Not Exactly What I Had in Mind

by Roy Blount

  Salute to the Bear

  DO YOU RECKON MARK Twain and Paul “Bear” Bryant ever sit around in Heaven chewing the fat?

  “What is Man?” muses Twain, who tends to get off into that kind of thing.

  “Well,” says the Bear, choosing to believe that the subject is pass defense, “there’s Man and there’s Zone. Down home I was always partial to Man, myself. Wasn’t anything technical about it. Just one old knotty-headed boy trying to haul in a projectile and anothun trying to change his mind.”

  “I know of a bear,” says Twain (having been brought back to firmer ground), “that crossed paths with a missionary. The question arose, who would convert whom? The matter stood unresolved for only a short time. Thereafter the bear held to his ursine ways, and the missionary walked in the paths of the bear — or all of him did, I mean to say, except his eternal soul and his India rubber boots.”

  “A bear don’t mince words,” says Bryant.

  Bear Bryant’s teams — most notably at the University of Alabama — won more games than any other coach’s in college football history. While he lived, Alabamians told this story:

  One day in Heaven a figure went stomping importantly by, wearing a whistle and a cap with an A on it, and a newcomer asked, “Who is that?” A longtime resident answered, “God — but he thinks he’s Bear Bryant.”

  They also said Bryant was the only coach ever to have an animal named after him, but in fact he earned his nickname when he wrestled a traveling bear in a movie theater in Fordyce, Arkansas, where he grew up dirt poor. I have spent only ten or twelve days in Arkansas in my life, but I have already met two different people who claimed they witnessed that event. One of them said that he, in a suit, was the bear; but he was drinking and I believe he would have said anything. In Arkansas. I don’t think he would have said that around many folks in Alabama.

  Let me interject here that I was once surrounded in a Birmingham hotel lobby by a swarm of drunks in red hats and miracle-fiber suits who were saying “Roll Tide” to one another. (“Roll Tide” is what fans of the Alabama Crimson Tide say the way other people say “What it is?” or “Shalom.”) And I didn’t like it. On the whole I would rather be surrounded in an airport by those kids who try to sell you Back to Godhead magazine. That’s how much I didn’t like it. But I never quarreled with the notion that Bear Bryant looked like God. That’s what quarterback George Blanda, an extremely craggy person himself, thought thirty-some-odd years ago when he saw Bryant’s granite face for the first time. When I saw the Bear for the first time up close, briefly in 1972, he had the hardest eyes I’d ever seen. Deep, like Raymond Burr’s, but a lot colder.

  One of the things that persuaded Bryant to leave Texas A & M in 1957 and return to Alabama, his alma mater, was that he had been receiving bagfuls of letters from Alabama grammar-school kids who said they wanted to play for him if he ever came back. Was he perceived, then, as a kindly, understanding figure who would ease a boy’s way through the hard knocks of big-time ball? Well, hell no, he wasn’t. The Bear was known for his sign that read BE GOOD OR BE GONE. When he overheard players so much as hint that they had had enough of his slave-driving drills, he “cleaned their lockers for them and piled their clothes out in the hall,” as he recalls in Bear, his rousing 1974 memoir written with John Underwood. “I’d make them prove what they had in their veins, blood or spit, one way or the other.” Bryant would take a bad team and push it so ferociously over rough and blistered ground that the kind of player he disliked, the player accustomed to getting by on natural gifts rather than on hunger, would quit. After the Bear’s first spring practice at Texas A & M, only 27 players were left out of the 115 who originally reported. And people with a taste for soft living don’t even drive through College Station, Texas, much less enroll in school there and go out for football. Bryant liked the player “who doesn’t have any ability but doesn’t know it.” He liked country boys like himself — in his last years they tended to be black, he said — who would do anything to get away from the dusty, grinding, ungratifying labor in their backgrounds. The Bear would give them even heavier dust, harder grinding, and less sweetness than they were used to. He would get down in the dirt with them and fight. He would hardly ever give them a kind word. He would rasp the bunch of them down to a hard core that could beat all comers at “eleven man and sic ’em” football and then graduate with a will into pro ball, coaching, or business. (How would you like a man like Bear Bryant to come over to your house to sell you insurance? “You ain’t got enough coverage and you know it! Just git on out of this house and turn this nice woman and these pretty babies out in the street if you ain’t man enough to insure ’em. Go on! Go on! If you don’t hurry I’m gonna set fire to your car!”)

