Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (5 page)

All good wishes,

John

Hôtel d’Aubusson

Paris

January 10, 2009

Dear John,

Your snappy, witty letter from 12/30 arrived just two hours before I left for the airport. Now I am in Europe again, a frigid Paris, twelve noon exactly, sitting in my hotel room, unable to go on with the nap I was hoping to take to ward off the effects of a sleepless night. Excuse the funny stationery, excuse the crappy ballpoint pen. For some reason, Paris hotel rooms are not equipped with typewriters.

I’m more than happy to leave behind our ruminations on economics. It is a subject I am ill qualified to talk about. Needless to say, I am an ardent believer in universal happiness. I would like everyone in the world to have satisfying, fulfilling work, for everyone to earn enough to escape the menace of poverty, but I have no idea how to achieve such worthy goals. Therefore, I will pass over these matters in silence.

Some last words on the Charlton Heston saga. You argue that those chance meetings became possible because we were both moving in a film milieu, traveling in the same circle. But the fact is that only the first meeting had anything to do with film. The second took place at a book fair in Chicago, the third in a New York hotel lobby. Hence my confusion and amazement, my feeling that those encounters were utterly implausible—as if they were events (as you suggest) not from real life but from a dream.

Last week, I reread
Crime and Punishment
for the third or fourth time. I was suddenly struck by plot manipulations that resembled the Charlton Heston story. The most unlikely people wind up living next door to one another. Dunya’s fiancé
just happens
to be in the same building as Sonya’s stepmother. The man who nearly ruined her (Dunya)
just happens
to be living in the apartment next to Sonya’s. Implausible? Yes, but highly effective in creating the atmosphere of a fever dream, which gives the book its tremendous force. What I am saying, I suppose, is that there are things that happen to us in the real world that resemble fiction. And if fiction turns out to be real, then perhaps we have to rethink our definition of reality . . .

WATCHING SPORTS ON T.V.

I agree with you that it is a useless activity, an utter waste of time. And yet how many hours of my life have I wasted in precisely this way, how many afternoons have I squandered just as you did on December 28th? The total count is no doubt appalling, and merely to think about it fills me with embarrassment.

You talk about sin (jokingly), but perhaps the real term is
guilty pleasure
, or perhaps just
pleasure
. In my own case, the sports I am interested in and watch regularly are the ones I played as a boy. One knows and understands the game intimately, and therefore one can appreciate the prowess, the often dazzling skills, of professionals. I don’t care a lick about ice hockey, for example—because I never played it and don’t truly understand it. Also, in my own case, I tend to focus on and follow specific teams. One’s involvement becomes deeper when each player is a familiar figure, a known quantity, and this familiarity
increases one’s capacity to endure boredom
, all those dreary moments when nothing much of anything is happening.

There is no question that games have a strong narrative component. We follow the twists and turns of the combat in order to learn the final outcome. But no, it is not quite like reading a book—at least not the kinds of books you and I try to write. But perhaps it’s more closely related to genre literature. Think of thrillers or detective novels, for example . . .

[Just now, an unexpected call from a friend, who is waiting downstairs. I have to go, but will continue when I return.]
3 hours later
:

. . . which are always the same book, endlessly repeated, thousands of subtle variations on the same story, and nevertheless the public has an insatiable hunger for these novels. As if each one were the reenactment of a ritual.

The narrative aspect, yes, which keeps us watching until the final play, the final tick of the clock, but all in all I tend to think of sports as a kind of performance art. You complain about the déjà vu quality of so many games and matches. But doesn’t the same thing happen when you go to a recital of your favorite Beethoven piano sonata? You already know the piece by heart, but you want to hear how this particular pianist will interpret it. There are pedestrian pianists and athletes, and then someone comes along who takes your breath away.

I wonder if any two contests have ever been
exactly
alike, play for play. Perhaps. All snowflakes look the same, but common wisdom says that each one is unique. More than six billion people inhabit this planet, and supposedly everyone’s fingerprints are different from anyone else’s. Of the many hundreds of baseball games I have watched—perhaps even thousands—nearly every one has had some small detail or event I have never seen in any other game.

There is pleasure in the new, but also pleasure in the known. The pleasure of eating food one likes, the pleasure of sex. No matter how exotic or complex one’s erotic life might be, an orgasm is an orgasm, and we anticipate them with pleasure because of the pleasure they have given us in the past.

Still, one does feel rather stupid after spending an entire day in front of a television set watching young men hurl their bodies against one another. The books sit on the table unread. You don’t know where the hours have gone, and, even worse, your team has lost. So I say from Paris, knowing that when the New York football Giants play a crucial playoff game against a tough Philadelphia team tomorrow, I won’t be able to watch—and I am filled with regret.

With a big salute across oceans and continents,

Paul

January 26, 2009

Dear Paul,

You seem to treat sport as a mainly aesthetic affair, and the pleasures of sports spectatorship as mainly aesthetic pleasures. I am dubious about this approach, and for a number of reasons. Why is football big business, while ballet—whose aesthetic attractions are surely superior—has to be subsidized? Why is a “sporting” contest between robots of no interest? Why are women less interested in sport than men?

What the aesthetic approach ignores is the need for heroes that sports satisfy. This need is at its most passionate among boys young enough to have a flourishing fantasy life; I suspect that it is the residue of this juvenile fantasy that fuels adult attachment to sport.

Insofar as I respond to the aesthetic in sport, it is moments of grace (grace: what a complex word!) that I respond to, moments or movements (another interesting word) that cannot be the issue of rational planning but seem to come down as a kind of blessing from on high upon the mortal players, moments when everything goes right, everything clicks into place, when the lookers-on don’t even want to applaud, just to give silent thanks that they were there as witnesses.

Yet what athlete would want to be complimented for his grace on the field? Even women athletes would give you a hard look. Grace, gracefulness: effeminate terms.

If I look into my own heart and ask why in the twilight of my days I am still—sometimes—prepared to spend hours watching cricket on television, I must report that, however absurdly, however wistfully, I continue to look out for moments of heroism, moments of nobility. In other words, the basis of my interest is ethical rather than aesthetic.

Absurdly because modern professional sport has no interest in the ethical: it responds to our craving for the heroic only with the spectacle of the heroic. “We cried out for bread and you gave us stones.”

The ubiquity of the postgame interview. The man who for an hour or two threatened to leave us behind, to ascend into that realm—only one step short of the divine—where heroes have their being is compelled to resume his mere earthly status, that is to say, is ritually humiliated. “Yeah,” he is compelled to say, “we worked hard for this, and it paid off. It was a team effort.”

You don’t work to become a hero. That is to say, what you do in preparation for the heroic contest is not “work,” does not belong to the round of production and consumption. The Spartans at Thermopylae fought together and died together; they were heroes all of them, but they were not a “team” of heroes. A team of heroes is an oxymoron.

All the best,

John

Brooklyn

February 2, 2009

Dear John,

I don’t think we are at odds about this. My letter from Paris was mostly a response to your comments about watching sports on television (a narrow topic, no more than a small sub-issue in the very large conversation about sports in general) and why we, supposedly grown men, would choose to fritter away an entire Sunday afternoon following the essentially meaningless activities of young athletes on distant ball fields. A so-called guilty pleasure, but one that often leaves us feeling hollowed out and disgusted with ourselves after the game is over.

Taking the broadest view possible, it strikes me that the subject of sports can be divided into two major categories: the active and the passive. On the one hand, the experience of participating in sports oneself. On the other hand, the experience of watching others play. Since we seem to have begun with a discussion of the latter, I will do my best to confine myself to that part of the question for now.

The ethical component you refer to is especially vital to the very young. You worship your gods and want to emulate them; every contest is a matter of life and death. At my advanced age, however, these attachments have weakened considerably, and I tend to find myself watching games from a much farther remove, looking for “aesthetic pleasures” rather than seeking to validate my own existence through the actions of others. Not to belabor the point, let’s drop the old man’s perspective for now. Let’s go back to the beginning and try to remember what happened to us in the distant past.

Your use of the word “heroic” is fitting and no doubt crucial for understanding the nature of the obsession, which inevitably begins at the dawn of conscious life. But what does it mean to talk about the heroic in connection to early childhood? With young boys, I think, it largely has to do with an idea of the masculine, of sexual identification, of preparing oneself to become a man . . . and not a woman.

Having raised two children—a boy and a girl—I was deeply fascinated (and often highly amused) to watch their sexual identities emerge at around the age of three. In both cases, it began through excess, through intensely exaggerated simulations of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. With the boy, it was all about Superman, the Incredible Hulk, and incorporating imaginary beings who were endowed with magical, all-crushing strength. With the girl (who at two asked if and when she would begin to grow a penis), it manifested itself in party shoes, miniature high heels, tutus, plastic tiaras, and a preoccupation with ballerinas and fairy princesses. Classic stuff, of course, but because it takes a while for boys and girls to understand that they are boys and girls, their first steps toward sexual identification are necessarily extreme, marked by a fixation on the symbols and outer trappings of their sex. Once the issue is settled (around age five?), the girl who previously insisted on wearing dresses at all times could happily put on a pair of pants without fear of turning into a boy.

As an American child in the early 1950s, I began my simulations of masculine life as a cowboy. Again, it was all about the outer trappings—the boots, the hat, the six-shooters snug in their holsters. Because no self-respecting cowboy could possibly go by the name of Paul, whenever I was decked out in my Wild West costume I insisted that my mother call me
John
—and refused to answer her whenever she forgot. (You were never an American cowboy by any chance, were you, John?)

But then—at what moment I can no longer remember, though surely when I was somewhere between four and five—a new passion took hold of me, a new set of symbols, a new realm in which to assert my masculinity. Football (in its American incarnation). I had never played a game, I barely understood the rules, but somewhere, somehow (through photos in newspapers? through games broadcast on TV?), I got it into my head that football players were the true heroes of modern civilization. Once again, it was all about the outer trappings. I didn’t want to play football so much as to dress up as a football player, to own a football uniform, and my ever-indulgent mother granted my wish by buying me one. Helmet, shoulder pads and two-color jersey, the special pants that came down to the knee, along with a leather football—which allowed me to look at myself in the mirror and
pretend
that I was a football player. There are even photographs that document the imaginary exploits of that little boy in his pristine uniform which never once touched an actual football field, which was never once worn outside the domain of the small garden apartment he lived in with his parents.

Eventually, of course, I did begin to play football—and baseball as well. With fanatical devotion, I might add, and the more interested I became in doing these things, the more interested I became in following the performances of the great ones, the professionals. In Portugal, I told you about the audacious, semi-insane letter I wrote to Otto Graham (the finest quarterback of the period, the star of the champion Cleveland Browns) inviting him to my eighth birthday party—and the gracious response I received from him, explaining why he could not attend. Ever since I mentioned this story to you, I have continued to ponder it, searching for more details, trying to come to a deeper understanding of my motives at the time. I remember now a distinct fantasy of Otto Graham coming to my house and the two of us going into the backyard and playing catch with a football. That was the birthday party. There were no other guests present—no other children, not even my parents—no one but my soon to be eight-year-old self and the immortal O.G.