To Absent Friends from Red Smith / The Red Smith Reader
Smith, Red & Anderson, Dave
opposite No. 14 Fornarnii as the hero walked past. Their nostrils were invaded by decay and foul weather, disintegration and putrefaction, by the twilight of civilization. Even seasoned veterans...
...In our pity for someone so naturally gifted and self-destructive as Fitzgerald there is probably also an element of self-approval or, anyhow, self-defense...
...Nor should we forget that pity, as Nietzsche long ago reminded us, is more often than not tinged with revulsion...
...tLate Innings: A Baseball Companion, Simon and Schuster, $17.50...
...Israel's right to EXIST...
...The steel bird does not die...
...In that endeavor, Bruccoli has in large part succeeded...
...176176176176176176176176176 CORRESPONDENCE (continued from page 21) f o r b e a r a n c e - - n e v e r f o r g e t i t . " , No...
...I'll go a step farther and admit that I know and like various people who subscribe to even more outlandish beliefsJreligious, literary, political, philosophical, whatever...
...The thing about fashion, of comTse, is that it is mainly bad...
...For example, Bruccoli includes in his study a long extract from a ll4-page typescript of a conversation between Scott and Zelda in 1933 when Zelda was a patient in "La Paix" in Towson, Maryland, a document that makes one wince...
...We were taking her back to her Institution, and he kept making passes at her that could not possibly be consummated...
...Grove": The press found Grove surly and laconic and put him away as a grouch, although it wouldn't have been hard to discover what made him the way he was...
...he later described the harrowing experience this way: "I had Scott and Zelda in my car and I wanted to kill him...
...Logic: We must have been happy...
...His secret, of course, was that he was a man who loved j o u r n a l i s m , loved writing several times a week for daily newspapers...
...He is, after all, our most industrious digger in that particular corner of the literary garden...
...The practitioners of such Beautiful Letters include, for example, David Halberstam, who spent time that may well have been productive following the Portland Trailblazers basketball team.* Or consider Roger Angell, whose wondrously spun tales might well fascinate baseball historians in 75 y e a r s - - f o r they are surely less t h a n compelling n o w . t I h e a r the ranks of the sports litte'rateurs will soon be joined by Gay T a l e s e , the painstaking nonfictioneer...
...Where once s p o r t s books were reviewed only in the juvenile press, if at all, today sports literature is given big play in the critical p r e s s of the major dailies and newsmagazines...
...To place Fitzgerald so high on the golden list merely indicates that Mr...
...What was no secret is t h a t Red Smith had a g r e a t deal of t a l e n t and style, as well as the stamina, to bring it off every day, or almost every day, for something like forty years...
...This is hardly news...
...It is somehow fitting that Death found him there in that tinsel land of shabby make-believe...
...Kill...
...There is an added point to be made h e r e . Much of the i n t e r e s t generated by these stories is extraliterary...
...They r a g e d a g a i n s t i n j u s t i c e s . But now that the Soviets and their revolution have provided a single, interminable, droning answer, the quest has been reduced to nothing more t h a n a longing for a " t w e n t y - b y - s i x t e e n room on Profsoyuznaya Street...
...Not long before the end in 1940, Fitzgerald wrote Max Perkins that "in a small way I was an original," giving proper emphasis, it seems to me, to the adjective...
...Collections Of columns are notoriously slow sellers (which is one reason publishers turn them down, doing a disservice to both writers who go for the s p r i n t i n s t e a d of the marathon, and r e a d e r s ) , and once they disappear from the shelves are not easy to locate...
...The situation, based upon the vexing and p e r s i s t e n t housing s h o r t a g e which plagues all Soviet city dwellers, is simple...
...But this is really no more than what is expected of the good newspaper rePorter...
...Even if he wrote a stinker, as he put it, there would be the next day " t o r e c o v e r , " and do b e t t e r . In Smith's words (to Jerome Holtzman, who made it the valedictory piece in No Cheering in the Press Box, a collection of t a p e d i n t e r v i e w s with old-time sportswriters): "The guy I admire most in the world is a good reporter...
