The Sportswriter Read online

  For lack of a better idea I cast my vote for New Jersey: a plain, unprepossessing and unexpectant landscape, I thought, and correctly. And for Haddam with its hilly and shady seminary niceness (I’d seen an ad in the Times, making it sound like an undiscovered Woodstock, Vermont), where I could invest my movie money in a sound house (I wasn’t wrong), and where there was a mix of people (there was), and where a fellow might sit down with good hope and do a serious piece of work himself (I wasn’t right there, but couldn’t have known it).

  X did not think it was worth a hard stand about Connecticut, and in the fall of 1970 we bought the house I now live alone in. X had quit her job to get ready for Ralph. I moved with renewed enthusiasm up to an “office” on the third floor—the part I now rent to Mr. Bosobolo—and set about trying to invent some more serious writing habits and a good attitude toward my novel, which I’d let drift over the summer. In a few months we fell in with a younger group of people (some of whom were writers and editors), began attending rounds of cocktail parties, took walks along the nearby Delaware, went to literary events in Gotham, attended plays in Bucks County, took drives in the country, stayed home evenings to read, were looked upon as a couple who were a little exceptional (I was just twenty-five), and generally felt fine about our lives and the choices we had made. I gave a talk entitled “The Making of a Writer” at the library and to the Rotarians in a neighboring town; wrote a piece in a local magazine about “Why I Live Where I Live,” in which I talked about the need to find a place to work that is in most ways “neutral.” I worked on an original screenplay for the producer who’d bought my book, and wrote several large magazine pieces—one about a famous center fielder from the old Sally League, who later became a petroleum baron and spent some time in prison for bank fraud, had several wives, but as a parolee went back to his arid West Texas home of Pumpville and built a therapeutic swimming pool for brain-damaged children and even brought Mexicans up for treatment. A year somehow managed to go by. Then I simply stopped writing.

  I didn’t exactly know I’d stopped writing. For a good while I’d gone to my office every day at eight, come downstairs at lunch and lounged around the house reading research books about Morocco, “doping out a few structural problems,” making graphs and plot-flow outlines and character histories. But the fact was, I was washed up. Sometimes I would go upstairs, sit down, and not have any idea of what I was there for, or what it was I meant to write about, and had simply forgotten everything. My mind would wander to sailing on Lake Superior (something I had never done), and after that I would go back downstairs and take a nap. And as if I needed proof I was washed up, when the managing editor at the magazine I now work for called me and asked if I had any interest in going to work writing sports full-time—his magazine, he said, had a nose for good writing of the type he’d seen in my article about the Texas millionaire-convict-Samaritan—I was more than interested. He said he’d seen something complex yet hard-nosed in that piece of writing, in particular the way I didn’t try to make the old center fielder either a villain or a hero to the world, and he had a suspicion I might have just the right temperament and eye for detail to do their kind of work, though he said 1 might just as well think the entire call was a joke. I took the train up the very next morning and had a long talk with the man who had called me, a fat, blue-eyed Chicagoan named Art Fox, and his young assistants, in the old oak-chaired offices the magazine then occupied on Madison and 45th. Art Fox told me that if you’re a man in this country you probably already know enough to be a good sportswriter. More than anything, he said, what you needed was a willingness to watch something very similar over and over again, then be able to write about it in two days’ time, plus an appreciation of the fact that you’re always writing about people who wanted to be doing what they’re doing or they wouldn’t be doing it, which was the only urgency sports writing could summon, but also the key to overcoming the irrelevancy of sports itself. After lunch, he took me out into the big room full of old-fashioned cubicles which still had typewriters and wooden desks, and introduced me around. I shook everyone’s hand and heard them out about what was on their minds (no one mentioned anything about my book of stories), and at three o’clock I went home in brimming spirits. That night I took X out to a high-priced dinner with champagne at the Golden Pheasant, hauled her off on a romantic moonlight walk up the towpath in a direction we’d never gone, told her all about what I had in mind, what I thought we could practically hope to get from this kind of commitment (I thought plenty), and she simply said she thought it all sounded just fine. I remember that moment, in fact, as one of the happiest of my life.

