by Paul Auster
After saying good-bye to you in Pietrasanta I went on to Genoa. After Genoa I was planning to take a leisurely train ride to Toulouse. But the hand of God intervened in the shape of floods and washaways in the Tarn valley. The trains stopped running, and I had to find a flight out of Nice.
Back in Adelaide, I am eight hours out of phase with life around me, and in the present cold and overcast weather find it hard to readjust my body clock. So I am staying up all night and sleeping in the day. One incidental boon is that I can watch the World Cup football live.
I have never been a true aficionado of The Beautiful Game, and what I see from South Africa does little to change my mind. There can’t be another sport in which players spend so much of their time fouling one another and generally infringing the rules behind the referee’s back. The fact that the all-seeing eye of the television camera captures their petty cheating and transmits it worldwide seems to make no difference to them. A reign of shamelessness.
All the best,
John
July 5, 2010
Dear John,
Many thanks for your letter, which I have just found in the fax machine downstairs. I was going to ask Siri to send you another e-mail with a two-word message—“Fax fixed”—but clearly you have figured this out for yourself.
Yes, it was an enormous pleasure seeing you in Italy. The trip to Lucca, the good food, the talk. Too little time, of course, but something is undoubtedly better than nothing. We will have to have another rendezvous in the not too distant future, although I’m afraid it won’t happen until you go to Toronto in the fall of 2011. Perhaps you (and Dorothy?) can visit us in New York afterward—or, if that isn’t possible, perhaps Siri and I can meet you in Canada, which isn’t far from here, at least not when compared to going to Australia.
Like you, I started following the World Cup because of jet lag. In America, the games are aired early in the morning and early in the afternoon, and because I have been getting up very early since returning from Europe, I quickly fell into the habit of switching on the TV to watch. Sports fiend that I am, I have become more and more engrossed. You probably played football (soccer) as a boy. I didn’t, and therefore my knowledge of the game is far more superficial than yours. I agree with you that the fouling and feigning are stupid and embarrassing, altogether at odds with the stoical, “good sportsman” attitude I grew up with, but if The Beautiful Game is not always beautiful, it does provide its pleasures. The grit of a so-so American team coming back from deficits again and again, the composure of the Dutch in defeating the Brazilians, the speed and precision of the Germans. I am pulling for Holland, the brilliant also-rans of cups past, but I’m afraid the Germans will be too strong for them. (By the time this letter reaches you, we’ll know if my prediction was accurate or not.)
What befuddles me about the sport, however, is the role of the clock. The game plunges on without any stoppage, players dawdle, delay, roll around on the pitch in two-minute-long group hugs after each goal is scored, and then, at the end of each half, the referee arbitrarily tacks on some additional time. In the clock sports I am most familiar with—basketball and American football—“clock management” is an essential part of the game. Every time the ball goes out of bounds, the clock stops. A basketball team must shoot within twenty-four seconds; a football team must execute its next offensive play within forty-five. All this makes sense to me. In soccer, however, there is a kind of lethargy or laxness that seems to undermine the importance of the clock—which is a contradiction, since it is a game ruled by the clock. Am I making sense?
I doubt that I know or understand Israel any better than you do, having been there only twice. The comparison you make with the end of apartheid in South Africa is tantalizing, seductive, perversely hopeful, but . . . I’m not sure. The situation in South Africa was essentially an internal one: a racist government oppressing the majority of its citizens. But South Africa wasn’t threatened by anyone outside its borders, which is sadly the case in Israel. Much as I despise the Israeli government for its hardheaded positions, lapses in judgment, and frequent acts of cruelty, there is no question that the threat is real. The one positive step the Israelis have taken in the last years—evacuating Jewish settlements in Gaza—has led to multiple catastrophes. The election of Hamas, thousands of rockets launched across the border, the blockade—to name just a few. You wonder if the Israeli army might one day turn against the government. Possibly yes, but it strikes me as the longest of long shots. Simply because the government can keep the military in line by pointing to the constant threats—real or imagined—from Israel’s neighbors.
I sometimes think that the best way to unblock the standoff would be a one-state solution. Abandon the principles of Zionism, declare the West Bank and Gaza part of Israel, and give all Arabs equal rights as citizens. But then I tell myself that this plan could never work. Israel would turn into Belgium. A bloody, hate-infested Belgium.
A few days before we left for Europe in early June, an article was published in the New York Times Book Review by American novelist Jonathan Franzen about the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children. Not a bad article, really; on the whole quite astute and generous, but the piece began with the following paragraph, which I found deeply strange:
There are any number of reasons you shouldn’t read The Man Who Loved Children this summer. It’s a novel, for one thing; and haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster? As an old English professor friend of mine likes to say, novels are a curious moral case, in that we feel guilty about not reading more of them but also guilty about doing something as frivolous as reading them; and wouldn’t we all be better off with one less thing in the world to feel guilty about?
