Going the Distance

William Steele

Description

This frank and authoritative biography explores the life and often controversial work of W.P. Kinsella, the author who penned iconic lines such as “If you build it, he will come.” Kinsella’s work was thrust into the limelight when, in the spring of 1989, his novel Shoeless Joe was turned into the international blockbuster Field of Dreams.

With the success of Shoeless Joe, Kinsella’s other works began to gain more attention as well, including a popular series of short stories narrated by a young Cree, Silas Ermineskin. Although many readers praised the stories for their humour and biting social commentary, Kinsella’s success reignited criticism of his appropriation of Indigenous voices for his own benefit, and of what some claimed was overt racism. For Kinsella, this censure was mitigated by the commercial success of the Silas Ermineskin stories. After scraping by as a taxi driver and restaurant owner, and later as a writing instructor, Kinsella took great satisfaction in being able to make a living from writing alone.

Achievement in his professional life was tempered by chaos in his personal life, including health problems, failed marriages and a tumultuous romantic relationship with writer Evelyn Lau that resulted in a highly public libel lawsuit. When long-term kidney issues resurfaced causing acute pain, Kinsella made his final arrangements. Never one to shy away from controversy, he made it clear to his agent that his decision to end his life by physician-assisted suicide must be mentioned in the press release following his death.

Though friends and family would remember him as stubborn, complicated, curmudgeonly, honest, loyal and a host of other adjectives, Kinsella answered, “I’m a story teller [and] my greatest satisfaction comes from leaving [while] making people laugh and also leaving them with a tear in the corner of their eye.”

Having been granted full access to Kinsella’s personal diaries, correspondence and unpublished notes, and with hours of personal interviews with Kinsella, his friends and his family, biographer William Steele offers insight into Kinsella’s personal life while balancing it with the critical analysis and commentary his fiction has inspired.

Informations

• Publié par: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781771621953
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Going the Distance
Going the Distance
The Life and Works of W.P. Kinsella
William Steele
Copyright © 2018 William Steele

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, www.accesscopyright.ca , 1-800-893-5777 , [e-mail] .

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
P.O. Box 219, Madeira Park, BC , V0N 2H0
www.douglas-mcintyre.com

Edited by Pam Robertson
Indexed by Emma Skagen
Jacket design by Anna Comfort O’Keeffe
Text design by Mary White
Printed and bound in Canada

Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $ 153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Government of Canada and from the Province of British Columbia through the BC Arts Council and the Book Publishing Tax Credit.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Steele, William, 1973–, author
Going the distance : the life and works of W.P. Kinsella / William Steele.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-77162-194-6 (hardcover).— ISBN 978-1-77162-195-3 ( HTML )

