Recent readings

I read relatively little fiction and, except for detective stories, even less contemporary fiction. But I was greatly rewarded by reading Philip Roth’s Everyman*. It is the story of the life of a man who feels that he is dying as he goes through the last twenty or so years of his life. He is Jewish, has gone through three marriages and divorces, and worked as an art director at a New York advertising agency. Funny thing: he is not given a name anywhere in the book–he is only described in third-person terms ("he", "his", "him"). He is Everyman.

* Everyman, by Philip Roth. Houghton Mifflin, New York 2006 (182 pages)

The story begins as his casket is lowered into a grave in a rundown Jewish cemetery in New Jersey, a cemetery founded by his grandfather in 1888. It contains the graves of his parents and those of many unrelated families. The mourners at the burial aren’t numerous–his second wife Phoebe and their daughter Nancy, in her mid-30's; his two sons by his first marriage, both in their late forties and clearly present only out of duty; his older brother Howie and his wife; a few former ad agency colleagues; and a few others who had known him at the Jersey shore retirement complex where he had been living. His death, at age 71, came when he was on the operating table undergoing a fifth operation for vascular problems.

The beauty of this novel is the way that Roth takes the reader through this man’s living, his thoughts, his fears without causing the reader to really like or dislike him. That sounds bland, but to me it was all the better.

He was reasonable and kindly, an amicable, moderate, industrious man, as everyone who knew him well would probably agree, except, of course, for the wife and two boys whose household he’d left and who, understandably, could not equate reasonableness and kindliness with his finally giving up on a failed marriage and looking elsewhere for the intimacy with a woman that he craved.

He had a soft manner with many people, such as the other elderly residents of his complex to whom he gave free art lessons. And especially with his daughter Nancy, a divorcee with twin daughters, who truly loved him notwithstanding his having left her and her mother for his third wife, a vacuous young thing about twenty years younger than he.

The story flows at an even pace, made all the more enjoyable by Roth’s fine word crafting. As Everyman contemplates the rest of his life--just a few years before it ended--he realizes:

Well, he was thrice divorced, a one-time serial husband distinguished no less by his devotion than by his misdeeds and mistakes, and he would have to continue to manage alone. From here on out he would have to manage everything alone.

There are two wonderful scenes near the end of the man’s life. One is when he reads an obituary of his former boss at the ad agency and phones the widow; his humanity comes through warmly in the conversation. At the same time he learns of two other colleagues who are hospitalized, one with depression and the other with prostate cancer. He phones them and has a very touching conversation with each.

For hours after the three consecutive calls–and after the predictable banality and futility of the pep talk, after the attempt to revive the old esprit by reviving memories of his colleagues’ lives, by trying to find things to say to buck up the hopeless and bring them back from the brink...he’d learned...the inevitable onslaught that is the end of life...Old age isn’t a battle; old age is a massacre.

The other scene is when he visits the cemetery, which he will soon inhabit, to be near his parents’ graves, he runs into a black man who is digging a grave. Their conversation is very mundane. Everyman asks the digger about the mechanics of digging a grave, hauling away most of the dirt but keeping just enough to cover the casket after it is lowered. (He finds that the digger had dug both of his parents’ graves.) The contrast, yet the closeness, of Everyman and the grave digger–two very different men--is displayed with grace.

"And you've been doing this work how long?" Everyman asks.

"Thirty-four years. A long time. It’s good work. It’s peaceful. Gives you time to think." is the digger’s response.

This was my first reading of Philip Roth’s work. I intend to read more.

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The Poe Shadow * I didn’t find very interesting; in fact, I didn’t finish it. It is a work of fiction, a period piece, in which a young lawyer in Baltimore, one Quentin Clark, attends Edgar Allan Poe’s funeral in that city (Poe died there in mysterious circumstances on October 7, 1849, at age 40). Afterward, Clark travels to Paris to look up C. Auguste Dupin, the father of all fictional private detectives, introduced to the world by Poe. Clark’s purpose for this visit is an attempt to put together the true story of Poe’s demise.

* The Poe Shadow, by Matthew Pearl. Random House, 2006 (370 pages).

The book should have interested me because I have read much Poe, I like mystery stories, and much of it takes place in Baltimore (although around 1849), in a suburb of which I have lived for many years. But somehow it didn’t. For me, it was an overly-contrived potboiler.

This week's quiz, last week's answers

This week's quiz: British and American writers.

