Luke Salisbury Books


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Henry Harrison, narrator of both The Cleveland Indian and Hollywood and Sunset, is my alter ego. Henry’s father was wounded at Antietam, the family fortunes faded, he received a gentleman’s education but had to make his way in the world. Henry didn’t want Wall Street. He wanted baseball. Baseball was his art, his imaginary world, he dreamed of helping players get a better deal from the tightfisted owners of the 1890s. Henry falls in love with two women – one who is home, one who is not. Henry lives out the fantasy of being the closest friend to the most talented ballplayer of his time – the enigmatic King Saturday, a Native American, the original Cleveland Indian. The novel is about a young man wanting to recapture what he thinks his family lost, missing a father who knew war and could not talk about it, falling desperately in love with what he can’t have, and what he must have. Henry sees baseball as an American Eden, a perfect aesthetic place, the Keatsian “Much have I traveled in the realms of gold.” He finds it is not.

The Cleveland Indian is a novel about that time in life when one wants to change a piece of the world. Own. Dare. Win. Lose. It’s also about disappearing frontiers – internal and external. About getting what you want and the price of holding it. You see, there is Eden and the memory of Eden.

It’s also about the mysterious, violent King Saturday, and a question: Where does revolutionary energy go in America? If you are truly an outsider, truly willing to confront power, get power, kill, love, throw baseball games, do anything – the question is not what, but where? There are many answers to what. Some legal, some not; some poetic, some mad, many ridiculous. The question is where do you go? Who do you work for? Who do you undermine? How long do you last?

Henry searches. For baseball, love, the Indian himself. Like most young men, he thinks he can contradict Jack Kerouac: “Not the biggest fighter, the biggest drunk, or the biggest lover, can find the center of Saturday night in America.” That quote is the centerpiece of a chapter of The Answer Is Baseball; I’m sure it is the origin of the name King Saturday (I didn’t realize that until just now).

The Cleveland Indian, originally published by The Smith in 1992, will appear in a new edition in Spring, 2005 with Black Sparrow Press. The novel was taught in an American Literature course at Indiana State University, and is the subject of a chapter in David McGimpsey’s Imagining Baseball: America’s Pastime ansd Popular Culture.

Praise for The Cleveland Indian

"The 1897 Cleveland Spiders were a talented baseball team, and Salisbury’s vividly rendered first novel captures the players, the memories surrounding them and the American public’s burgeoning obsession with baseball at the turn of the century. Salisbury focuses on the fictional relationship between narrator Henry Harrison–the team’s lawyer and a self-described “Krank,” as fans were called in those days–and the charismatic King Saturday, the club’s raucous, unpredictable and doomed American Indian superstar. Modeled after Lou Sockalexis–considered the first Native American major-leaguer and a real star for the Spiders in 1897 (you can look it up)–Saturday is rendered as a magisterial but unknowable figure of tremendous physical skills and enigmatic motivations. The character of 19th-century baseball–the aggressive tactics, hard-drinking players and pervasive gambling–is wonderfully depicted, as are the political tensions and social strictures of the period. Harrison’s earnest, crisp narrative voice is appealing. There are some flaws: certain sections–Harrison following Saturday to the steaming jungles of Cuba, for example–seem almost a parody of the adventure novel. It’s also unfortunate that we get to know the extraordinary King Saturday only through his schemes and his awesome deeds, and never through the articulation of his inner life."
— Publishers Weekly

"A Penobscot Indian with a terrific arm and flexible morality takes Cleveland’s baseball team briefly to the top of the league in the 1890’s. The salaries were a tiny fraction of today’s, and Cleveland was in the National League, but even then there were gifted players who gambled and lawyers who would rather sit in the grandstands than in a courtroom. Henry Harrison is among the latter, a well- born but impoverished Ivy League graduate dazzled by the throwing arm, hitting skills, and romantic talents of Louis King Phillip Saturday, a half-ugly half-Indian from Maine. Saturday is signed by the Cleveland Spiders, who also hire Harrison as their lawyer. Harrison’s primary duty is to keep an eye on his wild friend–an assignment that introduces him to the seamier side of the Cuyahoga River. It does not take Harrison very long to discover that Saturday sees nothing wrong with betting on baseball, including his own games, and Henry finds himself willingly holding the bag and becoming Saturday’s business partner. Saturday’s such a good player and such a good gambler that the bag begins to fill up fast, and Harrison’s ambition to own his very own professional team begins to seem possible. Another similarity to today’s sport: worshipful women. In addition to managing the money, Harrison must keep Saturday’s admirers in order. Alas, Harrison himself fancies at least one of the ladies. When the glorious season with the Spiders spectacularly ends, Saturday, whose gambling has become an open secret, must take it on the lam to Cuba, Mexico, and Colorado. Standard Oil, of all things, figures into the action at every turn. Salisbury (the nonfictional The Answer is Baseball, 1989) offers brisk fun for the Bart Giamattis of this world."
— Kirkus Reviews