The Last Days of Roger Federer

And Other Endings

Geoff Dyer

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838855772
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838855758
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Artist Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

In this endlessly stimulating investigation into 'things coming to an end, artists' last works, time running out', Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who've mattered to him throughout his life. He examines Friedrich Nietzsche's breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan's reinventions of old songs, Beethoven's final quartets, Jean Rhys's return from the dead (while still alive) and much more.

01.

‘The End’ is the last track on the Doors’ first album, released in January 1967, having been recorded the previous August, when the band had been together for just over a year. It grew out of multiple live performances at the Whisky a Go-Go in Hollywood, though no recordings of these evolving versions of the song have survived. From the get-go at the Go-Go, then, Jim Morrison was busy obsessing about the end—and not just in ‘The End.’ ‘When the Music’s Over’ ends with repeated assurances that music is your only friend ‘until the End.’ It’s a safe bet, contemplating or proclaiming the end like this; eventually you will be proved right.

‘The End’ was the last song the quartet performed live, at the Warehouse in New Orleans, on 12 December 1970. In March the following year the twenty-seven-year-old Morrison moved to Paris, where he was found dead, in the bathtub of his apartment, on July 3.

02.

In a version of ‘Tangled Up in Blue’ the unnamed lover tells Bob Dylan (or whoever the narrator of the song is supposed to be): ‘This ain’t the end, / We’ll meet again someday on the avenue . . .’

She’s right, it’s nowhere near the end when she says this. It’s the second verse of the long opening track of Blood on the Tracks. Dylan continued to tinker with the song in numerous ways after a test pressing of the album had been made, prepared for release, and, at the last minute, rejected in favour of a more rhythmically insistent version of ‘Tangled Up in Blue,’ rerecorded with different musicians, in Minneapolis. (The changes were made so late in the day that the record went on sale with the old sleeve, crediting only the original musicians.) He’s since performed it live, sometimes with major overhauls to words and music, on more than sixteen hundred occasions.

03.

On the wall of the barbershop where I have my hair cut on Main Street in Venice Beach—where the Doors started out—is a mural of Jim Morrison with his bare shoulders and luxuriant black hair that always looked like it never needed cutting. Recently another similar mural appeared, right on my street. All over Venice, in fact, there are traces of the Lizard King, tributes to the rock-god Dionysus. On the boardwalk at least one busker is always playing ‘Break on Through’ or one of the Doors’ other big hits.

04.

I was dilly-dallying, unsure how to start this book about how things end, on Thursday 10 January 2019, when, at the press conference ahead of his first-round match at the Australian Open, Andy Murray announced what amounted to his retirement. More than moving, it was devastating to watch. The first, fairly innocuous question proved too much for him. Unable to answer, he left the stage for several minutes to compose himself. It was the end, he said when he came back out. He hoped to bow out at Wimbledon in July but was not sure he would make it even that far. When another journalist asked if this meant the Australian Open might be his last tournament, Murray said that was quite likely. Which meant that his match on Monday—my Sunday in Los Angeles—against Roberto Bautista Agut might be his last. Murray sat there describing how the pain, not just of playing top-level tennis but of pulling on his socks and putting on his shoes at home, was too much. As often happens in these press conferences his common-sense answers made the questions a little superfluous. Had he seen a sports psychologist? Yes, but that didn’t help because the pain was still there. If it had made the pain go away then he’d be feeling great. The whole thing made for harrowing and, of course, absolutely absorbing viewing. It was the end, Murray said, partly because there was no end in sight—to the training, the rehab, the pain; no sign when he might begin to get back to his best. A line from ‘The End’ floated through my head as I watched this gladiatorial athlete ‘lost in a Roman wilderness of pain.’

One of the questions that had got me interested in this subject—things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out—was the long-running one of Roger Federer’s eventual retirement. The imminent departure of the first of the ‘big four’ male players brought an unexpected if indirect urgency into play. With a rival six years his junior on the way out Roger’s time seemed also to be shrinking around him.

Writers often have an end in sight for completing a book. For some this can take the form of a proposal that leads to a contract in which a deadline for delivery of the manuscript is agreed upon in advance; I’m not one of them but Murray’s going out of the Australian Open, as expected, in a blaze of beaten glory to Bautista Agut after five typically gruelling sets (the first two of which he had lost) concentrated the mind. It seemed important that a book underwritten by my own experience of the changes wrought by ageing should be completed before Roger’s retirement, in the long twilight of his career.* Even with no idea of where, when, or how things might end up it was time to start work—on a book that ended up being written while life as we know it came to an end.

05.

