Jeb Runcible, the narrator in Mark Goodman's 1985 novel Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies, remembers Hobey Baker at St. Paul's School, practicing alone at night on a frozen pond with a hockey stick. He was perfecting his ability to control the puck without looking at it:
So I took to walking late at night along the lower ponds, the fabled 'black ice' of St. Paul's. . . . It was on such a night that I came upon a lone figure scraping swiftly, hockey stick in hand, across the furthermost pond. I stopped to watch. If he saw me, he took no notice. Looking neither left, right nor down, he sped smoothly across the ice, his stick expertly tock-ticking the puck before him. Back and forth he flew, his blond hair forming an opalescent halo in the chill moonlight.
Hobey Baker, "golden youth of autumn fields and winter ice. . . . " That is the way Baker lives in Runcible's memory. After St. Paul's, and now at Princeton, Runcible remembers Baker, always playing without a helmet, returning a kick on the football field:
THUMP! The Harvard punt soars upfield toward our line where Hobey waits alone, his black jersey emblazoned with grime, his blond hair shining in the pellucid sunlight. He flexes on the soles of his cleats, hands fixed on his hips, as he gauges the ball's trajectory. He is perfectly still in the penultimate moment when the ball crests and begins to descend. Suddenly he back pedals three, four, five steps, plants, then dashes forward, his timing marvelous to watch, to catch the punt on the fly.
When Baker played football at Princeton, the ball was larger and rounder, more like a rugby ball, eliminating the forward pass; and the rules insisted upon in 1909 by Theodore Roosevelt sought to reduce injuries and, perhaps, eliminate fatalities, also greatly favored the defense. Though much of the scoring came from three-point drop kicks, Baker also was a spectacular broken-field runner. His 180-point scoring record at Princeton waited 50 years before being broken in 1964 by Cosmo Iacavazzi, playing in a much more open and offensive kind of football. Baker, at five-foot-nine and 160 pounds but wonderfully athletic, is now in the hockey and football Hall of Fame.
In his introduction to The Legend of Hobey Baker (1966) by John Davies, Arthur Mizener tells us why Hobey Baker, Princeton 1914, matters to us: "With his almost incredible skill and grace, his perfect manners, his dedicated seriousness, Hobey Baker was the nearly faultless realization of the ideal of his age"--that is, the period that ended with World War I. Yet Baker, a Philadelphia aristocrat, embodied gentlemanly ideals as they continued to inform the very different 1920s that followed the war.
The gentlemanly ideal went back through the Renaissance to medieval chivalry and, in Baker's time, was so firmly established in the upper classes of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston that (as Mizener says) it took Nick Carraway an astonishing jolt away from conventional attitudes to understand that Jay Gatsby, a bogus gentleman, nevertheless was far superior because of his imagination to the Yale football player and fellow clubman Tom Buchanan.
For Baker, the epitome of the gentleman ideal and an athletic perfectionist, the game itself was the point. How the game was played was what mattered: sportsmanship, modesty, good manners. Even when he had been hammered bloody on the hockey rink or the gridiron, and if the opposing team had played fairly, he always went to their locker room and congratulated them on a game well played. If fouled, he sometimes wept, not because he had been hurt but because the game itself had been betrayed. In The Legend of Hobey Baker John Davies writes that
Red Louden, Dartmouth's All-American end, for many years carried a newspaper clipping in his wallet about the time he tried to tackle Hobey and was knocked cold; not until he read the newspaper did he learn that Hobey had carried him off the field.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, who makes a cameo undergraduate appearance in Mark Goodman's novel, evoked Baker as Allenby, the Princeton football captain, in a famous passage early in This Side of Paradise (1920):
Now, far down the shadowy line of University Place a white-clad phalanx broke the gloom, and marching figures, white-shirted, white-trousered, swung rhythmically up the street, with linked arms and heads held back: Going back--going back, Going--back--to--Nas--sau--Hall . . . There at the head of the white platoon marched Allenby, the football captain, slim and defiant, as if aware that this year the hopes of the college rested on him, that his hundred and sixty pounds were expected to dodge to victory through the heavy blue and crimson lines.
John Davies reminds us that when Baker played football the game amounted to a civil religion, with the Ivy League contests at the center of national attention. Special trains carried crowds to New Haven, Cambridge, and Princeton. "There is not a vacant seat in the fur-lined stadium," wrote Francis Russell. "Any hushed moment is apt to be shattered by the crash of a hip flask, inadvertently dropped on the concrete." Ivy League games were written up in articles several thousand words long in the major newspapers, old players returned to practice with their teams and demonstrate favorite trick plays. Yale's great coach Walter Camp annually named the all-star team, and on the day he was elected president in 1912, Woodrow Wilson showed up at a Princeton football practice--no doubt seeing Hobey Baker on the field with the team.
The gentlemanly ideals that Hobart Amory Hare Baker embodied remained an ideal of behavior throughout Fitzgerald's fiction. Indeed, the name of Fitzgerald's surrogate, Amory Blaine in This Side of Paradise, connects him with Baker, and it is the loss of the old ideal of character and honor that destroys Dick Diver in Tender is the Night (1934). In tennis, at least, those ideals live today, if somewhat fitfully, and after a bad spell in the era of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe in the demeanor of Roger Federer and his obvious respect for the tradition of the game.