Franzen has had enormous success here—both critically and commercially. He is a man who has spent his life writing novels, which would suggest, I presume, that he believes in the practice of reading novels. Why then would he launch this attack against . . . himself? The article, after all, was written for a weekly magazine devoted exclusively to books, which means that any person who bothered to read the article necessarily has an interest in books, is necessarily a reader of books, not only of nonfiction but of novels—the very thing Franzen is telling him he should no longer be interested in. I scratch my head in bafflement.
Siri’s eighty-seven-year-old mother is with us now, and we will be taking her to Norway the day after tomorrow for a family reunion. I dread the thought of going on yet another plane, but we have to do this. It could well be Siri’s mother’s last trip home, and duty calls. We return on the fifteenth, at which point I plan to lock myself in a room and keep my feet on the ground for the rest of the summer.
With sweaty greetings on this ninety-eight-degree day,
Paul
July 19, 2010
Dear Paul,
In the wake of the recent World Cup (football), I have been ruminating on the question of why it is that you and I, you no longer as young as you once were and I positively aged, spend so much time watching sports that we can no longer play.
The answer is, I suppose, that both us see in organized sport, and the spectacle of sport devoured by so many people, one of the major social phenomena of our age. We see that and maybe also approve of it—approve of sport in and of itself and the vicarious participation in sport too.
So we think sport is a good thing. But why? For manly sports certainly do not turn one into a better person—there are too many instances of people who excel at sports but are no great shakes as human beings. Yet perhaps there is a certain elephant in the room that we ignore. Bearing in mind what I wrote a while ago about it perhaps being a good thing if the Palestinians would learn to swallow defeat, I’d like to relay some thoughts I have been having about losing in s
port.
Think of professional tennis. Thirty-two men take part in a tournament. Half of them will lose in the first round and go home without having tasted any of the sweetness of victory. Of the sixteen who remain another eight will go home having tasted a single victory and then defeat and expulsion. Humanly speaking, the predominating experience of the tournament will be of defeat.
Or take boxing. A boxer makes it to Caesar’s Palace with a record of thirty-two wins and three losses behind him. But what of the thirty-two guys he defeated, who will never make it to Caesar’s Palace or any other glamorous venue? What of the guys who never win a single fight, the professional losers, men who are shoved into the ring only because there can’t be a winner unless there is also a loser?
In sports there are winners and there are losers; what no one bothers to say (is it too obvious?) is that there are many more losers than there are winners. In the Tour de France, which is being contested as I write, there were something like 200 starters, of whom one will come out the winner on overall time while 199 will be nonwinners, i.e., no matter what consoling stories they may tell themselves, losers.
Sport teaches us more about losing than about winning, simply because so many of us don’t win. What it teaches above all is that it is OK to lose. Losing is not the worst thing in the world, because in sports, unlike in war, the loser doesn’t get to have his throat cut by the winner.
Think of that profoundly interesting moment in a small boy’s life when he graduates from pretend sport, in which the adults or the older boys allow him to win all the time and generally to feel he is a little king, to the real thing, where if you don’t hit the ball you are out, you have to give up the bat to someone better than you and retire ingloriously. It comes as a shock to the little boy’s psychic system. He wants to bawl, throw a tantrum, try all the tricks that work with his parents. He wants to subject reality to his ego. But it gets him nowhere. “Stop sniffling, kid!” But also: “Stop sniffling, kid—you’ll get another turn.”
Because that is the great lesson of sport. You lose most of the time, but as long as you stay in the game there will always be a tomorrow, a fresh chance to redeem yourself.
In this great school of losing, you don’t flunk out unless you refuse to accept that you have lost, unless you reject the verdict of the game and retire into majestic isolation.
I would like to see the Israelis and the Palestinians playing football against each other once a month, with neutral referees. Then the Palestinians can learn that they can lose without losing everything (there is always next month’s game), while the Israelis can learn that you can lose against Palestinians, and so what?
Thanks for the letter (July 5). A quick note on South African history (“South Africa wasn’t threatened by anyone outside its borders”). In the 1980s the South African army and air force fought a major campaign against Cuban forces in Angola, and lost, or at least had to take losses they could not sustain. It was not just a matter of being outnumbered: the Cubans were flying Russian fighters that outmaneuvered and outgunned the South Africans’ French Mirages. The generals went home and confronted the politicians. “The tide has turned against us,” they said. “You have got to do something about it.”
There are thousands (tens of thousands?) of Cubans buried in African soil. In Cuban eyes, their fraternal expedition to Angola counts as one of the high points in their history.
