Zane Grey’s 1922 novel … and baseball
Zane Grey (1872–1939) was a fabulously prolific and successful writer. His 85 books sold more than 100 million copies and inspired 111 films, nearly all of them “Westerns.” But the road to fame as America’s Man of the West was a long and circuitous one — as I have recounted in several stories here at Our Game (https://goo.gl/3X6otW) — and baseball was never far from the core of his being. Three early works featured baseball : The Young Pitcher, The Short-Stop, and The Redheaded Outfield and Other Stories. And those of us who regard ourselves as baseball experts thought that after 1920 Grey never again wrote about baseball. Not so, it turns out.
She recalled the first time she had ever seen him. It was at Cape May, where a group of college men maintained baseball games with visiting teams, professional and otherwise. Her aunt, with whom she lived, and most of her Philadelphia friends, always spent some weeks at the seashore. And Marian enjoyed games and bathing and dancing as well as anyone. One summer afternoon a friend took her to the athletic field and pointed out the famous Indian star. How curious she had felt! There was a strange pain in the recall of that first sensation. Her eyes fell upon a tall bareheaded athlete, slenderly yet powerfully built, his supple form broadening wide at the shoulders. His face was dark, his hair black as coal. Striking and handsome as he was, it was not his appearance alone that thrilled her so. She was a thoroughly modern young woman and had seen her share of college games. In action the Indian was simply beautiful. He had earned his great fame as a football star, and had been picked by experts for the All American team three successive years. But he did not need to be so great a baseball player to be good to look at. He played an outfield position, and the chances of the game fell so that he had little to do except run. And his running grew more and more thrilling to Marian. How easily he moved — what a stride he had! Marian found she was not alone in her admiration. This Indian athlete did not need her applause. Toward the end of the game, at a critical time for the home team, he hit a ball far beyond the reach of the opposing fielders. The crowd roared its delight. The Indian dashed down toward first base, and, turning, appeared to gather speed as he ran. Marian felt the pound of her heart, the sudden shock of delight and pride in the Indian’s sheer physical prowess. He ran as the Greek runners must have run, garlanded for their victories. How fleet! How incredibly faster and faster! Then he was making the turn for home base, and the crowd was yelling wildly. He seemed to be facing Marian as he sped on, magnificent in his action. He beat the throw and scored his home run, a feat the audience applauded with prodigious abandon. Marian then became aware that she too had been rather undignified.
This passage is from Grey’s The Vanishing American, which critics, often unkind to his potboilers, generally praised. Surely the ballplayer, Nophaie, is based on Jim Thorpe, who in 1922–23, the time of the book’s original serial publication in Ladies’ Home Journal, was long removed from his Olympic glory and even more distantly his collegiate football exploits. Though he had never played ball in Cape May, except perhaps on a lark, some summer day in 1915, the year he played for Jersey City, he may well have bumped into Zane Grey.
Nophaie had been captured by white rustlers and taken away from the desert and his people by force. They took him far to the east, where, as the renamed Lo Blandy, “Nophaie lived and studied in the white man’s school and college for eighteen years.”
Returning to the West he recalled, in a letter to Marian Warner, the white woman he had come to love while attending college in Pennsylvania and playing baseball on the Jersey shore.
I was young and full of fire that summer at Cape May. I drank the white man’s liquor, Marian. I was praised, fêted, sought because I had become a famous athlete — the football and baseball player, winner of so many points against the great colleges. I danced and played the same as white college men.
Then I met you, Marian. You were different from most of the white girls. I loved you at sight and respected you when I knew you. I stopped drinking for you. And for an Indian to give up whisky, once he knows its taste, is no small thing. I loved a white girl. I called you Benow di cleash, the white girl with blue eyes. And I’m sure your influence kept me from the fate of more than one famous Indian athlete — Sockalexis, for instance, who ruined career and health in one short year….
The red sand I tread is part the bones and flesh of my ancestors. I will live my life here and mingle my bones with theirs. I will do all I can for them. But alas! the eighteen years’ education forced upon me by the whites enables me only to see the pitiful state and the doom of the Indians.
Come, Marian, to Oljato — come to help me awhile or just to see the wildness and beauty of my home, so that always afterward your memory will be full of the color and music and grandeur and fragrance of the Indian land.
Though he played his last big-league game in 1919, Thorpe had continued to play baseball and football. His last year of minor-league baseball was … 1922. In pro football he hung on until 1928.
In its original serialized version, The Vanishing American offered a harsh portrayal of government agents and missionaries who preyed upon Native Americans. According to Zane Grey biographer Thomas Pauly, afterwards “the magazine was deluged with angry letters from religious groups, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs vehemently denounced his depiction of their efforts.” When Harper published the novel in book, the editor similarly asked Grey to tone down those depictions, which were watered down further in the 1925 film, Paramount/Famous Players-Lasky’s most costly and ambitious to that time. Most of it was filmed within the Navajo Nation reservation; locations included Monument Valley, Rainbow Bridge and Sagi Canyon. [Worth watching; look for Gary Cooper in an uncredited bit part!]
“Please Nophaie, put your uniform on for me,” she begged. “It’s only a girl’s sentimental whim. But I don’t care what it is. That girl loves you.”
“Benow di cleash, I hate the sight of that uniform now,” he said.
“Oh, why?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hate it until I got back here — on the desert — home.”
“Oh! Well, you need never put it on again after this time. Just once for me. I want to take your picture. Think — I have pictures of you in football suit, baseball suit, Indian suit, and now I want one of you as a soldier — an American soldier. Why not?”
And she was not above lending her arms and lips to persuasion, which quite vanquished him.
“You’re a white girl, all right,” he laughed.
“White? Certainly, and your white girl.”
Grey further challenged social mores of the period not only by depicting a romantic relationship between Nophaie and Marian but also ending the serialized version with Nophaie surviving and the two remaining as a couple. In both the version published by Harper in 1925 and in the film, Nophaie dies.
Jim Thorpe, the Vanishing American was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.