  The rest is history, as they say, until my son Ralph got Reye’s syndrome some years later and died, and I launched off into the dreaminess his death may or may not have even caused but didn’t help, and my life with X broke apart after seeing The Thirty-Nine Steps one night, causing her to send her hope chest chuffing up the chimney stack.

  Though as I began by saying, I’m not sure what any of this proves. We all have histories of one kind or another. Some of us have careers that do fine or that do lousy. Something got us to where we are, and nobody’s history could’ve brought another Tom, Dick or Harry to the same place. And to me that fact limits the final usefulness of these stories. To the extent that it’s incompletely understood or undisclosed, or just plain fabricated, I suppose it’s true that history can make mystery. And I am always vitally interested in life’s mysteries, which are never in too great a supply, and which I should say are something very different from the dreaminess I just mentioned. Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged. When you are young and you suffer it, it is not so bad and in some ways it’s normal and even pleasurable.

  But when you get to my age, dreaminess is not so pleasurable, at least as a steady diet, and one should avoid it if you’re lucky enough to know it exists, which many people aren’t. For a time—this was a period after Ralph died—I had no idea about it myself, and in fact thought I was onto something big—changing my life, moorings loosed, women, travel, marching to a different drummer. Though I was wrong.

  Which leaves a question which might in fact be interesting.

  Why did I quit writing? Forgetting for the moment that I quit writing to become a sportswriter, which is more like being a businessman, or an old-fashioned traveling salesman with a line of novelty household items, than being a genuine writer, since in so many ways words are just our currency, our medium of exchange with our readers, and there is very little that is ever genuinely creative to it at all—even if you’re not much more than a fly-swat reporter, as I’m not. Real writing, after all, is something much more complicated and enigmatic than anything usually having to do with sports, though that’s not to say a word against sports writing, which I’d rather do than anything.

  Was it just that things did not come easily enough? Or that I couldn’t translate my personal recognitions into the ambiguous stuff of complex literature? Or that I had nothing to write about, no more discoveries up my sleeve or the pizzaz to write the more extensive work?

  And my answer is: there are those reasons and at least twenty better ones. (Some people only have one book in them. There are worse things.)

  One thing certain is that I had somehow lost my sense of anticipation at age twenty-five. Anticipation is the sweet pain to know whatever’s next—a must for any real writer. And I had no more interest in what I might write next—the next sentence, the next day—than I cared what a rock weighed on Mars. Nor did I think that writing a novel could make me interested again.

  Though I minded like all get out the loss of anticipation. And the glossy sports magazine promised me that there would always be something to look forward
to, every two weeks. They’d see to it. And it wouldn’t be something too hard to handle in words (my first “beat” was swimming, and some of the older writers put me through a pretty vigorous crash apprenticeship, which always happens). I had no special store of sports knowledge, but that wasn’t needed. I was as comfortable as an old towel in a locker room, had plenty of opinions and had always admired athletes anyway. The good-spirited, manly presence of naked whites and Negroes has always made me feel well-located, and I was never out of place asking a few easy-to-answer questions and being somewhat less imposing than everybody around.

  Plus, I’d be paid. Well paid—and there’d be travel. I would regularly see “Frank Bascombe” in print above a piece of workmanlike journalism many people would read and possibly enjoy. Occasionally I’d get to be some fellow’s guest on a call-in show (a hook-up in my own living room) and answer questions from fans in St. Louis or Omaha, where one of my articles had stirred up a bees’ nest of controversy. “This is Eddie from Laclede, Mr. Bascombe, whaddaya think’s wrong with the whole concept of competition on the college level these days? I think it stinks, Mr. Bascombe, if you want to know what I think,” “Well, Eddie, that’s a pretty good question …” Beyond all that I could look forward to the occasional company of good-natured men who, at least on a superficial level, shared my opinions—something you don’t often have in the real writer’s business.

