
DATE: Sunday, November 9, 1997              TAG: 9710300642

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY TIM WARREN 

                                            LENGTH:   90 lines

JACKIE ROBINSON

A Biography

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD

Alfred A. Knopf. 512 pp. $27.50.

Major League Baseball has been paying tribute all year long to Jackie Robinson, who 50 years ago integrated baseball by playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Yet all the commemorative speeches and ceremonies couldn't begin to indicate the ordeal that Robinson went through. The scrutiny, the pressures he endured were unfathomable; one sympathetic sportswriter who interviewed him concluded that ``it's no fun to see a man fighting against odds that seem almost insurmountable.'' No wonder that the well-known sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote during Robinson's rookie year that he was ``the loneliest man I have ever seen in sports.''

Yet, as we all know, Robinson helped change not only American sport but American society as well. His joining the formerly all-white Dodgers in 1947 occurred seven years before Brown vs. The Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas and eight years before the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycotts. He became a leading - and often unpopular - voice calling for social change. But in the end, when he died in 1972, he was seen by many blacks as too moderate, too tied to the white ``establishment'' that in fact Robinson had fought much of his life.

His is a story of triumph and tragedy, and Robinson, a fascinating and deeply complex man, has been the subject of several biographies. Arnold Rampersad's Jackie Robinson, obviously timed to be published during the 50-year anniversary of Robinson's breaking baseball's color line, is the latest.

Rampersad, the biographer of Langston Hughes and ghostwriter of Arthur Ashe's excellent memoir, Days of Grace, attempts to see Robinson more in political and social terms than in a baseball context, and he largely succeeds. The early chapters, especially, on Robinson's growing up in integrated but solidly racist Pasadena, Calif., explain the forces that molded the young ballplayer and illustrate the sad state of race relations in the 1930s - even in the supposedly progressive West.

Yet this is a curiously tepid book. Rampersad is a diligent scholar, and his book benefits from extensive interviews with Rachel Robinson, the ballplayer's widow, a woman of great character and strength. (Jackie said during the 1947 season that she ``was the one person who really kept me from throwing up my hands in despair many times.'') But while Rampersad tells the story of Jackie Robinson well, his subject remains elusive.

Rampersad seems so intent on portraying Robinson as a heroic figure that he comes across less a human being than a force of history. For instance, after Robinson was discharged from the Army in 1944, after some harrowing encounters with Jim Crow America, Rampersad writes that his subject was ``far more deeply invested now in a personal commitment to the ideal of social justice, especially for blacks.'' But Rampersad gives no illustration of this newfound attitude; he merely affixes angel's wings and a halo.

Yet Robinson was a multilayered personality - proud, intelligent, driven, quick to anger. While compassionate and sensitive, he also could be abrasive and surprisingly callous, as indicated by his public and unseemly disparagement of the Negro Leagues once he joined the Dodgers.

The author dutifully reports Robinson's transgressions, but he seldom goes further; he's quick to champion and defend, but slow to criticize. For example, he tells us that Robinson was a model of virtue, but also that he twice endorsed cigarettes. Rather than suggest Robinson could be hypocritical or greedy, Rampersad merely notes that Robinson hated cigarettes. He's like an indulgent parent who can't discipline a loved child.

But a biographer should use a subject's flaws in order to give a complete portrait, understanding all the way that the story is more compelling when one succeeds despite flaws - more humanity and less nobility, in other words. And when the reader senses that a biographer is being overly forgiving, critical assessments become increasingly suspect.

As for the baseball aspects of Jackie Robinson, Rampersad seems to understand and appreciate the sport; one doesn't get the feeling that he is an academic slumming through the lowbrow. Yet one omission is most surprising. While describing Robinson's 1946 season with the Dodgers' minor league team in Montreal, Rampersad notes that one of his teammates was Al Campanis. What Rampersad does not point out is that this same Al Campanis, more than 30 years later and then a senior Dodgers official, would state on an infamous episode of ``Nightline'' that blacks lacked ``the necessities'' to manage in the big leagues. This was precisely the kind of attitude that Robinson fought all his life. MEMO: Tim Warren, a former book editor for The Baltimore Sun, is a

free-lance writer who lives in Silver Spring, Md. ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS/File photo

Photo

Rachel Robinson

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by CNB