Goodbye Fergie 5: Decline and the Father

                                                I do not know which to prefer
                                                The beauty of inflections
                                                Or the beauty of innuendoes,
                                                The blackbird whistling
                                                        Or just after.

                  - Wallace Stevens, from 'Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird'


Frankly, I don't know either.  The apotheosis of the great mid-sixties team was the 1968 European Cup Final in Wembley against Benfica, a match I watched live on black and white TV. United won 4-1, which makes it sound easier than it was. The match went to extra time, the performance to catch the eye was that of an almost unknown, twenty year old John Aston, whose first and last hour of glory it was, who had the beating of the Benfica full-back and outshone Best on the night. Law was missing through injury as he was ever more to do, and the other new boys were Brian Kidd, just nineteen at the time and David Sadler, then twenty-two. It seemed like dawn, but really it was the last brilliant blaze of glory before dusk and a fast approaching night. I am including an old clip of the transmission that I actually watched full and live, with the Kenneth Wolstenholme commentary.




Looking at it again, I imagine United in the beautiful dark blue they actually adopted for the match,an even-handed necessity since normally both United and Benfica played in red, so Benfica wore white. I notice how clean the match is, that there is no rolling about pretending to be hurt. There is little cynicism at all. Great players make mistakes. Best wags his finger at a Benfica defender and the great Eusebio applauds Alex Stepney's save.
Football, like any game, thrives on anxiety and disappointment. It was tense until the third goal. The relief and overwhelming joy at the fourth is the reward for your anxiety. No anxiety: no excitement. No danger of loss: no drama.
Loss was to come. The next season was one of great disappointment. Best, Law, and Charlton had all reached their peak. Stiles and Crerand were near the end of theirs. The hoped-for youth did not mature as hoped. Brian Kidd, the greatest one available, did well enough but Best was getting bored and moving beyond control. Being spat on and kicked by the Estudiantes player in the World Club Championship, then getting sent-off for retaliating, cannot have helped, but it was just another thing. He was falling off the edge of cliff in his own spectacular fashion, brilliant as ever, but deadly bored. The team finished eleventh in the league. Thing were falling apart. Matt Busby, now Sir Matt Busby, retired at the end of the season.
*

Boys naturally identify with other boys, generally older boys. The great footballers of the team you support are your wonderful non-existent brothers. They complete you when you are feeling at your least complete. You need them as you struggle past your parents, especially beyond your father, who, by the time you are eighteen or nineteen, has begun to take on the appearance of an old man. He is no longer the authority he might have been when you were ten or eleven.
That is if you have a good father. Mine was very good, but neither he nor I could prevent the withering of his power, not in my imagination, nor in our family life. Such withering away may be temporary. Time, as it advances, offers a more charitable perspective. The father becomes the man and it is as if he were growing into his earlier self, assuming a diferent kind of independent stature, as mine has done. If the successful players are your shadow brothers, the manager, especially one as venerable as Busby, is your über-shadow father. His age peaks in wisdom, and the hard lesssons of his life (a suffering you eventually recognise) offers the hope of survival and transformation.  
So with my father, so with Busby. Busby was the man who built Manchester United as the major force they had never been before the war (how hard it is to consider that possibility!) He survived Munich. He lost the best part of his team, effectively his sons, and he built again, with one surviving son, Bobby Charlton; one natural son, his fellow Scot, Denis Law; and his genius prodigal son, Georgie Best. He was "like a father to them". He had the benign fatherly look and a quiet, almost classless yet working-class Scottish intelligence and unforced authority that differentiated him from the English crowd that flowed around him. 
He was like my own father in many respects, but more competent, less nervous, less vulnerable, more effortlessly potent. He was not a grand strategist, not a technical chalk-board theorist.  He healed and encouraged - as I imagined, as we probably all imagined - by sheer presence.
* 
I watch Charlton score the first United goal in that European Cup Final. A moment of elation but no acrobatics, no piling into a crowd, no embracing, just a turning away and withdrawing into self, into further effort. The rejection of egotism. The good son working for the good father.
But then the good father goes.

