W. P. KINSELLA

Born: May 25, 1935

Birthplace: Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Other literary forms

W. P. Kinsella (KIHN-sehl-lah) is best known for his novels, including Shoeless Joe (1982) and The Iowa Baseball Confederacy (1986), which combine baseball with fantasy. Shoeless Joe is the basis of the popular 1989 film Field of Dreams. Because of its use in the film, Kinsella’s line “If you build it, he will come” has become a catchphrase. Kinsella has also written poetry, plays, and the nonfiction A Series for the World (1992), about the 1992 World Series between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Atlanta Braves.

Achievements

W. P. Kinsella is the recipient of many Canadian literary honors, including the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Canadian Authors Association Prize for Fiction, the Alberta Achievement Award for Excellence in Literature, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humor, and the Canadian Book Publishers’ Author-of-the-Year Award. In 1993, he was made an Officer of the Order of Canada; in 2005, he was awarded the Order of British Columbia; and in 2009, Kinsella was received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement Award.

Biography

William Patrick Kinsella was born May 25, 1935, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. His father was a contractor; his mother, a printer. An only child, Kinsella spent his early years in a log cabin near Lac Ste.-Anne, sixty miles northwest of Edmonton. He rarely saw other children and completed grades one through four by correspondence. His parents, grandmother, and aunt read to one another and told stories, and Kinsella began writing fantasies when he was five or six. The family moved to Edmonton when he was ten, and his father, a former semiprofessional baseball player, began taking him to baseball games. In the eighth grade, Kinsella won a prize for “Diamond Doom,” a baseball mystery. At eighteen, he published his first story, a science-fiction tale about a totalitarian society, in the Alberta Civil Service Bulletin.

Kinsella worked as a government clerk, manager of a retail credit company, account executive for the City of Edmonton, owner of an Italian restaurant, and taxicab driver, the last two while attending the University of Victoria, where he received a B.A. in 1974. He then attended the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, earning a master of fine arts degree in 1978. He taught at the University of Calgary from 1978 to 1983, but he hated the academic life and he quit to write full time. Kinsella was married to Mildred Clay from 1965 to 1978. From 1978 to 1983, he taught creative writing at the University of Calgary. He then resigned from teaching to spend his time writing. He married the writer Ann Knight in 1978, and they settled in White Rock, British Columbia, and Iowa City, Iowa, when not traveling to attend major league baseball games. Kinsella has two daughters, Shannon and Erin. In 1997 Kinsella was hit by a car and suffered a concussion and the loss of taste and smell. His injuries, which also included difficulty concentrating, put an end to his fiction-writing career.

Analysis

W. P. Kinsella said that his storytelling skills resulted from growing up in an oral tradition. He and his Yugoslavian grandmother swapped stories, hers set in the hills near Dubrovnik, his in rural Alberta. Through this process, he learned to entertain by making his listener eager to hear what would happen next. Kinsella is a serious writer who sees the writer’s first duty as entertainment and thus makes his characters less cynical and angry than he is. He considers himself a realist who does not believe in magic, yet many of his stories are tall tales or fantasies. While his fiction is sometimes sentimental, it is nevertheless effective because of the compassion that he feels for characters confronted by the absurdities of a seemingly meaningless world.

Kinsella calls his short, surrealistic stories “Brautigans” because of the influence of writer Richard Brautigan on his life and career. According to Kinsella, whose favorite book is Brautigan’s In Watermelon Sugar (1968), “Brautigan’s delicate, visual, whimsical, facetious writing appealed to a whole generation of us who were able to identify with the gentle, loving losers of his stories.” Typical of Kinsella’s Brautigans is “Syzygy,” about Grabarkewitcz, a European immigrant to Vancouver whose cat sleeps in the bathroom sink and disappears down the drain when its owner is shaving: ‘Cats are independent devils,’” said Grabarkewitcz. ‘They never come when you call them.’” The Brautigans are Kinsella’s most self-consciously literary stories, a fact that he acknowledges in “The Secret” by having Grabarkewitcz confess to the crime of “bookfondling.”

