Richard Ford

(Picture: lyceumagency.com)

»By 1985 it had become one of the cleanest lakes in Oakland County… and was again attracting attention«, it says on a website, dedicated to the history of Walled Lake (http://www.lorimarshick.com/WLHistory.html), a town 25 miles outside of Detroit, and situated at the lake of the same name. Another website is dedicated to the memory of the Amusement Park at Walled Lake (http://www.waterwinterwonderland.com/walledlakeamusementpark.aspx), which included a dance hall called the Walled Lake Casino. And although I have never been in this corner of the world, I know that one could have met young Frank Bascombe there, when the Casino was still in existence, before it apparently burned down in 1965. Frank Bascombe, who is a creation of one of my favourite contemporary writers, Richard Ford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Ford), and who, in the first of up-to-now three Frank Bascombe-novels, when he is being working as a sportswriter, travels to Walled Lake to conduct an interview. He’s being informed by his cab driver about the Casino, but this happens more in passing by, while being on the way to Walled Lake and not while conducting the interview.
But ›conducting an interview‹ is actually not a very precise description of what happens here, in this sixth chapter of the 1986 novel The Sportswriter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sportswriter), and at the very lakeside. While two men are looking at the lake. While something like an interview is being conducted. Or better: While plans to conduct an interview and/or to grant an interview get completely and shockingly out of hand (the scene is one of the epicenters of the novel and what happens afterwards is to be seen against and from what has happened here, because the shocking waves propagate from this very center all through the novel, interacting with other waves from other epicentres).

(Picture: Collinj)

Herb Wallagher, who is an ex lineman (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lineman_%28American_football%29), an ex professional football player, whose career had been ended by a waterskiing accident, turns out to be not the luminous example of optimism, of courage and of going on with your life, that would be suitable to be portrayed in the kind of sports magazine that Frank is writing for. He turns out to be more or less the opposite: a desperate man, not without future plans though, but sitting in a wheelchair and displaying oscillating moods. Oscillating between forced gaity, latent agression, self pity, despair and fear. What happens during this interview not actually being conducted, is an encounter of two men, a confrontation between the two men, a mutual checking out, a sort of crash. And while all kind of conversational subjects float over this scene like balloons – the surprising thing is, that art is one of these subjects, that appears and disappears – and once reappears during the scene. And the even more remarkable thing is, that art is the very subject that seems to be suitable to be grasped, and to serve as a possible and real bond between the two men, both intelligent, and both in their way realizing the desaster happening. And »art« means here in the first place (but not only) – the art of Winslow Homer.

An Adirondack Lake

›Do you have theories about art, Frank?‹ Herb says, setting his jaw firmly in one fist. ›I mean do you, uh, have any fully developed concepts of, say, how what the artist sees relates to what is finally put on the canvas?‹
›I guess not,‹ I say. ›I like Winslow Homer a lot.‹
›All right: He’s a good one. He’s plenty good,‹ Herb says, and smiles a helpless smile up at me.

This is how the subject of art comes in, unexpected, as a challenge for Frank, who immediatedly directs the more theoretical reflection to one artist he apparently likes: Homer. And Herb agrees: a good one. A bond between the two men seems possible. But why can desaster not be avoided?

›He’d paint Walled Lake here, and it’d feel and look pretty much like this, I think.‹
›Maybe he would.‹ Herb looks away at the lake.

And what follows now is the very epicentre of the desaster that is to come. It’s the decision of Frank, maybe not upon reflection, to leave the path of the conversation directing towards something like an actual encounter. And it is one sentence that also comprises the whole poetical concept of the writing of Richard Ford (indirectly addressed also in his beautiful essay on Chekhov, published as an introduction to selected stories of Chekhov, Ford edited as well: http://www.amazon.com/The-Essential-Tales-Chekhov-Anton/dp/0060956569), because it is one of the many moral decisions that happen in everyday life, of whose we are mostly unaware, but which are all like little epicentres of our daily life. It is the decision of Frank to direct the conversation, although he knows that this is going to be painful and although he knows that the story of Herb is not the kind of story anyway that was meant to be written for the magazine, away from art and towards sports:

›How long did you play pro ball, Herb.‹

And if it is another sublety of a scaringly intelligent a writer like Richard Ford to omit the question mark here, I don’t know (my paper back edition of the novel has it). Maybe it is meant to be there, but it seems to be lacking, and the sentence reads less like a question, but appears more like a ball that is thrown, instinctively, at Herb, and more or less unexpectedly for Herb (although he is to be interviewed as the ex lineman). And without giving the rest of the scene here, we know – this is how the desaster takes its course (the later question »Do you ever miss athletics?« is another adding of fuel to the fire of this desastrous encounter at the lakeside).

Hound and Hunter (picture: winslowhomer.org)

But the interesting thing is that the subject of Homer comes up again, towards the end of this painfully illuminating scene (illuminating as to the character of the two men, but also as to moral decisions in everyday life, illuminating in how art might serve as a bond between two men, and illuminating as to the complexities of narrative writing). But it is more like an echo of the first mentioning, a brief looking up to the balloon of art, that has not been grasped, and it is already clear that an actual encounter is not going to be taking place here. Commentators do judge Frank’s behaviour in various ways. Some call him egotistical and in any case: he draws a line. A line between him and Herb, because he feels the danger of being drawn into that pain and dispair of Herb’s.
Frank’s empathy is decidedly limited and he knows it, and even defends it: Because in the very end of chapter six, like explaining it to the reader, Frank says, that he will go down to the bottom – but with his own ship.
And maybe this is the last distant echo of the presense of Winslow Homer here. A metaphor, referring to seafaring, but at the same time a declaration not of empathy or boundless solidarity, but of individuality and, maybe cool, but not coldhearted decidedness to save forces to own’s own life and, one may add because of having read three novels with Frank Bascombe as the main character, that of one’s closest.

*

Here’s the real Basquiat (picture: theartofeveryday.wordpress.com)

As an example of another conversation, this one dedicated to art, that leads more or less and tragically funny to a drastic non-encounter we point here to the interview scene in Julian Schnabel’s Basquiat, based on a real interview conducted with the artist once (more informations here: http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/news/basquiat-behind-the-interview/). And to the right we show Winslow Homer’s The New Novel.

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

© DS