Shoeless Joe

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by W.P. Kinsella


First Published: 1982
224 Pages
 

Ray Kinsella, sitting on the porch of his Iowa farm one evening, hears the voice of a ghostly baseball announcer. It speaks to him the famous line, "If you build It, he will come." Needing no further explanation, Kinsella visualizes the ball field he is being asked to create in the middle of his field of corn. The voice will speak only two more things to Ray: "Ease his pain" and "Go the distance," and yet the dreaming, idealistic man knows just what it is he has to do. Digging up his corn to build a ballpark will inspire the return of baseball legend Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man whose reputation was forever tarnished by the scandalous 1919 World Series. Thus begins Shoeless Joe, the award-winning novel by W.P. Kinsella which also inspired Kevin Costner's exceedingly popular film, Field of Dreams.

W.P. Kinsella has been called a great writer of baseball novels, but this is misleading. While his works all evince a love for the game he grew up watching, Kinsella doesn't merely treat baseball as a subject in itself. Rather, he uses it as a metaphor, a way to talk about things like innocence, belief and, perhaps above all, America. Shoeless Joe is a parable about one of the most fundamental of American ideals, beginning anew. Ray Kinsella, by plowing up a large section of his farmland, is both building and rebuilding, creating what had never been there and re-creating what had come before. The land was once a place where the sins of the old could be expunged and a new vision realized, and this kind of renewal is what Kinsella's quixotic creation brings about.

W.P. Kinsella's novel is perhaps most importantly a story of personal renewal through redress of the sins and trauma of the past. The announcer says, "Ease his pain," which Ray intuitively understands to mean the pain of the great reclusive American writer, J.D. Salinger. Salinger, abraded by the publicity garnered by the worldwide success of his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, has withdrawn into almost total solitude, refusing to publish any more of his writings. Salinger is, along with Shoeless Joe, an American icon whose notoriety has spoiled something that was once was pure and passionate. Baseball, and what it represents, will help ease his pain.

The field will also allow Shoeless Joe, a legend whose name, the book suggests, was unfairly besmirched by the infamous "Black Sox" scandal, to return to the game he loves But more importantly, the ghost of Shoeless Joe is a link between Ray Kinsella and his father, a man from whom he has been estranged for many years. And thus the book is finally a story about Kinsella's own renewal, and the opportunity the field provides for him to face his ghosts.

W.P. Kinsella

Canadian author W.P. Kinsella is somewhat of a late bloomer. Born in 1935 on a farm in Northern Alberta, Kinsella didn't receive his B.A. in creative writing until the age of 39. Before that he held a series of odd jobs, including working as a taxi driver, selling insurance, and managing a restaurant. He began writing short fiction at the age of 17 but didn't see public success until the publication of 1979's Dance Me Outside. He became a sensation with 1982's Shoeless Joe, a novel about an Iowa man who digs up his cornfield in order to build a baseball park. The novel, an elaboration of his short story, "Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa," won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship and was made into the incredibly popular film Field of Dreams (1989). Kinsella greatly admired the film, although his other experiences with Hollywood have been less than positive.

 

Many of Kinsella's works focus on baseball, the game he loves and grew up watching. Other works of his include The Thrill of the Grass (1985), The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1996), and Magic Time (2001). His other great subject is Native Americans, the focus of his novels The Moccasin Telegraph (1985) and The Fencepost Chronicles (1987). W.P. Kinsella has taught creative writing at the University of Calgary for many years and lives in Canada.

Born On: 
Sat, 1935-05-25
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Field of Dreams
My father said he saw him years later playing in a tenth-rate commercial league in a textile town in Carolina, wearing shoes and an assumed name. "He'd put on fifty pounds and the spring was gone from his step in the outfield, but he could still hit. Oh, how that man could hit. No one has ever been able to hit like Shoeless Joe." Three years ago at dusk on a spring evening, when the sky was a robbin's-egg blue and the wind as soft as a day-old chick, I was sitting on the verandah of my farm home in eastern Iowa when a voice very clearly said to me, "If you build it, he will come." The voice was that of a ballpark announcer. As he spoke, I instantly envisioned the finished product I knew I was being asked to conceive. I could see the dark, squarish speakers, like ancient sailors' hats, attached to aluminum-painted light standards that glowed down into a baseball field, my present position being directly behind home plate. In reality, all anyone else could see out there in front of me was a tattered lawn of mostly dandelions and quack grass that petered out at the edge of a cornfield perhaps fifty yards from the house. Anyone else was my wife Annie, my daughter Karin, a corn-colored collie named Carmeletia Pope, and a cinnamon and white guinea pig named Junior who ate spaghetti and sang each time the fridge door opened. Karin and the dog were not quite two years old. "If you build it, he will come," the announcer repeated in scratchy Middle American, as if his voice had been recorded on an old 78-r.p.m. record. A three-hour lecture or a 500-page guide book could not have given me clearer directions: Dimensions of ballparks jumped over and around me like fleas, cost figures for light standards and floodlights whirled around my head like the moths that dusted against the porch light above me. That was all the instruction I ever received: two announcements and a vision of a baseball field. I sat on the verandah until the satiny dark was complete. A few curdly clouds striped the moon, and it became so silent I could hear my eyes blink. Our house is one of those massive old farm homes, square as a biscuit box with a sagging verandah on three sides. The floor of the verandah slopes so that marbles, baseballs, tennis balls, and ball bearings all accumulate in a corner like a herd of cattle clustered with their backs to a storm. On the north verandah is a wooden porch swing where Annie and I sit on humid August nights, sip lemonade from teary glasses, and dream. When I finally went to bed, and after Annie inched into my arms in that way she has, like a cat that you suddenly find sound asleep in your lap, I told her about the voice and I told her that I knew what it wanted me to do. "Oh love," she said, "if it makes you happy you should do it," and she found my lips with hers. I shivered involuntarily as her tongue touched mine. Annie: She has never once called me crazy. Just before I started the first landscape work, as I stood looking out at the lawn and the cornfield, wondering how it could look so different in daylight, considering the notion of accepting it all as a dream and abandoning it, Annie appeared at my side and her arm circled my waist. She leaned against me and looked up, cocking her head like one of the red squirrels that scamper along the power lines from the highway to the house. "Do it, love," she said as I looked down at her, that slip of a girl with hair the color of cayenne pepper and at least a million freckles on her face and arms, that girl who lives in blue jeans and T-shirts and at twenty-four could still pass for sixteen. I thought back to when I first knew her. I came to Iowa to study. She was the child of my landlady. I heard her one afternoon outside my window as she told her girl friends, "When I grow up I'm going to marry . . ." and she named me. The others were going to be nurses, teachers, pilots, or movie stars, but Annie chose me as her occupation. Eight years later we were married. I chose willingly, lovingly, to stay in Iowa. Eventually I rented this farm, then bought it, operating it one inch from bankruptcy. I don't seem meant to farm, but I want to be close to this precious land, for Annie and me to be able to say, "This is ours." Now I stand ready to cut into the cornfield, to chisel away a piece of our livelihood to use as dream currency, and Annie says, "Oh, love, if it makes you happy you should do it." I carry her words in the back of my mind, stored the way a maiden aunt might wrap a brooch, a remembrance of a longlost love. I understand how hard that was for her to say and how it got harder as the project advanced. How she must have told her family not to ask me about the baseball field I was building, because they stared at me dumb-eyed, a row of silent, thickset peasants with red faces. Not an imagination among them except to forecast the wrath of God that will fall on the heads of pagans such as I. "If you build it, he will come." He, of course, was Shoeless Joe Jackson.