The Sportswriter (6 page)

After graduation I bought a car and drove straight out to Manhattan Beach, California, where I rented a room and for four weeks walked in the sand, stared at the women and the oil derricks, but could not see much there that was worth writing about—which I’d decided was what I was going to do. I was getting disability money from the Navy by then, which was supposedly going to pay a tuition, and I managed to have the checks cashed by a woman I met who worked in the bursar’s office of Los Angeles City College, and who sent them to me where I went, to the village of San Miguel Tehuantepec in Mexico, to write stories like a real writer.

Inside six months of arriving, all in a rush, I wrote twelve stories—one of which was a reduced form of
Night Wing
. Without sending one to a magazine, I shipped the whole book to the publisher I’d been in touch with the year before, who wrote back inside of four weeks to say that his company might publish the book with a number of changes I was only too happy to make, and sent back immediately. He encouraged me to keep writing, which 1 did, though without much enthusiasm. I had written all I was going to write, if the truth had been known, and there is nothing wrong with that. If more writers knew that, the world would be saved a lot of bad books, and more people—men and women alike—could go on to happier, more productive lives.

The rest is of even less interest. My book,
Blue Autumn
, was officially accepted while I was on the road driving up from San Miguel Tehuantepec. (They wired me a check for $700.) I stopped off that evening and took in a Little League game under the lights in the town of Grants, New Mexico, and drank a bottle of Cold Duck sitting alone in the stands to toast myself and my fortunes. Almost the next day a movie producer offered to buy the book for a good price, and by the time I got to New York—which my editor suggested was a good place to live—I was rich, at least for those times. It was 1968.

Right away I rented a railroad apartment on Perry Street in Greenwich Village and tried to set up some kind of writer’s life, a life I actually liked. My book was published in the spring; I gave readings at some small local colleges, interviews on the radio, went out with a lot of girls, acquired a literary agent I still get Christmas cards from. I had my picture in
Newsweek
, stayed up late almost every night drinking and carousing with the new friends I was making, wrote very little (though I stayed at my desk a lot), met X at the book signing on Spring Street and took an advance from my publisher to write a novel I claimed to have an idea for, but had no interest in at all, nor any idea in the world what I could write about.

In the fall of 1969, X and I began to spend a great deal of time together. I took my first trip to the Huron Mountain Club and to the cushy golf clubs her father had memberships in. I found out she was not ungainly or too earnest at all, but was actually a wonderful, unusual, challenging girl (she was still modeling and making plenty of money). We got married in February of 1970, and I began doing some magazine assignments to deflect the agony of writing my novel, which was entitled
Tangier
, and took place in Tangier—where I had never been, but assumed was like Mexico. The first line of
Tangier
was, “Autumn came later that year to the rif of the Low Atlas, and Carson was having an embarrassing time staying publicly sober.” It was about a Marine who had deserted the war and wandered across the edges of continents in search of his sense of history, and was told in the first person and also mostly in flashbacks. It sits in my drawer in a closet under a lot of old life-insurance forms and catalogs to this very moment.

In the spring, my book was still in some book stores because a New York reviewer had said, “Mr. Bascombe is a writer who could turn out to be interesting.” The movie producer decided he could “see a movie” in my stories, and paid me the rest of the money he owed me (though one was never made). I began churning out more work on
Tangier
, which everybody including me thought I should write. Ralph began to be on the way. X and I were having a fine time going to ball games at Yankee Stadium, driving to Montauk, taking in movies and plays. And suddenly one morning I woke up, stood at the window from which I could see a slice of the Hudson, and recognized that I had to get out of New York immediately.

When I think about it now, I’m not sure why we didn’t just move into a larger apartment. If you were to ask X she would tell you it wasn’t her idea. Yet something in me just suddenly longed for it. I felt at the time that going into things with a sense of certainty and confidence was everything. And that morning I woke up with the feeling my passport to New York had been invalidated and I had insurmountable wisdom as to the ways of the world; a feeling that we had to get out of town pronto so that my work could flourish in a place where I knew no one and no one knew me and I could perfect my important writer’s anonymity.

