“If he’s a bit demented,” Simon liked to say in his uninspired way, “well, he’s only a mirror image of the insane nation that created him,” but though there was a germ of truth in that, it was a simpleminded truth. Just like Marx’s famous dictum: an overstatement in the heat of historical debate against ossified orthodoxies. Sure, we’re all crazy, and society often as not—as the lowest common denominator of our collective craziness—reinforces our silliest quirks, but between our cells and the informing universe (the dimensions are awesome, and not only in space) there’s a lot of action. Words, like pebbles in a brook, create eddies and murmurings, but they’re not the stream itself. Dogmatic epigrams like Simon’s just dam up the brook and send it flowing elsewhere.
He came up with a much more interesting remark, quite spontaneously, that night Gus tackled my stove. While cleaning up the debris and putting the stove back together again (we’d got Gus back to playacting again, easing him gradually away from the heat and excitement of football by having him perform from a play he’d apparently written himself called The Little Accident, in which he’d played the part of a football player at Whittier College), I related what I knew by then about his past, the football, the girls, his timetables, the early decisions, and I tossed out a thought that had come to me earlier: “What if that’s what we mean by ‘growing up’? I mean, coming to a decision, suddenly or slowly, consciously or unconsciously, to step out of the explosion at large and accept some kind of structure you can work in, some arbitrary configuration—your own invention or borrowed from others—that allows you to reduce time to something merely functional: a material you can cut up and construct memories with…”
“You mean, what if ‘growing up’ and ‘going nuts’ are the same thing?” Leo asked.
“Well, if they are,” Simon said, “then—as of right now—they aren’t anymore.”
This, coming from Simon, so surprised us that we all applauded. Gus assumed, of course, that we were clapping for him—didn’t all the world?—and he lifted both fists above his head and flashed a frozen smile. We got into a heated argument after that about Leo’s desire to use Gus in the coming confrontation in South Chicago, Jesse and I arguing against the cynical manipulation of idiots as a form of exploitation and ultimately dangerous to the cause (what if one of them took over?), Leo, O.B., and Simon arguing variously for the impossibility of any action without “manipulation,” the sheer entertainment value of the thing (this was O.B., who has walked so long at the edge of some brink or other that he’s forgotten to care anymore whether he drops off or not—though reviewed as “cries of protest,” his novels are really about suicide and how to enjoy it), and the paradox that in any revolution those rebelling against the society have been warped by it.
“And anyway,” Leo said, “I don’t think anybody’s going to get hurt. Now that U.S. Steel has seen the light, these little assholes like Girdler will have to cave in, too. But we’ve got to stand firm, and we can use Gus here as a kind of symbol. You know, HOLD THAT LINE!”
Gus, startled, leaped to his feet, dropped into a crouch, commenced to growl. “Whoa, boy!” Jesse cried. “Time out!”
“Man, I’m all for you takin’ this geek down there with you,” O.B. laughed, “but if you do, I’m gonna come and holler ‘29!’”
“Hey, Meyer!” It’s one of the boys. “I was safe, wasn’t I?”
I‘ve been watching their game in the schoolyard without thinking about it. Now I let what I’ve just seen pass again in slow motion before my inner eye (the one I do all my sculpting with—everything goes in there, but not everything stays, and reason has nothing to do with it; it’s a lot like Gus’s gearbox, now that I think about it): Bernie, the boy who asked me the question, has tried to stretch a single to a double. The kid on second was thrown the ball in plenty of time and was standing well in front of the detached chunk of sidewalk they’re using for the base, but he was scared and had his eyes shut. Bernie, eyes all lit up with the joy of it (memory is the greatest illusionist of them all, I think, giving us time with one hand and taking it away with the other), bashed into him, sending the kid sprawling. Right now, he’s trying very hard not to cry. “You were out, Bernie.”
“See? See?” cries the other kid loudly, too loudly, the tears springing to the corners of his eyes, reinforcing his indignation and self-righteousness. “You’re out, I told ya!”
“Aw, Meyer, you’re blind! He wasn’t even looking what he was doing!”
