Last Days of Roger Federer - Geoff Dyer

There isn't much about tennis in Geoff Dyer's latest book, and most of the tennis talk it does contain focuses not on Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, or Novak Djokovic, but on the aches and pains that Dyer himself has been experiencing on the court more severely than ever as he presses on past his sixtieth birthday. 

But Dyer still loves to play, and his boyish enthusiasm extends far beyond the tennis court. In this longish ramble through the back pages of cultural history Dyer examines the later careers of individuals as diverse as Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Turner—the painter, not the soul singer—but he has no difficulty throwing in de Chirico,  Bob Dylan, D. H. Lawrence, Phillip Larkin, John Coltrane, John Berger,  Jean Rhys, Eve Babitz, and many other artists and thinkers alongside them, while also keeping his own experiences firmly in view. The musings trip along, returning to their ostensible "theme"—how advancing age has affected the creations of this or that individual, and of Dyer himself—almost surreptitiously, and sometimes not at all.

Dyer isn't advancing a pet theory of aging, however—how dull that would be!—or offering words of warning or encouragement or advice.  He's observing, reporting, speculating, in a narrative style that, because it shifts its focus so often and so abruptly,  never becomes ponderous. On one page we're wandering the streets of Turin with Dyer in search of Nietzsche's ghost, and a few pages later we're in the Nevada desert at Burning Man, where Dyer had sworn he would never return ... until he went again, seduced by the invitation to appear in a documentary about the annual event.

This has always been Dyer's style. Here the passages are numbered and divided into four or five unnamed sections. The connecting links are often intuitive or non-existent, but when an author knows his or her material well, such a method can hardly be bettered, as subterranean connections rise to the surface and assert themselves. Similar examples of the same approach that come to mind are Evan S. Connell's Son of the Morning Star, Wolfgang Hildesheimer's Mozart, Karen Olsson's The Weil Conjectures, and Adam Zagejewski's Slight Exaggeration. 

But there's a difference. Those other works are all about something rather specific. Dyer's grand exercise in thinking out loud is about all sorts of things, from train travel to painting to literature to tennis—and on to the hip-hop being played on the boom-box at the basketball court next to tennis court number 6 (which you don't really want to play on) and even how the smell of marijuana, wafting his way from that basketball court, has changed over the years.

Though Dyer doesn't claim to be an expert on any of material he examines, he's certainly done plenty of research, and he flits back and forth between areas of focus expertly, like a hummingbird among the foxgloves. If there is one bloom he returns to a little too often, perhaps it would be Nietzsche's theory of the Eternal Return. This is the notion that we are all doomed to live our lives over and over in exactly the same way an endless number of times. There is no evidence that this is the case, however, and if there were, that evidence would vitiate the theory, because it would suggest that we have memories of our previous lives, making the current one different from the ones we've lived before. In short, the theory is illogical and conceptually ridiculous, though it does serve to convey the sense that even the most spirited among us must have occasionally of the grinding sameness of things.

Would Dyer take an interest in my little critique. I doubt it. At one point he writes:

In 1910, at the age of twenty-one, de Chirico wrote to a friend, I am the only man to have truly understood Nietzsche—all of my work demonstrates this.’ The claim to exclusive comprehension is some­thing all readers of Nietzsche will recognize, one of the things we all have in common. If you don’t feel this way you haven’t experienced Nietzsche at all; you’ve only studied him.

Dyer also seems to be somewhat out of his league when analyzing the appeal of Beethoven's late string quartets. He admits that writing about music can be hard when you don't know the technical terminology, and on the whole his judgments here seem a bit second-hand. But he makes good use of the biographical material, and we can give him credit for scouring Adorno's unfinished book on the subject for insights. Dyer reveals himself here (and elsewhere) as a working class Joe who yearns to absorb whatever's sublime and expressive in both life and art, with the drive and the smarts to do so and the candor to make his quest sound funny, and ring true. It's a rare gift.