  But what place did a man like that have in a university? Especially since the Bear in his own scholar-athlete days seldom went to class. He barely earned a phys ed degree from Alabama back when such degrees came even less hard than they do today.

  Look at it this way, though: what if courses in education were taught in the kind of language and at the kind of pitch in which and at which the Bear taught football? I’ll tell you what: the nation’s educators would make more sense.

  They wouldn’t be saying, “Evaluative procedures for the implementation of program goals and objectives have been identified, formulated, and prioritized based on acceptable criteria in order to foster enhanced positive learning experientialization.”

  They would be saying, “What you got to do is, keep your weight low to the ground, get your head in under the student’s rib cage, and thrust upward. And drive. And by God if he don’t learn what you’re trying to teach him then, he must know something you don’t. Or else not know something you thought he did. And you got to find out which it is and what it is — whatever it is — and come right back at him.”

  (I have tried and tried and tried to write the above passage in gender-unspecific terms. It won’t work. We need a new pronoun. For one thing.)

  I’m not trying to tell you that a college-football education resonates with human values. One evening in the early 1970s, a distinguished Tide lineman went before an audience of freshman players with a live squirrel he had just captured bare-handed on campus. He proceeded to rip the struggling animal apart, exclaiming as the blood flew, “This is what you got to do to win!” and then chewed on one of the torn-off legs. Poets, scientists, and department heads do comparably destructive things, though, and college teaching might make more sense and a deeper impression if it were more sanguineous. You always wonder what you might have learned if you’d had the chance to be scourged for a while by somebody who, like a standing dire emergency, was dreadfully good at getting some version of the most out of people.

  The University of Alabama is not the nation’s most rigorous academic institution. They say it is almost impossible to get anybody to take a class there after 2:00 P.M. But a hundred football players — some of them good students and all of them under pressure to absorb something one way or another — don’t drag down a student body of 17,300. On the other hand, what might be the effect on a university if it had a learning team? Spurring one another on. Reaching down deep. Stressing fundamentals.*

  In 1977 I went down to Tuscaloosa to confront the Bear. I entered his office at nine-thirty one morning. He was a big, fleshy sixty-four-year-old man, sprawled and restive behind his big sleek desk. The walls were paneled like a corporation exec’s, except for the built-in blackboards. On one of these, different hands had chalked “26/47 Belly” and “I love you, Grandpoppa. Love, S.G.B.”

  I told the Bear that people were wondering whether college was worth it anymore. What did he, as a man who had done a lot of teaching that helped bring people out of poverty, think of that? How would he motivate students today?

  He shrugged, not just modestly, and said he didn’t know.

  “Wouldn’t it be interesting if other subjects were taught the way you’ve taught football?”

  Maybe you have hear
d Kris Kristofferson on one of his albums introduce his song “To Beat the Devil” in a grave just-post-deep-deep-hangover talking bass: “I came across a great and wasted friend of mine … I saw he was about one step away from dying, and I couldn’t help but wonder why.” The Bear’s voice sounded like that, but he was saying, “I certainly don’t think football is as important as English or some academic department. Except that it’s hard to get a crowd out to watch an examination.”

  His eyes were a lot less imposing than I remembered. He hadn’t gotten to work until nine. He used to get in every morning at five-thirty, after stopping off somewhere on the way to throw up from the tension. In the old days he had spent evenings confronting his players in their dorm rooms. Now he hung out a lot at night at the Indian Hills Country Club.

  “I wish to heck I’d gotten an education. I think it’d be more fun. If I could go speak to the Rotary Club and not use the same old adjectives over and over …”

  I told him I’d never heard anybody complain about his adjectives.

  “I’d study grammar. When I follow Bud Wilkinson at a coaching clinic, it’s like daylight and dark, and I’m the dark.”

  That the Bear could think himself less eloquent than old network-bland Bud Wilkinson astounded me. In his book Bryant tells how he presented himself for the first time to a thousand Texas Aggies:

  “I took off my coat and stomped on it.

  “Then I took off my tie and stomped on it.

  “Then, as I was walking up to the mike, I rolled up my sleeves.”

  Here, in his office, he already had his coat and tie off.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know whether you ever motivate ’em or not. I doubt I have. … My old players get together now and talk about things that happened; I don’t even remember. Got to look ahead to the next day. … Up until a few years ago I didn’t do anything but work. Now other people are doing the work, most of it anyway. I’m trying to learn to relax. I don’t read many books. Watch television — John Wayne, Bob Hope.”

  I asked him, “If you were to go back and take a course that you missed out on, what would it be?”

  “I’d go back and take spelling.”

  Well, people had been telling me that the Bear had mellowed a lot. Investments had made him rich. In his book he had said he didn’t try to “bleed and gut” players anymore; he tried to save them. He was letting them grow their hair longish. Communication was the key today, he said. He couldn’t get down and scuffle with them anymore.

  Maybe now God and the Bear sit around mellowing together. With John Wayne. I bet it galls all three of them, though, that the Duke, who had been the Bear’s choice to portray him in his autobiographical movie, didn’t live long enough.

  To tell the truth, I thought that at some point during my visit with him the Bear would say something that would make me jump, like “Boy! Run through that brick wall over there and write a sharp account of whatever scene is on the other side. And I don’t want to pick up one damn iota of overt reference to the wall.” And I would have seriously considered doing it.

  What he did say was, “You come back and see us now.”

  As I left the field house, a voice in my mind started spluttering, “What? That ain’t the way to do a damn interview. That is a mean man back there. He has been known to hang out with Frank Sinatra and Spiro Agnew. You going to let him get away with all that crap about wishing he knew grammar and about English being more important than football?”

  “Yeah,” I told the voice. “I am. I think he’s right.”

  What’s So Humorous?

  “OF THE THREE TYPES of convulsion,” according to some notes I took years ago from a report on a conference on Cybernetics and Humor, “laughter is the one for which there is the clearest ideational content.”

  Aren’t there more types of convulsion than that? Sneeze, Paroxysm, Orgasm, Upchuck, and Heart Attack spring to mind. If I were writing an allegory in which the Bland Knight manages to pass through the Vale of Convulsion with his guide, the sorely pressed Equanimity, those would all be characters. I can see Sneeze and Upchuck now. And how about Hiccup?

  Another note from that cybernetics report: “There are two types of tickling.” Left-handed and right-handed? Sweet and mean? Literal and figurative? Ribs and feet? All we may say for certain is, it is hard to discuss Humor without seeming a fool.

  Hence, books of Humor receive little serious critical attention. There may well be thousands of close readers who would agree with me that Bruce Jay Friedman’s Lonely Guy’s Book of Life, for example, is a much better book, line for line and in toto, than many a bloated, enervating major comic novel such as John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy or John Irving’s World According to Carp. But no one ever says so in print.

  However, if there is anything less dignified than setting up as a humorist, it is setting up as a humorist who is not taken seriously enough. A funny writer probably ought just to be laughed at, at least until old age, when he or she deserves to be genuinely nasty and revered.

  Mordecai Richler, a truly funny writer but one who has had the wisdom to become a serious novelist, has collected The Best of Modern Humor. His sole criterion for the material he chose, he says in his introduction, was that “it had to make me laugh.” That is hard to argue with. But somebody’s got to do it.

