The Essential W. P. Kinsella

by W. P. Kinsella

  The year after Annie and I were married, the year we first rented this farm, I dug Annie’s garden for her; dug it by hand, stepping a spade into the soft black soil, ruining my salesman’s hands. After I finished it rained, an Iowa spring rain as soft as spray from a warm hose. The clods of earth I had dug seemed to melt until the garden leveled out, looking like a patch of black ocean. It was near noon on a gentle Sunday when I walked out to that garden. The soil was soft and my shoes disappeared as I plodded until I was near the centre. There I knelt, the soil cool on my knees. I looked up at the low grey sky; the rain had stopped and the only sound was the surrounding trees dripping fragrantly. Suddenly I thrust my hands wrist-deep into the snuffy-black earth. The air was pure. All around me the clean smell of earth and water. Keeping my hands buried I stirred the earth with my fingers and I knew I loved Iowa as much as a man could love a piece of earth.

  When I came back to the house Annie stopped me at the door, made me wait on the verandah, then hosed me down as if I were a door with too many handprints on it, while I tried to explain my epiphany. It is very difficult to describe an experience of religious significance while you are being sprayed with a garden hose by a laughing, loving woman.

  “What happened to the sun?” Shoeless Joe says to me, waving his hand toward the banks of floodlights that surround the park.

  “Only stadium in the big leagues that doesn’t have them is Wrigley Field,” I say. “The owners found that more people could attend night games. They even play the World Series at night now.”

  Joe purses his lips, considering.

  “It’s harder to see the ball, especially at the plate.”

  “When there are breaks they usually go against the ballplayers, right? But I notice you’re three for three so far,” I add, looking down at his uniform, the only identifying marks a large S with an O in the top crook, an X in the bottom, and an American flag with 48 stars on his left sleeve near the elbow.

  Joe grins. “I’d play for the Devil’s own team just for the touch of a baseball. Hell, I’d play in the dark if I had to.”

  I want to ask about that day in December, 1951. If he’d lasted another few years things might have been different. There was a move afoot to have his record cleared, but it died with him. I wanted to ask, but my instinct told me not to. There are things it is better not to know.

  It is one of those nights when the sky is close enough to touch, so close that looking up is like seeing my own eyes reflected in a rain barrel. I sit in the bleacher just outside the left-field fence. I clutch in my hand a hot dog with mustard, onions and green relish. The voice of the crowd roars in my ears like the sea. Chords of the “Star-Spangled Banner” and “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” float across the field. A Coke bottle is propped against my thigh, squat, greenish, the ice-cream-haired elf grinning conspiratorially from the cap.

  Below me in left field, Shoeless Joe Jackson glides over the plush velvet grass, silent as a jungle cat. He prowls and paces, crouches ready to spring as, nearly 300 feet away, the ball is pitched. At the sound of the bat he wafts in whatever direction is required as if he were on ball bearings.

  Then the intrusive sound of a screen door slamming reaches me, and I blink and start. I recognize it as the sound of the door to my house and, looking into the distance, I can see a shape that I know is my daughter toddling down the back steps. Perhaps the lights or the crowd has awakened her and she has somehow eluded Annie. I judge the distance to the steps. I am just to the inside of the foul pole which is exactly 330 feet from home plate. I tense. Karin will surely be drawn to the lights and the emerald dazzle of the infield. If she touches anything, I fear it will all disappear, perhaps forever. Then as if she senses my discomfort she stumbles away from the lights, walking in the ragged fringe of darkness well outside the third-base line. She trails a blanket behind her, one tiny fist rubbing a sleepy eye. She is barefoot and wears a white flannelette nightgown covered in an explosion of daisies.

  She climbs up the bleacher, alternating a knee and a foot on each step, and crawls into my lap, silently, like a kitten. I hold her close and wrap the blanket around her feet. The play goes on; her innocence has not disturbed the balance.

  “What is it?” she says shyly, her eyes indicating that she means all that she sees.

  “Just watch the left fielder,” I say. “He’ll tell you all you ever need to know about a baseball game. Watch his feet as the pitcher accepts the sign and gets ready to pitch. A good left fielder knows what pitch is coming and he can tell from the angle of the bat where the ball is going to be hit and, if he’s good, how hard.”

