by John Irving
Most of our dual-meet matches were also held in the cage, but not in the wrestling room where we practiced. An L-shaped wooden parapet extended like an arm off the wooden track. From this advantage--and from a loop of the wooden track itself--as many as 200 or 300 spectators could look down upon a less-than-regulation-size basketball court, where we rolled out the mats. There was barely enough floor space left over for a dozen or more rows of bleacher seats; most of our fans were above us, on the wooden track and parapet. It was like wrestling at the bottom of a teacup; the surrounding crowd peered over the rim of the cup.
Where we wrestled was appropriately called "the pit." The smell of dirt from the nearby track was strangely remindful of summer, although wrestling is a winter sport. What with the constant opening of the outside door, the pit was never a warm place; the mats, which were so warm and soft in the wrestling room, were cold and hard for the competition. And, when our wrestling meets coincided with track meets in the cage, the sound of the starting gun reverberated in the pit. I always wondered what the visiting wrestlers thought of the gunfire.
My first match in the pit was a learning experience. First-year wrestlers, or even second-year wrestlers, are not often starters on prep-school or high-school wrestling teams of any competitive quality. In New Hampshire, in the 1950s, wrestling--unlike baseball or basketball or hockey or skiing--was not something every kid grew up doing. There are certain illogical things to learn about any sport; wrestling, especially, does not come naturally. A double-leg takedown is not like a head-on tackle in football. Wrestling is not about knocking a man down--it's about controlling him. To take a man down by his legs, you have to do more than knock his legs out from under him: you have to get your hips under your opponent, so that you can lift him off the mat before you put him down--this is only one example. Suffice it to say that a first-year wrestler is at a considerable disadvantage when wrestling anyone with experience--regardless of how physically strong or well-conditioned the first-year wrestler is.
I forget the exact combination of illness or injury or deaths-in-a-family (or all three) that led to my first match in the pit; as a first-year wrestler, I was quite content to practice wrestling with other first-year or second-year wrestlers. There was a "ladder" posted in the wrestling room, by weight class; in my first year, I would have been as low as fourth or fifth on the ladder at 133 pounds. But the varsity man was sick or hurt, and the junior-varsity man failed to make weight--and possibly the boy who was next-in-line had gone home for the weekend because his parents were divorcing. Who knows? For whatever reason, I was the best available body in the 133-pound class.
I was informed of this unwelcome news in the dining hall where I worked as a waiter at a faculty table; fortunately, I had not yet eaten my breakfast--I would have had to vomit it up. As it was, I was four pounds over the weight class and I ran for almost an hour on the wooden track of the indoor cage; I ran in a ski parka and other winter clothing. Then I skipped rope in the wrestling room for half an hour, wearing a rubber suit with a hooded sweatshirt over it. I was an eighth of a pound under 133 at the weigh-ins, where I had my first look at my opponent--Vincent Buonomano, a defending New England Champion from Mount Pleasant High School in Providence, Rhode Island.
Had we forfeited the weight class, we could not have done worse: a forfeit counts the same as a pin--six points. It was Coach Seabrooke's hope that I wouldn't be pinned. In those days, a loss by decision was only a three-point loss for the team, regardless of how lopsided the score of the individual match. My goal, in other words, was to take a beating and lose the team only three points instead of six.
For the first 15 or 20 seconds, this goal seemed feasible; then I was taken down, to my back, and I spent the remainder of the period in a neck bridge--I had a strong neck. The choice was mine in the second period: on Coach Seabrooke's advice, I chose the top position. (Ted knew that I was barely surviving on the bottom.) But Buonomano reversed me immediately, and so I spent the better part of the second period fighting off my back, too. My only points were for escapes--unearned, because Buonomano let me go; he was guessing it might be easier to pin me directly following a takedown. One such takedown dropped me on my nose--both my hands were trapped, so that I couldn't break my fall. (It's true what they say about "seeing stars.")
When they stop a wrestling match to stop bleeding, there's no clock counting the injury time; this is because you can't fake bleeding. For other injuries, a wrestler is allowed no more than 90 seconds of injury time--accumulated in the course of the match. In this case, they weren't timing my nose bleed; when the trainer finished stuffing enough cotton up my nostrils to stanch the flow of blood, my dizziness had abated and I looked at the time remaining on the match clock--only 15 seconds! I had every confidence that I could stay off my back for another 15 seconds, and I told Ted Seabrooke so.