“The Book Buyers”

One of the longest and best of the Brautigans is “The Book Buyers,” which satirizes his native country’s eccentricities. The narrator wonders why, if most Canadians seem chained to television sets or computers, statistics show that they are buying more books than ever before. Finding himself in Toronto, he decides that this is the perfect place to investigate this phenomenon since “as we all know, there is nothing either west or east of Toronto.”

Going to the only bookstore in Toronto that sells books by Canadians, he spots a typical Canadian reader: “He had a bottle opener and ski lift tickets attached to the zipper of his parka.” The customer buys $102 worth of books and says he has to deliver them somewhere. The narrator eventually discovers that the books go to a warehouse, where they are shredded and recycled as packing cases by the government to keep the book business alive. He threatens to make the practice public unless at least one book he has written is included in each pickup. He describes the boxes containing computers and videocassette recorders as representing “the essence of Canadian literature.” “The Book Buyers” is typical of Kinsella’s satire since instead of becoming angry over Canada’s neglect of its writers and his compatriots’ general anti-intellectualism, he turns the whole matter into a benign joke.

“Evangeline’s Mother”

“Evangeline’s Mother,” one of the best of his realistic stories, deals with typical Kinsella subjects, such as loneliness and class differences. The ambitious Henry Vold goes to work for a savings and loan company after high school, meets Rosalie on a blind date, and impregnates and marries her. Rosalie, who lives for the moment, leaves the dull Henry for a service-station attendant when their daughter, Carin, is a year old. Henry remarries, choosing someone like himself this time—Mona, a financial analyst—and they have a son as practical and unadventurous as they are.

Carin becomes a rebellious, promiscuous teenager and comes to live with Henry when Rosalie can take her behavior no longer. Henry loves Carin uncritically, forgiving her anything. Mona warns him that Carin cannot be trusted and is manipulating him. Despite himself, Henry is attracted to Carin’s exotic, vivacious friend Evangeline. He is branch manager of a large savings and loan association and expects to be promoted into senior management, but he allows Evangeline to seduce him. Even meeting her slovenly mother, who once must have been as young and attractive as her daughter, does not deter Henry. He quits his job, withdrawing half his seventy thousand dollars in savings, and the three of them run away together.

Henry makes a mistake in getting involved with Rosalie, since she hardly fits into the carefully planned, conservative world he envisions for himself. His well-ordered world is perhaps too well ordered. He misses the adventure, the risk, and the sex that he associates with a certain type of woman. His world is empty and too lonely without it. Kinsella presents Henry’s decision as the fulfilling of a psychological need but does not sentimentalize it. The story ends with a hint of danger: “as he glanced down at Vangy’s sepia hand, it seemed to him that the nails . . . curled frighteningly. Images of talons filled Henry’s mind.” Henry can have order or adventure but not both. Kinsella explores this same theme of longing to recapture the spirit of the past in the equally poignant “Mother Tucker’s Yellow Duck” and “K-Mart.”

“The Thrill of the Grass”

As with his baseball novels, magic and spirituality are at the center of most of Kinsella’s baseball stories. These tales are remarkable for the author’s ability to find so many ways of looking at how the ritual of baseball can impose order on a chaotic universe and bring a sense of wholeness to shattered lives. In “The Thrill of the Grass,” the narrator misses major league baseball during the lengthy players’ strike of 1981 and goes to the empty stadium where he is a season-ticket holder. On impulse, he breaks the law for the first time in his forty years as a locksmith by letting himself into the stadium. In love with the game but repelled by the artificial turf, he enlists another fan to replace the turf with sod, square foot by square foot. Each invites a friend to take part, and soon dozens of men armed with sod, sprinklers, rakes, and hoes work each night until dawn to restore the field to its natural beauty, its divinity. With the transformation complete, the narrator feels “like a magician who has gestured hypnotically and produced an elephant from thin air.” For Kinsella, the magic of baseball inspires other magical acts.