  I look down at Karin. She cocks one sky-blue eye at me, wrinkling her nose, then snuggles into my chest the index finger of her right hand tracing tiny circles around her nose.

  The crack of the bat is sharp as the yelp of a kicked cur. Shoeless Joe whirls, takes five loping strides directly toward us, turns again, reaches up, and the ball smacks into his glove. The final batter dawdles in the on-deck circle.

  “Can I come back again?” Joe asks.

  “I built this left field for you. It’s yours any time you want to use it. They play 162 games a season now.”

  “There are others,” he says. “If you were to finish the infield, why, old Chick Gandil could play first base, and we’d have the Swede at shortstop and Buck Weaver at third.” I can feel his excitement rising. “We could stick McMullin in at second, and Cicotte and Lefty Williams would like to pitch again. Do you think you could finish the centre field? It would mean a lot to Happy Felsch.”

  “Consider it done,” I say, hardly thinking of the time, the money, the backbreaking labour it entails. “Consider it done,” I say again, then stop suddenly as an idea creeps into my brain like a runner inching off first base.

  “I know a catcher,” I say. “He never made the majors, but in his prime he was good. Really good. Played Class B ball in Florida and California . . .”

  “We could give him a try,” says Shoeless Joe. “You give us a place to play and we’ll look at your catcher.”

  I swear the stars have moved in close enough to eavesdrop as I sit in this single rickety bleacher that I built with my unskilled hands, looking down at Shoeless Joe Jackson. A breath of clover travels on the summer wind. Behind me, just yards away, brook water plashes softly in the darkness, a frog shrills, fireflies dazzle the night like red pepper. A petal falls.

  “God, what an outfield,” he says. “What a left field.” He looks up at me and I look down at him. “This must be heaven,” he says.

  “No. It’s Iowa,” I reply automatically. But then I feel the night rubbing softly against my face like cherry blossoms; look at the sleeping girlchild in my arms, her small hand curled around one of my fingers; think of the fierce warmth of the woman waiting for me in the house; inhale the fresh-cut grass smell that seems locked in the air like permanent incense, and listen to the drone of the crowd, as below me Shoeless Joe Jackson tenses, watching the angle of the distant bat for a clue as to where the ball will be hit.

  “I think you’re right, Joe,” I say, but softly enough not to disturb his concentration.

  Where It Began: Shoeless Joe

  W. P. Kinsella

  The book came first. Actually, the story came first. I wrote a twenty-page short story that eventually became chapter one of my novel Shoeless Joe. The story was published in an anthology, and a young editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin in Boston, Larry Kessenich, read not the story but a review of the anthology in Publishers Weekly. On the strength of that, he wrote to me at Desolate U. in Alberta, where I was teaching bonehead English, to suggest that if the story was part of a novel, he wanted to see it, and if it wasn’t, it should be.

  I wrote back to say I would need guidance, as I had published four collections of short stories but had never written a publishable novel. We worked well together, and Shoeless Joe was just like a baby—it took nine months. I wrote it under the title “The Kidnapping of J. D. Salin
ger.” Houghton Mifflin chose the title “Shoeless Joe,” though they considered “Dreamfield.” When finished, it was awarded the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and was published in 1982.

  Shoeless Joe was optioned by a small independent movie company that kept it in development for two years before the option expired. Paramount Pictures then optioned it and hired Phil Alden Robinson to write the screenplay. Phil was absolutely in love with my book and kept in touch all through the adaptation—though I had no input, nor would I have wanted any. Phil explained that there was no way to fit a three-hundred-page novel into an hour-and-forty-minute movie. He explained that marvelous characters like Eddie Scissions had to be cut, and that time had to be telescoped in many sequences.

  I replied that to me, writing a novel was akin to a baker baking a loaf of bread: So long as the buyers pay for the bread, they were free to do with it as they chose. If they made dainty sandwiches, fine. If they fed it to their gerbils, fine. I realized that most books optioned for movies became gerbil food. I’ve never understood authors who are proprietary with their work, fighting any changes of plot or character. All I care about is being properly paid.

