Step Across This Line Part 4

And they're playing my song.

May 2001

An Alternative Career

[Michael Ondaatje asked me to contribute a piece to an issue of the Canadian literary magazine Brick Brick about alternative careers. This was, obviously, many years before my appearance in the film of about alternative careers. This was, obviously, many years before my appearance in the film of Bridget Jones's Diary Bridget Jones's Diary . . . . . .]

I always wanted to be an actor, in spite of early reverses.

I started out at the age of seven as a pixie in a school play in Bombay. My costume was made of orange crepe paper, and halfway through the little pixie dance I had to do with several other pixies, it fell off.

When I was twelve, I played the Promoter (that is, prosecutor) in Shaw's Saint Joan. Saint Joan. I had to sit at a table in a grubby white ca.s.sock and make copious notes with a quill pen. The only quill pen that could be found in Bombay was actually a ballpoint with a large red feather attached. I scribbled away merrily. After the play someone congratulated me on my performance and said that he had been especially impressed by the fact that I had been able to write for so long without ever needing to dip my quill pen into the ink. I had to sit at a table in a grubby white ca.s.sock and make copious notes with a quill pen. The only quill pen that could be found in Bombay was actually a ballpoint with a large red feather attached. I scribbled away merrily. After the play someone congratulated me on my performance and said that he had been especially impressed by the fact that I had been able to write for so long without ever needing to dip my quill pen into the ink.

At school in England the difficulties continued. In one production I played a swarthy Latin hound who got poisoned at the end of Act One. I was permitted a wonderfully melodramatic death scene, full of staggers and clutches at the throat, before cras.h.i.+ng down behind a sofa. In Act Two, however, I had to lie behind the sofa for an hour with my legs sticking out. Stagehands climbed up above the stage and dropped peanut sh.e.l.ls onto my face, trying to make my legs twitch. They succeeded.

Next I was cast as one of the lunatics in Friedrich Durrenmatt's The Physicists, The Physicists, but then illness struck down the boy actor playing the megalomaniac hunchback woman doctor in charge of the lunatic asylum in which the play is set, and I was told to take over. (It was a single-s.e.x school, so we were obliged to follow the boys-only casting philosophy of the Elizabethan theater.) I wore thick tartan leggings, a tweed skirt, and a Mad Cherman Akzent. The play was not a success. but then illness struck down the boy actor playing the megalomaniac hunchback woman doctor in charge of the lunatic asylum in which the play is set, and I was told to take over. (It was a single-s.e.x school, so we were obliged to follow the boys-only casting philosophy of the Elizabethan theater.) I wore thick tartan leggings, a tweed skirt, and a Mad Cherman Akzent. The play was not a success.

At Cambridge I built myself a putty nose extension for a part in an Ionesco play, but on the first night, bending over a lady's hand, I squished my fake hooter sideways and looked more like the Elephant Man than I would have liked.

In a badly under-rehea.r.s.ed production of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, The Alchemist, playing to a first-night front row full of English literature professors, I suddenly understood that the line I was speaking was the answer to the question I was about to be asked. The whole cast immediately panicked and began improvising in something like Jonsonian meter, trying to find our way to a bit-any bit-we knew. It took what seemed like hours, but we managed it. Not one of the a.s.sembled luminaries of the Cambridge literature faculty noticed a thing. playing to a first-night front row full of English literature professors, I suddenly understood that the line I was speaking was the answer to the question I was about to be asked. The whole cast immediately panicked and began improvising in something like Jonsonian meter, trying to find our way to a bit-any bit-we knew. It took what seemed like hours, but we managed it. Not one of the a.s.sembled luminaries of the Cambridge literature faculty noticed a thing.

After graduating I spent a while involved in London fringe productions. In a production of Megan Terry's Viet Rock Viet Rock I was required to insult an audience full of people in wheelchairs, attacking them for their apathy about the war. Why were they not marching in protest, why had they not been at the Grosvenor Square demonstration confronting the mounted police, I demanded righteously. The wheelchair people hung their heads, abashed. I was required to insult an audience full of people in wheelchairs, attacking them for their apathy about the war. Why were they not marching in protest, why had they not been at the Grosvenor Square demonstration confronting the mounted police, I demanded righteously. The wheelchair people hung their heads, abashed.

In another production I went back into drag, wearing a long black evening gown and a long blond wig to play a sort of Miss Lonelyhearts figure in a play written by a friend who has since become a successful writer. To make the Nathanael West-ish point that such figures are often men, I also sported a prominent black Zapata mustache. My friend the now-successful writer still threatens from time to time to publish photographs of this performance.

