The Dagley Dagley Daily

By Janet Dagley Dagley
Covering the world from the waterfront in Hoboken, New Jersey, USA

ISSN 1544-9114

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George Plimpton, participatory journalist, 1927-2003

(We interrupt the Union maid series today for this breaking-news obituary.)

The incessant refrain of journalism, of course, is Bob Dylan's question: "How does it FEEL? How does it FEEL?" But today there's another musical question stuck in my head, not Dylan's, but Paul Simon's:

"Who'll be my role model, now that my role model's gone?"

George Plimpton was about the nearest thing I had to a career role model, and the closest I ever got to thanking him for that was six months ago when Michael and I watched, applauded, and laughed as he received the Poor Richard Award from the Small Press Center in New York, in recognition of his contributions to independent publishing. (By the way, if you find yourself fortunate enough to reach an advanced age and people suddenly start giving you a bunch of awards, get to the doctor for a checkup and hope they can find whatever it is that may be about to kill you, because a lot of distinguished people tend to get a bunch of awards right before they die.)

Obviously I couldn't follow his example in many ways: he was tall and male; I am short and female. He was born into a wealthy family that had been among the first European settlers on this continent, and I was born into a not-so-wealthy family that had been among the first European settlers on this continent. He earned degrees from Harvard and Cambridge; I dropped out of Wright State University to continue my education, majoring in on-the-job-training. He only had one actual job in his whole life, and he stayed in that job for as long as I've been alive. I've had quite a few jobs, and haven't stayed in any of them for more than a half-dozen years. In fact, the Poor Richard Award was part of a tribute to the 50th anniversary of his editorship of The Paris Review. Speaking of Paris, he lived in Europe for awhile, and so did I, some decades later and a thousand kilometers or so east in the Paris-of-the-20s-of-the-90s. He played professional football and wrote about it; I was offered a chance to join a professional women's football team (a novelty act that went nowhere) back in 1974, but my day job as a reporter required me to work every other Saturday so I had to decline. He was in the circus; I was in the circus. He also boxed, played pro baseball, tennis, bridge, golf, hockey, and played bit parts and cameos in numerous movies. Obviously I couldn't keep up with him, try as I might, but it's been fun trying.

Plimpton called himself a "participatory journalist," though all journalists participate whether they acknowledge it or not. Before Hunter S. Thompson went gonzo, before Tom Wolfe got on Ken Kesey's bus, Plimpton was out there in the boxing ring or playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions or a bedouin in Lawrence of Arabia.

I took some notes during the Poor Richard Award ceremony in March, and I can still read some of them even now. E. L. Doctorow presented the award, a statue of Poor Richard's Almanac publisher Benjamin Franklin. "He is the inventor and sole practitioner of literature of a particular genre," Doctorow said, "Adventurous self-deprecation, in which he humiliates himself by attempting tasks he's not capable of. His affliction is unassuagable." Doctorow told the crowd what they already knew about Plimpton's history as editor of The Paris Review, told us about how, "as a callow youth, he shamelessly pursued Ernest Hemingway until he got him to talk." Over the years, Doctorow said, Plimpton created an "accidentally invaluable record of 20th- and 21st-century writers.

"He couldn't not have done it," Doctorow said. "The moral from Plimpton's life work is that if we don't write our stories and our poems, someone else will write them for us."

As he stood there at the podium, brandishing what he called "The Ben," Plimpton was reminded of another first-name statue, the Oscar. "I went out once to the Oscars proceedings in Los Angeles," he said. "I had been in a film called When We Were Kings, and the film won an Oscar. I was hoping they might give another Oscar to me. I was at the Governor's Ball right next door to the ceremony when (producer) Leon Gast gave me his Oscar, and said, "This will get you in anywhere anyone asks, 'Where's your ticket?'

"So now I have the Ben. I want a good table in the back." He paused to look over his prize, then added, "It should be bigger."

Plimpton said that "literary magazines, like butterflies, don't have very long lives, usually. The reason the Ben is in my hand is not because of me, but the people who've worked on the magazine over the years, and the writers who were too good, too independent, to find other publishers."

"The Ben" and Plimpton's other awards and trophies must stay in this world, even as he moves on to the next. Still, I hope he gets credit there for the life he lived here, and I hope they give him a good table in the back. Because the breaking news is not so much that George Plimpton died, but that he lived, and that he lived so voraciously, and he never failed to acknowledge his own presence.

posted by Janet Dagley Dagley @5:39 PM

26.9.03