  Field of Dreams was a stunning exception. I wept when I read the finished screenplay. “This is my own work doing this to me,” I said. “How can this happen?”

  When Paramount read the script, it said, “This is a wonderful script. However, it is a SMALL movie, and this year we are not making small movies.”

  A disappointed Phil Robinson asked, and was granted permission, to shop the screenplay to other studios.

  Eventually, Universal Studios took over the option.

  Robinson and his associates accepted a lower budget in return for Phil being hired to direct the movie, something he felt was essential to protect the integrity of the script. Even so, he had his battles. Studio executives, when they read the ending, loved the idea of father and son playing catch so much that they insisted on moving it forward and have father and son travel across America together, searching for writer Terence Mann and Moonlight Graham. Phil was appalled and stood his ground, pointing out that it would nullify the sweet surprise of the father’s resurrection. Executives reluctantly conceded the point.

  In the novel, the reclusive writer was the real life J. D. Salinger. Why was he not a character in the movie? The answer involves both moxie and cowardice. Houghton Mifflin had their lawyers analyze the manuscript word by word. The lawyers said to the effect that “the only thing Salinger could sue for was under a little-known definition of libel called ‘false light.’” They went on to say that in order to advance his case, he would have to appear in court in person, something he definitely would not want, and he would have to say: “I have been portrayed in this novel as a kindly, loving, humorous individual. In reality, I am a surly son of a bitch who lives in a bunker on the side of a hill and shoots at tourists when they drive by my house. Therefore, I have been portrayed in a false light.”

  Houghton Mifflin’s lawyers did receive a grumbling letter from Salinger’s lawyers stating that he was outraged and offended to appear in the novel and would be very unhappy if it were transferred to other media. They didn’t say that he would do anything, just that he would be unhappy.

  The cowardice involved was that studio executives were afraid Salinger would launch a nuisance lawsuit just as the movie was being released, and it would cost them time and a lot of publicity money to get rid of it. The moxie appeared when the executives pointed out that on a good opening weekend, the movie would be seen by ten times the number of people who had read the book. The change would be noticed by only the literate few, people who are not valued by movie executives.

  For once, the movie people were right. Over the years, most people I have met have no idea that J. D. Salinger was the original reclusive author. Also, many who read the novel have no idea that Salinger was a real person, not my fictional creation.

  Why Ray Kinsella? The choice of name for my protagonist had little to do with me personally, and everything to do with Salinger. While researching the novel, I found that Salinger had used two characters named Kinsella in his fiction: Richard Kinsella, an annoying classmate in The Catcher in the Rye, and Ray Kinsella, in the short story “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All,” originally published in Mademoiselle magazine. I decided to name my character Ray Kinsella so he could turn up on Salinger’s doorstep and say, “I’m one of your fictional creations come to life, here to take you to a baseball game.”

  After scouting locations from New Mexico to Ontario, the movie was filmed near Dyersville, Iowa, primarily on Don Lansing’s farm. The movie site has become a major tourist attraction in Eastern Iowa. The Lansings have recently sold to a conglomerate, with ex-baseball great Wade Boggs as an investor.

  I spent a few days on the movie set. I am a person who stays in the background and observes, so few of the cast or crew knew I was there. Making movies requires tons of patience, which I don’t have. The endless setups, the persnickety lighting, the repetitive retakes are not something I can tolerate. My theory of movie making is you get two chances. If you screw up the first take, then you’d better get it right the second time. I’d always come in under budget if nothing else.

  I was present for the filming of the feed store scene, shot at an actual store in Dyersville. I sat just out of range of the cameras, finally was tired and completely bored after about eight takes, and went back to our motel. My wife and I were part of the audience at the PTA scene. We were trapped there for a full day of sweltering retakes, and we never appeared in the final cut.

  I met Kevin Costner and Amy Madigan, and Gaby Hoffmann, who played their daughter. The most interesting person I met and spent time with on the set was Hoffmann’s mother, Viva, the former Andy Warhol movie star of the 1960s. She was a charming, articulate woman who was also a writer and painter of note.

