Wednesday
So Father Time finally caught up with the incomparable Roger Federer, who last week played one last match before retiring. Although others have surpassed Federer records that once appeared unsurpassable, no one has ever played as beautifully as the Swiss tennis player, and I suspect no one ever will. Novelist Davis Foster Wallace once wrote an article entitled “Roger Federer as Religious Experience,” and he didn’t overstate the case.
In recent years I have written posts about Federer and the aging process, posts that cited Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Tennyson’s “Ulysses”, and even Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew. In these I compared him, respectively, to a man dying of sepsis, an aging epic hero setting off on one last voyage, and an aged suitor (Gremio) who doesn’t stand a chance against a younger rival. In one post, written in pain over an early Federer loss, I cited Arizona poet Richard Shelton’s “Requiem for Sonora”:
I am older and uglier
and full of the knowledge
that I do not belong to beauty
and beauty does not belong to me
I have learned to accept
whatever men choose to give me
or whatever they choose to withhold
but oh my desert
yours is the only death I cannot bear
And yet, I had no reason to complain as Federer delighted us for far longer than we could have reasonably expected. What’s important is that, win or lose, he did it all with grace. In the words of Rudyard Kipling’s “If,” somehow he could “meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.” (In a post on the poem I mention a a video of him reading alternate couplets from the poem with his great archrival Rafael Nadal .)
Rather than share one of my more recent Federer posts, I reach back to reprint the essay I wrote thirteen years ago when he won—for the first and only time—the French Open. In it, with the help of tennis writer Peter Bodo, I compare Federer with the 17th century Cavalier poets as I try to get at that special something that caused Federer to stand out.
Reprinted from June 12, 2009
As a tennis player and fan of Roger Federer, I am still vibrating over his having won the French Open this past Sunday. After his archrival Rafael Nadal went down in an early match to Swede Robin Soderling, all the pressure was on Federer to win the one grand slam event that has eluded him. He barely avoided defeat in the two matches leading up to the final.
In the quarterfinals match, he was one missed shot away from losing in three sets to the German Tommy Haas (who would have gone on to serve out the set), saving a break of his service by hitting a wondrously angled crosscourt forehand for a winner. Against the overpowering game of Argentine Juan Martin Del Potro, he found enough variety to eke out a five-set victory after twice being down a set. By the finals, he had rediscovered the game that made him unbeatable in 2006 and 2007 (or unbeatable by anyone other than Nadal on clay) and won easily.
Early in Federer’s career I resisted his lure because I was an Andre Agassi fan and also had hopes for Andy Roddick. But ultimately I fell in love with the most beautiful style of tennis I had ever seen. (I speak as someone who started watching tennis the year that Rod Laver won his second grand slam.) Seemingly without effort, Federer has the ability to turn a backhand defensive shot into an attack weapon that sends his opponent scurrying. His serve is amazing in its precision, as is his forehand down the line, and he has recently added a remarkable drop shot that he uses against players who, like Nadal, play deep behind the baseline. Federer is poetry in motion.
I was struck by Peter Bodo’s article on the Tennis Magazine website that puts Federer in a conversation that includes a couple of actual poets. Bodo is trying to put his finger on what distinguishes Federer and concludes that it is his ability to make difficult things look easy. Bodo applies the Italian concept of sprezzatura to Federer, which he says he learned about from Mark Kingwell’s book on flyfishing, Catch and Release.
Kingwell defines sprezzatura as follows:
“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .
Bodo invokes Kingwell’s definition as he contrasts Federer with other tennis greats:
He frequently seems to think, act, and express sentiments nothing like those of a host of iconic tennis players whose qualities were often trumpeted as germane to their station: the bullishness of [Guillermo] Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.
So where do poets come into the conversation? One poem that comes to my mind is W.B. Yeats’s “Adam’s Curse,” where the poet talks about how a poem should seem effortless, even though much effort goes into it:
I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;
Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,
Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”
That’s how Federer’s game looked. But drawing on Kingwell’s book, Bodo reaches back to an earlier era, making Federer appear somewhat as a throwback. Noting that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, Kingwell finds the quality within Cavalier poets Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace:
Puritanical critics tend to regard sprezzatura as a suspect quality, a polish in manners that indicates overrefinement or even feyness, the transparent self-justification of the fop. But such judgments ignore the real edge that must remain beneath the polish. Castiglione’s elegant courtiers or the dandy Cavalier poets of (Izaak) Walton’s own time were anything but fey. They were brave, wily, and often dangerous men – men who served with distinction in battles and intrigues. . ..Only a clod could fail to be impressed by the combination of poetry and military distinction observable in Richard Lovelace or Sir John Suckling. And yet, what military man today would dare admit he read poetry, let along composed it? On the others side, from what poet could we expect to see a display of manly vigor, except perhaps in the vulgar form of drunken brawling at a book launch. There may be such men out there – I really hope there are – but no one could reasonably argue that they form our currently dominant notion of masculine accomplishment.
Actually, I did know one such military man: three-star marine general Robert Hogaboom, famous for directing the ship-to-shore invasion of Iwo Jima during World War II, retired to the town where I live, which allowed me to witness his refined artistic sensibilities. But Kingwell’s point is well taken since Hogaboom too seemed a throwback to an earlier era.
At any rate, Lovelace and Suckling were both warriors fighting in the doomed cause of King Charles I. Suckling, after a failed attempt to free the king’s minister from execution, fled to France and died bankrupt a year later. Lovelace was twice imprisoned for fighting for the king and is most well known for a couple of poems he composed in his cell. You may know them:
To Lucasta, Going to the Wars
Tell me not, sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breast and quiet mind
To war and arms I fly.
True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.
Yet this inconstancy is such
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.
And the last stanzas from “To Althea, from Prison”:
Stone walls do not a prison make,
Nor iron bars a cage;
Minds innocent and quiet take
That for an hermitage.
If I have freedom in my love,
And in my soul am free,
Angels alone, that soar above,
Enjoy such liberty.
Suckling, meanwhile, is famous for such poems as the one below, which finds a comic new take on the image of the languishing lover that was a staple of Renaissance love poetry. Don’t be put off by the explosive punch line at the end. Although it is an instance of a man venting about female rejection, Suckling is also making fun of the speaker: the poet claims to be able to dispense dispassionate and common sense advice, only in the end of lose his cool:
Song
Why so pale and wan, fond lover?
Prithee, why so pale?
Will, when looking well can’t move her,
Looking ill prevail?
Prithee, why so pale?
What so dull and mute, young sinner?
Prithee, why so mute?
Will, when speaking well can’t win her,
Saying nothing do’t?
Prithee, why so mute?Quit, quit, for shame; this will not move,
This cannot take her.
If of herself she will not love,
Nothing can make her:
The devil take her.
Whether or not one agrees with the political sympathies (or the sexual politics) of the Cavalier poets, they remind us of the value of keeping things light when life gets serious. Today we live in an earnest and often Puritanical culture (Suckling and Lovelace were fighting against the Puritans) and spend a lot of time and energy getting bent out of shape. While these poets risked their lives for a cause, they do not come across as humorless enthusiasts. Suckling makes light of rejection and Loveless of imprisonment as they model an alternative way of responding to crisis.
So the next time you feel the pull of a passionate intensity, whether it involves a sacred cause or politics or sports or some other aspect of life, pick up a Suckling or Lovelace poem. They will help you regain perspective. And while it is still possible, watch Roger Federer dancing elegantly, fending off cannon shots that muscle-bound young men fire his way. You’ll find life a little easier to bear.