by Paul Theroux
I said that at Wimbledon two years ago the crowd was rooting for him when he played against Connors.
"They didn't know me then," said McEnroe, with a wan smile. "Now they do."
I could not understand his combative attitude towards spectators. Wasn't it better if they cheered you?
"Sure, it's better if the crowd is on your side. I want them on my side, but I don't know how to do it. I play Borg and the crowd goes bananas for him. Why? Because he doesn't change his expression? I don't know. The crowd's funny—they want you to talk to them, I guess. But I don't make jokes. So they yell things at me, they say stupid things, pop flashbulbs, clap at the wrong time, walk around, make noise."
I had got nowhere in discussing The Deer Hunter with him (he had seen it in Rotterdam the previous week; the film had shocked him, but "I couldn't really relate to the war—I was too young"), but he became animated on the subject of spectators. He described a fantasy he sometimes has where an unruly crowd is concerned. As soon as the match is over, McEnroe sees himself stepping forward. "Stay where you are," he says in this imagining, as the crowd begins to rise. "I'd like to talk to you about some of the things you've just done. You were too noisy. You were laughing in the wrong places. You clapped at a double fault. That's rude!"
"But not all spectators are rude," I said. "They say the Wimbledon spectators are the most knowledgeable in the world".
"Who says?" demanded McEnroe, hunching his shoulders and assuming that I would say Fred Perry. "Who told you that?"
"My wife," I said.
"Your wife!" he cried, then quietly conceded that this might be true. "But they don't have too many sports over there, do they? Only tennis and soccer and, whats-it—cricket."
Soccer is one of McEnroe's passions. He played it all the way through school ("It was considered a sissy sport, but it gave me a lot of satisfaction to play on the team"). More revealing is his plain love for the way the British play football. "The England team really knows how to do it," he said, speaking of his admiration for the aggressive attacking style which is a counterpart of his own in tennis. "The Dutch and the Germans just kick the ball to each other—it's so dull it's like chess."
Because he regards dullness in sport as the greatest vice, he despises the poker-faced play of someone like Stan Smith. "If every guy were like Smith tennis would stink—it'd be boring. People criticise Nastase, but Nasty's done more for the game than any one man. He's made it lively and now more people are interested in it."
I suggested that losing one's temper destroyed one's concentration—it certainly seemed so in the case of Nastase who, after blowing his top, usually went on to lose the match. McEnroe denied this was so: "Anger doesn't necessarily affect your concentration." He went on to say that if there was a bad call a player was obliged to make a fuss; but he admitted that it seldom did much good to complain, since officials were so stubborn and unwilling to admit their mistakes. (A man who knows McEnroe's game well told me, "He's almost always right when he questions a call—he's got sharp eyes.") He loathes opponents who accept disputed points. This happened while he was playing Peter Fleming in Jamaica, and he swore at him throughout the match until finally Fleming screamed back, "What do you think I am, Junior, the Salvation Army?"
But it wasn't right, said McEnroe. His innocent sense of fair play is not confined to tennis. "These people who recognise me—I go into a restaurant and they give me the best table, or they do things for me that they wouldn't do for anyone else—that's not fair." This struck me as an honorable attitude in one so young, but his youth has something to do with it. It surprises him, he says, that he has found so much deceit and dishonesty since he started to play tennis professionally; he is only calm and talkative when the atmosphere is sympathetic, and he cannot bear to be scrutinized or judged.
In this sense he could not be more American. He insists he plays for pleasure, but he is intensely competitive (and withdraws and falls silent when the talk is of anything but sports or rock music), obsessed with winning, more tenacious in play than any tennis player I have ever seen—he throws himself on impossible shots, often risking a fracture as he somersaults into the scoreboard, knocking numbers all over the floor. He has been playing tennis in a serious way since he was twelve and beating older opponents at the Douglaston Club in New York. Little else matters to him.
Challenged on this, he says, "I've learned more about life in a year of pro tennis than I would have in four years of college. Now I can see through people a lot quicker"—and he goes on to describe the phonies he's met and their dreary deceptions.
His father has been quoted as saying that his famous son ("but I don't feel famous—I get nervous when I meet real sports stars") is living in an unreal world. McEnroe laughed at this. "My father's in an unreal world. He's my manager! He's learned a lot, too—suddenly I'm earning more than he is. He figures I was going to earn maybe a hundred thousand or so—was he surprised! There's about six people in his law firm working on my accounts—taxes, all that stuff. He says, 'Hey this is getting serious' or 'I'm concerned that you're playing too much.'
"But I take time off—weeks sometimes, when I'm tired and can't stand the sight of a racket. There are lots of players who practise more than me—six hours a day. That's not my style. Or those long flights—one day in Tokyo, the next day in Stockholm or Miami, playing on two or three hours' sleep. I hate that. Gullikson won Jo'burg and then for about two months he was walking around like a Zombie. Not me, man. If I'm playing in London on Monday I try to arrive on Saturday."
