This is the second article in the “Tabula Rasa” series. Read Volume One and Volume Three.
Sloop to Gibraltar
I thought once of writing about what happens to some books. I had in mind my own. A grizzly ate one—in a trapper’s cabin on a Yukon tributary a couple of hundred miles northeast of Fairbanks—or at least destroyed it, tore it apart, and whole chapters were missing. The book, “Coming into the Country,” was in some measure about the grizzly, and the trapper figured prominently in it, too. I sent him another copy, with an inscription noting that I was glad he had not been in the cabin when the bear broke in.
Another trapper, in a neighboring drainage, fell out of his canoe in high water and drowned. His inscribed copy of the same book ended up on Amazon.com. A dozen books inscribed privately across fifteen years to my editor Robert Bingham ended up in the same public receptacle. Bob Bingham died young, of brain cancer, and his books were bought by a dealer. Tough to tender, green to purple, write what you will in a private inscription. It will end up on Amazon.
“To my mother and father, without whom . . .” $19.50.
Chasing down inscriptions that come to strange light and book copies with surprising fates was not a great idea for a piece of writing, and I would have realized that at a much earlier date were it not for a letter, postmarked somewhere in Florida, that came to me in the nineteen-nineties. I have lost it somehow, and can’t remember the name of the young man who wrote to me, or of his mother, or of his crewman, but I will never forget the story he told me. Somebody in Switzerland had bought a sloop in Florida. The guy who wrote the letter had been hired to sail the sloop across the Atlantic and deliver it in Gibraltar. With a friend as crewman, he was ready to cast off from Fort Lauderdale when his mother came to say goodbye. She had a going-away present for him, for both of them, a copy of “Looking for a Ship.”
The book had been published recently and had by far the most complicated structure of any book I had written or would write thereafter. (Fig. 1.)
Try sailing that across the Atlantic. Its oddity was the result of attempts to get certain effects, nearly all involving Paul McHenry Washburn, captain of the S.S. Stella Lykes, U.S. Merchant Marine. In 1988, I had gone to the Masters, Mates & Pilots union hall in Charleston, South Carolina, with Andy Chase, a second mate looking for a ship. Andy, of course, had no idea what ship, if any, he would get. If a job arose, we meant to ask the shipping company if I could go along—as a PAC, Person in Addition to Crew—for the purpose of writing about the Merchant Marine, and that was a long shot, too. In other words, the whole approach was completely random; and what should come steaming toward Charleston with a second mate getting off there? The S.S. Stella Lykes. Run: the west coast of South America.
Six weeks, six countries, three stowaways, and a few dozen pirates later, I had come to regard being on Captain Washburn’s ship as a piece of luck comparable to playing a complete round of golf (his favorite game) in eighteen strokes. He epitomized the Merchant Marine. He had learned from the old skippers, as old skippers of the future would learn from him. He was aloof, commanding, understanding, sympathetic, and utterly adroit in the skills of his demanding profession. His sense of humor could cut fog. About some topics he was confessedly vitriolic, but from the engine room to the bridge the ship was running on respect for him.
In the book that I later wrote is this passage: “When Captain Washburn looks landward from the bridge of his ship, he will readily say, ‘I would rather be here for the worst that could be here than over there for the best that could be there. . . . I once thought I was going to college and be a history teacher, but I have never been able to concentrate on anything else but this . . . By the end of 1945, I had passed the point of no return. I was in the soup now good. Anything adverse that came up, this was my safety blanket: “Hey, I can get a ship.” If I made plans and they went wrong, I was gone—looking for a ship.’ ”
Something adverse that came up was the Washington Redskins’ performance against the Philadelphia Eagles on the twenty-seventh of October, 1946. Captain Washburn’s home was in the District of Columbia, and the Redskins were more important to him than any other group of people on land. He had developed an affectionate and protective sympathy for the Redskins after the Chicago Bears beat them 73–0 in their fourth Washington season. Washburn, who was at that game, had been following the team even before they came to Washington. He remembered them as the Boston Redskins. He even remembered the team as the Duluth Eskimos. And now, on this significant Sunday in 1946, the Redskins led the Eagles 24–0 at the half. The final score was Philadelphia 28, Washington 24.
