Introduction
The Gravity's Rainbow Support Group (GRSG) began in June, 202o as a "reading group" of two people as a support mechanism to plow though Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (a book you should never try to read alone) during the pandemic. The GRSG took the challenge out of reading challenging books and provided a way to keep two now-retired college chums (from Indiana University) Francis Walker of Winston-Salem, North Carolina and Murray Browne of Decatur, Georgia in touch. Basically, we decided to keep this good thing going.
This page is the fourth installment of our reading-discussion notes of books we assigned ourselves in 2023. Like in the pages past, (See Gravity's Rainbow Support Group and Gravity's Rainbow Support Group - 2021) it is full of favorite quotes and passages. Don't expect coherent prose or well thought out arguments, but our musings may provide insights to your own understanding and enjoyment of these books.
Here are the lists of books read and discussed in previous years:
2020 Reading Notes Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon; The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker; Pnin by Vladimir Nabokov
2021 Reading Notes The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War by Drew Gilpin Faust; Absalom, Absalom by William Faulkner; Stilwell and the American Experience in China, 1911-1945 by Barbara W. Tuchman; Cultural Amnesia by Clive James; The Periodic Table by Primo Levi; The Historian’s Craft by Marc Bloch; An Inventory of Losses by Judith Schalansky; Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight The Odyssey and Illiad by Eva Brann; Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell
2022 Reading Notes The Age of Anger: A History of the Present by Pankaj Mishra; Mountains and a Shore: A Journey Through Southern Turkey by Michael Pereira; The Life and Opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman by Laurence Sterne; Grant by Ron Chernow; The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain; The U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, and The Big Money); Under the Net by Muriel Spark; Two Wheels Good: The History and the Mystery of the Bicycle by Jody Rosen; Red and Black: A Chronicle of 1830 by Stendhal
And now we begin with our 2023 list:
A Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe by Robert Maraniss
Our first book of 2023 was Maraniss’s book of Jim Thorpe, a name we all know that he was a great athlete in the first quarter of the 20th century, but admittedly little else. Perhaps we may have known he was a member of an Indian tribe (the Sac and Fox tribe born on an Indian reservation before Oklahoma became a state). This all ended with the voluminous Maraniss book, published in 2022, about the life of Jim Thorpe (1887 – 1953), put into a context of the times he lived.
This book covered the same time period as John Dos Passos U.S.A. Trilogy which we read last year, but the approach, (Dos Passos’s book was fiction albeit with historical interludes) was different as two books could be, yet they work well together.
A Path Lit by Lightning book encompasses several themes. One is life for Native Americans in this period where the Indian tribes had reached the end of the sovereignty. The next question became was how best to assimilate hundreds of tribes with different languages and culture to the predominant white culture. Maraniss uses Thorpe’s experiences at Carlisle to explain the various approaches. One was schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. With Jim Thorpe he arrived there in 1904 but it wasn’t until legendary coach Pop Warner (not necessarily an honorable man) recognized Thorpe’s bruising combination, of speed, strength and toughness on the gridiron* did Thorpe emerged as force, playing against and defeating the college football powerhouses of that era (Army, Penn, Pitt). Thorpe’s athletic skills also included track and field which eventually led him to win two gold medals at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. This makes the book a history of the early days of college and later professional football. Thorpe also played professional baseball with many greats of his era though he was not exceptional (unable to consistently hit the curve ball).
In the second half of the book, is more focused on Jim Thorpe’s sad demise: living hand to mouth, failing health, alcoholism, several failed marriages and tormented by his desire to return to greatness. However, Maraniss also admires Thorpe’s determination.
