dreaming baseball
Reviewed by Tim Morris, University of Texas at Arlington
JUNE 4, 2007 archive
James T. Farrell was more deeply affected by the Black Sox scandal than any other canonical American novelist. F. Scott Fitzgerald's invocation of "the faith of fifty million people" in The Great Gatsby (1925; NY: Scribner, 1995: 78) is oft-quoted, but tangential to that novel, as baseball was tangential to Fitzgerald's work. But Farrell was a teenage White Sox fan, an avid Chicago sandlot ballplayer in 1919. He grew up idolizing the White Sox of Eddie Cicotte, Eddie Collins, Buck Weaver (and Ring Lardner and Jack Keefe). Farrell's attitude toward baseball consisted of "a pronounced element of fantasy and a very heavy dosage of sentimentality ... all centered, of course, in the White Sox," as he says in My Baseball Diary (NY: A.S. Barnes, 1957: 94). But after the revelation that Sox players had conspired to fix the 1919 World Series, Farrell's "interest in baseball changed ... For years I had no favorite team. I was growing up, and this marked the end of my days of hero-worshiping baseball players" (108).
Farrell thought about the Black Sox intensely while compiling My Baseball Diary. That book includes chapters on "Clean Sox" Ray Schalk, Red Faber, and Eddie Collins, as well as a much-cited sympathetic interview with excommunicated infielder Buck Weaver. But the Black Sox chapters in My Baseball Diary give just a hint of Farrell's fascination with the 1919-20 Sox, a fascination that spilled over into two drafts and 1,500 manuscript pages of baseball fiction, written in 1957-58 -- fiction that Farrell never published.
Editors Ron Briley, Margaret Davidson, and James Barbour have taken Farrell's manuscripts and worked them into a 308-page novel that they call Dreaming Baseball (Farrell never got as far as titling the work). The novel as Farrell left it in 1958 was a roman à clef, because several principals from 1919 still survived. Half a century later, with no-one alive to offend, the editors have gone through and identified the real-life characters, supplying their true names.
Dreaming Baseball has no real plot. Its structure is that of chronicle. In the 1950s, a White Sox scout named Mickey Donovan hears that Buck Weaver has died. The news takes Mickey back to 1918-20, when he was a young member of the Sox. Mickey's transition from South Side Irish sandlot ballplayer to reserve infielder for the defending World Champions in the summer of 1918 is just barely plausible, but it gives Farrell a narrative fly on the wall who can tell the story of the pennant-winning 1919 season, the disastrous Series, and the acidic revelations of the Fix during the 1920 season.
The better Black Sox novels have centered on more central participants in the drama: Weaver himself in Harry Stein's Hoopla (1983), fixer Sport Sullivan in Brendan Boyd's Blue Ruin (1991), or even the ghost of Joe Jackson in W.P. Kinsella's Shoeless Joe (1982). Without such a character to interest the reader, Dreaming Baseball is doomed to a rather static presentation of the facts by a basically well-meaning, contented narrator who can do little but marvel at how wrong everything is going around him.
And at that, the Dreaming Baseball manuscripts prove to be fairly intractable. Even the editors' condensed, polished version is flaccid and verbose. Farrell seems to have composed the novel in the manner of film directors who compose by shooting ten times the footage they need. His original commercial editors passed on the manuscript; his present-day critical editors have done yeoman service in preserving and presenting Farrell's draft, but they are unable to breathe life into a story that the author failed to invigorate to begin with. In Dreaming Baseball we go over and over the same territory again and again, cycling back to try new approaches to material presented before.
Dreaming Baseball is a big disappointment. Even though My Baseball Diary is similarly formless and verbose, it features charming passages and vivid writing. One wants Dreaming Baseball to be just as good yet more sustained. But all we really see in this version are good reasons for editors to have rejected it back in the 1950s. At the risk of browbeating the poor book, I will quote from a near-random paragraph. Here is Mickey Donovan just before his initial tryout with the Sox:
Waking up on those summer mornings, those mornings of June, July, and August and thinking of the day ahead of you, of playing baseball and having that dream of your future so bright and shining in your own mind. And seeing that it was sunny outside and it was going to be another of those good days, and maybe laying in bed and closing my eyes and imagining. What wouldn't I give to have those days back. We never get our second chance. (71-72)
Unobjectionable sentiments, but lifeless writing. Farrell even at the height of his powers was a realist chronicler rather than a modernist prose poet. But he was an energetic chronicler. In the Dreaming Baseball material, energy is entirely lacking.
Farrell's failure to write a strong Black Sox novel is intriguing, however, not just in terms of his own career, but in terms of the literary history of baseball. Farrell wrote Dreaming Baseball in the midst of a considerable renaissance of baseball literature. In 1952 Bernard Malamud had made use of Black Sox myth to write the heavily symbolic The Natural. In 1954 Douglass Wallop had written an arch comedy about a Fix of anagogical dimensions, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant. In 1955 Eliot Asinof, who would go on to write the definitive history of the Black Sox (Eight Men Out, 1963), and who provides the foreword for Dreaming Baseball, published Man on Spikes. Asinof's novel, like Dreaming Baseball, treats a young prospect's disillusionment -- but makes fine use of multiple perspectives and elaborate narrative structure. Farrell uses neither symbolism nor comedy nor multiple reflector-characters to tell his story: he just lists one thing after another.
Perhaps most tellingly, the editors note, "Farrell also had not made up his mind about Donovan's diction, whether he speaks correctly, grammatically, or expresses himself in more informal, colloquial street language" (314). The editors regularize Mickey's language. But think what Farrell, who had a great ear for the vernacular, could have done if he had emulated the late Mark Harris. Harris, in The Southpaw (1953), Bang the Drum Slowly (1956), and A Ticket for a Seamstitch (1957), used a conventional first-person chronicle form -- but in the indelible voice of Henry Wiggen, one of the great narrator-characters of American realist fiction. What a shame that Farrell didn't give us a Mickey Donovan to compare with Henry Wiggen. Truly, as Mickey says, we never get our second chance.
Farrell, James T. Dreaming Baseball. Edited by Ron Briley, Margaret Davidson, and James Barbour. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. vii + 316 pp. $28 cloth. 978-0-87338-897-9.
Copyright © 2007 by Tim Morris.