  What I determined to do was write well everything they told me to write—mixed pairs body-building, sky-diving, the luge, Nebraska 8-man football—I could’ve written three different stories for every assignment, I thought of things in the middle of the night, jumped out of bed, practically ran down to the study and wrote them. Raw material I had up to then—ruminations, fragments of memory, impulses I might’ve tried to struggle into a short story suddenly seemed like life I already understood clearly and could write about: fighting the battle with age; discovering how to think of the future in realistic terms.

  It must happen to thousands of people that a late calling is missed, with everything afterwards done halfway—a sense of accomplishment stillborn. But for me it was the reverse. Without knowing I had a natural calling I had hit on a perfect one: to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter; talk to coaches and equipment managers in the gusty autumn winds of Wyoming; stand in the grass of a try-out camp in a mid-size Illinois grain town and watch footballs sail through the air; to bone up on the relevant stats, then go home or back to the office, sit down at my desk and write about it.

  What could be better, I thought, and still think? How more easily assuage the lifelong ache to anticipate than to write sports—an ache only zen masters and coma victims can live happily without?

  I have talked this very subject over with Bert Brisker, who was also once a sportswriter for the magazine, but who has since become a book reviewer for one of the slick weeklies, and he has a remarkably similar set of experiences. Bert is as big as a den bear but gentle as they come now that he’s stopped drinking. He is the closest acquaintance I still have in town from the old cocktail-dinner party days, and we are always trying to arrange for me to have dinner at their house, though on the one occasion I did, Bert got jittery as a quail halfway through the evening (this was about at the point it became clear we had nothing to talk about), and ended up downing several vodkas and threatening to throw me through the wall. Consequently we see each other only on the train to Gotham, something that happens once a week. It is, I think, the essence of a modern friendship.

  Bert was once a poet and has two or three delicate, spindly-thin books I occasionally see in used bookstore racks. For years, he had a wild-man’s reputation for getting drunk at public readings and telling audiences of nuns and clubwomen to go straight to hell, then falling off stages into deep trance-like sleeps and getting into fistfights in the homes of professors who had invited him there and thought he was an artist. Eventually, of course, he ended up in a rehab hospital in Minnesota and, later, running a poetry program in a small New Hampshire college—very like the one I taught at—and eventually getting fired for shacking up with most of his female students, several of whom he moved right into the house with his wife. It is not an unusual story, though that was all years ago. He came to sports writing precisely as I did, and now lives nearby on a farm in the hills outside of Haddam with his second wife, Penny, and their two daughters, and raises sheepdogs in addition to writing about books. Bert’s specialty, when he was a sportswriter, was ice hockey, and I will commend him by saying he was very good at making an uninteresting game played by Canadians seem sometimes more than uninteresting. Many of our writers are former college teachers or once-aspiring writers who simply couldn’t take it, or rougher-cut graduates of Ivy League schools who didn’t want to be stockbrokers or divorce lawyers. The day of the old bulldog reporter up from the Des Moines Register or the Fargo Dakotan—your Al Bucks and your Granny Rices—are long gone, though that wasn’t as true when I started twelve years ago.

  Bert and I have talked about this subject on our train rides through the New Jersey beltland—why he quit writing, why I did. And we’ve agreed, to an extent, that we both got gloomy in an attempt to be serious, and that we didn’t understand the vital necessity of the play of light and dark in literature. I thought my stories were good at the time (even today I think I might like them). They seemed to have a feeling for the human dilemma and they did seem hard-nosed and old-eyed about things. It was also true, though, that there were a good many descriptions of the weather and the moon, and that most of them were set in places like remote hunting camps on Canadian Lakes, or in the suburbs, or Arizona or Vermont, places I had never been, and many of them ended with men staring out snowy windows in New England boarding schools or with somebody driving fast down a dark dirt road, or banging his hand into a wall or telling someone else he could never really love his wife, and bringing on hard emptinesses. They also seemed to depend on silence a lot. I seemed, I felt later, to have been stuck in bad stereotypes. All my men were too serious, too brooding and humorless, characters at loggerheads with imponderable dilemmas, and much less interesting than my female characters, who were always of secondary importance but free-spirited and sharp-witted.