“The Thrill of the Grass” is one of the best examples of Kinsella’s presentation of baseball as a substitute religion. The men’s journeys to the stadium are called pilgrimages, and the narrator does not even confide in his beloved wife, since the restoration of the grass is “a ritual for true believers only.” Kinsella does not attempt to explain or justify this attitude toward baseball; it must be accepted on faith. The locksmith always watches games from the first-base side and mistrusts anyone, even his daughter, who prefers to sit elsewhere: “The positions fans choose at sporting events are like politics, religion, or philosophy: a view of the world, a way of seeing the universe. They make no sense to anyone, have no basis in anything but stubbornness.” Kinsella expresses deep suspicion of organized religion (as well as politics, bureaucracies, academics, and reformers) throughout his fiction, especially in his Native Canadian stories. Baseball is infinitely superior to religion, for it allows the possibility of regaining Eden.

“The Last Pennant Before Armageddon”

Religion also plays a part in “The Last Pennant Before Armageddon.” Al Tiller is considered the stupidest manager in major league baseball. The fifty-five-year-old has never had a winning record as either player or manager in professional baseball. Suddenly, however, he is an apparent genius. The Chicago Cubs, who have not won a National League pennant since 1945, have been in first place all season, and Al should be on top of the world. Managers are essentially lonely people, but Al is lonelier than most, since he has an enormous burden that he is unable to share.

In June, he is listening to a radio sports program in St. Louis, when a caller who says he is an archangel announces that the Chicago Cubs will win the last pennant before Armageddon. Since early August, Al has a nightly dream in which petitioners plead with God to allow the Cubs to win. God replies that the Cubs will win the last pennant before Armageddon. (The Iowa Baseball Confederacy also involves the Cubs and apocalyptic events.) Not a religious man, Al is concerned because the Soviet Union has troops in Sri Lanka and the American president has threatened to use force to remove them. Al calls the host of the radio program, but he does not remember anyone claiming to be an archangel.

Al has been faced with a difficult decision before. As a minor leaguer, he fell in love with the perfect woman, but she married someone else. After Al became engaged to a less exciting woman from his hometown, his first love left her husband and asked Al to take her back. He did the honorable thing but always wondered what his life would have been like with his first love, even though she died at thirty. Now, as the Cubs approach the final game of the National League play-offs with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Al has to endure a final dream. In it, a woman petitioner who has always had her back to him turns and is his first love: “Now I have the most important reason of all to manage to win, something beyond honour, beyond duty. For surely, when all is said and done, love is more important.” Like Henry Vold in “Evangeline’s Mother,” Al needs to take a chance for once. Playing it safe has made him a loser. Just as baseball and honor may be more important than religion and politics, love is superior to anything. Kinsella uses baseball and magic or the supernatural to comment on basic human issues.

The Silas Ermineskin stories

Kinsella has written dozens of stories about the Cree Indian reserve near Hobbema, Alberta. He writes about Native Canadians with sensitivity and understanding of their unique culture. The characters are generally poor, semiliterate, unemployed, and alcoholic, with little hope for improvement. While these problems lurk in the background of most of the stories—and are the main concern of several—the predominant tone of the tales narrated by Silas Ermineskin is comic. Kinsella comments on racism, social injustice, and political indifference, while creating entertainment through the absurdities and even slapstick surrounding these issues.

The stories originate when twenty-year-old Silas is given a writing assignment in an English class at the technical school that he attends and where he continues with the encouragement of his teacher. Because the teacher corrects only spelling and punctuation, the tales are written in an unlettered, colloquial style. They usually center on the misadventures of Silas; his best friend, the uncouth and uncontrollable Frank Fencepost; Mad Etta, a four-hundred-pound medicine woman; and Bedelia Coyote, the local feminist and political activist. Mad Etta is often a Jeeves to Silas’s Bertie Wooster, advising him on how to extract himself and his friends from complicated situations. Silas’s stories deal with such subjects as a Native Canadian automobile salesman who cheats other Native Canadians, a father who forces his daughter into prostitution, Silas and Frank’s trip to Las Vegas, a Native Canadian politician who tries to be white, a Mexican who poses as a Native Canadian doctor, the staging of a buffalo hunt for Prince Philip, and Mad Etta’s playing hockey. Silas describes disease, death, and despair and is often bitter: “Sometimes when I have to put up with the Government or the Church I feel so helpless, I get so mad my hands shake.” The harsh reality of the Native Canadians’ situation is counterbalanced by Kinsella’s use of mysticism, as when Mad Etta rights a series of wrongs by turning three men into weasels.

