Imagining Baseball: America's Pastime and Popular Culture by David McGimpsey (review)

HUMANITIES 295 capital the author brings to the text. Greg Gatenby, who has been the artistic director of the International Festival of Authors for the last twenty-five years, has made his life=s work by drawing connections between writers and place. He is a fine gossip who clearly loves the fabric of the city and a good story, so as we walk along we pick up fascinating details about the incredible traffic in literary figures that has moved through the city for over a hundred and fifty years. In his hands Toronto becomes an important place; like Scadding and Arthur, Gatenby creates a cultural landscape where few believed one had existed. For all the pleasure it gives, however, the book has some very apparent drawbacks. The guide is cumbersome to carry and its small print makes it difficult to read in the open air. Present addresses are not disclosed, so one circles upper Admiral Road without ever being alerted to the closeness of Her Presence. The book is also curiously silent on some important literary matters. There is very little here about the class and ethnic development of the neighbourhoods themselves and one needs to supplement the guide with James Lemon=s history of the city in order to parse out what living in a certain area might mean for the literary concerns of these writers. As a literary guide, this book is also far too literal. It is filled with wonderful detail about the lives of these writers, but we see very little of those elements of the city that figure so prominently in the cultural production of Canadian literature. The imaginative dimension of the city of Toronto is by any measure enormous. Dennis Lee found cadence at Casa Loma; Michael Ondaatje drew upon the construction of a series of public monuments to fashion a proletarian counter-history of the city. The guide would have been enriched enormously were such places enfolded into our literary tours. (WILLIAM WESTFALL) David McGimpsey. Imagining Baseball: America=s Pastime and Popular Culture Indiana University Press. xii, 194. US $29.95 In the final chapter of his study of baseball fiction and film, David McGimpsey recalls a 1995 episode of the television series >Northern Exposure.= A certain Chris has completed his MA thesis on baseball. He is to be examined by two >professors traveling on an outreach program.= The text at issue is >Casey at the Bat.= One examiner deploys the smart deconstructive weapons of the 1990s >culture wars.= The other, enlisted under the banner of William Bennett=s army, defends >standards.= Apparently closer in spirit to the former, Chris presents baseball as an >antiphiliopietistic metaphor for America=s role in post-Cold War geopolitics.= McGimpsey wryly describes this as a project he fears >adequately describes my fourth chapter.= Well might he worry. This is not to say that McGimpsey=s always interesting study lacks merit or that >baseball fiction= is infra dig. If baseball is no longer the most popular 296 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 of American spectator sports, its mythological clout, rivalled by no other sport, fully merits not only literary representation but literary criticism. In Canada, where McGimpsey grew up and whence issue the novels of W.P. Kinsella (discussed in this book), baseball may lack the full measure of its American >clout,= but it can still dominate warm-weather sports pages. And sometimes cold-weather classrooms B as I discovered when a literary criticism seminar insisted on discussing a recently deceased >Yankee Clipper.= Nor was it a digression: we were supposed to discuss archetypes. In his effort to account for the strength of baseball=s grip on the imagination, McGimpsey inevitably calls on the classic topoi of cultural studies: race, gender, and class. Now it is, of course, a sport that has had special appeal for writers and filmmakers, but on the imagination these topoi are pitiless. Little is left standing of it but nostalgia, sentimentality, and a Luddism (hostility to a techno-culture symbolized by the National Football League) routinely mobilized by a game too often imagined as rural America=s contribution to the pastoral tradition. McGimpsey proceeds by a thematic analysis of numerous novels (often unknown to...