David Halberstam wrote sprawling books about politics, war, sports, firefighters, mass media, show business, and everything in between.
Halberstam looked for the universal in the particular and the particular. His prose sometimes reached. Sometimes he wanted to get dramatic while describing ordinary people and moments. And as he connected one observation to another — and another and another and another — his prose often turned purple.
But Halberstam was one great a reporter and he helped you to understand how big and little things related to each other.
His two best books, in my mind, were The Best and the Brightest (about the Kennedy and Johnson administrations’ bumbling into Vietnam) and The Breaks of the Game (a season with the Portland Trail Blazers).
Here’s what he said about Maurice Lucas, the power forward of the Blazers:
It was, [coach Jack] Ramsay knew, always going to be a test of wills with Luke. Of the blacks on the team, he was by far the most political and also the most willing to test authority, any authority. Some of the other blacks, Ron Brewer and T.R. Dunn, for example, had grown up in the South and had gone to southern schools; there was, some coaches thought, a lack of assertiveness to their play, something the coaches suspected could be traced back to their childhoods, to that region where, despite significant social change, authority still belonged to whites and blacks remained tentative about expressing their feelings openly, whether in politics or sports. But there was no problem like that with Maurice Lucas, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, late of the Hill district of the ghetto. Sometimes the Portland front office, talking about a particular player in college or on another team, used the phrase, and to them it was a positive: obedient kid. Obedient kid. Maurice Lucas was most demonstrably not an obedient kid. He was very black, very articulate, very political, a strong and independent man sprung from circumstances that could also create great insecurity. There was about him a constant sense of challenge; everything was a struggle, and everything was a potential confrontation, a struggle for turf and position. It was in part what had made him at his best so exceptional an athlete. He liked the clash of will. He was at once an intensely proud black man, justifiably angry about the injustice around him, and a superb and subtle con artist, a man who had in effect invented himself and his persona — Luke the Intimidator. When he was making demands, when he talked about race being an issue at point, it was sometimes hard to tell which Maurice Lucas was talking — the Lucas who genuinely believed he was a victim of such obvious American racism, or the Lucas who knew that his cause was more dramatic if he deliberately cloaked it in himself. Indeed, it was not possible at certain times to tell if he himself knew. (He was capable of complaining that Portland would never pay a black superstar what it would pay a white superstar, which was possibly correct, and, in the next breath, of complaining about the fact that Mychal Thompson, a rookie, who was also, it happened, black, had made twice as much in his rookie year as Luke made, then in his third year in Portland.)
Vintage Halberstam. In one sprawling paragraph, he plays the role of sociologist and psychologist. He generalizes about blacks in the South and blacks in the North. He makes knowing comments about the attitudes of coaches and sports executives. He teases out puzzles about the subject: Does he mean it when he complains about racism … or is he self-righteous … or is he trying to use his outsized persona to dramatize the concerns of lesser beings.
You can see how this kind of writing can stretch the limits of storytelling. Specifics and generalities blend together. You don’t get much of an image of the subject, but you do get a sense of the man and his time. No bad.
But try doing this too often, or without the insight of Halberstam, and you’ve got a disaster on your hands. You got long-winded prose, dramatic words and generalizations that can’t be proved or disproved, an air of insight but none of the modesty that should accompany efforts to understand.
In the end, the problem with this stream-of-consciousness writing is that it tries to do too much at a time. Rather than focus on one aspect of the subject, carefully, before moving to the next, it pulls all kinds of observations and judgments together, about different topics.