1. Kinsella, W. P. 2. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

PS 8571. I 57 Z 86 2018 C 813’54 C 2018-902131-4
C 2018-902132-2
In memory of John L. Steele II I , 1947–2016
He fought the good fight; he finished the race
Dedicated to Al Trabant, whom I am proud to call a friend
Contents
Prologue 1 Six Hundred Miles from Anywhere 5 Edmonton 23 The Lost Years 63 Back to School 81 Iowa 98 Desolate U. 116 “If You Build It . . .” 131 Goodbye, Desolate U. 161 Trouble on the Reserve 179 “. . . He Will Come” 191 “Nowhere to Go but Down” 203 The Gin Runs Out 236
Epilogue 258
Acknowledgments 263
Notes 267
Index 281
Photos I
Prologue
Early in the summer of 1989, a group of friends went with my brothers and me to see a matinee at a nearby theatre. My brothers both had an eye on one of the girls in the group, so when she decided she wanted to watch Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade , they, and everyone else with us, bought tickets for that show. A few weeks before, however, I had seen a trailer for a movie about a man who heard a voice telling him to build a baseball field on his farm, and plow under his cornfield to do so, and knew I had to see it. So I bought a ticket for that and found myself a seat near the back of the theatre, where I settled in for the next two hours. Once the lights had dimmed and James Horner’s music set the stage, I heard Kevin Costner begin narrating, “My father’s name was John Kinsella. . .” And I was hooked.
In the opening credits, I learned the movie was based on a novel, Shoeless Joe , by some writer named W.P. Kinsella. I soon read and re-read the novel, devouring it for its use of magic realism, though at the time I wasn’t aware that the style had a name. When the movie came out on vhs (and later, DVD ), I bought a copy and drove my family and friends crazy watching it over and over.
Eight years after I first saw the film, I was completing my coursework for my master’s degree in English, and I needed to find a topic for my dissertation. Being told for the first time in my academic career I could write about whatever I wanted, I decided to explore the various father-son relationships in Kinsella’s novel and in Phil Alden Robinson’s movie. Fully expecting the committee to say my proposal wasn’t scholarly enough, I was more than a little surprised when they not only approved the topic but also seemed genuinely interested in the idea. While I was defending the thesis the following spring, one of the committee members became emotional while talking about his own relationship with his father. And in a letter of congratulations, the dean mentioned being reminded as he read it of watching the Brooklyn Dodgers play at Ebbets Field when he was young.
Six years later, I quit my teaching job and moved to Pennsylvania to pursue a doctoral degree in literature and criticism. I found myself having to choose a research topic that would consume my life for the next two years. And once more, I found myself drawn to Kinsella’s fiction. By this time, I had read all of his baseball novels and short stories I could find, so I expanded the scope of my research to consider the role the game has in establishing various types of identity in his baseball novels.
During a research trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, the research librarian became interested in my topic and asked if I had reached out to Kinsella himself. My only interaction with Kinsella had been two years before when I attended a reading he gave in Portland, Oregon, when he looked like he might hit me over the head with my master’s thesis when I asked him to sign it. Having later discovered his disdain for academia, specifically for literary theorists, whom he felt spent too much time searching for hidden symbols and their meanings in literature, I had admittedly been reluctant to reach out to him and was unaware of how to contact him. The librarian provided me with Kinsella’s address, but my attempt to contact him with a few questions went unanswered.
On the day I graduated with my PhD, the committee member who hooded me during the ceremony, Dr. David Downing, told my wife that it was her job to make sure I pitched my dissertation to a publisher, as it was the first in-depth study of Kinsella’s work ever done. I, however, had spent the previous two-plus years immersed in researching and writing about the topic, so I put the manuscript on a shelf for more than three years, until I finally convinced myself to revisit it.
In the fall of 2011, my first book, A Member of the Local Nine: Baseball and Identity in the Fiction of W.P. Kinsella , was released just a few weeks after Kinsella’s first novel in thirteen years, Butterfly Winter , was published. One evening several months later, I received an email from Al Trabant, a man in Canada who introduced himself as a Kinsella fan who was interested in reading anything by or about Kinsella. Though he originally reached out to me to ask about a paper I had presented at a conference, he was happy to hear I had just published a book and requested that I send him a copy.
Some weeks later, Al emailed me again to tell me he was friends with Kinsella and had loaned him my book to read. Although part of me was interested in what Kinsella would think about my critical approach to his work, most of my time was spent thinking about a quote of his I had read somewhere in which he said he kept the heart of a literary critic on his desk. Not long after that, I received an email from Kinsella himself telling me he had just finished the book. “You’ve done a good job, make some good points, and don’t make a fool of yourself as so many academics do, by creating ludicrous interpretations of the books you study,” he wrote, and it remains to this day the best compliment anyone has ever given me related to my scholarship. It meant even more coming from someone who had very little to say by way of complimenting people in my line of work.
Two weeks later, Kinsella surprised me even more when he contacted me and asked if I would consider writing his biography. Having turned down multiple offers at the height of his career, he had decided it was time for something to be written while he and the important people in his life were still alive. To Bill’s credit, he provided me with hundreds of pages of handwritten autobiographical notes, sent folders full of clippings, and gave me contact information for any of his friends and family I needed for the project. The following summer, we made plans for me to visit him at his home overlooking the Fraser River in British Columbia.
One morning in early August 2013, I was standing outside my hotel in Hope, BC , when a small red car pulled up and an older bearded man waved me over as he unlocked the door.
“Good morning. I’m Bill Kinsella,” he said as he shook my hand. “I was thinking of getting some breakfast at Tim Hortons. Will that be alright with you? I figured we would eat and visit a little bit before getting to work.”
The next few minutes began what would eventually turn into several hours’ worth of conversations, emails and research. When he’d initially approached me about writing his biography, he said, “My life is not that interesting . . . I use my imagination to create interesting stories. But I am a thoroughly unadventurous person, live quietly and confide in virtually no one, which may or may not pose a problem for a biographer.” What I came to find over the next four years was that Bill was right: his life was not really all that much different from most of our lives. But I also discovered that he was able to make it far more interesting because of his imagination and tenacity, the two tools that served him so well for more than forty years as a writer.
Returning to his house after breakfast, we sat down at his kitchen table, where we began the first of many interviews. As Bill played multiple games of online Scrabble simultaneously, muttering under