Ways of Ending: On Geoff Dyer's "The Last Days of Roger Federer"
Geoff Dyer | The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings | Farrar, Straus and Giroux | 2022 | 304 Pages
On a hot, dry July afternoon in 2009, bent at the hips, swaying left to ride on the parched baseline of Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Roger Federer awaits the missile serve of Andy Roddick, knowing that if he loses this point he will go down two sets to love, a virtual death sentence at the highest level of the sport.
Roddick tosses the ball low over his head and in a single snap straightens his back and left arm while recoiling at the knees, his racket face slotting into the gap where, a moment before, his right shoulder jutted. The movement is compressed, mechanical, a totally efficient use of the body, the perfected result of thousands of hours of practice. Then Roddick explodes, his legs driving his body into the air, the racket rising to meet the ball at its zenith and firing it down the line. It lands a foot inside the deuce court. Federer scrambles to block a backhand return. Roddick, instead of replying with a regular backhand, deceives Federer at the last moment by slicing the ball midway between service box and baseline. But the shot is slightly short, which gives Federer an opportunity to pounce: he wraps his forehand around the ball and whips it crosscourt. Now Roddick is scrambling. At full stretch he smacks a forehand down the line and Federer hunches toward the grass like an amateur at the park moving a leaf off-court. He has no angle and yet, with a prestidigitator’s flick of the wrist as he whips the cloth off his top-hat to reveal the rabbit inside, somehow swerves the ball to the opposite side of the court where it softly plops, unanswered, in the mirrored service box to where the point began.
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In The Folding Star (1994), Alan Hollinghurst describes summers watching Wimbledon on TV with the windows open and curtains closed in “an English limbo of light and shade, near and far, subtly muddled and displaced.” For me and my grandfather in 2009, it was less a limbo than an inferno. He was Swiss, I grew up in Wimbledon: we were Federer fans through and through. I don’t remember how much of that second-set tiebreaker my granddad saw, since he was pacing in and out of the living room, unable to watch yet compelled not to miss a moment. But I do remember that when Federer won the next four points to level at 6-6 we were back on the couch. He won two more to take the set and we erupted. The moment when Federer would at last break Pete Sampras’ record of fourteen grand slams seemed on the brink.
In fact it would take more than two hours and forty minutes for him to get his hands on the famous pineapple-topped trophy, with many more points in between that my granddad fought hard to see and not see. The year previous, when Federer had lost to Rafael Nadal in a final often described as the best ever played, we had thought dejectedly that this was a permanent changing of the guard. Now it seemed certain Roger’s reign would resume, and could indeed go on and on.
We thought the same about my grandfather. However, soon after Federer’s triumph, his Parkinson’s entered a rapid decline. Hospitalized for an infection during the spring of 2010, unexpectedly and without warning, he died. That at least was our and the doctors’ perspective. From his, I think, it was not entirely unplanned; the day he passed was the sixth anniversary of his wife’s death. Even on the downslope of cognitive decline, perhaps some force of will kept him going until that exact date.
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Early departures, surprise comebacks, protracted witherings, late holdings-on: all different ways of ending things. These are Geoff Dyer’s subjects. At sixty-three, the “Slacker Laureate” is too old to still be zipping between beaches in Mexico and full moon parties in Thailand. The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings is a book prompted by and about mortality—“the last days and last works” of artists and athletes “who’ve mattered to [Dyer] throughout his life.”
Federer himself is just one of the book’s variegated subjects. The book condenses a lifetime of idiosyncratic interests between its covers. D.H. Lawrence and jazz (subjects of previous books) reappear, as does Burning Man, which Dyer visits for the last time in a coda to his essay from Yoga for People who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003). Bob Dylan’s failing voice, “no longer able… to achieve unprecedented fidelity of expression,” becomes emblematic, a “magnificent ruin” like the crumbling Roman marble romanticized by Piranesi’s etchings. Turner’s late paintings, suffused with a light that abolishes solidity, are imagined as tending toward an ideal he never reached, prophesied by Lawrence as “the body gone, the ruddy light meet[ing] the crystal light in a perfect fusion, the utter dawn, the utter golden sunset, the extreme of all life, where all is One, One-Being, a perfect glowing Oneness”. For Lawrence, Turner never painted his last picture.
Typically for Dyer, the canon shares space with personal obsessions: the myth and death of the Old West, its resurrection in movies, the books he will never read, his elbow and knee injuries, raving, DMT. One could view his entire career as a quest to fuse the roles of highbrow critic and beach bum into a professional identity. But here, the melancholy of the subject matter predominates: for the most part he is in straight-faced mode.