1. This British author, as a boy, worked in a factory that made black shoe polish. Later he became a court stenographer.

2. This American author has a bridge in Boston named after him.

3. This British author began a novel with the words "It was a dark and stormy night..." for which there is a contest every year in the USA for an opening sentence worse than that one. He also coined the phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword."

4. This American author had only one book, a novel, published to great acclaim; it was later made into a popular movie. The author died after being hit by a taxi.

Next week's quiz: Dogs and cats

Answers to last week's quiz: Battles of history.

1. King Leonidas was the leader of his army in what battle?

The Battle of Thermopylae. Leonidas, the Spartan king, led a coalition of Greek city states against the invading Persians in 480 BC. The Persians won that battle and took over Athens, but were driven from Greece a year later in the Battle of Plataea.

2. A famous poem was inspired by a battle in the Crimean war. Name the poem and the poet.

"The Charge of the Light Brigade" by Alfred Lord Tennyson. The oft-quoted lines "Theirs not to reason why/ Theirs but to do and die" are from the poem.

3. Mikhail Kutuzov commanded Russian forces in what battle?

The Battle of Borodino, fought in Russia against the invading French army of Napoleon in September 1812.. The French won this battle and moved on to seize Moscow.

4. In a war fought by American forces there were two battles fought in the same place, about a year apart. Name the war and the place.

The American Civil War. The First Battle of Bull Run began on July 21, 1861 in northern Virginia--it was the first engagement between the Union and the Confederate forces following the attack on Fort Sumter by the Confederates earlier that year. The second began on August 30, 1862. Both were won by the Confederates. These battles have also been referred to as the First and Second Battles of Manassas (Bull Run was a stream and Manassas was the small town in the proximity of the battles.)

World Cup doesn't interest Americans?

I read and hear that Americans have no interest in the World Cup of soccer (which the rest of the world calls "football"). Even Charlie Pierce, the Boston Globe columnist and commentator on National Public Radio, who seems to know everything about every sport, expresses his disdain for the World Cup.

My question: How can there be so much hype in the USA about the Olympics (to me, the most boring of events) every four years, with hours and hours of it on TV, and yet be told that Americans couldn’t care less about the World Cup (also played every four years)?

To be sure, soccer would be more exciting to watch if there were more scoring–a game ending in a score of 1-0 or a 0-0 tie isn’t nearly as exciting as it could be; there is too much kicking the ball up and down the field for nought in those matches. My recommendation for more scoring is to make the field smaller and/or the goal larger (which will happen when pigs fly).

But, as it is, soccer is exciting to watch and, with the World Cup teams representing many countries, adds the flavor of international competition. I plan to watch parts of many of the games on TV until the championship one on July 9th, for which I will be glued to my set.

Chacun à son gout.

It's June 1st--baseball is here for me

Although the major league baseball season begins in April, I just can’t get interested in it until the beginning of June. The season is too long–the regular schedule runs from the first week of April through the end of September; then there are the divisional playoffs (which have grown longer as expansion teams have been added to the list) and then the World Series, which can go into November (the 2005 one, which was shorter than most because the Chicago White Sox won four straight, went through October 26th).

I remember snow falling in Baltimore on the opening day of the 1979 World Series when the Orioles took on the Pittsburgh Pirates at home for the first game.

So, on June 1st my antenna goes up and I start to keep up with what is going on. What has been going on with the Baltimore Orioles at the beginning of June hasn’t been a pretty sight: right now they are seven games out of first place in their American League division. This is such a contrast to their earlier days when they went to six World Series in the 18 years 1966-1983 (winning three and losing three), but haven’t been there in the 22 succeeding years through 2005. Much of my interest in sports comes from nostalgia. Some of my nostalgia musings about baseball:

–Pickup sand lot baseball games when I was a kid in the 1930's and early 1940's. There were no organized little league-type sports during that era in the small North Carolina town where I grew up. But we had lots of pickup games after school and on weekends–anywhere from five or six to ten or twelve kids would go to one of the several open spaces in town (sometimes someone’s side yard at a street corner house, with the outfield out in the street) and make up two teams, and the game would begin.

I am glad that there are organized little league sports for kids today–our daughter played softball in one and our son baseball in another; these leagues play an important role in kids’ development. However, something can also be said for the way we played our games in my youth: we did it on our own without any adults running things for us. It helped us realize that we could be independent and do things on our own.

