Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) (6 page)

I see now, I
know
now with utmost conviction, that this fantasy represented a wish to create a substitute father. In the America of my young mind, fathers were supposed to play catch with their sons, but my father rarely did that with me, was seldom available in any of the ways I imagined fathers were supposed to be available to their sons, and so I invited a football hero
to my house
in the vain hope that he could give me whatever it was my own father had failed to give me. Are all heroes substitute fathers? Is that why boys seem to have a greater need for heroes than girls? Is all this youthful fixation on sports no more than another example of the Oedipal struggle gone underground? I’m not sure. But the maniacal intensity of sports fans—not all, but vast numbers nevertheless—has to come from somewhere very deep in the soul. There is more at stake here than momentary diversion or mere entertainment.

I don’t mean to suggest that Freud is the only one with anything to say on the matter, but there is no doubt that he has something to add to the conversation.

I realize that I often respond to your remarks with stories about myself. Understand: I am not interested in myself. I am giving you case studies, stories about anyone.

With warmest thoughts,

Paul

March 15, 2009

Dear Paul,

You write of the young male child’s fixation on sporting heroes, and go on to distinguish this from a mature attitude that seeks the aesthetic in the sporting spectacle.

Like you, I think that watching sport on television is mostly a waste of time. But there are moments that are not a waste of time, as would for example crop up now and again in the glory days of Roger Federer. In the light of what you say, I scrutinize such moments, revisiting them in memory—Federer playing a cross-court backhand volley, for instance. Is it truly, or only, the aesthetic, I ask myself, that brings such moments alive for me?

It seems to me that two thoughts go through my mind as I watch: (1) If only I had spent my adolescence practicing my backhand instead of . . . then I too could have played shots like that and made people all over the world gasp with wonder; followed by: (2) Even if I had spent the whole of my adolescence practicing my backhand, I would not be able to play that shot, not in the stress of competition, not at will. And therefore: (3) I have just seen something that is at the same time both human and more than human; I have just seen something like the human ideal made visible.

What I would want to note in this set of responses is the way in which envy first raises its head and is then extinguished. One starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends up neither envying nor admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a human being—a being like oneself—can do.

Which, I find, is very much like my response to masterworks of art on which I have spent a lot of time (reflection, analysis), to the point where I have a good idea of what went into their making: I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he (occasionally she) exemplifies!

And at that point I can no longer distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic.

As a footnote to my comments on the present banking crisis, may I quote a comment by George Soros that I came across? “The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock. . . . The crisis was generated by the system itself.” Dimly Soros recognizes that nothing has really happened—the only things that have changed are the numbers.

All good wishes,

John

Brooklyn

March 16, 2009

Dear John,

In light of your quotation from George Soros, these sentences from the galleys of a book I received the other day, written by a professor friend, Mark C. Taylor, to be published by Columbia University Press: “Since the late 1970s a new form of capitalism has emerged—finance capitalism. In previous forms of capitalism (i.e., industrial and consumer capitalism), people made money by buying and selling labor or material objects. In finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs, backed by nothing but other signs, in a regression that for practical purposes is limitless. Financial markets have become a sophisticated confidence game, and the people at the helm are latter-day versions of Melville’s wily Confidence Man. . . .”

•

A new twist in the Beckett Chronicle that might amuse you. A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to attend a new literary festival to be held just outside Dublin in September and to give—imagine this—the first annual Samuel Beckett Address. I tortured myself about it for several days and then finally agreed to accept the invitation. I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake. I wish, somehow, that we could do it in tandem.

On the subject, I bought a copy of the first volume of Beckett’s letters last week and have been poking around in it with a kind of gloomy fascination. Never have I seen a book of correspondence with such a heavy, cumbersome apparatus. I now understand your doubts and confusions when you were asked to review it. The distinction between “work” and “life” has created a volume in which too much is missing, and I feel frustrated by it and at times (I confess) rather bored. I’m looking forward to reading your piece.

•

We can leave sports behind if you wish, although I was planning to go on at great length about the second part of the question (participating in sports rather than watching others play them): the pleasures of competition, the intense focus required that at times enables you to transcend the strictures of your own consciousness, the concept of belonging to a team, the necessity of coping with failure, and numerous other topics. At some later point, perhaps, I will sit down and try to write that letter, even if we are in the midst of something else. It’s a subject that still interests me a great deal.

As for the exaltation you talk about when watching Federer in his glory days, I am in total accord with you. Awe at the fact that a fellow human being is accomplishing such things, that we (as a species) are not only the worms we often appear to be but are also capable of achieving miraculous things—in tennis, in music, in poetry, in science—and that envy and admiration dissolve into a feeling of overwhelming joy. Yes, I agree with you entirely. And that is where the aesthetic and the ethical merge. I have no counter-argument, for I have often felt exactly the same way myself.

With fondest good thoughts,

Paul

April 6, 2009

Dear Paul,

Before you tell me what you think of the pleasures of competition, I have a preemptive comment to make.

In my early twenties I was deeply involved in chess. For years I had been spending my working days writing machine code for computers, getting so deeply sucked into the process that I sometimes felt I was descending into a madness in which the brain is taken over by mechanical logic.

I had the good sense to abandon computers, and then made my way to the United States to do a graduate degree. Onboard ship crossing the Atlantic (yes, in those days one could travel by sea if one didn’t have much money—the crossing took five days) I entered a chess competition and made it through to the final round, where my opponent was to be an engineering student from Germany named Robert.

Our match commenced at midnight. At dawn we were still hunched over the chessboard. Robert was one piece up, but I felt I had the tactical advantage. The last few spectators around the board drifted away: they wanted to get a sight of the Statue of Liberty. Robert and I were alone.

