From the Editors
Review Hiatus Continues; Dispatches in America
As the above title suggests, the New Haven Review’s hiatus continues. In the meantime, we commend to your attention John Stoehr’s review of Dispatches in America, the first issue released by Dispatches, a quarterly journal and website concern with a fascinating mission and editorial stance. May we hear much more about Dispatches as it progresses.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
From the Editors
Review Hiatus; Summer Book Group This Wednesday
The New Haven Review’s August hiatus from reviews begins this week as we line up website reviews for the fall and edit Issue 3 of the print edition, which will appear in November. (Yes, we hope to throw another party. We can’t help ourselves.)
We would also like to remind New Haven-area readers that our final summer book group meeting at Labyrinth Books is this Wednesday at 6 p.m.; New Haven Review contributor Steven Stoll will discuss David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism. For those unfamiliar with the term, neoliberalism is the catchall phrase for the dominant economic ideology of our time — liberalized capitalism — and the various political and social policies associated with it that have changed the world in profound ways. As the ideology is championed, reviled, elided, and misunderstood in nearly equal measure, a discussion of neoliberalism should be about as lively as discussions get. As always, Labyrinth provides the wine and cheese. See you there!
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Emily Moore
On Kay Ryan
The spindly, aphoristic poetry of Kay Ryan, our new poet laureate
If Emily Dickinson, as Ted Hughes once suggested in his exquisite, under-read introduction to A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, combined “the riddle and the hymn,” Kay Ryan has selected the margin and the aphorism. Ryan is a gleaner, a poet constantly imagining and fleshing out whimsical circumstances such as those suggested by a quick sampling of her titles: “Living With Stripes,” “Imaginary Eskimos,” “The Fourth Wise Man” (who, in Ryan’s conception, “disliked travel”), “Death By Fruit.” She’s a champion of underdogs and the overlooked. A poem titled “The Excluded Animals” begins, “Only a certain / claque of beasts / is part of the / crèche racket,” later imagining the toothy grins of “unchosen alligators.” The title poem of Elephant Rocks extends this theme in its description of odd surfacings at the “edges and marges” and the pushing of fragments of “shambling elephant armature, / up through the earth.” In fewer than twenty lines, Ryan explores the extraordinary strangeness of elephants, the craggy, rock-like nature of their humps and bulges, the enduring value of what is “too patient and deep to be lost,” and the artistic process itself. Her margins are achingly, eerily, wonderfully alive.
Though her lines are often half the length of those of her predecessor, Ryan’s aphorisms are fully Dickinsonian in their oddness. “Doubt uses albumen / at twice the rate of work,” she tells us, and later “Time is rubbery. / If you hide it / in the shrubbery / it will wait / till winter and / wash back out.” She is often quite tender, for instance when she assures us that “Patience is / wider than one / once envisioned” and calms us with the notion that “There could be nutrients / in failure — / deep amendments / to the shallow soil / of wishes.” Don’t be fooled, though, for, as Ryan herself puts it, “Tenderness and rot / share a border. / And rot is an / aggressive neighbor / whose iridescence / keeps creeping over.” Ryan delights, but she does not console. Her filament-like poems are short, spindly, slant-rhymed contraptions, punctuated by deliciously exact words such as “sedges,” “lacunae,” “apertures,” and “castanets.” Hers is a poetry of “herringbones and arrows,” one that evokes the “guilty shimmer” of cribbed objects. Ryan prefers the third person to the first, and her poems revolve around animals and strange facts rather than interpersonal relationships. Reading her work, I hear the voice of a particularly wry, elegant schoolteacher whispering into my ear. As she writes in “Outsider Art,” “We are not / pleased the way we thought / we would be pleased.”
Emily Moore teaches English at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan. Her poetry has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and the Yale Review.
Peter Ephross
Man on Spikes
By Eliot Asinof (orig. pub. 1955; reissue by Southern Illinois University Press, 1998)
The writer Eliot Asinof is best known for Eight Men Out, a history of the 1919 Black Sox baseball gambling scandal. Those who are unfamiliar with the book might recognize its title because of the popular 1988 John Sayles film, based on Asinof’s work. If Eight Men Out is Asinof’s most popular book, his mid-century baseball novel, Man on Spikes, might be his most intriguing. Columnist Jimmy Cannon even described it as the “truest novel I’ve ever read.” Since it’s virtually unknown, however, Man on Spikes might better be labeled the truest novel they’ve never read.