That is not to say The Last Days of Roger Federer is a boring book; Dyer is too agile a writer for that. Visiting Turin, he stumbles into Piazza Carlo Alberto where Nietzsche lived between spring and autumn in 1888 while writing Ecce Homo. It is in this city where the famous, likely apocryphal story took place: noticing a cart horse being brutally beaten by its driver, the philosopher throws himself over the animal’s stricken body to prevent another blow from the whip. His realization of man’s petty cruelty, perhaps also the swell of empathy in an otherwise socially stunted life, drove Nietzsche out of his mind. He never completed another book. Beholding an equestrian statue, “some generalissimo on a horse on a plinth, sword raised, going nowhere,” Dyer imagines replacing it with a monument to the philosopher and the cart horse. It would be “at ground level rather than on a pedestal… life-size… tucked discreetly into a corner (in accordance with the way that Nietzsche created his earth-changing work while living in almost complete obscurity).” This moment of hypothetical urban planning follows four pages of penetrating discussion on Nietzsche’s thinking about time: the Eternal Recurrence “offered an explanation of the sensation of déjà-vu—the flicker that is both premonition and memory;” certain aphorisms have “a prophetic quality, or more subtly, the proleptic ability to suggest a time in the future when the past is present as a constant echo.” In a self-satirizing moment, Dyer imagines himself not only “organising and judging” a competition to design the statue but “in the way of dictators, submitting my own proposal for what would turn out to be the winning entry, by a unanimous decision.”
Indeed, if the book has a governing spirit to tie together its heterogeneous numbered sections, it would be Nietzsche and his conception of the Eternal Recurrence, which proposes that all things recur indefinitely, in exactly the same way. That is: you will relive every moment of your life, just as it already happened. Nietzsche asks the reader whether she would “curse the demon who spoke thus” or if a single “tremendous moment” would justify endlessly reliving the rest to the extent that she would exclaim, “I have never heard anything more divine!” For Dyer, such “tremendous” moments are the “afternoons and nights spent in bliss, in cities and hotel rooms around the world.” Sex, in other words. Surprisingly, he does not discuss impotence; perhaps at sixty-three, it has still to raise (or rather, droop) its head. Either that or pharmaceuticals have come to his aid. Instead, Dyer’s old-man fear about sex is of being labeled a creep. Maybe that young woman in the bakery thought I was flirting when I was only being chatty. How does such an anxiety begin? “Like everything else, it just creeps up on you.”
Regrets for past pleasures are intermixed with the pleasure of new discoveries. He watches The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) for the first time with delight. He treasures the fact that he now cries more easily: at the newsreel footage of the Hindenburg going down, at Dr. Martin Luther King’s great speeches, at pandemic acronyms like ICU, NHS and PPE. Old age turning its victims sentimental is as much a cliché as its turning them bitter or reactionary. So it’s easy to understand why the Eternal Recurrence attracts Dyer. In spite of the book’s somber (for Dyer’s standards) tone, its ultimate outlook is optimistic. In a letter to Philip Roth, Saul Bellow wrote “There is almost enough art to cover the deadly griefs with. Not quite, though.” For Dyer, there seems to be more than enough. He happily admits the profusion of great books he will never get ‘round to reading. In terms of what he does consume, he gravitates towards artists and thinkers who seek ecstatically to transcend death: Beethoven, Nietzsche, Lawrence, Art Pepper. But as an ironist at heart, Dyer cannot share the defiant conviction that drives them, almost blasphemous in the intensity with which it denies necessity; such defiance is what transforms a death into a tragedy. And so the book holds us at one degree removed from the end’s visceral reality, even as it makes the end personal.
A couple of pages from the last, Dyer signals the possible end to his own career—“Has [the book] finished me?”—which follows his acceptance, one by one, of the certain end to some of his best-trodden subjects: parties, drugs, Burning Man, one musician after another. Rather than blasting us with tragic defiance, Dyer takes these losses soberly. Is this book a prelude and a clue? If so I expect in his last phase of work that we will see more pages like its criticism of artists and writers, fewer quirky personal quests (such as trying never again to pay for shampoo) and backpacker adventures. A loss for the author, it would be a loss to his readers too: your slacker friend with all the good stories who doesn’t try and still gets by transformed into a diligent student, whose insights were sweated over the nights before.
Or perhaps that’s premature. Perhaps old age, with its attendant comedies of misunderstanding and out-of-touchness, will provide Dyer a rich, unexpected vein of new material. In that case, this end, like so many of Roger’s, will prove a new beginning.