After playing the blonde, I understood that I had a limited future in this line of work and ceased to tread the boards. The itch remains, however. A few years ago another frustrated actor, the writer, editor, and publisher Bill Buford, suggested that we should sign up one summer in the most out-of-the-way American summer-stock company we could find and spend a few happy months playing pixies, swarthy Latins, ca.s.socked prosecutors, mad doctors, et cetera. It never happened, but I wish it had.

Maybe next year.

October 1994

On Leavened Bread

There was leavened bread in Bombay, but it was sorry fare: dry, crumbling, tasteless, unleavened bread's paler, unluckier relation. It wasn't "real." "Real" bread was the chapati, or phulka, served piping hot; the tandoori nan, and its sweeter Frontier variant, the Peshawari nan; and for luxury, the reshmi roti, the s.h.i.+rmal, the paratha. Compared to these aristocrats, the leavened white loaves of my childhood seemed to merit the description that Shaw's immortal dustman, Alfred Doolittle, dreamed up for people like himself: they were, in truth, "the undeserving poor."

My first inkling that there might be more to leavened bread than I knew came on a visit to Karachi, Pakistan, where I learned that a hidden order of nuns, in a place known as the Monastery of the Angels, baked a mean loaf. To buy it you had to get up at dawn-that is, a servant had to get up at dawn-and stand in line outside a small hatch in the monastery's wall. The nuns' baking facilities were limited, the daily "run" was small, and this secret bakery's reputation was high. Only the early bird caught the loaf. The hatch would open, and a nun would hand the bread out to the waiting populace. Loaves were strictly rationed. No bulk buying was permitted. And the price, of course, was high. (All this I knew only by hearsay, for I never got up at such an unearthly hour to see for myself.) The nuns' bread-white, crusty, full of flavor-was a small revelation but also, on account of its unusual provenance, eccentric. It came from beyond the frontiers of the everyday, a mystery trailing an anecdote behind it. It was almost, well, fictional. (Later, it became fictional, when I put the monastery and its secret sisters into Midnight's Children. Midnight's Children.) Now, in the matter of bread, such extraordinariness is not good. You want bread to be a part of daily life. You want it to be ordinary. You want it to be there. You don't want to get up in the middle of the night and wait by a hatch in a wall. So while the Angels' bread was tasty, it felt like an aberration, a break in the natural order. It didn't really change my mind.

Then, aged thirteen and a half, I flew to England. And suddenly there it was, in every shop window. The White Crusty, the Sliced and the Unsliced. The Small Tin, the Large Tin, the Danish Bloomer. The abandoned, plentiful promiscuity of it. The soft pillowy mattressiness of it. The well-sprung bounciness of it between your teeth. Hard crust and soft center: the sensuality of that perfect textural contrast. I was done for. In the wh.o.r.ehouses of the bakeries, I was serially, gluttonously, irredeemably unfaithful to all those chapatis-next-door waiting for me back home. East was East, but yeast was West. *10 *10 This, remember, was long before British bread counters were enlivened by the European invasion, long before olive bread and tomato bread, ciabatta and brioche; this was 1961. But the love affair that began then has never lost its intensity; the new exotic breads have served only to renew the excitement.

I should add that there was a second discovery, almost as thrilling: that is, water. Water back home was dangerous, had to be thoroughly boiled. To be able to drink water from the tap was a privilege indeed. In this respect, life in the West has somewhat declined in quality . . . but I have never forgotten that when I first arrived in these immeasurably wealthy and powerful lands, I found the first proofs of my good fortune in loaf and gla.s.s. A regime of bread and water has never, since that time, sounded like a hards.h.i.+p to me.

November 1999

On Being Photographed

Outside a photographic studio in South London, the famous Avedon backdrop of bright white paper awaits, looking oddly like an absence: a blank s.p.a.ce in the world. In Avedon's portrait gallery, his subjects are asked to occupy, and define, a void. Somebody once told me that a frog on a lily pad keeps its eyes (which see by relative motion) so still that they see nothing at all, until an insect flies across their field of vision and becomes literally the only thing there, captured without escape on the white canvas of the frog's artificial, temporary blindness. Then snap, and it's gone.

There is something predatory about all photography. The portrait is the portraitist's food. In a real-life incident I fictionalized in Midnight's Children, Midnight's Children, my grandmother once brained an acquaintance with his own camera for daring to point it at her, because she believed that if he could capture some part of her essence in his box, then she would necessarily be deprived of it. What the photographer gained, the subject lost; cameras, like fear, ate the soul. my grandmother once brained an acquaintance with his own camera for daring to point it at her, because she believed that if he could capture some part of her essence in his box, then she would necessarily be deprived of it. What the photographer gained, the subject lost; cameras, like fear, ate the soul.

