Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (13 page)

A footnote: the fellowship I received from the National Endowment for the Arts, to complete my third novel, was not enough money for a family of four, which I was supporting, to live on for a single summer; I spent the “fellowship” to rebuild the only bathroom in the Putney house — and I took a summer job. I'm not complaining about having to get a job,
or
about the NEA — the NEA was only giving me what the NEA could afford.

I've heard many of my fellow writers say that a writer must make it on his own and not lean on the university for assistance; they say that a writer who teaches for his daily bread — so that he's not putting financial burdens on his writing — is not a real writer… only hedging his bets. But in my own experience I
wanted
my writing to be free from the pressure to publish it too soon — free from the need to make a living from it. Friends who were constantly interrupting their novels-in-progress to write for magazines, or who published novels badly in need of rewriting because they needed the advances, have suffered the constraints of time and money as, truly, I never did.

Nowadays, nothing angers me as much (from my fellow writers) as to see those fortunate souls who are self-supporting in the writing business make their insensitive pronouncements at various Creative Writing programs across the United States. In the presence of good writers who teach for a living, these best-selling authors are fond of denouncing the university as too-safe a haven; they frequently urge student writers to make it on their own — even, hypocritically, to starve a little. This is
idle
hypocrisy, of course; it is doubly hard to tolerate when the proselytizing author is expensively well-tailored and riding a multibook contract in 25 languages.

Creative Writing courses are an economic necessity for writers in this country; for the writers who teach them, they are essential to their lives
as writers.
And for those few students who truly benefit from them, they are a gift of encouragement and time; writers — young writers, particularly — need more of both.

There is a quandary here, however: not every writer can or should teach Creative Writing. Many of my writer friends are simply too standoffish for the requisite social contact of the job; some are preternaturally uncomfortable in the presence of “young people” — many more are too thin-skinned to endure the nastiness of English Department politics.

I once was a member of an English Department (at Windham) wherein a senior full professor proposed that any department member without a Ph.D. should not be permitted to vote on matters concerning the curriculum. I was the
only
member of that English Department without a Ph.D., and so I sought to defend myself by saying that I agreed; I even flattered my colleagues by telling them that the writing of a Ph.D. thesis was a “massive” accomplishment. I thought it fair to warn them, however, that I was soon going to publish my first novel, which they would surely accept as an undertaking equal to their theses; I would wait to have a vote in the department until my novel was published.

I felt it also fair to warn them that I intended to write a second novel, and a third — and, if I were able, many more after those — and that with the publication of each novel I expected to be granted an additional vote. To my surprise, my argument was not met with the good humor with which I had delivered my defense, but the proposition — that only Ph.D.s be permitted to vote on matters pertaining to the curriculum — was narrowly defeated.

Many writers I know would rather write nonstop for magazines or newspapers than subject themselves to the pompous lunacy of academics. But, in my case, I got up early to write — having children in the house helps. I met with my students in an organized fashion, I daydreamed through English Department meetings, and then I went to the wrestling room — to a great number and variety of wrestling rooms — and I forgot about everything for two hours. Fortunately for me, this meant I hurried my writing for no one. And I could turn a deaf ear to that contact with the university community which I know is truly odious and intolerable to many writers. The point being: writers
usually
need to support themselves by means other than that writing which they most desire to do. And the economics of being a writer aren't getting any better — except for the lucky few, like me.

In 1968 I was paid an advance of $7,500 for my first novel, which Random House published in 1969. Joe Fox was my editor. Still at Random House, and still my in-house editor there, Mr. Fox told me that the average advance for a literary first novel today — “with expectations similar to the expectations that I had for
Setting Free the Bears”
— is $12,500. (Richard Seaver, my editor at Arcade, disputes Mr. Fox's figures; Mr. Seaver argues that the more common figure today is
still
$7,500.)

In 1968, with a wife and one child, I could
almost
have lived for a year on $7,500, but the pressures this would have put on me to too-hastily produce a second novel were unwelcome. I kept my teaching and coaching jobs, and I wrote my second novel — and my third and fourth — at a restrained pace.

