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.
Plus, I’d be paid. Well paid — and there’d be travel. I would regularly see “Frank Bascombe” in print above a piece of workmanlike journalism many people would read and possibly enjoy. Occasionally I’d get to be some fellow’s guest on a call-in show (a hook-up in my own living room) and answer questions from fans in St. Louis or Omaha, where one of my articles had stirred up a bees’ nest of controversy. “This is Eddie from Laclede, Mr. Bascombe, whaddaya think’s wrong with the whole concept of competition on the college level these days? I think it stinks, Mr. Bascombe, if you want to know what I think,” “Well, Eddie, that’s a pretty good question …” Beyond all that I could look forward to the occasional company of good-natured men who, at least on a superficial level, shared my opinions — something you don’t often have in the real writer’s business.
What I determined to do was write well everything they told me to write — mixed pairs body-building, sky-diving, the luge, Nebraska 8-man football — I could’ve written three different stories for every assignment, I thought of things in the middle of the night, jumped out of bed, practically ran down to the study and wrote them. Raw material I had up to then — ruminations, fragments of memory, impulses I might’ve tried to struggle into a short story suddenly seemed like life I already understood clearly and could write about: fighting the battle with age; discovering how to think of the future in realistic terms.
It must happen to thousands of people that a late calling is missed, with everything afterwards done halfway — a sense of accomplishment stillborn. But for me it was the reverse. Without knowing I had a natural calling I had hit on a perfect one: to sit in the empty stands of a Florida ball park and hear the sounds of glove leather and chatter; talk to coaches and equipment managers in the gusty autumn winds of Wyoming; stand in the grass of a try-out camp in a mid-size Illinois grain town and watch footballs sail through the air; to bone up on the relevant stats, then go home or back to the office, sit down at my desk and write about it.
What could be better, I thought, and still think? How more easily assuage the lifelong ache to anticipate than to write sports — an ache only zen masters and coma victims can live happily without?
I have talked this very subject over with Bert Brisker, who was also once a sportswriter for the magazine, but who has since become a book reviewer for one of the slick weeklies, and he has a remarkably similar set of experiences. Bert is as big as a den bear but gentle as they come now that he’s stopped drinking. He is the closest acquaintance I still have in town from the old cocktail-dinner party days, and we are always trying to arrange for me to have dinner at their house, though on the one occasion I did, Bert got jittery as a quail halfway through the evening (this was about at the point it became clear we had nothing to talk about), and ended up downing several vodkas and threatening to throw me through the wall. Consequently we see each other only on the train to Gotham, something that happens once a week. It is, I think, the essence of a modern friendship.