“I know. He didn’t tag you, you tagged the ball. If you’d been smart, instead of trying to knock him down like that, you would’ve just tiptoed around behind him.”
Everybody laughs at that, even the kid who’s been hit. “Hey, Meyer,” says another, the fat boy who’s playing Big Zeke Bonura over on first, “come and umpire, will ya?”
“Yeah, Meyer!”
“Can’t, fellas. I’ve got to get on home, get some work done. Besides, I’m soaking wet, and I’ve got some raw fish here I have to put in the icebox.”
“Aw, Meyer, just half a hour!” pleads the bespectacled White Sox pitcher.
“No, you see, a friend of mine died today, I couldn’t really keep my mind on the ballgame. But, hey, that was some game you pitched Monday! You made the Hall of Fame!” The boys laugh at that, a little self-consciously maybe, but they know I’m good at pretending with them. I see Old Man Donaldson coming around the corner with his fruit cart. “I tell you what I will do, though—I’ll buy you all an apple!”
They cheer at that and swarm around Donald-son’s wagon to pick out the ones with the least bruises. Bernie, to get even, takes a banana, which is expensive. Donaldson is a surly old wretch and might have taken a cut at them with his horsewhip, but just then his old nag drops a load of manure, and he gets distracted picking it up, shoveling it into a bucket he keeps hanging from the side of the cart for the purpose. “Never throw nothin’ away,” he always says, and does so now. Bernie’s slide into second base with all its inner contradictions is still playing before my inner eye, and an idea comes to me suddenly for a little football piece, something to mark Gus’s performance down at Republic Steel. Not exactly what Leo had in mind maybe (I’m thinking of the lurch into freedom through all those grabbing and flailing restraints of the line, form emerging from chaotic matter), but it’s the first idea of any kind I’ve had in a month, I have to get home and sketch it out. I pay for the apples and the banana and buy myself a box of strawberries, thinking: I’m a rich man, I can eat like the Duke of Windsor and spend all my days modeling little football and baseball players out of mud and nails—and if Leo and the others cannot see what I’m doing, then that just shows that, as with Gloomy Gus, their lives are too narrow and segmented.
“How, after all you’ve been through, Meyer,” Leo once asked me, “can you fuck around making these goddamn emptyheaded palookas?”
“It’s social realism,” Simon said, defending me, and Leo laughed, thinking Simon was making a joke. But Simon’s too dense for humor; I supposed he was thinking of all those muscular Soviet posters (though in that respect, the Fascists are even better social realists than the Soviets). Either way, he was wrong about it. True, I believe in social realism, after a fashion, but I don’t think you can know it before you start. True dialectic means letting your own work teach you as you go along. Art as process, as Dewey says, as interaction, shared celebration. You have to expose yourself before the world will show itself to you: a truth from the Torah.
I often get criticized by my friends for the athletes I make (and Leo’s right in a way: my welding techniques often use suggestion more than solid matter, so the heads are often, quite literally, empty). They argue that professional American sports reflect the sickness of American society: the exploitation of players, manipulation of followers, the brutality and competitiveness of the game, the record-keeping mania and personality cults, even the hokum reenactment and reinforcement of the rags-to-riches mythology. Bigtime football especially enrages them. They ha
te the raw, naked aggression, the implicit imperialism in the battle for yardage, the dehumanizing uniforms and training schedules, the lionization of the bully, and the celebration of violence as a way of discovering the self.
“It stinks!” Harry has barked, getting emotional. “A shandeh, Meyer! A game of Fascists!”
“Or feudalists,” I once offered in reply. “King Quarterback and his knights in the backfield getting all the glory, the peasant serfs up on the line taking all the punishment…”
“Right! F’kucken Cossacks!”