  First, however, I will declare my interest. I am one of the sixty-four writers anthologized, and I am also mentioned favorably in the introduction (to avoid any conflict, please skip over that passage, which is on page xvii, toward the bottom). As a lad, I read anthologies and figured that, if I could myself reach the point of being anthologized, I would be set. In my near-maturity I find that an anthologee’s lot is not glorious. He is liable, browsing in a bookstore all innocently, to stumble upon himself in Trees: A Golden Treasury of the Best Arboreal Writing of the Ages. Never is there a prepublication card in the mail proclaiming, “Congratulations! You are hereby one of the great tree writers of all time.” Since The Best of Modern Humor reached the stores, I have spoken to four of the writers appearing in it. Two of them were unaware that there was such a book. I gather that all I am ever going to see out of the deal, financially, is $67.50.

  When my high-school classmates were tearing apart ’51 Fords and inserting new cams and mufflers, I was getting just as greasy reading A Subtreasury of American Humor, edited by E. B. and Katherine S. White. That book appeared in 1941, the year of my birth. This new collection is the most definitive-looking roundup of literary American humor since, and it also embraces various top-notch Brits and V. S. Naipaul. Here are heroes of my adolescence — Robert Benchley, James Thurber, S. J. Perelman, H. L. Mencken, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Ring Lardner, and so on. Here too are at least seven contemporaries of mine with whom I have had too much to drink. I always wanted to be on a mythical all-star team.

  And now that I am on one — these should have been Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon — it is not exactly what I had in mind. This book has a great deal of wonderful stuff in it, including Mencken on cops, Liebling on Earl Long, John Mortimer on schooldays, Eudora Welty on family life, Thomas Meehan on introducing Yma to Oona, Veronica Geng’s “My Mao,” Woody Allen on one man’s Emma Bovary, and J. B. Morton’s grandly ineffable “Intrusions of Captain Foulenough.”

  But Flann O’Brien, who may have been the funniest writer ever, is inadequately represented by some of his Keats and Chapman gags, one of which I don’t get. I’d rather have had something from Peter De Vries and Kenneth Tynan other than their respective Faulkner parodies. (Trying to send up Faulkner is like trying to do an impression of Little Richard. You had better be able to cut loose.) Richler’s Thurber selection is a pale one. And I have never cared much for Frank Sullivan’s “Cliché Expert” pieces. I prefer the Whites’ choice from Sullivan, “Gloria Swanson Defends Her Title,” which has a magnetic hat in it; I am a sucker for anything with a magnetic hat.

  At the time of the Whites’ anthology, it was pretty
clear what Humor was in this country. It was funny writing that had come out in the New Yorker or that people assumed had come out in the New Yorker. Parodies, sketches, personal essays, short stories, reporting, verse. For the prose, the New Yorker had and still has an infelicitous but suggestive term, “the casual.” Implied is a straight-faced, graceful, deftly self-conscious flouting of rigidities and … oh God, I’ve got to get out of this kind of thing. There are two types of exit from this kind of thing, and that is one of them.

  The other is to invoke the White House. We are seeing a resurgence of Humor in this country, as in the Harding and Coolidge administrations. My theory is that Humor flourishes in times of chipper but ill-advised composure.

  In high school I decided that writing Humor was my vocation. I assumed there would be a good living in it. When I got out of college in 1963, however, there was not. This was partly because I was not as good at Humor as I had been in high school and partly because of the historical moment. Humor is counterrevolutionary. So are the great majority of revolutions, within a few months, but that was not a point that seemed called for in the sixties. In the sixties we had the Theater of the Absurd and Black Humor, neither of which was funny.

  J. D. Salinger and Donald Barthelme had borne the New Yorker tradition of Humor off into, respectively, mysticism (or New Hampshire) and experimental fiction. Humor collections were scarce, pale, and ill-selling. Magazines kept saying they were always on the lookout for good Humor pieces, but rarely did they, the New Yorker included, find any.

  Big shifts had to occur. I recall the lurid — no, the wholesome — exhilaration I felt on seeing the advance excerpt from Portnoy’s Complaint in Partisan Review. Philip Roth had done what Zooey couldn’t. He had brought explicit sex into Humor. It was about time. Humor as represented by the Subtreasury had always bordered on the prudish — had indeed (see Thurber) derived much of its energy from sexuality abashed and redirected. That did not work anymore.