One of the fundamental genre constraints to historical fiction is that, if you're describing large-scale historical events with famous people, your readers often know how it will turn out. So if you want to create tension or suspense, you have to do it some other way, maybe smaller and more personal stakes. A great example, which I'll come back to, is "Ninety-Three" by Victor Hugo. I think everybody who sits down to pick up a book with Robespierre, Marat, and Danton, knows what's going to happen in the general "republicans versus monarchists" battles. Even on the specific scale of the Vendée war, the republicans have a huge advantage both in numbers and technology. We're not in suspense about the campaign. But we are in suspense over the fate of three young children who have been kidnapped and taken hostage by the monarchists.
"The Celebrant" is a book I'd heard of a long time ago because it's been excerpted/quoted in a couple of my (many) anthologies of baseball literature. I knew it was a work of historical fiction, dealing with a Jewish-American immigrant family's assimilation to New York City in the early 1900s, against the backdrop of Christy Mathewson, a brilliant pitcher for the New York Giants. (Mathewson and all the baseball people in the book are real.) What I hadn't remembered/osmosed is that it was written in the 1970s/80s, not contemporaneously to the events it describes.
A celebrant is a person who celebrates. Giants fans are celebrants when the team wins a big game, but Mathewson, despite his book-learning and occasional otherworldliness, is also one of the guys; after a hard-fought poker game or checkers match, he can be a celebrant, too. But--in another "extremely on-brand for me" moment--one of the reasons I keep remembering to put this on my TBR and then go "eh, maybe after bingo" is the other context of the word "celebrant"; in Christian denominations like Episcopalianism, the pastor who says the blessing over Communion is the "celebrant." (In the Lutheran churches where I grew up, we would usually say "presiding minister.") It's a sacred act of emulating Jesus' sacrifice. So week in, week out, I keep seeing that in the bulletin and being like "yeah, I have to track down that Mathewson book, don't I..."
The main timespan of the book covers seasons from 1901 through 1919. Here are some of the names you will find in this book: John McGraw, "Iron" Joe McGinnity, Jake Stahl, Connie Mack, Johnny Evers, Hank O'Day, Honus Wagner, "Smoky" Joe Wood, Tris Speaker, Hal Chase, Joe Jackson, Harry Frazee. If any of these names mean anything to you, you already have some sense of what the baseball-related sections are going to cover.
If none of those names mean anything to you, you probably are not going to enjoy this book, because there is a lot of baseball. Diligently-researched box scores and replays. Sometimes, when the narrator is summarizing a season or two, it can almost read like nonfiction, and those parts weren't as engaging for me, maybe because I've read so much baseball nonfiction before. (Although, when people try to "spice up" their nonfiction by throwing in a bunch of fun facts about who was president or what was going on in pop culture or other trends to set the stage, that annoys me even more.)
If none of those names mean anything to you,
but you're confident you would love reading 280 pages of baseball minutiae (there's been a lot of baseball since Greenberg's day, it's entirely possible there are avid fans who don't care about anything that happened in the segregated era!): for the sake of my own curiosity, I would love to hear about your reading experience if you skip the biographical note at the beginning and the line scores/game summaries at the beginning of chapters, and go in completely blind except for stuff like "in 1901, the National League that we currently know exists; the New York Giants are the team that will later play in San Francisco; the American League has just been founded but the NL doesn't recognize it as legit yet."
But yeah, I think for most of us, asking "will McGraw win a World Series?" is about as moot as "will the revolution triumph?" What we care about boils down to something much more personal, which is, "what will happen to Jackie and his relationship with Mathewson?"
The narrator, Jackie Kapp | Yakov Kapinski, is almost the same age as Mathewson, and an avid fan. As a kid, he could pitch a little himself; as a teenager, he gets to shake hands with a big-leaguer who has some life advice for him: "At the dinner, his eyes never leaving the page, he delivered a speech analogizing baseball and life. Practice, dedication, clean living, and fair play—these guaranteed success on and off the field."
But Jackie blows out his arm and never advanced beyond amateur status. So at first glance, it seems like they epitomize the
Quester/Family Person dichotomy--Mathewson, the pitching genius, represents the road not taken for Jackie, who has to console himself with a wife and kids.
