Murder

by David Adams Richards

  “Where? Up to London?”

  “No. He’s dead.”

  He lies buried in Ripe, England. The coroner stated that his passing was “a ease of death by misadventure.”

  1998

  BRAVE AS ANY MAN

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD DIED AT THE AGE OF FORTY-FOUR. NO one, not even himself, meant to kill him. But there is no doubt in my mind that he joined the assault.

  It was one way to get along and not have to try to be what he might have become. A failure is great if he can always pretend he could have succeeded to those who will sympathize. A drunk is almost always the personification of this. Sooner or later they all start lampooning themselves for laughs. After his early success he seemed driven to fail.

  He began to applaud Hemingway instead of himself, became a script writer in Hollywood. People who worked with him thought he was long dead until they met him. Hemingway called him “a coward” to his former friends.

  I admire Hemingway. I think all in all he was one of the great short story writers of the century. But most of us have at least one way to be a coward. When it really counted, and where it really counted, Fitzgerald was as brave as any man.

  They told Scott to stop drinking, stop writing and he’d live longer. He did try with drink. He never, ever put down the pen. How could he? He was born to it. When you are born to something, you stop and you’re dead anyway. Boxers know this, as well.

  There is a great scene in the made-for-television film Last of the Southern Belles where Fitzgerald is in a speakeasy. Some men are making remarks about Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald stands up (he was no great hulk of a man) to defend him:

  “My name is F. Scott Fitzgerald. I wrote The Great Gatsby. Ernest Hemingway is a friend of mine,” he says. He gets his nose bashed in for his effort.

  Hemingway would never have spent a second defending him. The secret is, Fitzgerald knew this.

  Scriptwriting in Hollywood. But I suppose most people who know of Fitzgerald know of these stories. Because that’s where the money was. He needed to impress Hemingway by writing letters about how much money he made; and then, feeling guilty about lying, he’d write a retraction.

  As far as Hollywood went, almost nothing he did was put in the can. So he died a failure. Now almost everything he wrote is a movie of some kind.

  Most writers, no matter where they are born, know this truism. You can TRY to be famous or you can TRY to be great—you choose, because you can rarely TRY to be both. Fitzgerald was convinced by others, or by himself, that he should not TRY to be great—deciding, instead, to become rich and famous. (Sometimes he dressed incognito even though no one knew who he was.)

  He goes in and out of fashion, like all writers. There is only one person I admire who really thinks Fitzgerald was a great writer. But there is nothing Fitzgerald has done that I haven’t respected. And I’ve respected him more over the years. I think the unfinished The Last Tycoon was an unfinished masterpiece.

  And in a certain way, I’ve respected his life more than his writing, although his life was so wretched. His wife in an institution, and his daughter, “Scottie,” in private school; dogged by debt and memories of what might have been, friends who had fled, hiding his bottles from his mom.

  Never to be even a twentieth as good or as celebrated, I still could have humbly offered some advice. Being published at almost the exact same age, about a year before either of us shaved, we went along the same road for a while. Met many very well known people, most of them older by ten to twenty years.

  I could have told him that he was once so young there was no way any of them was ever going to forgive him for any success he had. Nor, finally, did he have to take the blame for this. That the bottle is never in your corner, but is the best counterpuncher in the business. You hit it, it hits you right back, twice as hard.

  He went off to Hollywood, hoping that newness, and money, was everything it was cracked up to be. But he was no longer new. He was sick and old at the age of thirty-six. In many ways forgotten.

  There was a great confrontation between Dashiell Hammett, writer of The Thin Man, and Ernest Hemingway over Scott at a party one night. Hemingway was trying to show his prowess in front of Hammett, who, having worked as an agent for Pinkerton, was not impressed.

  Hammett finally said, “Why don’t you go back to bullying someone you’re capable of bullying—Scott Fitzgerald. Poor Scott—the very best we have—if he only knew.”

  Hemingway left the room.