...He was indeed a sad case...
...TO ABSENT FRIENDS FROM RED SMITH Red Smith / Atheneum Publishers / $17.95 THE RED SMITH READER Edited by Dave Anderson/Random House/$15.95 Joe Mysak Newspapermen know that some of the b e s t writing and some of the worst writing appears on the sports pages...
...But what of Fitzgerald, man and boy, at Work and play, at home and abroad, sober and in his cups (where he spent most of his adult life...
...Anecdotes are fine, but there is nothing like a story with a news-peg to it...
...editor's chair...
...We stopped at a drug store to get him some gin...
...I think the best way to remember Red Smith is this little quotation on the back of Red Smith's obit book, which is covered by testimonials "To An Absent Friend...
...I t is to his credit that Bruccoli in no way attempts to sweep the crud under the rug...
...Is that a negotiable item...
...after all, we were em~ied...
...The evidence in Contemporary Russian Prose is far too slim to s u p p o r t such weighty pronouncements...
...To Absent Friends From Red Smith is the author's last book...
...In 1970, he examined "The Boat Race": "In As a shortstop, Honus got his throws across the diamond quickly and accurately, yet there was a common complaint about him among all the long parade of first basemen who passed through Forbes Field in his time...
...The Reader is divided into sectionson the Olympics, Racing, Football, Baseball, Politics~ Some Other Sports, Fishing, Offbeat, Boxing, and Pals, Colleague, and Himself, which ends with his last ~ column, "Writing Less--And B e t t e r ? " Some wiI1 no doubt say that i t is a tribute to his versatility, this variety of topics...
...The lines are drawn for a story as well defined and uncluttered as a Greek drama...
...He wants to write a book about the Yankees...
...Aksenov's story is a s a t i r e on Stalinist methods...
...Red Smith did not often get angry, but when he did so, it was for good reason, and when he trained his guns on the ta~rget, they always had a good effect...
...People who had more schooling than he or had traveled more widely made him uneasy...
...They wonder aloud what his s e c r e t was, and continue to turn out t h e i r dreadful stuff...
...He did not live to see it finished, but, he saw it announced in the publisher's 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982 catalogue, he selected most of the contents, and wrote the foreword...
...the departure of the Mets' Tom Seaver to the Reds...
...The Pope and Bill Buckley are entitled to the opinion that Jerusalem ought to be Something other than a Jewish capital--but I would love to hear that matter argued with a risen Jesus on "Firing Line...
...As a matter of fact, he has succeeded rather beyond his expectation...
...This is why in the Reader you can read coverage of a dog show as well as the 1937 "Red Trotsky Talks to Red Smith...
...Bruccoli's critical judgment is untrustworthy--as I have on occasion informed him...
...why there is a visit to a canoe manufacturer in Maine, an examination of the 1951 basketball scandal, and a column about Ted Williams, who hit .406 in 1941, going after the tarpon, bonefish, and Atlantic salmon triple crown...
...I've always had the notion that people go to spectator sports to have fun and then they grab the paper to read about it and have fun again...
...In fact, he presents his subject in utter nakedness and utter forgetfulness, trailing precious few clouds of glory whence he came...
...I told you I was ungrateful...
...Scott Fitzgerald is now permanently placed with the greatest writers who ever lived, where he wanted to be all along...
...The druggist would not give it to him...
...But the eulogy is wearing Over the long distance...
...For this reason I believe that the most i n t e r e s t i n g story in the collection, despite the Proffers' argument for the c e n t r a l i t y of Sasha Sokolov's "A School for Fools," is Yuri T r i f o n o v ' s "The Exchange...
...He was ~that rare thing: a newspaperman who actually loved his job, and who did not crave the paydays of big books...
...But to identify these links with past masters is not to say that the seven writers chosen by the Proffers are of comparable stature...
...J u s t try to find The Best of Red Smith, a 1962 collection of New York Herald Tribune s t o r i e s i l l u s t r a t e d by the incomparable Willard Mttllin, if you don't believe it...
