[ARETE] Review of Ivan the Terible

[Duncan Jamieson]

All, Please find below Scott Peterson's review of Ivan the Terrible

Review of Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic by Charles Holdefer
Reviewed by Scott D. Peterson, University of Missouri-St. Louis

With a title the likes of Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic, Charles Holdefer’s new collection announces itself as an atypical baseball book. That said, fans of sport literature will quickly recognize how thoroughly the game is embedded in the tales.  The ten stories, one of which—“Wild West Show”—appeared in Aethlon, are connected loosely through the inner, outer, and tangential elements of baseball, as well as through the forward chronological movement of the settings, starting from the sixteenth century, when the titular character becomes the unlikely progenitor of America’s national game. Given the hoax inflicted on the sporting world by Albert Spalding—baseball’s actual first hidden emperor—at the turn of the twentieth century and the seemingly ever-expanding theories of the game’s origins, the founding Tsar of the Russian Empire might as well have his time in the sun field next to Abner Doubleday.

As an author of counterfactual fiction, I was particularly interested in “Gertie and the Babe.” This story explores what might have happened if Babe Ruth and Gertrude Stein switched cultural roles and continents to take up each other’s professions. Yes, cross-dressing is involved, but the story’s thought experiment also shines light on the ways that baseball was becoming more culturally acceptable in the 1920s when Heywood Broun was touting Ruth as a force for cultural good. In Holdefer’s take on the 1926 season, Gertie hits one less home run than the Babe did in our actual universe (46 to 47), but she matches Ruth’s failed stolen base attempt that was the last out of the World Series that year to give the St. Louis Cardinals the first of their eleven championships. Meanwhile in Paris, the Babe struggles with Stein’s coterie: “Hemingway—freeloader—needs title—what?” and supplies Stein’s contribution to the post-war generation in a slightly different and delightfully Ruthian manner: “You can all get LOST and stay LOST! YOU CAN QUOTE ME ON THAT!” (39).

Other stories offer more meditative looks at the game. “Deadball” takes place in what feels like a small town and focuses on the spiritual struggles of Harlan, a member of the Morgantown nine who wrestles between playing in the big game against the Mungo Clowns and staying home to continue his religious journey. Set in the present century, “The Promise” revisits the oft-told tale of Babe Ruth’s agreeing to hit a home run for a sick child. Holdefer adds a thought-provoking twist when the washed-up player encounters the grown-up child and is tasked with accounting for his failures. Power dynamics are also examined in “Foul,” which is set in disco-era Chicago and finds a decided degree of authenticity when, among references to slugger Dave Kingman and giant wax cups of bad beer, one of Wrigley Field’s legendary metal urinal troughs makes an appearance. “Antenna” is set in a rural county somewhere at the edges of the broadcast range of KMOX, the 50,000-watt radio station that expands the fan base of the St. Louis Cardinals up and down the Mississippi valley and all over the Midwest. The story is set in 1967, but it could take place almost any time between 1928 and the present (with the exception of two six-year gaps around 1950 and early in this century). This piece reminds us of how baseball is better built for the radio and will speak to anyone who played run-down in the street under summer evening streetlamps backed by the dulcet voices of Jack Buck and Mike Shannon.

As the foregoing paragraphs illustrate, the tones of the stories in the collection range from satirical to more serious. Overall, Holdefer successfully avoids what he identified in an interview as the tendency for writers of baseball fiction and journalism to invest heavily in myth, a tradition that stretches back at least as far as the first decades of the twentieth century in the paeans and poems of Grantland Rice and other “Gee Whizz” baseball writers. Coupled with the collection’s exploration of the game’s inner spaces, as the author identified in that same interview, I agree with Holdefer’s further assessment that the stories contain a “recurring sense of the theatrical side of baseball, and the way people, not just players, connect with it.” The reflections of Billy, the non-fan who had the full Wrigley experience in “Foul,” perhaps capture this effect best when Holdefer has the character meditate on the “often bewildering spectacle” of baseball: “It felt like life itself—but grounded and temporarily contained, offering a chance to focus” (76). This observation, as well as many other elements of Holdefer’s collection, supports the argument that the cultural work of sports in general, and baseball in particular, extend well beyond the mere comparisons of metaphor to become integral metonymic components embedded in the fabric of American life.

Charles Holdefer. Ivan the Terrible Goes on a Family Picnic. Sagging Meniscus, 2024, 159 pp, paper, $18.

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