The Mutations of Rollerball: Essays

By William Harrison

What do Margot Kidder, Tom Cruise, Oliver Stone and Robert Mitchum have in common with author William Harrison? Its here in the pages of The Mutations of Rollerball: An inside view of the life of a writer whose career has spanned six decades and four continents, the madness of Hollywood, the evolution of academic writing programs, and all points in between.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 27, 2010
• ISBN: 9781453556269

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Copyright © 2010 by William Harrison.

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CONTENTS

FOREWORD

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A MINOR AMERICAN WRITER (2000)

PRESENT TENSE AFRICA (1990)

EDUCATED AT THE ASTOR THEATER (2007)

BIG NAMES, HUGE STORYLINES, GIGANTIC TRUTHS: SHORT TAKES ON THE WRITER IN HOLLYWOOD (1995)

LIGHT YEARS AWAY: REMEMBERING A THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION (1999)

MY ONLY RECIPE: TIMBER RATTLER STEW (2001)

NOTES ON THEOLOGY AND PLACES

THE MUTATIONS OF ROLLERBALL (1976)

74 RULES TOWARD BEING AN AMERICAN GENTLEMAN IN THE 21ST CENTURY: AN ESSAY IN THE FORM OF A LIST (1999)

NAMES AND PLACES: AN EARLY LITERARY MEMOIR (1973)

READING BOOKS

ELEVEN BEDS: THE ANNOTATED SHORT STORY (2009)

To MERLEE, new family members CLARISS and OLIVIA, and to LAURIE, SEAN, QUENTIN, SAM, RACHEL

and ETHAN

 FOREWORD

A number of years ago I published in Antaeus magazine an essay entitled Why I Am Not an Autobiographical Writer.

I was referring to my fiction.

To some extent the claim was always false because I’ve used portions of my experience in eight published novels and some 50 short stories in three collections. I’ve also published here a few pieces of non-fiction, (along with some items that were never offered for publication) as well as the short story, Eleven Beds, containing some accompanying notes.

As time passes one tends to look back and get more personal.

Memory, as I said once, is really the art of art.

WHAT IT’S LIKE TO BE A MINOR AMERICAN WRITER (2000)

The short answer: it’s wonderful.

If fame is a peculiar and especially virulent form of American poison—and all evidence suggests that it usually is—the rewards of modest success are great. I’ve been writing and publishing for years and my face is unrecognized everywhere; my name is scarcely known; my most popular works, a short story and a novel that became movies, are by no means known everywhere and my part in their authorship is generally a matter of indifference.

But I’ve seen much of the world as a traveler incognito, learning, telling stories, and my mobility has been absolute—even if I don’t always travel first class. I’ve flown around Mount Everest in the morning sunrise, dined with celebrities in Nairobi, slept on yachts in the Sea of Cortez, and hung out with major players and minor characters—all with considerable pleasure. I’ve lived in London flats, Malibu beach houses, hotels in Zanzibar, villas in Spain and my modest house on a mountain in Arkansas.

If I have regrets in my later years I find they’re curiously small. True, my fiction has found only a handful of readers and the changing commercial demands of the book trade are disheartening to anyone who doesn’t write in the clearly defined genres such as crime, mystery or romance. Yet my stories have been published steadily beyond my 70th year and I keep working and learning about my craft. I remain optimistic about the future of both storytelling and books and I want to do what I’ve always done: travel, read, write and enjoy my family and friends.

I’ve known dozens of writers, of course, who’ve grown to wallow in self pity, envy, and a curious loathing of the literary community they set out to conquer. The prizes eluded them. Neither money nor fame happened. As James Dickey once so cleverly observed about himself and others, the American writer after age fifty is like a gut shot bear.

This brings up another matter. In our wild pop culture many authors take refuge in snobbism by way of explaining why their careers haven’t caught fire. Intelligent observation isn’t enough for these types. Mere entertainment is beneath them. They invoke the gods of art. They speak with highbrow praise of the great masters (their lists vary). They dislike movies and detest television. They celebrate their own obscurity as if genius (like theirs) always goes unnoticed—which it rarely does.

In this regard I enjoyed the many conversations when the film Shakespeare in Love entered our movie houses back in 1998. My highbrow acquaintances assured me that this extremely clever work came from Tom Stoppard, the nimble British playwright and one of their favorites, hailed by critics and Oxford dons for his wit. In truth, though, the film was the creation of Marc Norman, a journeyman television writer who conceived, structured and wrote the script. Stoppard was brought in late by the studio to punch up the dialogue and shared screen credit—at the studio’s insistence—but a yeoman Hollywood professional gave us this comic triumph just as Shakespeare himself, an often uneven writer, drew his work out of popular culture, the low taste of the masses, and his wild imagination.