Loosely based on the real-life experiences of Mickey Rutner, the 1955 novel chronicles the travails of career minor leaguer Mike Kutner. A Kentucky native, Kutner is the son of a gruff, immigrant coal-mining father who doesn’t understand his son’s desire to play baseball. Discovered by a scout, Kutner signs a minor league contract with a $2,000 bonus — the money helps assuage his father’s initial objections. His team’s crochety manager refuses to play him because he doesn’t think he has the talent; in response, Kutner asks to be traded. The manager says he will, on the grounds that Kutner lets the team decrease his signing bonus to $250. With no other options, Kutner agrees.
This financial malfeasance is only the beginning of Kutner’s misfortune. A talented player who hits for average and runs and fields well, he enjoys success at the top minor league levels. But he runs into a string of bad luck, spending some of his prime playing years serving in World War II. Kutner also runs into a system that is stacked against him.
As it is in Eight Men Out and so many of his other works, Asinof’s major theme in Man on Spikes is capitalism and how it destroys the human spirit. The wealthy baseball owners, barons of the system, hold the players down. In Eight Men Out, Asinof reinterpreted the Black Sox scandal as a protest by the White Sox players against their tight-fisted owner, Charles Comiskey. In doing so, he revolutionized our understanding of the scandal, in which the favored White Sox threw the series to the Cincinnati Reds. Until Asinof and Sayles, people thought of the players as the scandal’s villains, rogues who willingly damaged the National Pastime for extra cash.
Man on Spikes is far more prophetic that Eight Men Out. There are a few good men who back Kutner — the scout who originally signs him, a manager who sees his value. But more frequent are those who either run the system, i.e., team owners, or are pawns of it: Journalists, for example, are in the owners’ clutches. Even the Major League commissioner, although sympathetic to Kutner’s plight, is powerless. The thing is, it’s all true: Until the mid nineteen-seventies and the advent of free agency, baseball players were the property in perpetuity of the team that originally signed them. About fifteen years before free agency became the touchstone issue in sports labor relations, Asinof wrote it all down in Man on Spikes.
Asinof’s own experience with individual powerlessness was no fiction. During the McCarthy era, Asinof was blacklisted from Hollywood. In his angry Bleeding Between the Lines, which chronicles his struggles over the legal rights to Eight Men Out and is also a partial memoir, he writes that “the sole reference to my subversiveness was a petition I had signed in 1951, outside Yankee Stadium, urging the New York Yankees to hire a Negro ballplayer.” I attempted to ask Asinof about the blacklist and other issues during a phone interview earlier this year, but he cut the interview off after a few questions, saying he didn’t feel well.
In Bleeding, published in 1979, he also makes clear his anger toward the system. Just before discussing the career of Marlon Brando (Asinof was married for several years to Brando’s sister, Jocelyn), he launches into a rant against postwar, Watergate-era America: “We had become an affluence of leeches, wheeler-dealers, hustlers, brokers, manipulators — some legal, some not.”
Asinof’s rage against the machine pervades Man on Spikes. The book is a fast-paced novel. It’s chock-full of action and physical description, with Kutner as its quasi-tragic hero whose fruitless pursuit of his dream (it’s no stretch to see the story as symbolic of the destructiveness of the American dream) beats him down. Near the end of Kutner’s career, Asinof places these thoughts in the mind of Kutner’s wife, Laura, as she watches her husband play:
But now the chip on his shoulder was too plain to see. He moved like an animal stalking his prey, fast and hungry and relentless. The quiet confidence was still there but it had a sullen edge to it. He was tired.
Laura, too, is weary. Two-thirds of the way through Man on Spikes, she has become an aging, boozy beauty. In the book’s most moving scene, she gets drunk in a hotel bar with the son of a big-league owner, willing to sleep with him to advance his husband’s career. Only because he passes out in his hotel room do the two not have sex.
