Pulling No Punches

In the mid-1960s, a sportswriter for the New York Times decided to try his hand at fiction. His novel, about a young man who finds himself through boxing, was marketed as "young adult" fiction, a then-new category. Today, of course, anyone who cares about YA literature knows The Contender and its author, Robert Lipsyte. In this first, groundbreaking novel, and in several others that followed, Lipsyte maps the scary, confusing terrain of teenaged boys struggling to fit in, to make hard choices, to become men. For The Contender, as well as three other books of enduring appeal—One Fat Summer, The Brave, and The Chief (all from HarperCollins)—Lipsyte was named this year's winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime contribution to young adult literature. (The award is sponsored by School Library Journal and administered by the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association.)

To talk to Lipsyte about his life and work, who better, we thought, than Walter Dean Myers, another Edwards Award winner and another writer whose books explore ideas about manhood and morality. Lipsyte spoke to Myers by phone from his home in New York City, where, when not traveling the country to cover sports for the Times , he continues to write for adults and young adults. One of his latest projects is writing the libretto for an opera about Muhammed Ali.

Watler Dean Myers: When I was growing up, I lived in a rough Harlem neighborhood, where reading was synonymous with weakness. As a result, I became a secret reader and book lover. Did you have a similar experience?

Robert Lipsyte: Well, I didn't really have to be a secret book lover. I was fat… and hated my body and hated to go out in the world. So books were a real refuge. Also, I grew up in pretty much of a lower-middle-class striving Jewish ghetto in Queens, where there was tremendous pressure on reading and on education.… [Basically], in that society, I was the marginalized boy. I was a girl. You know, if you were fat or disabled or had very thick glasses or a stutter or whatever it was, that put you last to be chosen on the team and sent to play with the girls. So books and writing were a real refuge for me. When I lost my weight at the age of 14, it was like those operations where a kid's blind all his life and then suddenly, "I can see!" And from the age of 14 for the next I don't know how many years, I didn't read, I didn't do anything, except, you know, play ball and screw around.

WDM: Your books nearly always deal with masculine identity. By that I mean the idea of boys being aware of what it is to be a boy, of competition with other males. I think that's a vastly underrated concern of teenaged boys and that it's really important for them to realize it's not just them having those feelings. But you don't find this dealt with very often in young adult literature.

RL: Well, I think that maybe so many guys who are writing tend to take that for granted or haven't understood that, simply because they were not in some ways placed on the sidelines. I think that I'm very much aware of it because it was a long time before I was allowed to participate. I never took it for granted, being male. Probably in the same way that gay men, and others who've been told that they're not quite on the team, are marginal. I think that in those years of being fat and being an observer and being very much aware of watching guys—and then, you know, after 14, being allowed to participate, I don't think I ever really lost the idea that I don't quite belong.

WDM: One of the things that comes off very strongly in your books is that even the most physically aggressive guys—Alfred in The Contender, for example, and Sonny Bear in The Chief—all have this marvelous awareness of "becoming" males. Of the way that, from boyhood to manhood, there's this idea of "How male are you?" You expect it in One Fat Summer [the story of an overweight teen] because here's a kid who's marginalized. But in your books, even the fighters, the toughest guys, are aware of this question of manhood, of another man imposing his will on you.

RL: I think kids talk about it and respond to it because we have been taught not to show our inner life. Because we're not supposed to be vulnerable to each other. It's interesting: I never got into it, but that whole Iron John movement—remember Robert Bly? Guys hugging each other and playing drums in the woods? There were guys who really went for that, and others who obviously felt threatened by it and mocked it. The idea is that there is this tremendous need for guys to trust each other, to be friendly, to be vulnerable to each other. But we're constantly being taught, for very good reasons, not to. [Instead we're supposed] to keep up the game face—the constant facade of masculinity, of toughness, and never to let down.

You know, the whole thing about homophobia, I mean when you think about it, who should really give a s---?… But the threat, you know, that you would be cast out from this male society if they found out you were a fag, was really another way for parents and teachers and coaches to keep us under control…. And I think that it became then increasingly important to never show any kind of weakness or vulnerability or sensitivity, because then you're a faggot. And I think guys kind of closed into themselves. And I think they like to hear that other people have, you know, lives and feelings, and are scared. I mean, guys are scared.