Near the end of the book, Dyer confesses that his original plan had been to do a collective study of three roughly contemporary nineteenth century artists working in different fields each of whom developed a widely recognized "late" style, perhaps in the manner of Jacques Barzun's Darwin, Marx, Wagner. He soon settled on Beethoven and Turner, but had trouble finding a writer of roughly the same period who fit the bill.

This has allowed him to make use of his original research while also sifting through and processing  a much wider field of creative endeavors--including tennis!--in constructing the book he actually wrote.

Dyer spends quite a bit of time, for example, describing the plot-lines of specific films, from Robert Redford's All is Lost to those old-fashioned British classics Brief Encounter and Colonel Blimp, (which made him cry).  He discusses the significance of the American artist Albert Bierstadt's painting "The Last Buffalo" and describes the profound impact of a Clash concert he heard in 1988, adding that he can hardly bear to hang on to the end of one of their songs today.

In one section he reflects on all the canonical novels he read as a young man without really comprehending, and those he simply could not finish, "great" though they were purported to be.

"Just because something's a classic doesn't mean it's any good ...  My Penguin Modern Classics edition of a certain book quotes Walter Allen's opinion that 'a good case could be made out for considering it the greatest novel in English of the twentieth century.' Since that's an experience no one in their right mind would want to miss out on I will milk the suspense no longer: it's Nostromo, a book I waded through forty years ago, when I had the stamina of a youthful ox and the dumb faith of a bespectacled lamb, a book that has stayed with me because nothing I have read since has been quite as boring as Nos-frigging-tromo. That's not true, obviously, but the horror, the horror of trudging through Nostromo is something not easily forgotten. 

(I presume the reference here to Conrad's Heart of Darkness—the horror, the horror— is not merely coincidental.)

 At another point Dyer describes in some detail his waning enthusiasm for smoking marijuana, a passage that concludes:

Anyway, that's all in the past now. I just don't like marijuana anymore and at some level I can scarcely even remember what it was like when being stoned lit up the world, releasing the latent glow of things. It's difficult not to feel, like Wordsworth, that 'there has passed away a glory from the earth.' which is not at all the way to feel in California, the land of glory, one of the last places on earth where the glory fades each day, where everything glows, where the blue sky that shows nothing—though whether sky this blue can be counted as nothing remains a moot point—is nowhere and is endless. 

In the end, Dyer's interest in tennis takes him far beyond Roger Federer's career to those of earlier stars who eventually flamed out, as all athletes must:

Sampras seems to be a champion who was utterly unfazed by life after tennis. Borg, in his untutored way, was heir to some non-specific Scandinavian malaise: an all-court jumble of Hamlet, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, and Strindberg, held in check during the course of his career by a sweaty headband (or, conceivably, caused by the headband?)

In a book full of judgments delivered almost in passing, no reader is going to agree with them all. Dyer likes Keith Jarrett's noodling solo piano recordings for ECM more than I do; he's less enamored of James Salter's exquisite sentences that I am, and even goes so far as to suggest that Salter's first book is his best—a judgment with which few readers will agree.

Dyer's passing enthusiasms are many:

"If you don't find [Joy Williams] funny then there's no point even having a sense of humor."

And he cannot resist the occasional zinger:

"I read somewhere that W.H. Auden believed he was always the youngest person in the room—quite an achievement given the state of that thousand-year-old face ..." 

And how about this one?

"No one wants to be lectured at once a lecture is over. In Milosz's case he sort of converses with the reader from on high, as if that's where he habitually dwelt. It's not even self-regarding; it's more a well marinated assumption of the high regard in which he is held. Fair enough, you might say, the guy won the Nobel Prize. How could I forget, given that he mentions it so often?"

 In short, Dyer's ruminations are all over the map, and the book might fairly be described as a romp. This may be because Dyer has become adept at following his own advice: "After a stage in a man's life—especially if a degree of eminence has been achieved—it is essential that he retain some residue of how he saw the world as a fourteen-year-old."