"It's only the second period," Seabrooke said.
I survived the 15 seconds but was pinned about midway into the third period--"With less than a minute to go," my mother lamentably told me.
The worst thing about being pinned in the pit was the lasting image of all those faces peering down at you. When you were winning, the fans were loud; when you were on your back, they were quiet, and their expressions were strangely incurious--as if they were already distancing themselves from your defeat.
I was never pinned in the pit again; the only other loss I remember there was by injury default--I broke my hand. When the trainer offered me the slop bucket--I needed to spit--I saw the orange rinds and a bloody towel in the bottom of the bucket, and I promptly fainted. Aside from that misfortune, and my first-ever match--with Mount Pleasant's Vincent Buonomano--I associated the pit with winning; my best matches were there. It was in the pit that I wrestled New England Champion Anthony Pieranunzi of East Providence High School to a 1-1 draw. I was not so lucky with Pieranunzi in the New England Championship tournament, where he beat me two years in a row; despite two undefeated dual-meet seasons, I never won a New England title.
My years at Exeter were the final years when the winner of the New England tournament won a truly All-New England title; 1961 was the last year that high schools and prep schools competed together in a year-end tournament--I was captain of the Exeter team that year. After that, there were separate private-school and public-school tournaments--a pity, I think, since high-school and prep-school wrestlers have much to learn from each other. But, by '61, the New England Interscholastic tournament, as it used to be called, had already grown too large.
I remember my last bus ride with the Exeter team, to East Providence--to the home mats of my nemesis, Anthony Pieranunzi. We'd checked our weight on the scales in the academy gym at about 5:00 in the morning; we were all under our respective weight classes--in some cases, barely. The bus left Exeter in darkness, which near Boston gave way to a dense winter fog; the snow, the sky, the trees, the road--all were shades of gray.
Our 121-pounder, Larry Palmer, was worried about his weight. He'd been only a quarter of a pound under at Exeter--the official weigh-ins were at East Providence. What if the scales were different? (They weren't supposed to be.) I'd been a half-pound under my 133-pound class; my mouth was dry, but I didn't dare drink any water--I was spitting in a paper cup. Larry was spitting in a cup, too. "Just don't eat," Coach Seabrooke told us. "Don't eat and don't drink--you're not going to gain weight on the bus."
Somewhere south of Boston, we stopped at a Howard Johnson's; this is what Larry Palmer remembers--- I don't remember the Howard Johnson's because I didn't get off the bus. A few of our wrestlers were safely enough under their weight classes so that they could risk eating something; most of them at least got off the bus--to pee. I'd had nothing to eat or drink for about 36 hours; I knew I didn't dare to eat or drink anything--I knew I couldn't pee. Larry Palmer remembers eating "that fatal piece of toast."
Just the other day, we were remembering it together. "It was plain toast," Larry said. "No butter, no jam--I didn't even finish it."
"And nothing to drink?" I asked him.
"Not a drop," Larry said.
(Lately, we're in the habit of getting together at least once a year. Larry Palmer is Professor of Law at Cornell Law School; one of his kids has just started wrestling.)
On the scales at East Providence, Palmer was a quarter-pound over 121. He'd been a sure bet to get as far as the semifinals, and maybe farther; his disqualification cost us valuable team points--as did my loss to East Providence's Pieranunzi, who was tougher at home than he was in the pit. In two years, Pieranunzi and I had wrestled four matches. I beat him once, we tied once, he beat me twice--both times in the tournament, where it counted most. All our matches were close, but that last time (in East Providence) Pieranunzi pinned me. Thus, the two times I was pinned at Exeter--my first match and my last--I was pinned by a New England Champion from Rhode Island. (Exeter failed to defend its New England team title in '61--our '60 team was arguably the best in Exeter history.)
Larry Palmer was stunned. He couldn't have eaten a half-pound piece of toast!
