MY BASEBALL DIARY
By James T. Farrell
Southern Illinois University Press, 276 pages, $14.95 paper
James T. Farrell was basking in the literary celebrity created by “Studs Lonigan” when he visited Ernest Hemingway in Key West. According to Hemingway biographer Carlos Baker in “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story,” after Farrell gave a tongue lashing to a man who had been putting on literary airs, Hemingway took Farrell aside and said, ” `Jesus Christ, Jim, . . . don’t do that. Those fellows have nothing but their writing. Take that away from them and they’ll commit suicide.’ “
The remark proved prophetic. On July 2, 1961, in deep depression over his writing, Hemingway pressed the twin barrels of his Boss shotgun against his forehead and tripped both triggers.
Farrell was made of sterner stuff. He died at 75 of natural causes on Aug. 22, 1979. “Studs Lonigan” had been published some 50 years before. His fate was to write an American classic in his late 20s and then plunge into oblivion.
But despite lack of later success, Farrell kept writing. He wrote more than 50 books, including one completed only five weeks before his death. When he died, his estate was valued at less than $10,000.
I first read Farrell’s “My Baseball Diary” 30 years ago. It has been republished as part of a baseball-related series by Southern Illinois University Press. Rereading it, I was astonished how well this collection of essays, memoirs and interviews stands up. They transport you back to Chicago’s old South Side and the vintage White Sox, the kind of baseball team now lost in the fog of time.
You won’t forget Farrell’s meeting with Buck Weaver, one of eight Sox players banned from the game for life because they threw the 1919 World Series. The young Farrell ditched school and was in the stands for three of those games. His meeting with the tragic Weaver, the team’s star third baseman, occurred 36 years later, shortly before Weaver’s death.
In another piece called “I Remember the Black Sox,” Farrell writes: “(T)his marked the end of my days of hero-worshiping baseball players. Many fans felt betrayed. I didn’t. I felt sorry. I wished it weren’t true. I wished the players would have been given another chance.”
You wouldn’t need all the fingers on your throwing hand to count the best of the literary baseball books ever written. My picks would be, in order, Lawrence Ritter’s “The Glory of Their Times”; Jerome Holtzman’s elegy to old-time baseball writers, “No Cheering in the Press Box”; and Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer.” Farrell’s book deserves the pleasure of their company.
Farrell knew how competitive the writing business was. At one point in “My Baseball Diary” he writes: “(T)here are more persons in these United States who want to be writers than there are who want to play baseball. About five or six years ago, one estimate was that there are 8,500,000 aspiring writers in the nation.”
Farrell’s misfortune was that his naturalistic writing style fell out of fashion. He had no interest in writing felicitous phrases. But he wrote with power and detail in often-staccato sentences that piled observation upon observation. No one who read “Studs Lonigan” ever forgot his characters. But the era of Clifford Odets, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser was over. Farrell was trapped in a world he never made.
Several years before he died, I interviewed Farrell in his small apartment in New York City. He had been a football player at Mt. Carmel High in Chicago and kept demonstrating the art of punting as the interview progressed. After a short while he was almost breathless.
But he remained feisty as ever. Between deep breaths, Farrell gasped: “They say I’m washed up. Editors tell me I should have quit writing years ago. They think I should have died at 30. But I won’t die. I’ll keep on writing.”