“I’ll give you a draw,” Robert offered. “OK,” I said. We stood up, shook hands, put away the chess set.

He was a piece up, but I had the advantage: a draw was a fair compromise, not so?

We docked. I was in the legendary city of New York. But the mood of the contest would not leave me, a mood of cerebral excitement, feverish and slightly sick, like a real inflammation of the brain. I had no interest in my surroundings. Something kept humming inside me.

My wife and I got through Customs and found our way to the bus station. We were to catch different buses: she would go to Georgia to stay with friends while I went to Austin to find a place for us to live. I said good-bye to her abstractedly. All I wanted was to be alone, so that I could replay the chess game on paper and settle the doubt that nagged me. All the way to Texas in the Greyhound bus (two days? three days?) I pored over my notations, following a hunch that I should never have accepted a draw, that in three or four or five moves Robert the German would have been forced to capitulate.

I should have been drinking in my first sights of the New World. I should have been making plans for the new life that was opening up before me. But no, I was in the grip of a fever. In a quiet way, I was raving mad. I was the madman in the last row of the bus.

That episode is what comes to mind when you write about the pleasures of competition. What I associate with competition is not pleasure at all but a state of possession in which the mind is focused on a single absurd goal: to defeat some stranger in whom one has no interest, whom one has never seen before and will never see again.

The memory of undergoing that fit of nasty exultation, nearly half a century ago, has fortified me forever against wanting to be the winner at all costs, to defeat some or other opponent and come out on top. I have never played chess since then. I have played sports (tennis, cricket), I have done a lot of cycling, but in all of this my aspiration has simply been to do as well as I can. Winning or losing–who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.

I don’t like forms of sport that model themselves too closely on warfare, in which all that matters is winning and winning becomes a matter of life and death—sports that lack grace, as war lacks grace. At the back of my mind is some ideal—and perhaps concocted—vision of Japan in which one refrains from inflicting defeat on an opponent because there is something shameful in defeat and therefore something shameful in imposing defeat.

All the best,

John

April 8, 2009

Dear John,

I have been living in a state of gloom and sorrow these past months. It has been a season of death, a time of funerals, memorial services, and condolence letters, and even as the headlines announce the disintegration of our flawed and ragged world, these private losses have touched me far more deeply than the mayhem burning in the universe-at-large.

On Christmas day, the suicide of the twenty-three-year-old daughter of one of my oldest friends. In February, the death of a beloved woman friend I had known since I was seventeen. And last month, the absurd death of a forty-five-year-old friend after what appeared to be a harmless fall. All women, all gone before they could live out the time allotted to most of us. I tell myself that I should know better than to feel surprised, that such is the way of the world, that we are all mortal beings and our end can come at any time, but the long view offers not the smallest shred of consolation. The heart aches. There is simply no cure for it.

Your chess story—which is also a kind of horror story—has made me rethink what I mean by the word “competition.”

(I haven’t played chess in years, by the way, but there was a time in my early twenties when I became immersed in it, too. It is without question the most obsessive, most mentally damaging game invented by man. After a while, I found myself dreaming about chess moves in my sleep—and decided that I had to stop playing or else go mad.)

When I used the phrase “the pleasures of competition,” I think I was referring to the sense of release that comes from giving yourself wholly to a game, the beneficial effect on both body and mind caused by absolute concentration on a particular task at a particular moment, the sense of being “outside yourself,” temporarily relieved of the burden of self-consciousness. Winning and losing are necessary but secondary factors, the excuse one needs in order to make a maximum effort to play well—for without maximum effort, there can be no real pleasure.

Exercise for the sake of exercise has always bored me. Sit-ups and push-ups, jogging around the track “to stay in shape,” lifting weights, tossing around a medicine ball do not have the same salutary effect produced by competition. By trying to win the game you are playing, you forget that you are running and jumping, forget that you are actually getting a healthy dose of exercise. You have lost yourself in what you are doing, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this seems to bring intense happiness. There are other transcendent human activities, of course—sex being one of them, making art another, experiencing art yet another, but the fact is that the mind sometimes wanders during sex—which is not always transcendent!—making art (think: writing novels) is filled with doubts, pauses, and erasures, and we are not always able to give our full attention to the Shakespeare sonnet we are reading or the Bach oratorio we are listening to. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.

We mustn’t overlook the question of fatigue. If your body tires in the middle of a game, you lose your concentration and your desire to win (that is, the ability to make a maximum effort). That is why tough and demanding competitive sports are played by young people, why most professional athletes are finished by the time they reach their midthirties. But there is a definite pleasure in trying to push yourself beyond your perceived limits, of continuing to make a maximum effort even though your resources are spent.

I vividly remember my last stab at sporting glory. Twenty-plus years ago, I played in the New York Publishers Softball League once a week in Central Park as a member of the Viking-Penguin team (your American publisher, formerly mine). The squads were coed, the games were loose, sloppy affairs, but even though I was pushing forty or already past it, I enjoyed reactivating my old baseball muscles and (by force of habit and temperament) always played hard. One evening, as I stood at my position in the field (third base), the batter lofted a foul ball far, far to my right. When I saw the trajectory of the ball, I understood that I had no chance of catching it, but (again, by force of habit and temperament) I went after it anyway. Urging my no longer young legs to move as quickly as they could, I ran for what felt like ten minutes, realized that yes, perhaps I did have a chance, and at the last moment, just as the ball was about to hit the ground, lunged at full extension, snagged the ball in the utmost tip of my glove, and belly-flopped onto the grass. Remember, this was a game of no account, a friendly contest between joking book editors, secretaries, receptionists, and mailroom clerks, and yet I willed myself to go after that ball from a simple desire to push myself, to see if I had it in me to catch it. I was out of breath, of course, my knees and elbows were smarting, but I felt happy, terribly and stupidly happy.