by John Irving
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 first 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 -- befo
re 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.
"Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions," Greene wrote. I used to have that typed on a yellowing piece of paper, taped to my desk lamp, long before I understood how true it was. Something I understood sooner -- as soon as I began to write -- is this cutting I also made from The End of the Affair: "So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."
The End of the Affair is the first novel that shocked me. I read it at a time when most of my contemporaries (those who read at all) were being shocked by The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was as perfunctory as masturbation. Salinger's familiar creation, that troubled boy, knew nothing that could compare to Bendrix's frightening knowledge that "there is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple -- they all have the trigger that sets love off."
Later, to think of Greene making the disclaimers he made -- or describing some of his work, as he did, as mere "entertainments" -- was confounding to me. Greene's manipulations of popular though "lesser" forms (the thriller, the detective story) obviously cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.
I am reminded of Maurice Bendrix thinking of one of his critics. "Patronizingly in the end he would place me: probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime, not yet; but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way." Greene wrote this about Bendrix in 1951; Greene himself was already becoming popular -- he would soon commit "that crime" -- and the "wise detectives" would sniff at his success and bestow their praise on far less perfect craftsmen than Greene.
If, in the beginning -- when I first read him in prep school -- Graham Greene showed me that exquisitely developed characters and heartbreaking stories were the obligations of any novel worth remembering, it was also Greene, later, who taught me to loathe literary criticism; to see how the critics would dismiss him made me hate critics. Until his death, in 1991, Graham Greene was the most accomplished living novelist in the English language; in any language, he was the most meticulous.
As Greene was always keen to observe: coincidence is everywhere. Greene's niece, Louise Dennys, is my Canadian publisher. The man who introduced me to Greene, the Reverend Frederick Buechner -- no longer the school minister at Exeter -- is my old friend and neighbor in Vermont. (Small world.) And it is only mildly astonishing to me that by the time I left Exeter I had already read most of the writers who would matter to me in my life as a writer; it is also true that the hours I spent reading them contributed (in combination with my dyslexia) to the necessity of my spending a fifth year at a four-year school.
It hardly matters now. And it's a good lesson for a novelist: keep going, move forward -- but slowly. Why be in a hurry to finish school, or a book?
A Backup
While the intelligentsia of my Exeter classmates moved on to various Ivy League colleges, or to their elite equivalents -- George Trow moved slightly south to Harvard, where Larry Palmer would go the following year, and Chuck Krulak was accepted at the Naval Academy (Krulak had left Exeter for Annapolis the previous year) -- I attended the University of Pittsburgh because I wanted to wrestle with the best.
I would have been happier at Wisconsin, where I was wait-listed for admission because I wasn't in the top quarter of my graduating class. (It's questionable that, if I'd gone to Exeter High School instead of the academy, I would have been, although this was my feeling at the time.) Rather than wait for Wisconsin to accept me, I chose Pitt. Why? Because Pittsburgh didn't make me wait.
I made a mistake. I liked George Martin, the Wisconsin wrestling coach, and he liked me; his son Steve, a future 157-pounder for Wisconsin, had been a teammate of mine (and a close friend) at Exeter. When I visited Madison, I loved the place -- I loved the Badger wrestling room, too. Had I attended the University of Wisconsin, I might never have been a place winner in the Big 10 tournament -- or even a starter on the Wisconsin team -- but I know that I would have kept wrestling, and I would have stayed four years (maybe longer) in Madison; there's no question that I would have graduated. But I was 19 -- Pittsburgh had accepted me, and Wisconsin had told me to wait and see. When you're 19, you don't want to "wait and see."
Coach Seabrooke warned me that I might be getting in over my head at Pitt; I should go to a smaller school, I should try a less competitive wrestling program-- these were Ted's recommendations. But when he couldn't persuade me, he wrote to Rex Peery, the coach at Pittsburgh, giving Rex his evaluation of me. Knowing Ted, I presume he didn't exaggerate my potential. Coach Peery was prepared for me to be no better than "halfway decent"; as it turned out, I was worse than that.
Rex Peery was an Oklahoma boy and a former three-time national champion -- even his sons had been three-time NCAA champions -- and Pittsburgh was loaded with future Ail-Americans the year I arrived. Dick Martin, the 123-pounder, would be an All-American; Darrel Kelvington (147) and Timothy Gay (157) and Jim Harrison (167) and Kenneth Barr (177) would also be All-Americans. (Harrison was a future national champion; he would win an NCAA title in 1963.) Then there were Zolikoff at 137 and Jeffries at 191 and Ware at Unlimited -- I once could recite that lineup in my sleep.
Sherman Moyer, the Pitt 130-pounder and my most frequent workout partner, was married and had completed his military service. Sherm was reputed to smoke one cigarette a week -- usually in a toilet stall before his match (at least this was the only place I ever saw him smoke) -- and he was devastating in the top position. Sherman Moyer was simply impossible to get away from; he could ride me, and did, all afternoon. At the time, it was small consolation to me that Moyer's abilities as a "rider" led him to defeat Syracuse All-American Sonny Greenhalgh twice in that season. (Sonny and I still talk about Moyer.) Nor was it greatly consoling that Moyer was a gentleman; he was always decent and good-humored to me -- ever friendly -- while grinding me into the mat.
As for my fellow freshmen at Pitt, they were a tough lot, too -- especially in and around my weight class. Tom Heniff was from Illinois and Mike Johnson was from Pennsylvania; they were often my workout partners -- and Moyer's. Heniff and I were 130-pounders -- I had dropped three pounds from my Exeter weight class -- and Johnson, who wrestled at 123 and at 130, could take apart anyone in the wrestling room up to about 140 or 150 pounds. In the next year, Mike Johnson would be an All-American; he was an NCAA runner-up in '63. (Johnson is a high-school wrestling coach in Du Bois, Pennsylvania, today.)
I also worked out with a couple of freshman 137-pounders: a redhead named Carswell or Caswell, who was pound for pound the strongest person I ever wrestled -- I remember him as about
five feet five with a 60-inch chest -- and a smiling guy named Warnick who had an arm-drag that left you looking for your arm. The freshman recruit at 147 pounds was (I believe) a guy named Frank O'Korn; I don't remember him well -- I must have wrestled him only occasionally. At 157 pounds, John Carr had won a New England Interscholastic title as a PG at Cheshire. (Carr would transfer from Pitt to Wilkes; until recently, he was a high-school coach in the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania.) And topping off that freshman class was a highly recruited 177-pounder named Lee Hall.
I knew they would be good -- I had gone there because they were the best. But in the Pittsburgh wrestling room, in the '62 season, there was not one wrestler I could beat -- not one.
My technique was not the problem; I had been well coached at Exeter. The problem in Pittsburgh was that my limited athletic ability placed me at a considerable distance from the top rank of college wrestlers around the nation. Because of Ted Seabrooke, I wasn't a bad wrestler; I also wasn't a good athlete, as Ted had told me. I took a pounding at Pitt. "Halfway decent" didn't cut it there.
I won't presume to define that essential ability which makes a "good athlete" for all sports, but for wrestling good balance is as important as quickness; it is also as uncoachable. And by balance I mean both kinds: the ability to keep your balance -- to a small degree this can be taught, by maintaining good position -- and how quickly you can recover your balance when you lose it. The latter ability is un-teachable. The speed with which I can recover my balance when I lose it is mournfully slow; this is my weakness as an athlete. (It is a sizable limitation for a wrestler.)
