Remembering Mark Harris

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As I get older, I sometimes look back at missed opportunities and have a few regrets. When I read in the paper about the passing of Mark Harris in May, one of those regrets of my life resurfaced.

I knew Mark Harris when I was in high school with his son, Anthony, in the early 1970s. I say I knew Anthony’s father, but to me he was just the parent of another classmate. We lived in Valencia, a brand-new housing development at the time, where everyone was a transplant--some, like myself, from as near as the San Fernando Valley; others, like the Harrises, from as far away as New York. I felt a special kinship to their family, because the Newhall area at that time was about 99% Republican, or at least it seemed that way. Football and Nixon were held in equally high regard. We were considered oddballs, because we were lefties, we had friends of all colors and ethnicities, and my mom worked for a living. The Harrises were all those things and more.

I knew Mr. Harris was a writer--he had written ‘Bang the Drum Slowly,’ and I’d seen the movie version, loving its compassion for those who are different. What I didn’t realize at the time was that Anthony’s dad was one of the truly brilliant American novelists of the 20th century.

About 12 years ago, I happened upon a first edition of ‘Bang the Drum Slowly,’ and I figured it was about time to read the book by my long-lost friend’s dad. It was a revelation. Its simple, direct prose was unbearably moving. The characters of baseball players Henry Wiggen and Bruce Pearson were so fully developed that I wanted to believe they were real. Baseball becomes mythical and tangible at the same time--and a heartbreaking metaphor for life.

‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ whetted my appetite for the other Henry Wiggen books, which I acquired and read in order: ‘The Southpaw,’ ‘Bang the Drum Slowly’ (a second time), ‘A Ticket for a Seamstitch’ and ‘It Looked Like Forever.’ That was it. I was hooked. I wanted more. I craved the humor and simple beauty of Harris’ prose, the characters that etch themselves into your psyche, the situations that make you laugh and cry at the same time.

And this is where that regret enters because I wish I’d known then, at 16, what I know now at 51. I wish I’d known that Anthony’s dad was an American master and that I could have learned something from a uniquely gifted storyteller. Perhaps some of his genius stemmed from that modesty, from his being just another father of another classmate. And perhaps I learned as much as I needed to--about compassion and tolerance, strength and frailty, courage and insecurity--from Wiggen and Pearson, from the characters Speed and Jacob Epp.

Pamela Wilson