Goodbye Fergie 4:The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth Beatle

My full adolescence coincides perfectly with Philip Larkin's Annus Mirabilis, the Beatles' first LP and the appearance of George Best. It was stiff competition for a fifteen year old, deeply insecure teenager with a big nose, always on the fringes of the school team, making the odd appearance in the First Eleven but much more likely in the Second. The England dream had long gone. I was fast (I got to run for the county, once) but I was short-sighted, lacked that 'vital first touch' and, had I been observing myself play, I would generally have awarded myself 6 out of 10). My actual position was out on the right-wing. I had no functioning left foot. I was OK at best.

Nor did I lead the social life of the other footballing boys. No girlfriends until I was seventeen and always awkward, not only with girls but with other boys, in fact with pretty well everybody. I know every teenage boy feels this, but factor in the foreigness that never quite went away and you get some idea.

Then came the great mid-Sixties team who were a glory to my imagination. Numinous names doesn't cover it! Stepney, Brennan, Dunne, Crerand, Foulkes, Stiles, Best, Charlton, Sadler, Aston, Cantwell, Herd and Connelly. In compiling that list I am aware that it fades a little after Aston, but the light doesn't altogether go. I have clear memories of Herd and Connelly. This was the miracle team,  that played thrilling, dynamic football. It was the first triumph of hope.

What do I mean by dynamic, thrilling football? I must try to write a little about that for those who are indifferent to the game and will do so later. For now I mean that the ball moved fast and accurately from player to player. That defenders tried to make thoughtful passes, that Stepney behind that defence was reliable and more, that Foulkes was a rock, that Stiles, unlikely as he looked (he resembled an electrician my dad knew, little, with glasses, in Stiles's case off the field of course) was fierce and capable of dealing with some of the best forwards in the world. But above all, there was Charlton cruising the midfield, Law appearing here and there, sharp, brilliant, deadly, magnificent as a bird in flight, and, above all, Best, who was something else altogether, a small, willowy, handsome wizard such as wingers are dreamt to be, spinning, slipping by people, turning at impossible angles, clearly a world star.

And that is what he was. The Fifth Beatle as the foreign press labelled him. I now think he was Ryan Giggs, born into a football version of the Restoration. Best was a Restoration rake in what had been a Puritan game in England. And the team too had something of the flamboyant rake about it. They were what one could aspire to in late adolescence.

Denis Law in flight

It was beautiful football. Not all the time, not in every game, but at its high-points it had what commentators now occasionally call poetry. Poetry was what I needed, though I didn't know that at the time. Football didn't save my life, but it offered somewhere for my imagined life to be.

And behind them all stood Matt Busby, the manager, of whom more next time.

Goodbye Fergie 3: Albert Quixall days

Albert Quixall

I am writing this from Budapest at the flat of a friend, but want to continue the series as a lead-up to the Fergie High Plateau, an eminence I hadn't ever thought to reach.

The long romance was only five years old and I was fourteen when the sixties team began to climb to its first peak since 1958. It started with the FA Cup Final on 25 May 1963, almost exactly fifty years ago to the day as I write. Bobby Charlton was in place, Denis Law had arrived but Georgie Best was not yet ready. His first appearance was to be in the November of that year.

I mentioned names before. The numinous ones here are Gaskell, Dunne, Cantwell, Crerand, Foulkes, Setters, Giles, Quixall, Herd, Law, Charlton. Leicester had Ken Keyworth, Mike Stringfellow, Colin Appleton and Frank McLintock. Names like Keyworth and Stringfellow seemed the epitome of England to my forming verbal imagination. A man worth a key and a fellow that looked like string.

