The Imaginary Girlfriend (3 page)

I remember my last bus ride with the Exeter team, to East Providence—to the home mats of my nemesis, Anthony Pieranunzi. We'd checked our weight on the scales in the academy gym at about 5:00 in the morning; we were all under our respective weight classes—in some cases, barely. The bus left Exeter in darkness, which near Boston gave way to a dense winter fog; the snow, the sky, the trees, the road—all were shades of gray.

Our 121-pounder, Larry Palmer, was worried about his weight. He'd been only a quarter of a pound under at Exeter—the official weigh-ins were at East Providence. What if the scales were different? (They weren't supposed to be.) I'd been a half-pound under my 133-pound class; my mouth was dry, but I didn't dare drink any water—I was spitting in a paper cup. Larry was spitting in a cup, too. “Just don't eat,” Coach Seabrooke told us. “Don't eat and don't drink—you're not going to gain weight on the bus.”

Somewhere south of Boston, we stopped at a Howard Johnson's; this is what Larry Palmer remembers—- I don't remember the Howard Johnson's because I didn't get off the bus. A few of our wrestlers were safely enough under their weight classes so that they could risk eating something; most of them at least got off the bus—to pee. I'd had nothing to eat or drink for about 36 hours; I knew I didn't dare to eat or drink anything—I knew I
couldn't
pee. Larry Palmer remembers eating “that fatal piece of toast.”

Just the other day, we were remembering it together. “It was plain toast,” Larry said. “No butter, no jam—I didn't even finish it.”

“And nothing to drink?” I asked him.

“Not a drop,” Larry said.

(Lately, we're in the habit of getting together at least once a year. Larry Palmer is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; one of his kids has just started wrestling.)

On the scales at East Providence, Palmer was a quarter-pound over 121. He'd been a sure bet to get as far as the semifinals, and maybe farther; his disqualification cost us valuable team points—as did my loss to East Providence's Pieranunzi, who was tougher at home than he was in the pit. In two years, Pieranunzi and I had wrestled four matches. I beat him once, we tied once, he beat me twice—both times in the tournament, where it counted most. All our matches were close, but that last time (in East Providence) Pieranunzi pinned me. Thus, the two times I was pinned at Exeter—my first match and my last—I was pinned by a New England Champion from Rhode Island. (Exeter failed to defend its New England team title in ‘61—our ‘60 team was arguably the best in Exeter history.)

Larry Palmer was stunned. He
couldn't
have eaten a half-pound piece of toast!

Coach Seabrooke was, as always, philosophic. “Don't blame yourself—you're probably just growing,” Ted told him. Indeed, this proved to be the case. Larry Palmer was the Exeter team captain the following year, 1962, when he won the New England Class A title at 147 pounds. More significant than his 26-pound jump from his former 121-pound class, Palmer had also grown six inches.

It's clear to me now that Larry Palmer's famous piece of toast at Howard Johnson's didn't weigh half a pound. Larry's growth spurt doubtless began on the bus. We were so sorry for him when he didn't make weight that none of us looked closely enough at him; in addition to gaining a half-pound, Larry was probably two inches taller by the time he got to East Providence—we might have seen the difference, had we looked.

In schools—even in good schools, like Exeter—they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was
Billy Budd, Sailor
that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered
Moby Dick
on my own. It was
Great Expectations
and
A Christmas Carol
that introduced me to Dickens, and (also in English classes) I read
Oliver Twist
and
Hard Times
and
A Tale of Two Cities
, which led me (out of class) to read
Dombey and Son
and
Bleak House
and
Nicholas Nickleby
and
David Copperfield
and
Martin Chuzzlewit
and
Little Dorrit
and
The Pickwick Papers.
I couldn't get enough of Dickens, although he presented a challenge to my dyslexia—to the degree that my schoolwork certainly suffered. It was usually the shorter books by the authors I loved that drew me to their longer books, which I loved more. Loving long novels plays havoc with going to school.