In his preface to the 1998 edition of Man on Spikes, Asinof acknowledges that he was inspired by his friend Mickey Rutner (they met as minor league teammates), who had a career trajectory similar to Kutner’s. Like the book’s hero, Rutner spent years toiling, and excelling, at the top minor league levels with little to show for his efforts. In Bleeding Between the Lines, Asinof approvingly quotes Rutner teaching him the following line: “Fuck ’em all, big and small.”
I met with Mickey Rutner early in 2005 for an oral history project on Jewish baseball players being conducted by a group called Jewish Major Leaguers. Then in his mid-eighties (he died in October 2007 at the age of 87), the Bronx-born Rutner seemed to have come to terms with his almost-but-not-quite baseball journey; he was proud of his lifetime batting average of .295 playing mainly in the highest levels of minor league ball. He told me: “I said, ‘Get those men on base and I’ll knock them home.’ I wasn’t a great fielder and I didn’t have a great arm but I was a good hitter.”
Rutner was also pleased with being Asinof’s model. He confirmed the general outline, and some of the specifics, of Man on Spikes. Like his fictional counterpart, Rutner was denied part of his original bonus, World War II harmed his career (although he was proud of having served in the U.S. Army in Sicily while under attack from Germany), and he was lied to by owners and managers who repeatedly promised him he would be called up to the Big Show. Despite the exorbitantly high salaries players earn today, there’s little doubt that the system is fairer than in the old days, when players were unable to sell their services to the highest bidder. As Rutner told me simply, “They owned you and they could do what they want with you.”
There’s one major biographical difference between Rutner and his fictional alter ego. In Man on Spikes, Mike Kutner’s not Jewish — his father is a German immigrant. In the preface to the second edition, published in 1998, Asinof addresses this issue: “Is there anti-Semitism present in baseball? Does a bear dump in the woods? [But t]o make my hero a Jew would distort the impact that all ballplayers were victimized.”
Asinof was unwilling to make his protagonist Jewish, but he was willing to play hardball with his politics: In Man on Spikes, the system is to blame. The system has even defeated the owner’s son, a Harvard grad who was drawn to Laura Kutner in the bar because he “wanted to cut the never-ending dullness that was his life.” Any union agitator would have been proud. There’s a reason why Marvin Miller, the man responsible for developing the baseball players’ union in the 1960s and ’70s, later called Asinof a “prophet — with honor.”
Rutner himself didn’t mind that his character wasn’t Jewish, although he identified as a Jew (his kids had celebrated becoming b’nai mitzvah, and he and his wife, Lee, belonged to a chavurah down in Texas, where they lived in retirement). He told me he felt welcomed by the Southern communities that he often played in, even more so by the Jewish community. He and Lee, explained that the Sokol Brothers, owners of an Alabama department store chain, had asked them to stay and live in Birmingham, where he played one year. Rutner turned down the offer because he wanted to play baseball. He also said he didn’t think anti-Semitism had kept him out of the major leagues, although he had encountered some problems:
There were always remarks. They always say, “The rich Jews up in those stands up in the park” and so forth. I’d say, “Those rich Jews up in those stands are paying your salary.” You know, you got to put them in their place. I got into a couple of fights. I remember in the clubhouse one time one of the guys was pitching and I musta made an error and he made some remark, so I went at ’em.
So why isn’t Man on Spikes more popular? In part, it may be because it’s sports fiction. With a few exceptions, like Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, sports novels aren’t considered high art. The fact that Man on Spikes, unlike The Natural or Eight Men Out, was never made into a movie, although it has been optioned a few times, doesn’t help.
In part, too, it’s Asinof’s own fault. He partially sacrifices his novel on the altar of his leftist politics, describing Kutner, at times, like a hero out of a Soviet socialist-realist novel. After he meets with the commissioner of baseball, the commissioner “watched the athlete now in that walk, in the spring of those powerful legs.” The paragraph ends: “The last thing he saw was the neck bronzed by the hot Southern sun as the ballplayer disappeared in the lobby.”