*

I had to look the United team up to check those numinous names, but with a little thought I would have got them all. All except one: Albert Quixall.  It is as if Quixall were a time visitor from a previous era, a childhood figure mixed up with teenage dreams; a Victorian among the Moderns. Albert Quixall - a record buy from Sheffield Wednesday for £45,000  - was a quick-heal straight after the Munich disaster. Quixall the Quickheal.

He was a boy with a blond quiff, and unusual in being called Albert. Not many boys of his age were, and, if they were, they tended to shorten it to Bert, or possibly Al. Albert was the Victorian part of him. He was gone by the end of 1963 so his brief blond comet trail only entered my consciousness as it was leaving it. Quixall looked as though he might have been part of a backing band on a rock 'n roll gig. He had a boyish face, still a little plump in the cheeks. To me he will forever represent the pre-Beatles and Philip Larkin pre-sexual intercourse days.  Those were my impressionable days too of course, between the ages of ten and fourteen.

Boys like Quixall were my elders at co-ed state grammar school. They were glamorous, slightly threatening semi-adults, whose magnetism preceded the magnetism of girls by a year or two, maybe less. They were a possible realm of being. They might appear in the school football team or be found hanging around the corridors. Some would be smoking down by the bike-shed. Some might have transcended class barriers or have been born into the lower middle class. Some became engineers, some doctors. Other would work in garages, offices or shops.

My own ambitions, apart from football, were determined by the ambitions of my parents. Penniless refugees,  set up in jobs and accommodation in London with invaluable official help, they had brought their aspirational backgrounds with them. Their children's lives were to be secure and assimilated. My brother was to be a violinist (he had the talent for it) and I was to be a doctor (they thought I had the talent for it). My Hungarian school results had given them plenty of encouragement though the English results were not quite as glittering. It's the adaptation to the language, they must have thought. My personal ambitions were survival, a different face and body and a top quality bicycle to tour with, ideally a racing Raleigh with Sturmey-Archer five-speed gears. Of these, only survival was a realistic ambition. In my heart of hearts I already knew that I would fail to win an England cap at football, and that I might even struggle to make the school's under 14-team.

This was North-West London so the boys I knew supported Chelsea or Arsenal or Spurs, with the odd Watford or Brentford fan among them. I remember asking a tall thin scholarly boy what team he supported. He didn't look the football type. Chesterfield, he replied. We were nowhere near Chesterfield geographically. Chesterfield was nowhere near glamour or even hope. It was an admirable answer, like a gasp of northern wind. I like the crooked spire, he said.

The Quixalls of early teenage life were objects of envy, fear, and tenderness. It was as if I knew that their opportunities might be limited, their flowering brief. Looking back on it now I am sure there was a trace of homo-erotic love in my feelings though Eros was no conscious part of it. There was something baby-faced about them, though in certain lights there was a hint of Richard Attenborough as Pinky in Brighton Rock.

I was not of them. I was not that face. Bobby Charlton's face was the benign aspect of older boys, mostly blond, mostlly British. They nearly always came with quiffs or other not-too-tidy but fancy hairstyles. Quixall's was their passing aspect, just as he was United's.

Goodbye Fergie 2Falling in love with Bobby Charlton

You can't help but notice you are growing. Your body changes shape, you sprout hair, you are becoming a creature alien to yourself and to your parents, to the world. No wonder teenagers love scary films full of transformations and violence. The energy is there but so is the fear and you don't know what to do with it.

I think the first time I saw Manchester United in the flesh was at Fulham when Fulham had players like Jim Langley and Johnny Haynes.

Johnny Haynes

Names. Names mean nothing and everything. Decades later they toll you back into some small booth of your life, the kind of booth you used to get in record shops where you could listen to the record before you bought it. They were like phone-hoods, like the kind of hairdryer you saw in women's hairdressers.  Mention a name and a face swims up at you, or a moment of movement, or a voice echoing out of an unseen space.