If you believe the language-and the language itself never lies, though liars often have the sweetest tongues-then the camera is a weapon: a photograph is a shot, and a session is a shoot, and a portrait may therefore be the trophy the hunter brings home from his s.h.i.+kar. A stuffed head for his wall.

It may be gathered from the above that I do not much enjoy having my picture taken, do not enjoy becoming, rather than exploring, a subject. These days writers are endlessly photographed, but for the most part these aren't true portraits-they are publicity pix, and every newspaper, every magazine, must have its own. Mostly the photographers who work with writers are kind. They make us look our best, which isn't always easy. They compliment us on being interesting. They ask our opinions. They may even read our books.

Richard Avedon is the author of some of the most striking portrait photographs of our day, but he is not, in the sense I have used the term, kind. He looks like an American eagle, and he sees his subjects, against white, with a bleak unblinking eye, whether they are writers or the mighty of the earth or anonymous folks or his own dying father. Perhaps, for Avedon, the stripped-down, head-on technique of his portraiture is a necessary alternative to the high-gloss fantasy world of his other life as a fas.h.i.+on photographer. In these portraits he is not selling but telling. And perhaps he is excited, too, by the fact that the people he is looking at are not members of that new tribe created by the camera: the tribe of professional subjects.

If the camera is a stealer of souls, is there not something Faustian about the contract between photographer and model, between the Mephistophilis of the camera and the beautiful young men and women who come to life, hoping for eternity (or at least celebrity), before its one-eyed stare? Models know how to look, the good ones know what the camera sees. They are performers of the surface, manipulators and presenters of their own extraordinary outsides. But finally the model's look is an artificiality, it is a look about how to look. Off-duty models photograph one another ceaselessly, defining each pa.s.sing moment of their lives-a lunch, a stroll, a meeting-by committing it to film. Garry Winogrand, quoted in Susan Sontag's On Photography, On Photography, says that he takes photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed," and these professional subjects are similarly trapped-they can never step outside the frame. They become quotations of themselves. Until the camera loses interest, and they fade away. The story of Faust does not have a happy ending. says that he takes photographs "to find out what something will look like photographed," and these professional subjects are similarly trapped-they can never step outside the frame. They become quotations of themselves. Until the camera loses interest, and they fade away. The story of Faust does not have a happy ending.

Avedon's glamour photography has often touched on the theme of beauty and its pa.s.sing. In a recent sequence the supermodel Nadja Auermann is seen in a series of surreal high-fas.h.i.+on clinches with an animated skeleton who is, of course, a photographer. Death and the maiden, a spectacular, with costumes by the great designers of the world. Perhaps Avedon is making a joke at his own expense, the skeleton as grand old man; perhaps he is hinting at the pa.s.sing of the supermodel phenomenon. Equally relevant, however, is his wholehearted willingness to enter into the high-budget, high-gloss elaboration of this type of mega-commercial rag trade extravaganza. This is no ivory tower artist.

The contrast with his portraiture could not be greater. The portrait photograph is Avedon's naked stage, his blasted heath. Is it, I wonder, that one has to do something do something to exceptional beauties-cover their faces in icicles, make them dance with skeletons-to make them interesting to photograph; whereas unbeauties, the faces of real life, are rewarding even (only) when unadorned? to exceptional beauties-cover their faces in icicles, make them dance with skeletons-to make them interesting to photograph; whereas unbeauties, the faces of real life, are rewarding even (only) when unadorned?

A great portrait photograph is about insides. Cartier-Bresson and Elliott Erwitt catch their people on the wing, as it were: often, their work is revealing because the subjects have been caught off guard. Avedon is more formal: the white sheet, the majestic old plate camera on its tripod. In this setup it is the insect that must be perfectly still, not the frog.

I have seen a lot of photographers work. I remember Barry Lategan in a natty beret snapping away during an interview, nodding every time I said something he liked. I began to watch him carefully, becoming dependent on his nods, growing addicted to his approval: performing for him. I remember Sally Soames persuading me to stretch out on a sofa and more or less lying on top of me to get the shot she wanted, a shot in which, unsurprisingly, I have a rather dreamy expression in my eyes. I remember Lord Snowdon rearranging all the furniture in my house, gathering bits of "Indianness" around me: a picture, a hookah. The resulting picture is one I have never cared for: the writer as exotic. Sometimes photographers come to you with a picture already in their heads, and then you're done for.