“I couldn’t handle defeat like that,” he said. “I can’t now. I picked an argument with my wife. I remember saying, ‘Listen, woman, I don’t have to listen to this. I can go back to sea.’ She said, ‘Listen, jackass, if you go back to sea, if you come back to this house it will be so empty it will look like no one ever lived in it.’ In those days, you didn’t wave any red flags or throw gauntlets in front of the kid. November 7th, I was fireman and water tender on a ship out of Baltimore leaving for Poland.”
And forty-two years later, in predawn darkness on the bridge of the Stella Lykes, he was frustrated anew as he approached Valparaíso and tried and tried again to radio the port. “So much for moving ships at this hour in the morning,” the captain said. “The port isn’t even awake yet. When Ethan Allen was expiring, people said to him, ‘Ethan, the angels expect you,’ and Ethan said, ‘God damn them. Let them wait.’ Then he expired.”
The complete resonance of the captain’s parable passed above the head of the Person in Addition to Crew. In the dark, the captain paced back and forth across the wheelhouse. Andy was also a bridge pacer. Andy and the captain had long since developed a collision-avoidance system. “I don’t stay in one place,” the captain said. “I never did. I don’t stay in one place even when I’m in one place. Give ’em a moving target.”
The sloop from Fort Lauderdale was somewhere west of the Azores when the gift copy of “Looking for a Ship” went to the bottom of the ocean, fourteen thousand feet down, where it settled on the abyssal plain, the sloop with it. According to the letter from the young skipper, the crossing had gone smoothly for something like twenty-five hundred miles, and he and his crewman had read the book. Then a great storm arose, mountainous seas, and the sloop was destroyed. It had a Zodiac raft, and the two young men escaped on it. They had also been able to send out an SOS.
For some time, they clung to the raft, and then, miraculously, a merchant ship appeared through the stinging rain and came over the raging seas to rescue them. Flying the American flag, it was a Ro/Ro (roll-on, roll-off), and what it had aboard to roll off were U.S. Army tanks on their way to the Gulf War. At that time, about twenty-three thousand six hundred merchant ships were on the world’s oceans, while the size of the U.S. merchant fleet was down to six hundred and dropping. Of those twenty-three thousand ships, this one was closest to the sunken sloop. The skipper of the Ro/Ro was waiting for the two men as they were hauled up the side and through a bunker port. Welcome aboard, guys. This is Captain Washburn.
When they neared Gibraltar, there was no way he was going to let them off. To dock in Gibraltar would have cost him five thousand dollars. He had been talking to them non-stop since he picked them up, and he went on talking to them as the Ro/Ro went through the Mediterranean. Without a doubt, they heard at least three times about each of the old skippers with whom Washburn had sailed when he was young, and on whose seamanship he had modelled his own: Leadline Dunn, Terrible Terry Harmon, Dirty Shirt George Price, Rebel Frazier, Clean Shirt George Price, Herbert P. High Pressure Erwin. Captain Washburn had saved the young men’s lives, and now he was talking them to death.
He let them off in Port Said.
The Valley
I am happy to say that I never took up a promising piece called “The Valley.” I achieved this ambiguously negative and positive attitude in 2016. The idea, and even the title, had come to me on a frozen lake in northernmost Maine in 1984. In a light plane equipped with skis, I was flying from lake to lake with a warden pilot named John McPhee (yes), who was checking the licenses of people fishing through the ice. On the small lake—near the Canadian border, which is also the St. John River—were two quite separate ice-fishing shacks, and while the warden lingered at the first one I walked on toward the other.
People who live on or near the St. John refer to their world as the Valley. Some are Americans, some are Canadians, but they call themselves and think of themselves as people of the Valley. They have more in common with one another than they do with the people elsewhere in their own countries. On the shelves of an American general store, you would see Mélasse de Fantaisie, Pure de la Barbade, Scott Tissue, Sirop d’Érable Pur, and Ivory Liquid Detergent. As I walked across the snow-covered ice, a kid came out of the fishing shack and walked toward me. He appeared to be teen-aged, an American high-school student, evidently alone there and glad to have some company. With a big welcoming smile, he said to me, “Parlez-vous français?”
