Charyn’s Art of Staying Alive

Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins

By Jerome Charyn

(Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001, $24)

Reviewed by Tim Boggan, USATT Historian

Charyn’s Art of Staying Alive
“…wasn’t I also a confidence man, tricking people, blowing wool over their eyes, asking them to take some mystery tour…?”

This unique book by Jerome Charyn, which I hasten to say I recommend, is about ping-pong, yes, but, more entertainingly to me – something of a pongiste and table tennis insider whose writings Jerry has borrowed liberally from – the sizzle has less to do with the Game and more to do with the Writer. For the most part, the table tennis history sections of the book, including “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” and the backgrounds of Ruth Aarons, Dick Miles, and Marty Reisman, at home or abroad, I’m of course already very familiar with, as are doubtless those who view the USATT Website – but the interviews with Dr. Jean-Francois Kahn, the International Table Tennis Federation’s Sports Science Chair, and Jerry’s account of his visit to see Michel Glikman, the 1931 French Champion, plus some of the historic photos, particularly one of young Miles as he graduated from the 8^th grade, were to me new and welcome. What most interested me, though, in this “tale of two cities” (New York and Paris), is Charyn’s permeating image of himself as a writer cum ping-pong player…as presented through an often romanticized and somewhat schizoid persona. This for me is the soul of the book.

Let it be said that, though the uninitiate reader might not realize it, Charyn, as a table tennis writer, is an outsider. ITTF President Sharara’s name is spelled Shakara; World and Olympic Champions Kong Linghui and Liu Guoliang are rendered as Kong Linhgui and Lui Guoliang, Lou Pagliaro, who’s shown in a great action shot on the cover of the book, is referred to not as “Paggy” but “Pagi,” Reisman’s Club at 96^th and Broadway is said erroneously to be the “Riverside” Club (but Bobby Gusikoff, who for a decade ran the rival 73rd St. Riverside Plaza Hotel Club, where Miles played, is never mentioned, and his once popular Club, called inaccurately “a poor man’s Marty Reisman’s,” is subsumed under a later guise as “Morris’ club on West Seventy-third Street…in the basement of the Ansonia [Hotel]”), and there are a number of other mistakes – all of which inadvertently make a valid point: namely, that Charyn doesn’t really care to be a table tennis insider.

Let it be said, too, that Charyn’s “I” persona, who I often think of as a fictional stand-in, a double for the author, certainly considers himself an outsider – in fact, is pleased to be a “mongrel,” a “wanderer,” a “vagabond,” a “voyager,” a “fellow outlaw” welcomed into “Reisman’s band.” To Charyn, Reisman, whom he’s also dependent on for quite a bit of background in this book, is a USATT-outlaw hero. “The Needle,” Charyn’s fictional appellation for Marty, suggests a criminal sub-culture?

What engages me in this always readable book is the way Charyn (who, like all fact/fiction writers, really is a confidence man taking us on tour), has romanticized his persona to reflect “neurosis, rebellion, creativity, and criminality” – all attributes of he who comes to Paris to write (a la Hemingway), and also to fiercely play table tennis as a way of saying, like Miles and Reisman, “no to the dominant culture.” Indeed, it’s these four attributes of the writer/player, which in a moment I’ll take up one by one, that gives some cohesion to what otherwise has to be considered a hodge-podge of a stimulating book. For Charyn, the “Art of Staying Alive” (as he sub-titles his book), has surely as much to do with writing, how that flies, as with the bounce of the ball off his pippled racket.

Which is not to say that Jerry, who says he’s ranked "11013" in France, doesn’t very much enjoy the Game – I’ve played with him, and he does. It’s just that he enjoys writing more. The writer/ping-pong player analogy is inescapable: “What had given me the edge,” he says, “was my own unorthodoxy. I played like no one else. And I felt a kind of kinship between table tennis and my scribbling, which had its own wild side….”

So, from the opening page, Charyn sets up a dream. Ah, he says after his seduction in the art of ping-pong in that Edenic orchard of the farmer’s daughter, if only at 10 I’d had a Club to go to, where I could play and train. “I wouldn’t have had to lock myself inside a jungle growth of words. I’d have had fifty years of continuous ping-pong, not the broken banisters and rails of a writer’s craft.” But then, Jerry, you wouldn’t have written this book, or some 30 others, right?

Still, is the dream lost? Will Jerry admit it is? Or not? What can we believe? The “I” in this book both deprecates and prides himself on his play (as he does with regard to his writing – being both a scribbler, and, as he tells Miles, a pro). Though he admits that, relatively speaking, he doesn’t play ping-pong all that well, he can’t romantically resist telling us how, again and again, first with his special sandpaper racket, then with his revered pips, he gets the better of players, including a local champ he’s named Lord Byron. Throughout, he’s a fanatic player. “I live for the sound of the ball” he’s told us – this “musketeer” who, on taking “his picot out of its sheath,” is ready to engage in a duality of life and death. Has he really lost his dream? En garde, says this swordsman of clever words – for now the question is: Can his pips and prose make us a believer!

The first attribute of Charyn as writer/player is neurosis (like Reisman, he had a period of nervous breakdown in his youth). We see this most prominently in the “Hemingway’s Room” and “The Left-Handed Gun” chapters. Having lunch with Dr. Kahn, “the official doctor of the French national team,” Charyn learns that world-class table tennis is “violent to the body,” that those who play a lot begin to have “isometric contraction in the legs” –and now Charyn’s “I” says he begins to feel old. When he hears Dr. Kahn’s position that older people (Charyn is 64) shouldn’t play competitively because of “stress,” “buildup of blood pressure,” and thus the risk of “heart strain,” he says (and do you believe him?) “I couldn’t finish my salmon steak.” Being starved of psychic (table tennis) nourishment, he perversely orders “a double scoop of coffee ice cream.”