But it's not that simple. Jackie isn't a ballplayer, but his dedication and passion for his art (his family runs a jewelry business that grows slowly over the course of the decades) is a reflection of Mathewson's brilliance. All his best pieces are spontaneous tributes to Mathewson, but he can't replicate that kind of art on demand. In his own way, he's a Quester, too. And while he tells himself that being a Family Person is worth the tradeoffs, it comes across as very perfunctory to the reader. It's just, like, "timeskip, that girlfriend I have? We're engaged now. Timeskip. Oh by the way she's pregnant. Timeskip. Yeah we had another kid." In an American intergenerational baseball story, like, of course the child has to grow into manhood to have a son and pass down the game to the next generation, that's on the bingo card. But, spoilers, the daughter doesn't exist to do anything except get fridged and give Jackie manpain. Sigh.
Jackie adores Mathewson; his business-minded brothers, and almost everyone else, are like, "that's great, let's find a way for you to get into the clubhouse and shake his hand, it'll make you happy and be good for business."
“I don’t want to be his friend at all.”
“A secret admirer?”
“No secret to it.”
“What, then? A worshipper from afar?”
“Isn’t that the proper distance for worship? You don’t crawl into the ark to worship torah.”
“No, but you touch it when it’s walked through the temple.”
“I’ve never liked that, people climbing all over one another while the scrolls are paraded through the aisles. It’s not dignified.”
“It’s emotion, sport, like cheering at a ballgame.”
“I suppose.” I shaded the drawing on my pad. “Eli, you don’t really think I worship Mathewson, do you? In the religious sense? That’s heresy.”
There's the old trope about "the only person worthy of power is the humble person who believes they're unworthy of it." Well, that's kind of what happens here, except instead of power it's Mathewson's admiration and friendship, and Jackie keeps shying away and sending gifts indirectly instead. The one time they do talk, of course, there's mutual respect and camaraderie, and Mathewson deconstructs the "baseball is like life" cliches:
After all, baseball isn’t anything like life. I think that was your point, sir, when you said there’s nothing real about it. In that sense I agree. In truth, nothing in the game appealed to me as much as its unreality. Baseball is all clean lines and clear decisions. Wouldn’t life be far easier if it consisted of a series of definitive calls: safe or out, fair or foul, strike or ball. Oh, for a life like that, where every day produces a clear winner and an equally clear loser, and back to it the next day with the slate wiped clean and the teams starting out equal. Yes, a line score is a very stark statement, isn’t it? The numbers tell the essential story. All the rest is mere detail.
Towards the end, the character of Hugh Fullerton (a baseball journalist, also from RL but not someone I was very familiar with), emerges as sort of a reader stand-in, incredulously going "what do you
mean you barely spoke to him." You (or at least I, maybe not Fullerton) want to shake Jackie by the shoulders and go "he's made it perfectly clear he understands your art as well as you understand his, go be his friend! Now! Before it's too late!"
In "Ninety-Three," Cimourdain is Gauvain's mentor, best friend, father-figure, etc. They're incredibly close. Gauvain would never do anything with the purpose of harming Cimourdain, just like Jackie would never do anything with the purpose of harming his brother or family. And yet, Gauvain's ultimate loyalty has to be to the visionary republic ideals, even if it brings Cimourdain grief. In the end, Jackie's ultimate dilemma is much the same;
“It isn’t Eli who stands on the precipice,” he said. “It’s you, you, who sways there. It’s you that risks damnation. Do you see that? How can I teach you?”
There are a couple names that I did
not include in that big list of characters, that you might expect to show up if you know a lot about early-1900s New York Giants folklore. Spoilers: they do show up. But baseball is a complicated game, and for every dramatic, headline-making play that alters the path of a pennant race or postseason series, there are a dozen others that have just as much influence on the final standings, but don't get the press. In recollections after the fact, people will often say, "yeah, [foo] got a bad rap for how things played out, but you really also have to credit the decisive brilliance of [bar], it's not fair that we're still talking about foo." Except, in that sentence, you've already mentioned "foo" twice.