...Yet the shelf of abominable s p o r t s books sags with the accumulated rot of 80 years or so...
...The results: Books, articles, and e s s a y s as i n t e r m i n a b l e as they are unmemorable cascade from the printing presses even as the Friends Joe Mysak is a writer living in New Jersey...
...If those estimates seem to me overblown--even outrageously so--they do no harm...
...He's got Nolan Ryan's fastball and Sandy Koufax's curve...
...and it is perhaps important to remember that this book was not Smith's idea, although he eventually went along With it...
...Who makes it one...
...Perhaps it is b e t t e r to say t h a t never before have there been more overpraised badly done sports books...
...To Absent Friends pointsup the trouble with such collections...
...15.00...
...The fact is t h a t s p o r t s w r i t i n g is f a s h i o n a b l e now...
...Nor did he go after the power and prestige of the *The Breaks of the Game, Alfred A. Knopf...
...Reading t h e s e two collections not only reminds you how good Smith was, it also points up the hamminess and p o r t e n t o u s n e s s of the rest of the field...
...Under the terms dictated by the New York Yacht Club, it is almost totally devoid of competition...
...And I like to do it in a way that gives the reader a little pleasure, a little entertainment...
...If you can just accept it as entertainment, and write it as entertainment, then I think that's what spectator sports are meant to be...
...His charm, his urbane graciousness, were his trademarks to the e n d . " This is from a 1955 reminiscence of the big hands of Honus Wagner: work, and somewhat better reading, even at length (though I would have preferred more of the older columns...
...Exclamation point...
...It simply flies away and it may, in fact, return...
...So while, in the section on baseball (Smith's favorite sport, next to horse racing), there are vintage pieces on Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Hank Aaron, Dizzy Dean, and the Miracle at Coogan's Bluff, the most memorable pieces deal with the Yankees and George Steinbrenner, George III to Smith...
...It is mentioned in almost every story and is i m p o r t a n t , if not quite so c e n t r a l , to s t o r i e s like "The Steel B i r d , " " L i f e in Windy Weather," and "Downstream...
...of Trees race to beat the woodsman...
...And in the work of w r i t e r s like Bitov and Rasputin we see an even stronger, if less adventurous, link to the past...
...estimates of Fitzgerald the writer, Bruccoli eschews literary criticism...
...What Red Smith did, what he wanted to do and what he died doing, was write for newspapers...
...His praises have been sung so loudly and by such a host t h a t perhaps even Smith has heard them by now...
...The smell conjured up something that not even the most desperate times had produced, that a normal person would never dream of, not even hell, something far worse...
...Writing about Jimmy Walker in 1946, Smith described the former mayor of New York as "a bandleader, and the most charming one that ever swung a baton...
...Jews hear it in the inner ear...
...But I wanted to kill him for what he was doing to that crazy woman, who kept telling me that she had to be locked up before the moon- came u p . " I should add that during that period Zelda had made several attempts to kill herself...
...I have offered the comparisons in a descriptive sense, not as critical evaluations...
...And let me say at once that much of what I know, or knew, I attribute to the spade work done by Bruccoli over the last twenty or so years...
...Before I917 the characters in Russian / novels longed for solutions...
...He was never one to mount a Menckenesque assault...
...have heard or said something to the effect that the PLO must recognize Israel's right to exist before the U.S...
...In Bruccoli's minute bookkeeping of Fitzgerald's personal and literary accounts we see the darkest side of a life largely wasted and a talent unused...
...The " h e r o " of the story is a man who is not r e a l l y a man but rather a steel bird, which gradually intimidates the residents of a Moscow apartment house, grows increasingly t y r a n n i c a l as time wears on, then js at last driven out...
...He said what he had to say in ten or twenty inches of copy, and he said it from t h r e e to seven days a week...
...At one point in the furious exchange, Zelda remarks that their marriage had "been nothing but a long battle ever since I can remember' '--to which Scott responds: "I don't know about that...
...And this is from a 1975 story, "The Terrible-Tempered Mr...
...deals with that organization...
...I had to persuade the druggist to relent, and he got the gin...
...I'm tired of the assigned role, tired of hearing that I can play Masada all I want hut I can never be the Roman winner...
...It is incredible--but Israelis hear it all the time--quite directly...
...In this summing up of the Life he has made a definite contribution to our understanding of one of the saddest figures in our literature...
...and the designated hitter, which Smith termed -a "loathsome ploy...
...For exampl e , in the Preface he notes that Fitzgerald "wrote" the best American prose," and in his conclusion, some 500 pages later, he avows,"F...
...I'd like to be considered good and honest and reasonably accurate...
...There is a certain grayness to most of the great Russian novels and short stories, but it was p a r t of the search for meaning or truth, a quality of those interminable Russian winters...
...Scott had himself prevented her from throwing herself under a train...
...Catching a throw from him, they said, was like facing a firing squad, for along with the ball there would come a hail of dirt and pebbles, and when Honus reached for a grounder he got it, along with a tract of infield as well, and everything went with the throw...
...I am fed up with being an exotic and irritated by the reminders issued to me alone--that I am wonderfully (or fearfully) unassimilable and that everyone else's rights are my privileges...
...Aside from a few general William H. Nolte is C. Wallace Martin Professor of English at the University of South Carolina...
...As O'Hara remarked, she was utterly deranged...
...We want documentation as much as good literature...
...Nevertheless, I find in my heart of hearts ample room to forgive him...
...Were I a man of true candor, without fear of reproach from the Irish Mafia or the romantic barbarians in our midst, I should have to say that Scott Fitzgerald was so insensitive to the feelings of others as to be a certifiable, unimpeachable, incandescent, A-1 cad, and so selfindulgent and self-pitying as to be undeserving of the pity that has been so abundantly bestowed upon him...
...The only other quality common to these works-,especially those with urban settings--is the grayness of the lives described...
...Some of the best was done by Red Smith, who died t h i s p a s t January...
...Even seasoned veterans who had marched from the Volga to the Spree were stunned...
...You can say goodbye to Secretariat, and read how Americans responded to an attack on our shoresJin 1941, when a Japanese sub shelled some California oilfields...
...and a great deal of modern Soviet h i s t o r y has been compressed into these opening paragraphs...
...Okay...
...A.product of the bituminous fields of the western Maryland mountains, he had little experience with strange~ and no exposure to social graces...
...Okay--but I'm not a crank Elder of Zion...
...Here he vents umbrage at Avery Brundage, and also reflects on the murder of Israeli athletes at Munich...
...To Absent Friends is a collection of the author's obituaries of various friends, among them Connie Mack, Walter Johnson, Grantland Rice, Joe McCarthy (the Yankee skipper, not the pol), Seabiscuit, and the New York Giants...
...Has any other state, any other people, and any other person ever been told that life itself was its sole stake...
...What the hell are you all talking about...
...Saul David Van Nuys, California 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER 1982...
...of course...
...It is from Tom Seaver: "A rookie on the Reds, a few years ago, asked me who that little old man was--and I said 'that little old man is Red Smith, but don't let his size or age fool you...
...I'm an elderly crank...
...And in his league he's the best there i s . ' " V] SOME SORT OF EPIC GRANDEUR: THE LIFE OF F. SCOTT FITZGERALD Matthew J. Bruccoli / Harcourt Brace Jovanovich / $25.00 William H. Nolte I n this thorough, meticulous, often engrossing biography of Fitzgerald, Matthew J. Bruccoli has set himself the task of, in his own words, "providing a detailed account of [Fitzgerald's] career as a professional writer...
...From Reagan to Kissinger to Jane F o n d a . . . that's an accepted truism...
...That he refuses to listen to me only further indicates his poverty of taste...
...To a man, from the s p o r t s rep o r t e r s t o t h e sports w r i t e r s to the s p o r t s copy e d i t o r s , to the s p o r t s columnists and the sports authors of books, they all acknowledge the primacy of Red smith...
...Retreating into a shell, he became one of the great lobby-sitters of his time, a graven image shrouded in cigar smoke...