  Some say Fitzgerald did know. If he did, other people’s ideas of what he was always got in the way.

  Hemingway used boxing as a metaphor for writing. In a way it’s better than another metaphor used mainly by academic writers—baseball.

  Writing is no team sport. I agree it is like boxing.

  Both professions are lonely. Both are preyed upon by the vulgar.

  Both have their entourages, ready to flee at a given moment. Both have their Don Kings.

  Fitzgerald would have known all of this. There was something magnificent about his struggle to keep it all going.

  Or to pretend to keep it all going while essentially throwing it away. Last of the Southern Belles is one of the great movies about a man who knew his reach should exceed his grasp and sometimes couldn’t bring himself to reach.

  Once in my life I was at a party with a person who knew F. Scott Fitzgerald. The year was 1985, and I was invited to her house in New Orleans. She was an old lady, a Guggenheim lady, who had known them all—Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Faulkner.

  At the party was a small—tiny, really—Southern gentleman by the name of Everette Maddox. He had written a collection of poems called The Everette Maddox Song Book. He looked like a ghost.

  “I am a howling failure,” he told me, and seemed pleased. His teeth were going and his body was frail. Really when you read his poems, you realized that he had two things to offer: first, a wideeyed innocence about his own predicament—as if he alone couldn’t believe how he’d ever gotten himself into such a wretched state; and second, a despair and a hope that he would someday soon disappear off the face of the earth.

  He was drinking himself down to nothing as it was. He had started off at 150 pounds, with a wife, a job, a house and a car. When I met him, he was 109 pounds, no wife, no job, no house and he was unsteady when he walked.

  He swept up at a tavern, and organized poetry readings.

  Everyone he had ever loved had left him. And in a way he blamed no one. I will tell you I thought he was a great poet. One of the best poets I’ve ever met. But his life wasn’t so great. It reminded me of Malcolm Lowry’s short story about the ill-luck of writers: of Poe’s disastrous relationship with his stepfather; and of Keats’s early death.

  The short story is called “Strange Comfort Afforded by the Profession.”

  Mr. Maddox was a Southern gentleman. There was an Old World romantic notion in him. There is a story that after he read a friend a new poem once, his friend was so moved he blurted, “I’ll buy you a bottle of bourbon if you let me put my name on that.”

  Everette winced, looked around the room to make sure no one was watching and handed the poem over. His friend, who had just been joking, started to cry.

  Everette kept waiting for everyone, especially his wife, to come back, tell him they loved him, all was forgiven. You can see it in every page of a poetry book that may have sold a hundred copies.

  “Please come back,” he wrote on my copy.

  He died on a park bench in New Orleans at the age of forty-four.

  Now they celebrate his life. Some say he was great. A wonder, a delight.

  As with Fitzgerald, they were all happy he was dead so they could love him once more.

  But really that’s the nature of the beast. Even the writers themselves know this.

  Once a young interviewer, on leaving my s
tudy, stopped to look at a picture of Roberto Duran training for his junior middleweight bout with Davey Moore.

  “You know who that is?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said, because she knew who my favourite writer was.

  “That’s Leo Tolstoy,” she answered proudly

  I told this to Rick Trethewey, a friend of mine, a writer who was once a professional boxer.

  “Tolstoy never got such a great compliment,” Trethewey commented. He’s right.

  And Tolstoy knew what Duran knows.

  There’s always enough blood to go around.

  1995

  GRETZKY GAVE US EVERYTHING HE HAD

  HE HAS HAD MANY NOMENCLATURES: THE GREAT ONE, GRETS, Number 99, the Wayner, and, on occasion, the Whiner. I was in my early twenties when I heard that a kid from Brantford was going to be greater than Bobby Orr. I didn’t want to believe it. I’m not sure why. In a way, hearing how many goals he had scored in one year, (about a thousand and a half) was like hearing about the Krupp Cannon in the 1870s—which, since it fired accurately up to four times the distance of any other cannon of its time, couldn’t be for real, and therefore was hard to sell to the Prussian army chiefs of staff.

