Triumph and Sadness:
Opposites in Ourselves and in
Nat Fein's Photo of Babe Ruth's Farewell
By Michael Palmer

     This photograph taken by Nat Fein of baseball's legendary George Herman "Babe" Ruth is one of the most famous and most cared for in all of sports.  It won a Pulitzer Prize in 1949. 

I'm moved each time I see it because it has great feeling—a man returning to the scene of his greatest successes, saying goodbye for the final time.  The way triumph and sadness, pride and humility are one in this photograph give it a meaning that goes far beyond the story it tells as a newspaper illustration.   I am grateful to Aesthetic Realism, the education founded by the American poet and critic Eli Siegel, to have a method of understanding why I care for this photograph.  It is in his great principle—"All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."   In its technique this photograph puts together opposites people are trying to make sense of in their lives such as:

The photograph was taken at Yankee Stadium on a special day for the Yankees and Babe Ruth—the 25th anniversary of the Stadium.  Ruth, who had left the Yankees as a player 14 years earlier, was having his famous number 3 uniform retired.  The idol of millions whose homerun hitting, personality and flair literally built Yankee Stadium and made him baseball's greatest figure, Babe Ruth, here, was a very sick man who had barely two months to live.  Nat Fein, a staff photographer for the New York Herald Tribune, was looking for a picture that would convey the meaning of that day.  He left the other photographers and went to the back of where Ruth was standing, where he saw the elements of the story in one composition—Ruth in relation to his former teammates, to the Stadium, to the fans.  He saw Babe Ruth in a moment of great triumph and in a tremendously sad moment as well.

       Though it was an overcast day, Fein took the picture without a flashbulb because he believed what he learned from his picture-editor, Richard Crandall, to be true—"natural light catches the mood of the occasion."¹  The mingling of light and dark captures accurately the mingled feelings of that moment.  Ruth himself is light and dark—his light uniform set off by the dark socks and hat and dark pinstripes on the uniform.  Light crowns his dark hair.  The fans in the distant Stadium seats are also light and dark—the persons in the visible seats are illuminated, while darkness shrouds those sitting farther back.  That combination accents the poignancy felt by people on that day.

       In a published lecture titled Afternoon Regard for Photography, Eli Siegel took up a photograph related to this one—a Dutch actor seen from the back, bowing in his farewell to an audience in Amsterdam.  What he said explains a central reason other people have been so much affected by the Nat Fein photo. Said Mr. Siegel:

Pride is in the fact that he is the hero of the evening, he is acknowl- edging applause...[and] this man is [also] an object of sadness—as in every farewell. We are trying to put our triumph and our sadness together. ²

        Babe Ruth here is tall, the largest figure in the picture.  He has grandeur. Yet he is humble too, slightly stooped at the shoulders, his hat at his side.  And above Ruth's head, flags fly on tall poles atop the Stadium. The pennant banners blowing in the wind rise, while they also have uncertainty. The facade on the upper deck on the right, crossing behind the figure of Ruth, sweeps up, giving his hunched shoulders an upward motion.

        Though very young, I was at the Stadium that day in 1948 and I remember being both thrilled at seeing Babe Ruth in uniform and saddened by the obvious weakening his illness had made for.  Ruth, in his final words to the fans, said he was grateful for having been part of something whose large meaning goes beyond the playing field. This can be felt in the way he stands. He is bowing slightly, his cap to his side. He is both the center, being honored, but is also honoring something outside of himself, looking out to the encircling stands and to the open spaces, the infinite beyond the Stadium. 

 In his book Self and World, Mr. Siegel describes the largest question a man has—how to be oneself as individual, and at the same time be in the best relation to what is not oneself.  He writes: 

        The way I saw being an individual was very narrow and against my being in a good relation with the world.  It was a cause of much pain.  I thought I was most myself by being as separate from people as I could be, and didn't like doing things other children did, such as going to parties, dances, summer camp.  I preferred taking long walks by myself, and when I went to a ballgame, I liked going alone, sitting by myself, way on top, away from the other fans. I was triumphantly alone, but very lonely.  This way of seeing changed as I studied in classes taught by Eli Siegel.  Seeing how I was hurting my life, Mr. Siegel said to me in a class:

 A human being, according to Aesthetic Realism, has an indefinite possibility of conscious relation.  That can be felt in the line from Tennyson's [poem] "Ulysses"—"I am a part of all that I have met."  But Ulysses could also say, "I am a part of all that I haven't met." Do you want to come into your heritage?  Your heritage is all reality besides yourself as seen by you. 

        In this photo, the great Babe Ruth is shown in relation to the world in many ways. The bat he is holding and leaning on almost seems a part of his body. The vertical stripes of his uniform are related to the vertical lines of the middle deck facade and the vertical poles of the Stadium throughout. The field and the baselines link him to former teammates and other Yankee players.  You feel Ruth is "a part of all that he has met and all he hasn't met."
 

                               __________________________________________

Notes: