Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (18 page)

All the best,

John

July 21, 2010

Dear John,

One of the reasons why I remain so attached to baseball after all these years is the very thing you write about in your letter: the frequency of losing, the inevitability of failure. A look at the standings in this morning’s paper shows that the team with the best record this season has fifty-eight wins and thirty-four losses—which computes to a 63% success rate, meaning that the strongest team out of thirty has gone home frustrated 37% of the time.

Baseball seasons are very long—162 games—and each team goes through its ups and downs over the course of that six-month stretch: slumps and streaks, injuries, painful losses that turn on a single crucial play, unexpected last-second victories. Unlike boxing—which is always do or die—baseball is do
and
die, and even when you do die, you must crawl out of your coffin the next day and give it your best shot again. It is for this reason that steadiness of temper is so highly valued in baseball. Shrug off defeats, take victories in stride, without undue exaltation. The common wisdom is that baseball mirrors life—in that it teaches you how to take the good with the bad. Most other sports tend to mirror war.

There have been many strange doings in the athletic universe this summer. The longest set in tennis history, bizarre errors by referees in the World Cup, the official return to the female sex by the South African runner whose name escapes me now. Most compelling of all, there was an incident that occurred a couple of months ago in a major league baseball game—not so much a story about sports as about human grace. By my rough calculations, approximately a quarter of a million baseball games have been played in the past 120 years. In all that time, only twenty perfect games have been thrown by pitchers—that is, games in which the pitcher has retired every batter on the other team from the beginning of the game to the end, twenty-seven batters in a row, three per inning for the full nine innings. A young pitcher from Detroit named Galarraga (very young, early twenties, just starting out, someone I had never heard of) was on the brink of entering the palace of immortality. He had retired the first twenty-six batters, and when the twenty-seventh was thrown out at first base, it appeared that the doors of the palace had opened and he had stepped across the threshold. The batter was clearly out (every replay from every angle proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt), but the first-base umpire, a man named Jim Joyce (James Joyce!) missed the call and said the batter was safe. This was a stupendous error, perhaps the worst officiating blunder in the history of the sport, and the beautiful thing about what happened at that moment, the moment when Galarraga understood that his perfect game had been unfairly stolen from him, was that the young man smiled. Not a smile of derision or contempt. Not even an ironical smile, but a genuine smile, a smile of wisdom and acceptance—as if he were saying, “Of course. Such is life, and what else can you expect?” I have never seen anything like it. Any other player in that situation would have erupted in a tantrum of anger and protest, screaming at the injustice of it all. But not this boy. Calmly, showing no hint of upset (for the game had to continue), he retired the twenty-eighth batter—thereby completing a perfect game more perfect than any that had come before it, and one for which he will get no credit.

Afterward, when Jim Joyce saw the replay, he was mortified. “I robbed that kid of his perfect game,” he said, and he publicly apologized to Galarraga—who graciously accepted the apology, saying that everyone makes mistakes and that he bore no grudge.

•

Forgive me for forgetting Angola. Stupid, stupid. But still, would you agree with me in saying that apartheid was an internal South African policy, and until international sanctions started quite late in the game, the world mostly stood around and watched for decades?

I don’t know if you remember this, but it still burns in my mind, still fills me with anger: sometime in the seventies or eighties, the U.S. Congress made a symbolic declaration to the South African government, asking them to release Nelson Mandela from prison. The vote was nearly unanimous. Among the two or three dissenters: Dick Cheney.

•

As for the reading of novels, I think novelists themselves should be exempted from the discussion. You can’t read other people’s novels while you are writing your own. And when we do read them, needless to say we don’t want to read mediocre ones. Raking leaves is surely preferable (and I detest raking leaves), but we mustn’t forget the thrill we feel when we come across something truly good. And then—ah, and
then
—how to forget the passion of our reading when we were young, when it seemed that our very lives depended on it?