Along the Rio Grande in southern Texas, people on both sides of the river refer to the place where they live as the Valley. What I thought of writing, under that singular title, was a composition of alternating parts from the American-Mexican and American-Canadian milieus. I let thirty years go by while I mused about it, then along came Donald Trump with his cockamamie wall, and instead of writing “The Valley” I found myself scribbling incoherent abstracts like “Trumpty Dumpty sat on a wall” and “Oh, say, can you see what my base sees in me?”
December 19, 1943
In Sunday school, in the fall of the year when I was twelve years old, I was told that I would be ushering and passing a collection plate at the Christmas pageant, an annual living crèche in the First Presbyterian Church of Princeton. I hated Sunday school. I resented having to attend. I learned nothing. I went to school Monday through Friday and that was enough. I was a spiritual wasteland, then as now. But I shrugged and didn’t think about the pageant until the day was nigh and Julian Boyd—who was thirteen, and did not go to Sunday school—told me about adventures he was having skating up the ice-covered Millstone River, and asked me to come with him on, as it happened, the afternoon of the Christmas pageant. With no hesitation, I said I would.
My mother saw this in a different light. She said, “You are not going skating with Julian. You are ushering at the Christmas pageant.”
I pointed out that I was just one of several ushers.
Her next remark was identical to the first one.
John Graham, twelve years old, had been invited by Julian to skate up the Millstone on the same afternoon. John was in no way burdened by religion, and planned to go. Charlie Howard, twelve, had already skated up the river with Julian, and would be coming along this time, too.
My mother was—in a word she liked—adamant. I howled and moaned and griped and begged. Adamant.
The afternoon came, and by now you may have guessed where I was. In church. Passing the plate. Mad as hell. Obedient.
John Graham had come down with a severe cold, and stayed at home in bed.
Julian and Charlie died at an isolated place called the Sheep Wash, where the current of the Millstone sped up and the ice as a result was thin. Next day, their bodies were collected off the bottom with grappling hooks. Each boy’s arms were stiff, and reaching forward, straight out from the shoulders. They had gone into the water through the thin ice, then clung to stronger ice closer to the edge of the river, but had not been able to climb out. Their arms reached over the ice, supporting them, until the cold killed them.
Their small coffins were placed side by side in the crossing under the choir loft in the Princeton University Chapel. Helen Howard, Charlie’s mother, was nearby, with Charlie’s father, Stanley Howard, a professor of economics; as was Grace Boyd, Julian’s mother, with her younger son, Kenneth, and her husband, Julian Boyd, editor of “The Papers of Thomas Jefferson.” This was the second such funeral for the Boyds, who had lost a daughter some years before.
I did not know Charlie Howard well, and the impact of his death stopped there. Not so with Julian, whose future has remained beside me through all my extending past. That is to say, where would he have been, and doing what, when? From time to time across the decades, I have thought of writing something, tracing parallel to mine the life he would have lived, might have lived. A chronology, a chronicle, a lost C.V. But such, of course, from the first imagined day, is fiction. Actually, I have to try not to think about him, because I see those arms reaching forward, grasping nothing.
The Dutch Ship Tyger
The Tiger, or Tyger, a merchant vessel from the Netherlands, crossed the Atlantic in 1613. The skipper’s name was Adriaen Block, and the ship’s mission was to fill up with furs obtained from American tribes. Across recent decades, scholars on both sides of the Atlantic have parsed its story to a fare-thee-well, but records are very limited and much of the Tyger’s story, while long thought to be true, is based on probability and conjecture. In repeating it here, I have been mindful of scholars’ facts and suppositions while preserving the story as I learned it. Furs collected, the Dutch ship was anchored in the Hudson River at Manhattan when it caught fire and burned to the waterline, and the crew were as stranded as they would have been had the island beside them been in Micronesia. After beaching the Tyger and removing some materials, the crew went ashore, marooned.