In Man on Spikes, Kutner eventually makes it to the major leagues as a late-season call-up, but he strikes out in a key game and then quits. Only after he makes that decision to leave the sport do Kutner and Laura experience a sense of liberation and relief. That’s not exactly how it happened in real life. Rutner made it to the big leagues for a few games, in September of 1948. During his twelve games in the Major Leagues, he had a game-winning hit at Yankee Stadium, not far from where he grew up. As he put it, “That was the biggest thrill of my life.” Sometimes, it seems, life is at least a little happier than art.
I never got a chance to find out if Eliot Asinof’s life, too, was happier than his art. He died at the age of 88 on June 10, 2008, less than a year after his good friend Mickey Rutner.
Peter Ephross’s articles and reviews have appeared in the Village Voice, The Forward and Publishers Weekly, among other publications.
From the Editors
Summer Book Group July 23: Lush Life
Another reminder: The New Haven Review’s Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books continues tomorrow, July 23, with Mark Oppenheimer leading a discussion of Richard Price’s Lush Life, in which Price turns his unflinching eye on the new New York. As before, we bring the discussion; Labyrinth provides the wine and cheese.
Hope to see you tomorrow.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
From the Editors
The Great Kisser
By David Evanier (Rager Media, 2007)
We all do it, right? Before we read a book, we look at the blurbs, look at the publishing house, look at the bio, look at the acknowledgments, put it all together, and try to figure out if this writer is somebody. (Isn’t it nice to pigeon-hole a writer before you’ve read one word of her work?) But then sometimes you do all that stuff and at the end of it still have no idea what to think. Such was the case after I’d done my superficial canvass of The Great Kisser, by David Evanier, published by the little known — okay, unknown — Rager Media, of Akron, Ohio. Never heard of the guy, for one thing. Couldn’t quite believe that, as his bio claimed, he’d once been fiction editor of The Paris Review. And while one blurb was from Sven Birkerts, and another from Stephen Dixon, the third was from Norman Podhoretz.
Stumped.
So I read the book.
It is splendid. A story cycle that loses some power as it goes along — its constituent parts get a bit repetitive — it is the travelogue through life of one Michael Goldberg, a New York kid, now in his upper years, a writer who never quite made it, spent some time in Hollywood, didn’t quite make it there either, unlucky in love, obsessed with Sinatra and the other crooners. Misplaced in time, probably should have been born fifty years earlier. The courtship rituals of an earlier era would have helped him with the ladies, and the music was more to his liking. The opening novella, “The Tapes,” about Goldberg’s psychiatrist’s leaving him tapes of dozens of hours of sessions with patients, is funny, touching, touched, and memorable. “Scraps,” about the high school sweetheart who got away, is so wonderfully dead-on earnest you almost have to look away.
If you don’t quite get it yet, think Starting Out in the Evening, by Brian Morton, mixed with some of the poignant scenes from Annie Hall and some of the bleak sex one finds in Leonard Michaels. In fact, this book’s closest kin is Michaels’s gets-in-your-bones good novella Sylvia. Same NYC without the air-conditioning, love that can’t last, that sort of thing. New Yorkish and Jewish and intellectual, but lacking confidence and mostly lacking money — that’s Michael Goldberg. Also, he has a weird affinity for mobsters.
Good books are published in Akron, it seems.
Mark Oppenheimer is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Louise Swinn
The End of the World
By Paddy O’Reilly (University of Queensland Press, 2007)
The follow-up to Paddy O’Reilly’s debut novel, The Factory (2005), The End of the World is a collection of the stories that have won her accolades including The Age short story competition and the Zoetrope: All-Story short fiction contest. It is immediately clear why O’Reilly has been so applauded and well published: She hops across genre lines in a mixture of different styles and voice, but always writes with pathos and empathy, without sentimentality, and with a good dose of humor.
In “FutureGirl,” there’s sorrow and comedy when a freakishly large girl realizes that she won’t live as long as regular-sized people. There’s no hiding the vivid imagination behind “Speak to Me,” in which an alien tries to communicate with a fantasy writer in Regency-romance English. The title story — a highlight — depicts a woman who is leaving her partner, watching in her rearview mirror as his car follows her for hours (they even stop for gas at the same time). The story’s end plays out like a short film; perhaps we have O’Reilly’s background as a screenwriter to thank for that.
