Shoeless Joe, the Bambino, the Big Bankroll, and the Jazz Age

Most of you have read Shoeless Joe, a novel of magical realism by Bill Kinsella, whom I knew a little bit thirty years ago, before he finished that book and before I became a historian of the game we both so clearly love. Shoeless Joe is a novel about fathers and sons, the baseball of now and then, and guilt, and hope. It is about the transformative power of fable and dream.

Bernard Malamud is another fellow whose baseball novel about sin and redemption, The Natural, is, like Kinsella’s, more widely known through the film adapted from it. It was Malamud who once observed, “The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.” Yes indeed. This creates a problem no less for the novelist than for the historian. We crave realism not only from game accounts but also from imaginative renderings of an activity that itself is not real. Play, like play acting, is metaphoric action.

Like a novelist who ventures to write about theater or film, the writer tackling baseball always starts off at one remove from reality, and is always playing catch-up. Baseball is not about baseball, at least not entirely, even if you’re playing it. For those watching it or thinking about it or reading about it, this great game is about past glories, power transference, surrogated combat, and unconscious contests of generation and gender.

Yet another author, one who with The Great Gatsby may have written the best of all American novels, used baseball as a symbol of all that was good about our nation, so that he could depict how even an icon could be stained. My own book, too, Baseball in the Garden of Eden, deals with the game’s history and legend and good and evil—the title gives that away rather blatantly—but it is a work of history, not fiction. All the same, it raises issues that one may confront with Shoeless Joe and in one’s observations of what we uncertainly call “real life.” What is real, and what is made up? Can we shape or even alter the facts of history to make for a better story? Can our imaginations create a desired reality? If we do so, are we artists of our own lives, architects of legend, or mere liars, no matter how lofty our intentions might be?

Shoeless Joe’s ballpark in the cornfield speaks to us as a symbol of paradise lost, when rural innocents played ball for the love of the game, when distant fathers could toss a ball with sons perplexed by real life. But baseball’s idyllic past, like America’s and like our own, for each of us, is not history; it is a pretty story agreed upon. Not a lie, exactly, but a sustaining myth.

What might possibly join The Great Gatsby, Shoeless Joe, and my little book? Let’s look to the Jazz Age, the Black Sox scandal, and the religion of baseball—complete with a creation myth, a fall from grace, an expulsion from paradise, and an eternal longing for a dimly recalled golden age.

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald—an all-American boy from St. Paul, Minnesota—drifted east with his family’s shifting fortunes and in 1913 entered Princeton University. Graduating with the class of 1917, he went to New York, determined to become a writer. Two years later, after a despairing, impoverished return to bunk in his parents’ home, he linked up with Scribners, a prestigious house, to publish This Side of Paradise, his first novel. Appearing in 1920, it portrayed a generation that, drained of all illusion by the horrific casualties, was heedless in its pursuit of pleasure.

The novel was a great success and launched his magazine career, where the real money was back then. Short fiction in Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, and other story papers often fetched five thousand dollars—a handsome annual salary for a white-collar worker and four times that of the common working man.

In 1922, Fitzgerald published a collection of stories titled Tales of the Jazz Age...