Darryl Brock tells of Broun playing bridge with Christy Mathewson), and a number of actual baseball stars from the era make appearances or at least get casual mention throughout the narrative, including Harry Heilmann, Ty Cobb, and Red Faber—both Tiny Tyler and his inspiration, Babe Ruth, hit walk-off home runs off of Faber. This conflation of reality and fiction lends a strange sense of transparency to the novel, a sense that one is not so much reading a modernist text as reading through a modernist text. The novel exists so entirely in its particular historical moment that it reads at times like a twenty-first-century parody of the Jazz Age; for example, Judith writes to George to tell him that the “Sherwood Anderson piece” is not finished but “I have an excellent article ready for him on ‘Tribal Rites in America’ which begins with ‘The Golden Bough’ and ends with a discussion of...