Richard Ford - The Sportswriter

“No. I haven’t lost my mind,” I said, smiling guiltily. “This is something I’ve always wanted to do.” (Which was a total lie.) “There’s no time like the present if you ask me. What do you think?” I went over to give her a pat on the arm, and she just turned and went out into the yard. And that was the last time we ever talked about it. I started making arrangements with the college to provide me a house. I asked for and received my leave from the magazine (a Breadth Fellowship was what they called it). My texts were mailed down midway through the summer, and I did what I felt like was proper preparation. Then at the first of September I packed the Chevy and drove up.

What I found, of course, when I got my feet under me was that I had about as much business teaching in college as a duck has riding a bicycle, since what was true was that in spite of my very best efforts I had nothing to teach .

It’s rare, when you think about it, that anyone ever would, given that the world is as complicated as a microchip and we all learn it slowly. I knew plenty of things, a whole lifetime’s collection. But it was all just about myself, and significant only to me (love is transferable; location isn’t actually everything). But I didn’t care to reduce any of it to fifty minute intervals, to words and a voice ideal for any eighteen-year-old to understand. That’s dangerous as a snake and runs the risk of discouraging and baffling students — whom I didn’t even like — though more crucially of reducing yourself , your emotions, your own value system — your life — to an interesting syllabus topic. Obviously this has a lot to do with “seeing around,” which I was in the grip of then but trying my best to get out of. When you are not seeing around, you’re likely to speak in your own voice and tell the truth as you know it and not for public approval. When you are seeing around, you’re pretty damn willing to say anything — the most sinister lie or the most clownish idiocy known to man — if you think it might make someone happy. Teachers, I should say, are highly susceptible to seeing around, and can practice it to the worst possible consequence.

I could twine off sports anecdotes, Marine Corps stories, college jokes, occasionally vet an easy Williams poem to profit, tell a joke in Latin, wave my arms around like a poet to demonstrate enthusiasm. But that was all just to get through fifty minutes. When it came time to teach, literature seemed wide and undifferentiable — not at all distillable — and I did not know where to start. Mostly I would stand at the tall windows distracted as a camel while one of my students discussed an interesting short story he had found on his own, and I mused out at the dying elms and the green grass and the road to Boston, and wondered what the place might’ve looked like a hundred years ago, before the new library was put up and the student center, and before they added the biplane sculpture to the lawn to celebrate the age of flight. Before, in other words, it all got ruined by modernity gone haywire.

The fellows in my department, God knows, couldn’t have been a better bunch. To their way of thinking, I was a “mature writer” trying to get back on my feet after a “promising start” followed by a fallow period devoted to “pursuing other interests,” and they were willing to go to bat for me. To make them all feel better I claimed to be putting together a new collection based on my experiences as a sportswriter, but in truth any thought I had for such an enterprise fled like thunder the minute I set foot on campus. I’d see a copy of my book at a dozen different houses at a dozen different dinner parties (the same library copy that made its way around ahead of me). And though no one ever mentioned it, I was to understand that it had been read closely and remarked on admiringly and in private by people who mattered. One crisp October evening at the house of a Dickens scholar, I inconspicuously removed it off the coffee table, put it in the snappy autumn fire and stood and watched it burn (with the same satisfaction X must’ve felt when her hope chest billowed up our chimney), then went in to dinner, ate chicken Kiev and had a good time talking in a pseudo-English accent about departmental politics and anti-Semitism in T. S. Eliot. I ended up late that night in a bar across the New York line, with Selma, who had also been a guest, arguing the virtues of the American labor movement and the checkered career of Emil Mazey with a bunch of right-to-work conservatives, and afterward sleeping in a motel.

My colleagues, I should say, were all fiercely interested in sports, especially baseball, and could carry on informative brass-tacks conversations about how statistics lie, hitting zones and who the great all-time bench managers had been — bull sessions that could last half an evening. They often knew much more than I did and wanted to talk for hours about exotic rule applications, who covers what on a double-steal, and the “personalities” of ball parks. They would often alter their own English or urban accents to a vaguely southern, “athletic” accent and then talk that way for hours, which also happened at Haddam cocktail parties. I even had some confide wistfully that they wished they’d done what I did, but had never seen where the “gap” was in a young life that let you think about such a thing as being a sportswriter. All of them, of course, had gone right out of college, raced through graduate school, and as far as possible gotten jobs, tenure, and a life set for them. If they’d had any “gaps,” they didn’t acknowledge them, since that might’ve had something to do with a failure of some kind — a bad grade, a low board score or a wishy-washy recommendation by an important professor, something that had scared the bejesus out of them and that they wanted to forget all about now.

Still, I could tell it confused them that something had happened to me that hadn’t happened to them, and that here I was in their midst, and not such a bad guy after all, when their lives seemed both perfect and perfectly ordinary. They would smile at me and shake their heads, arms folded, pipes clenched tight, ties adjusted, and for some reason I didn’t and still can’t understand, listen to me talk! (whereas they wouldn’t listen to each other for a second). I was specimen-proof that life could be different from theirs and still be life, and they marveled at it.

Writing sports was, I think, inviting to them just the way it’s inviting to me, and also exotic, but because of its literalness it sometimes embarrassed and scared them and made them laugh and fold and refold their arms like Zulus.

They all seemed, however, extremely encouraging that I give another try at real writing. That was something they could understand a fellow wanting to do and then failing at nobly. They respected deeply the nobility of small failures since that was what they suspected of themselves. Though for my lights they thought too little of themselves, and didn’t realize how much all of us are in the very same boat, and how much it is an imperfect boat.

I do not hold to the old belief that professors like writers because they can see us fail in a grander and sillier and therefore more unequivocal way than they have. On the contrary, they like to see someone trying, giving it all up to set a permanent mark. They may also be absolutely expecting to watch you fail, but they aren’t really cynical types at all. And since I wasn’t trying to set any marks (they simply thought I was and had some admiration for me for that reason) I probably got the best the place had to offer.

The only people whom I can say with certainty I didn’t get along with were the “junior people,” the sad, pencil-mouthed and wretched hopefuls. They hated the sight of me. I was, I think, too much like them — unprotected in the world — yet different in a way they found infuriating, incriminating and irrelevant. Nothing is more inciteful of disdain than somebody doing something other than what you’re doing, not doing it badly but not complaining about it (though at the moment I was as much at sea as a man can be). They looked on me with real disgust and usually wouldn’t even speak, as if certain human enterprise was synonymous with laughable failure, though at the same time as if something about me seemed familiar and might figure dimly in their futures if things did not work out. The gallows, I imagine, is less scary to the condemned man than to the one not yet sentenced.