Trying to Save Piggy Sneed

With one exception: Graham Greene. Greene was the first contemporary novelist I was assigned to read at Exeter; it would probably have provoked him to know that I read him not in an English class but in the Reverend Frederick Buechner's extremely popular course on Religion and Literature. I took every course Fred Buechner taught at Exeter, not because he was the school minister but because he was the academy's only published novelist -- and a good one. (I wouldn't realize how good until, long after Exeter, I read Buechner's quartet of Bebb novels -- Lion Country, Open Heart, Love Feast, and Treasure Hunt.)

We were a negative lot of students at Exeter, when it came to religion. We were more cynical than young people today; we were even more cynical than most of us have since become -- that is to say that my generation strikes me as less cynical today than we were. (Is that possible?) Anyway, we didn't like Freddy Buechner for his sermons in Phillips Church or in our morning chapel, although his sermons were better than anyone else's sermons I've ever heard or read -- befo

re or since. It was his eloquence about literature that moved us; and his enthusiasm for Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory, which engendered my enthusiasm for all (or almost all) of Greene, was unstoppable.

I feel that I know Greene's people better than I know most of the people I have known in my life, and they are not even people I wanted (or would ever want) to know: it is that simple. I cannot sit in the dentist's chair without envisioning the terrible Mr. Tench, the expatriate dentist who witnesses the execution of the whiskey priest. It is not Emma Bovary who epitomizes adultery to me: it is poor Scobie in The Heart of the Matter, and poor Scobie's awful wife, Louise; it is Helen, the 19-year-old widow with whom Scobie has an affair, and the morally empty intelligence agent, Wilson, who is a little bit in love with Louise. And then there is the ghastly sleaziness of Brighton Rock: the utterly corrupted 17-year-old Pinkie, and the innocent 16-year-old Rose ... the murder of Hale, and Ida drinking stout. They have become what an "underworld" means to me, just as The End of the Affair is the most chilling antilove story I know. Poor Maurice Bendrix! Poor Sarah and poor Henry, too! They are like people you would shy away from if you encountered them on the street, knowing what you know.

"Hatred seems to operate the same glands as love: it even produces the same actions," Greene wrote. I used to have that typed on a yellowing piece of paper, taped to my desk lamp, long before I understood how true it was. Something I understood sooner -- as soon as I began to write -- is this cutting I also made from The End of the Affair: "So much of a novelist's writing ... takes place in the unconscious: in those depths the last word is written before the first word appears on paper. We remember the details of our story, we do not invent them."

The End of the Affair is the first novel that shocked me. I read it at a time when most of my contemporaries (those who read at all) were being shocked by The Catcher in the Rye, which I thought was as perfunctory as masturbation. Salinger's familiar creation, that troubled boy, knew nothing that could compare to Bendrix's frightening knowledge that "there is no safety anywhere: a humpback, a cripple -- they all have the trigger that sets love off."

Later, to think of Greene making the disclaimers he made -- or describing some of his work, as he did, as mere "entertainments" -- was confounding to me. Greene's manipulations of popular though "lesser" forms (the thriller, the detective story) obviously cost him the critical appreciation that is withdrawn from writers with too many readers.

I am reminded of Maurice Bendrix thinking of one of his critics. "Patronizingly in the end he would place me: probably a little above Maugham because Maugham is popular and I have not yet committed that crime, not yet; but although I retain a little of the exclusiveness of unsuccess, the little reviews, like wise detectives, can scent it on its way." Greene wrote this about Bendrix in 1951; Greene himself was already becoming popular -- he would soon commit "that crime" -- and the "wise detectives" would sniff at his success and bestow their praise on far less perfect craftsmen than Greene.

If, in the beginning -- when I first read him in prep school -- Graham Greene showed me that exquisitely developed characters and heartbreaking stories were the obligations of any novel worth remembering, it was also Greene, later, who taught me to loathe literary criticism; to see how the critics would dismiss him made me hate critics. Until his death, in 1991, Graham Greene was the most accomplished living novelist in the English language; in any language, he was the most meticulous.

As Greene was always keen to observe: coincidence is everywhere. Greene's niece, Louise Dennys, is my Canadian publisher. The man who introduced me to Greene, the Reverend Frederick Buechner -- no longer the school minister at Exeter -- is my old friend and neighbor in Vermont. (Small world.) And it is only mildly astonishing to me that by the time I left Exeter I had already read most of the writers who would matter to me in my life as a writer; it is also true that the hours I spent reading them contributed (in combination with my dyslexia) to the necessity of my spending a fifth year at a four-year school.