Relief comes in talking with two U.S. doctors who do play competitively: Dr. Michael Scott, and especially Dr. Steve Horowitz, who warns against geriatric depression, or, as Charyn puts it, “mental and physical paralysis” a la the suicidal Hemingway. In one of the “Ping-Pong Diplomacy” chapters, Jerry will sympathize with U.S. Team member John Tannehill’s anxieties in China, and record my own feeling that, burdened with responsibility, I was “sometimes near paralysis,” for, says Charyn, who is left-handed, the “Americans were like a bunch of left-handers lost in a right-handed world.” More pressure for Charyn, too, in that he says he “developed nyctophobia – a fear of night – only on the nights I had to play.” Also, he says, he “developed agoraphobia…couldn’t seem to go to a match.” We see him play and panic, yet, with the help of his coach, win. As a left-hander, he broods over the fact that “89 percent of us are ‘six times more likely to die from causes initiated by accident-related injuries.’” My god, it’s positively heroic for him to be playing cut-throat table tennis.

The second attribute is rebellion. Right off, Charyn speaks of attending Columbia

College in 1955, where “I had to spend most of my afternoons at NROTC headquarters, tolerating curses, advice, and fingers in my chest from the Marine corporal who was meant to groom us and make us into perfect cadets.” No surprise that eventually he was “court-martialed.” Then he worked “with freshmen at Stanford University on a government project that suffered from a fit of creative insanity” – he “failed the project.” Later, he’ll end a chapter by saying, “I’d banished myself, one more Billy the Kid, a left-handed gun.” He gives special attention to the neurotic chessmaster Bobby Fischer (left-handed?), a ping-pong enthusiast who went for “his opponent’s jugular,” though ping-pong was not for him, or for Charyn, his rebellious primary calling (“words could annihilate, could kill, the way Bobby Fischer could kill with some ultimate leap of his imagination”). And of course one of those he dedicates the book to is the “indifferent to the world” player/writer Miles, whom he describes as searching for “his own land of musketeers” as he climbed “Lawrence’s rickety stairs.” Dick, for Jerry the quintessential outsider, the USTTA “bad boy,” in just six words dismissed this Charyn book: “very boring material, very lackluster writing.”

The third attribute is creativity, and this is most apparent in Jerry’s subtle selection. For example, I have to think that Jerry, in asking Dr. Kahn to come for that Paris luncheon interview, deliberately chose La Coupole so he could use this setting in the book – could describe the restauarant and the mythic associations it had for him and all those Parisians who knew of the artist’s model, Kiki of Montparnasse, who flirted with Hemingway, or that “Sartre ate lunch [here] with Simone de Beauvoir.”

Understandably, writers are a band Jerry wants to be, and is proud to be, a part of. He opens the book with Melville’s opening of Moby Dick, compares himself to a Kafka character, thinks of blind Milton after he’s been bothered by the glare of gym lights, speaks of himself and Henry Miller as “modern Tom Sawyers and Hucklberry Finns. (Miller, he deems, a “fiendish” ping-pong player at 80, one whom he immortalizes by claiming that, in a “meditative, ‘very Zen’” way, Miller,  “immortalized” the Game.)

The fourth attribute is criminality. As a boy, he had to “steal a game whenever I could.” His first racket, a sandpaper one, “I swiped…from a YMCA in the East Bronx.” At Reisman’s, says Jerry, “I fell in with a gang” – “a gang of serious players.” He’s indebted to Miles and Reisman “and that New York pride and stubbornness, which is close to criminality.” As readers who don’t know about them will see, Dick and Marty represented Manhattan, the fabled Lawrence’s Club (described, via the film “Casablanca” – Cheryn’s persona loves “intrigue” – as a “Rick’s Café”). Miles and Reisman, says Jerry, were exiled “creatures of the night.” He makes seemingly gratuitous reference to a top U.S. player who “would do time” as a criminal. He himself thinks that being a pongiste is “my cocaine and my honeydew” (the Romantic poet Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” high). Later, he will say, like Michel Glikman (aka “Michael French” when he appeared on stage with Ruth Aarons), we all wear masks. He reflects, however, that “perhaps I wasn’t as much of a criminal as I thought.” The book ends with Jerry’s visit to INSEP, France’s school for champions, where he meets still another “voyager” – the “wandering coach” Milan Stencil, who smiles “like some Mafia don” – and where he, Charyn, delights in filching a 40 mm Tibhar ball (with which come January he’ll hope to pocket a tournament?).

So, what to believe about this book, part fact, part fiction – how assess it? As always, when we read about how a serious writer stays alive, we go, as I’ve done here, to his words. “I hunt in the wildlands,” Charyn says, “the white spaces between each sentence. But I wouldn’t be much of a hunter without my picot.” Well, yes, at least in this book – for it’s his racket that serves as a sort of baton for the soothing “language” of ping-pong, “the ineffable music of its motions.” It’s also his fairy-tale wand to cut an arc, spin a romantic readiness over that which threatens every writer – the “closing down”: the “terrible isolation” of anonymity and oblivion.