Untitled Document Mr. Claro -- Modern Nonfiction Reading Selection by Donald Hall A Ballad of the Republic DONALD HALL was born in Connecticut in 1928 and lives in New Hampshire, on the farm where his mother and grandmother were born, married to poet Jane Kenyon. He makes his living as a freelance writer. Principally a poet, he started writing prose with a memoir, String Too Short to Be Saved (1961), and now writes for the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Yankee, Esquire, Playboy, and Sports Illustrated. "A Ballad of the Republic" was commissioned for a centenary edition (1988) of the poem "Casey at the Bat." Some of his essay collections are Fathers Playing Catch with Sons (1985), Seasons at Eagle Pond (1987), and Death to the Death of Poetry (1994). Books of poems include The One Day (1988), Old and New Poems (1990), and The Museum of Clear Ideas (1993). In his long essay Life Work (1993), Hall revealed, to universal distaste, that he rises at four in the morning and writes until nightfall in a continuous abandoned joyous frenzy of work. Somewhere the sun is shining, and somewhere children shout, and somewhere someone is writing, "Casey at One Hundred." A century ago, on June 3, 1888, a twenty-five-year-old Harvard graduate, one- poem poet Ernest Lawrence Thayer, published "Casey at the Bat" in the pages of the San Francisco Examiner. I suppose it's the most popular poem in our country's history, if not exactly in its literature. Martin Gardner collected twenty-five sequels and parodies to print in his prodigy of scholarship, The Annotated Casey at the Bat (1967; rev. 1984). Will the next Casey bat clean-up in the St. Petersburg Over-Ninety Softball League? Perhaps, instead, we will hear of a transparent Casey on an Elysian diamond, shade swinging the shadow of a bat while wraith pitcher uncoils phantom ball. Or spheroid, I should say. The author of this people's poem was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts: gentleman and scholar, son of a mill owner. At Harvard he combined scholastic and social eminence, not always feasible on the banks of the Charles. A bright student of William James in philosophy, he graduated magna cum laude and delivered the Ivy Oration at graduation. On the other hand, he was editor of the Lampoon, for which traditional requirements are more social than literary; he belonged to Fly, a club of decent majesty. It is perhaps not coincidence, considering Victorian Boston's social prejudices, that Thayer's vainglorious mock hero carries an Irish name. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...CHOOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Hall/Hall.htm (1 of 9)11/18/2005 8:07:20 PM Untitled Document After his lofty graduation, Thayer drifted about in Europe. One of his Harvard acquaintances had been young William Randolph Hearst, business manager of the Lampoon, expelled from Harvard for various pranks while Thayer was pulling a magna. The disgraced young Hearst was rewarded by his father with editorship of the San Francisco Examiner, where he offered Thayer work as humorous columnist. By the time "Casey" appeared, Thayer had left California to return to Worcester, where he later managed a mill for his father and studied philosophy in his spare time. He received five dollars for "Casey" and never claimed reward for its hundreds of further printings. By all accounts, "Casey"'s author found his notoriety problematic. As with all famous nineteenth-century recitation pieces - "The Night Before Christmas," "Backward Turn Backward Time in Thy Flight" - other poets claimed authorship, which annoyed Thayer first because he did write it and second because he wasn't especially proud of it. There was the additional annoyance that old ballplayers continually asserted themselves the original Casey of the ballad: Thayer insisted that he made the poem up. The author of "Casey at the Bat" died in Santa Barbara in 1940 without ever doing another notable thing. The poem's biography is richer than the poet's: At first "Casey" blushed unseen, wasting its sweetness on the desert air, until an accident blossomed it into eminence. In New York De Wolf Hopper, a young star of comic opera, was acting in Prince Methusalem. On August 15, 1888, management invited players from the New York Giants and the Chicago White Stockings to attend a performance, and Hopper gave thought to finding a special bit that he might perform in the ballplayers' honor. His friend the novelist Archibald Clavering Gunter, recently returned from San Francisco, showed him a clipping from the San Francisco Examiner. In Hopper's autobiography, he noted that when he "dropped my voice to B-flat, below low C, at 'the multitude was awed,' I remember seeing Buck Ewing's gallant mustachios give a single nervous twitch." Apparently Hopper's recitation left everyone in the house twitching for joy, and not only the Giants' hirsute catcher. For the rest of his life, Hopper repeated his performance by demand, no matter what part he