Mr. Reindeer
White Lodge
- Apr 13, 2022
- 924
- 2,014
I’m jumping ahead a bit in my Frost literary marathon, as Before I Wake is apparently not on Kindle, and my physical copy from Amazon took awhile to arrive. Rather than break stride, I figured I’d move on to his next book, and his first nonfiction work.
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been dreading a bit hitting this stretch of Frost’s bibliography. I’m the type of person who would have a difficult time naming anything that bores me more than watching a golf match on TV; but reading about a golf match, well, that seems potentially even duller. This is probably a big part of the reason I haven’t embarked on this read-through sooner…I’ve been meaning to read Frost’s books for awhile, but I knew that when I did it, I’d have to be all-in, because that’s just how I roll. And reading three books about golf just was not an appealing proposition.
Golf, of course, plays its role in Twin Peaks. There’s Cooper’s hypnotic zen golf monologue, which puts Jacoby into a trance and puts Harry to sleep, in Episode 10 (credited to Robert Engels). Episode 15 (written by Mark’s brother Scott) is a veritable ode to the game, with Leland practicing his indoor putting, transporting Maddie in his golf bag, and nearly braining Cooper with a club. And let’s not ignore the significance of The Return having eighteen parts, the same as the number of holes on a golf course. Coincidence? I think not. (OK, OK, I’m kidding.)
Frost’s deep and abiding love for the game was inherited from his maternal grandfather, Dr. Douglas Calhoun (for whom the hospital in Twin Peaks was named). Grandpa Doug was also the one who first told Mark the story of Francis Ouimet’s victory in the 1913 U.S. Open, which makes up the backbone of this book. The story came back to Frost decades later during a 2001 plane trip with his literary agent, the late Ed Victor. Victor (to whom Frost dedicated several of his books, most notably the heartfelt posthumous dedication in Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier) was probably the most famous literary agent in the world, perhaps best known for representing Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency)…and the fact that chronic procrastinator Adams ever got a word written down on a page is a credit to Victor (as well as Adams’s various editors, who literally had to imprison him in hotel rooms and force him to write after numerous blown deadlines). Victor repped celebrity authors from Mel Brooks to Eric Clapton. An American expatriate famed for his star-studded London parties, Victor seems to have come into Frost’s orbit during the early days of Twin Peaks, and he was involved in getting The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and the other ’90s Peaks tie-in books made, before encouraging Frost to follow his dream of becoming an author himself beginning with The List of Seven. On this occasion in 2001, Frost and Victor were on a transcontinental flight to NY, on a golfing vacation to tour several Long Island courses. Frost himself had introduced Victor to the sport in 1995. Appropriately enough to the purpose of their journey, the story of Ouimet’s U.S. Open triumph came to Frost, and he told the story to Victor as best as he could remember it: Working-class kid grows up across the street from a country club (literally named the Country Club—apparently this is the place that led to the generic term entering common parlance), falls in love with the game watching his social betters play from a distance, becomes a caddie, works for years to perfect his game (sneaking around during early morning hours, as caddies aren’t allowed to play on the course), and becomes the first amateur to win the Open, defeating his role model, right there at the Country Club, within shouting distance of his family’s front porch. It’s an irresistible feel-good story, and Victor immediately perked up and convinced Frost, who had just been making idle chit-chat, that this should be his next book.
While I did have some difficulty initially investing in the book, Frost eases the unconverted in with a few deft early passages where he reflects on the appeal of golf in a way that acknowledges many of the complaints people like me routinely make about the sport, and explains the draw he feels to the game in a way that was infectious enough to make me go along for the ride. He has described his trilogy of golf books as “social commentary masquerading as sports books,” and while this may be overstating things a bit, class inequality is certainly a major theme of the book, and that element did interest me a great deal and gave me something to hold onto in the early chapters, as I was getting to know the many personalities being introduced. In particular, it was very interesting to learn how much professional golfers on both sides of the Atlantic were looked down upon. While the wealthy class, who competed as amateurs, loved to watch the pros play at their high level, the pros were seen as entertainment and nothing more, sort of similarly I suppose to how black jazz musicians were treated just a few years later. The fact that these men excelled at the game the wealthy amateurs so loved didn’t earn the pros any respect: they were restricted from using most of the facilities at the clubs where they played. The idea of earning money from sport was inherently distasteful, evoking the notion of a seedy low-life wanderer not too different from a roving professional gambler, seemingly. (Never mind that many of the aristocrats who looked down their noses at this source of income had never actually earned anything for themselves at all!) Even to this day, apparently, as residue of this class system, amateurs’ names in tournaments are written with the honorific “Mr.” preceding their names, whereas professionals are not accorded this respect. This sort of treatment was really interesting and eye-opening to me from a modern perspective, given that things have gone full-scale topsy-turvy in the exact opposite direction, with professional athletes nowadays as some of the most absurdly overcompensated and admired people on the planet.