Coach Seabrooke was, as always, philosophic. "Don't blame yourself--you're probably just growing," Ted told him. Indeed, this proved to be the case. Larry Palmer was the Exeter team captain the following year, 1962, when he won the New England Class A title at 147 pounds. More significant than his 26-pound jump from his former 121-pound class, Palmer had also grown six inches.
It's clear to me now that Larry Palmer's famous piece of toast at Howard Johnson's didn't weigh half a pound. Larry's growth spurt doubtless began on the bus. We were so sorry for him when he didn't make weight that none of us looked closely enough at him; in addition to gaining a half-pound, Larry was probably two inches taller by the time he got to East Providence--we might have seen the difference, had we looked.
The Books I Read
In schools--even in good schools, like Exeter--they tend to teach the shorter books by the great authors; at least they begin with those. Thus it was Billy Budd, Sailor that introduced me to Melville, which led me to the library, where I discovered Moby Dick on my own. It was Great Expectations and A Christmas Carol that introduced me to Dickens, and (also in English classes) I read Oliver Twist and Hard Times and A Tale of Two Cities, which led me (out of class) to read Dombey and Son and Bleak House and Nicholas Nickleby and David Copperfield and Martin Chuzzlewit and Little Dorrit and The Pickwick Papers. I couldn't get enough of Dickens, although he presented a challenge to my dyslexia--to the degree that my schoolwork certainly suffered. It was usually the shorter books by the authors I loved that drew me to their longer books, which I loved more. Loving long novels plays havoc with going to school.
In an Exeter English class, I was "started" on George Eliot with Silas Marner, but it was Middle-march that would keep me from finishing my math and Latin assignments. My father, the Russian scholar, wisely started me on Dostoyevsky with The Gambler, but it was The Brothers Karamazov that I read and reread with an all-consuming excitement. (My father started me on Tolstoy and Turgenev, too.)
George Bennett was the first person in my life to introduce me to contemporary literature; in addition to his duties as Chairman of the Exeter English Department, George was simply a great reader--he read everything. I was still at Exeter--this was about 10 years before my fellow Americans would "discover" Robertson Davies upon the publication of Fifth Business--when George Bennett urged me to read Leaven of Malice and A Mixture of Frailties. (Tempest-Tost, the first novel of The Salterton Trilogy, I wouldn't read until much later.) And, not surprisingly, it was reading Robertson Davies that led me to Trollope. (With all there was to read of Trollope, this doubtless caused further injury to my schoolwork.) It has been said many times that Robertson Davies is Canada's Trollope, but I think he is also Canada's Dickens.
Twenty years later, Professor Davies reviewed The Hotel New Hampshire (1981) for The Washington Post. It was such a likable and mischievous review--and by then I'd read everything of his--that I eventually journeyed to Toronto for the sole purpose of having lunch with him. I'd broken a big toe (wrestling), and the toe was so swollen that none of my shoes would fit. My son Colin already had bigger feet than mine (by the time he was 16); yet it was only a pair of Colin's wrestling shoes that permitted me to walk without hobbling. It was either wear the wrestling shoes or meet Robertson Davies in my bare feet.
Professor Davies took me to the York Club in Toronto for a rather formal lunch; he was exceedingly polite and kind to me, but when his glance fell upon the wrestling shoes, his glance was stern. Now my wife, Janet, is his literary agent. Janet and I live part time in Toronto, where we dine frequently with Rob and Brenda Davies. Footwear is never a topic of conversation between us, yet I don't doubt that Professor Davies's memory of our first meeting remains somewhat critical.
When Janet and I were married in Toronto, my two sons from my first marriage, Colin and Brendan, were my best men, and Robertson Davies read from the Bible. Rob brought his own Bible to the wedding service, not trusting the Bishop Strachan Chapel to have the correct translation. (Professor Davies is a great defender of the King James Version in these treacherous modern times.)
Colin and Brendan had not met Rob before the wedding, and Brendan--he was 17 at the time--didn't see Professor Davies, in his magnificent white beard, approach the pulpit. Brendan looked up and, suddenly, there was this big man with a big beard and a bigger voice. Colin, who was 22 at the time, told me that Brendan looked as if he'd seen a ghost. But Brendan, who was not overly familiar with churches of any kind, had had a different thought. Brendan was quite certain that Professor Davies was God.
In addition to providing me with my first opportunity to read Robertson Davies--at a time when I was about the age Brendan was at my second wedding--George Bennett encouraged me to go beyond my initial experience with Faulkner. I don't remember which Faulkner novel I was introduced to (in an Exeter English class), but I struggled with it; I was either too young or my dyslexia rebelled at the length of those sentences, or both. I would never love Faulkner, or Joyce, but I grew to like them. And it was George who talked me through my earliest difficulties with Hawthorne and Hardy, too; I would grow to love Hardy, and Hawthorne--more than Melville--remains my favorite American writer. (I was never a Hemingway or Fitzgerald fan, and Vonnegut and Heller mean much more to me than Twain.)
It was also George Bennett who forewarned me that in all probability I would be "cursed to read like a writer," by which he meant that I would suffer from inexplicably strong and inexpressibly personal opinions; I think George really meant that I was doomed, like most of the writers I know, to have indefensible taste, but George was too generous to tell me that.
I can't read Proust, or Henry James; reading Conrad almost kills me. The Rover is okay, but most suitable for young males (under 18). Heart of Darkness is simply the longest short novel I know. I agree with one of Conrad's unkind reviewers that Marlow is "a garrulous intermediary"--I would call Marlow a tedious narrative device--and the same reviewer points out why I prefer (to all the rest) The Rover, which is generally looked down upon as Conrad's only children's book. "As nowhere else in Conrad," says the unkind reviewer, "disquisitions on ethics and psychology and metaphysics are conspicuously absent."
Not all "disquisitions" on such subjects are unbearable to me. It was Death in Venice that led me to the rest of Thomas Mann--particularly to The Magic Mountain, which I have read too many times to count. The literature of the German language wouldn't attract me with full force until I was in university, where I first read Goethe and Rilke and Schnitzler and Musil; they would lead me to Heinrich Boll and Gunter Grass. Grass, Garcia Marquez, and Robertson Davies are my three favorite living authors; when you consider that they are all comic novelists, for whom the 19th-century tradition of storytelling--of narrative momentum and developed characters--remains the model of the form, I suppose you could say that I haven't ventured very far from Dickens.
With one exception: Graham Greene. Greene was the fir
st contemporary novelist I was assigned to read at Exeter; it would probably have provoked him to know that I read him not in an English class but in the Reverend Frederick Buechner's extremely popular course on Religion and Literature. I took every course Fred Buechner taught at Exeter, not because he was the school minister but because he was the academy's only published novelist--and a good one. (I wouldn't realize how good until, long after Exeter, I read Buechner's quartet of Bebb novels--Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt.)
We were a negative lot of students at Exeter, when it came to religion. We were more cynical than young people today; we were even more cynical than most of us have since become--that is to say that my generation strikes me as less cynical today than we were. (Is that possible?) Anyway, we didn't like Freddy Buechner for his sermons in Phillips Church or in our morning chapel, although his sermons were better than anyone else's sermons I've ever heard or read--before or since. It was his eloquence about literature that moved us; and his enthusiasm for Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which engendered my enthusiasm for all (or almost all) of Greene, was unstoppable.
I feel that I know Greene's people better than I know most of the people I have known in my life, and they are not even people I wanted (or would ever want) to know: it is that simple. I cannot sit in the dentist's chair without envisioning the terrible Mr. Tench, the expatriate dentist who witnesses the execution of the whiskey priest. It is not Emma Bovary who epitomizes adultery to me: it is poor Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, and poor Scobie's awful wife, Louise; it is Helen, the 19-year-old widow with whom Scobie has an affair, and the morally empty intelligence agent, Wilson, who is a little bit in love with Louise. And then there is the ghastly sleaziness of Brighton Rock: the utterly corrupted 17-year-old Pinkie, and the innocent 16-year-old Rose . . . the murder of Hale, and Ida drinking stout. They have become what an "underworld" means to me, just as The End of the Affair is the most chilling antilove story I know. Poor Maurice Bendrix! Poor Sarah and poor Henry, too! They are like people you would shy away from if you encountered them on the street, knowing what you know.