...Life has been d r a i n e d of color, reduced in size, like the search itself...
...I imagine that many readers will come to this volume, as I did, for information about how life is lived day by day in Russia...
...Red Smith wrote so many columns, and so many good columns, t h a t selecting the over 300 that make up these collections must have been a noisome t a s k . Yet it seems likely these will be the last collections to appear for some time, so you would do well to buy your copies while you still can...
...Here is the Olympics boycott, originally proposed by Smith...
...Unable or unwilling to call such behavior by its correct name, Bruccoli succeeds only in begging the question--thus: "Although Fitzgerald's behavior with Zelda was sometimes cruel or irrational, he retained a fidelity to their past, a sense of regret that was not always distinguishable from selfpity...
...I like to report on the scene around me, or the little piece of the world as I see it, as it is in my time...
...I've always tried to remember--and this is an old line--that sports isn't Armageddon...
...We were about the most envied couple in about 1921 in America...
...In Contemporary Russian Prose, the grayness is everywhere and has infected everything...
...all his battles boiled down to appeals to decency and logic...
...given an issue, Smith could mix it up with the best of them...
...His final years, as everyone by now surely must know, were spent in the Abyssinian night of_ Hollywood...
...Where he belongs...
...But not for The American Spectator...
...These are just little games that little boys can play, and it really isn't important to the future of civilization whether the Athletics or the Browns win...
...In many ways they show Smith's style at its best, nostalgic and gentle...
...This is a boat race in the horse player's sense of the term...
...I respect a good reporter and I'd like to be called that...
...There is, as can be expected, a lot of good stuff here...
...The Red Smith Reader, on the otherhand, is a much more varied THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR NOVEMBER t982 35 many American newspapers, the most absurdly overplayed event in sports is the 'competition' for the America's CUP...
...Almost from the beginning, as far back as the Princeton years, Fitzgerald lived in hock, constantly borrowing on the future to pay bills current...
...The preoccupation with living space is ever present in the collection...
...Nathaniel Benchley, in putting ~together a volume of his-father's most durable humorous pieces, once wrote that the book "be read piecemeal rather than in one lump---because, after all, the pieces had their original appeal as separate e n t i t i e s : " This is good advice...
...Culled mostly from the Herald Tribune and the Times, these pieces are, naturally enough, nearly alike instyle and substance: notice and anecdote, a sigh, a tear, and a laugh...
...The reporter has one of the toughest jobs in the world--getting as near the truth as possible is a terribly tough job...
...Dimitriev's aggressive wife Lena sees a change to get a l a r g e r apartment by inviting her mother-in-law, whom she dislikes, to move in with them, exchanging both her old room and t h e i r s for a real a p a r t m e n t . L e n a ' s real motive, of course, is t h a t she knows t h a t her mother-in-law is dying, and will then leave them with an extra room in the apartment they could not get otherwise---Soviet law allotting space on the b a s i s of how many members there are in a family...
...It is frequently deficient in sportsmanship...
...There it is, in a n u t s h e l l , Red Smith's secret...
...Consider how often you...
...One further example, and I shall retire to the nearest monastery...
...The truth is, as the numerotrs such quotations make clear, that both parties in that disastrous marriage were vampires, using each other as fictional prey...
...They buy the books, laud the legend, and otherwise pay his shade lip service...
...In 1935 John O'Hara visited the Fitzgeralds in Baltimore...
...To repeat: This is an accounting of the life, not of the work, of Fitzgerald...
...The steel bird, in all its implications, is one of those typically out-sized metaphors that are characteristic of the best of Russian literature...
...The lengthy nature descriptions that fill these stories recall the Turgenev of A Sportman's Sketches...
...And he goes on to explain why...
...One might say t h a t today t h e r e is more bad sports writing dignified by hard covers t h a t in former days would have mercifully p e r i s h e d with the day's papers...
...That is to say, he has drawn a portrait of Fitzgerald that reveals blemishes of which I was unaware, and I thought I knew about all there was to know about the writer...
Vol. 15 • November 1982 • No. 11