In front of me on the field the Manchester United team of 1960. I look up the date now it says 26 March 1960. That seems right. I think I remember a spring day. If it is 1960 the team is: Gregg, Foulkes, Brennan, Carolan... more names, but wait. It can't be that date. It must have been 28 April 1962. In 1960 United won 5-0, and I would remember that. In 1962 Fulham won 2-0. That is less memorable.

 And now it comes back. I am very depressed by the loss. We are outside the ground and I ask my father (in English by now, Hungarian seems to have disappeared into thin air): Do you think we (gulp) will go down, dad? I am almost tearful. And he says, No.

I am consoled but my father's voice is no longer the voice of God. He can't ensure United won't go down, nor can he know that they won't. It's not in his power. His powers are limited. In fact United finish 15th and the next season is even worse: 19th. Almost down. (Manchester City and Leyton Orient go down that year.) I am squaring the tragic heroes of 1958 with the team in transition in the early Sixties. Not that I understand such terms as 'transition', not really. I understand it as danger and the hope of rescue.

Because by now it is deep within me. What is? A sort of story. It is not exactly what theorists call a discourse because there seem to be no dimensions to the story apart from the sense of anxiety and relief you process as a story that has a beginning but seems for ever to be improvising itself into a potentially tragic pattern. Loss is not only depressing: it is a form of humiliation. The heart goes into hiding. It is not from others. Others don't care. I have no sense of what it might be like to be a Fulham supporter. They are another planet, as is everyone else. The humiliation is of the loved object, and the lover is bound to feel it as his own humiliation. It is mirrorless.

*

The young men on the pitch are fragments of my psyche. I have fallen in love with Bobby Charlton. It is a distant romance and perfectly satisfactory in that form. He is like an older brother I will never meet, and that too is satisfactory. He glides, he swerves, he homes in, then he unleashes. These movements are metaphors as much as events in a script. Bobby Charlton is the benign worker-gentleman aspect of the nation which is, I assume, my nation. The rest of the team is vital, but there is a core to it, an embodiment. Bobby Charlton is that embodiment.

He is also, by default, my embodiment, only with a better body. What he does is not impossible. It is not inconceivable I should be able to do such things.  That's the tangible part. I must work. I must run faster. I must glide, swerve, home in, and unleash. These are beautiful things to do. They are possible. And listen! He is a survivor of the great crash. And here he is, alive and cruising. Life can be like this.

Goodbye Fergie: 1Why football, why Manchester United

Sir Alex Ferguson' last game at Old Trafford, 11 May 2013

It has been quite a year so far in both public and private terms. The death of Margaret Thatcher, the abdication of the Pope, and now the retirement of Fergie on the one hand and our decision to make this our last year of salaried employment on the other. Time's wingéd chariot is hurrying near. Eras are ending.

I will no doubt write more about retirement plans and what retirement, in this sense at least, might mean. I'll reflect a little on the years of teaching art, history of art and poetry. But that's for later. This is a football post and anyone not interested can stop reading here.

Though you might choose to wait because this isn't so much about football as about a team and what it means in a personal life that, I suspect, might be untypical. The truth is that I feel very deeply about this team and have done for over fifty years and would quite like to explain to myself not only why but why I haven't grown out of it. It is a romance that has gone on a very long time.

*

I have written before about my father taking me to my first football match in 1955 or 1956, the open terraces of the Népstadion, and the faint memory of the lilac shirts of the Újpest Dózsa team that struck me as somehow romantic, all the more so because the occasion was a moment of intimacy with my father and because it was among a large and potentially frightening mass of people. There is something raw and heady about a football crowd, as there is about any great gathering intent on an occasion. Even as a child you are aware of passions that seem to exceed whatever events are happening on the field. I felt them as an aspect of adulthood.

Ujpest Dózsa

Soon after we left Hungary, came to England, found our first accommodation in London, and in all the chaos of adjustment I doubt I noticed anything much beyond the immediately personal. The big world outside, if I heard anything about it at all, was not my affair.