I first heard about the Tyger from Bob VanDeventer, in 1962, when he was working for the Port of New York Authority, on Eighth Avenue, and I at Time: The Weekly Newsmagazine, on Sixth. We had been friends and teammates in high school. He was now an inchoate writer of fiction and I the other way around. At lunch one day in Greenwich Village, I told him that I had written to The New Yorker asking to become a contributor, and had received a response inviting me to submit some sample writing at the length of the pieces in The New Yorker’s section called The Talk of the Town.
I have long meant to amplify this account as part of an anti-cautionary tale for young writers, as a chronicle of rejection as a curable disease, and as a reminder that most writers grow slowly over time, but so far I’ve preferred just to tell it to them. In short, I was in high school when I decided that what I wanted to do in life was write for The New Yorker, in college when I first sent a manuscript to the magazine, and in college when I filed away that first rejection slip and the second and the sixteenth, then on through my twenties and into my thirties, when the whole of that collection of rejection slips could have papered a wall.
The New Yorker person who wrote back to me in 1962 was Leo Hofeller, whose title was executive editor. I sent him a couple of pieces that I don’t remember, and a piece on an urban farmer who was growing sweet corn in a vacant lot on Avenue C, but the one I had the most hope for was about the Dutch ship. It was such a New York story. In my mind’s eye, I could see it under The New Yorker’s distinct Rea Irvin typeface. As the story unfolded, Adriaen Block and his crew built log cabins, about where the twin towers of the World Trade Center would be built. They lived in the cabins through the winter of 1614 and were the first European residents of Manhattan. They busied themselves building a small caravel, and in the spring went off to hunt for a ship to take them home. They sailed up the East River into Long Island Sound, and beyond Montauk Point they saw in the ocean—freestanding and imposing—the island that they named for Adriaen Block. Looking for a way home, they found it, probably on a merchant ship that happened upon them and picked them up.
In 1916, sandhogs digging a subway tunnel under Greenwich and Dey Streets—on the seventeenth-century shoreline of Manhattan—encountered the bow of an ancient ship sticking out from one side. They were about to destroy it when their history-minded foreman told them to cut it off and keep those eight and a half feet whole. Today, that piece is in the Museum of the City of New York. Long thought to have been the prow of the Tyger, it is now ascribed to a somewhat later era. The rest of the ship was not removed and was probably destroyed in the nineteen-sixties, during the excavation for the Twin Towers. In 1962, meanwhile, preparing my sample Talk pieces for Leo Hofeller, I visited the museum, on Fifth Avenue at 103rd Street, and I went to Brooklyn to interview James Kelly, the sandhog foreman who had caused the nautical artifact to be preserved. Amiable, informative, delightful, he was no longer digging subways, having become an official historian of the City of Brooklyn.
A couple of weeks after I sent in those sample Talk pieces, a note came from Hofeller. He would like to talk. Could I come to 25 West Forty-third Street at a certain time on a certain day. Could I! I found his office, on the nineteenth floor. On his desk were my sample pieces and the Daily Racing Form. He was colloquial, a little gruff. He said, “These pieces are pretty good.” He paused, and looked at me in a way suggesting that he had placed a bet and was feeling bettor’s remorse. Then he said, “Now, don’t misunderstand me. I said ‘pretty good.’ I did not say ‘very good.’ ” That the magazine had no intention of buying any of those sample pieces was clear without articulation, but Hofeller did finish off the meeting by suggesting that as time went along I might suggest to the magazine longer projects that I might do.
About then, Harold Hayes, an editor at Esquire, wrote to me at Time and asked if I would like to freelance a piece for Esquire, and, if so, we could talk about it over lunch. I had never met him, but he had apparently read a couple of my Time cover stories, probably the ones on Jackie Gleason and Sophia Loren. In Princeton, New Jersey, my home town, I had bought some property and was planning to build a house, and was therefore moonlighting feverishly to help pay for it. As a writer at Time, you could freelance not only for other Time Inc. publications but also for sections of Time itself other than your own. I was the writer of the Show Business section. So I reviewed books at a nervous clip. The extra pay was good. For Time-Life Books, I anonymously revised a manuscript that had made them unhappy. And I went to lunch with Harold Hayes.
