November 4, 2015

When Baseball Is Stranger Than Fiction: If Shoeless Joe Is Here, Can J.D. Salinger Be Far Behind?

Stuart RevBy Stuart Mitchner

In the course of checking to see whether the 2015 World Series is the first to begin and end in extra innings, I found that the longest game ever played without being called a tie or suspended was between the New York Mets and the St. Louis Cardinals on September 11, 1974. The game lasted 7 hours and 45 minutes, and when the Cardinals won it 4-3 in the 25th inning, it was 3:13 a.m. and only a thousand fans were still at Shea Stadium. Writing a few weeks ago when post-season play had just begun, I quoted catcher Bengie Molina’s father telling Bengie that it was possible for a baseball game to last forever if no team scored. The idea that baseball could defy space and time sounded to Bengie “more like God than anything I heard in church.”

If I’m thinking of extra innings in cosmic terms — baseball’s version of the afterlife — it’s because I’ve been reading W.P. Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe (1982), the basis for the 1989 film Field of Dreams. Among the novel’s numerous challenges to the “suspension of disbelief” are two formidable fantasies: the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson to a ball field laid out for him (“If you build it, he will come”) and the forced return of literary legend J.D. Salinger from self-imposed exile in New Hampshire. An even more improbable leap of the imagination for Kinsella than the resurrection of Jackson was the notion of a fictional baseball-loving Salinger ultimately going along with the field-of-dreams fantasy. Still more improbable was that the real-life Salinger would allow himself to be written into someone else’s novel. 

Said Kinsella in an interview given shortly after Salinger’s death in January 2010, “His lawyers wrote my publisher’s lawyers saying he was outraged and offended to be portrayed in the novel and they would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media.” Being “too chicken,” given the clear hint of a lawsuit, the “movie people” replaced Salinger with the character played by James Earl Jones. This major concession aside, it still beggars belief that the “outraged and offended” author permitted the full-scale liberties taken by Kinsella, who consigned his version of Salinger to a crucial, fully developed role in the novel culminating in a long rhapsodic speech that most likely would have had the real-life Salinger fuming if he’d ever read it. To top it off, Kinsella titled the concluding chapter of Shoeless Joe, “The Rapture of J.D. Salinger,” wherein Holden Caulfield’s creator is content to join the team of the living dead (“publishing is such a pale horse compared to this”), disappearing with teammates Shoeless Joe and Happy Felsch and the others into the “retreating mirage like a boat sailing into a fog bank.”

Allie’s Mitt

So why did an author so famously and sometimes litigiously protective of his privacy and his work allow Shoeless Joe to see the light? If he was truly “outraged and offended,” wouldn’t Salinger’s lawyers have leaned on Kinsella to do what the filmmakers did and rename and revise the Salinger character? On the other hand, it’s entirely possible that the author of The Catcher in the Rye appreciated the transcendent as well as the everyday virtues of the national pastime. “We loved baseball,” Margaret Salinger says in her memoir Dream Catcher, after describing how her father taught her to play — “He came out almost every afternoon and pitched to me, played catch with me, and a game we called ball-on-the-roof, which was a variation of a city kid’s game played against an apartment building wall.”

Then of course there’s The Catcher in the Rye itself, the title taken from Holden Caulfield’s claim that the only thing he’d really like to be is the catcher standing on the edge of some “crazy cliff” where thousands of little kids are playing in a big field of rye and he’s there to catch anybody who starts to go over the edge. And then there’s Holden’s dead brother Allie’s mitt, which has poems written in green ink “all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere” so “he’d have something to read when he was on the field.” If you look online, you can even find a baseball card showing Salinger as catcher on the Quirk Books All-Stars.