As the book progressed and I got to know the central characters better—particularly the charmingly guileless protagonist Francis Ouimet—it became easier to get invested in the golf stakes, since they mattered to the characters. Frost sketches Ouimet and the other figures—the unshakeable Harry Vardon (I don’t know if Frost coined the word “Vardonic” to describe Harry’s smile or if that came from the contemporary press, but it’s brilliant); unflappable rakish wisecracker (and future champion) Walter Hagen; patriotic hothead and habitual nervous wreck Johnny McDermott; and the many others—with, as Frost himself has said, a dramatist’s eye. Frost confessed that he approached the book not as an historian or journalist first and foremost, but as a dramatist. That’s not to discount the tremendous amount of research Frost did to ensure the accuracy of the book, reading every contemporary published account, as well as all the private papers of the people concerned that he could get his hands on. However, despite the painstaking research, there are moments where Frost portrays dialogue exchanges and even interior thoughts of characters that seem to be created from whole cloth, in a way that would feel more appropriate to a play or film dramatization, but feels somewhat jarring in a nonfiction book, even as it simultaneously feels welcome, helping as it does to foreground the humanity of the characters and the relationships and to aid the reader’s immersion in the scene. This is a complaint David Owen raises in his mostly positive review for The New York Times, and Frost anticipates this criticism in a short section at the back of the book entitled “A Note on the Writing,” where he preemptively endeavors to justify his approach. I agree with Owen, who admits the strategy has its merit, but wishes that Frost would have cited his sources so the reader would know where he is taking liberties. For instance, Frost has said that all the conversations between Francis and his ten-year-old caddie Eddie Lowery—in many ways the central relationship of the latter half of the book—came from Eddie’s own personal papers, which were provided to Frost by Eddie’s daughter. Citing to that kind of thing in a footnote or endnote would have made the book even more fascinating, as opposed to leaving the reader to wonder whether Frost simply made up those conversations.
Part One of the book (roughly the first third) is made up of alternating chapters tracing the early lives and golf careers of Harry Vardon and Francis Ouimet, and to a lesser extent the various other pros and amateurs in their orbits. I’ll admit, I sometimes got a bit overwhelmed by all the minutiae in the backstories: the various competitions, amateur, pro, British, American, which titles had been won by whom, the various animosities and ambitions of the players, etc. Among the most effective passages in this first section is a portion where Harry insists on finishing the 1903 British Open despite a debilitating illness (eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis) that has him coughing up blood and barely able to stand except when he steps onto the course and gains the super-human strength that allows him to win the Open, at tremendous cost to his long-term health. Harry’s brother Tom is a poignant figure here and throughout the book: a passionate and talented golfer himself but of clearly lesser ability than his brother, amiable, content to always live in his brother’s shadow, always focused on helping his brother’s game, even when Tom is competing alongside him, self-possessed enough to accept his role as a supportive aid, never destined for greatness of his own.
Part Two is where the book really takes off. All the central figures having been introduced and the stage set, the 1913 U.S. Open is recounted in detail, and Frost’s passion for the game and his skillful descriptions and characterizations manage to wring enough drama from the proceedings to have me invested. The interesting thing is, unlike many of these sports dramas, there’s no real bad guy: Everyone in the competition has been fleshed out as a “character,” and as presented by Frost, they’re all likable and sympathetic in their own ways. We’re not rooting against anyone, but we’re rooting for Francis…and by the end, so are even most of his rivals, to greater or lesser degrees. While “feel-good underdog sports drama” is not even close to being my favorite genre, it’s tough not to smile when reading about Francis’s mother, sitting on the porch hearing cheers from across the street, until she finally can’t contain herself and has to go watch her son, guided through the crowd by neighborhood boys yelling, “Let her through! We got his mother here!” It’s just wholesome, sweet stuff.
While the three-way Saturday morning playoff that gives Francis his win is the climax of the story, the most effective portion of the book for me is the two preceding chapters, chronicling Friday’s gameplay in the midst of an all-day deluge. Extreme weather is always a visceral way to set an atmosphere and draw the reader into the scene, and Frost does this very effectively throughout this sustained portion of the book, making the reader feel every bone-chilling gust of wind and soggy ball-devouring patch of mud as the players (even the English who are used to terrible weather) battle the elements and try to reconsider their strategies on each hole with the drastically altered circumstances of play.
Along the way, there are also some fascinating historical interjections about everything from the evolution of the materials used to make golf balls (including an unlikely influence from Vishnu) to the strange evolution of the term “bogie,” as well as a prolonged stage-setting chapter where Frost lays out the world of 1913, including the political landscape (he clarifies that he really likes Teddy Roosevelt, so I apparently misread what I thought was Frost’s condemnation of Teddy’s imperialism in The Six Messiahs).