I told him that I had once suited up to play basketball for the University of Cambridge against Her Majesty’s Royal Fusiliers in the central courtyard of the Tower of London, a venue that was shifted at the last moment because a lorry backed into and brought down one of the baskets. I had been thinking of writing the story on a freelance basis for some time. Now, said Hayes, happily commissioning the piece, but after I wrote it and sent it to him he rejected it. Depressed, thirty-one years old, I recklessly sent it to Sports Illustrated and The New Yorker simultaneously. A few weeks went by, another freelanced book review, and then my phone rang at Time. The New Yorker was buying the piece. Oh, my God. Breathlessly, I went to the elevator and down to Sports Illustrated and called on Jack Tibby, an assistant managing editor, who coördinated outside submissions. I had not previously met him. I asked him to return the manuscript to me, and I said why. A large pile of manuscripts was on a corner of his desk. He said that actually Sports Illustrated was quite interested in the manuscript and he could not give it back to me. Hunting for it in the pile on his desk, he needed some minutes to find it. As he searched, he was murmuring something, and it soon blossomed into a cloud of fury. How dared I—a Time Inc. writer—submit a piece to The New Yorker? He was going to see that this breach of loyalty was reported to Henry Luce and everybody else on the thirty-fourth floor, not to mention Otto Fuerbringer, the managing editor of Time. Above all, he would try to see to it that the sale to The New Yorker was blocked. Shell-shocked, I interrupted him. “Mr. Tibby,” I blurted, “I beg you not to do that.” I told him this was the most important moment of my professional life, that I had been trying to sell something to The New Yorker for fifteen years and everything had failed. “I beg you to give me that manuscript.” He looked at me for a long moment, his face softened, and he handed me the story. I never heard of or from him again.
“Basketball and Beefeaters” ran in The New Yorker in March, 1963. It was in the category of reminiscence that The New Yorker called casuals, and was handled by the fiction department, fact notwithstanding. It gave me enormous pleasure but had no discernible effect on my future. Nobody was asking for more, so I wrote to Leo Hofeller and asked him for advice. Some days later, he responded, saying that I could send him a list of ideas for longer, factual pieces, including profiles. I sent him some, mentioning among them a possible profile of Bill Bradley. Days passed before I heard from him. He said to go ahead and try one of those pieces, “but not that basketball player; we just did a profile of a basketball player.”
Bradley by now was in his third year at Princeton. I had watched him in his freshman season, in which he broke a record by making fifty-seven consecutive foul shots, and had since been present at all his home games. Everyone around Princeton basketball thought him as rare a person as a player, and so he would seem to me, for the canonical work ethic, the monastic and ecclesiastical work ethic, that resulted in scoring feats such as thirty-six points against Syracuse, forty-six against the University of Texas, and forty-seven against Wisconsin, a record for the Kentucky Invitational Tournament. Not to mention his commitment to teach Sunday school in the mornings after his Saturday-night games, even if they had been played at Harvard, Dartmouth, or Cornell. I knew this about him but had never met him, yet I decided that for the time being I was more interested in writing about him than in writing for The New Yorker. I wrote a letter to Leo Hofeller thanking him and saying that I hoped to be in touch with him at some future date but meanwhile I was going ahead with the basketball player for any publication that might show interest in the finished piece. I didn’t stop there. Compulsively, unconsciously, I just kept writing that letter, trying to explain why I was going ahead anyway, trying to describe Bradley’s way of playing basketball, his court sense, his array of shots, his no-look passes that seemed always to end up in the hands they were meant for. The length of the letter was five thousand words. After a time, and to my surprise, Hofeller replied. Despite what he had told me, he said, The New Yorker would like to read the piece when I had finished it, “no guarantees, of course.” He added that what had interested the magazine most was the technical stuff.