  In many ways Gretzky was a hard sell. I was part of those who waited to be convinced. For he was the antithesis of what a hockey player looked like. He was too small; supposedly didn’t skate that well; supposedly again, had no shot; looked awkward; didn’t really mix it up. So many of the greats looked better on skates, were bigger, could take the shot and had a mean streak. Bobby Orr (the only man who rivals Gretzky for number one) had a mean streak—and when he skated, my God.

  * * *

  —

  Gretzky had to quell every doubting Thomas. For a while there were thousands, maybe a million. If his holding sixty-two National Hockey League records is a legacy, his more lasting personal achievement is that. I don’t think there can be any more questions. He has answered them. Now, looking back at it, it didn’t even seem that hard to do. He has proven that no player born on any soil was greater. Still, it must have taken its toll. He has aged before our eyes.

  * * *

  —

  Much of the criticism wasn’t even about hockey There was something about his personality, too. He was too clean, shy, and his opinions seemed to be rehearsed. Yet he loved attention. Then he never got in trouble. There was always a bit of danger about Messier, which was appealing. For some, Gretzky was too close to his father. And after he went to L.A., he was seen to be mouthing the sentiments of the hockey commissioners to make the game more appealing to the Yanks. “Good for the game” is a line I’ve always mistrusted.

  The game in Canada was on a decline and Gretzky had gone south, for the market—for the money. It was mentioned in the House of Commons as a national crisis. But a thousand other players had gone south over the years: Hull and Howe and Orr. Or was it just L.A. we felt didn’t deserve that great a hockey player? But at one time they had Dionne. That is, our country has often given its national treasures away, bringing them home for the Order of Canada. Maybe we have no options anymore. But if we don’t blame ourselves, we can’t blame Gretzky. He stayed here longer than most. He also played some of his greatest games for Canada. I don’t remember him ever saying no.

  I don’t know when I began to change my opinion about him. I still love the way Lafleur moved, and Mario played, Denis Savard, Doug Gilmour and Pavel Bure, too. But then again, there is only one 99.

  One night watching a game back when he played for the Oilers, I suddenly sat up. He was there. And it was over—that is, my feeling that I ever needed convincing anymore. It had dissipated in his move behind the net, at centre ice, and when he came out from the corner and found—without even looking—anyone he wanted to, at any time, with a pass. I was as close to watching perfection as I was likely ever going to be. I was alone with no one to shout about it with.

  He then, over twenty seasons, shattered all the records. I have delighted in his play for years, but saw him play live only five times. The first was the second game against the Soviets in the 1987 Canada Cup. The one that went into double overtime. Even greater was his moment in the third game, coming back from 3–0 and the pass to Lemieux with a minute left. Or the 1991 Canada Cup, when he seemed to handle the Swedes singlehandedly.

  What to me was his greatest moment—the moment he made me proudest? I’ll whisper it. It was when he sat alone on the bench after our loss to the Czechs in ’98. I realized, at that moment, five o’clock on that dreadful morning, that in some truly ultimate way, he had given us everything he ever had.

  So how will we measure the man? We will measure him by what we refuse to forget after he is gone.

  1999

  (I thought of this essay again, when in 2015 at the World Championship we dominated every team—especially the Russians; that we won both the World Cup and the 2014 Olympics. However, looking at the newspaper reports on the World Championship of 2015, and the texts and emails that responded to it, I realized how many Europeans simply believed that if the NHL hadn’t been in the midst of the Stanley Cup at that time, the Americans would have won, their thinking being that all the players on US-based teams must be American, neglecting the fact that Crosby, Burns, Giroux and most of the Team Canada players played for US-based teams, as did over half of the Russian players, including Ovechkin. There seems no longer any way to correct a mistruth about us, which is simply taken as fact.)