  For Bert, being serious meant he ended up writing poems about stones and savaged birds’ nests, and empty houses where imaginary brothers he believed were himself had died grisly ritual deaths, until finally, in fact, he could no longer write a line, and substituted getting drunk as a donkey, shacking up with his students and convincing them how important poetry was by boinking the daylights out of them in its name. He has described this to me as a failure to remain “intellectually pliant.”

  But we were both stuck like kids who had reached the end of what they know they know. I did not, in fact, know how people felt about most things—and didn’t know what else to do or where to look. And needless to say that is the very place where the great writers—your Tolstoys and your George Eliots—soar off to become great. But because I didn’t soar off to become great—and neither did Bert—I have to conclude we suffered a failure of imagination right there in the most obvious way. We lost our authority, if that is a clear way of putting it.

  What I did, as I began writing Tangier, which I hoped would have some autobiographical parts set in a military school, was become more and more grave—over my literary voice, my sentences and their construction (they became like some heavy metallic embroidery no one including me would want to read), and my themes, which became darker and darker. My characters generally embodied the attitude that life is always going to be a damn nasty and probably baffling business, but somebody has to go on slogging through it. This, of course, can eventually lead to terrible cynicism, since I knew life wasn’t like that at all—but was a lot more interesting—only I couldn’t write about it that way. Though before that could happen, I lost heart in stringing such things together, became distracted, and quit. Bert assures me his ow
n lines took on the same glum, damask quality. “Waking each day / at the end / of a long cave / soil is jammed / in my nostrils / I bite through / soil and roots / and bones and / dream of a separate existence” were some he quoted me from memory one day right on the train. He quit writing not long after he wrote them and went chasing after his students for relief.

  It is no coincidence that I got married just as my literary career and my talents for it were succumbing to gross seriousness. I was crying out, you might say, for the play of light and dark, and there is no play of light and dark quite like marriage and private life. I was seeing that same long and empty horizon that X says she sees now, the table set for one, and I needed to turn from literature back to life, where I could get somewhere. It is no loss to mankind when one writer decides to call it a day. When a tree falls in the forest, who cares but the monkeys?

  3

  By a quarter to ten I have surrendered to the day and am in my Malibu and down Hoving Road, headed for the Great Woods Road and the Pheasant Run & Meadow condos where Vicki lives—really nearer to Hightstown than to Haddam proper.

  Something brief should be said, I think, about Haddam, where I’ve lived these fourteen years and could live forever.

  It is not a hard town to understand. Picture in your mind a small Connecticut village, say Redding Ridge or Easton, or one of the nicer fieldstone-wall suburbs back of the Merritt Parkway, and Haddam is like these, more so than a typical town in the Garden State.

  Settled in 1795 by a wool merchant from Long Island named Wallace Haddam, the town is a largely wooded community of twelve thousand souls set in the low and roily hills of the New Jersey central section, east of the Delaware. It is on the train line midway between New York and Philadelphia, and for that reason it’s not so easy to say what we’re a suburb of—commuters go both ways. Though as a result, a small-town, out-of-the-mainstream feeling exists here, as engrossed as any in New Hampshire, but retaining the best of what New Jersey offers: assurance that mystery is never longed for, nor meaningful mystery shunned. This is the reason a town like New Orleans defeats itself. It longs for a mystery it doesn’t have and never will, if it ever did. New Orleans should take my advice and take after Haddam, where it is not at all hard for a literalist to contemplate the world.