sang or played, doomed to recite the poem (five minutes and forty seconds) an estimated ten thousand times before his death in 1935. As word spread from Broadway, the poem was reprinted in newspapers across the country, clipped out, memorized, and performed for the millions who would never hear De Wolf Hopper. Eventually the ballad was set to music, made into silent movies, and animated into cartoons; radio broadcast it, there were recordings by Hopper and others, and William Schuman wrote an opera called The Mighty Casey (premiere 1953). When he first recited the poem, Hopper had no notion who had written it. Thayer had signed it "Phin.", abbreviating his college nickname of Phinny. Editors reprinted the poem anonymously or made up a reasonable name. When Hopper played Worcester early in the 1890s, he met the retiring Thayer - and poet recited poem for actor, as Hopper later reported, without a trace of elocutionary ability. file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...CHOOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Hall/Hall.htm (2 of 9)11/18/2005 8:07:20 PM Untitled Document There are things in any society that we always knew. We do not remember when we first heard about Ground Hog Day, or the rhyme that reminds us Thirty Days Hath September. Who remembers first hearing "Casey at the Bat"? Although I cannot remember my original exposure, I remember many splendid renditions from early in my life by the great ham actor of my childhood. My New Hampshire grandfather, Wesley Wells, was locally renowned for his powers of recitation - for speaking pieces, as we called it. He farmed bad soil in central New Hampshire: eight Holsteins, fifty sheep, a hundred chickens. In the tie-up for milking, morning and night, he leaned his bald head into warm Holstein ribs and recited poems with me as audience; he kept time as his hands pulled blue milk from long teats. When he got to the best part, he let go the nozzles, leaned back in his milking chair, spread his arms wide and opened his mouth in a great O, the taught gestures of elocution. He spellbound me as he set out the lines on warm cozy air: "But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out!" The old barn (with its whitewash over rough boards, with its spiderwebs and straw with its patched harness and homemade ladders and pitchforks shiny from decades of hand-labor) paused in its shadowy hugeness and applauded again the ringing failure of the hero. If he had not recited it for me lately, I reminded him. He recited a hundred other poems also, a few from Whittier and Longfellow but mostly poems from newspapers by poets without names. I don't suppose he knew "Ernest Lawrence Thayer" or the history of the poem, but "Casey" itself was as solid as the rocks in his pasture. The word that left Broadway and traveled was: This poem is good to say out loud. Earlier, the same news had brought intelligence of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" and Bret Harte's "The Heathen Chinee." Public schooling once consisted largely of group memorization and recitation. The New England Primer taught theology and the alphabet together: "In Adam's fall! We sinned all" through "Zacchaeus he! Did climb a tree! His Lord to see." Less obviously the Primer instilled pleasures of rhyme and oral performance. When we decided fifty and sixty years ago that rote memorization was bad teaching, we threw out not only the multiplication table but also "Barbara Frietchie." Recitation of verse was turned over to experts. Earlier, for two hundred years at least, recitation and performance took 10 center stage in the one-room schools; but it did not end there. In the schools, recitation-as-performance - not merely memorization to retain information - climbed toward competitive speaking, elimination and reward on Prize Speaking Day, when the athletes of elocution recited in contest before judges. The same athletes did not stop when school stopped, and recitation exfoliated into the adult world as a major form of entertainment. Hamlets and cities alike formed clubs meeting weekly for mutual entertainment that variously included singing, playing the violin or the piano, recitation, and political debate. In the country towns and villages, which couldn't afford to hire Mr. Hopper to entertain them (nor earlier Mr. Emerson to instruct and inspire them), citizens made their own Lyceums and Chautauquas.0 In my grandfather's South Danbury, New Hampshire, young people founded the South Danbury Debating and Oratorical Society. Twice a month they met for programs that began with musical offerings and recitations, paused for coffee and doughnuts, and concluded with a political debate, like: "Resolved: That the United States should Cease from Territorial Expansion." file:///C|/Documents%20and%20Settings/Joe%20Claro/D...CHOOL/gr%2012%2003-04/Nonfic%20pieces/Hall/Hall.htm (3 of 9)11/18/2005 8:07:20 PM Untitled Document Lyceums and Chautauquas: Associations providing public lectures, concerts, and entertainment.