Trust me: it was more possible for a family of three to live on $7,500 in 1968 than it is even imaginable for a family of three to survive on $12,500 today — for the moment assuming that Joe Fox's higher figure for an “average advance” is correct. And what did
Setting Free the Bears
actually sell? About 8,000 hardcover copies — a good number for that time, far exceeding both my publisher's and my own expectations. A first printing of a novel of a similar kind, today, would run between 7,500 and 10,000 copies — with the notable difference that,
today
, a sale of 8,000 copies would make neither the publisher nor the author feel at all as secure as Joe Fox and I were made to feel in 1969.

(I never expected, not quite 10 years later, that
The World According to Garp
would enable me to support myself by my writing alone. I don't miss teaching Creative Writing — it was hard and time-consuming work. But it was honorable, worthwhile work, and of use to my students — if only to a few of them.)

In a separate conversation I asked Mr. Fox if he would publish
Setting Free the Bears
if it came across his desk at Random House today. My friend Joe hesitated, just a moment too long, before saying, “Well, yes,
but
…” I think the answer is no.

I taught Creative Writing, at one place or another, for a total of 11 years; yet I continued to coach wrestling long after the publication of
The World According to Garp
freed me of the financial need for an outside job. I coached until 1989, when I was 47, not only because I preferred coaching to teaching but for a variety of other reasons; the foremost reason was the success of my two elder sons in the sport — they were better wrestlers (and better athletes) than I had been, and coaching them meant more to me than my own modest accomplishments as a competitor.

Colin, who wrestled at Northfield Mount Hermon, was a prep-school All-American at 152 pounds — at the annual Lehigh tournament in 1983. Colin also won the New England Class A title at l60 pounds in ‘83; ironically, he pinned a guy from Exeter in the finals. Colin was voted the Outstanding Wrestler in the Class A tournament, for which he received the Ted Seabrooke Memorial trophy. I would have been happier if Ted had been alive to see Colin win the championship. Ted had seen Colin wrestle only once, when Colin was just starting the sport.

“He's got much longer arms than
you
ever had,” Coach Seabrooke told me. “You ought to show him a crossface-cradle.” By the time Colin was a Class A Champion and an All-American, he was pinning half his opponents with a crossface-cradle.

At six feet two and a half, Colin was tall for a middleweight. I think that his college coach was well intentioned but mistaken to put Colin on a weight-lifting program in order to beef him up to the 177-pound class, and then to 190. Colin was not a natural light heavyweight; he was at his best as a
tall
middleweight. Nowadays — Colin is 30 years old — he stays out of the weight room and rides a mountain bike; he's a very lean 175.

His younger brother Brendan was, like me, a lightweight;
unlike
me, Brendan was a
tall
lightweight — at five feet eleven and a half, Brendan is so thin that he looks like a six-footer. (I'm only five feet eight, “normal” for a lightweight.) Unremarkably, both Colin and Brendan grew up in wrestling rooms; rolling around on a mat was second nature to them — I remember that Brendan learned to walk on a wrestling mat. Unlike Colin, who didn't start competing as a wrestler before his prep-school years, Brendan had already won six junior-school New England tournaments before his prep-school career began. (Brendan won his first wrestling tournament at the weight of 82V2 pounds.) By the time Brendan was wrestling for Vermont Academy, the other wrestlers — and, especially, the other coaches — in the New England Class A league were watching him closely to see if he would live up to the reputation of being Colin living's little brother; this was a burden for Brendan, largely because his proneness to injury was unlike anything Colin had ever suffered.

Brendan placed third in the New England Class A tournament his sophomore year at Vermont Academy; it was a good finish to a bad season for him, because the tournament was only a month after he'd had knee surgery for torn cartilage — he'd missed most of the ‘87 season. In ‘88, he was seeded second in the Class A tournament; he'd had an undefeated dual-meet season, excepting two losses to injury-default. Then, in the semifinals of the tournament, he reinjured the knee and was pinned by a boy he'd pinned earlier in the season; the injury forced him to drop out of the Class A's — and he reinjured the same knee at the Navy wrestling camp in Annapolis that summer. He spent the rest of the summer and the fall in physical therapy.