In 1972, during a Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Expedition (Bronze), we were camping somewhere in Gloucestershire, about eight of us from grammar school, when the news came over the radio. George Best had quit football. He would have been twenty-six; I was fourteen. We had not started drinking then—just being out in the countryside rather than at home with our parents was enough to make our camping trip thrilling, but it was the news about Best that made it memorable. He actually returned after quitting, and it was not until 1 January 1974 that he played his last match for Manchester United before the long and wandering years of boozy decline. This was not the first time I had heard of someone’s career coming to an end but it was the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing something they loved, the thing that gave their life meaning. It was also the first time I heard of a retirement that was not, of someone quitting and then resuming the thing they had retired from. In Best’s case it established a pattern for giving up booze and then giving up on trying to quit drinking.

06.

Retirement in the world I grew up in—the world of poorly paid, often unpleasant and unrewarding work—was something my relatives began to look forward to from a surprisingly early age. It was a form of promotion, practically an ambition. In the world I’ve become part of, retirement is almost unheard of or at least seldom admitted to. If you have retired—are no longer able to write or are finding it impossible to publish what you have written—you keep it to yourself; you keep the manuscript to yourself because nobody wants it. And in any case, if part of the job is sitting in a chair at home with your feet up, reading, then the difference between work and retirement is imperceptible, even if you start reading—though it’s something I advise against, whatever the weather—with a blanket over your knees.

07.

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme was a big deal at my school. Probably it was one of many little attempts at importing something of the character-forming ethos of the public school to a grammar school where rugby, not football, was the official sport. I gave up ahead of the more rigorous demands and gruelling expeditions of Silver and Gold just as, at junior school, I’d given up on the personal survival swimming badges after Bronze, which I’d wriggled through by doing almost all of the required lengths in the chokingly chlorinated water of Pittville baths on my back. (On my back, not doing back-stroke as such. It barely even counted as swimming but by kicking my legs wildly and sort of waggling my hands by my sides I was able to cover distances far in excess of any that might have been achieved by conventionally recognised methods of propulsion.) My mum duly stitched the Bronze survival patch onto my trunks and that was the end of it. Neither of my parents could swim; both regarded the ability to do so as one of many things that were beyond their reach, and were content with this third-level endorsement of their child’s aquatic survival skills as sufficient evidence of generational advance.

As a perpetually grumbling anti-royalist my dad had never been able to muster up much enthusiasm for the Duke of Edinburgh scheme, which, he suspected, must in some undisclosed way be lining the pockets of the dim-witted duke (whose physical resemblance to my dad was quite uncanny), and so was not at all displeased when I quit. Bronze, in my family, was always enough.

Many years later I contributed an essay to a series of radio broadcasts on a word associated with the Olympics. I can’t remember what my word was but Gillian Slovo cleverly chose ‘fourth,’ focusing on competitors who narrowly miss out on a medal and are, as a result, completely forgotten and go away without recognition—become indistinguishable, in fact, from the anonymous mass who come trailing in their wake. So spare a special thought for members of this group of near-miss losers who, after the Olympic flame has been extinguished, having returned home to resume the acclaim-denied grind of training or the uncertainties of retirement, are subsequently and unceremoniously upgraded to bronze because of a drugs disqualification among the trio who basked in podium glory.*

08.

‘I’ve always been a quitter,’ announces the narrator of Budding Prospects, the second novel by T. C. Boyle, who’s turned out to be the opposite of a quitter, who’s gone on to set such a pace that his publishers have their work cut out trying to keep up with his productivity, but who no longer teaches at the University of Southern California, where I occupy the office and chair (not Chair) that used to be his. The first paragraph of the novel is a list of all the things the narrator has given up on: ‘I quit the Boy Scouts, the glee club, the marching band. Gave up my paper route, turned my back on the church, stuffed the basketball team. I dropped out of college, sidestepped the army with a 4-F on the grounds of mental instability, went back to school, made a go of it, entered a Ph.D. program in nineteenth-century British literature, sat in the front row, took notes assiduously, bought a pair of horn-rims, and quit on the eve of my comprehensive exams.’ This epic résumé of curtailed achievement culminates with the declaration that ‘the only thing I didn’t give up on was the summer camp.’ The next paragraph is just six words: ‘Let me tell you about it.’

Put like that it all sounds so easy.

09.

I gave up playing football gradually, the intervals between games increasing because of injuries until the games became intervals between injuries. The ongoing passage of time was still broken up in multiple ways but less frequently—and then not at all—by what became an obsolete and eventually forgotten marker called football. I can’t remember when I played for the last time but at least twice a year I still dream that I am playing. My wife says that during these dreams my legs start kicking in the bed. She never wakes me up—as she does if I’m moaning in the grips of a nightmare—because she knows how happy I am. Those are my best dreams of the year. I say that, but, increasingly, these dreams do not involve scoring goals or even making long, powerful passes. Instead the ball seems to get stuck between my feet or somehow lodged in the leggy grass so that I’m stranded in a kind of stagnant dribble. Maybe my legs twitch in the bed because I am trying to free myself from whatever entanglements have taken root in the unconscious.

On nights after I’ve played tennis I often have trouble sleeping. Partly this is because I always collapse into a long nap or a brief coma after getting home so that by bedtime, although I’m exhausted and achey (lower back, both knees, left shoulder and elbow), I’m not sleepy. Plus it’s fun lying there, replaying crucial sequences and points—up to a point. But then I become powerless to select or stop which bits are replayed and am stranded in a tormenting swirl of yellow balls that gradually becomes a Slazenger-sponsored meteor shower in the tramlines of space.

10.

‘Seen a shooting star tonight . . .’

Even though Martin Scorsese’s film about Dylan’s 1975 Rolling Thunder tour had begun streaming on Netflix a day or two earlier, the Prince Charles Cinema in London, on 13 July 2019, was packed—with an audience of the widest possible age range, from teenagers to Dylan’s contemporaries and beyond. Who else could pull in a comparable demographic, for something that wasn’t even the streaming of a live show? There was periodic applause, starting at the climax of ‘Isis,’ which comes not at the end of the song but in the middle, after the shouted ‘Yes’ that completes the amazing quatrain of dialogue:

She said, ‘Where ya been?’ I said, ‘No place special.’
She said, ‘You look different.’ I said, ‘Well, I guess.’
She said, ‘You been gone.’ I said, ‘That’s only natural.’
She said, ‘You gonna stay?’ I said, ‘If you want me to, yes.’

Everyone in the Prince Charles’s notoriously lumpy seats was gripped throughout the 140 minutes of the film’s duration. In the communal intoxication of the occasion I had the distinct sense that all around me people were asking themselves the same question that I was: how can someone be so great? I had no answer but the question played its part in ushering in another of the Dylan revivals that have punctuated my adult life. I’ll go for six months without listening to him until something prompts me to play ‘I’ll Keep It with Mine,’ ‘Boots of Spanish Leather,’ or whatever, and there I am again, instantly and completely enthralled.

With so much music from one’s youth, curiosity about a given track—‘Hmm, I wonder what “Keep Yourself Alive” or “Spanish Bombs” sounds like today . . .’—evaporates midway through the song, often earlier. With Dylan you’re on the edge of your lumpy seat, even when you know the song off by heart (as long as you stay clear of the anthemic tedium of ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ which I would happily never hear again—which is how I felt from practically the first time I heard it, which was probably sometime before I had even listened to it). It’s not that his music never ages; it keeps step with our own ageing in a way that Freddie Mercury or even Joe Strummer never do. This is not because they died young; it’s because we’ve grown old and out of the music they made. London Calling is a great album; seeing the Clash in Lewisham in February 1980 was one of the best gig-going experiences I’ve ever had, but these days, even when driving, I scarcely have the patience to get to the end of one of their songs.* There’s nothing left to hear. But I’ll be listening to Dylan, to new and old versions of songs I’ve been listening to for more than forty years, with undiminished wonder, till the end of my days, hopefully after Dylan himself is no longer around, when the incredible fact that he exists, that we could probably go to see him play somewhere tonight, no longer holds true.

Not that I’d bother going to see him tonight, tomorrow, or any other night, even if he were playing for free at a venue down the road—as he was, in Hyde Park, as it turns out, a month after I saw the Scorsese film at the Prince Charles.

11.

The film ends with a year-by-year list of all the gigs Dylan has played from the Rolling Thunder tour onwards, like names on a memorial: non-stop (almost) and never-ending (until Covid brought everything to an end). I’ve been to four of them, the first at Earls Court in 1978, the last in Austin, Texas, on 6 May 2015, in a smallish venue conveniently located only a fifteen-minute cycle ride from where I was living. The band was great, the sound was superb, and the seats were excellent (row twelve of the stalls). It was OK, I suppose, but I kept thinking of something a friend had said about the last time she’d seen him, also in Texas: ‘He was so done.’ Except he wasn’t and isn’t. Covid permitting, there’s plenty more doing to be done.

So: why does he do it and why does anyone go to see him do it? The second is the easier question to answer: people go not to see Bob Dylan but to have seen him. I can understand that urge, though for me it has never been strong enough to render the quality of a musical experience irrelevant. There is little satisfaction to be derived from having seen any artist way past his or her best. I can say, truthfully, that I have seen Van Morrison (in Hay about twenty years ago) and Miles Davis, looking deeply amphibious, at the Royal Festival Hall in June 1987. Neither occasion was memorable but it is still possible, friends insist, to catch Morrison in top form (before he was reduced to complaining about his rights being trampled on by Covid fascism). I believe them in a way that I don’t believe it when people claim that Dylan was recently fantastic on whichever stop it was on his ceaseless tour. I did believe another friend I bumped into the time before last that I saw Dylan, at Brixton Academy in 2003. He had been playing keyboards, mainly, it seemed, so that he could have something to lean on. I was familiar with the way Dylan changed his songs around, but his singing, combined with the murky sound at the Academy, made it difficult to tell which song from the back catalogue he was in the process of mauling...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Postscript
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Illustration Credits