The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 289

THE BOOK REVIEW Endpapers The Poetry of Baseball idly in aperback! "His most accomplished artistic performance to datef-wfe THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER BY EMM out this Wednesday." Moore spoke baseball, you might say, with a Parnassian accent. I recall my own tonal difficulties on assignment, years ago, in Cuba. One day, I was summoned to watch Fidel Castro pitch against a team of political police, whose own pitcher was the interior minister, the considerably feared not by Castro, of course, at least not then Ramiro Valdes. Castro gave himself a comfortable edge by choosing a team of Cuba's top players. Not surprisingly, he won.

Having been brought up abroad, and without benefit of the Saturday afternoon broadcasts, my problem was language. I could see perfectly well that Fidel was throwing the ball and that it went somewhere rather fast. I realized that you couldn't phrase it that way in an American newspaper. "Mr. Castro leaned way back and heaved a fast ball below the knees of Mr.

Valdes," I wrote. If that sounds peculiar, there was the visiting Spanish writer who sat near me and almost got beaned by a Valdes wild pitch. "And you cannot say that you have been in a country unless you have trembled there," was the way he put it in a draft he showed me the following day. Did it sound authentic? he wondered. Told no, he explained that he had lifted the line from the East German ambassador.

For most Americans, after all, and probably for all the writers who have attempted this kind of thing after Moore, baseball is a common tongue of childhood. As for me, I have been partly naturalized. Not to get interested in the Red Sox when living in Boston would be like living in Iowa and ignoring corn. Besides, one of my by RICHARD EDER With that Sisyphus of teams, the Red Sox they scrabble to the top and almost always slide back playing the Angels in a climax that few Sox fans ever expected, the Boston Globe last Monday got 11 writers to tell what baseball meant to them. They were John Updike, Stephen King, David Halberstam, George Will, George Higgins, Ward Just and others; the result varied from the touching to the graceful to the dutiful to the pompous.

It was going the whole hog, literarily speaking; and at times, it did resemble an 11-course meal consisting entirely of pork chops. But there was a tradition at work. I am not sure who started it, but my uneducated guess is the poet Marianne Moore. Moore's sporting sorties were odd but quite genuine; even if in her later years, New York journalism tended to overdo her as its literary mascot. It was always character she was after in her recondite and unexpected poetry and prose.

She found it in a whole array of ceremonies, objects and personages; pouncing upon the least likely. Knives were never the same after she winkled out the eternal significance of her kitchen set. Neither were hats. (The Bor-salino's moral attribute was Even baseball players seemed to tilt slightly in her skittering lines. "The difference of a hair, in offense or defense, could mean success, I feel, for the Cardinals or the Tigers in this World Series," she wrote in 1968.

"The teams are so nearly matched in talented personnel that individual effort under stress is going to make the difference when the first ball is thrown THE BOOK WIK sons-in-law is a Sox fan; the other, for no apparent reason apart from liking arguments, follows Baltimore. And they help me. Nobody heaves a ball in the Globe's selection. But there is a varying ability to find the right tone. You might say it is a question of stance.

Updike could not fail of grace if he tried. He is wise enough not to try too hard, in fact. His amusing account of wearing out the car battery listening to a Red Sox game during a Vermont vacation wreathes imperceptibly with a golden reflection on mortality's losing game. Doris Kearns, a historian, is a natural. She writes of going regularly with her father to Brooklyn's Ebbets Field and, nowadays, taking her children to see the lumpy old Dodgers' lumpy successors in Boston's Fenway Park.

Movingly, and without contrivance, she finds she has perpetuated something of her father in the grandchildren who never knew him. Other stances come with heavier feet. George Will writes impeccably about Wade Boggs, but turns it into an insufferable lesson about the American dream. A. Bartlett Giamatti, who abandoned Yale's presidency to become president of the National League, wields a lethal dose of language.

Previously, he wrote of baseball as a Renaissance ceremony, and of the gloomy Boston fans as an example of New England's self-denying Calvinism. Here, he begins: "In all its complementary contradictions, its play of antitheses, baseball captured a continent bounded to east and west by oceans, laced by mountains and rivers, dry, fertile, wet, wooded and at its heart, or stomach, endlessly flat." Endlessly mountainous, Giamatti continues as he has begun. What does all this suggest? Why do quite a few American writers feel it to be somewhere between an urge and a duty to put in their 2 cents about baseball; at least when an editor asks them. Would a similar collection of Italian writers contribute their thoughts about soccer? Would an Italian editor ask? You could talk about a shared childhood. You could think of baseball as a kind of bonding in a society that hasn't much of it.

You could think of a solitary writer coming out for a break and wanting some undemanding sense of community. You could also think of it as our only authentic laureateship. Never mind the Library of Congress' recent appointment of Robert Penn Warren as Poet Laureate. The traditional role of the Laureate was to celebrate the king or queen not so much for their individual qualities (though flattery came into it and so did reward) as for their personification of the nation. Who personifies us? What would a laureate write about? The Constitution is not a person.

The Supreme Court would be plain silly. Could it be nine young men, continually replaced, out there in the sun, or playing night games? That is probably silly too. Authors writing about baseball with their various mixtures of archness, wit, grace, ponderosity and self-promotion, seem to be turning out just about our only literary form of national ceremonial. REVIEW un ir ii. i Aft DeauriTUiiy evocanve! Esquire "Dazzling prose!" New York Tim Book Review JACK MILES, Times Book Editor NEXT SUNDAY Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford) W.

J. West, Orwell: The War Commentaries (Pantheon) Peter Berger, The Capitalist Revolution: Fifty Propositions About Prosperity, Equality, and Liberty (Basic) R. Foster Winans, Trading Secrets: Seduction and Scandal at the Wall Street Journal (St Martin's) Pat Conroy, The Prince of Tides (Houghton Mifflin) Jay Parini, The Patch Boys (Holt) Excerpts from nominees for The Times Book Prize in fiction SOON IN VIEW Joyce Carol Oates, Raven's Wing (Dutton) C. R. Badcock, The Problem of Altruism: Freudian-Darwinian Solutions (Blackwell) The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore (Viking) Richard Selzer, Taking the World in for Repairs (Morrow) Steven Millhauser, From the Realm of Morpheus (Morrow) "Star is the bepvsd heart that cannot by this Books 95 SUNDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1986PAGE 13 LOS ANGELES TIMESTHE BOOK REVIEW.