Depending on abundant material in the Baker Archive at Princeton, Davies provided an invaluable account of Baker's life, along with photographs of Baker at various stages of his short life. Using the resources of a novelist in Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies (the title that of a stoic and ironic song sung by pilots on the Western Front), Mark Goodman evoked him though his first-person narrator, Jeb Runcible from Texas, a Princeton football player and friend of Baker. As in Gatsby, the reliable narrator brings us close to the remarkable character at the center of the story.
It rained over most of northern France the day we buried Hobey Baker. The weather bore in from the North Sea well before dawn, silent and thick with mist, enshrouding the now still battlefields like a gray benediction. The squadron--or what was left of it, more than a month after the Armistice--began to fall out for burial parade shortly after mess.
Baker, like Jay Gatsby, another idealist, is buried in the mud. That Mr. Goodman begins with this parallel surely was calculated.
After graduation from Princeton in 1914, Hobey Baker worked in the J.P. Morgan Bank on Wall Street, bored with the conventional career he was launching but finding relief in top-flight hockey games at the St. Nick's Arena. After some automobile racing with Eddie Rickenbacker, then volunteer flight training at Mineola on Long Island, he enlisted in the Lafayette Escadrille, and before leaving for France performed acrobatic tricks with his squadron during halftime at a football game over Princeton's new Palmer Stadium. As described by Goodman,
It was an extraordinary sight, Hobey flying point for a V formation of mechanized geese, flying south to Princeton for November. They came over high, stretched out against the darkening autumn sky, then banked and swooped in low over the stadium. As the bobbing planes receded upward, Hobey broke off from the formation and passed over the Stadium one more time, dipping his wings as the crowd rose and cheered.
In France, after more training, Baker is assigned to a squadron near Toul and goes into combat flying Spads. Jeb Runcible soon follows him to France, sometimes annoyed that Hobey regards aerial warfare as another football game.
Hobey gave himself over to the war absolutely. Now, I saw a lot of men do that in France. . . . What happened to Hobey was more disturbing. He reached far back to those playing fields--the lost world of our youth--and tried to superimpose their innocent glory upon the fields of Flanders. It was no longer merely a matter of conversational analogies; mild affectation had become obsession. When the 141st [its name after America entered the war] got its new Spads, Hobey had them painted the orange-and-black of Princeton with a tiger standing astride a German helmet.
When the squadron hears that Georges Guynemer, the great French ace, has been shot down and killed, they toast him and sing the fatalistic "Hurrah for the Next Man Who Dies." But Runcible is made uneasy by the sense that Hobey is treating Guynemer as if he "had been sidelined with a broken ankle."
Aloft with the squadron, and until he becomes its commander, Baker is so skillful that he is allowed to fly independently, looking for targets of opportunity--in effect, playing "rover" as he had in hockey. (Again, he is disgusted by his publicity, but "French waiters were almost polite to us.") At length, Jeb Runcible is shot down, crashing and escaping across no-man's-land amid furious infantry battles, on the way shooting a German soldier who looks about 16, the pistol shot blowing his face off.
Back at the squadron, Runcible loses his temper with Hobey: "I vaguely pointed eastward. Do you understand this, Hobey? That's not the bloody f--ing Yale game out there." Yet to Baker, the deadly contest in those cloud fields was, in fact, an extension of the playing fields, but now a game ending in life or death, skill, risk, matchless excitement, the pursuit of perfection. Like Yeats's Major Gregory, his "Irish Airman" and modern Sir Philip Sydney, Hobey Baker pursued a "lonely impulse of delight [that] drove to this tumult in the clouds."
John Davies's historical account and Mark Goodman's novel agree on the circumstances of Hobey Baker's death on December 21, 1918, soon after the Armistice on November 11, the now-legendary eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month when an eerie silence descended on the Western Front--but only after the American artillery, at the last moment, fired off everything it had at the defeated Germans.
Baker had known that the advent of peace would be a letdown, even feared it as offering no challenges that would test his extraordinary abilities. They agree that he volunteered to test-fly a repaired Spad with a carburetor known to be unreliable, that the plane stalled and crashed as Baker tried to land it on the squadron's airstrip. Baker died instantly of head injuries. Baker, an expert pilot, knew how to crash-land a Spad, which could safely be deposited amid trenches, on rooftops, even in a tree. But he apparently decided to land the plane intact, and failed.
What we cannot know is exactly what was in Baker's mind during his last flight. Some think that, perhaps half-consciously, he committed a kind of suicide, motivated by the depressing prospect of peace and boredom. I think it more likely that Baker, always a perfectionist, self-confident after years of exceptional skill and success against the odds, believed he could get the faltering Spad back undamaged to the airstrip. He pushed the stick forward to gather air speed--a fact suggesting that he intended to succeed. If he had had another hundred feet he could have leveled off and landed intact; trying not to crash-land, he slammed the nose of the plane into the ground and wrecked the plane and himself.
His body finally came home to a cemetery in his native Bala Cynwyd, just outside Philadelphia.
Jeffrey Hart, professor emeritus of English at Dartmouth, is the author, most recently, of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times.