In your letter you quote the opening paragraph of a recent review by Jonathan Franzen, who in turn quotes a professor friend of his. I fear that the attitude expressed by the friend (a professor of English yet!) is all too typical. Professors of literature don’t, by and large, keep up with what is being published in poetry and fiction, don’t see it as part of their remit. If you want to meet people who read new fiction, you have to go to the book clubs and reading circles, where the readers are mainly women putting their liberal-arts degrees to some use. But I don’t have to tell you this.
As for Franzen’s own position—which from the extract you quote seems to me layered in irony—I suspect I am more sympathetic to him than you are. Faced with a choice between reading a run-of-the-mill novel and raking leaves in the garden, I think I would go for raking leaves. I don’t get much pleasure out of consuming novels; and—more important—I think that indifference to reading fiction as a recreation is spreading in society. It has become quite respectable, at least among men, to say that one doesn’t read fiction at all. I am a professional, with a professional stake in the business, so I can’t use myself as a yardstick. But I must say that I get impatient with fiction that doesn’t try something that hasn’t been tried before, preferably with the medium itself.
All the best,
John
July 21, 2010
Dear John,
One of the reasons why I remain so attached to baseball after all these years is the very thing you write about in your letter: the frequency of losing, the inevitability of failure. A look at the standings in this morning’s paper shows that the team with the best record this season has fifty-eight wins and thirty-four losses—which computes to a 63% success rate, meaning that the strongest team out of thirty has gone home frustrated 37% of the time.
Baseball seasons are very long—162 games—and each team goes through its ups and downs over the course of that six-month stretch: slumps and streaks, injuries, painful losses that turn on a single crucial play, unexpected last-second victories. Unlike boxing—which is always do or die—baseball is do and die, and even when you do die, you must crawl out of your coffin the next day and give it your best shot again. It is for this reason that steadiness of temper is so highly valued in baseball. Shrug off defeats, take victories in stride, without undue exaltation. The common wisdom is that baseball mirrors life—in that it teaches you how to take the good with the bad. Most other sports tend to mirror war.
There have been many strange doings in the athletic universe this summer. The longest set in tennis history, bizarre errors by referees in the World Cup, the official return to the female sex by the South African runner whose name escapes me now. Most compelling of all, there was an incident that occurred a couple of months ago in a major league baseball game—not so much a story about sports as about human grace. By my rough calculations, approximately a quarter of a million baseball games have been played in the past 120 years. In all that time, only twenty perfect games have been thrown by pitchers—that is, games in which the pitcher has retired every batter on the other team from the beginning of the game to the end, twenty-seven batters in a row, three per inning for the full nine innings. A young pitcher from Detroit named Galarraga (very young, early twenties, just starting out, someone I had never heard of) was on the brink of entering the palace of immortality. He had retired the first twenty-six batters, and when the twenty-seventh was thrown out at first base, it appeared that the doors of the palace had opened and he had stepped across the threshold. The batter was clearly out (every replay from every angle proved this beyond a shadow of a doubt), but the first-base umpire, a man named Jim Joyce (James Joyce!) missed the call and said the batter was safe. This was a stupendous error, perhaps the worst officiating blunder in the history of the sport, and the beautiful thing about what happened at that moment, the moment when Galarraga understood that his perfect game had been unfairly stolen from him, was that the young man smiled. Not a smile of derision or contempt. Not even an ironical smile, but a genuine smile, a smile of wisdom and acceptance—as if he were saying, “Of course. Such is life, and what else can you expect?” I have never seen anything like it. Any other player in that situation would have erupted in a tantrum of anger and protest, screaming at the injustice of it all. But not this boy. Calmly, showing no hint of upset (for the game had to continue), he retired the twenty-eighth batter—thereby completing a perfect game more perfect than any that had come before it, and one for which he will get no credit.
Afterward, when Jim
Joyce saw the replay, he was mortified. “I robbed that kid of his perfect game,” he said, and he publicly apologized to Galarraga—who graciously accepted the apology, saying that everyone makes mistakes and that he bore no grudge.
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Forgive me for forgetting Angola. Stupid, stupid. But still, would you agree with me in saying that apartheid was an internal South African policy, and until international sanctions started quite late in the game, the world mostly stood around and watched for decades?
I don’t know if you remember this, but it still burns in my mind, still fills me with anger: sometime in the seventies or eighties, the U.S. Congress made a symbolic declaration to the South African government, asking them to release Nelson Mandela from prison. The vote was nearly unanimous. Among the two or three dissenters: Dick Cheney.
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As for the reading of novels, I think novelists themselves should be exempted from the discussion. You can’t read other people’s novels while you are writing your own. And when we do read them, needless to say we don’t want to read mediocre ones. Raking leaves is surely preferable (and I detest raking leaves), but we mustn’t forget the thrill we feel when we come across something truly good. And then—ah, and then—how to forget the passion of our reading when we were young, when it seemed that our very lives depended on it?