A year and a half ago, I read W.P. Kinsella’s novel The Iowa Baseball Confederacy and was utterly knocked out by it. At the time, I remember thinking that it was even better thanShoeless Joe, which is terrific and better-known. I hadn’t reread Joe for years at that point, though, and I remember thinking that I should dig up my copy and reread it for comparison. And because I’d enjoy reading it, of course, because it’s a wonderful book.
So, after letting it sit for a few months to give myself a fresh perspective, I went to my shelves. It turns out that I don’t own a copy of Shoeless Joe. This came as a surprise to me. Surely I must have bought one at some library sale or other, or from a used book store, or even paid actual money for a new copy. In fact, I suspect I have passed up the opportunity to buy a used copy for half a buck because of course I already have a copy. I mean, really. How could I not own Shoeless Joe?
Well, I don’t. And then I promptly forgot about my interest in obtaining a copy, so nothing happened for a year and a half. And then I happened to see a copy at my library, so I checked it out and took it home and read it. So I still don’t own a copy. But at least now, I know that I don’t own a copy, so I will probably buy one at some point. Right?
Oh, and to answer my question, I like Joe very very much indeed, but I think Iowa is even better. This may be because I can’t help spending some of my energy when reading Joe thinking about the film Field of Dreams, and the way that they took the book and made a very different film about very different things out of most of the same events. And how I had remembered the World’s Oldest Cub, and that he was taken out of the movie, but I had forgotten how important he is not only to Joe’s plot but to the book’s themes and mood, to the idea of investing baseball (or whatever) with our dreams and our soul, how we create stories of our lives out of those dreams, and how we instinctively recoil from our parts in other people’s stories, and how important it is and can be to take up those parts whole-heartedly, to love people not only as they are but how they see themselves.
We are creatures of myth, us humans. Our stories—the Black Sox, Catcher in the Rye, the family farmer and the greedy banker, the small-town doctor, the separated twins, the absent father, the reclusive author, the crazy old coot, and Shoeless Joe—are like the air. We can’t breathe without them. And they are so easily poisoned. And so easily made sweet.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.