“No wonder the game’s full of goddamn Irish Catholics,” Leo said. “Either they’re employed as cops heating up working stiffs, fighting for the Fascists in Spain, stealing us blind down at City Hall, or playing football for fucking Notre Dame!” We’ve all been down on Irish Catholics of late, though one of our best friends is—or was—a socialist priest named Clanahan who used to live and drink over on Larrabee; we haven’t seen him since the war broke out in Spain: had he been horrified by the Republican massacre of priests and nuns and returned to the fold, or has he, as rumored, joined the Basque Resistance in Bilbao? (Now collapsing under the weight of the Fascists’ superior arms, sad to say, yet another piece of today’s dismaying news mosaic.) Leo himself might once have been a Catholic for all we know, depending on whether his real name is Leopold, Leonardo, León, Leonid, or Leonides, all of which—and more—I’ve known him to use at one time or another.
“Shit, the silly ball don’t even bounce straight!” Jesse put in. “It’s a insult to common sense!”
“Good point!” Leo laughed. “Bunch of damn perverts!”
“F’kucken nihilists!”
Oddly, nobody ever complains about the jugglers and dancers, which belong to the same set of images: bodies in motion, for me the central thing about life. I don’t miss the dead gods and vanished mysteries; motion is all the magic I need. And these figures of mine are real sentient bodies at full stretch—I don’t like amoebic or inanimate shapes, I like something that knows itself and tests itself. The first print I ever owned was one of Remington’s “Western Types.” Remington is popular now for the wrong reasons. I’m not interested in “the American scene,” the current “quest for a usable past,” local color, what Harry calls “all that acreage on canvas, poor art for poor people.” What excited me about Remington—and still does—is the way everything in his paintings, even the landscapes, expresses a kind of contained dynamic, some inner—perhaps tragic—force struggling, through matter, to free itself. I like things that move from the inside out, not things you look at from the outside in. I’m no voyeur, I hate the Impressionists, and was sorry when Picasso turned to Cubism, which is a hall-of-mirrors trick, not revelation—he could learn something right now from guys like Hopper and Benton. Expression is everything for me, and working as I do for the most part with figures only about a foot high, I feel that athletes, less likely to rigidify into archetypal positions than, say, workers or warriors, leave me more room to swing.
Also there’s the ball. Boxers, pole-vaulters, and swimmers also work at full stretch, but I’m less drawn to them. The strange ambiguity of the ball fascinates me, so much so that it never appears in my sculptures. It often seems to be there, but it isn’t. This creates a strange tension, especially with the jugglers, where the longing, the anticipation, seem more intense. Yet the jugglers always turn out too flat somehow, too static. I prefer the greater dynamism of the ballplayers, the outflung limbs, the twisted torsos, the seeming defiance of gravity and the collision of forces: they all seem actually to move, because without the logic of motion they make no sense. And football is not about violence or atavistic impulses, like Harry says, it’s about balance. The line of scrimmage is a fulcrum, not a frontier, the important elements of football being speed and weight. The struggle is not for property, it’s for a sudden burst of freedom. And the beauty of that. In football, as in politics, the goal, ultimately, is not ethical but aesthetic.
Of course, I admit, most footballers are probably ignorant of all this. All but the odd exception go banging unreflectively through football and then life, vaguely nostalgic at the end for something beautiful they had and lost, but unable when called upon at their testimonial dinners to put their fingers on it. This is true of all of us. One of the main tasks of socialism has to be to give all men what artists take for granted: time and incentive for reflection. Capitalism has made us overvalue action as power (the early bird gets—and consumes—the worm, and that’s the beginning and end of it: a plate of worms), and contemplation has become, not merely a kind of unpatriotic idleness, but socially and psychologically hazardous as well.
Which is one risk Gloomy Gus never took. The only All-American in the history of his little college, the first Heisman Trophy winner (I heard at the hospital today from the sportswriter doing that retrospective piece on him that because of his involvement in the Memorial Day riot, there’s a move underfoot now to erase his award from the books—but can history be erased? yes, yes, it always is, in fact that’s the first thing that happens to it…), an All-Pro halfback for the NFL Chicago Bears, and it still isn’t clear he ever understood what the game is all about at the most fundamental level. Or ever wished to know. Certainly, he had not been attracted to freedom, mystery, beauty—if anything, he was frightened by such things. He apparently lacked any capacity for joy, so how could he have known these other things even if he’d encountered them? He would probably have registered them as some kind of vexatious disorder, and added yet another calisthenic to his schedule.