Faced with this, X put in a vote for Lime Rock, Connecticut, up the Housatonic, where we had taken drives. But I couldn’t have been more fearful of that indecisive Judas country. Its minor mountains and sad Shetland-sweater, Volvo-wagon enclaves spoke to me only of despair and deceit, sarcasm and overweening informalities—no real place for a real writer; only for second-rate editors and agents of textbook writers, was my judgment.

For lack of a better idea I cast my vote for New Jersey: a plain, unprepossessing and unexpectant landscape, I thought, and correctly. And for Haddam with its hilly and shady seminary niceness (I’d seen an ad in the
Times
, making it sound like an undiscovered Woodstock, Vermont), where I could invest my movie money in a sound house (I wasn’t wrong), and where there was a mix of people (there was), and where a fellow might sit down with good hope and do a serious piece of work himself (I wasn’t right there, but couldn’t have known it).

X did not think it was worth a hard stand about Connecticut, and in the fall of 1970 we bought the house I now live alone in. X had quit her job to get ready for Ralph. I moved with renewed enthusiasm up to an “office” on the third floor—the part I now rent to Mr. Bosobolo—and set about trying to invent some more serious writing habits and a good attitude toward my novel, which I’d let drift over the summer. In a few months we fell in with a younger group of people (some of whom were writers and editors), began attending rounds of cocktail parties, took walks along the nearby Delaware, went to literary events in Gotham, attended plays in Bucks County, took drives in the country, stayed home evenings to read, were looked upon as a couple who were a little exceptional (I was just twenty-five), and generally felt fine about our lives and the choices we had made. I gave a talk entitled “The Making of a Writer” at the library and to the Rotarians in a neighboring town; wrote a piece in a local magazine about “Why I Live Where I Live,” in which I talked about the need to find a place to work that is in most ways “neutral.” I worked on an original screenplay for the producer who’d bought my book, and wrote several large magazine pieces—one about a famous center fielder from the old Sally League, who later became a petroleum baron and spent some time in prison for bank fraud, had several wives, but as a parolee went back to his arid West Texas home of Pumpville and built a therapeutic swimming pool for brain-damaged children and even brought Mexicans up for treatment. A year somehow managed to go by. Then I simply stopped writing.

I didn’t exactly know I’d stopped writing. For a good while I’d gone to my office every day at eight, come downstairs at lunch and lounged around the house reading research books about Morocco, “doping out a few structural problems,” making graphs and plot-flow outlines and character histories. But the fact was, I was washed up. Sometimes I would go upstairs, sit down, and not have any idea of what I was there for, or what it was I meant to write about, and had simply forgotten everything. My mind would wander to sailing on Lake Superior (something I had never done), and after that I would go back downstairs and take a nap. And as if I needed proof I was washed up, when the managing editor at the magazine I now work for called me and asked if I had any interest in going to work writing sports full-time—his magazine, he said, had a nose for good writing of the type he’d seen in my article about the Texas millionaire-convict-Samaritan—I was more than interested. He said he’d seen something complex yet hard-nosed in that piece of writing, in particular the way I didn’t try to make the old center fielder either a villain or a hero to the world, and he had a suspicion I might have just the right temperament and eye for detail to do their kind of work, though he said 1 might just as well think the entire call was a joke. I took the train up the very next morning and had a long talk with the man who had called me, a fat, blue-eyed Chicagoan named Art Fox, and his young assistants, in the old oak-chaired offices the magazine then occupied on Madison and 45th. Art Fox told me that if you’re a man in this country you probably already know enough to be a good sportswriter. More than anything, he said, what you needed was a willingness to watch something very similar over and over again, then be able to write about it in two days’ time, plus an appreciation of the fact that you’re always writing about people who wanted to be doing what they’re doing or they wouldn’t be doing it, which was the only urgency sports writing could summon, but also the key to overcoming the irrelevancy of sports itself. After lunch, he took me out into the big room full of old-fashioned cubicles which still had typewriters and wooden desks, and introduced me around. I shook everyone’s hand and heard them out about what was on their minds (no one mentioned anything about my book of stories), and at three o’clock I went home in brimming spirits. That night I took X out to a high-priced dinner with champagne at the Golden Pheasant, hauled her off on a romantic moonlight walk up the towpath in a direction we’d never gone, told her all about what I had in mind, what I thought we could practically hope to get from this kind of commitment (I thought plenty), and she simply said she thought it all sounded just fine. I remember that moment, in fact, as one of the happiest of my life.

