The Invention Conceit

• In our modern Scots-invented world of bloviation, headlines and titles can't stand the heat of a literalist's kitchen.
  

Being a literalist when it comes to words and their usage (though not without a sense of humor, I hope), I tend to pay attention to headlines and titles and to parse them unmercifully.

That's why, when I got my copy of Sports Illustrated last week, I was taken aback by the headline on the cover. (Yes, I get a hard copy of Sports Illustrated. It apparently comes as part of the audio subscription I have with Major League Baseball. I didn't ask for it and wouldn't buy it otherwise. I even turn down the copy of the swimsuit issue, which probably disappoints the editors because they use their highest level of sports knowledge to produce this profound epic. But I digress.)

The headline on this week's issue of SI reads: The Best Game Ever. One of the subhead is "How John Unitas and Raymond Berry Invented the Modern NFL."

I'm no expert, but I know a little bit about the history of professional football in this country. I was alive in 1958 and remember listening to the Giants-Colts game on the radio in my room where I grew up in Nashville, Tenn. (It was on Sunday afternoon, and in my household at that time, we didn't watch television on Sunday.)

True, this was the first of an era of popularity of professional football that still has not run its course. And true, it was a great game with many great players. The stuff of legend, as they say. I don't quarrel with the assertion that it might have been the best game ever.

But really . . . to claim, as the subhead does, that a couple of players "invented" professional football is a bit over the top. It certainly doesn't qualify as being discrete or modest in the use of the language. In fact, it goes too far in the other direction by being splashy and overblow -- and by ultimately being wrong.

But this article, which concentrated far more on Raymond Berry than Johnny Unitas, is actually an excerpt from a forthcoming book, and it got me to thinking that this is not the first time that I have run into this "invention conceit." A quick search of Amazon reveals the following:

• Frank Deford, The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball
  
  
• Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World & Everything in It
  
  
• Arthur DePalma, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times
  
  
• Neal Gabler, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood
  
  
• Andrew Wilson, Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex
  
  
• Andrew Lycett, The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes: The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• Daniel Stashower, The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder

The list could go on, and I'm sure you get the point.

These are probably all terrific books. I have read only one of these books: Frank Deford's book on John McGraw and Christy Mathewson. It was okay though in the end disappointing because Christy Mathewson died early and for some very wrong reasons. He was from all accounts a truly fine person and did not deserve his fate. (BSP alert: The watercolor of him at right can be found at First Inning Artworks.)

But nowhere in the book does Deford really make the case tht McGraw, Mathewson and the Giants invented modern baseball. How could he? It is a ludicrous argument to embark on in the first place.

By the same token, I'm pretty sure that the Scots did not invent the modern world. Don't get me wrong. I love Scotland. I lived their for several months once. At no time did I hear any Scot bragging about inventing the modern world. The Scots do brag about inventing golf. I'll give them that one.

Herbert Matthews, I'm confident, did not invent Fidel Castro. If he did, he has a lot to answer for. The Jews didn't invent Hollywood, Mary Rogers and Edgar Allen Poe didn't invent murder (that one goes to a guy named Cain) and Harold Robbins didn't invent sex. I know I'm on solid ground with that last one.

The only one I'm willing to concede is the last one: Arthur Conan Doyle probably did create Sherlock Holmes.

Because that's what authors do.

Updated May 4, 2008.

First things first

You won't find too many partisan political statements on this blog unless they come from commenters. But there is one thing I believe in: the idea behind the First Amendment.

People have the right to speak, write and think as they please.

Jeremiah Wright, Pat Robertson, and anyone else in the public realm may say things that are mean, stupid, wicked or offensive. They may also be speaking the truth -- uncomfortable truths that we would rather not hear. Whatever the case, if America means anything, it means that they have the right to speak.

We should be zealous in guarding that right.

The self-publishing phenomenon

It used to be hard thing to get your book published. Now it's not.

Rachel Danadio has an interesting essay, "You're an Author? Me Too," in the New York Times on the self-publishing phenomenon. And you get the feeling that she'd rather return to the good old days when agents and publishers and book review editors like Danadio had more control over the barricades:

In short, everyone has a story — and everyone wants to tell it. Fewer people may be reading, but everywhere you turn, Americans are sounding their barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world, as good old Walt Whitman, himself a self-published author, once put it.

Well, not everyone. Still, it's worth the read.

Review: The Last Casualty

• An Episcopal priest hears the confessions of a dying man. Get ready for a ride.

THE LAST CASUALTY, (Amazon) the latest thriller by Cyn Mobley, is like an Indiana Jones movie, a wild ride that never lets you catch your breath. David Dalt is a U.S. Navy Episcopal priest and an ex-SEAL -- except that apparently there are no ex-SEALs. (Just as Marines will tell you there are no ex-Marines.) Dalt is drawn back into the life when he hears the confession of a dying man. The man is a spy who has betrayed Dalt's old unit. Dalt's vows won't allow him to violate the confessional, but they can't stop him from trying to save his comrades.

It's a complex tale that moves at the pace of a speeding train.

Recommended.

(Disclosure, BSP: Cyn Mobley is a good friend. Her publishing company, Greyhoundbooks, will unleash my debut novel, Kill the Quarterback, sometime later this year.)

Wolhwend in the NYT

Good friend Chris Wohlwend has an article in the New York Times about University of Tennessee footballer Jackie Walker, one of the first black players for the Vols in the late sixties and early seventies. Walker's take is a sad one, but he finally getting some of the recognition that should have been his years ago. Congratulations to Chris on a fine article.

Good writing from a baseball insider

• When is the last time you called a major league baseball player a good writer?

Lots of talented authors have written superbly about baseball. Among all our national games, baseball is a game that lends itself easily to good wordsmiths. But rare among those smithies is an author who has played the game at the highest level. Now we have one.

Doug Glanville played major league baseball for nine years for the Chicago Cubs, Philadelphia Phillies and Texas Rangers. He is bringing all that experience to bear in a series of occasional pieces for the New York Times.

He is also bringing an easy, readable style that is all the more remarkable when you find out that he has an engineering degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

His latest offering, It Gets Lake Early Out There, is now on the New York Times web site. You can find links to his two previous pieces there, too.

Good column, good game, good stuff.

Eliot Spitzer as fiction

Novelist Richard Russo puts Eliot Spitzer into the realm of fictional hero -- or protagonist.


Some disagreement with Russo, but it's an interesting thought.

What if you wrote a novel about Eliot Spitzer? What would it look like?

That's the question that novelist Richard Russo considers in an interesting column in the March 16 in the Washington Post.

The news media, Russo says, have reduced the Spitzer story to a one-dimensional tale of hypocrisy outed, and while Russo didn't say this, they have thrown around the word "tragedy" a little freely. The real story of Spitzer is certainly as sad as it is surprising, but we would have to know more to bring it to the level of tragedy.

But what if we did know more? And what if, like a good novelist, we could make it up? That's what Russo does to some extent. First he considers the character of Spitzer himself.

But I don't mean to jigger the facts; fictive Eliot will do exactly what the real Eliot has done, only my guy almost never imagines getting caught. And when he does occasionally consider the possibility, he trusts that there will be ample warning that disaster is imminent. For the most part, things in his life have happened slowly, especially the good things, and he trusts that bad things will evolve similarly. He will swerve at the last moment. The possibility of a head-on collision, swift and devastating, simply never occurs to him.

Even worse, though he knows that the world doesn't work this way, he convinces himself that if he's caught, people will treat him fairly. Sure, he has shamed himself, but he's done a lot of good things, too, and people will remember that. He has always employed a kind of moral arithmetic, and he'll expect that same math to be applied to him -- all his virtues set up on one side of the ledger, his one weakness on the other. People will understand that he's mostly good. By the time my Eliot realizes that he's wrong about all this, it's too late. The damage is done. He has betrayed his wife, his children, his best self, and it's all his fault.

Russo goes on to talk about Spitzer's wife and family.

First, Eliot's wife -- and here I sense a mystery even deeper than the mystery of Eliot himself. Why does she stand there beside him at the podium when he confesses? Why do they all? I feel uniquely unqualified to look inside her heart, to ferret out her motives. I make a list of what I know (not much) and what I suspect (not much more) and wonder whether imagination will fill in all those blanks. I'm relatively certain of one thing: It's not this woman's fault. I won't portray her as frigid or otherwise complicit in what has transpired. She hasn't driven Eliot to any of this. I don't believe in perfection, but I've decided for the time being that she's been a good wife, a good mother.

Russo makes some interesting observations about how the story might play out. He gives Spitzer a sidekick who can inject a little humor into this tale. This would be a good character, as Russo conceives him. He can give Spitzer a different look at the world, as opposed to the self-center take he always has. Russo takes a look at Spitzer's daughters to see what effect their father's actions might have on them.

How does the story end? Here is where I would part company with what Russo has written.

There's also a story in which Eliot isn't even the main character. Because how believable is it, really, that they came across him by chance on that wiretap? His many enemies are justly famous as the dirtiest of tricksters. Maybe I should be writing a thriller, but I dislike and distrust plot-driven narrative and have grown fond of my own messed-up, untidy Eliot, so American in both his ambition and the disgrace that seems to flow from it so naturally. I might not know precisely why he's done what he's done, but he connects to my long-held conviction that people (in fiction, in life) aren't meant to be saints, or to be treated like saints. That's the hard lesson Hawthorne's Reverend Dimmesdale learned from the pulpit.

I'm not sure why Russo distrusts "plot-driven narrative." I'm not even sure what that means.

In my take, a good plot comes first, characters second. I can see Spitzer brooding about his losses and his own stupidity, searching for some redemption. But he doesn't brood for long. He acts in character. One storyline is that he has been set up. Someone somewhere has taken advantage of his foibles to do him in. Maybe there is ample justification, something we don't know yet. Spitzer goes on a quest to discover what he doesn't know.

I think I'd like to go with him.