Old Curses Die Hard

James Finn Garner: Author and Poet

By Donald G. Evans

James Finn Garner turned up at the Lovable Loser’s Literary Revue on a Wednesday evening in early June, when the Chicago Cubs were starting to look like a team of destiny. Jim had heard about the Revue from friend Jonathan Eig, who was a featured guest that night, as well as Sid Yiddish, a regular contributor to the series. I asked Jim to be a guest at a future event, and since he would be away much of the summer he agreed to September. That month the theme was “Curses”.

“When I sat down to write, I thought of different curses that hadn’t been explored yet,” Jim says. “The Cubs have voodoo, witchcraft, black cats, the billy goat, and the ghost of Bonehead Merkle. What other areas of hoodoo could I explore?”

Jim wrote three pieces for the event, two of which are included in Cubbie Blues. He wrote a poem, a humorous short story, and delivered the closing prayer. That September night was a microcosm of Jim’s incredible literary career, showcasing an impressive range of literary forms and styles, as well as performance polish.

Three Fates and Yer Out plays on the three Greek mythological goddesses who literally spun human fate. Sitting atop Mount Olympus, one goddess spun the thread of a man’s life, one measured it out, and one cut it. Jim worked the Cubs and their losing tradition, which of course was the theme of both the Revue and the anthology, into that scenario.

“Different mythologies have different ideas of how life begins and ends,” says Jim. “It’s an evergreen concept : our lives are decided by somebody else. If the Cubs are going to be a classical failure, why not bring in a classical allusion?”

Jim considered other “big, doomed efforts,” like the story of Ulysses and Jason and the Argonauts. But the number three—as in three strikes and three outs—is an important number in baseball, and that synergy with the Fates, along with the comic possibilities, urged Jim forward. He brainstormed with various literary and sports threes: Hamlet’s three witches, Tinkers to Evers to Chance, even Who, What and I Don’t Know from the popular Abbott and Costello skit. Baseball writing does not generally enjoy a reputation for sophistication, much less erudition, plus the piece was to be performed in a Mexican restaurant, and Jim was aware during the process that he was straining the boundaries of audience.

“It was an unknown subject I was twisting in a weird way, so I had everything going against me,” Jim says. “I realized it was a different kind of poetry than is usually done in a bar: the rhyme scheme is a little more complicated, tighter, denser. People had to listen hard to it.”

But if Three Fates and Yer Out was a potential nightmare to perform, The Wrigleyville Monkey’s Paw was a pleasure. Jim took on the wary, sophisticated voice of the narrator, and then to underscore the dialogue assumed the gnarled expression and maniacal, panicked voice of the low-level con man.

“I enjoyed performing that much more,” Jim says.

Jim loves acting and reading for an audience, having performed in shows and cabarets such the Elbo Room and the (now defunct) Roxy. He actually got into performing to loosen up his writing muscles. In the early 1990s, he hosted a show called “Theater of the Bizarre,” a Weimar cabaret for the end of the Cold War. One of his recurring pieces in that show was “Politically Correct Bedtime Stories.” He later expanded that concept into book form and tried to sell it. After two-and-a-half years and 30 rejection slips from publishers all over the country, this “sure-fire idea” was finally purchased by Macmillan Publishing. It became a runaway hit in 1994 and spawned two sequels, calendars and a CD-ROM game. Politically Correct Bedtime Stories has been translated into more than 25 languages and spent more than a year on the New York Times Best Sellers list.

In writing Monkey’s Paw, Jim struggled to find the right narrative voice. He tried and discarded third person; tried and discarded first person from the point of view of the con man; and finally settled on first person from the victim’s perspective.

This story also has classical roots, though much more modern than The Three Fates. W.W. Jacob’s horror story “The Monkey’s Paw” first appeared in Harper’s Monthly magazine in 1902, and there are many parallels between the construct of Garner’s and Jacob’s tales. Jacob’s story is set before the White family’s cozy fireplace, but an uneasy tension seeps into the comfortable setting when an old friend visits bearing a mummified monkey’s paw, acquired during his time abroad.

What Jim does, as he has done with such panache in his satirical Politically Correct stories, is to mirror the framework, but update the details in a ridiculous and telling fashion. For example, the monkey’s paw, which turns out to be a chewed buffalo wing, is “mummified” in a simple bar napkin.

“The paw has gone through two wishes, it’s eaten, it’s falling apart, but it’s that hope that Cubs fans have that makes the story a burlesque,” Jim says. “Taking it to the most ridiculous degree, this is how far hope can take you, that a half-eaten buffalo wing with tendons falling off can maybe help you achieve all your wishes.”

Curses, and the unraveling of them, are familiar in Cubs’ lore, but as the team has eclipsed the magical century mark since its last championship the dynamic, perhaps, has shifted.

“Now that it’s 100 years old, the failure has gone beyond immediate tragedy,” Jim says. “Now it’s eternal, it’s epic, it’s for the ages, so let’s bring in ancient curses. Every year, we try lifting the curse. It used to be lighthearted, but now it’s getting more earnest. We can’t lightheartedly bring a goat to home plate or blow up the baseball anymore.

"Sprinkling holy water around the dugout is taking things to a whole new level. How many virgins do we need to sacrifice? Slit some throats at the Ernie Banks statue? Give a burnt offering at the Harry Caray statue? It's getting deadly serious. It's gone beyond innocent fun; now it's turning into black magic."

In the spirit of the ancient, mystical tale, in which old sea captains and conquerors and other world travelers return home to tell tales of exotic places, people and, indeed, supernatural events, Jim did away with traditional quotation marks to denote dialogue.

“I think it’s a story about a story,” Jim says. “If you needed to insert quotation marks, you might put them at the very beginning and end. This version has an oral history feel, reaching back to old myths and old curses.”

Combining these classical literary traditions with baseball was a natural marriage for Jim. Though he’s been in Chicago 26 years, he was raised in Detroit, in an atmosphere in which the voice of Ernie Harwell (loooong gone) crackled and buzzed from the transistor at home and the family car’s AM radio on road trips. Jim was eight years old when the Tigers won the World Series, and he also retains fond memories of Billy Martin and Mark “The Bird” Fydrich.

Jim, who lived a block from Wrigley Field for many years, would attend lots of Cubs games with his stock trader roommate, but his attempt to ally himself with the home team ultimately failed.

“Suddenly, themes of my youth came up,” he says. “I care about American League teams fighting it out. Not Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, but the Yankees and the A’s and the Sox. I didn’t grow up here, so I can’t completely switch my allegiance to it. Why take on somebody else’s pain? I’ve got enough of my own.”

Jim and cohort Stuart Shea just completed their second season as custodians of the baseball poetry site Bardball.com. It started when Jim and friends started swapping Barry Bonds limericks, mostly centered on his steroid use. That led to the idea of resurrecting the tradition of Grantland Rice and Ring Lardner, in which daily poetry was used to record thoughts on baseball heroes and anti-heroes, on their deeds and on their relationship to the fans. Jim’s goal is to publish an annual anthology containing the best work from the previous year.

“I thought it would be fun to start a dialogue with other people thinking these things,” he says. “I also wanted to avoid baseball poetry that was too serious. I’d rather write about Cecil Fielder being the world’s fattest vegetarian.”

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Want more James?

• Read Five Minutes with James Finn Garner
• Visit his website and Bardball.com