They are fascinating images, not only for what they show, but for what they hint at.
In one photograph, Civil War-era troops stand in formation at Ft. Pulaski, Ga.; in the background, other soldiers are playing baseball.
There’s another photo of a group of battle-ready Union soldiers in full uniform; their equipment includes baseball bats as well as rifles.
And there are the old lithographs and paintings showing soldiers engaged in baseball games.
While America was divided into North and South by a bloody Civil War, it seems there was at least one piece of common ground: the baseball diamond.
Thomas Dyja has taken that notion and turned it into his first novel, “Play for a Kingdom” (Harcourt Brace), a fictional account of heroism, honor–and baseball–in the Civil War.
“There are two things in the world that people are real sticklers on,” Dyja said during a recent book tour stop in Chicago, “the Civil War and baseball. So I had to get all the facts straight.”
His book takes place during the spring of 1864, when a company of ragtag Union soldiers from Brooklyn, with just weeks left in their three-year enlistment, engages in a series of baseball games with a company of Rebel troops between battles in the Wilderness in Virginia.
These baseball encounters are not by chance, as the soldiers from both sides believe, but are a cover for meetings between a Union second lieutenant and a Confederate lieutenant, who is acting as a spy for the North.
Around savage battles and the ballgames, Dyja builds a novel populated by characters who are forced to question not just what they’re fighting for, but their beliefs and lives as well.
Dyja, 35, was born and raised on the Northwest Side and graduated from Gordon Tech. He left Chicago to attend Columbia University, and, after getting his degree in English, remained in New York, working at a variety of jobs in the publishing industry, as a manuscript reader, editor and literary agent. For the last three years he has worked at Balliett & Fitzgerald, a New York firm that produces books for the publishing industry.
Dyja seems to be a natural for a career in writing and publishing. “Ever since I was 12 I wanted to write the Great American Novel,” he said.
And he was able to combine his two greatest boyhood interests, the Civil War and baseball–he has been a Cubs fan all his life–in “Play for a Kingdom.”
As a child, Dyja was always fascinated by a Grand Army of the Republic exhibit at the downtown Chicago Public Library, and each summer his family would attend the Illinois State Fair in Springfield, where “we’d do the Lincoln thing” and he’d soak up more Civil War-era lore. At home, he’d stage mock Civil War battles with his toy soldiers.
“In the middle of writing the book I realized, jeez, I’m doing what I did when I was 8 years old,” he said. “Moving troops around, making them have their battles.”
Dyja got the idea for the book about five years ago when he was reading “Our American Game,” written by baseball pioneer–and Cubs founder–Albert Spalding. In it, Spalding mentioned that there had been rumors of games between Union and Confederate troops during the Civil War. The light bulb went on.
He began reading histories of the war and researched early baseball, in the process evolving from an interested party and fan to an expert in both arenas.
“New York’s a great place to research early baseball because it’s the home of it, and you can go and see places where these guys played,” he said. “You can go to the Brooklyn Historical Society and get these sort of sporting magazines from the 1850s and 1860s.”
On the military front, Dyja wanted to base his soldiers on a real regiment. He eventually settled on the 14th Brooklyn, a multiethnic, cosmopolitan regiment that included everything from merchants and bankers to actors and street thugs and whose war exploits have been researched and well-documented over the years. The 14th became Dyja’s regiment during one of his visits to the Brooklyn Historical Society.
“I had gotten some reasonable stuff, but nothing I could really build a book on,” he said. “As I’m walking out the door, there’s a file sitting there, says `Civil War.’ So I look at it, and there’s a transcript of the adjutant’s report that has basically everything (the 14th) did every day of the war. Including the baseball scores of their matches with other regiments. So, even the kind of passing mention I’ve made in the book about matches with other regiments, they really played those matches.”
When Dyja needed a Confederate regiment to play ball with the troops from the 14th Brooklyn, the 12th Alabama magically appeared.
“After I figured out the 14th Brooklyn would be the right regiment, I was reading a lot, looking at the maps, trying to figure out a Confederate regiment that would be the right one. And I came on the 12th Alabama. I said, these are the guys. They were in the right places at the right time. I’m sitting there, reading their history at the public library, and it turns out their first duty in the war was to bury the dead of the 14th Brooklyn at the first Battle of Bull Run. I said, whoa, I think I’ve sort of hit on some karma here.”
Dyja was meticulous in using facts to create his fiction.
“Any actions going on during the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in the book are historical fact,” he said. “If there’s somebody going in at 2 o’clock on the left, to the best of my research and knowledge, that’s what was going on.
“The games themselves are really the only things (in the book) that are real fantasy, and, of course, the characters obviously.”
For further research, Dyja traveled to Virginia to visit the battle sites.
“To go to a battlefield, you have to have a sense of what happened there. You can still see the trenches there. And if you don’t know what happened there, it’s just a big empty field. But once you do, they really are an incredible experience. I’m sort of a jaded type at this point, but I found it very moving. . . . I wanted to spend some time walking around, when there’s no cars and it’s just quiet and the trees are creaking away. You can really feel what happened there.”
Once his research was complete, it was simply a matter of writing. And rewriting. A dozen rewrites later, he had a book. A book that could end up as a movie. Director Ron Howard has optioned it for Universal.
At this point a movie would be gravy. Dyja is already living every first-time author’s dream.
“I was going to work the other day on the subway,” he said by way of explanation. “And I look over at the guy next to me, and he’s got the book. So I sat down next to him on the train. After a little bit, I asked him, `You like it?’ And he said, `Yeah. Why?’ `I wrote it.’ And he gets all excited, `Yeah, I really like the book,’ and he’s asking me to sign it and everything.
“I spend five years riding the subway back and forth to work, watching people read books, and here’s just this regular guy reading my book. Wow.”