So what drew him to football in the first place? I’m not sure. When his brother came through looking for him a couple of weeks after Maxie’s party, I asked him how it had started, and what he said was: “I think it was because of the challenge. It was the thing he was worst at. That and getting on with girls. He used to be good at lots of things. Like mashing potatoes, for example. Or debate. Studies. We all thought he was going to be a teacher or a lawyer. Dick was always reserved. He was the studious one of the bunch, always doing more reading while the rest of us were out having fun. But what he did well, he took no pleasure in, while what he did badly made him very upset.”
“Did he talk about these things?”
“No, he just got tics.”
Most of what I’ve come to know about Gloomy Gus, I learned from his brother on that surprise weekend visit and from the Hearst reporter doing the whatever-happened-to wrap-up. Neither man was very intelligent and I had to piece a lot of it together myself, but I was helped by the sportswriter’s notes and a scrapbook of Gus’s football career that his brother brought along with him, together with some testimonials from girls he’d had. This brother is a grocer and souvenir seller with his father back in Gus’s hometown, and I gathered they’d been cleaning up by playing on Gus’s national fame—he showed me a picture of the store and it was full of Chicago Bears programs, pennants, publicity shots, and the like, as well as footballs, jerseys, autographed photos of famous ladies, and other mementos of the Bears’ All-Pro halfback. He expressed a great deal of concern for his brother, but it was obvious that underneath he was angry and embarrassed by the way Gus had let him down. “So this is where he’s ended up,” he said, gazing around my studio. “I never realized Dick had fallen so far…”
Apparently, the critical turning point in Gloomy Gus’s life came during his freshman year at Whittier College out in southern California. At that moment, he did what sooner or later we all do: he began to simplify himself. I can understand this: my sculpting is not something that was added to an expanding life, but that which remains after all the other things have been peeled away, things that, who knows, I might have been better at. We all have too few lives to live. Later, in an unpublished interview, Gus was to say that all he ever wanted to do was play football and screw girls, but up till that autumn in 1930 he had been trying to score everywhere at once: as a scholar, a politician, an organist, pianist, and violinist, a carny barker, gas station attendan
t, Quaker Sunday School teacher, debater and actor, entrepreneur, journalist, songwriter and playwright. A familiar pattern: he seemed destined to become president of the local Chamber of Commerce, or maybe a judge. He’d won scholarships, elections, awards, leading roles, oratorical contests, and public praise. But he still hadn’t been able to make the football team or coax a girl’s underpants down.
Which was more important to him is not clear. In later years, Gus himself spoke mostly about football, but the Hearst guy insists that under the uniform he was “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure hard-on.” Gus’s brother had no opinion, though when I asked he winked broadly. This wink was a peculiarity of Gus’s brother, however, and could have signified anything. Girls admired Gus apparently, but they didn’t have much fun with him. He developed a kind of paranoia, stimulated by some advertisement maybe, about having bad breath—each morning before leaving the house, he used to brush his teeth, gargle with special mouthwashes, and make his mother smell his breath—but at least part of the problem was that on dates he talked to the girls about such things as what might have happened to the world if Persia had conquered the Greeks, and then with no transition tried to wrestle them to the floor. This never worked. Likewise with the football: it was all verbal. Maybe his early successes with debates and elections had twisted him a bit. One teammate who knew him that freshman year summed up his talents very simply: “Dick had two left feet. He couldn’t coordinate.” Then why was he allowed to go on working out with the team? “He was always talking it up. That’s why the Chief let him hang around. He was one of the inspirational guys.” Of course, even the talking had required practice and so, like his acting, was cued and predictable, though maybe people failed to notice this at the time. A kind of religious recitation. We tried him out on winter nights around my stove. If you said, “Keep it rolling,” he’d say, “Fuckin’ good game!” If you said, “That’s showing them,” he’d say, “Make ’em eat shit!” Et cet.