Life of brilliant Yale professor and baseball commissioner

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BART GIAMATTI: A PROFILE

By Robert P. Moncreiff

Yale University Press, $35, 219 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN

If Angelo Bartlett Giamatti had not actually existed but rather had been a fictional character, most people would have refused to believe he was remotely real. A brilliant literary critic and teacher of Renaissance literature tenured in the departments of English and of Comparative Literature at Yale in his early 30s, Giamatti was appointed president of that university before his 40th birthday.

After a stormy eight years in that office, he left academia for another presidency he had long coveted, that of baseball's National League. He topped that off by becoming Baseball Commissioner before dying suddenly of a massive heart attack at age 51. Add to this an ability to attract controversy in all the high offices he occupied and a colorful personality, and you begin to have some idea of just what a story his relatively brief life was.

Robert P. Moncreiff, a Yale graduate and a retired lawyer, never knew Bart Giamatti, but like most of his fellow alumni (and many who had no Yale connection), he was fascinated by what he observed at a distance about this force of nature. Finding that there was not much to be found in print about Giamatti, Mr. Moncreiff decided to write something himself.

(He also writes disarmingly that "retired professional persons . . . need projects with some intellectual content," a statement that demonstrates what a contrast his low-keyed manner presents to that of his mercurial subject.)

He was hampered by Yale's iron rule about not releasing any papers of its presidents until 35 years after they have left office and also by the unwillingness of Mrs. Giamatti and her children (two of whom, Marcus and Paul, are well-known actors today) to speak with him. Because of this, Mr. Moncreiff decided to make his study a profile rather than a full biography and, within the limits imposed upon him, has produced a judicious, informative book, albeit one that focuses largely but not exclusively on the public rather than the private life of Giamatti.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should add that, unlike the author of this book, I did know Professor Giamatti (as he then was) as an undergraduate at Yale, and I kept in touch with him sporadically after I graduated. I never actually took one of his courses, although I heard him lecture brilliantly on occasion, and he was a member of the small faculty committee that supervised the independent research projects of Yale's twelve seniors who were Scholars of the House, of which I was one in 1970-71.