I’ve known a lot of writers and heard most of them speak of their failed careers. One, a female, complained in my presence that her work hadn’t been published in The New Yorker for more than two years. A half dozen others have pouted that they went to good eastern schools where they excelled, made good contacts, published books yet failed to become rich or famous. Others offer a familiar litany: if I had only gone to New York (or London or Los Angeles), if I hadn’t married so young, if I hadn’t taken that teaching job, if I had run with a better literary crowd.

No career completes us, not even a highly successful one. For those with fame or money, too, there never seems to be enough of it.

As I’ve grown older I find I’m relatively happy. I have family and a modest circle of cronies. In my whole life I’ve only pushed away from a couple of acquaintances—because they were filled with too much pomposity or too much booze or both. If I’m a little cranky, so are my pals. And I remain grateful for life and its gifts.

On my best days I play bogey golf. That’s one stroke per hole on the wrong side of par. No one has ever admired my golf swing or its results yet I still go out to the course. I’ve been a published writer for many years, too, and I’ve experienced its difficulties—even grammar is work—yet for all the time I’ve given to my craft it has given back to me.

Not fame, but more than fame.

PRESENT TENSE AFRICA (1990)

At night in the Bristol Hotel everyone seems to have a key to my room, this little cinderblock cubicle at the rear, two floors above the alleyways of Lagos. I fold a pillow beneath my head and try to sleep facing the door.

A jangle of keys then a vendor shuffles in, speaking softly as he shows me his magazines. Go away, I tell him, and he nods but advances to the foot of the bed, smiling and selling until I raise my voice.

A man with a flit gun arrives to kill insects.

A squat little woman with a kerchief on her head comes to clean the basin.

It’s now two o’clock in the morning. The desk clerks retired at midnight and this is Africa where complaining only adds stress to your problems.

An Arab boy with a neck brace enters, pointing out that I’ll need a guide the next day.

Twenty minutes later a young prostitute arrives, asking in broken English if I didn’t ask the bartender to send her up. Please, I manage, please go away.

Exhausted, I stand at the window looking down on hundreds of wayfarers, dark figures in the rainy alleyway out back. Some sleep beneath old cartons while others slump in doorways, smoking cigarettes and waiting out the night. Not far off is a rubbish pile as large as a city block. A church bell clanks out a toneless count.

A man in a uniform unlocks my door and peers in, wanting to know if everything is all right. He’s the watchman, he tells me, and suggests money, just a little tip, please, but he smells drunk and unofficial.

An old woman with assorted flowers.

A nearly naked man with a bicycle wheel.

A waiter from the lounge bar.

It’s four in the morning when the magazine vendor loudly jangles his keys and tries again. Yes, all right, I tell him, one of those, and when he’s gone I prop myself up, turn on the single naked lightbulb, and begin to look at the pictures and read.

+ +

At the roadblock near Singida our van is stopped by a trio of ragtag Tanzanian soldiers, one of them carrying a rusty M-1 rifle with an oily rag dangling like a flag from its breech.

The day is scorching, dust devils everywhere, all the waterholes dry, and the tall soldier in the vest glances into our van to see that we have six full cases of Tusker, the best Kenyan lager.

The drinking begins.

The third soldier, dressed in short khaki pants and a crushed straw hat, carries the lone bullet for his companion’s rifle. Wrapped in dirty string and draped around his neck, its brass casing glints in the sun.

They drink bottle after bottle of our warm beer and ask where we’re going. Dodoma, we tell them, then up to Mwanza. But why? No reason, we tell them, and that’s clearly reason enough.

The landscape north of the lush Iringa Forest is bleak as the moon: high savannah, rock, red dust covering the leaves of a few thorny bushes. As our van waits in the raw heat we can see ten miles in every direction—no other vehicles in sight—and as we offer the beer as a gift or a bribe, no one knows which, we stand in the road and wait. How much will they drink? Do we leave them a full case? When they’re drunk will they become hostile? Or will they soon raise that flimsy crossbar?

What to do? We’re wealthy travelers by their standards, just passing by, a fortune of beer in our possession, plastic cards in our pockets that can buy us the world, and they’re small men in tatters who share a common rifle and a single bullet.

We’ve talked about what to do if the van breaks down out here, how we’ll stay close to the vehicle because, as we know, we’re the slowest beasts on the landscape. We’ve talked about emergencies, the wild animals, how to stay calm. This is a land of cobra and lion, of strange disease and pestilence, but actually the great dangers are fleeting authority, vague boundaries, old gods and loyalties, and the oblivion of some unintentional insult in a language no one really understood. Unlike the world we usually inhabit in America, politics here can kill you.

+ +

At Cape Point there’s an asphalt parking lot, then a steep climb uphill to