  When we were informed the movie was going ahead, we, of course, talked casting. We were informed they were recruiting Kevin Costner. I had never heard of Costner, so my choice for Ray Kinsella was Bo Svenson, who I thought looked a little like me and the imaginary Ray, and whose work I had admired in Walking Tall. I rented No Way Out and agreed that Kevin would be perfect for the part. James Earl Jones was the obvious choice for Terence Mann, and I was delighted when he was available.

  I am told that the Voice that speaks to Ray in the cornfield was, though not credited, Ed Harris, Amy Madigan’s husband.

  I loved the movie. Novels and movies are entirely different art forms. I don’t see how Phil Robinson could have done a better job of successfully transferring one to the other.

  How have things changed in the past twenty-five years since the release of the movie? Fathers and sons still bond playing catch, still attend baseball games together, still share warm and luminous memories of games and players gone but not forgotten.

  I have received letters from every part of the world, mainly from younger men, about how the ending of the movie affected them. Moved by those final scenes, men traveled, often thousands of miles, to take their fathers to baseball games, or just to have a catch in the backyard.

  When the movie went into wide release and came to my then-hometown of White Rock, British Columbia, I set up a table in the lobby of the local theater to sell books as the crowd exited. But before that, each evening, I stood at the back of the theater as Kevin Costner and Dwier Brown, Ray and John Kinsella, played catch; and as I did, I came to realize the absolute power of the great movie that Phil Robinson had created. For every night, one could hear the sniffling and snuffling of the audience, and the unabashed and unashamed tears that flowed as the universality of the father-son dynamic touched even the most indifferent hearts. I realized that my writing coupled with Phil Robinson’s genius had made that happen.

  Still, after twenty-five years, the saga that began with my recalling my own father’s recollections of a disgraced baseball player undeserving of his fate is not over; Field of Dreams the musical is out
there in the cosmos, ethereal as Brigadoon, lurking, waiting patiently, being groomed for the stages of the world.

  About the Author

  W. P. (William Patrick) Kinsella (1935–) was born in rural Alberta, Canada. Kinsella was homeschooled until the age of ten by his mother, Olive, through correspondence courses. He attended school for the first time when he and his parents moved to Edmonton. By the age of five he had already begun to write fantasy stories. His father John, a semiprofessional baseball player, instilled a passion for the game in his son. At fourteen, young Bill Kinsella won a YMCA writing contest with his short story, “Diamond Doom,” a tale of murder in a baseball stadium.

  As a young man, Kinsella had many occupations, including taxi driver, claims investigator, restaurant manager, and civil servant. In 1970, he decided to take creative writing courses at the University of Alberta, receiving a B.A. in 1974. He continued his education at the University of Iowa, receiving an M.F.A. from the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978. He taught at the University of Calgary from 1978 to 1983, until he began to write full time after the publication of Shoeless Joe.

  Baseball has had a lasting influence on Kinsella. In addition to his several baseball-related short-story collections, including The Last Pennant Before Armageddon and The Dixon Cornbelt League, Kinsella has written other baseball-related books, including The Iowa Baseball Confederacy, Magic Time, If Wishes Were Horses, and Butterfly Winter; two novels on prairie life during the Great Depression, Box Socials and The Winter Helen Dropped By; he edited Diamonds Forever: Reflections from the Field, the Dugout & the Bleachers, and he co-wrote Ichiro Dreams, a nonfiction book on the Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki.

  Kinsella has also earned critical acclaim for his satiric short-story collections that focus on the members of a fictionalized Native Canadian tribe from the Hobbema reservation in Alberta. These collections include Dance Me Outside (adapted for the CBC television series The Rez), The Fencepost Chronicles, Brother Frank’s Gospel Hour, and The Moccasin Telegraph. Kinsella’s characters, such as Silas Ermineskin and Frank Fencepost, provide a window into the difficult, frequently dark, yet also comedic juxtapositions between Native and Caucasian Canadian modern life. Kinsella was occasionally criticized for some of his portrayals, and once responded, “It’s the oppressed and the oppressor that I write about. The way that oppressed people survive is by making fun of the people who oppress them. That is essentially what my Indian stories are all about.”