I have seen a lot of photographers work, but I never saw anyone take as few pictures in a session as Avedon does with his big plate camera. Is it that he knows exactly what he wants, or that he is content to take what he gets, I wondered: for Mr. Avedon is a man on a tight schedule. Some people will give him more than others-so does the onus of becoming a good photograph rest with us, his non-professional subjects, who know rather more about our insides than our outsides? Must we reveal ourselves, or will his sorcery unveil us anyhow?

He positions me just as he wants me. I am not to sway, even by a millimeter, as I may go out of focus: it's that critical. I must hold my expression for what seems an eternity. I find myself thinking: this is how I look when I am being made to look like this. This will be a photograph of a man doing something awkward to which he is not accustomed. Then, shrugging inwardly, I surrender to the great man. This is Richard Avedon, Richard Avedon, I tell myself. Just let him take the d.a.m.n picture and don't argue. I tell myself. Just let him take the d.a.m.n picture and don't argue.

[image]

Photograph copyright Richard Avedon. Photograph courtesy of Egoiste Egoiste magazine. magazine.

Two setups, one indoors in a long black raincoat and one indoors, very close up, in a pin-striped black s.h.i.+rt. I saw the results of the close-up first, and to tell the truth it shocked and depressed me. It looked, well, satanic. A part of me blamed the photographer; another, larger part blamed my face. The next time I met Avedon, his opening words were "So, did you hate it?" I was unable to grin and say, it's great. "It's very dark," I said. "Oh, but the other picture's much friendlier," he comforted me. The other picture is the one accompanying this piece. Fortunately, I really like it. I'm not sure if "friendly" is the word for it (actually, I am sure, and "friendly" is not not the word for it; I have a cheery, even chirpy way of looking at times, and this is definitely not one of those times), but I am, as they say, "comfortable" with the way it makes me look. The head is a good shape-my head is not always a good shape in photographs-and the beard is tidy and the face has a certain lived-in melancholy that I can't deny I recognize from my mirror. The black j.a.panese raincoat looks great. the word for it; I have a cheery, even chirpy way of looking at times, and this is definitely not one of those times), but I am, as they say, "comfortable" with the way it makes me look. The head is a good shape-my head is not always a good shape in photographs-and the beard is tidy and the face has a certain lived-in melancholy that I can't deny I recognize from my mirror. The black j.a.panese raincoat looks great.

The way the subject of a photograph looks at the photograph is unlike the way anyone else will ever see it. You hope your worst bits haven't been emphasized too much. You hope not to look like a bag person. You hope not to scare people who come across the picture by chance.

Let me try to see this picture as if I were not its subject. Richard Avedon was not interested in making a picture of a cheery novelist without a care in the world. I think he wanted to make a portrait of a writer to whom a number of bad things had happened. I think the picture shows some of that pain, but also, I hope, it shows something of resistance and endurance. It is a strong picture, and I am grateful to Avedon, for his solidarity, for his picture's clarity, and for its strength.

November 1995

Crash

THE DEATH OF PRINCESS DIANA.

It has all been so disturbingly novelistic, and the novel I'm thinking of isn't a fairy tale, although Diana's story did begin like a fairy tale, nor is it a soap opera, although goodness knows the long saga of the battling Windsors has been sudsy enough. I'm thinking of J. G. Ballard's Crash, Crash, whose recent film adaptation by David Cronenberg caused howls from the censors.h.i.+p lobby, particularly in Britain. It is one of the darker ironies of a dark event that the themes and ideas explored by Ballard and Cronenberg, themes and ideas which many in Britain have called p.o.r.nographic, should have been so lethally acted out in the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver. whose recent film adaptation by David Cronenberg caused howls from the censors.h.i.+p lobby, particularly in Britain. It is one of the darker ironies of a dark event that the themes and ideas explored by Ballard and Cronenberg, themes and ideas which many in Britain have called p.o.r.nographic, should have been so lethally acted out in the car accident that killed Princess Diana, Dodi al-Fayed, and their drunken driver.

We live in a culture that routinely eroticizes and glamorizes its consumer technology, notably the motorcar. We also live in the Age of Fame, in which the intensity of our gaze upon celebrity turns the famous into commodities, too, a transformation that has often proved powerful enough to destroy them. Ballard's novel, by bringing together these two powerful erotic fetishes-the Automobile and the Star-in an act of s.e.xual violence (a car crash), created an effect so shocking as to be thought obscene.

