Too easily overlooked in all this shuffling of personae is Plimpton’s great gift as a writer. “The Best of Plimpton” (368 pages. Atlantic Monthly Press. $21.95) should change that. Showcasing three decades of his work, this anthology shows Plimpton to be a quietly adroit stylist with the lightest touch since E. B. White.
While his contemporaries were off writing about war, sex and assorted other social upheavals, Plimpton was writing humorously and indelibly about taking the poet Marianne Moore to the World Series, playing the triangle with the New York Philharmonic, boxing heavyweight Archie Moore and visiting fireworks nut Orville Carlisle in his Norfolk, Neb., shoe store and fireworks museum (“Almost any loud noise in Norfolk is attributed to Orv”).
At 63, Plimpton doesn’t get around quite as much any more, but he still moves and talks with boyish animation. He’s lived in the same three-story Manhattan townhouse since the ’60s, sprawling digs that accommodate his living quarters, the offices of the Paris Review and a living room with both a splendid view of the East River and a pool table. In a quick interview late one afternoon - he finished while hurriedly climbing into formal gear for a black-tie engagement - Plimpton discussed his writing with beguiling deference. He managed to kill most of the time with anecdotes about other people. (Self-mockery, a trade-mark of Plimpton’s writing, is a conversational mainstay as well: asked about the trophies that crowd his shelves, he grinned and said, “As someone pointed out, they’re all for coming in second.”)
Plimpton attributes his humility to the fact that he grew up around so many good writers. “When I was in college, there was Michael Arlen. There was John Updike. Then I went to Paris and started the Paris Review with Harold Humes and Peter Matthiessen, and they were the writers.” To this day he jokingly tells Matthiessen, “I coulda been a contender if you hadn’t stuck me with the Paris Review.” Still, he seems in earnest when he says, " When your contemporaries are William Styron, James Jones, Peter Matthiessen, I mean, it’s fairly intimidating. There’s always been this sense in my psyche that I’m an editor, not a writer." Inevitably, Plimpton’s most durable role has been as an amateur gamely contending against professionals.
But his chronicles of these adventures - he calls it “participatory journalism” - are anything but amateurish. Lighthearted, yes, and usually funny, but done with an almost religious sense of purpose. “The idea of going out and pitching in Yankee Stadium is sort of dilettantish, but the point is, it may not be a serious thing on the surface, but in actual fact it’s a method of trying to understand something of what it’s like to be a baseball player. I write these things with enormous care and attention, scared half to death.”
In fact, it is only Plimpton’s premise that is lighthearted. His famous account of pitching against a National League lineup, for example, is a document of surreal torment, a portrait of a man falling apart in the middle of Yankee Stadium: every boy’s dream becomes Everyman’s nightmare. Plimpton’s subject is passion, whether he finds it in the major leagues, in a man who catches grapes in his mouth or in a bespectacled boy playing football. Writing about Alex Karras’s Pony League football team of 9- and 10-year-old boys, Plimpton focused on a diminutive lineman called Popper, a feckless but fierce athlete who talked to himself. “If Popper could play the game he talks,” Karras told Plimpton, “no one else would walk out on the field; they’d all go home and hide in their basements.” While Popper failed to distinguish himself in the course of the game (“I ran away”), in Plimpton’s eyes he wound up “the hero of the piece” all the same, thanks to his zeal.
In the last piece in the book, Plimpton’s eulogy for his father, he writes, “In their letters of condolence so many have mentioned meeting Father for the first time - and of the pleasure and surprise of running into such an inquiring, attentive, humorous, and courtly mind.” Like father, like son, in person or in print.
[They] stared out from beneath the rims of their helmets with enormous, gentle eyes and their high voices, clear as whistles, were as unferocious as bird calls in the evening.
GEORGE PLIMPTON ON A SQUAD OF 9- AND 10-YEAR-OLD FOOTBALL PLAYERS