The rest is history, as they say, until my son Ralph got Reye’s syndrome some years later and died, and I launched off into the dreaminess his death may or may not have even caused but didn’t help, and my life with X broke apart after seeing
The Thirty-Nine Steps
one night, causing her to send her hope chest chuffing up the chimney stack.

Though as I began by saying, I’m not sure what any of this proves. We all have histories of one kind or another. Some of us have careers that do fine or that do lousy. Something got us to where we are, and nobody’s history could’ve brought another Tom, Dick or Harry to the same place. And to me that fact limits the final usefulness of these stories. To the extent that it’s incompletely understood or undisclosed, or just plain fabricated, I suppose it’s true that history can make mystery. And I am always vitally interested in life’s mysteries, which are never in too great a supply, and which I should say are something very different from the dreaminess I just mentioned. Dreaminess is, among other things, a state of suspended recognition, and a response to too much useless and complicated factuality. Its symptoms can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling, or a bout of the stares that you sometimes can not even know about except in retrospect, when the time may seem fogged. When you are young and you suffer it, it is not so bad and in some ways it’s normal and even pleasurable.

But when you get to my age, dreaminess is
not
so pleasurable, at least as a steady diet, and one should avoid it if you’re lucky enough to know it exists, which many people aren’t. For a time—this was a period after Ralph died—I had no idea about it myself, and in fact thought I was onto something big—changing my life, moorings loosed, women, travel, marching to a different drummer. Though I was wrong.

Which leaves a question which might in fact be interesting.

Why did I quit writing? Forgetting for the moment that I quit writing to become a sportswriter, which is more like being a businessman, or an old-fashioned traveling salesman with a line of novelty household items, than being a genuine writer, since in so many ways words are just our currency, our medium of exchange with our readers, and there is very little that is ever genuinely creative to it at all—even if you’re not much more than a fly-swat reporter, as I’m not. Real writing, after all, is something much more complicated and enigmatic than anything usually having to do with sports, though that’s not to say a word against sports writing, which I’d rather do than anything.

Was it just that things did not come easily enough? Or that I couldn’t translate my personal recognitions into the ambiguous stuff of complex literature? Or that I had nothing to write about, no more discoveries up my sleeve or the pizzaz to write the more extensive work?

And my answer is: there are those reasons and at least twenty better ones. (Some people only have one book in them. There are worse things.)

One thing certain is that I had somehow lost my sense of anticipation at age twenty-five. Anticipation is the sweet pain to know whatever’s next—a must for any real writer. And I had no more interest in what I might write next—the next sentence, the next day—than I cared what a rock weighed on Mars. Nor did I think that writing a novel could make me interested again.

Though I minded like all get out the loss of anticipation. And the glossy sports magazine promised me that there would always be something to look forward to, every two weeks. They’d see to it. And it wouldn’t be something too hard to handle in words (my first “beat” was swimming, and some of the older writers put me through a pretty vigorous crash apprenticeship, which always happens). I had no special store of sports knowledge, but that wasn’t needed. I was as comfortable as an old towel in a locker room, had plenty of opinions and had always admired athletes anyway. The good-spirited, manly presence of naked whites and Negroes has always made me feel well-located, and I was never out of place asking a few easy-to-answer questions and being somewhat less imposing than everybody around.