 |
Out of Left Field |
|
SAW THE DERBY
|
These 'Literateurs' let fly
at the Kentucky Derby
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
The 131st Kentucky Derby comes up Saturday, the traditional first Saturday in May. To mark the occasion and whet the appetite of punters and literateurs, I quote from two acclaimed-by-some legendary pieces about the Derby.
The first is the lead paragraph from a report about the 1955 Kentucky Derby: It reads:
“Three days before. This saw Boone: the bluegrass, the virgin land rolling westward wave by dense wave from the Allegheny gaps, unmarked then, teeming with deer and buffalo about the salt licks and the limestone springs whose water in time would make the fine bourbon whiskey; and the wild men too-the red men and the white ones too who had to be a little wild also to endure and survive and so mark the wilderness with the proofs of their tough survival--Boonesborough, Owenstown, Harrod’s and Harbuck’s Stations: Kentucky: the dark and bloody ground.”
And while you are digesting that, we move on to an excerpt in the middle of the second hailed Derby piece: It reads:
“Creeping Jesus, I thought. That
screws the press credentials. I had a vision of some nerve-rattling
geek all covered with matted hair and string-warts showing up
in the press office and demanding 'Scanlan’s' press packet.
Well…what the hell? We could always load up on acid and
spend the day roaming around the clubhouse grounds with bit sketch
pads, laughing hysterically at the natives and swilling mint
julep so the cops wouldn’t think we’re abnormal…
“I took the expressway out to the track, driving very fast
and jumping the monster car back and forth between lanes, driving
with a beer in one hand and my mind so muddled that I almost
crushed a Volkswagen full of nuns when I swerved to catch the
right exit.”
The first piece, entitled: “Kentucky: May: Saturday” was written by William Faulkner for “Sports Illustrated’ on the 1955 Derby. It was reprinted in 1994 in what the magazine called, “one of 40 classic SI pieces presented as a special bonus to our readers in celebration of SI’s 40th anniversary.”
The introduction says, “In this SI classic from 1955, a Nobel-Prize-winning novelist recounts the drama leading up to the day that Swaps beat Nashua in the Derby.”
And here is a paragraph that is the closest Faulkner comes to describing what actually happened in the race:
“Only a little over two minutes: one simultaneous metallic clash as the gates spring. Though you do not really know what it was you hear: whether it was that metallic crash, or the simultaneous thunder of the hooves in that first leap or the massed voices, the gasp, the exhalation--whatever it was, the clump of horses indistinguishable yet, like a brown wave dotted with the bright silks of the riders like chips flowing toward us along the rail until, approaching, we can begin to distinguish individuals, streaming past us now as individual horses--horses which (including the rider) once stood about eight feet tall and 10 feet long, now look like arrows twice that length and less than half that thickness, shooting past and bunching again as perspective diminishes, then becoming individual horses once more about the turn into the backstretch, streaming on, to bunch for the last time into the homestretch itself, then again individuals, individual horses, the individual horse, the Horse: 2:01 4/5 minutes."
A dissenter could claim that it is easy and unfair to choose obtuse paragraphs out of context to poke fun at a literary icon. But I assure any reader who had the trouble I have had with this piece that each of these samples are of an order with all the writing in the Faulkner epic.
Faulkner never mentions Swaps and Nashua, the two big rivals in the race, never informs that Swaps wins the race. He is writing this in Sports Illustrated, a magazine whose readership, I think, would have at least a cursory interest in some lucid detail about the race itself. But he is a Nobel-Prize-winning author and SI was so thrilled to have him in its pages, I guess, that it allowed him the literary license to present the Derby as he saw it.
The second piece, entitled, “The Kentucky
Derby Is Decadent and Depraved” by Hunter S. Thompson, appeared
in the long-defunct magazine, “Scanlan’s Monthly”
in June, a month after the 1970 Derby.
Thompson was accompanied on the assignment by a British artist,
Ralph Steadman, who had been hired to illustrate the piece and
accompanied Thompson on his rounds. Most of the piece is about
the two of them the days leading up to Saturday and their pursuit
of viable press credentials.
So we read this:
“On our way back to the hotel after Friday’s races I warned Steadman about some of the other problems we’d have to cope with. Neither of us had brought any strange illegal drugs, so we would have to get by on booze. 'You should keep in mind,' I said, ‘that almost everybody you talk to from now on will be drunk. People who seem very pleasant at first might suddenly swing at you for no reason at all.’ ”
This is Thompson’s one paragraph on the race:
“We went back to the clubhouse to watch the big race. When the crowd stood to face the flag and sing ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ Steadman faced the crowd and sketched frantically. Somewhere up in the boxes a voice screeched, 'Turn around you hairy freak!' The race itself was only two minutes long, and even from our super-status seats and using 12-power glasses, there was no way to see what really happened to our horses. Holy Land, Ralph’s choice, stumbled and lost his jockey in the final turn. Mine, Silent Screen, had the lead coming into the stretch but faded to fifth at the finish. The winner was a 16-1 shot named Dust Commander.
It could be argued that “Scanlan’s” had no interest in the race itself, only in a description that captured the admittedly vulgar Derby scene in Louisville and at Churchill Downs. (Probably every sports columnist visiting the Derby for the first time has a crack at this). Thompson at least named the winner of the race, an item that escaped the Faulkner effort.
The paragraph most eye-catching to me in Thompson’s near-10,000-word screech comes toward the end when Steadman smiles and says to Thompson:
“We came down here to see this teddible scene: people all pissed out of their minds and vomiting on themselves and all that…and now, you know what? It’s us…”
In an essay in the New York Times Book Review shortly after Thompson’s recent death by suicide, a friend, Rich Cohen, wrote, “This piece saw the breakthrough of Thompson as a gonzo journalist. On this first assignment for 'Scanlan’s,' when Thompson sat down to write, nothing came. He had been so wasted at the Derby: what could he remember? He had his reporter’s notebook, though, each page filled with a few sharp sentences. In the end he simply tore some pages out and sent them over. He was giving up on the idea of creating a traditional narrative…But the editors loved what he gave them and asked for more. When it was set in type and published as ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,’ the piece announced a new kind of journalism, raw and unprocessed-what you tell your friend about the party the moment before you pass out.”
Oh.
When the piece shows up on Google in a selection of Derbyana
provided by the website “Call to the Post,” there is
this special note: “Parental discretion is advised for this
essay, as it is rated R. It includes adult language, references
to drug and alcohol abuse, and other generalizations and behavior
which readers might find quite shocking.”
Indeed.
There is no such warning on Faulkner’s 2,500-word piece in Sports Illustrated. But it is known that Faulkner, to use the operative sanitary phrase, was known to take a drink. I submit that, like Hunter S. Thompson, the narcissistic gonzo journalist, he was fueled with some of the energy that produced these classics.
Is all of this just a quibble by a newspaperman
hardhead who believes that at least a little adherence to “who,”
“what,” “where” and “why” belongs
even in a literary masterpiece? Probably.
©2005 by Stan Isaacs.
The Stan Isaacs caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This
column first posted May 2, 2005.
You
can comment on this column online. Please address your message
to either "The Editors" or Stan Isaacs. To send an
email, click here: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|