The death of Princess Diana is just such an obscenity. One of the reasons why it is so very sad is that it seems so senseless. To die because you don't want to have your picture taken! What could be more meaningless, more absurd? But in fact this frightful accident is freighted with meanings. It tells us uncomfortable truths about what we have become.

In our erotic imaginations, perhaps only the camera can rival the automobile. The camera, as a reporter, captures the news and delivers it to our door and, in more adoring mode, often looks upon beautiful women and offers them up for our delight. In Princess Diana's fatal crash, the Camera (as both Reporter and Lover) is joined to the Automobile and the Star, and the c.o.c.ktail of death and desire becomes even more powerful than the one in Ballard's book.

Think of it this way. The object of desire, the Beauty (Princess Diana), is repeatedly subjected to the unwelcome attentions of a persistent suitor (the Camera) until a das.h.i.+ng, glamorous knight (riding his Automobile) sweeps her away. The Camera, with its unavoidably phallic long-lensed snout, gives pursuit. And the story reaches its tragic climax, for the Automobile is driven not by a hero but by a clumsy drunk. Put not your trust in fairy tales, or chivalrous knights. The object of desire, in the moment of her death, sees the phallic lenses advancing upon her, snapping, snapping. Think of it this way and the p.o.r.nography of Diana Spencer's death becomes apparent. She died in a sublimated s.e.xual a.s.sault.

Sublimated. That's the point. The Camera is not, finally, a suitor in its own right. True, it seeks to possess the Beauty, to capture her on film, for economic gain. But that's a euphemism. The brutal truth is that the camera is acting on our behalf. If the camera acts voyeuristically, it is because our relations.h.i.+p with the Beauty has always been voyeuristic. If blood is on the hands of the photographers and the photo agencies and the news media's photo editors, it is also on ours. What newspaper do you read? When you saw the pictures of Dodi and Diana cavorting together, did you say, that's none of my business, and turn the page? That's the point. The Camera is not, finally, a suitor in its own right. True, it seeks to possess the Beauty, to capture her on film, for economic gain. But that's a euphemism. The brutal truth is that the camera is acting on our behalf. If the camera acts voyeuristically, it is because our relations.h.i.+p with the Beauty has always been voyeuristic. If blood is on the hands of the photographers and the photo agencies and the news media's photo editors, it is also on ours. What newspaper do you read? When you saw the pictures of Dodi and Diana cavorting together, did you say, that's none of my business, and turn the page?

We are the lethal voyeurs. "Are you satisfied now?" people in Britain have been shouting at photographers. Could we answer the same question? Are we satisfied now? Are we going to stop being fascinated by those illicit images of Diana's kisses, or by the earlier "sensational scoops" of Prince Charles naked in a distant room, of Fergie getting her toes sucked, all those purloined moments, those stolen secrets of public people's private lives that have, for more than a decade now, been the stuff of our most popular newspapers and magazines? Will we no longer want to eavesdrop on the intimacies of those-like the voluptuous Earthling movie star in a Vonnegut novel, imprisoned with a man in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, so that the locals could study her mating habits-whom we imprison in fame?

Not a chance.

Princess Diana became skillful at constructing the images of herself she wanted people to see. I recall a British newspaper editor telling me how she composed the famous shot in which she sat, alone and lovelorn, in front of the world's greatest monument to love, the Taj Mahal. She knew, he said, exactly how the public would "read" this photograph. It would bring her great sympathy, and make people think (even) less well of the Prince of Wales than before. Princess Diana was not given to using words like "semiotics," but she was a capable semiotician of herself. With increasing confidence, she gave us the signs by which we might know her as she wished to be known.

Some voices have been saying that her "collusion" with the media in general and with photographers in particular must be an important mitigating factor in any discussion of the paparazzi's role in her death. Perhaps so; but one must also consider the importance attached by a woman in her position to controlling her public image. The public figure is happy to be photographed only when she or he is prepared for it, "on guard," one might say. The paparazzo looks only for the unguarded moment. The battle is for control, for a form of power. Diana did not wish to give the photographers power over her, to be merely their (our) Object. In escaping from the pursuing lenses, she was a.s.serting her determination, perhaps her right, to be something altogether more dignified: that is, to be a Subject. Fleeing from Object to Subject, from commodity toward humanity, she met her death. Wanting to be the mistress of her own life, she surrendered herself to a driver who was not even able to control her car. This, too, is a bitter irony.