There is nothing predictable here. A short story writer can fall into the trap of using the same structure or narrative arc again and again; O’Reilly is always crisp, new, and striking, whether she is writing in a realist mode or working up a very literary science fiction story. Whatever the situation O’Reilly puts them in, however, her unusual bunch of characters are universal in their needs and the way that they express or refuse to express them. Even in the strangest contexts, the turning moments within each of these stories are heartbreakingly familiar.
Louise Swinn is the editorial director of Sleepers.
From the Editors
New Haven Review Summer Vacation
In deference to Independence Day, the New Haven Review has taken this Monday off. It will also take off the Mondays in August, as we know that nearly everyone — well, everyone in publishing, anyway — goes on vacation; and even if they don’t, nobody wants to be inside, hunched over a computer, when they could be outside, on the beach, drinking a gin-and-tonic from what is ostensibly a water bottle while three children nearby bury their father up to his neck in the sand. But we will be back next week with more reviews and will resume again, full throttle, in September.
Meanwhile, Issue 3 of the New Haven Review, due out in the fall, is shaping up to be a doozy. We have an essay from Jim Knipfel, a piece from Willard Spiegelman (editor of the Southwest Review), an excerpt from Jess Row’s new novel, an interview with David Orr, and numerous other essays, poetry, and fiction from people you may not have heard of yet, but will soon. Stay tuned.
From the Editors
Summer Book Group July 2: The Rest is Noise
Just a reminder: The New Haven Review’s Summer Book Group at Labyrinth Books continues this Wednesday, July 2, with Tom Gogola leading a discussion of Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise. Quite possibly this discussion will include demonstration, as Tom is an excellent guitar player.
Hope to see you there.
Brian Francis Slattery is an editor of the New Haven Review.
Amy Weldon
Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests
By John Kricher and Roger Tory Peterson, with illustrations by Gordon Morrison (Houghton Mifflin, 1988)
Pity the poor “reference” book — sturdy and uncomplaining, plastic-bound for a dictionary stand or a doctor’s office or, in the case of Peterson Field Guides, a backpack. Need, rather than pleasure, drives us to seek it out. What a shame. Because what pleasures it can give. Take, for instance, the Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Forests. For anyone with ties to a specific rural place — or just drawn to the concept of “place” itself — this is a treasure. As a former Alabama farm kid now living in Iowa, I’m captured by the Field Guide’s wealth of resonant terminology: old field succession (the gradual dissolution of pastures back into forest, seen on so many abandoned farms), windthrow (“an important disturbance factor, creating gaps of various sizes that permit light to enter, churning up the soil and providing new sites where seedlings and saplings can grow”), and forest islands (“as suburbia and agriculture have each claimed ever-increasing amounts of land, forests in many areas have become fragmented”). There are careful descriptions of animals: meadow voles (“husky little rodents”), possums (“gives birth to babies so tiny that a dozen will fit on a tablespoon”), and roadrunners of the Texas savanna (“reminding one of a tiny feathered dinosaur as it races along.”) The tone is quietly humorous, quietly marveling. “Don’t bother looking for Field Sparrows in an Oak-Hickory Forest and forget about finding Hermit Thrushes hopping between ragweed stalks,” it advises. “The factors by which birds recognize and orient themselves to their chosen habitats are poorly known.” Today, rooted in a place eleven hundred miles from my home, I’m reminded of rainy days spent poring through my family’s Peterson guides, and the way the sturdy pages with their color paintings rendered the familiar creatures of my world — rat snakes, mockingbirds, bobwhite quail, fox, and white-tailed deer — miraculous. “With persistence and patience,” the authors promise, “you will see many species and come to understand many facets of their natural history.” This is a patience and persistence we need more than ever. And so we need the Petersen Guide — a handbook of quiet ecstasy, organizing the wonders of the visible world for anyone who cares to look.
A graduate of Auburn University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Amy Weldon is assistant professor of English at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
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