That was in March, 1964. The New Yorker bought the piece in November, and Leo Hofeller again asked me to come to 25 West Forty-third Street. I had not really sensed that, while his title was executive editor, he was not an editor in the usual definition of the word. He dealt with would-bes and wannabes but not with pieces going to press. When the horses were running at Belmont Park, his hours in the office were said to be reduced. He told me this time that I was to forget absolutely everything he had ever said to me. I was about to enter a different dialogue. Then he walked me to the office of William Shawn. The profile was published in January, 1965, Shawn its editor. Some weeks later, around my thirty-fourth birthday, I was added to the list of New Yorker staff writers, actually a freelance arrangement with a “best efforts” contract, spectacularly brief. In those days, you just agreed to give your best efforts to The New Yorker.
Ray Brock
What do you have to be to be carried away by bullfighting and by Ernest Hemingway’s descriptions of it? Immature comes to mind. I was immature for more time than most people, and I spent the entire summer after graduating from college—after studying Middle English and Italian Renaissance painting and the Elizabethan world view—reading just about every book in English on the subject known in Spain as el ruedo. Some of those books were better written than Hemingway’s, but there was only one “Death in the Afternoon.”
Then, in early autumn, I went off to the University of Cambridge, read Shakespeare and nothing but Shakespeare through the Michaelmas and Lent terms, bought an Army jeep left over from the Second World War, flew with it across the Channel in a cargo plane, and went to Spain with American friends. Our first destination was, it’s almost needless to say, the nine-day Fiesta de San Fermín, at Pamplona, in Navarra, where bulls of the day spent their last morning running through the streets, fireworks filled the sky at night, and Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Sun Also Rises”—disdained in all Spain by the Fascist regime—was set. For his participation in support of the losing side in the Spanish Civil War, Hemingway himself was persona non grata in the country. If Generalísimo Franco had been an ayatollah, there would have been a fatwa.
I had with me a copy of “Fiesta,” an Argentine translation of “The Sun Also Rises,” my notion being that if you read in a language you are learning a book with which you are particularly familiar in your own language the result should be marked improvement. I had plenty of room for that.
We found a place to stay, on a farm some miles from town, and missed a lot of running bulls after getting back there at two in the morning. Afternoons, every afternoon, we took in the whole card, from the first spin of a cape to the last kill. We could afford sol, sometimes sol y sombra, never better. Looking around, we saw many faces that did not look Spanish. A lot, plainly, were American college kids, American male college kids. In fact, we recognized quite a few of them. And a particular moment has never faded in my mind’s eye. One of these students, two years behind me at Princeton, whom I had known at home but not well, happened to be sitting near us, and after a dying bull hemorrhaged through its nostrils I saw that the kid was weeping. We did not see him again there. Three or four years later, he was training as a Navy pilot, flying a jet fighter off a carrier. He missed a landing, and the plane, right side up, went onto the water. He tried to open the canopy and get out, but the canopy was stuck shut and wouldn’t budge. The plane filled with water. Sailors who observed it go down said the pilot looked up at them, raised his hands past his head in the spreading gesture of helplessness, and shrugged.
In crowded barrooms, crowded cafés, we drank red wine that, like sangria, was set on the table in pitchers. If the person next to you shouted loudly enough, you could sometimes hear what was said. We hunted for scenes of relative quiet, and one night, in a room with well-spaced round tables, we sat opposite a man and a woman who seemed interested in who we might be and where from, and what, if anything, went on in our minds. If they were interested in us, the reverse was even more true, because they looked exactly like every picture we had ever seen of Mary Welsh Hemingway and Ernest Hemingway. They did not introduce themselves. If you had seen a Look magazine cover, a Time cover, a Life cover, there it was, across the table. Her blondness. His white beard. Her compactness. His heft. Her smile, and his. Their photogenic faces.
Could it be? Since 1923, he had been here many times. Why not this time? If he could drive to Paris while bullets were still flying, why not Pamplona while bulls were still running? This for him was a magnetic town, a place to beat the odds he was always beating. Of course, the man and woman at the barroom table could be fakes, impersonators, but this was early for that. By 2010, there were four hundred thousand Elvis Presleys extant, some of them women. And it was not unknown for passengers on airplanes to find themselves sitting next to Chairman Mao, especially in China, where at least one Mao Zedong was a woman.