I realize that Franzen was trying to be funny—or ironic—or provocative in his opening paragraph. It’s simply that the joke fell flat for me. The contempt in America for anything related to artistic or intellectual pursuits is so widespread today, so deeply a part of right-wing, populist thinking, that it pained me to see F. rehashing those ugly platitudes—even in jest. This is the country, after all, where George W. Bush, the scion of wealth and privilege, can pretend to be a “regular guy”—and get away with it—whereas Obama, who grew up in difficult circumstances, is seen as an “elitist” because he has written a couple of books, did well at Columbia and Harvard, and used to be a law professor.

•

We are back from Norway now, which I would have to describe as the Land of No Torment. Landscapes of unearthly beauty—literally, not of this earth, as if we had landed on some other planet. Siri’s mother, who just six weeks ago appeared to be at death’s door, has made a complete recovery after a doctor’s misdiagnosis, and she was the queen of the family reunion (which included forty-nine people of all ages), the last living member of her generation, and therefore the matriarch, albeit a quiet, self-effacing one, basking in the affection of her children, her nieces and nephews, and the children of her children, nieces, and nephews. A wondrous thing to behold.

•

According to a note I received from Philip Roth the other day: “You should know that in the Italian press Debenedetti said that he plans to publish a book of his fabricated interviews with an introduction by me.”

Apparently, the story goes on.

With best thoughts,

Paul

July 29, 2010

Dear Paul,

This morning I finished reading Philip Roth’s
Exit Ghost
, and this evening I watched François Ozon’s film
Le temps qui reste
. A common motif: cancer.
Exit Ghost
stars a septuagenarian who, impotent after prostatectomy, falls head over heels in love with a young woman. The film is about a rather vain and selfish young man who finds that he has terminal cancer and in the course of his last days becomes what one can only call a better human being. So: the one a comedy of cancer, of the bitter Rothian variety, the other an elegy of a quite affecting kind.

I don’t find
Exit Ghost
a particularly notable addition to the Roth canon. I know that Roth relishes the challenge of wringing something fresh out of stock situations, but there is only so much mileage one can get out of the aging male struggling against decay to prove his virility one last time.

Otherwise with the Ozon film. Do you know his work? The film is perfect in its way, capturing the loneliness of the dying and the mix of compassion, indifference, and anxiety with which the rest of us treat them. It makes delicate use of a little inset story that in other hands might have come out grotesque: a waitress approaches the young man in a café, compliments him on his looks, and invites him to inseminate her, since her husband—who is complicit in the proposal—is sterile. She even offers to pay. The young man is at first offended, but in the end thinks better of it: it is a way of leaving something of himself behind.

There is a Chekhovian feel to this inset story as Ozon handles it: sympathetic yet cool and clear-eyed. The couple’s rather anxious question to the young man, as they are saying good-bye: Can you reassure us that it is cancer you are suffering from (dying of) and not AIDS? He would clearly like to see them again; they have no such wish.

I assume you have read
Exit Ghost
, so you know that it is a bit of a ragbag. It includes an entirely unmotivated diatribe on trends in so-called cultural journalism put in the mouth of Roth’s character Lonoff. In this diatribe there is no doubt much that I, as non–New Yorker, miss. But Lonoff (Roth too?) clearly feels nothing but contempt for the mixture of moralizing and biographical reductionism that passes for criticism in your cultural organs (ours too). (By biographical reductionism I mean treating fiction as a form of self-disguise practiced by writers: the task of the critic is to strip away the disguise and reveal the “truth” behind it.) The villain in
Exit Ghost
is one of these critics. He threatens to publish a reading of Lonoff’s fiction as a disguised history (or perhaps an occluded history—one doesn’t know) of incest with an elder sister.

I have no trouble understanding why Roth, a very visible figure on the literary landscape, should have strong feelings about this brand of literary criticism, even while he is aware that the more he fulminates, the more the Klimans of the world (Kliman is the critic-villain) lick their lips (
What is he trying to hide?
). I am sure that you, who swim in the same pond as Roth and are only slightly less visible, must have views of your own on the subject, which I think I can guess at. As for me, I like to think that, living on the very fringes of the known universe, I will escape the attention of the Klimans; but I am probably deluded.

Warmest wishes,

John

P.S.: I have no wish to extend the discussion of South African history unnecessarily, but if there had been no cold war the whole South African mess would have been settled much earlier. For decades the South African regime represented itself as a bastion against Russian penetration into minerals-rich sub-Saharan Africa, and one U.S. administration after another bought that story. It didn’t help that the African National Congress was enmeshed with the South African Communist Party.

The old South African regime was only one of a rats’ nest of dictatorships and oligarchies worldwide that the U.S. supported during the cold war for strategic ends. It was no coincidence that F. W. de Klerk unbanned the ANC in the same year that the Soviet Union was dissolved and the Berlin Wall fell.

July 29, 2010

Dear John,

Alas, I have not read
Exit Ghost
, nor have I seen
Le temps qui reste
. I have consumed several Roth novels over the years (no more than a fraction of his output) and have seen two or three Ozon films—one of which,
Swimming Pool
, made a strong impression on me.

Do I swim in the same pond as Roth? I’m not sure. We have crossed paths a few times, have twice had threesome dinners with Don DeLillo (a close friend of mine for many years), and have exchanged a handful of letters. In other words, he is an acquaintance, not a comrade. The thing that most interests him about me, I think, is the fact that we were both born in Newark. As for New York, however, I am not “slightly less visible” than he is—I am vastly less visible, perhaps infinitely less visible. Roth is a god whose work has been universally praised since his first book, whereas I am a mere struggling mortal whose work has been kicked around far more than I wish to remember. On top of that, I tend to steer clear of crowds, parties, and public pronouncements, preferring to tend my own little garden in Brooklyn. Roth, on the other hand, has been an enormous literary presence for more than fifty years—an exceptionally long run for any writer, no doubt the longest run of any American in history. One proof of his fame: he is the only living novelist whose work has been published by the Library of America.

Not having read
Exit Ghost
, I can’t comment specifically on Lonoff’s rant against contemporary cultural journalism, but from your description of it, I would say that it is spot-on. Americans seem to have lost contact with the essence of fiction—which is to say, have lost the ability to understand the imagination—and therefore they find it difficult to believe that a novelist can “make things up.” Every novel is turned into a hidden autobiography, a roman à clef. No need to elaborate on how impoverished this view is—nor how ugly it can become in the hands of a malicious journalist.

Your fax arrived last night while I was in the midst of watching my hapless baseball team (the New York Mets) suffer through yet another painful, extra-innings loss, and since we have written so much about sports lately, and since your letter discusses both a book and a film, I was fascinated to find the enclosed two articles in this morning’s
New York Times
.

To begin with “E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text.” Everyone has an opinion about e-books, of course. It is the burning topic in publishing today, and there is no doubt that we are witnessing a revolution, one that seems to be gaining strength with each passing minute. Even though I fall into the category of technophobe, I feel no threat from or hostility to Kindles, Nooks, or iPads. Anything that encourages reading should be considered a good thing, and these devices are unquestionably a great boon to the literary traveler. Rather than lug around a suitcase with thirty books in it, you can now load those thirty books into a lightweight digital contraption and move from place to place unencumbered.

On the other hand, I do have certain fears. (Fears, by the way, already borne out by the destruction of the music business. How I miss browsing in record shops!) Amazon, which has so far cornered the market here, is selling books at too low a price, is in fact taking a loss with each book it sells in order to woo the public into buying the machines. One can foresee dire consequences in the long term: the collapse of publishing houses, the death of bookstores, a future in which every writer is his own publisher. As Jason Epstein pointed out in an article in the
New York Review
some months ago, it is absolutely essential that we continue to publish traditional paper books, that our libraries be maintained, since they are the bedrock of civilization. If everything went digital, think of the possible mischief that could ensue. Erased texts, vanished texts, or, just as frightening, altered texts.