Literary birthday greetings: Moe Berg

One of the most compelling characters in baseball history — and perhaps American culture — has to be Moe Berg, born this date in 1902.

I’m not going to go into a whole lot of background about Berg. Other have written about him well and at length, including Nicholas Dawidioff’s seminal biography The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, published in 1994.

Suffice it to say that Berg was a mediocre player at best who added to his legend by serving as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of the CIA, perhaps based on his “free-lance” work of taking photos of the Tokyo skyline during a barnstorming trip to Japan in 1934 which were purportedly used during the Doolittle Raid in World War Two.

His most dangerous OSS assignment came in 1944 when he was sent to attend a lecture in Switzerland given by the German physicist Werner Heisenberg. Armed with a gun and a poison pill, Berg was charged with determining of the Germans were close to building a nuclear bomb and, if so, assassinating Heisenberg and committing suicide, which obviously never came to pass.

This episode in Berg’s life was turned into “Agent Provocateur,” a fascinating short story by fantasy and science fiction author Alex Irvine that deals with baseball and philosophy, two of my favorite subjects (although I’m certainly no scholar of either).

I asked Irvine to explain his fascination with his subject in an e-mail exchange.

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Are you a big-time baseball fan?

I love baseball. I was one of those kids who pored over box scores in the paper every day and I still hear Mel Allen’s TWIB [This Week in Baseball] voice in my head every time I hear or read the phrase “How about that?” My other baseball-loving friends and I are prone to drop the names of obscure players into conversations. Much to the consternation, it must be said, of those around us who aren’t quite as in love with the game.

How did you “discover” Berg?

I’m not sure where I first ran across Moe Berg. I used to have all kinds of books about baseball history, and he must have been in some of them.

Given his most unusual life style, if Berg didn’t exist, would he have to be invented? You could have made up a figure for the main character; why did you pick a real-life figure?

Berg was the kind of real-life person who is unbelievable if he is invented, but since he’s real he’s too good to pass up. Also he was perfect for this story because I had been walking around for a while thinking about Heisenberg and all of the questions surrounding his involvement with Nazi nuclear research during WWII. There are people who think he slow-walked the Nazi program because he didn’t really want them to have the bomb, and whether or not that’s true the question highlights some of the complexities of Heisenberg’s character — which then, of course, resonate nicely with the Uncertainty Principle. The story really fell together when I read that Berg had attended a lecture Heisenberg gave; after I found that out, I wrote it in a day or so.

I like to get fictional looks at real-life people. Not the most famous, but the ones who do enormously important things that are invisible to the main historical narrative. Moe Berg struck me as a guy like that precisely because of what he did not do, and I found that really interesting.

You have a good mix of fact and fiction. Which part is harder for you: the factual research or the creative narrative?

I love research. When I write fiction set in a historical past, I love to dig around in that history so I can get all of the details right. (Of course, you almost never do, and readers are quick to let you know when you mess something up.) Research is great, though, because you can get it right. When I’m working on a story, I’m always acutely conscious of the probability that there’s some way to do it better that I’m not figuring out. I love telling stories, don’t get me wrong, but there’s always that notional better version of the story you’re telling. It can drive you crazy sometimes.But it’s also great, and keeps you aspiring to be better.

How much research did you do on Berg?

Most of what I know about Berg comes from Dawidoff’s excellent book. I also looked up all of his stats on…. I have some kind of dim memory that I found other articles on Berg, but the vast majority of the Berg-related stuff in “Agent Provocateur” is taken from Dawidoff. I owe him a beer.

Do you read a lot of baseball fiction? Who are some of your favorite writers in that genre?

I taught a course on Baseball in American literature once, and my favorite books from that class would probably be [Robert] Coover’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop. and Philip Roth’s The Great American Novel. Also Karen Joy Fowler’s The Sweetheart Season: A Novel is a terrific novel about women and baseball during and after World War II. And of course nobody can talk about baseball literature without mentioning The Natural.

Not being a huge follower of the genres, what’s the difference between science fiction and fantasy? Is it merely that the former has possibilities “based” on science (Space/time travel, aliens, etc.) and the latter deals with the “impossible” (unicorns, dwarfs and elves, etc.)? How would you classify “Agent Provocateur?”

This is a question that has vexed genre readers for a long time. If you ever want to start an argument among SF or fantasy fans, bring this up. What you suggest is a good basic division, though: broadly speaking, SF is the literature of the possible, and fantasy the literature of the impossible.

I believe you previously mentioned you had written another baseball-related story…?

There’s baseball in a lot of my stuff, usually as part of the background. There’s a novel I wrote, The Narrows, which takes place in Detroit during World War II — like “Agent Provocateur” — and the characters in that book complain about how bad wartime baseball is and wish Hank Greenberg was still around. But mostly that book is about the golem archetype (the main character works on a secret project making golems for the war effort) and Detroit folklore. In another one of my books, One King, One Soldier, one of the main characters is a barnstorming baseball player in the 1880s — but again, the main thrust of that book is more about Arthur Rimbaud, the Fisher King legend, and Beat culture. Sort of.

Are you familiar with other stories/books of baseball science fiction? I’m thinking of the some of the work of W.P. Kinsella , but are there others you can recommend?

Sure. There’s If I Never Get Back, a time-travel baseball novel by Darryl Brock. Kim Stanley Robinson wrote a terrific story called “Arthur Sternbach Brings the Curveball to Mars.” There’s a Michael Bishop novel called Brittle Innings that is maybe the best fantasy novel about baseball this side of The Natural. Rick Wilber writes lots of baseball fiction and it’s good stuff, too.

The ending of “AP” kind of reminds me of the end of Inception: both leave you wondering, what will happen?

I haven’t seen Inception! But I want to. Yeah, the story is about the eternal problem of not being able to know what’s going to happen. In another way, it’s about the inverse of that question: do we know that what has happened had to happen? Was there another possibility? Does that other possibility exist in some other time stream or reality? These are fantasies, but since there’s no way to disprove them they’re interesting to think about. Moe Berg understood the irony of never being able to know what’s going to happen and nevertheless having to make choices based on anticipated consequences. The great thing about him as a character is that he had enough perspective on that problem to be able to make notes to himself about the uncertainty principle while he’s holding Heisenberg’s life in his hands.

Many thanks, Alex.

Thanks for the conversation. Now I’m going to go watch Inception.

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Other books about Moe Berg include