The Game Player (28 page)

11

Some praise at morning what they blame at night, But always think the last opinion right.

—Alexander Pope

M
Y PARENTS AGREED
, at the end of my last year of Yale, that I should wait for the publication of my book, which involved a considerable tour of television, newspaper, and radio interviews, wait, in other words, a year before deciding whether to go into graduate school. I cannot explain why, in the fall of 1974, a book about the meaning of the current trend in clothing, music, and occupation among young people should become a best seller and earn me nearly six hundred thousand dollars. An ironic achievement since my point was that my peers were in danger from their greed for, not the suburban family dream of the fifties, but greed for superstardom and endless wealth. I suppose it was misread as an attack on how middle-class parents had spoiled their children; I know some leftists thought I was trying to reverse the anti-political feelings of the people who were teen-agers during the late sixties. But I think, I'm very sorry to say, that the book's success was due to reactionary feelings of adults against the troubles young people had caused; they were given a stamp of approval by me, with my admirable credentials of being young and politically left.
Even
he says so, I could see a disgruntled parent saying.

Of course, as any intelligent reader can surmise, I was in a state of almost constant ecstasy for the seven months of my book's prominence. I lost touch with all of my friends except for Brian if for no other reason than the fact that I had no residence for three months while I toured the country, and that I did not join their entrance into various far-flung graduate writing programs. I spoke to Brian on the phone once a week for the first few months. He was the only friend I had who didn't resent or feel distanced from me by my success; even Karen seemed to think that my new wealth and fame somehow made me alien. She needed constant reassurance that I loved her, just as my writing comrades needed a continual admission from me that my book's success came from factors that weren't connected to skill or intelligence. But Brian relished my triumph as if it were communal: “I can see,” he said, the evening after I appeared on the “Today” show, “your writing teachers choking on their orange juice.” He would remind me (actually I needed no prodding) of the times my instructors or my friends had told me my work wasn't cohesive or forceful, that a mass audience didn't care about the minutia I concerned myself with. While others would insult me, by implication, with suggestions that I shouldn't spend my money since I probably would never have another best seller, Brian would say, “I've been thinking about it, and I don't see why you should settle for a Mercedes. That's as if you're saving money for your grandchildren. Buy a Rolls. It'll last you the rest of your life, anyway, so it's probably cheaper.” The conversations were absurd and they relieved my loneliness and mounting terror of the future. I could relax in my horrendous hotel room, lying on the bed with a Coke poured into a clear plastic cup, and laugh like a boy with my friend on the phone. He knew that the only way to enjoy the way this society farts out successes, fully grown, was to be vulgarly exuberant. He never suggested I pretend to a mincing distaste for best seller lists, big money, the preposterous capsuling of ideas on television, and the imperfect praise of reviewers. He knew that integrity is a quality only fakes and scoundrels preserve.

But when my book's success had crested and withdrawn to a tranquil state, I found my capacity for withstanding the pressures of envy, of writing another book, of finding a home for my life, wasn't great. I retreated to New York with Karen, repressing my desire to propose and, I assume, marry her, because of all the boring, reasonable things people say about marriage. I was too young, she was too young, marriage too silly except for parenthood and surely I wasn't considering
that?
We got a one-bedroom apartment in the Village, not even as luxurious as the New Haven place, and allowed my father to have my money invested so as to provide me with a modest income. Disgusted by the reactionary use my book had been put to, I wrote another article for the
Times,
saying so, and that put me in touch with a group of leftists who, with the collapse of the movement, had decided to start an intellectual magazine. I suppose they hoped, though they would deny it now, that I would guiltily give them a hundred thousand or so. But I did agree to write for them for free and in a few weeks, I became one of the editors, eventually buying into the magazine quite voluntarily for a mere eight thousand dollars. My colleagues were all between eight and fifteen years older than I and I enjoyed this freedom from the dreamy atmosphere of youth: the magazine was hard, practical work, frustrating and satisfying.

Brian had also asked his father for a year off before entering law school and that had been agreed to as long as Brian traveled in Europe for half of that time. Mr. Stoppard seemed to feel that even if Brian just slept and ate in that Continent, there would be a mysterious absorption of culture. Brian left for Europe a week after I moved to New York and though I halfheartedly wrote to him, my letters were pathetic. I stopped, one day, after a frustrating hour of writing disconnected informational sentences, because I realized my difficulty was that my friendship with him always involved
my
reacting to his actions and statements. I never brought anything to the friendship except loyalty and admiration: I needed a letter to answer and he wrote none. Perhaps that suddenly struck me as degrading, but I decided true friendship wasn't unequal, and that Brian was just a monument, a souvenir of my childhood.

My new friends were concerned with social issues or with the personal triumph of good values (equal relationships, open and non-competitive friendships) over the harsh, isolated interests of most New Yorkers in pursuit of successful careers. I found that after all those years of fighting back my suspicion of Brian's worth as a human being, I had lost the battle. I don't think I was defeated because I finally agreed that a person who
cored
about winning was bad, as most of my leftist friends would. True, his values were those of a capitalist: he believed he deserved his advantages; he thought nothing of increasing them without regard to the consequence; and his emotional life was either permanently closed off to others or nonexistent. But I think I would have accepted his individualistic view of life, though my friends never would, if he were an artist; then at least his selfishness would be part of the mechanism that produced beauty for people. No, in the end, what bothered me about him was that, once I had money and position in the world, and the activities of the world were no longer limited to playing games, I saw nothing awesome about him. He was a good-looking, polite, rich kid on his way to a year-round tan and stock options.