People's brains are weird, especially when you're trying to debunk things! How do you reframe, or retell, that history, to put the emphasis on bar where it should be, rather than foo? A century later, baseball fans would still love to know this. (So would many other people, for that matter.)
Greenberg notes that one of his main sources was "The Glory of Their Times," by Lawrence Ritter, which is a classic (1966) oral history from many of the contemporaries. This was a book I didn't read until I'd read many other, more recent, baseball books, but as soon as I read it it's like, "oh, this is what they're all using as a source, in particular, when the players say 'we talk a lot about foo but we should talk about bar also,' the successors/ripoffs are just like 'foo! okay, moving on now.'" One thing about baseball is that it is extremely allusive, and reading one story like this will bring up several others. Smoky Joe Wood, a Red Sox star and hero of the 1912 World Series, gets interviewed in "Glory of Their Times." In 1981, Roger Angell--inspired in part by reading that book--tracked him down and talked with him at an epic college playoff game where Ron Darling pitched against Frank Viola, which got turned into a news article. Darling and Viola both become major league pitchers, won the World Series in different years, and played together on the Mets. Angell lived to be 101, and when he died just a couple years ago, there were lots of tributes quoting that story and the 1975 World Series and many others...
And it reminded me of another Mathewson story, originally written by Ring Lardner, collected in a humor anthology. An intro to that chapter/section mentions that "Lardner's tongue-in-cheek elegy has been quoted frequently as a solemn eulogy." But, okay, that blurb is several pages before the excerpt itself. And "elegy" and "eulogy" mean basically the same thing. And yes, there is some over-the-top verse with the "news article," but a lot of actual attempts at serious news in those days also featured over-the-top verse. And the anthology was put together long, long after the fact, once a lot of context had been lost, and I was too young to pick up on a lot of sarcasm in those days. And--spoilers--Mathewson
did die prematurely, but not because of the circumstances described in the article. (Well, Greenberg's fictionalized version may have had a more explicit death wish.) Anyway, this is the opening paragraph:
"The baseball world was shocked yesterday by the news that Christy Mathewson, one of the game's greatest exponents, had signed to manage the Cincinnati Reds at the age of thirty-seven years, the very prime of his life. Mathewson is the seventh prominent baseballist to succumb to this disease in a space of twelve years."
Get it? It's a joke that the Reds are very bad. That's it, that's the joke. I think I understand the joke now a lot better than I did when I first read the anthology.
Speaking of humor, "The Celebrant" has a couple uproariously funny scenes--Jackie's businessminded brother, Arthur, accompanies him and their older brother on a trip to
Wanamaker's in Philadelphia and tries to improve their company's data collection, and they are...not ready for that mindblowing level of data science. Then there's also an argument between John McGraw and an umpire that is not at all safe for work but very amusing. (McGraw was a small, belligerent, manager from Baltimore who loved small ball, hit-and-run, bunting type stuff, and fighting with everybody all the time. Mathewson was a cerebral college man. Despite Jackie's skepticism, opposites attract and they were an intense bromance, because they were both consummate competitors. Joe Posnanski points this odd couple dynamic out in his "Baseball 100"--Greenberg really didn't need to do any fictionalizing here, except maybe to lean into some of the "oh yes we're ~very close, we lived together with both our wives, wink wink" aspects.)
Okay, so: does "The Celebrant" stick the landing? I don't know--does "Ninety-Three"? Cathartic, in some sense of the word, sure. (I'm good at the "getting filled up with emotions" part but not "and then dumping them out" part.) Bittersweet, yes. Number of sympathetic adult main characters left standing? No comment.
But the real Mathewson, despite the tragedies in his life (
his two RL brothers don't make the fictional version, Jackie's family gets the tragedy instead), seems to have been somewhat more hinged in the timeframe of the last chapters than the fictional one. Maybe I can be grateful that, at least, he took the game seriously and was devoted to truth all through his life, or relieved that he never actually had to deploy intermediaries to track down a doppelganger who was too shy to be his friend. Or maybe this is all something I tell myself to keep from having too many emotions about fictional characters.
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