Finally, I asked the white-bearded papa across the table point-blank to tell us his name.
He said, “Ray Brock.”
Ray Brock? The foreign correspondent? International News Service? United Press? New York Times? Profiler of dictators and diplomats in North Africa, Turkey, Pakistan, Israel, Iran, and elsewhere? Author of “Blood, Oil and Sand,” which the review in Commentary said was full of “the globe-trotting journalist’s standard mixture of frenetic prose, pointless anecdote, name-dropping, innuendo, aimless detail . . .”? Who was impersonating whom?
I had never heard of Ray Brock. I would look all that up later. But no one named Ray Brock could be the author of the book in my travel bag and also the alter ego of the protagonist preparing to fish a Navarrese river:
And then Jake Barnes and Bill Gorton start off on foot from a country inn. As they walk across a meadow and through rising woods and across high open fields and down to a stream, each successive sentence, in stairstep form, contains something of its predecessor and something new—repeating, advancing, repeating, advancing, like fracture zones on the bed of the ocean. It is not unaffective. It is lyrical. In future years, I would assign the passage to writing students, asking if they could see a way to shorten it without damaging the repetition.
Ray Brock died of a heart attack in 1968 in Orangeburg, New York. That he and Hemingway knew each other is indisputable. In a Hemingway collection in the Kennedy Library, in Boston, for example, are three letters from Brock to Hemingway with notations on them in Hemingway’s handwriting. Brock was only fifty-four when he died. So, if he was the white-bearded papa at the table in Pamplona, he was forty at the time. His “Blood, Oil and Sand” had been published two years before. In a photograph on its dust jacket, he is interviewing a Turkish minister and the American Ambassador in Ankara. His beard is blacker than a diplomat’s shoe.
Writer
Routinely, in winter months, Peter Benchley would pick me up in his car to go to an indoor court and play tennis with two others. Peter wrote at home. He lived on Boudinot Street, on the west side of the town of Princeton, where a great white shark was painted on the bottom of his swimming pool. He hadn’t lived or written there long. In 1970, living in Pennington, eight miles from Princeton, he rented space in the back of a furnace factory with the purpose of writing a novel. He was nine years out of Harvard and had worked in television, written a travel book, and been a speechwriter for President Johnson. The novel, of course, was “Jaws,” published in 1974, and before long the Benchleys moved to Princeton. I worked then in rented space on Nassau Street, across from the Princeton campus, and in the early winter of 1977 things were not going well. Nothing goes well in a piece of writing until it is in its final stages or done. One day, as usual, I couldn’t wait for Peter to show up, and when he did I ran downstairs and across the street as if I were escaping. I jumped into his car, shouting, “Writing sucks. It sucks, stinks, and pukes. Writing sucks!” Peter turned at the corner and drove on wordlessly.
A few weeks later—same time, same curb—I got into Peter’s car, and after turning the corner he said, “Remember that time you got into the car saying ‘Writing sucks’?”
“How could I forget it?”
“If you made so much money that you would never have to write again, would you?”
I said, “Peter, that is your problem. That is so far off the scale in my case that I can’t even think of an answer to the question.”
I happened to know that Peter had netted eight million dollars in one recent year. (Eight million dollars then translates to thirty-eight million at this writing.) He could float forever on his raft above the shark in his pool.
But he did not. As things turned out for him, he had twenty-nine more years to live. Already, he had defeated some of the devils that defeat writing. In a friend’s pool, before he had his own, he swam long distances almost every afternoon at cocktail time. Decades later, when pulmonary fibrosis overtook him in his sixties, he wrote his way past it as long as he could. Meanwhile, through the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, he never stopped writing, never stopped travelling to inform his writing—articles, screenplays, factual and fictional books. Out of his pool and into the Pacific Ocean, he swam into cages surrounded by real great whites, the better to tell about them. He found cinematic fiction in the Sea of Cortez. At home in Princeton, he ate lunch at a place called the Alchemist and Barrister, always at the same table, and with me frequently enough that I knew what he was writing and ceaselessly marvelled at the answer he was giving to the question he had asked me that time in his car in the early winter of 1977. ♦