In an Exeter English class, I was “started” on George Eliot with
Silas Marner
, but it was
Middle-march
that would keep me from finishing my math and Latin assignments. My father, the Russian scholar, wisely started me on Dostoyevsky with
The Gambler
, but it was
The Brothers Karamazov
that I read and reread with an all-consuming excitement. (My father started me on Tolstoy and Turgenev, too.)

George Bennett was the first person in my life to introduce me to contemporary literature; in addition to his duties as Chairman of the Exeter English Department, George was simply a great reader—he read everything. I was still at Exeter—this was about 10 years before my fellow Americans would “discover” Robertson Davies upon the publication of
Fifth Business
—when George Bennett urged me to read
Leaven of Malice
and
A Mixture of Frailties. (Tempest-Tost
, the first novel of
The Salterton Trilogy
, I wouldn't read until much later.) And, not surprisingly, it was reading Robertson Davies that led me to Trollope. (With all there was to read of Trollope, this doubtless caused further injury to my schoolwork.) It has been said many times that Robertson Davies is Canada's Trollope, but I think he is also Canada's Dickens.

Twenty years later, Professor Davies reviewed
The Hotel New Hampshire
(1981) for
The Washington Post.
It was such a likable and mischievous review—and by then I'd read everything of his—that I eventually journeyed to Toronto for the sole purpose of having lunch with him. I'd broken a big toe (wrestling), and the toe was so swollen that none of my shoes would fit. My son Colin already had bigger feet than mine (by the time he was 16); yet it was only a pair of Colin's
wrestling shoes
that permitted me to walk without hobbling. It was either wear the wrestling shoes or meet Robertson Davies in my bare feet.

Professor Davies took me to the York Club in Toronto for a rather formal lunch; he was exceedingly polite and kind to me, but when his glance fell upon the wrestling shoes, his glance was stern. Now my wife, Janet, is his literary agent. Janet and I live part time in Toronto, where we dine frequently with Rob and Brenda Davies. Footwear is never a topic of conversation between us, yet I don't doubt that Professor Davies's memory of our first meeting remains somewhat critical.

When Janet and I were married in Toronto, my two sons from my first marriage, Colin and Brendan, were my best men, and Robertson Davies read from the Bible. Rob brought his own Bible to the wedding service, not trusting the Bishop Strachan Chapel to have the correct translation. (Professor Davies is a great defender of the King James Version in these treacherous modern times.)

Colin and Brendan had not met Rob before the wedding, and Brendan—he was 17 at the time—didn't see Professor Davies, in his magnificent white beard, approach the pulpit. Brendan looked up and, suddenly, there was this big man with a big beard and a bigger voice. Colin, who was 22 at the time, told me that Brendan looked as if he'd seen a ghost. But Brendan, who was not overly familiar with churches of any kind, had had a different thought. Brendan was quite certain that Professor Davies was God.

In addition to providing me with my first opportunity to read Robertson Davies—at a time when I was about the age Brendan was at my second wedding—George Bennett encouraged me to go beyond my initial experience with Faulkner. I don't remember
which
Faulkner novel I was introduced to (in an Exeter English class), but I struggled with it; I was either too young or my dyslexia rebelled at the length of those sentences, or both. I would never love Faulkner, or Joyce, but I grew to like them. And it was George who talked me through my earliest difficulties with Hawthorne and Hardy, too; I would grow to love Hardy, and Hawthorne—more than Melville—remains my favorite American writer. (I was never a Hemingway or Fitzgerald fan, and Vonnegut and Heller mean much more to me than Twain.)

It was also George Bennett who forewarned me that in all probability I would be “cursed to read like a writer,” by which he meant that I would suffer from inexplicably strong and inexpressibly personal opinions; I think George really meant that I was doomed, like most of the writers I know, to have indefensible taste, but George was too generous to tell me that.