He returned from Europe and entered Harvard Law School in the fall of 1975. When he visited his parents for Christmas I invited him to the nickel, dime, quarter poker game I played in with others on the magazine. I explained that it was friendly in a fierce way, with a lot of kibitzing, and asked if that would bother him.

“Well, it might be a little dull,” he said in a puzzled tone. “You play in that regularly?”

“Yeah, it's fun. I mean, it's not—I'm not into that kind of heavy gambling we went in for.”

“Unhuh,” he said, as if he had decided not to tease me about this ridiculous game. “Well, I hope we'll get a chance to talk. I haven't seen you in almost two years.”

I assured him, after protesting that it was only a year or so since our last face-to-face meeting, that we would have dinner alone. I was almost embarrassed by walking in the Village with this healthy, tailored young man. The gays would look at him as if checking whether this was a closet homosexual just in from the Midwest; and the plump, dungareed writers would glance at me as if offended that I was going out with what must be a publicity man.

He talked of cars, clothes, his excitement over learning tennis, the school politics of Harvard, as if these were the sum of existence. When he asked about the business details of the magazine, he seemed incapable of understanding that it wasn't run for a profit, that most of us worked without a salary, and that both those facts weren't indications of failure, but the result of principles. He looked bewildered when I, in answer to a question about why I wasn't working on another book, told him I had turned down a three-hundred-thousand-dollar contract to write my autobiography (A
Memoir at Twenty-three
was the coy title an editor suggested) because I was tired of vulgar publicity and writing lightly about life.

“Why not just do it for the money?” he said as if that was a marvelous motive.

“Why the fuck should I make myself miserable just to make money?”

He laughed. “I don't know,” he said with a smile made brilliant by his winter tan. “To buy delicious food with?”

His charm caught me in time to prevent an outburst. “You know that I only spent ten thousand of the bread the book earned me?” I asked, once I had mastered my immediate annoyance. “Dad's invested the rest for me at ten per cent and that's an income of forty thousand. And I'm still going to inherit another hundred thousand from his business.”

He watched me nervously explain my reason for complaisance about money with his opaque, amused eyes. “That's great,” he said, smiling with his lips closed and with an encouraging nod of the head. “I didn't seriously mean you should do a book you didn't want to do just because of money. I'm just surprised that you don't feel that memoir idea would allow you great freedom as to subject.”

I had felt so sure of myself, a proud and masterful individual, until he, as if with a magical intuition, zoomed in on this weakness. Others took it for granted that I was being noble in resisting the pressures of the book industry to corrupt myself. Only once or twice before had it been necessary to explain that when they pay you three hundred thousand dollars, they expect a commercial book and I didn't wish to write one.
That
was always accepted as the last word, but Brian leaned back in his chair and stared at me for a moment before saying, “Howard, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I have a very good memory. And I always listened especially carefully to you when you would talk about your ambitions and your plans in relation to publishing.” He stopped as if that was all he need say.

“That's true,” I said warily. “What's your point?”

“Well, it's just that you said nothing could be accomplished until you became a best-selling writer. I
was
the one who would disagree and say that good work well done would eventually be rewarded
and
important.”

I laughed. “I guess I was wrong and you were right.”

He smiled. “Yeah, but you did both at once with your first book.”

“I don't know if I did.”

“I'm telling you, you did. That's the sense I'm getting from you. Which is that your reason for not signing that contract and for working on this sort of polite magazine—”

“We're hardly polite, Brian. We're radicals.”

“I mean polite in ambition and impact. You have the capacity, by writing a book, of reaching hundred of thousands of people, most of whom would learn something from you. But instead you're writing for a magazine that reaches—what?”

“Fifty thousand or so.”

“Most of whom already agree with you, right? What's the point of that?”

He reached through the fragile barrier I had built between my fears and the recognition of them. I had thought all this during those ghastly hours of sleeplessness that followed my rejection of the contract, but when I presented my problem to Karen and others, they said no harm could be done by waiting a year or two before writing another book, and that the magazine was a broadening and vital experience. Of course, I wanted them to tell me that and I had guided the discussion to encourage such advice, but I had done so to prevent them from reacting routinely to the huge sum I was offered. So I presented this final defense to Brian, conscious of its timidity and cowardice.

“Sure,” he said. “And in two years, you'll decide another two couldn't hurt. And so on. Come on, Howard”—he reached across the table to slap my shoulder. “You can't squander success like that. It's not something you can turn on and off. You're young. You have to grow, you have to work at your skills. How many times have you told me writing is a craft? Well, does a carpenter take two years off because he built a beautiful house? No, he gets paid more and goes on to something more difficult. What stops you from working on both the magazine and the book?” He was relentless and wore me down to the point where I admitted that I was scared I couldn't do another book. He then began to recount, with a terrible accuracy, the twenty or so ideas for critical works that I had told him, over the years, I dreamed of doing. I answered that I didn't know enough to do them, that publishers were interested in more on the same subject as my first book, and so on in a vomiting of excuses.

“So fail!” he yelled in the middle of my litany. “Is that what you're trying to convince me of? That you'll fail? Good, I'd like to see you fail. You've had such a fucking easy time of it. That's why everybody else isn't urging you to write.”

“Who said that?” I argued. “No one's told me—”

“Oh, come on,” he said, closing his eyes and sweeping his hand across the space between us to silence me. “Good friends wouldn't let you stagnate. You didn't let me fall apart. Why the hell should I let you off that easy? They're scared you'll succeed. They know that if you do nothing, you'll fail. You have nothing to lose by writing, if your alternative is to do nothing. It's disgusting to hear you worry that you'll blow it. Nothing's worth doing unless there's defeat for a penalty.”