The Tennis Players by Lars Gustafsson
"The Tennis Players" by Lars Gustafsson is a novel that intertwines themes of academia and personal reflection, set against the backdrop of a year spent teaching at the University of Texas. The protagonist, who shares the author's name, is a Scandinavian literature professor who initially relishes the Texas sunshine and his love for tennis. However, he soon finds himself entangled in various quirky university happenings that divert his attention from the sport. The narrative is marked by a picaresque style, featuring a series of loosely connected events and characters, such as the philosophical student Doobie and the eccentric Bill, who each challenge academic norms and values.
The story explores themes of cultural dissonance, as the Swedish professor navigates the social intricacies of the American South. With elements of humor and absurdity, the plot includes a scandal involving university administration and a theatrical production that brings to light complex questions about art, philosophy, and truth. Despite its comedic surface, "The Tennis Players" reflects Gustafsson's keen observations on the interplay between personal identity and societal expectations, all while maintaining a philosophical depth. The novel serves as both a commentary on the academic world and a broader exploration of life's truths, making it an intriguing read for those interested in literature that questions moral and cultural frameworks.
The Tennis Players by Lars Gustafsson
First published:Tennisspelarna, 1977 (English translation, 1983)
Type of work: Philosophical satire
Time of work: 1974
Locale: The University of Texas in Austin
Principal Characters:
Lars Gustafsson , a visiting professor of Swedish literature at the University of TexasDoobie Smith , Gustafsson’s favorite studentBill , a graduate student who questions the accepted literary criticism on August StrindbergChris , a tennis player and computer genius
The Novel
Although the novel is entitled The Tennis Players, it is less about tennis than it is about academe. The story is told from the point of view of the main character, Lars Gustafsson, who happens to share the name of the author. Gustafsson, a Scandinavian professor of literature, reminisces about one year in his life which he spent teaching a seminar in nineteenth century European thought at the University of Texas. At first, he is able to take advantage of his year in the Texas sunshine to bicycle and to perfect his tennis serve, but he is reluctantly drawn into a series of events concerning university matters that drag him away from his beloved tennis courts.
The novel has many picaresque elements, in that it is somewhat unstructured. While the details are specific and concrete, the separate events are generally unrelated, and the various characters interact only with the central character. For example, Doobie and Bill are students of Professor Gustafsson and are presumably in the same seminar, but they do not seem to know each other. Also, the fact that the author and the central character share the same name and occupation suggests that the novel is, at least to some extent, autobiographical. While the main character is not a picaro because he hardly qualifies as a rascal, he does, as a visitor from Sweden, stand outside the social order of south central Texas and find that many of its traditions and mores are incomprehensible to him.
The title of the first chapter is “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” which the narrator explains is an aria from Richard Wagner’s opera Gotterdammerung. It is this tune that Professor Gustafsson tries to whistle as he bikes to his favorite tennis court, across from Fred’s vegetable stand. The hero of the opera, Siegfried, is a respected warrior who goes about slaying dragons and other evil creatures and rescuing damsels in distress. Although the narrator is quick to point out that he is not the legendary, daring Siegfried, nor is he biking his way “down a dark, foggy river toward strange Germanic adventures in gathering gloom,” the juxtaposition suggests that the professor from Sweden is clearly on his way to some peculiarly American adventures.
One adventure involves a student with the unlikely name of Doobie Smith. Doobie, a brilliant student who has learned Norwegian in order to read Henrik Ibsen in the original, is enamored of Berlin as it was in the late nineteenth century. What intrigues the professor about Doobie is her commitment to Nietzschean philosophy and her uncanny resemblance to the photographs of Lou Salome, the young woman whom Friedrich Nietzsche hoped would become his intellectual and personal companion. The world of reality intrudes upon the world of ideas when Doobie tries to supplement her meager income by appearing in the campus production of another Wagner opera, Das Rheingold. She is cast as Flosshilde, one of the Rhine Maidens, but the Italian conductor is more interested in Doobie’s body than her voice.
Learning of Doobie’s plight, the narrator offers to intervene on her behalf. Before he has a chance to rescue the fair maiden, however, another campus adventure intrudes. The Board of Trustees is threatening to fire the president of the university, John R. Perturber, Jr., a former professor of forestry. This time the issue is the spring concert. The trustees want to scrap DasRheingold in favor of Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, complete with live elephants. The trustees have charged that the president’s decision to go along with the German opera, which was the choice of the orchestra and the chorus, actually constitutes a political statement because of the large German-speaking population in the area, which usually votes Democratic. The members of the Board are Republicans. The students and faculty, led by the English Department, are outraged and a full-fledged riot is in the making.Fortunately, the crisis is averted when Chairman of the Board Hugh Frisco is discovered having sex with a hotel waitress on hallowed ground, namely the batter’s box of the university baseball stadium. The batter’s box, it seems, is reserved for the best university batter and his girl on the night before an important game. The resulting scandal means that the president gets to keep his job, the students get to keep their opera, and the narrator, unlike Siegfried, avoids a confrontation with both the Texas National Guard and the Italian conductor.
A third crisis involves Professor Gustafsson more directly because it challenges some widely accepted assumptions about the Swedish novelist and dramatist August Strindberg. It seems that Bill, one of the narrator’s graduate students, has unearthed an obscure book by a Polish exile with the unpronounceable name of Zygmunt I. Pietziewzskoczsky. The book, entitled Memoires d’une chimiste, which translates as Memoirs of a Chemist, details the efforts of Pietziewzskoczsky and other Polish exiles to spy on Strindberg, who was at the time writing his novel Inferno (1897; English translation, 1912) and experimenting with making gold. According to the memoirs, the Polish exiles were watching Strindberg in order to learn his secrets of alchemy. This new information challenges the assumption that Strindberg’s paranoia about being watched was simply the ravings of an insane mind. If Memoirs is to be believed, Strindberg criticism will have to be reevaluated, at considerable inconvenience to scholars who have built their reputations on the current theory. This rather thorny problem embroils the narrator in his next escapade.
On the tennis court, the narrator meets Chris, a computer whiz who just happens to have access to one of the largest computers in Texas. In spite of the fact that Chris is on the Central Intelligence Agency’s blacklist, he has a part-time job at the Strategic Air Command, where he monitors the airspace in the Southern Air Defense District. Chris offers to use the Command’s computer to determine whether Strindberg’s Inferno and Pietziewzskoczsky’s Memoirs do, in fact, correspond. The procedure overloads the Early Warning System and causes it to black out for two hours. Unfortunately, before Chris can get an answer to the Strindberg question, he is fired from his job for taking part in the campus demonstrations to save the Wagner opera.
The novel ends when Lars Gustafsson boards the plane for Santa Barbara on his way back to Sweden. Bill, the Strindberg enthusiast, has dropped the whole pursuit in favor of attending Harvard Business School. As far as the professor and Chris know, a computer somewhere out in the Texas desert is still trying to solve the problem of whether Strindberg was truly insane or was the victim of real persecution.
The Characters
Since the narrator-protagonist of The Tennis Players has the same name as the author, and a photograph of the author (playing tennis) appears on the front cover of the book, the novel must be considered to be to some extent autobiographical. Yet the events are at once so bizarre and so amusing that it is clear that the characters are fictional. In his lecture on “The Wagner Case,” the professor asks his students the meaning of Nietzsche’s complaint against Wagner when Nietzsche makes the following comment: “Now the musician becomes an actor; his art develops more and more into a talent for lying.” In The Tennis Players, the writer becomes an actor and gives himself the starring role in his own novel. Gustafsson has said: “My writing is mainly an inventory of the different layers of lies and truth in the society where I live.” It seems, therefore, that Gustafsson would add to Nietzsche’s phrase that as the actor delves into his psyche he also develops a talent for discovering the truth.
None of the other characters is well developed and each is seen only in relation to Professor Gustafsson. Their interior lives are never probed. For example, Bill, the graduate student whose discovery of the memoirs of an unknown chemist threatens to disrupt the entire body of criticism of August Strindberg, is never given a last name. Of his physical description, the reader is told only that Bill is black, tall, skinny, and excitable. While Bill’s theory may be brilliant, he is described as being “quite mad.” Bill’s decision to give up the humanities in favor of more practical pursuits when he is accepted into Harvard seems implausible, if amusing.
Except for the fact that Chris is a better-than-average tennis player, he is a fairly typical computer hacker. He is nearsighted, recovering from a nervous breakdown, emotionally immature, and a mathematical wizard. His room, on the third floor of the large antebellum-style home of his psychiatrist, is a clutter of notebooks, a minicomputer, cushions, and a telescope, but no furniture.
Doobie Smith is the most fully developed character after Professor Gustafsson, but explanations of what motivates her seem philosophical rather than personal. The professor’s interest in Doobie seems to stem more from her remarkable resemblance to Lou Salome than from her own personality. Although a product of a Baptist college in San Antonio, Doobie accepts the Nietzschean philosophy that truth is that which serves life; therefore, morals can be invented. Belief, however, is not action, and Doobie, who is actually a good little Southern girl, ends up calling on the good professor to save her from the amorous clutches of the Italian conductor.
Critical Context
Lars Gustafsson, philosopher, novelist, dramatist, and critic, is a highly respected Swedish writer. He is best known for his poetry and his cycle of five novels which he wrote from 1971 through 1978. The novels have many elements of a Kunstlerroman, a type of novel in which the writer/protagonist struggles toward an understanding of his purpose as a creative artist. James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is the most famous example. Gustafsson’s novels of piercing self-examination have influenced other Swedish writers to develop more liberated expressions of values and morals.
The Tennis Players, begun in 1974 when Gustafsson was Thord Gray Professor at the University of Texas, and completed in 1977, interrupts the more somber novel cycle. In this case, Gustafsson is not looking inward as much as he is looking outward at American and especially Texan mores. The result is both amusing and thought-provoking. The delightful translation by Yvonne L. Sandstroem preserves the spirit of the original. One suspects that Gustafsson would dismiss The Tennis Players as simply a potboiler. Henry James said the same thing about The Turn of the Screw (1898), the novel which has perhaps received more critical attention than any other of his works. Unfortunately, Gustafsson’s novel has received very little critical attention by writers in English.
Bibliography
Booklist. Review. LXXIX (March 15, 1983), p. 945.
Kirkus Reviews. Review. LI (January 15, 1983), p. 75.
Library Journal. CVIII, April 15, 1983, p. 840.
Los Angeles Times Book Review. August 28, 1983, p. 8.
McKnight, Christina Soderhjelm. “Two Contrasting Images of America in the 1970’s: P.O. Enquist and Lars Gustafsson,” in Scandinavian Studies. LVI (Spring, 1984), p. 196.
Publishers Weekly. CCXXIII (February 11, 1983), p. 64.
Sandstroem, Yvonne L. Review in World Literature Today. LII (Summer, 1978), pp. 479-480.
Updike, John. “As Others See Us,” in The New Yorker. LIX (January 2, 1984), pp. 87-88.
Voltz, Ruprecht, ed. Gustafsson lesen, 1986.