The next day in San Jose he had two matches, the singles and doubles finals, both of which he won. A night in San Francisco and then he went to Las Vegas to compete in an exhibition tournament at Caesar's Palace. On his way to Las Vegas he passed through San Francisco Airport. I happened to be there, waiting for my own flight. I did not recognise his face, but identified him because he was carrying six tennis rackets under one arm and an enormous radio-cassette player in the other. He loped through the lobby alone, and no one else saw the mild, anonymous-looking youth anymore than, in another dimension, anyone had assumed that Jekyll could be anything but a nice-natured doctor who was away most evenings.
Christmas Ghosts
[1979]
The tradition in England of ghost stories at Christmas is much older than Dickens. "It is evident enough that no one who writes now can use the Pagan deities and mythology," Dr. Johnson said in 1780. "The only machinery, therefore, seems that of ministering spirits, the ghosts of the departed, witches and fairies." Although Dickens is the most celebrated exponent of the machinery of ministering spirits and ghostly epiphanies at Christmas, there was no better practitioner of the English ghost story than Montague Rhodes James. His stories are more eerie than Dickens's, dustier than L. P. Hartley's, less harshly suburban than Elizabeth Bowen's, and though lacking the narrative gracility of his namesake Henry's, are much scarier for their persuasive antiquarian detail.
People die horribly in M. R. James's stories; their bones are found in marshy woods, finely spun with cobwebs or in ghoulish coitus—two skeletons embracing; their hearts are knifed out and diabolically used; they are murdered and burnt and visited by dark creatures from the distant past. Perhaps this is not so odd. Mr James was himself an antiquary, a translator of the New Testament Apocrypha, passionately interested in paleography and for many years Provost of Eton, where he had any number of pupils and colleagues to sit at his feet. The lovable and learned old bachelor is a natural teller of ghost stories. But the curious thing is that, nearly always, M. R. James used Christmas as the occasion for giving his devotees the creeps with these strong tales. Indeed, he called the most hair-raising of them his "Christmas productions."
The fireside, the indoor life which winter demands, the somberness and good cheer which combine to become something like hysteria—these matter. So does the dark, the penetrating blackness that makes the English December a month almost without daylight, filling the afternoon with a clammy gr
aveyard gloom—everyone hurrying through the wet streets with his head down, and homeward-bound schoolchildren looking blank-faced and lost. In the countryside, the trees drip like leaking wounds in the darkness, and owls squeeze out hoots from where they creepily roost; in the city, the housefronts stare through the trachoma of torn curtains across deserted parks, and moisture blackens every brick with a look of decay, giving the once-solid city some of the atmosphere of a hugely haunted ruin. It is the perfect weather, the perfect setting, for ghost stories, and it does not seem unusual to me that it has produced so many in England.
But why such stories as "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad"—or, for that matter, the one that begins with the ghost of Jacob Marley—at Christmas? I think, to understand this, one has to understand the English dislike of piety and church ceremony, the distrust of Catholic liturgy and the low esteem in which most English hold Catholicism. I say "dislike" and "distrust", but uneasiness is its true source, and I should say that in the English character is a kind of protesting residue of paganism. It is a revolt against sanctimony—Christmas pulls one way, pagan skepticism the other, and the result is frequently a blend of the pious and the supernatural, a species of half-belief that is persuasive because it is frightening: fear is the oldest excuse for reverence. And so the Christmas catharsis of the ghost story, that half-belief made into fiction, God in the shape of a bogeyman with a face of crumpled linen, making his annual visitation to an imperfect world. And because Christmas celebrates birth, we are nagged by its opposite, that things end; the ghost story celebrates the experience of death. In Dickens, the haunted man gets a reprieve; in M. R. James, he gets the chop. But Christmas is the only holiday that is specifically associated with a fictional genre, and though the English have contrived a characteristic way of expressing it, the tradition has a shadowy charm, and it is, ultimately, easy to see why it has caught on in other places.
Two Christmases ago, I decided to write such a story for my children. Their requirements were fairly undemanding. They wanted to appear in the story themselves; it had to have snow in it, and a ghost. I wrote it easily, but afterward they suggested with a certain diffidence that it wasn't right—the ending was sad. The old man disappeared—where was he? What happened to him? Was he all right? They said, in so many words, that the lugubrious inconclusiveness of it would keep them awake. So I cobbled together a new ending, and the next night they were satisfied. This I published last year as "A Christmas Card." Interested readers may notice in it a piece of plot I cannibalized from M. R. James's story, "The Mezzotint."
It was a happy experience, this Christmas ghost story. My children are now too young to read any of my other books, and they have only the vaguest notion of what I do all day. They are proud and pleased when they see my name on a new book, but beyond an acquaintance with the titles they have no idea of what is between the covers. (And I wonder, sometimes with a sense of dread, what they will think at the age of twenty or so, when they chance upon a novel of mine; will it arouse pity, or admiration, or cause embarrassment?) It struck me that they would not read anything of mine that was not written specifically for them. So, in the spirit of Edward Lear, who gladly turned from one of his Indian watercolors to sketch a cartoon for a young friend, I made another attempt last Christmas.