The Windsors and the Fayeds are the archetypal Insiders and Outsiders. Mohammad al-Fayed, the Egyptian who longed to be British, bought Harrods (and Conservative MPs) in his failed quest for British citizens.h.i.+p, and members.h.i.+p of an Establishment that closed its doors against him. Princess Diana's love of Dodi al-Fayed may have felt to Dodi's father like a moment of sweet triumph over that Establishment. Diana alive was the ultimate trophy. In death, she may unmake al-Fayed. He has lost his eldest son and perhaps also his last, best chance of being accepted by the British.

I described the Windsors as Insiders, but their status is also in doubt. Once beloved of the nation, they are now widely seen as the family that maltreated the far more beloved Diana. If al-Fayed is fated to remain on the outside looking in, then the Royal Family itself may just possibly be on the way out. The nation's love of Diana will undoubtedly transfer itself to her sons. But if our insatiable, voyeuristic appet.i.te for the iconic Diana was ultimately responsible for her death, then we should ask ourselves some sober questions about these boys. Would they be better off away from the crippling burdens of being Royal? How can they go on living in the real world she tried to show them, the world beyond the closed society of the British aristocracy, beyond Eton College? Diana herself seemed far happier once she'd escaped from the Royal Family. Perhaps Britain too would be happier if it made the same escape, and learned to live without kings and queens. Such are the unthinkable thoughts that have become all too thinkable now.

September 1997

The People's Game

A FAN'S NOTES

1. WE ARE THE WORLD.

In 1994, when the soccer World Cup was about to be played across the length and breadth of a largely indifferent America, perhaps the main concern of those few U.S. citizens who knew it was happening was that the alien phenomenon of soccer hooliganism might be about to arrive in the States. Fortunately the England team failed to make the finals, and so the feared English hooligans stayed home. Fortunately for the hooligans, I suspect, for, as I heard an American comedian explaining on British television, the World Cup matches were to be played in some of the toughest neighborhoods of some of the toughest cities in the world. "I tell you what," he suggested. "Why don't you bring your hooligans, and we'll bring ours."

Four years later, the 1998 World Cup was staged in and won by France, and as it happened I watched the entire tournament in America, on ESPN and Univision. The dullness of the ESPN coverage, with its commentators desperately misapplying the terminology of America's ball games to soccer, suggested that America's lack of interest in the rest of the world's favorite game was as great as ever. Even when the USA team was defeated by Iran-Iran!-there was no more than a brief blip of attention before the Yankees, McGwire, and Sosa regained center stage.

Over on the Spanish-language Univision channel, however-"Goooooooooooool!!!!!!"-things were very different. Here was all the excitement and color missing from the ESPN commentary. And as it was on television, so it was also in real life; for wherever in polyglot America you stumbled over clumps of French men and women, or Brazilians, Colombians, Mexicans, Croatians, Germans, even Brits, for example in the many-nationed bars of Queens, the tournament and its pa.s.sions were to be found there also, blazing as fiercely as anywhere else on earth.

The poor performances of the USA team were no doubt due, in part, to the crus.h.i.+ng uninterest of the American mainstream but could also, I thought, be ascribed to the fact that the team seemed to be made up of college kids. For while college teams successfully supply fresh talent, year after year, to the NFL and NBA, soccer is not a college sport. Soccer is the people's game, played with empty tin cans in the back streets of Brazilian cities. Soccer is working-cla.s.s self-expression. If the United States is to have a first-rate soccer team, its administrators must look away from the colleges and into the heart of the minority communities who could be found crowding around their televisions in those summer weeks, sharing in the world's excitement over the world champions.h.i.+p of o jogo bonito, o jogo bonito, the Beautiful Game. the Beautiful Game.

How to convey to America the idea of beauty as applied to a ball game it knows and cares so little about? How to explain the links that exist between soccer teams and national character? For all soccer fans know what it means to play like Brazilians (that is, with flair, flamboyance, and intoxicating rhythm), or like Germans (with great discipline, unwearying physical strength, and iron determination) or Italians (defensively, but with devastating bursts of counterattacking play).

This essay seeks to answer such questions by avoiding them. It seeks to find common ground between those who, like me, love soccer, and those to whom it feels like an alien irrelevance. It sets out not to describe the arcana of the game itself but to explore a related condition that crosses all sporting boundaries: that of being a fan.

A fan doesn't just tune in once every four years to cheer his country's team at the time of the World Cup. The true soccer fan is the club fan, for whom continuity is everything, and so is loyalty in times of adversity, and small gratifications offer great emotional rewards. Which is why, one rainy Sunday afternoon in March, I set out for Wembley Stadium, London, to watch my favorite club, Tottenham Hotspur, take on Leicester City in the final of the Worthington Cup.