I can't read Proust, or Henry James; reading Conrad almost kills me.
The Rover
is okay, but most suitable for young males (under 18).
Heart of Darkness
is simply the longest short novel I know. I agree with one of Conrad's unkind reviewers that Marlow is “a garrulous intermediary”—I would call Marlow a tedious narrative device—and the same reviewer points out why I prefer (to
all
the rest)
The Rover
, which is generally looked down upon as Conrad's only children's book. “As nowhere else in Conrad,” says the unkind reviewer, “disquisitions on ethics and psychology and metaphysics are conspicuously absent.”

Not all “disquisitions” on such subjects are unbearable to me. It was
Death in Venice
that led me to the rest of Thomas Mann—particularly to
The Magic Mountain
, which I have read too many times to count. The literature of the German language wouldn't attract me with full force until I was in university, where I first read Goethe and Rilke and Schnitzler and Musil; they would lead me to Heinrich Boll and Günter Grass. Grass, Garcia Märquez, and Robertson Davies are my three favorite living authors; when you consider that they are all comic novelists, for whom the 19th-century tradition of storytelling—of narrative momentum and developed characters—remains the model of the form, I suppose you could say that I haven't ventured very far from Dickens.

With one exception: Graham Greene. Greene was the first contemporary novelist I was assigned to read at Exeter; it would probably have provoked him to know that I read him not in an English class but in the Reverend Frederick Buechner's extremely popular course on Religion and Literature. I took every course Fred Buechner taught at Exeter, not because he was the school minister but because he was the academy's only published novelist—and a good one. (I wouldn't realize
how
good until, long after Exeter, I read Buechner's quartet of Bebb novels—
Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast
, and
Treasure Hunt.)

We were a negative lot of students at Exeter, when it came to religion. We were more cynical than young people today; we were even more cynical than most of us have since become—that is to say that my generation strikes me as
less
cynical today than we were. (Is that possible?) Anyway, we didn't like Freddy Buechner for his sermons in Phillips Church or in our morning chapel, although his sermons were better than anyone else's sermons I've ever heard or read—before or since. It was his eloquence about
literature
that moved us; and his enthusiasm for Graham Greene's
The Power and the Glory
, which engendered my enthusiasm for all (or almost all) of Greene, was unstoppable.

I feel that I know Greene's people better than I know most of the people I have known in my life, and they are not even people I wanted (or would ever want) to know: it is that simple. I cannot sit in the dentist's chair without envisioning the terrible Mr. Tench, the expatriate dentist who witnesses the execution of the whiskey priest. It is not Emma Bovary who epitomizes adultery to me: it is poor Scobie in
The Heart of the Matter
, and poor Scobie's awful wife, Louise; it is Helen, the 19-year-old widow with whom Scobie has an affair, and the morally empty intelligence agent, Wilson, who is a little bit in love with Louise. And then there is the ghastly sleaziness of
Brighton Rock:
the utterly corrupted 17-year-old Pinkie, and the innocent 16-year-old Rose . . . the murder of Hale, and Ida drinking stout. They have become what an “underworld” means to me, just as
The End of the Affair
is the most chilling antilove story I know. Poor Maurice Bendrix! Poor Sarah and poor Henry, too! They are like people you would shy away from if you encountered them on the street, knowing what you know.

“Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions,” Greene wrote. I used to have that typed on a yellowing piece of paper, taped to my desk lamp, long before I understood how true it was. Something I understood sooner—as soon as I began to write—is this cutting I also made from
The End of the Affair:
“So much of a novelist's writing . . . takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them.”

The End of the Affair
is the first novel that shocked me. I read it at a time when most of my contemporaries (those who read at all) were being shocked by
The Catcher in the Rye
, which I thought was as perfunctory as masturbation. Salinger's familiar creation, that troubled boy, knew nothing that could compare to Bendrix's frightening knowledge that “there is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple—they all have the trigger that sets love off.”

Later, to think of Greene making the disclaimers he made—or describing some of his work, as he did, as mere “entertainments”—was confounding to me. Greene's manipulations of popular though “lesser” forms (the thriller, the detective story) obviously cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.