Colin lost a close match in the Class A finals his junior year — to a boy he'd beaten easily in the dual-meet season. Colin didn't win the New England Class A title until his senior year. Brendan's senior year began badly. A separated shoulder and a torn rotator-cuff tendon eliminated him from a Christmas tournament. Brendan was the 1989 team captain at Vermont Academy, but he would spend the heart of the season on the bench. When his shoulder healed, he was back in the lineup for three matches; he won all three — then he sat out another three weeks with mononucleosis. (Then he knocked out a front tooth.)

The week before the New England Class A's, Brendan was wrestling at St. Paul's when the St. Paul's wrestler, who was losing at the time and repeatedly being put in a crossface-cradle, bent back two of Brendan's fingers on his right hand and broke them at the big knuckle joints. Under the finger-bending rule (all four or none), Brendan won the match, despite having to default with the injury. But the damage had been done: the fingers wouldn't heal by the time of the tournament — Brendan would wrestle at the Class A's with two broken fingers.

To add insult to injury, the mother of the St. Paul's wrestler objected to the referee's decision to award the match to Brendan because of her son's illegal hold; when a wrestler is injured by an illegal hold, and cannot continue wrestling, he wins. But the St. Paul's mother declared that Brendan had been injured prior to the match; she'd seen a Band-Aid on one of his fingers — one of the now-broken fingers. (Brendan had skinned a knuckle while scraping the ice off his car's windshield that morning, on his way to weigh in.) I had to restrain myself from sending the St. Paul's mother a videocassette of the match. The St. Paul's wrestler not only clearly broke Brendan's fingers; with his other hand, Brendan was pointing to his bent fingers — to draw the referee's attention to the foul — when the two fingers broke. The ref had made the right call, but he should have spotted the injury-in-progress — he could have prevented it.

Given the accumulation of Brendan's injuries, and his small number of matches in the ‘89 season, the seeding committee at the New England Class A tournament was entirely justified in seeding Brendan no higher than fifth in the 135-pound class; there were seven other wrestlers in the weight class with winning records. As his coach — I was an assistant coach at Vermont Academy for one year and the head coach for Brendan's last two seasons — I had contemplated moving Brendan up to the 140-pound class. In previous seasons, Brendan had pinned the two best wrestlers who would be the finalists in that weight class; in the 1989 Class A's, 140 was a weaker weight than 135. But Brendan, who was always admirably stubborn — even as a small child — insisted that 135 was
his
weight class; he didn't want to move up. (No wrestler wants to move
up
a weight class.)

The New England Class A tournament was at Exeter that year — in the new gym, where I'd never wrestled. (I have no idea what the pit is used for now.) I had a good team at little Vermont Academy in ‘89. In the Class A team standings, we would finish third — behind Deerfield and Exeter, two much bigger schools. I would send three Vermont Academy wrestlers to the finals, and two of them would win — Brendan was one of Vermont's two champions. He pinned the number-four seed from Northfield Mount Hermon in the quarterfinals, he pinned the number-one seed from Hyde in the semifinals, and he pinned the number-two seed from Worcester in the finals; he stuck his broken fingers, which were rebroken in the semifinals, in a bucket of ice between the rounds.

Tom Williams, who would die of cancer in three years, came to the tournament. Colin was there. My wife, Janet, was there; for two years, she'd not missed a match of Brendan's — and she'd taken what seemed, at the time, to be an excessive number of photographs. (As time passes, I'm grateful for every picture.) My mother had come up from Florida to see the tournament. And my old Exeter teammate, Charles C. (“Brute”) Krulak —
General
Krulak — had come to see Brendan, too. Chuck had seen Brendan win the Lakes Region tournament (now known as the Northern New England tournament) the previous year; he'd promised Brendan that he would come to see him wrestle in the New England Class A's — but only if Brendan would promise to win the tournament. Brendan had promised, and Brendan had done it. (To be truthful, I'd always known he
could.
But he'd been so banged-up, I didn't think he
would.)