  2016

  IN DEFENCE OF MY GRANDMOTHER

  MY FATHER BY THE AGE OF FIVE WAS LEFT SOLITARY AND alone, raised by young girls his mother hired to take care of him when she ran the theatre business in our little town of Newcastle, New Brunswick. She loved my father, but as fate would have it, she was a widow and had a business to run. The maids used to terrify him, in conspiracy with certain people in town. One of the things they did was put him to bed and put the chair his father, who had died of diabetes in 1924, used to rock in outside his door, telling him that his father was now a ghost and watching him. Funny enough if you’re a girl of seventeen full of piss and vinegar and rifling through rooms downstairs. Terrifying if you are a boy of four, believing that these girls are there to protect you.

  It is amazing to me that women, and men (and for some reason more men than women), have written about independent women of the 1920s and 1930s, and have ascribed to them many of the fashionable sentiments of independent women of the eighties and nineties. That is, they have accepted the ideas and ideals of our time as being essential to an overall wisdom, and transposed these new virtues back to my grandmother’s time and place believing this is the only way to portray women as being seriously independent. The crowds rock and roll with this, too, because they have the firm belief that “freedom” is something that can only be explained because our generation—our Western affluent generation—is the only generation wise enough to have achieved it. And that the fight for women’s rights is somehow the one thing worth portraying, but only in the way acceptable to people who have learned the right lessons. Besides—and here is the catch—so many of these writers and thinkers have been told all their lives what to believe about the fight. And more to the point, what is now virtuous and what is not.

  This prevalence is not considered false by many people I know and my concern about it is often viewed with facile enjoyment.

  But there is a part of this that is so misrepresentative of the world I came out of some comment is necessary. Because I have noticed that some people are determined to use my grandmother’s life in a way to prove their and my own generation’s advancement or ascension. That they do and have done this with women of the thirties in novels written now by certain men from coast to coast does not bother me in the least—pandering to fashion is never out of fashion. But that they bring my grandmother into the fray is something else again.

  Back in the mid-eighties, when I was attached to
a university here, certain women lectured me about this: “Yes, your grandmother was just like me,” they would tell me. Matched by a sympathy not one of them really felt. For they did not know her at all—and she would have seemed to them to be troublesome, because of how old-fashioned she was.

  What’s more my grandmother would have scared half of them to death, simply with her gaze. Yet back then in the mid-eighties what these entirely nice, competent young ladies were doing, or wanting to do, is to claim my grandmother’s uniqueness as a parcel. That is, that her singular toughness and solitude were theirs for the asking because they themselves had enough money to be taught how to think. If that is unfair, tell me where it is unfair and I will work on correcting it. They were the daughters of lawyers or doctors and so often had been told how to behave—not in order to be wise, but in order not to be left out. Being left out was what they really couldn’t accept. In fact in their certain circles so often others were scapegoated and left out. Religion was oppressive; men were the cause of it. Pregnancy was a crime (in many circles) and men were a cause of that, too. Sexuality could be, and should be, expressed by women but not by men—an affair was in order for a woman, but a man was a scoundrel if he succumbed. And the idea often rehashed was that one must look upon all of this with a good deal of irony—and if you challenged this assumption, as I did from the first time I heard it and from the first book I wrote, you were considered a chauvinist or a sexist—in fact you were not to have a voice in the great new debate.

  Except the debate was not new, not particularly genuine and almost always self-infatuated.

  What disturbs me, even now, is these young women, or many of them simply assumed my grandmother would have thought like they did—about the terrible Catholic Church or abortion; or more to the point, she would applaud how they now think as virtuous. Of course that is a completely false assumption, and a pernicious one. Or what is pernicious is many of them believed that what they could teach her she would soon ascribe to. That is, “I would have loved to have talked to her,” one young lady said to me, as if handing a benediction. Well, perhaps she wouldn’t have cared to talk to that young lady This naïveté followed them without much harm, but who knows how they may have harmed others. It is also the lie deeply embedded in conventional literature that those forerunners were much like the runners now. What smugness laces up the shoes of their sentiments?