And then came the Munich aircrash in which  many members of a football team were killed. I hardly knew who they were but somehow I was aware that very shortly afterwards the same club, Manchester United, put out a makeshift team that succeeded in reaching the final of the FA Cup. This was the point I started following the story without knowing anything much about football. The makeshift team were defeated in that final of 1958, the United goalkeeper, Harry Gregg, being barged into the net in a way that seemed to me cruel. An aircrash and now this! I can't remember watching the match on TV. I don't know if we even had a television then, but it is as if I remembered it.

Nat Lofthouse barges Harry Gregg into the goal, FA Cup Final 1958

It was love I think, a strong sense of identification that demanded loyalty: it was the first thing in my life outside my immediate family circle that required such thoroughgoing, possibly eternal commitment. It's a commitment I have kept to this day.

The commitment wasn't related to specific acts of support, more to a web of complex feelings I didn't understand at the time,  an emotional condition with emotional triggers.

Manchester United match day programme

I actually started playing in 1959 while at primary school. I was quite solidly built for a nine year old and could run fast so the teacher in charge of the school football team picked me to play at centre forward. I don't think I had very much technical ability but I practiced hard in the playground and dreamt vainly of playing for England, vainly as I knew even then, because however good I was or could be, being born Hungarian, I was ineligible.

The school team was rather good and won a local schools cup in a final for which the teacher, a strongly religious man with a talent for  rousing public speech, psyched us up. We won 2-0 and I picked up a small medal. Not being a particularly social child, being part of a team and being awarded a medal, was my first social success. By the time primary school came to an end in 1960 I understood a little more about the game I was actually playing. I can still recall the sense of lining up on a pitch and running hard in chase of a ball. I can be that boy for a few microseconds of YouTube memory.

On 19 September 1959 my father took me to White Hart Lane to see Spurs play Preston in their change kit of dark blue and white. Spurs won 5-1. It was another moment of intimacy but less bewildering. I can see that fathers are going to be part of this.

I'll continue down this line as long as it interests me so that should take me a through a few posts.

An extraordinary week, two prizes and a gift

Tuesday 30 April: Win CLPE Poetry Award for In the Land of the Giants (Salt)

Wednesday 1 May: YouTube of Sir Patrick Stewart reading my poem, The Matrix Reloaded for Dignity in Dying

Friday 3 May: Win BTBA (Best Translated Book Award) in USA 

for László Krasznahorkai's great Satantango

I haven't known a week like this, exhausting yet rewarding beyond measure. In fact it is two weeks. Cambridge reading on Tuesday 23rd,  university the next day, London the next for PBS meeting, Warwick on Friday to give brief paper at the translation conference, Saturday a full day's writing workshop at the Writers Centre, Norwich. Sunday with guests and family.

This last Monday in Brighton for reading and discussion at Sussex University with Hungarian novelist Noémi Szécsi, staying overnight to go to London. Return home. Back down next day for drinks in memory of Valerie Eliot at The London Library. The next day at university and finishing review of Imre Kertész's Dossier K for The Times. Yesterday to Oxford for marvellous reading by Gerard Woodward, and later for news of the translation prize.

It does sound a crazy time, even to me. No time to reflect now as I am due to teach a whole day here. More later.

My Life on Trains, starring Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton in The General
This is a reasonable allegorical representation of my life in the last ten days and probably the next ten days too. Buster Keaton plays an itinerant poet. The action consists chiefly of running around trains. A train dashes through countryside. I am struggling to put on some decent clothes. The train is delayed through some fault on the line, generally signals. And so on. General Parker advances. People in the real world do important things. There seems to be a young woman bound up in some way. I forget who she is. You can make up the rest. 
Tomorrow Brighton, Tuesday London, Wednesday London, etc.
You can have it with jazz too. In fact you do. Once my brain is back in order I will write more sensible blogs.