The Early Days of Football Are Not Unlike Modern Football
Chapter 4, Page 70:
“From 1901 to 1905 there were 71 recorded deaths in football. In 1905 a Union College back, Harold Moore, died of a cerebral hemorrhage after being kicked in the head while trying to tackle a New York University runner. He was one of 18 players who died that year. An unofficial casualty count of the 1905 season read like a military after-action report: deaths, 18; partially paralyzed, 1; eyes gouged out, 1; intestines ruptured, 2; backs broken, 1; skulls fractured, 1; arms broken, 4; legs broken, 7; hands broken, 3; shoulders dislocated, 7; noses broken, 4; ribs broken, 11; collarbones broken, 7; jaws broken, 1; fingers broken, 4; shoulders broken, 2; hips dislocated, 4; thighbones broken, 1; brain concussion, 2. And these numbers were likely an underestimate.”
Chapter 13, Page 235: (regarding the collapse of the stands at one of the games—one person died, many were injured).
The players had been warming up when the disaster unfolded and watched it all, some rushing to assist. What next? The powers that be decided the game must go on, so they played, and more than three thousand fans stayed around to watch “sorrowed by the sad accident that preceded the game.” (Unlike the Hamlin incident involving that the Buffalo Bills player who collapsed during a Monday Night Football game recently).
Chapter 10, Page 197:
He might have been serious, or not, but it was a refrain that would become familiar for the rest of his long career. Every year or two, reliably, Jim would say he was going to chuck it all, and the press would blast out headlines about his imminent retirement, which never followed. (Remind you of any pro football types like Tom Brady?)
Chapter 4, Page 72:
They also had their own dining room stocked regularly with beef, milk, potatoes, and flapjacks—fare the rest of the school was served infrequently…..The fact that football players received elite treatment fostered some resentment among other students, just as it did at many colleges around the nation. (This reminded us of the Gresham middle cafeteria at our dorm at Indiana University, where the football players feasted nightly, while we survived on starches and canned veggies boiled in soap.)
Baseball in the Early 20th Century
As Maraniss wrote, Thorpe’s professional baseball career was basically upside down. He went directly to the major leagues playing for the John McGraw’s New York Giants. He only played parts of six professional seasons, but for decades later he played in the minor leagues and barnstormed with semi-pro teams for years afterwards.
The highlight of his career was touring with McGraw’s Giants on their World Tour in the offseason of 1913-1914. McGraw signed Thorpe because of his Olympic fame and everyone wanted to see him including the Pope, Sir Thomas Lipton (of Lipton Tea fame). Playing a game in Egypt near the Sphinx, sparked the fertile imagination of E.L. Doctorow, author of Ragtime, (another Dos Passos companion book?) who placed one of his central characters, the financier Pierpont Morgan, at the monument at the same time. “As he passed the great Sphinx and looked back and saw men swarming all over her, like vermin.... The desecrators were wearing baseball suits,” Doctorow wrote.
Then there were the baseball writers of the era. Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner, who wrote the baseball classic, You Know Me, Al And, of course Damon Runyon, who created the stories upon which the musical and movie Guys and Dolls was based (and who was one of the most colorful sportswriters of his era).
Chapter 13, Page 249:
Damon Runyon, then covering baseball for the Hearst newspaper chain, was waiting for them, ensconced in the lobby of the St. James Hotel, ready to follow them for the cushy Paris-London-and-home end of the journey. Runyon wrote in the style of the joyful wise guy in on life’s joke. “Covered all over with foreign labels and all chattering away like Baedekers, the Giant White Sox party of sixty-seven—count them yourself—breezed into this sedate little village tonight with the firm determination of playing a five-night stand.”
Other Famous People (to be added)
Here are my notes from the first half of the book. I did not clip quotes on his interactions with George Patton, Dwight Eisenhower, or Omar Bradley—or his fateful rides on boats—the USS Finland to Stockholm in 1912 just a few months after the Titanic disaster nor the Lusitania in early 1914 a few months before its disaster (not to mention his tour of all the royals virtually on the eve of WW1)--but they are all well documented in the book and of considerable interest.
Marianne Moore
Maraniss's approach to the racism towards the Indians.