I’m not going to lie, I’ve been dreading a bit hitting this stretch of Frost’s bibliography. I’m the type of person who would have a difficult time naming anything that bores me more than watching a golf match on TV; but reading about a golf match, well, that seems potentially even duller. This is probably a big part of the reason I haven’t embarked on this read-through sooner…I’ve been meaning to read Frost’s books for awhile, but I knew that when I did it, I’d have to be all-in, because that’s just how I roll. And reading three books about golf just was not an appealing proposition.
Golf, of course, plays its role in Twin Peaks. There’s Cooper’s hypnotic zen golf monologue, which puts Jacoby into a trance and puts Harry to sleep, in Episode 10 (credited to Robert Engels). Episode 15 (written by Mark’s brother Scott) is a veritable ode to the game, with Leland practicing his indoor putting, transporting Maddie in his golf bag, and nearly braining Cooper with a club. And let’s not ignore the significance of The Return having eighteen parts, the same as the number of holes on a golf course. Coincidence? I think not. (OK, OK, I’m kidding.)
Frost’s deep and abiding love for the game was inherited from his maternal grandfather, Dr. Douglas Calhoun (for whom the hospital in Twin Peaks was named). Grandpa Doug was also the one who first told Mark the story of Francis Ouimet’s victory in the 1913 U.S. Open, which makes up the backbone of this book. The story came back to Frost decades later during a 2001 plane trip with his literary agent, the late Ed Victor. Victor (to whom Frost dedicated several of his books, most notably the heartfelt posthumous dedication in Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier) was probably the most famous literary agent in the world, perhaps best known for representing Douglas Adams (Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency)…and the fact that chronic procrastinator Adams ever got a word written down on a page is a credit to Victor (as well as Adams’s various editors, who literally had to imprison him in hotel rooms and force him to write after numerous blown deadlines). Victor repped celebrity authors from Mel Brooks to Eric Clapton. An American expatriate famed for his star-studded London parties, Victor seems to have come into Frost’s orbit during the early days of Twin Peaks, and he was involved in getting The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer and the other ’90s Peaks tie-in books made, before encouraging Frost to follow his dream of becoming an author himself beginning with The List of Seven. On this occasion in 2001, Frost and Victor were on a transcontinental flight to NY, on a golfing vacation to tour several Long Island courses. Frost himself had introduced Victor to the sport in 1995. Appropriately enough to the purpose of their journey, the story of Ouimet’s U.S. Open triumph came to Frost, and he told the story to Victor as best as he could remember it: Working-class kid grows up across the street from a country club (literally named the Country Club—apparently this is the place that led to the generic term entering common parlance), falls in love with the game watching his social betters play from a distance, becomes a caddie, works for years to perfect his game (sneaking around during early morning hours, as caddies aren’t allowed to play on the course), and becomes the first amateur to win the Open, defeating his role model, right there at the Country Club, within shouting distance of his family’s front porch. It’s an irresistible feel-good story, and Victor immediately perked up and convinced Frost, who had just been making idle chit-chat, that this should be his next book.
While I did have some difficulty initially investing in the book, Frost eases the unconverted in with a few deft early passages where he reflects on the appeal of golf in a way that acknowledges many of the complaints people like me routinely make about the sport, and explains the draw he feels to the game in a way that was infectious enough to make me go along for the ride. He has described his trilogy of golf books as “social commentary masquerading as sports books,” and while this may be overstating things a bit, class inequality is certainly a major theme of the book, and that element did interest me a great deal and gave me something to hold onto in the early chapters, as I was getting to know the many personalities being introduced. In particular, it was very interesting to learn how much professional golfers on both sides of the Atlantic were looked down upon. While the wealthy class, who competed as amateurs, loved to watch the pros play at their high level, the pros were seen as entertainment and nothing more, sort of similarly I suppose to how black jazz musicians were treated just a few years later. The fact that these men excelled at the game the wealthy amateurs so loved didn’t earn the pros any respect: they were restricted from using most of the facilities at the clubs where they played. The idea of earning money from sport was inherently distasteful, evoking the notion of a seedy low-life wanderer not too different from a roving professional gambler, seemingly. (Never mind that many of the aristocrats who looked down their noses at this source of income had never actually earned anything for themselves at all!) Even to this day, apparently, as residue of this class system, amateurs’ names in tournaments are written with the honorific “Mr.” preceding their names, whereas professionals are not accorded this respect. This sort of treatment was really interesting and eye-opening to me from a modern perspective, given that things have gone full-scale topsy-turvy in the exact opposite direction, with professional athletes nowadays as some of the most absurdly overcompensated and admired people on the planet.
