Dreaming Baseball (review)

Reviewed by: Dreaming Baseball Peter Carino James T. Farrell. Dreaming Baseball. Preface by Eliot Asinof. Afterword by Ron Briley. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2007. 316 pp. Cloth, $28.00. Author of more than twenty-seven novels and dozens of short stories and essays, James T. Farrell railed until his dying day against critics who labeled him simply "the author of Studs Lonigan." The Lonigan trilogy is, for better or worse, Farrell's single masterwork. As a mainstay of twentieth-century realism, it remains in print, made the Modern Library's list of best one-hundred novels, and continues to uphold Farrell's reputation in academic circles. While not a superstar of American letters, à la Hemingway, Faulkner, or Fitzgerald, Farrell is nevertheless second-team all-canonical along with fellow realists of his generation such as Jack Conroy and Nelson Algren. Readers of baseball literature likely know Farrell as the author of My Baseball Diary, a collection of essays, short stories, and brief sections of his novels that collect his observations and opinions as a lifelong devotee of the game. While the posthumous publication of Dreaming Baseball may not be enough to elevate Farrell's reputation beyond his status as "the author of Studs Lonigan," the novel will certainly interest Farrell scholars, baseball literature scholars, and fans looking for a good read. Written in the late 1950s, Dreaming Baseball never found a publisher at that time. The manuscript has been in the Farrell collection at the University of Pennsylvania Library and was recently brought to light by Kent State University [End Page 134] Press under the editorial hand of frequent NINE contributor Ron Briley and university professors James Barbour and Margaret Davidson. Briley's afterword tells the story of the manuscript fortuitously coming to his attention and his subsequent collaboration with Barbour and Davidson to edit it for publication. Briley also explains how he and his colleagues had to collate two competing beginnings in the three manuscript copies marked by Farrell simply "Baseball Novel," standardize usage and punctuation among the three, and then devise an apt title. The editorial work of Briley and his co-editors pays off in a readable novel with a title wisely chosen from an evocative phrase recurring throughout the book. Dreaming Baseball is at once Black Sox novel, memoir of an old ballplayer, and maturation tale. The novel opens with fictional ex-ballplayer Mickey Donovan working at a baseball camp in Florida in the 1950s, specifically January 31, 1956, the day of Buck Weaver's death. A reporter shows up to interview Donovan, who was a bench-warming hopeful in his first full year in big-league ball during the notorious season of 1919 when, as is well known, eight White Sox players conspired to throw the World Series. This uncomfortable visit becomes Donovan's baseball madeleine, triggering his memories of breaking into the game right out of a Chicago high school at the end of the 1918 season before joining the Sox for good after a mid-season call-up in the following fateful year. The novel goes on to chronicle Donovan's career, focusing primarily on the years 1919 through 1921. Unlike later (but earlier published) Black Sox novels such as Hoopla! and Blue Ruin, Dreaming Baseball does not take the revisionist view of the scandal, which largely sees the players' throwing of the Series as a labor action protesting the skinflint operations of Charles Comiskey, Major League Baseball in general, and an increasingly avaricious cultural climate on the eve of the Roaring Twenties. While there is much sympathy for Buck Weaver, Farrell, a boyhood White Sox fan, ultimately condemns the action of the players. He characterizes Joe Jackson as ignorant and easily led but nevertheless guilty of wrongdoing. Cicotte, though Farrell and his narrator understand his plight as an underpaid aging star with a family, must pay for his sins, and as in most accounts of the scandal Gandil and Risberg are the evil ringleaders. Farrell and Donovan definitely recognize that Comiskey was cheap but otherwise see him as a man who treated his team well. The strongest indictment of the Old Roman from both author and narrator is that he did...

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