Princeton’s Chris Young

The night of the first game of the World Series my wife and I enjoyed a piece of vintage Hollywood from 1940 called Comrade X that ends with Clark Gable as a reporter for the Topeka Whatzit and Hedy Lamarr as Moscow street car conductor and ex-communist-true-believer named Theodore watching the Brooklyn Dodgers “murder” the Cincinnati Reds. It was a treat to transition instantly from that to the game-tying home run by Kansas City’s Alex Gordon that extended the action into the extra-inning afterlife where Chris Young, the tallest player in major league baseball, shut down the Mets for the last three innings.

What makes baseball stranger than fiction? For Princetonians, Game One had a Hollywood ending, given the fact that Chris Young graduated from the University in 2002 with a degree in politics after writing a senior thesis about racial stereotypes in baseball while pitching for the Hickory N.C. Crawdads the summer before his senior year. A hundred years ago, September 29, 1915, another Princeton man, Charles Bernard “King” Lear of the Cincinnati Reds, threw the last pitch of his brief Major League career against the Chicago Cubs. If you think I’m fantasizing, you can look up King Lear of Princeton online, and then check out the Poe Brothers. What other university on the planet can claim two athletes named Edgar Allan Poe and King Lear? And how about Moe Berg, the guy Casey Stengel called “the strangest man ever to play baseball” who graduated magna cum laude from Princeton in modern languages and after 15 seasons in the majors became a spy for the O.S.S. during World War II.

Here’s Hemingway

You get a midwesterner’s perspective on World Series baseball in Ernest Hemingway’s short, posthumously published piece, “Crossing the Mississippi,” which begins on “the Kansas City train” with Nick Adams thinking about the World Series in New York and “of Happy Felsch’s home run in the first game … the white dot of the ball on its far trajectory toward the green fence at center field … and the exulting roar from the spectators as the ball landed in a knot of scrambling fans in the open bleachers.” That’s the same Happy Felsch who is walking beside J.D. Salinger and Joe Jackson in Shoeless Joe’s final field-of-dreams mirage. Baseball surfaces again in the conversation between Nick and Bill in “The Three Day Blow,” from Hemingway’s first collection, In Our Time (1925). It’s October, “the best time of year” and Nick is saying he’d like to see the World Series and wondering if “the Cards will ever win a pennant …. Gee, they’d go crazy’” — which happened a year later when the Cards beat the Murderers Row Yankees in the 1926 World Series, thanks to the Game 7 heroics of Grover Cleveland Alexander. Speaking of Hollywood endings, “Old Pete” was played by Ronald Reagan in 1952’s The Winning Team. Flash forward to 1985, three years after Shoeless Joe was published, Reagan was president and the Kansas City Royals were world champions at the Cardinals’ expense in a Series that turned on the most infamous blown call in baseball history. Now here they are again. As Curly sings in Oklahoma, “Everything’s like a dream in Kansas City/It’s better than a magic lantern show.” And the Royals “have gone about as fer as they could go.”

And Where’s Salinger?

With only two months left in 2015, the year that was to mark the end of the five-decades-and-counting wait for new work by J.D. Salinger, the time is right for some late-inning literary heroics. Here on the darkling plain of literature’s field of dreams, it’s the bottom of the ninth, the game’s on the line, we need a pitcher with magic stuff or a hitter with a magic bat, or both in one as in the stoopball feats of Seymour Glass, the character at the heart of Salinger’s later work. As described in Seymour: An Introduction, a stoopball home run was scored “only when the ball sailed just high and hard enough to strike the wall of the building across the street without being caught on the bounce-off.” Seymour “scored a home run nearly every time he was up,” for instead of letting fly “with a hard sidearm motion” like everyone else, he “faced the crucial area and threw straight down at it … and the ball zoomed back over his head … straight for the bleachers as it were.”

But where is Salinger? Who’s blocking his way to the field that his many readers have built for him? With the ever-patient, ever-expectant crowd waiting for an announcement explaining the delay, why is the PA system silent? Why in all this time, five years and counting, have we had no word from his heirs about the unpublished work? We’re into extra innings. When will we finally get the promised long relief we need? Where’s the closer of our dreams?