–Going to major league exhibition games as a kid. When the east coast teams traveled by train from spring training in Florida back to their home cities, they would often stop off in Durham or Raleigh, N.C. to play each other. Going to those games was a big thrill because in the 1930's and early 1940's there was no TV and no radio broadcasts of regular season baseball games in North Carolina, thus these exhibition games were the closest most people there could get to see a major league game.

–My first regular season major league game. In July 1946, when I was home from college for the summer, I volunteered as an older boy to accompany (along with several adults) a group of young school safety patrol boys from my home town on a trip to Washington. While there, I went to two Washington Senators games (against the Detroit Tigers) in the old Griffith Stadium. It was the last year of all-white players (Jackie Robinson made his appearance with the Brooklyn Dodgers the following years to break the color line).

–Going to Cubs and White Sox games when I worked in Chicago on the Chicago Tribune newspaper the summer of 1948 before my senior year in college. I worked from 8 PM to 4 AM, so after work I could go to my rented room, get some sleep, have breakfast and get to nearby Wrigley Field by 1 o’clock to see the Cubs play (all of their games were day games then, lights only having been added many years later). I also went to a few White Sox games at Comiskey Park, which is on the south side of Chicago, a much longer trip for me.

–Going to Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers games in New York. My first job out of college was in New York, where I lived from 1949 through 1951. It was easy to take the subway to Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds to see the Yankees and the Giants play (I never went to Ebbets Field in Brooklyn but saw the Dodgers play the Giants many times at the Polo Grounds). Almost everyone in New York had one of those three teams as his favorite–mine was the Giants.

–Hearing the "shot heard around the world." That was the famous home run hit by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson to win the best two-of-three playoff against the Brooklyn Dodgers on October 3, 1951. The Giants had pulled themselves up from 13 1/2 games behind the Dodgers in the National League on August 11th to a tie just before the World Series was to start the first week of October, so there had to be the playoff to determine who would go against the Yankees of the American League in the World Series. With the Giants and the Dodgers having won one game each, the Giants were behind 4-2 in the final game with just two outs left in the bottom of the 9th inning; then Thomson came to bat and slammed the three-run homer that gave the Giants a 5-4 win and the sportswriters the event that they called the "shot heard around the world."

On that miraculous October 3rd I was working as a trainee in the Foreign Accounting Department of the oil company Texaco (now part of Chevron) at its home office in the Chrysler Building in New York. No work was being done that afternoon as every one of the 25 or 30 workers in that department was huddled around a radio listening to this crucial third game (there were no portable TV sets in those days). We were probably split right down the middle as to Giants fans and Dodgers fans. It being a mild day, the office windows were open (like most New York buildings at the time, the Chrysler Building wasn’t air conditioned), so that each time one or the other of the teams got a hit or scored a run loud cheering was heard, not only from our own department, but from those listening to the game in the tall buildings on all sides of the Chrysler Building.

I was standing with a group of three or four other fellows listening to the game through earphones on a small crystal set in a cigar box that one of the group had made (there were no transistor radios then). The earphones were passed around the group for each to listen for a few minutes. They were passed to me in the bottom of the ninth. THEN IT HAPPENED!Thomson hit the game-winning home run! I jumped up with the earphones still on and yanked them right out of the crystal set. This is certainly one of my two or three most enduring sports memories. (The Giants went on to lose the World Series to the Yankees by 4-2.)

–The New York Giants World series 4-0 win over the Cleveland Indians in 1954. I was then in Dakar, Senegal (at that time a French colony in west Africa) working for Texaco; we could get the games on short wave radio. I listened to them with several American expatriates, including a native of Cleveland who worked at the American consulate in Dakar and his wife, so there was much back-and-forth between us as the games were played.

–The only World Series game I ever attended. It was in October 1970, the Baltimore Orioles at home against the Cincinnati Reds (the only game the Orioles lost in their 4-1 sweep of the Reds). I had been in bed with the flu for several days before the game, but that particular day was sunny and mild so that I felt up to going to the game with my wife on two tickets that a business acquaintance had given me. My benefactor had also been equally generous to others in my company–including my boss, who was sitting right behind me. When I got there, he said, "I’m glad you’re feeling better." I explained that I had just gotten out of my sick bed for the occasion and was going right back to it. In fact, I stayed in bed several more days.

I'm ready. "Take me out to the ball game..."