A gentleman among players

I once played in something called the Writers’ World Cup. A lot of people in publishing (novelists, journalists, editors, agents) like to think that if their lives hadn’t been poisoned by books, they might have really made something of themselves — as ballplayers, among other things. This is probably one of the more pleasant delusions. The star of the tournament was a stocky bull-chested essayist who, rumour had it, used to play in some Hungarian minor league. Nobody could take the ball off him. Afterwards the writers got together in some theatre that the organisers had hired and talked for several hours in turns about the meaning of football. I guess this is what we were good at.

George Plimpton spent a large part of his writing career putting this delusion to the test. Yellow Jersey Press are reissuing several of his books of ‘participatory journalism’, as the phrase is — beginning with Out of My League, his brief experiment in major-league baseball, which gave him a taste for the whole enterprise. Writers are generally guilty of a kind of constitutional amateurism — they play for fun with lives their characters have to live for keeps. In other words, they keep up the old distinction between the gentlemen and the players. Plimpton was the classic gentleman.

His family money came from publishing, but there were fancy connections on both sides to prominent figures of one kind or another. For years, he edited the Paris Review, whose office was staffed, as Philip Roth put it, by

young men in their late twenties and early thirties, for the most part, like [George] … from wealthy, old-line families who’d sent their sons to exclusive preparatory schools and then on to Harvard, which, in those early postwar years, as in prior decades, was mainly a bastion for educating the offspring of the socially elite.