WDM: Absolutely. And I think that in this country the boys read less than in, say, Europe. You know, we spend about six weeks a year in London and it's not uncommon to see young guys on the Underground reading. Here, I never see that. And yet if you go to comic book fairs, they're full of young sweaty boys buying comic books. But it seems that once they reach a certain age, they don't transfer it to books. I read comic books as a kid. I'm sure you did. And just reading other stuff, this came naturally to me. How did you get into reading?

RL: I didn't go to ball games with my father, I went to the library with my father. That was our thing. We went to cowboy movies and we went to the library at least once a week. And I could take out as many books as I could carry. That's how I built up upper body strength [laughs]. So reading was very much encouraged in the household. My father had a lot of books. And I moved from comic books to pulp magazines. I read a lot of mostly westerns, then later, science fiction and some detective. But I read a lot of pulp magazines, and then into "book-books."

WDM: How do you think we could encourage more boys to read now?

RL: Well, I see around the country, there are librarians who kind of feed boys books, one book at a time. I suspect that it's the same way how you find, you know, an alpha boy in high school, a kid that everybody looks up to, and you make sure that he's wearing, you know, "Air Myers" sneakers. And if you can get him a book and turn him on to a book, and if he's not afraid to walk around with a paperback in his baggy back pocket, you could do it that way. The [problem] is that the people who are involved in books, say, "Hey, this is kind of a wonderful thing. We're just going to wait until the light goes on over America." And that's never going to happen.

WDM: It's never going to happen.

RL: I mean [reading] really has to be sold and pushed…. But there's never been that kind of an effort. Although there are these pockets… [for instance] I was just in a library in Philadelphia. It was kind of a tough neighborhood—they had more guards than librarians [laughs]. And the place was packed with all these kind of real tough-looking kids. And man, they were great. They had a lot of questions—good questions—about the books, about me.

Two questions I hadn't been asked before: One, do I ever use drugs to help me write? And two, the killer—the one that I'm still stewing over—was, "Are you rich enough now to stop writing?" The answer to both was a resounding no. But they were really into it. They were into the books. They had read the books. And it was because librarians and teachers had fed these books to them slowly. And they talked to them and the kids got turned on by them, as I think they'd get turned on by any books that were sold to them in the right way. I mean that's not really happening in any kind of a mass way. For all the talk, I don't think the culture really wants young people to read. I think reading is ultimately dangerous and subversive to any kind of authority.

WDM: One thing in your books is interesting in light of the recent school shootings and people suggesting that when kids hear another student talking about this kind of thing, they should go to the authorities. I think that's such nonsense. I mean, I think kids should go to the authorities—that would be nice. But kids are not like that. Even when kids know there's something wrong going on, they have these divided loyalties. And one of the themes you treat so clearly in your books is the value young people place on peer loyalty. In The Contender, Alfred doesn't approve of the guys planning to rob the grocery store. In The Brave, Sonny Bear doesn't want to betray Dolly and Stick. I don't think adults always understand these conflicts. And I think some kids just want to know that it's okay even to think about some of these things. But I don't find that in enough books.

RL: Well, I guess one of the problems in the books we write is that it's very much of a genre. And as a genre, it has conventions and customs, one of which is the idea that these books, because they are for children, for this kind of vulnerable audience that has not yet reached the wisdom of the writer, has to be on the side of authority. You know what I mean? On the one side is the kids and on the other side is the teachers and the librarians and the cops and the parents.

I wrote a book called The Chemo Kid. After I had cancer and I went home, I was really sick from the chemo. And my kids were, like, 10 and 7. So I made up these stories for them about chemo giving you supernatural power. And at the end of the book, in the draft that I turned in, the hero is given the choice either to stop the chemo and be normal again, or to lose his supernatural powers. And he opts to keep taking the chemo and to keep having supernatural powers. And the editor, whom I no longer will work with, went crazy on that. And not even from a literary aspect, but from the idea that the implicit message was that drugs were okay, you know?

WDM: Right, right.