There are three major compet.i.tions in English soccer each season, one played in leagues-the elite Premiers.h.i.+p and the three lower divisions of the Football League-and two on a knockout basis (i.e., whoever loses is eliminated): the ancient and glamorous Football a.s.sociation Challenge Cup (the "FA Cup"), and the johnny-come-lately, cheap-and-cheerful League Cup, which has metamorphosed, in this era of sponsors.h.i.+p, into the Milk Cup, the Coca-Cola Cup, and now the Worthington Cup. (At least milk, c.o.ke, and Worthington beer are all things you can pour into cups. Cricket, also a much-sponsored sport, has had its Cups sponsored by the manufacturers of cigarettes and razor blades.) In spite of the third-out-of-three status of the Worthington Cup, the chance to watch one's team play at Wembley lifts the heart and quickens the pulse. Wembley is the hallowed heart of the English game, the turf on which the England team won its only World Cup way back in 1966. I've been a Spurs fan since the early 1960s, but I've never made it to Wembley to watch them in a final until now.

What's more, the nineties have been lean years for this once-great soccer club. But now, here we are in a cup final again. A win may herald the beginning of a new golden era. I make my way to the great stadium, full of hope.

2. FIRST LOVE.

I came to London in January 1961 as a boy of thirteen and a half, on my way to boarding school and accompanied by my father. It was a cold month, with blue skies by day and green fogs by night. We stayed at a huge barracks of a hotel, the c.u.mberland at Marble Arch, and soon after we settled in, my father asked if I would like to see a professional soccer game.

In Bombay, where I had grown up, there was no soccer to speak of; the local sports were cricket and field hockey. The only part of India where soccer was taken seriously was Bengal, and although the fame of the Mohun Bagan team of Calcutta had reached my ears, I had never seen the game played.

The first game my father took me to see was a friendly match between the North London club, a.r.s.enal, and the Spanish champions, Real Madrid. I did not then know that the visitors were rated as perhaps the greatest club side ever seen anywhere. Or that they had just won the European Cup, the annual tournament held to determine the champion of all Europe's national champions, five years running (an achievement that n.o.body before or since has matched). Or that among their players were two of the game's all-time immortals, the Hungarian Ferenc Puskas, "the little general" who masterminded his national side's humiliating drubbings of the England team, and the Argentinian center-forward Alfredo di Stefano. Other Real players-the flying winger Gento, the defensive colossus Santamaria-were rated almost as highly as the two superstars.

This is the way I remember the game: *11 *11 in the first half, Real Madrid tore the a.r.s.enal apart. The London club was and is renowned for its tough defensive style of play-"Boring a.r.s.enal" is a label they were stuck with for years-but Real went through them almost at will, and at the halftime break led 30. Then, because this was after all just a friendly game with nothing riding on it, Real took off their star players and replaced them for the second half with a bunch of kids. a.r.s.enal stubbornly kept all their first-team players on the field and the game ended up tied, 33; but not even the most die-hard a.r.s.enal fans at the game could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams. On the way back to the hotel my father asked me for my views. "I didn't think much of that English team," I told him, "but I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there's an English team that plays like Real Madrid?" Unknown to me, I had asked for the near-impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan's airborne heyday, I had asked, "Can you find out if there's a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?" My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, "I'll ask at the front desk." What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous club of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart. in the first half, Real Madrid tore the a.r.s.enal apart. The London club was and is renowned for its tough defensive style of play-"Boring a.r.s.enal" is a label they were stuck with for years-but Real went through them almost at will, and at the halftime break led 30. Then, because this was after all just a friendly game with nothing riding on it, Real took off their star players and replaced them for the second half with a bunch of kids. a.r.s.enal stubbornly kept all their first-team players on the field and the game ended up tied, 33; but not even the most die-hard a.r.s.enal fans at the game could pretend that the result accurately reflected the quality of the two teams. On the way back to the hotel my father asked me for my views. "I didn't think much of that English team," I told him, "but I liked that Spanish side. Can you find out if there's an English team that plays like Real Madrid?" Unknown to me, I had asked for the near-impossible; as if, in Michael Jordan's airborne heyday, I had asked, "Can you find out if there's a team that plays like the Chicago Bulls?" My father, almost as much an innocent in these matters as myself, said, "I'll ask at the front desk." What he learned from that long-forgotten hotel clerk changed my life, because a few days later we went to watch the other famous club of North London, Tottenham Hotspur, and I lost my heart.

