W.P. Kinsella- An Appreciation

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.