It hardly matters now. And it's a good lesson for a novelist: keep going, move forward -- but slowly. Why be in a hurry to finish school, or a book?

A Backup

While the intelligentsia of my Exeter classmates moved on to various Ivy League colleges, or to their elite equivalents -- George Trow moved slightly south to Harvard, where Larry Palmer would go the following year, and Chuck Krulak was accepted at the Naval Academy (Krulak had left Exeter for Annapolis the previous year) -- I attended the University of Pittsburgh because I wanted to wrestle with the best.

I would have been happier at Wisconsin, where I was wait-listed for admission because I wasn't in the top quarter of my graduating class. (It's questionable that, if I'd gone to Exeter High School instead of the academy, I would have been, although this was my feeling at the time.) Rather than wait for Wisconsin to accept me, I chose Pitt. Why? Because Pittsburgh didn't make me wait.

I made a mistake. I liked George Martin, the Wisconsin wrestling coach, and he liked me; his son Steve, a future 157-pounder for Wisconsin, had been a teammate of mine (and a close friend) at Exeter. When I visited Madison, I loved the place -- I loved the Badger wrestling room, too. Had I attended the University of Wisconsin, I might never have been a place winner in the Big 10 tournament -- or even a starter on the Wisconsin team -- but I know that I would have kept wrestling, and I would have stayed four years (maybe longer) in Madison; there's no question that I would have graduated. But I was 19 -- Pittsburgh had accepted me, and Wisconsin had told me to wait and see. When you're 19, you don't want to "wait and see."

Coach Seabrooke warned me that I might be getting in over my head at Pitt; I should go to a smaller school, I should try a less competitive wrestling program-- these were Ted's recommendations. But when he couldn't persuade me, he wrote to Rex Peery, the coach at Pittsburgh, giving Rex his evaluation of me. Knowing Ted, I presume he didn't exaggerate my potential. Coach Peery was prepared for me to be no better than "halfway decent"; as it turned out, I was worse than that.

Rex Peery was an Oklahoma boy and a former three-time national champion -- even his sons had been three-time NCAA champions -- and Pittsburgh was loaded with future Ail-Americans the year I arrived. Dick Martin, the 123-pounder, would be an All-American; Darrel Kelvington (147) and Timothy Gay (157) and Jim Harrison (167) and Kenneth Barr (177) would also be All-Americans. (Harrison was a future national champion; he would win an NCAA title in 1963.) Then there were Zolikoff at 137 and Jeffries at 191 and Ware at Unlimited -- I once could recite that lineup in my sleep.

Sherman Moyer, the Pitt 130-pounder and my most frequent workout partner, was married and had completed his military service. Sherm was reputed to smoke one cigarette a week -- usually in a toilet stall before his match (at least this was the only place I ever saw him smoke) -- and he was devastating in the top position. Sherman Moyer was simply impossible to get away from; he could ride me, and did, all afternoon. At the time, it was small consolation to me that Moyer's abilities as a "rider" led him to defeat Syracuse All-American Sonny Greenhalgh twice in that season. (Sonny and I still talk about Moyer.) Nor was it greatly consoling that Moyer was a gentleman; he was always decent and good-humored to me -- ever friendly -- while grinding me into the mat.

As for my fellow freshmen at Pitt, they were a tough lot, too -- especially in and around my weight class. Tom Heniff was from Illinois and Mike Johnson was from Pennsylvania; they were often my workout partners -- and Moyer's. Heniff and I were 130-pounders -- I had dropped three pounds from my Exeter weight class -- and Johnson, who wrestled at 123 and at 130, could take apart anyone in the wrestling room up to about 140 or 150 pounds. In the next year, Mike Johnson would be an All-American; he was an NCAA runner-up in '63. (Johnson is a high-school wrestling coach in Du Bois, Pennsylvania, today.)

I also worked out with a couple of freshman 137-pounders: a redhead named Carswell or Caswell, who was pound for pound the strongest person I ever wrestled -- I remember him as about

five feet five with a 60-inch chest -- and a smiling guy named Warnick who had an arm-drag that left you looking for your arm. The freshman recruit at 147 pounds was (I believe) a guy named Frank O'Korn; I don't remember him well -- I must have wrestled him only occasionally. At 157 pounds, John Carr had won a New England Interscholastic title as a PG at Cheshire. (Carr would transfer from Pitt to Wilkes; until recently, he was a high-school coach in the Wilkes-Barre area of Pennsylvania.) And topping off that freshman class was a highly recruited 177-pounder named Lee Hall.

I knew they would be good -- I had gone there because they were the best. But in the Pittsburgh wrestling room, in the '62 season, there was not one wrestler I could beat -- not one.

My technique was not the problem; I had been well coached at Exeter. The problem in Pittsburgh was that my limited athletic ability placed me at a considerable distance from the top rank of college wrestlers around the nation. Because of Ted Seabrooke, I wasn't a bad wrestler; I also wasn't a good athlete, as Ted had told me. I took a pounding at Pitt. "Halfway decent" didn't cut it there.

I won't presume to define that essential ability which makes a "good athlete" for all sports, but for wrestling good balance is as important as quickness; it is also as uncoachable. And by balance I mean both kinds: the ability to keep your balance -- to a small degree this can be taught, by maintaining good position -- and how quickly you can recover your balance when you lose it. The latter ability is un-teachable. The speed with which I can recover my balance when I lose it is mournfully slow; this is my weakness as an athlete. (It is a sizable limitation for a wrestler.)

In '62, freshmen were ineligible for varsity competition; yet I'd anticipated a challenging schedule of dual-meet matches and tournaments for the Pittsburgh freshman team -- we would have been a winning team. But Johnson and Heniff and Warnick and O'Korn and Carr were either academically ineligible or nursing injuries, or both; what there was for a freshman wrestling schedule was canceled. The only competition I would see, until the year-end tournament -- the Freshman Eastern Intercollegiates at West Point -- was the considerable competition in the Pitt wrestling room. And I could easily predict my future, if I stayed at Pittsburgh. I would be a backup to Johnson or Heniff or Warnick (or to all three); later, I would be a backup to whatever talented freshmen would enter next year's wrestling room with the new freshman class. I would always be a backup. When one of the starters was sick, when he was hurt or couldn't make weight, I would sneak into the lineup; and there was little doubt what my role would be then -- it wouldn't be to win but to not get pinned. It would be, at best, a career spent facing Vincent Buonomano -- like my first time in the pit.

It was what success I had met with in the pit -- after the beating by Buonomano -- that made the backup role hard for me to bear. At Exeter, I had been a three-year starter. Years later, as a coach, I had the highest respect for the backup wrestlers on good wrestling teams; they were what made the teams good -- as teams. They were the necessary workout partners who could have been starters at a smaller school, in a less competitive program. But once I'd been part of a program like Pittsburgh's, I couldn't have been satisfied with anything less; nor was I wise enough to recognize the distinction of backing up a wrestler of Mike Johnson's quality. Instead, I was disappointed in myself -- in my limitations. I wanted to leave Pittsburgh, but there was nowhere else I wanted to go.

For once I was not struggling academically; yet, for the first time, I was lazy (academically), too. I worked hard in the wrestling room, but -- without any outside competition -- I couldn't see my own improvement as a wrestler. I could only see that I wasn't improving against Moyer or Johnson or Heniff or Warnick, or Carswell or Caswell -- whatever the strong redhead's name was. And I was bored with everything but the wrestling; to simply see more of it -- since I couldn't compete -- I asked Coach Peery to take me on varsity road trips as the team manager. Rex took me; he knew I was discouraged, and he was being kind to me -- I was an easily distracted manager. (Daydreamers have pathetic managerial skills.)

Rex Peery was always kind to me, except once when he cut my hair. We were traveling -- we were in the training room at either Navy or Maryland -- and he'd warned me earlier to get a haircut. I wasn't being in the slightest rebellious; I'd just forgotten to do it -- I would have done anything to please Rex.

Coach Peery put a surgical basin on my head -- it was a bowl, but not a round one -- and he cut my hair with a pair of snub-nosed shears, of the kind used for removing adhesive tape from injured ankles and knees and shoulders and wrists and fingers ... and whatever else could be taped. (By the end of a wrestling season, almost everything was taped.) All things considered, it wasn't a bad haircut -- Rex would never try to make anyone look foolish. Besides, emblematic of my experience at Pitt, I had brought the haircut on myself.

The Hundred-Dollar Taxi Ride