As the book progressed and I got to know the central characters better—particularly the charmingly guileless protagonist Francis Ouimet—it became easier to get invested in the golf stakes, since they mattered to the characters. Frost sketches Ouimet and the other figures—the unshakeable Harry Vardon (I don’t know if Frost coined the word “Vardonic” to describe Harry’s smile or if that came from the contemporary press, but it’s brilliant); unflappable rakish wisecracker (and future champion) Walter Hagen; patriotic hothead and habitual nervous wreck Johnny McDermott; and the many others—with, as Frost himself has said, a dramatist’s eye. Frost confessed that he approached the book not as an historian or journalist first and foremost, but as a dramatist. That’s not to discount the tremendous amount of research Frost did to ensure the accuracy of the book, reading every contemporary published account, as well as all the private papers of the people concerned that he could get his hands on. However, despite the painstaking research, there are moments where Frost portrays dialogue exchanges and even interior thoughts of characters that seem to be created from whole cloth, in a way that would feel more appropriate to a play or film dramatization, but feels somewhat jarring in a nonfiction book, even as it simultaneously feels welcome, helping as it does to foreground the humanity of the characters and the relationships and to aid the reader’s immersion in the scene. This is a complaint David Owen raises in his mostly positive review for The New York Times, and Frost anticipates this criticism in a short section at the back of the book entitled “A Note on the Writing,” where he preemptively endeavors to justify his approach. I agree with Owen, who admits the strategy has its merit, but wishes that Frost would have cited his sources so the reader would know where he is taking liberties. For instance, Frost has said that all the conversations between Francis and his ten-year-old caddie Eddie Lowery—in many ways the central relationship of the latter half of the book—came from Eddie’s own personal papers, which were provided to Frost by Eddie’s daughter. Citing to that kind of thing in a footnote or endnote would have made the book even more fascinating, as opposed to leaving the reader to wonder whether Frost simply made up those conversations.
Part One of the book (roughly the first third) is made up of alternating chapters tracing the early lives and golf careers of Harry Vardon and Francis Ouimet, and to a lesser extent the various other pros and amateurs in their orbits. I’ll admit, I sometimes got a bit overwhelmed by all the minutiae in the backstories: the various competitions, amateur, pro, British, American, which titles had been won by whom, the various animosities and ambitions of the players, etc. Among the most effective passages in this first section is a portion where Harry insists on finishing the 1903 British Open despite a debilitating illness (eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis) that has him coughing up blood and barely able to stand except when he steps onto the course and gains the super-human strength that allows him to win the Open, at tremendous cost to his long-term health. Harry’s brother Tom is a poignant figure here and throughout the book: a passionate and talented golfer himself but of clearly lesser ability than his brother, amiable, content to always live in his brother’s shadow, always focused on helping his brother’s game, even when Tom is competing alongside him, self-possessed enough to accept his role as a supportive aid, never destined for greatness of his own.
Part Two is where the book really takes off. All the central figures having been introduced and the stage set, the 1913 U.S. Open is recounted in detail, and Frost’s passion for the game and his skillful descriptions and characterizations manage to wring enough drama from the proceedings to have me invested. The interesting thing is, unlike many of these sports dramas, there’s no real bad guy: Everyone in the competition has been fleshed out as a “character,” and as presented by Frost, they’re all likable and sympathetic in their own ways. We’re not rooting against anyone, but we’re rooting for Francis…and by the end, so are even most of his rivals, to greater or lesser degrees. While “feel-good underdog sports drama” is not even close to being my favorite genre, it’s tough not to smile when reading about Francis’s mother, sitting on the porch hearing cheers from across the street, until she finally can’t contain herself and has to go watch her son, guided through the crowd by neighborhood boys yelling, “Let her through! We got his mother here!” It’s just wholesome, sweet stuff.
While the three-way Saturday morning playoff that gives Francis his win is the climax of the story, the most effective portion of the book for me is the two preceding chapters, chronicling Friday’s gameplay in the midst of an all-day deluge. Extreme weather is always a visceral way to set an atmosphere and draw the reader into the scene, and Frost does this very effectively throughout this sustained portion of the book, making the reader feel every bone-chilling gust of wind and soggy ball-devouring patch of mud as the players (even the English who are used to terrible weather) battle the elements and try to reconsider their strategies on each hole with the drastically altered circumstances of play.
Along the way, there are also some fascinating historical interjections about everything from the evolution of the materials used to make golf balls (including an unlikely influence from Vishnu) to the strange evolution of the term “bogie,” as well as a prolonged stage-setting chapter where Frost lays out the world of 1913, including the political landscape (he clarifies that he really likes Teddy Roosevelt, so I apparently misread what I thought was Frost’s condemnation of Teddy’s imperialism in The Six Messiahs).
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