He Wrote One Great Novel

The late John Casey won the National Book Award for the sailing tale “Spartina,” but he also wrote engagingly about his love of sports and exercise.

In 1991, the summer before senior year, my high school assigned three books for reading. Summer books weren’t those considered classics, like King Lear or Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, but they were contenders, near-greats: The Street, Ann Petry’s 1946 novel about black life in Harlem; The Road From Coorain, Jill Ker Conway’s (1989) memoir of her bleak childhood in the Australian grasslands; and John Casey’s 1989 novel, Spartina.

In the first English class meeting of the school year, the only book we wanted to talk about was Spartina. How could we not? For starters, there were the main characters’ names: Dick Pierce and Elsie Buttrick. Ponder those names as if you were 17. But once Mrs. Archibald waited out our tittering and steered us toward the text, we agreed this maritime thriller was special. The story follows middle-aged Yankee Dick Pierce as he negotiates the class politics of his coastal Rhode Island community, works odd jobs for the summer vacationers, and slowly builds the boat that will give him financial freedom as an independent fisherman.

Spartina is about labor, love, lust. It’s also a nail-biter about surviving (or not) a fearsome hurricane, and the boat—named Spartina after the tall marshland grass—that he’d built well enough to survive it. “As he stood back up, Spartina suddenly slid forward as though she was greased,” we read, as Dick sails his newly built boat through the storm. The boat is good; he’s done good, assembling a vessel and, simultaneously, a new life. “He’d made her,” he thinks, “but now she was the good one. She was better than him. It wasn’t alarming to hear this news, it was deeply, thickly soothing.”

Spartina was an adult novel, one of the first books that gave me a foretaste of the pleasure that reading might provide following formal schooling. Unlike most authors we read in class, John Casey was still living, still working; I could keep reading him! Who knew what he’d give the world in the years to come?

As it turned out, not very much. Casey died in February, 86 years old to my 50. Spartina, his third novel, was not only his first great novel but his last. It’s not unusual for authors to have one enduring book. But how can an author capable of Spartina—which a review in The New York Times called “possibly the best American novel about going fishing since ‘The Old Man and the Sea,’ maybe even ‘Moby-Dick’”—never again produce a timeless work?

It’s not that Casey never wrote again. He wrote two more novels after Spartina: The Half-Life of Happiness (1998) and Compass Rose (2010), an inferior sequel to Spartina. He wrote a well-regarded book about craft, Beyond the First Draft (2014). He was a beloved teacher of writing at the University of Virginia, at least until he retired in 2018 after a University of Virginia investigation found that he had had inappropriate sexual contact with a student in 2001. (Casey said the contact was a consensual but “regrettable” extramarital affair.)

What seems to have kept Casey from the writing desk were the demands of his athletic life. This we know from his late, excellent nonfiction work Room for Improvement: Notes on a Dozen Lifelong Sports (2011). An essay collection that stands proudly with Casey’s best fiction, “Room for Improvement” is a tour of Casey’s sporting obsessions and accomplishments. At various points in his life, he excelled at rowing, running, ice hockey, cross-country skiing and judo. Among much else.

At a boarding school in Switzerland, Casey had played goalie in the Swiss schoolboy hockey championships, in Zermatt. Switzerland is where he took up rowing. He began distance running while in the Army Reserve. He piloted small boats while living on an island in the Narragansett Bay. (He took his wife and baby to live on an island with no electricity, which says something about the man’s tolerance for risk).

For Casey’s fiftieth birthday, he hiked fifty kilometers—not miles, “bless the metric system.” For his seventieth birthday, he completed a seventy-kilometer journey, variously Rollerblading, bicycling, running and rowing on an ergometer. He once slept in subzero temperatures in a snow cave of his own making. Et cetera. To read Room for Improvement is to think, with the poet James Wright: “I have wasted my life.”

Yet Casey did not see his strenuous exercise regimen as an impediment to his writing, but as a precondition for it. “I wouldn’t write if I didn’t read a lot,” Casey said. “I also wouldn’t write if I didn’t get out in the physical world in my own body, sometimes as a ‘sojourner in nature,’ as Thoreau puts it.” The best passages in “Spartina” testify to his life of physical vigor, a familiarity with life at the body’s frontier of the possible, where the line between the terrain and oneself is permeable, even disappearing. “But it wasn’t the condition of the sea that was his problem,” Casey writes of Dick, sleepless, delirious and storm-tossed. “It was his own condition. He hadn’t done anything dumb yet, but he was getting to a state where he wasn’t sure he could watch himself.” For Casey, life and writing were part of a reckless adventure, one that could take him to the edge of sanity, and well beyond his desk.

(This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal.)

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Back to the drawing board … or canvas

One of my loyal readers said she missed the feature in which I asked ChatGPT to paint pictures of new subscribers, based on what I imagined their physical characteristics to be. Well, okay, it’s back. I have a new subscriber named Stefan—last name is Germanic, let’s say it’s Hofmeister, or Schwarzenegger, or something like that. I asked ChatGPT to paint for me a picture of “a Swiss chess player and skier who drinks beer and entertains friends with lusty stories of mountaineering adventure with his large dog.” Here is what Frau ChatGPT gave me. I have to say, I think she did good: