I did not read all of the works of William Patrick (W.P.)
Kinsella, the Canadian author who took his own life by assisted suicide at the
age of 81 on September 16. In fact, except
for the occasional re-reading of one of several short stories, I hadn’t read
anything from him since 1996’s If Wishes
Were Horses. Following the release
of that novel, Kinsella was injured by a van while walking, and for the rest of
his life found the concentration, and the desire, necessary for his writing
hard to come by. After 1997, he would
not release another novel—though he continued to publish short stories—until 2011.
Like most of Kinsella’s American audience, I came to his
works through the 1989 movie Field of
Dreams, based on Kinsella’s novel Shoeless
Joe, itself an extension of his earlier short story “Shoeless Joe Jackson
Comes to Iowa.” I remember seeing the
movie when I was 18 and being struck by the power of the storytelling. References to old ballplayers were fine trivia
points, even when the screenplay got details wrong, and added meat to the
story.
This led to the book…and then to others he had written. Then I was primarily reading his baseball
stories. Baseball is a sort of American
mythology. James Earl Jones’ character
is right when he tells Ray Kinsella that America has grown up with it; it was
born, or at least came into its own, in our rebirth after the Civil War.
Kinsella, a Canadian, didn’t have much to say about America,
except indirectly, but he was the bard of baseball’s mythology. Having earned his MFA at the University of
Iowa, he had at least a passing acquaintance with the American “heartland,” and
a feel for the rhythms of small town life that served him well in his writing. For Kinsella the baseball diamond was the
world rendered in miniature, encompassing its possibilities. The two were tethered, indeed in several of
Kinsella’s stories characters are seen to observe that, in theory, baseball
diamonds extend to infinity, so all the world is contained in them.
Because of this anything that could happen, that might even
be remotely possible, did happen. A left
field created out of an Iowa cornfield could summon the shade of “Shoeless” Joe
Jackson. Armageddon could logically
hinge on one pitch, in which the Chicago Cubs either win or lose the National
League pennant. The New York Giants of
the 1950s could be a collection of top-notch ballplayers and autodidacts,
speaking an average of three languages each, allowing a fourteen-year-old
stand-in for the author with an unerring eye to pinch hit. A cabal of devoted baseball
fans, waiting for the end of the 1981 strike could, one square foot at a time,
replace the artificial in Kansas City’s stadium.
He wrote of games that went on for thousands of innings, in
which gods and various otherwise inanimate objects joined; of twins who played
catch in the womb, one destined to be a pitcher and the other a catcher; of
baseball dreamers and schemers.
Sometimes baseball was the focus, sometimes it was the backdrop. In his stories it provided order, and
occasional tragedy, to the lives of characters, to the cosmos itself.
In another cycle of stories he wrote about the lives of Cree
Indians on a reservation in Alberta.
These spoke to me less, but they were warm and humorous even in
tragedy. And in them, baseball was never
far off. I know he was criticized for
appropriation—something Kinsella derided as a creation of East Coast academics—of
First Nations’ voices, but I can’t help enjoying them for their humanity, and
the respect with which he treated their lives.
Kinsella, at the end, had suffered a long time from
diabetes. Most of his last years were
apparently spent playing on-line Scrabble,
having apparently been an avid tournament player. Due to complications he sought, and received, medical assistance
in ending his life. This year has been
one noted for its deaths of public figures.
I’m not surprised by it, and expect next year to be busier; a generation
of stars, many hard-living, who were idols to children of the 1960s and 1970s
is getting long in the tooth, and the actuarial projections must be grim.
W.P. Kinsella wasn’t one of those, but his is another loss
in a year of them. Stories about
baseball aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I can imagine many people walking
away from one of his works wondering what the fuss is about. But his style is hard to deny. He wrote touching and often funny stories
about mostly real people, usually facing weird situations on or near a baseball
diamond (of course, everything that happens happens on a baseball diamond, if you remember). He increased my appreciation for baseball. I think of something from one of his stories
almost every time I come near the game, and it usually makes me smile. A tremendous gift, that, and one that leaves
the world a little poorer for its loss.