There were still many things I didn't know. I didn't know that between Tottenham and a.r.s.enal, the Spurs and the Gunners, there was a long rivalry and a deep mutual loathing. I didn't know that the Spurs tradition was of cavalier attacking play, and that if a.r.s.enal were jeered for their negativity (it was said that their fans would sing in celebration of a scoreless draw), then the leaky Spurs defense was also a traditional b.u.t.t of ridicule for soccer fans everywhere. I didn't even know the words to the Spurs' version of "Glory, Glory, Hallelujah." ("Poor old a.r.s.enal lies a-moldering in the grave / while the Spurs go marching on! on! on!") Most of all I didn't know that under their manager, the taciturn Yorks.h.i.+reman Bill Nicholson-"Billy Nick"-and their loquacious Irish captain, Danny Blanchflower, Tottenham had become the greatest team to emerge in Britain since the "Busby Babes" of Manchester United perished in the Munich air disaster of 1958. The hotel clerk had been right. This team could have given Real Madrid a fright. These were the Super Spurs in their greatest year, on their way to capturing British soccer's Holy Grail, the League and Cup Double; that is to say, victory in a single season both in the First Division of the Football League and in the country's premier knockout compet.i.tion, the FA Cup.

I don't remember who Spurs thrashed that day, but I do recall understanding that I had in some profound and unalterable way been changed by my visit to this bleak northern borough of a city in which I was still a complete stranger. The boy who left the Spurs' stadium at White Hart Lane after the final whistle was no longer a spectator. He had become a fan.

Bill Brown, Peter Baker, Ron Henry, Danny Blanchflower, Maurice Norman, Dave Mackay, Cliff Jones, John White, Bobby Smith, Les Allen, Terry Dyson. To this day I can recite the names of the first team without needing to look them up. I can even do most of the reserves. Johnny Hollowbread, Mel Hopkins, Tony Marchi, Terry Medwin, Eddie Clayton, Frank Saul . . . Sorry. Sorry. I'll stop.

I can remember, too, the horror with which I greeted the series of mishaps that broke the side up. I felt them as personal tragedies: Blanchflower's knee injury, Norman's broken leg, Mackay breaking the same leg twice, twice, and above all the death of John White, killed by lightning while sheltering under a tree on a golf course. White's nickname at Spurs had been the Ghost. and above all the death of John White, killed by lightning while sheltering under a tree on a golf course. White's nickname at Spurs had been the Ghost.

Spurs did the Double in the 196061 season, narrowly missed repeating the feat in 196162, and in the following thirty-seven years they have often been "a good Cup side," winning many British and European knockout trophies, but they have never won a League Champions.h.i.+p again. This is what it means to be a fan: to wait for a miracle, enduring decades of disillusion, and yet to have no choice in the matter of allegiance. Each weekend, I turn to the sports pages, and my eye automatically seeks out the Spurs' result. If they have won, the weekend feels richer. If they have lost, a black cloud settles. It's pathetic. It's an addiction. It's monogamous, till-death-us-do-part love.

In that glorious 196061 season, however, Blanchflower's Tottenham did, just that once, take the First Division champions.h.i.+p by storm. Then, on the first Sat.u.r.day in May, they went down the road to Wembley for the Cup Final, the Double's second leg. They won the game 20, even though they didn't play well on the day, as even their manager, Bill Nicholson, later admitted. They were, in fact, lucky to win.

The team they beat was Leicester City.

3. GOALKEEPERS.

The 1999 Worthington Cup Final would turn out to be a tale of two opposing goalkeepers. The Spurs goalie, Ian Walker, had only recently regained his first-team place after a slump in form, and many of us still worried about his vulnerability. Leicester, on the other hand, had the U.S. international keeper, Kasey Keller, in goal. Walker and Keller would make one bad mistake apiece at crucial moments of the match. One of them got away with it. The other's fumble decided the game.

Goalkeepers aren't like other players, perhaps because they are allowed to handle the ball within the delineated confines of the "penalty area," perhaps because they are the last line of their team's defense, but mainly because, for goalkeepers, there is no middle register of performance; each time they play, they know they will come off the field either as heroes or as clowns.

A good goalkeeper must be brave enough to dive at the feet of an opponent arriving at speed. He must command the area around his goal and exude an air of swift decisiveness. He must know when to catch the ball and when to punch it, and whenever high crosses are aimed into the penalty area from the wings, he must, if he can, rise above the throng of players and make the ball his own.

In spite of (or because of) the goalie's vital importance, English soccer has goalkeeper jokes the way rock 'n' roll has drummer jokes. There was once a goalie nicknamed Dracula, because he was afraid of crosses. Also a goalie nicknamed Cinderella, because he was always late for the ball.