RL: So we were at a real stalemate, because I wasn't going to change the ending. Then actually it was my son who helped me through it. He has subsequently written a book of short stories, and he has a novel coming up, but at that time he came up with the solution whereby—I forget now—there was a counterdrug and the character refuses the counterdrug that would cancel out the chemo—so it was worked out. But you know, I kept thinking about the idea that these books are so often placed on the side of the authorities that lie to the kids. And that in so many of the books, the endings are kind of clean and the adults tend to be either very good guys or a few evil ones. It's not really like life, where adults manipulate kids, where adults exploit kids. I mean there have been a lot of books now about sexual abuse of children. And I'm sure there's a lot of sexual abuse of children. But not everybody gets sexually abused, and that's not the only issue in which adults manipulate and exploit kids. It's often much more subtle than that.

WDM: It's emotional abuse.

RL: Yeah, it's emotional and it's on a day-to-day basis. So I think that the idea that we're a genre and that we're supposed to, you know, be saying, "Just say no," and be giving good, clear-cut lessons, often gets in the way of—forget about storytelling—it gets in the way of telling kids the truth.

WDM: Another thing about your books, what's missing in them is the "ghetto to glory" concept.

RL: Actually there was a book called From Ghetto to Glory [about baseball great Bob Gibson].

WDM: Yeah, and it's really kind of absurd, because the guy is always a saint when he begins and the world just has to recognize it. That's missing in your books, and I'm very grateful about that being missing. The people and the gyms are so interesting in all of your boxing books. The people—they're real human beings. I read in one of your bios that you felt that putting sports in perspective was a real important thing to you.

RL: Well, yeah. I remember the first time I was sent to Yankee Stadium. This was kind of my turning point about those guys, about sports. I was on night rewrite—I was a reporter early, so I could have been like 22. And somebody had jumped out of the stands and hit Mickey Mantle. This could be like 1960. It was before [the idea of] recreational violence. I mean this was kind of off-the-wall stuff. And the New York Times "ambassador to baseball," whoever was covering the Yankees at the time, was not going to bother the great man by asking what happened. They go on a road trip and obviously Mantle had gotten hurt pretty badly. You know, his jaw was bruised. So now it's a week later and he's back, they're back in the stadium, and they send me up to interview Mantle about what happened that night. I'm sure I was wearing a suit and tie, as I did in those days. And Mantle and Berra were warming up in front of the dugout. And I'm sure I said, "Mr. Mantle," or something like that. And I asked him you know, really politely—I introduced myself—I asked him very politely about what had happened that night. And it was just in a kind of a casual way that he looked over his shoulder and said, 'Why don't you go f--- yourself?' You know, I mean there wasn't even like, specific anger at [something], just 'Why don't you go f--- yourself?' I remember thinking that I had either heard wrong or asked the question in an improper way, and I kind of rephrased it. And then he and Berra started throwing the ball through my hair.

WDM: Wow.

RL: At which point I knew that the interview was over. And so my first reaction was kind of shame and humiliation, and what had I done wrong that this, you know, American hero—butter wouldn't melt in his mouth—I read everything about Mickey Mantle before I went up there and I knew that he was a perfect human being. So I had misspoken, something I had done was wrong. And it took me a really long time to figure out that we had been lied to about Mickey Mantle. Many, many other sportswriters had been shamed and humiliated by him in all kinds of ways, and never reported it, never talked to each other about it, because we were all keeping up this invulnerability. And also we were protecting ourselves as much as we were protecting him. And here was this guy who, you know, kicked little kids and was sort of a stone prick. I went through a process of being very angry later and then to figure out that if I could be, you know, 22 and already half grown, and could be lied to in this way and have bad feelings about it, what about kids? Why should kids be lied to? Why should kids have these guys as false role models?

WDM: Your bio says that when you were young, your role models were Steinbeck, Haliburton, and Salinger. But you know, when I read your work, I often think of Arthur Miller.

RL: Well, thank you. Wow.

WDM: Because he deals with some of the same issues. Have you ever done adult fiction?

RL: Yes. I've done two adult novels, Liberty 2, and Something Going. Liberty 2 is a thriller about an astronaut who came back to lead America into the second revolution. And Something Going was a racetrack novel. And both went in the toilet.

WDM: Oh yeah? Are you going to go back to that?

RL: I would, I have no reason not to. But I find writing YA so much more attractive in a lot of ways. I guess it's the messianic impulse. When you write for adults—and I think much of my sportswriting and health writing is for adults—you're either a genius or a jerk, depending on whether you stroke or ruffle their feathers. But kids are seemingly reading with more of an open mind. And you do have more of an opportunity to have an impact on somebody's life, and I like that.