Silas’s most memorable stories are the comic ones. In one of the best, “The Killing of Colin Moosefeathers,” Silas and Frank invent a fellow student at the technical school as a prank, giving him “the silliest name we can come up with.” A chain of events leads to Colin’s being registered for classes. Silas, Frank, and Bedelia eventually manage to get a credit card for him, making purchases up to the credit limit. Silas quickly learns why they can get away with it all: “People is real greedy and will take a chance if it gonna mean a sale for them.” When the bill collectors start arriving, they say Colin is dead. To get liquor for Colin’s wake, they allow a white man in a suit to use the credit card: “Those kind be the most anxious to make quick money because they all the time have to pay for expensive clothes.” Silas and his friends even come up with a grave, cross, and wreath to prove to the police that Colin is dead. The police dig up the grave only to be told that Colin has been cremated.

Throughout Silas’s stories, white people ignore, distrust, and hate Native Canadians. Colin Moosefeathers gives them the opportunity for revenge and fun at the same time that they exploit a socioeconomic system from which they have been excluded. Their pranks escalate because of the whites’ gullibility and greed and their faceless bureaucracy. Anyone can use Colin’s credit card, since Anglo-Canadians think all Native Canadians have funny names and look alike. Whites almost always lose in such confrontations with Kinsella’s Native Canadians because they underestimate them.

These Native Canadian stories succeed primarily because of Kinsella’s virtuosity as a storyteller, and “The Kid in the Stove” celebrates the art of storytelling. Silas entertains his little brothers and sisters with the story that he learned from their mother about how, in 1907, Lazarus Bobtail and four of his five children were murdered by a white man. The fifth child escaped by crawling into a stove: “For such a sad story it almost make a happy ending when you hear at the end that one child got away.” Since he is interested in the history of Native Canadians in Alberta, Silas wants to find out more about the murder and locates a newspaper account that fails to mention the fifth child. He learns that Mrs. Bobtail, who was away at the time of the killings, gave birth a few weeks later. Her having “one in the oven” has evolved in the Native Canadians’ oral tradition into a more positive account of what happened. Silas is eager to correct the mistake until he realizes that the misconstrued version serves a much better purpose than the truth.

The Silas Ermineskin stories often verge on sentimentality because Kinsella, like his hero Brautigan, forces himself to find some virtue arising out of sorrow. “The Kid in the Stove” stands out for reflecting Kinsella’s apparent theory of art by acknowledging the healing power of fiction. The audience wants the thrill of the horrifying murders but needs some redemption resulting from their fears. The constant good humor of Silas and his friends in the face of despair is life-affirming.

“Bull”

Ever since the colonial period, Native Canadians have been largely excluded from well-paying jobs and often have been forced to live on reservations. In his 1994 book of short stories entitled Brother Frank’s Gospel Hour, and Other Stories, Kinsella describes how different Native Canadian characters deal with Anglo-Canadians who treat them condescendingly. In the short story “Bull,” the protagonist Frank is portrayed as a rather simpleminded Native Canadian who tries to stay away from bill collectors and the police. Frank gets a job as a foreman on Manley Cartstairs’s large ranch by claiming that he has extensive experience on large ranches throughout Alberta; Frank is such a slick talker that Manley Carstairs does not bother to check his false references. Frank is summarily fired from his job when Manley Carstairs finds him sleeping with his daughter. He is very surprised when he receives a subpoena to testify in a civil court case brought by the employer who had fired him, for this will be his first time in court as a witness and not as a defendant. Frank resents losing his job and wants to get back at his former boss.

As the civil trial begins, Frank is confused because there is no criminal defendant; he does not understand that courts hold both civil and criminal trials. Manley Carstairs raises Charolais cattle, and he had hired Ace Artificial Insemination, Inc., to inseminate his prize cattle, but something went wrong and the new calves were a mixed breed. He is suing the company for his losses. During his testimony, Frank pretends that he does not understand questions from the judge and the lawyers, and they conclude that he is an honest simpleton. When the lawyer for the insemination company asks Frank how the error could have happened, Frank recognizes a clear opportunity to get back at his former boss. Frank swears under oath that because of his anger toward his former boss he opened the gate around the Charolais cattle, thus allowing other cattle to mate with them. The judge then absolves the animal insemination company of all responsibility. After the trial, Frank’s friend Silas tells him that his testimony was filled with lies because Silas, not Frank, had opened the gate around the Charolais cattle on the Carstairses’ ranch. Manley Carstairs treated his workers so badly that they were all patiently waiting for an opportunity to cause him financial loss.

“Brother Frank’s Gospel Hour”

The title and final short story in this collection is “Brother Frank’s Gospel Hour.” In this story, Frank is still the main character, but this time he is an employee of a poorly funded radio station for Native Canadians called KUGH. For reasons Frank and his friends do not understand, the Canadian federal government moves their radio station from the town onto the reservation. Frank is upset because this move will result in KUGH receiving less revenue for commercials from local businesses. Frank creates an ingenious get-rick-quick scheme, pretending he is a clergyman who mixes Christianity with traditional Native Canadian myths, which he makes up during his broadcasts. He promises on the air to send gifts to poor people who ask him for help, and he simply asks his listeners to send him money so he can help those who are suffering. Frank is so persuasive that the money begins to flow into KUGH. He keeps a hefty profit for himself and his friends, but he does send gifts to people in need. Wealth has finally come to this impoverished reservation. Frank skillfully negotiates contracts with a national company that agrees to pay him very well to syndicate his show, but Frank insists on maintaining control over all contributions. Frank has become a celebrity, but this fame has changed him. He now dresses like a white man, and other residents of the reservation feel alienated from him, although he does share his new wealth with his friends and other Native Canadians.

Bibliography

Aitken, Brian. “Baseball as Sacred Doorway in the Writing of W. P. Kinsella.” Aethlon 8 (Fall, 1990): 61-75. Aitken looks at the spiritual aspects of Kinsella’s baseball novels and two of his stories, “Frank Pierce, Iowa” and “K-Mart.” He concludes that Kinsella shows how North Americans can find as much spiritual fulfillment in sports as in formal religion.

Cameron, Elspeth. “Diamonds Are Forever.” Saturday Night 101 (August, 1986): 45-47. Cameron shows how most of Kinsella’s fiction centers on adolescent males who, unencumbered by women, pursue quests as if they were knights errant.

Horvath, Brooke K., and William J. Palmer. “Three On: An Interview with David Carkeet, Mark Harris, and W. P. Kinsella.” Modern Fiction Studies 33 (Spring, 1987): 183-194. Kinsella explains how he came to write about baseball and his attitude toward literary criticism.

Kinsella, W. P. “Interview.” Short Story, n.s. 1 (Fall, 1993): 81-88. Kinsella discusses baseball as the chess of sports and why it serves him so well in his fiction. Talks about the transformation of the book Shoeless Joe into the film Field of Dreams. Discusses those contemporary short-story writers he likes best, his own collections of short stories, and what he thinks the future of short fiction will be.

_______. “W. P. Kinsella, the Super-Natural.” Interview by Sheldon Sunness. Sport 77 (July, 1986): 74. Kinsella discusses his fondness for baseball, his disdain for Canada’s native game of hockey, and his wish to be a major league baseball player in another life.

Murray, Don. The Fiction of W. P. Kinsella: Tall Tales in Various Voices. Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada: York Press, 1987. This brief but excellent study provides an overview of Kinsella’s fiction, placing emphasis on the short stories. Murray includes three interviews with Kinsella, a bibliography, and an index.

_______. “A Note on W. P. Kinsella’s Humor.” The International Fiction Review 14, no. 2 (1987): 98-100. Humor is the basic ingredient in Kinsella’s fiction, according to Murray. He argues that anarchy is justified and funny in Kinsella’s works.

Sharp, Michael D., ed. Popular Contemporary Writers. Vol. 7. New York: Marshall Cavendish Reference, 2006. Includes an entry on Kinsella containing a brief biography and analyses of his works.

Michael Adams

Edmund J. Campion