The Sportswriter

2

All we really want is to get to the point where the past can explain nothing about us and we can get on with life. Whose history can ever reveal very much? In my view Americans put too much emphasis on their pasts as a way of defining themselves, which can be death-dealing. I know I’m always heartsick in novels (sometimes I skip these parts altogether; sometimes I close the book and never pick it up again) when the novelist makes his clanking, obligatory trip into the Davy Jones locker of the past. Most pasts, let’s face it, aren’t very dramatic subjects, and should be just uninteresting enough to release you the instant you’re ready (though it’s true that when we get to that moment we are often scared to death, feel naked as snakes and have nothing to say).

My own history I think of as a postcard with changing scenes on one side but no particular or memorable messages on the back. You can get detached from your beginnings, as we all know, and not by any malevolent designs, just by life itself, fate, the tug of the ever-present. The stamp of our parents on us and of the past in general is, to my mind, overworked, since at some point we are whole and by ourselves upon the earth, and there is nothing that can change that for better or worse, and so we might as well think about something more promising.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history’s continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence. This seems like a fine lineage to me still.

My parents were rural Iowans who left farms near the town of Keota and moved around a lot as young marrieds, settling finally in Biloxi, Mississippi, where my father had some work that involved plating ships with steel at the Ingalls ship-building company, for the Navy, which he’d served in during the war. The year before that they had been in Cicero, doing what I’m not really sure. The year before that in El Reno, Oklahoma, and before that near Davenport, where my father had something to do with the railroad. I’m frankly hazy about his work, though I have enough memory of him: a tall rangy blade-faced man with pale eyes — like me — but with romantically curly hair. I have tried to place him in a Davenport or a Cicero, where I’ve gone myself to report sports events. But the effect is strange. He was not a man — at least in my memory — for those places.

I remember my father played golf and sometimes I went with him around the flat course on hot days in the Biloxi summer. He played on the Air Force Base links which were tanned and bleached out and frequented by non-coms. This was so my mother could have a day to herself and go to the movies or get her hair fixed or stay home reading movie magazines and cheap novels. Golf seemed to me then the saddest kind of torture, and even my poor father didn’t seem to have much fun at it. He was not really the golf type, but more the type to race cars, and he took it up, I believe, in a mindful way because it meant something to him, some measure of success in the world. I remember standing on a tee with him, both of us wearing shorts, looking down the long palm-lined fairway beyond which you could see a sea wall and the Gulf, and seeing him grimace toward the faraway flag as if it represented a fortress he was reluctantly about to lay seige to, and him saying to me, “Well, Franky, do you think I can hit it that far?” And my saying, “I doubt it.” He was sweating and smoking a cigarette in the heat, and I have a very clear memory of him looking at me then as if in wonder. Who was I again? What was it I was planning? He seemed struck by such questions. It was not exactly a heartless look, just a look of profoundest wonder and resign.

My father died when I was fourteen, and after that my mother placed me in what she called “the naval academy,” which was in fact a little military school near Gulfport called Gulf Pines (we cadets called it Lonesome Pines) and where I never once minded being. In fact, I liked the military bearing that was required there, and I think there is an upright part of my character which at least respects the appearance of rectitude if not the fact, and which school was responsible for. My situation at Lonesome Pines was somewhat more than average, since most of the cadets had come there from the broken homes of rich people or from abandonment, or because they had stolen something or burned something down and their families were able to get them off and sent there instead of reform school. Though the other students never seemed any different from me, just boys full of secrecy and not-knowing and abject longing, who thought of this time as something simply to be gotten through, so that no one made attachments. It was as if we all sensed we’d be gone someday soon in a sudden instant — often it happened in the middle of the night — and didn’t want to get involved. Or else it was that none of us wanted to know anybody later on who was the way we were now.

What I remember of the place was a hot parade grounds surrounded by sparse pine trees, a flag pole with an anchor at its base, a stale shallow lake where I learned to sail, a smelly beach and boat house, hot brown stucco classroom buildings and white barracks houses that reeked with mops. There were some ex-Navy warrant officers who taught there — men unsuited for regular teaching. One Negro even taught there, a man named Bud Simmons who coached baseball. The Commandant was an old captain from World War I, named Admiral Legier.

We took our leaves in bunches, out on Highway 1 in the little Gulf Coast towns we could get to by public bus, in the air-conditioned movie and tamale houses, or hanging out in the vicinity of Keesler Air Force Base, in the hot, sandy parking lots of strip joints, all of us in our brown uniforms trying to get the real servicemen to buy us booze, and wretched because we were too young to go in ourselves and had too little money to be able to do anything but squander it.

I went home on holidays to my mother’s bungalow in Biloxi, and occasionally I saw her brother Ted who lived not far away, and who came to see me and took me on trips to Mobile and Pensacola, where we did not do much talking. It may be just the fate of boys whose fathers die young never to be young — officially — ourselves; youth being just a brief dream, a prelude of no particular lasting moment before actual life begins.

My only personal athletic experience came there at Lonesome Pines. I tried to play baseball on the school team, under Bud Simmons, the Negro coach. I was relatively tall for my age — though I’m more normal now — and I had the lanky, long-loose-arm grace of a natural ball player. But I could never do it well. I could always see myself as though from outside, doing the things I was told to do. And that was enough never to do them well or fully. An inbred irony seemed to haunt me, and served no useful purpose but to make me a musing, wiseacre kid, shifty-eyed and secretive — the kind who belongs in exactly such a place as Lonesome Pines. Bud Simmons did what he could with me, including make me throw with my other arm, which I happily did, though it didn’t help at all. He referred to my problem as not being able to “give it up,” and I knew exactly what he meant. (Today I am amazed when I find athletes who can be full-fledged people and also “give it up” to their sport. That does not happen often, and it is a dear gift from a complex God.)

I did not see so much of my mother in those years. Nor does this seem exceptional to me. It must’ve happened to thousands of us B. 1945s, and to children in earlier centuries as well. It seems odder that children see their parents so much these days, and come to know them better than they probably ever need to. I saw my mother when she could see me. I stayed in her house when I was back from school and we acted like friends. She loved me as much as she was able to, given her altered situation. She might’ve liked having a closer life with me. I’m sure I would’ve liked it. But it’s possible she was dreamy herself and in no particular mind to know exactly what to do. I’m sure she never thought my father would die, in the same way I didn’t think Ralph would die, except he did. She was only thirty-four, a small dark-eyed woman with skin darker than mine, and who strikes me now as having been shocked by how far she had come from where she was born, and having been more absorbed by that than anything. Her life just distracted her the way another person would, not in a hateful or a selfish way, possibly even the way my father had, but that I knew nothing about. I think she must’ve been worried about going back to Iowa, and didn’t want to.

Eventually she went to work in a large hotel called the Buena Vista in Mississippi City as the night cashier, and while she was there she met a man named Jake Ornstein, a jeweler from Chicago, and after a few months in which he made several trips down, she married him and moved to Skokie, Illinois, where she lived until she got cancer and died.

At almost that same time I won an NROTC scholarship through Lonesome Pines, and by pure chance enrolled at the University of Michigan. The Navy’s idea was to achieve a mix, and nobody got to go where they wanted to go, though I don’t even remember where I wanted to go, except it probably wasn’t there.

I do remember that there were times when I visited my mother in Skokie, taking the fragrant old New York Central from Ann Arbor and spending the weekend lounging around trying to be comfortable and make conversation in that strangely suburban ranch-style house with plastic slipcovers on the furniture and twenty-five clocks on the walls, in a Jewish neighborhood and in a town where I had no attachments. Jake Ornstein was fifteen years older than my mother and was quite a nice fellow, and I got along well with him and his son Irv — better, in fact, than I ended up getting along with my mother. She mentioned she thought my college was “one of the good schools,” but treated me like a nephew she didn’t know very well, and who worried her, even though she liked me. (She gave me a smoking jacket and pipe when I left for school — she was already in Skokie by then so that my leaving was from there.) For my part I’m sure I stared a lot and kept a distance. I’m sure we both tried to approach one another on some new level that could’ve flattered us both when we saw how we’d adjusted. But her life had gotten in front of her somehow, and I became someone out of another time, a fact I don’t hold against my mother and haven’t felt abandoned or disaffected because of it.

What could her life have been like, after all? Good, bad, both by turns? A long pathway through which she hoped to be not too unhappy? She knew. But only she knew. And I am not prone to judge a life I don’t know much about, in particular since things have turned out all right for me. The best I knew then, and still, is of my own life, which at the time my mother was married to Jake Ornstein, I was on fire to get on with. I know that she and Jake were happy, and that I loved my mother very much in whatever way I was able, knowing so little about her. When she died I was still in school. I went to the funeral, acted as a pallbearer, sat around Jake’s house for a weekend afternoon with the people they both knew, tried to think of what my parents had taught me in their lives (I came up with “a sense of independence”). And that night I got back on the train and slipped out of that life for good. Jake, afterwards, moved to Phoenix, married again, and died of cancer himself. Irv and I kept in touch for a few years, but have drifted apart.

But does that seem like an odd life? Does it seem strange that I do not have a long and storied family history? Or a list of problems and hatreds to brood about — a bill of particular grievances and nostalgias that pretend to explain or trouble everything? Possibly I was born into a different time. But maybe my way is better all around, and is actually the way with most of us and the rest tell lies.

Still. Do I ever wonder what my family would think of me? Of my profession? As a divorced man, a father, a quester after women? As an adult heading for life and death?

Sometimes. Though it never stays with me long. And, indeed, when I think of it, I think this: that they would probably have approved of everything I’ve done — particularly my decision to quit writing and get on to something they would think of as more practical. They would feel about it the way I do: that things sometimes happen for the best. Thinking that way has given me a chance for an interesting if not particularly simple adulthood.

By 9:30 I have nearly finished the few odds-and-ends details remaining before picking up Vicki and heading for the airport. Usually this would include a cup of coffee with Bosobolo, my boarder from the seminary in town, a custom I enjoy, but not today. We have had some good give-and-takes on such subjects as whether the bliss of the redeemed is heightened by the sufferings of the damned — something he feels Catholic about, but I don’t. He is forty-two and from the country of Gabon, and a stern-faced apologist for limitless faith. I usually argue for works, but without any illusions about where it’ll get me.

Why take a boarder? To ward off awful loneliness. Why else? The consolation in the disinterested footfalls of another human in an otherwise empty house, especially a six-foot-five-inch Negro from Africa living in your attic, can be considerable. This morning, though, he is away early on his own business and I see him from the window larruping up Hoving Road like a Bible salesman, heading for school — white shirt, black trousers and truck-tread sandals. He has told me that he is a prince in his tribe — the Nwambes — but I have never known an African who wasn’t. Like me, he has a wife and two children. We’re both Presbyterians, though I am not a good one.

My other duties require the usual phone calls from my desk: first to the magazine, for business with Rhonda Matuzak, my editor, who has dug into the rumors that all is not roses on the Detroit team, which could be a problem. The general feeling at the editors’ meeting is I should do the story and take what I get. Sports thrives on this kind of turmoil and patented misinformation, though I am not much interested in it.

Rhonda is divorced and lives alone with two cats in a large dark-walled, high-ceilinged floor-thru in the West Eighties, and is always trying to get me to meet her at Victor’s for dinner, or to haul off to some evening’s activity after work. Though except for one painful night after my divorce I’ve always managed just to have a drink at Grand Central, put her in a cab, then hurry off to Penn Station and home.

Rhonda is a tall raw-boned, ash-blond girl in her late thirties with an old-fashioned, chorus-line figure, but with a face like a racehorse and a loud voice I don’t like. (Illusion would be well-nigh impossible even with the lights off.) For a time after my divorce everything began to seem profoundly ironic to me. I found myself thinking of other peoples’ worries as sources of amusement and private derision which I thought about at night to make myself feel better. Rhonda helped me out of all that by continuing to invite me to dinner and leaving notes on my desk which said “all loss is relative, Jack,” “nobody ever died of a broken heart,” and “only the young die good.” On the one night I agreed to have dinner with her — at Mallory’s on West 70th Street — we ended up in her apartment sitting in facing Bauhaus chairs, with me unhappily coming down with a case of the dreads so thick they seemed to whistle out the heating ducts and swarm the room like a dark mistral. I needed to take a walk in the street for air, I said, and she was considerate enough to believe I was still having trouble getting adjusted to being single again, and not that I was for some reason scared out of my wits to be alone with her. She walked me downstairs and out into the dark and windy canyons of West End Avenue, where we stood at the curb and talked about her favorite subject, American furniture history, and after a while I thanked her, clambered into a cab like a refugee and beat it down to 33rd Street and my safe train to New Jersey.

What I didn’t tell Rhonda and what is still true, is that I cannot stand being alone in New York after dark. Gotham takes on a flashing nighttime character I just can’t bear. The lights of bars demoralize me, the showy glow of taxi cabs whiz-banging down Fifth Avenue or careening out of the Park Avenue tunnel make me somehow heartsick and turmoiled and endangered. I feel adrift and badly so when the editors and the agents stroll out of their midtown offices in their silly garb, headed for assignations, idiot softball games or cocktails on the cuff. I can’t bear all the complications, and long for something that is façades-only and non-literate — the cozy pseudo-colonial Square here in conventional Haddam; the nicotine clouds of New Jersey as seen from a high office building like mine at dusk; the poignancy of a nighttime train ride back down the long line home. It was bad enough that one night to have Rhonda “walk me” down West End three blocks to a good cross street, but it was worse afterwards to ride in that bouncing, clanging cab clear to the station and then to dart — my feet feeling frozen — in and down the escalator from Seventh before the whole city reached out and clutched me like the pale hand of a dead limo driver.

“Why stay out there like a hermit, Bascombe?” Rhonda is louder than usual on the phone this morning. As an equalizer she refers to men by our last names, as if we were all in the Army. I could never yearn for anyone who called me Bascombe.

“A lot of people are where they belong, Rhonda. I’m one of them.”

“You’re talented, God knows.” She taps something hard near the phone with a pencil eraser. “I’ve read those short stories, you know. They’re very, very good.”

“Thanks for saying so.”

“Did you ever think about writing another book?”

“No.”

“You should. You should move up here. At least stay in sometime. You’d see.”

“What would I see?”

“You’d see it’s not so bad.”

“I’d rather have something wonderful, not just not so bad, Rhonda. I’ve pretty much got it right here.”

“In New Jersey.”

“I like it here.”

“New Jersey’s the back of an old radio, Frank. You should smell the roses.”

“I have roses in my yard. I’ll talk to you when I get back, Rhonda.”

“Great,” Rhonda says loudly and blows smoke into the receiver. “Do you want to make any trades before the deadline?” There is an office baseball league that Rhonda is running and I’m in on it this year. It’s a good way to ride out a season.

“No. I’m sitting pat.”

“All right. Try to get some insider stuff on the NFL draft. Okay? They’re putting together the Pigskin Preview Sunday night. You can call it in.”

“Thanks, Rhonda. I’ll do my best.”

“Frank? What’re you searching for?”

“Nothing,” I say. I hang up before she has a chance to think of something else.

I make my other calls snappy — one is to an athletic shoe designer in Denver for a “Sports Chek” round-up box I’m pulling together on foot injuries, and which other people in the office have worked on. He tells me there are twenty-six bones in the foot, and only two people in eight will ever know their correct shoe size. Of those two, one will still suffer permanent foot injury before he or she is sixty-two — due to product defect. Women, I learn, are 38 percent more susceptible than men, although men have a higher percentage of painful injuries due to body weight, stress and other athletic-related activities. Men complain less, however, and consequently amount to a hidden statistic.

Another call is to a Carmelite nun in Fayetteville, West Virginia, who is trying to run in the Boston Marathon. Once a polio victim, she is facing an uphill credentials fight in her quest to compete, and I’m glad to put a plug in for her in our “Achievers” column.

I make a follow-up call to the public relations people at the Detroit Football Club to see if they have someone they’d like to speak on behalf of the organization about Herb Wallagher, the ex-lineman, but no one is around.

Finally a call to Herb himself in Walled Lake, to let him know I’m on my way. The research department has already done a workup on Herb, and I have a thick pile of his press clips, photographs, as well as transcribed interviews with his parents in Beaver Falls, his college coach at Allegheny, his surgeon, and the girl who was driving the ski boat when Herb was injured and whose life, I’ve learned, has been changed forever. On the phone Herb is a friendly, ruminative fellow with a Beaver Falls way of swallowing his consonants— wunt for wouldn’t, shunt for shouldn’t. I’ve got before-and-after pictures of him in his playing days and today, and in them he does not look like the same person. Then he looks like a grinning tractor-trailer in a plastic helmet. Now he wears black horn-rims, and having lost weight and hair, looks like an overworked insurance agent. Linemen often tend to be more within themselves than most athletes, particularly once they’ve left the game, and Herb tells me he has decided to go to law school next fall, and that his wife Clarice has signed on for the whole trip. He tells me he doesn’t see why anybody shunt get all the education they can get, and that you’re never too old to learn, and I agree wholeheartedly, though I detect in Herb’s voice a nervy formality I can’t quite make out, as if something was bothering him but he didn’t want to make a fuss about it now. It could easily be the team troubles I’ve been hearing about. But more than likely this is just the way with all wheelchair victims: after you lift weights, eat a good breakfast, use the toilet, read the paper and bathe, what’s left for the day but news broadcasts, reticence and turning inward? A good sense of decorum can make life bearable when otherwise you might be tempted to blow your brains out.

“Listen, I’ll sure be glad to see you, Frank.” We have never laid eyes on each other and have talked on the phone only once, but I feel like I know him already.

“It’ll be good to see you, Herb.”

“You miss a lot of things now, you know,” Herb says. “Television’s great. But it’s not enough.”

“We’ll have a good talk, Herb.”

“We’ll have a time, won’t we? I know we will.”

“I’ll say we will. See you tomorrow.”

“You take care, Frank. Safe trip and all that.”

“Thanks, Herb.”

“Think metric, Frank. Hah.” Herb hangs up.

Whatever’s left to tell of my past can be dispensed with in a New York minute. At Michigan I studied the liberal arts in the College of Literature, Science and the Arts (along with ROTC). I took all the courses I was supposed to, including Latin, spent some time at the Daily writing florid little oversensitive movie reviews, and the rest with my feet up in the Sigma Chi house, where one crisp autumn day in 1965, I met X, who was the term party date of a brother of mine named Laddy Nozar, from Benton Harbor, and who — X—impressed me as ungainly and too earnest and not a girl I would ever care to go out with. She was very athletic-looking, with what seemed like too large breasts, and had a way of standing with her arms crossed and one leg in front of the other and slightly turned out that let you know she was probably sizing you up for fun. She seemed like a rich girl, and I didn’t like rich Michigan girls, I didn’t think. Consequently I never saw her again until that dismal book signing in New York in 1969, not long before I married her.

Shortly after our first meeting — but not because of it — I quit school and joined the Marines. This was in the middle stages of the war, and it seemed the right thing to do — with my military bearing — and the NROTC didn’t mind. In fact, I joined with Laddy Nozar and two other boys, at the old post office on Main Street in Ann Arbor and had to cross an embarrassing protest line to do it. Laddy Nozar went to Vietnam and got killed at Con Thien with the Third Marines. The two others finished their tours and now run an ad agency in Aurora, Illinois. As it happened, I contracted a pancreatic syndrome which the doctors thought was Hodgkin’s disease but which turned out to be benign, and after two months in Camp Lejeune I was discharged without killing anyone or being killed, but designated a veteran anyway and given benefits.

This event happened when I was twenty-one years old, and I report it only because it was the first time I remember feeling dreamy in my life, though then what I felt was not so pleasant and I think I would’ve said I felt sullen more than anything. I used to lie in bed in the Navy hospital in South Carolina and think about nothing but dying, which for a while I felt interested in. I’d think about it the way you’d think of a strategy in a ball game, deciding one way then deciding another, seeing myself dead then alive then dead again, as if considerations and options were involved. Then I’d realize I didn’t have any choices and that it wasn’t going to be that way, and I felt nostalgic for a while, but then got sullen as hell so that the doctors ended up giving me antidepressants to stop my thinking about it altogether, which I did. (This happens to a lot of people who get sick at a young age, and, in fact, can ruin your life.)

What it did for me, though, was let me go back to college, since I had only missed a semester, and, by 1967, entertain the idea I’d been entertaining since reading the seafaring diaries of Joshua Slocum at Lonesome Pines — to write a novel. Mine was to be about a bemused young southerner who joins the Navy but gets discharged with a mysterious disease, goes to New Orleans and loses himself into a hazy world of sex and drugs and rumored gun-running and a futile attempt to reconcile a vertiginous present with the guilty memories of not dying alongside his Navy comrades, all of which is climaxed in a violent tryst with a Methodist minister’s wife who seduces him in an abandoned slave-quarters, though other times too, after which his life is shattered and he disappears permanently into the Texas oil fields. It was all told in a series of flashbacks.

This novel was called Night Wing, the title of a sentimental nautical painting that hung above the sweetheart couch in the Sigma Chi chapter room (I used a quotation from Marvell up front). In the middle of my senior year I wrapped it up and sent it off to a publisher in New York who wrote back in six months to say it “showed promise,” and could he see “other things.” The manuscript got lost in the mail back and I never saw it again, and naturally I hadn’t kept a copy. Though I can remember the opening lines as clearly as if I had written them this morning. They described the night the narrator of the story was conceived. “It was 1944, and it was April. Dogwoods bloomed in Memphis. The Japanese had not given in and the war plowed on. His father came home from work tired and had a drink, not thinking of the white-coated men with code names, imagining at that moment an atomic bomb….”

After graduation I bought a car and drove straight out to Manhattan Beach, California, where I rented a room and for four weeks walked in the sand, stared at the women and the oil derricks, but could not see much there that was worth writing about — which I’d decided was what I was going to do. I was getting disability money from the Navy by then, which was supposedly going to pay a tuition, and I managed to have the checks cashed by a woman I met who worked in the bursar’s office of Los Angeles City College, and who sent them to me where I went, to the village of San Miguel Tehuantepec in Mexico, to write stories like a real writer.

Inside six months of arriving, all in a rush, I wrote twelve stories — one of which was a reduced form of Night Wing. Without sending one to a magazine, I shipped the whole book to the publisher I’d been in touch with the year before, who wrote back inside of four weeks to say that his company might publish the book with a number of changes I was only too happy to make, and sent back immediately. He encouraged me to keep writing, which 1 did, though without much enthusiasm. I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people — men and women alike — could go on to happier, more productive lives.

The rest is of even less interest. My book, Blue Autumn, was officially accepted while I was on the road driving up from San Miguel Tehuantepec. (They wired me a check for $700.) I stopped off that evening and took in a Little League game under the lights in the town of Grants, New Mexico, and drank a bottle of Cold Duck sitting alone in the stands to toast myself and my fortunes. Almost the next day a movie producer offered to buy the book for a good price, and by the time I got to New York — which my editor suggested was a good place to live — I was rich, at least for those times. It was 1968.

Right away I rented a railroad apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and tried to set up some kind of writer’s life, a life I actually liked. My book was published in the spring; I gave readings at some small local colleges, interviews on the radio, went out with a lot of girls, acquired a literary agent I still get Christmas cards from. I had my picture in Newsweek, stayed up late almost every night drinking and carousing with the new friends I was making, wrote very little (though I stayed at my desk a lot), met X at the book signing on Spring Street and took an advance from my publisher to write a novel I claimed to have an idea for, but had no interest in at all, nor any idea in the world what I could write about.

In the fall of 1969, X and I began to spend a great deal of time together. I took my first trip to the Huron Mountain Club and to the cushy golf clubs her father had memberships in. I found out she was not ungainly or too earnest at all, but was actually a wonderful, unusual, challenging girl (she was still modeling and making plenty of money). We got married in February of 1970, and I began doing some magazine assignments to deflect the agony of writing my novel, which was entitled Tangier, and took place in Tangier — where I had never been, but assumed was like Mexico. The first line of Tangier was, “Autumn came later that year to the rif of the Low Atlas, and Carson was having an embarrassing time staying publicly sober.” It was about a Marine who had deserted the war and wandered across the edges of continents in search of his sense of history, and was told in the first person and also mostly in flashbacks. It sits in my drawer in a closet under a lot of old life-insurance forms and catalogs to this very moment.

In the spring, my book was still in some book stores because a New York reviewer had said, “Mr. Bascombe is a writer who could turn out to be interesting.” The movie producer decided he could “see a movie” in my stories, and paid me the rest of the money he owed me (though one was never made). I began churning out more work on Tangier, which everybody including me thought I should write. Ralph began to be on the way. X and I were having a fine time going to ball games at Yankee Stadium, driving to Montauk, taking in movies and plays. And suddenly one morning I woke up, stood at the window from which I could see a slice of the Hudson, and recognized that I had to get out of New York immediately.

When I think about it now, I’m not sure why we didn’t just move into a larger apartment. If you were to ask X she would tell you it wasn’t her idea. Yet something in me just suddenly longed for it. I felt at the time that going into things with a sense of certainty and confidence was everything. And that morning I woke up with the feeling my passport to New York had been invalidated and I had insurmountable wisdom as to the ways of the world; a feeling that we had to get out of town pronto so that my work could flourish in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me and I could perfect my important writer’s anonymity.

Faced with this, X put in a vote for Lime Rock, Connecticut, up the Housatonic, where we had taken drives. But I couldn’t have been more fearful of that indecisive Judas country. Its minor mountains and sad Shetland-sweater, Volvo-wagon enclaves spoke to me only of despair and deceit, sarcasm and overweening informalities — no real place for a real writer; only for second-rate editors and agents of textbook writers, was my judgment.

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 own 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?