Their requirements: a London setting; snow; suspense; a happy ending; and "please put a cat in it." I had the setting immediately. There is a church near where we live in which William Blake was married. It is a Georgian church, St. Mary's in Battersea, sited directly on the south bank of the Thames. One of the windows in the church is dedicated to the memory of Benedict Arnold, a useful reminder that one country's traitor is another's patriot-hero. Arnold's bones lie somewhere in the muddy churchyard, and there is also a boat and mooring at the edge of that churchyard. From this dingy precinct of South London you can see clearly the prim pink brick and iron balconies of Chelsea.
"London Snow"—the title, but nothing else, is from a Robert Bridges poem—was a hit with my children, and reading it to them on the three nights preceding Christmas, leaving the hammerstroke for Christmas Eve, was an intense pleasure for me. It was in a way like a rehearsal of the oldest form of fiction, telling this long story on successive nights in the close seclusion of my children's room; it was also an excuse to be alone with them, an invitation to see what my work is and a homemade groping toward an enchantment in producing some of my own ghosts. I felt lucky in being able to share it with them, and I promised that I would do it every year—a new story—for as long as they could stand it.
Purely for my own amusement, I hired the wood-engraver, John Lawrence, to illustrate the text, and decided to print a small edition myself, with the best paper I could lay my hands on, the best printing and binding. It is a limited edition: I will sell enough copies to pay for the publication, and I'll give the rest away as Christmas presents. That is for this year, and the whole enterprise has been immensely satisfying, the result a more grandly produced book than I have ever seen commercially published. Really, a book can be a beautiful thing, given patience, the collaboration of a gifted artist, a little money and a lot of time.
And I suppose the appeal of a Christmas story should not be a riddle. It is the imaginative and civilized celebration of a time of year that is full of mystery—part joy, part fear. It is expressed as an ambiguous epiphany in the last sentence of the best Christmas story ever written, James Joyce's "The Dead": "His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead."
Henry Miller 1891–1980
[1980]
There is a poem entitled "Shitty" by Kingsley Amis in D. J. Enright's Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse. Reading it, I was instantly put in mind of Henry Miller, because it is not shocking but bright and funny, less a tone of voice than a startling gesture, the respectable writer clearing his throat and going ptooey while you watch. I think we are shockproof as far as coarse language is concerned; now, what alarms us, and rightly, is squalid action, the aristocrat and the boy scout, the traitorous don, the cabinet ministers wheeling and dealing in slag-heaps and ennobling shifty little asset-strippers. Next to these men's deeds, what is Miller's grunting? Anyway, he made it possible—he among others—for us to say exactly what we mean in our own words, and it is enjoyable to hear Mr Amis, grumpily profane, expressing common sentiments in direct language.
When Henry Miller stopped shocking people with his gonadal glow he was no longer taken seriously. But that was a long time coming. Tropic of Cancer was published in France in 1934, yet it was almost another thirty years before it was freely available in America and England. The illicitness contributed to his legend and he was forgiven his flatulence. A loophole in French law meant that books in English were not subject to censorship, and Miller's books could be regularly published under the Obelisk Press imprint alongside epics of coprophilia by "Akbar del Piombo."
Miller was a late bloomer—forty-two when his first book appeared—though he claimed that in the 1920s he hawked his prose-poems like Fuller brushes from door to door in his Brooklyn neighborhood. He loved this starving-artist image of himself, the romance of penury and neglect, writing against the odds, whistling in the dark, with his flat cap yanked over his eyes and (he says) muttering "Fuck you, Jack" to curious bystanders.
Anyone who has read Orwell's essay "Inside the Whale" knows how profoundly Miller affected and liberated at least one English temper. He was Orwell's opposite—reckless, amoral, loud, boastful, mendacious, and wholly contemptuous of politics. Orwell praised Miller's vigor and imagination, Miller returned the compliment by saying (in The Paris Review), "Though he was a wonderful chap ... in the end I thought him stupid ... a foolish idealist. A man of principle, as we say. Men of principle bore me..." What was Miller's philosophy? "One has to be a lowbrow," he said, "a bit of a murderer ... ready and willing to see people sacrificed, slaughtered for the sake of an i
dea, whether a good one or bad one."
Typically, he talked through his hat, and apart from the most dubious generalities, didn't have an idea in his head. He claimed to be on the side of joy, freedom, criminality, insanity, ecstasy; he wasn't particular, but neither was Whitman, whom he much resembled. His writing was wild talk, scatological rather than sexual ("I am for obscenity and against pornography"). He was a shouter—a boomer, as they say Down South—and there are not many of those who achieve much in literature. His look, that of a Chinese sage, was misleading. Underneath was a hobo, the sort who sits stinking and dozing in public libraries, who screams abuse (some of it quite original) when he is told to move on, and who cherishes views such as "Civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture."