I
IT WAS LATE afternoon in Northern California and Bill Barich had his waders on to go fishing. For much of the last five years he had dedicated himself, both on bitterly cold mornings and drawn out evenings such as this, to the pursuit of steelhead trout. He didn’t consider himself a particularly good fisherman, but these trout had proven a more evasive target than even he had first cared to imagine. They clung to the river bed, immune to what he had to offer them. Travelling from the Pacific Ocean to this stretch of water to spawn they had no desire to be disturbed by him. Stood on the decking that bordered two sides of the mobile home he rented with his wife on a 14-acre plot, he could see the Russian River below that they had inhabited and he would shortly head toward. All around him was the untouched beauty of Sonoma County and it gladdened Bill’s heart when he looked out from here how much it reminded him of landscapes he had experienced in Italy years earlier.
The trailer itself (to call it a mobile home is perhaps too grandiose) was shoddy, but nice. It had two bedrooms, two bathrooms and there was a hole in a wall where Bill had flung a boxed manuscript only to discover the fragility of plasterboard. For $200 a month, however, Bill and his wife could overlook any shortcomings. Out there in the countryside, one encountered other people with the same regularity that steelhead trout made themselves known to Bill. This sense of being somewhat removed from the world was welcome. A shared sense of devastation had brought them here. They had lost and were losing close family members to cancer, suffered through miscarriages, and Bill’s wife had undergone what transpired to be unnecessary surgery for a misdiagnosed brain tumor. They had decided that 12 months should be enough to work through what they were feeling, but for the next five years they would call this place home.
One cold morning down on the Russian, Bill had encountered (or had been encountered, really) a local who’s knowledge of the steelhead trout far surpassed his own. Had Bill’s struggles not been so apparent, they may have parted company there and then. Instead, he came away with some essential insight to the ways of this fish. If you want to tempt them up, he was told, you would need the roe of a female steelhead, the eggs from her ovaries. And it needed to be fixed to a gold hook he was informed, “otherwise you’re wasting your time”. Fishing had become analogous to writing for Bill. He had left his job in the publishing industry to spend those initial 12 months writing a novel. When one year became two, three and then four, he delivered a novel for each of them. Publishers repeatedly told him that they liked his writing, but something about his fiction just didn’t land. Not to be deterred, he changed his approach. If they liked his writing but not what his imagination had to offer, he would find something else to write about. Something real.
As he stood there in his waders about to go fishing, he had figured out how to catch steelhead trout, and his first work of non-fiction had broken through. Laughing In The Hills, a book which recounted his 10-week experience of the 1979 season at San Francisco’s Golden Gate Fields race track would be in book stores soon, and Viking Press had paid him $1,500 for the privilege of publishing it. He hadn’t yet left for the river when the phone started ringing and his wife, who was in the house and answered, called out to him.
“Bill, it’s Mr Shawn,” he heard.
For almost 30 years William Shawn had been the editor of The New Yorker magazine. Bill’s literary agent had told him that they had been interested in serialising his book, but this was the first conversation he would have with a man who had published everyone from Hannah Arendt to John Updike. In his high-pitched voice and with an unbreakable formality, Mr Shawn spent the next 10 minutes or so explaining how much he had enjoyed Laughing In The Hills to a largely silent Mr Barich.
“And we’ll pay you a minimum of $25,000,” the editor said, bringing the conversation to a close and Bill back to his senses.
“But my agent told me it was $2,500,” he replied, stunned that the “twenty-five” his agent had been quoted represented an amount unfamiliar to both of them when The New Yorker was concerned. Shawn could only chuckle as this realisation dawned on his newest author and when the phone call ended.
Bill, waders still on, decided there was nothing for it but to go fishing.
II
Serialisation in The New Yorker brought Bill Barich’s work immediate and widespread recognition, but it is the book has led both of us to a Dublin hotel café almost half-a-century after its publication.
I spend more time than I care to mention (and more money than is wise to count) searching online for old American sports books. It is through this habit that I have encountered David Halberstam’s writing on baseball, Ken Dryden’s remarkable hockey memoir, Frederick Exely’s A Fan’s Notes and most importantly of all, Barich’s Laughing In The Hills. It had been included on a list Sports Illustrated compiled of the Top 100 Sports Books, and the accompanying blurb seemed at once a touch sensational, but compelling: “Nearing 40 and faced with the death of his mother and a failing marriage, Barich checks into a hotel near Golden Gate Fields racetrack and stays for the season. As he gambles alongside a flock of railbirds, he becomes, he says in this evocative memoir, ‘restored if not renewed.’” As it turned out, he was still a few years shy of 40, it was a motel that he stayed in, and although Barich and his wife would separate it seems presumptuous to describe their marriage as failing based on what we read alone. All the same, I was sold on the premise. The book that followed exceeded all expectations.
What I find appeals to me about these old American sports books is their finality. When Halberstam writes about Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in Summer Of ’49, I read it knowing that the story has been played out to its fullest.
I might find myself hoping things turn out well for some characters over others, but the overwhelming satisfaction of stepping into these sporting stories comes with the certainty that there is no uncertainty. They do not possess the same possibilities for joy and anxiety as actual sport, but the best of those books are not worse off for that. Indeed, they are a welcome escape from that. So far removed in time and place, the measure of their success has less to do with what a team or athlete achieved than how well the writer can tell that story.
It was unnerving to then discover that the author of Laughing In The Hills had breached this distinction. For almost 20 years before I had encountered Bill Barich’s work, he had been living in Dublin. In an instant he had ceased to be an abstract figure who had written a brilliant sports book in the late 1970s. It sounds naïve to have never considered that these worlds would interject. Yet, as I watched him walk toward me on a Tuesday morning to a semi-secluded table in the café, it required a conscious leap of logic to associate the man from the book with the Bill Barich now sat opposite me.
He is a quietly charming man in his 81st year. There’s little outward trace of the ordeals that he worked through over the course of his book. As he patiently recounts those scenes from decades ago, his memories almost seem to be of an eccentric friend he once knew. Yet, his life changed with the creation of Laughing In The Hills. An aspiring writer who became a published author, the serialisation of the book led to a staff writer job at The New Yorker. Numerous other successful books followed and Barich inched ever further away from the desperate man who had taken his final shot with a book about a mid-range horse track.
As he speaks, his attention is drawn to the copy of the book that has been left sitting on the table between us. It is a 2015 reprint that he helped to design himself; the choice of an Edgar Degas painting for the cover was his own, he proudly explains. Degas was only a few years younger painting Le Défilé (‘The Parade’) (1866-68) than Barich had been writing the book.
Taking us from the grandstand onto the yellowy grass of the track, Degas shows us six horses and their jockeys in various states of readiness for a race that has yet to begin. The two foregrounded appear stood still. Another two calmly walk in our direction, while the final pair of these jockeys look to be in conversation as their horses move along parallel to one another. This is a seven-horse meet, however, and Degas has instilled a little chaos. The final horse portrayed is closest to the centre of the painting, but it is also the farthest away. The jockey’s clothing – a brownish top and red cap – almost blends in with the autumnal backdrop, but the dark colour of the horse’s coat keeps him in view. Contrary to the calmness of those first six horses, the seventh is panicked and its jockey is desperately trying to bring it back under control.
That this wildness is not immediately apparent on first glance feels important. Degas almost allows it to be lost in the beautiful scenery of the Parisian racetrack. Furthermore, it is striking that not one of the other six horses or jockeys appear even to have noticed the struggle that is ongoing. And while Degas’ portrayal of the crowd is vague in that Impressionist style, we can make out enough to realise that there has been no swell of interest on their behalf either. “It was as though many versions of reality were competing for a chance to obtain,” wrote Barich of his initial sensation looking out at the racetrack from the Golden Gate Fields grandstand one hundred years removed from this painting. “I stood there paralyzed, unable to make a choice.”
Degas and Barich transmit a shared understanding of the possibilities open to an inquisitive mind at the racetrack. Degas allows himself is a snapshot; one scene in which any number of stories could be told. Barich goes deeper. He brings the horses, their jockeys and the myriad other individuals whose existence interweaves with the track to life. The wildness of Degas’ seventh horse would have been of concern to anyone with money on it. Barich introduces us to these people. There would have been a trainer and groom concerned with why their horse had reacted this way. Barich takes us into their barn. And those people in the crowd whom Degas presents as an anonymous whole, Barich gives them specificity and meaning.
The racetrack contains multitudes. Barich unpacks them.
III
Fishing and writing demand patience. So does picking horses.
Bill Barich rediscovered the thrill of horse racing throughout the heartbreaking period that his terminally ill mother was slowly taken from him. It started as an occasional wager made at an Off-Track Betting office where his family lived in New York. Soon enough, Bill was driving to the local newsagents every morning to pick up a copy of the Daily Racing Form. Opening it up on the kitchen table, he would lose himself in the details trying to figure out which horses to back. It felt to him that a successful process should be attainable through logic, but could equally be undone through chance. When some family members surprised him by asking to place bets of their own, both the scientific and scattershot methods of picking winners were tested. Once all bets were in, the family would gather together around Bill’s dying mother on the porch and listen to the delayed radio broadcast of the races. “My father said the races were good for her,” he wrote. “I thought [my mother] heard in the track announcer’s call a little pulse of life at the heart of the cancer.”
From the kitchen table of his family home in New York to a motel room not far from the Golden Gate Fields racetrack in Albany, California, Bill continued picking horses. He had sold Viking Press on the idea of a non-fiction book and it would involve him spending 10 weeks at a racetrack. There was a part of him that welcomed the time it would offer to really work on his process for picking horses. But there was something greater in the idea that the “little pulse of life” his mother experienced could contain an interior life of its own to be explored. He was not of the horse racing world, nor did he typically frequent racetracks or even know many racing people. When he descended on Golden Gate Fields with the purpose of finding material for a book, it was as a complete unknown.
“Joan Didion said about people talking to her because she seems so harmless,” he says, suggesting that his presence was similarly inoffensive to this community of racing people. He refused to carry a notebook for fear that people might consider him a journalist, or worse, a cop. “There’s a lot of things that were going on, particularly at a track like Golden Gate Fields,” he continues, “that people don’t generally want you to know about.”
The conversations he had or overheard were only written down in the seclusion of a nearby bar or his motel room. With time, his continual presence at the racetrack inspired more curiosity than suspicion from both the patrons and those working there alike. “You go back to the same barn a fourth time,” he explains, noting that racetracks like Golden Gate Fields didn’t contain owners, trainers and grooms who were commonly sought out for conversations about their work, “they just say, ‘OK, we’ll talk to you.’”
What transpired in the form of Laughing In The Hills was an exploration of what goes into the day-to-day running of a racetrack. Using his naivety as an asset, Barich asked simple questions that most readers probably didn’t know the answers to either. There was an unquestionable ordinariness to what he was discovering, but as with the details he pored over looking for clues in a horse’s form, his observations served as an extension of his attempts to finesse the process. To see how a horse is treated when it is not racing, to speak candidly with those working long hours for mediocre pay, or to gain some understanding of the ways horses can be chemically enhanced, it all helps to establish what is in a sense one man’s (ultimately unsuccessful) manual on picking horses.
Yet, this sense should not be overplayed. Laughing In The Hills is as much a treatise on gambling as Moby Dick is a guidebook for whaling; some good insights of both are contained within, but it’s scarcely the point. “That book is incredibly compressed, but I wanted it to be like that,” he explains. “I wanted there to be no waste.”
IV
It can be therefore difficult to distinguish between the composite parts of Laughing In The Hills and the book in its totality.
Structurally, it is broken down into 10 chapters. One for each week he spent at the track, perhaps, although linearity isn’t something that always concerns him. Within each chapter he decided to break things down further into sub-sections; each like a race on a given day’s card. In this sense, it is easy to regard the book as almost a series of Degas’ snapshots from the racetrack. The reader is never asked to focus for too long on one particular subject, and that staccato style can generate the feeling that one’s flying through all the action. However, as with the wild horse that Degas almost allows you to overlook in the background, Barich has an ability to show you worlds within worlds across a matter of paragraphs.
His face shows the hint of a smile as I mention the man he encountered in the parking lot of his motel one afternoon. A globe salesman that mistook Bill for a thief, he remembers being briefly overwhelmed by the sight of so many globes in the man’s car when its owner emerged from his room. Inebriated (or working toward it), this guy started raising hell. When Bill explained that he too was a resident of the motel and didn’t mean any harm, the salesman’s anger turned to the deepest guilt. He insisted that Bill accept his offer of a free globe by way of apology. The scene had all the quality of a short story, and Bill’s assessment of the man’s behaviour wonderfully surmised his rapid change of heart: “Minor judgmental errors tend to unhinge men who’ve been drinking alone in motel rooms since two in the afternoon.” Like Degas, Barich can give us just enough information to know what is happening, but only some indication or inference of what might happen next.
It is best to approach the question of its totality through the style in which it was written. Barich wasn’t a journalist, but his writing fit within the New Journalism stylings of the era. He insists that this owed more to his work as a novelist than his adherence to any creative credo, but what Tom Wolfe noted in his famed collection of New Journalism works a few years earlier resonated with Barich’s work in the late 1970s:
“[Writers of New Journalism] developed the habit of staying with the people they were writing about for days at a time, weeks in some cases. They had to gather all the material the conventional journalist was after – and then keep going. It seemed all important to be there when dramatic scenes took place, to get the dialogue, the gestures, the facial expressions, the details of the environment. The idea was to give the full objective description, plus something that readers had always had to go to novels and short stories for: namely, the subjective or emotional life of the characters. That was why it was so ironic when both the journalistic and literary old guards began to attack this new journalism as ‘impressionistic’. The most important things one attempted in terms of technique depended upon a depth of information that had never been demanded in newspaper work.”
As was the case for certain prominent purveyors of this style, Barich assumes the role of the book’s central character around which all events take place. However, unlike Hunter S Thompson or Wolfe himself, Barich’s presence is not overwhelming. Indeed, Barich’s reader is afforded a dual role as the audience for which he is writing, but also as a player in the process of acquiring the information that will come to be written about. Whatever rules New Journalism broke in turn of reporting and technique, the material that could be unearthed (and the unearthing of that material) was of primary importance. What Wolfe described as “the juice”.
To the extent then that Laughing In The Hill tells a story from Golden Gate Fields, Bill’s discovery of Pichi shaped the narrative course of the book. She was an unruly horse brought to Gary Headley’s stable. What Degas left to the imagination, Barich brings to life. Pichi’s concerned owners turned to Headley and his captivating groom, Bo Twinn in the hope that they could salvage the genealogical pedigree this wild horse possessed and turn it into a winner. In a book that never really intends to tug at sentimentality, it almost worried Barich when he succumbed to the pull of Pichi and this traditional underdog story. When people speak to him now about the book, it is Pichi that they almost inevitably mention. And he has learned to be at ease with that for it remains a remarkable story. “God know what Gary Headley gave her,” he says with a laugh, “but it worked!”
V
There is another aspect of Laughing In The Hills that unsettles its categorisation as a sports book. Too prominent to have been overlooked by the blurb-writer at Sports Illustrated, it can only have been a choice to not include it. Bill Barich spends a considerable portion of this book writing about Florence during the Renaissance.
When he considers that decision now, there is no doubt in his mind that it was correct. “Well, I thought I may never write another book,” he says, “so I figured I’d put everything I know into this one.” Some readers had trouble reading of a mid-range Californian racetrack one moment, before being asked to consider the author’s portrayal of 15th and 16th century Florentine artists the next.
I would argue that this facet of Barich’s creativity is what turns Laughing In The Hills from a very good sports book into an exceptional one. Weaving both worlds together when he locates a suitable point of intersection, he is as comfortable dedicating standalone sections of the book to some aspect of Florence’s rich history. They are both remarkably compelling and open-minded. Barich continually invites the reader to become an interpreter. Through some act of serendipity, I had encountered Laughing In The Hills – knowing nothing of it beyond what the blurb detailed – not too long after visiting Florence for the first time. “I chose to live in… the legendary Florence of Lorenzo the Magnificent,” he wrote in a chapter dedicated to the months he spent living there as an exchange student in the 1960s. My visit only lasted a few days, but his intention rang true. Florence, with its remarkable artwork and history, encourage such duality of thought. You walk through the city as it stands today, constantly aware of those who walked before you. It reveals itself to you as you project your own thoughts upon it.
The New Yorker just took that all out,” he says, all references to Florence removed from the two-magazine run it was published across. “That was brutal.”
While his experience publishing the book with Viking was arduous in the way one might expect, The New Yorker presented an altogether tougher challenge. It would be unfair to suggest that he was misled, but Shawn’s lavish praise for Laughing In The Hills had given Barich cause to assume that there would only be so much that needed changing.
“You have to debate everything,” he says, “from commas to semi-colons.”
And then there were the fact-checkers. A necessary process, Barich nevertheless found himself answering questions about how a particular trainer might take to being described as “flakey” (“He’s a racetrack guy, he’s been called worse, believe me!”) and that it’s generally considered better not to describe someone as bald if it can be avoided at all (“It’s deeply offensive, apparently”). On and on, with manuscripts being sent back and forth between their offices in New York City and Bill’s home in the Californian countryside, it severely tested his patience. “I wasn’t about to roll over though,” he says. “I was very happy to be taken seriously.” When it was eventually published across two magazines in April and May 1980, the effect it had on his personal and professional life was transformative.
“It actually ended up being around $35,000,” he says, an even greater amount than he had been able to contemplate when he first got the call from Shawn.
With that enormous payday, Bill and his wife departed their trailer overlooking the river on a 14-acre plot of land in Sonoma County for a house in the suburbs (that didn’t last long). The following year he would have four articles in The New Yorker and by 1982 he even had two pieces of his fictional writing published there too. More books would shortly follow. His writing eventually featured in collections like Best American Short Stories and Best American Essays, and in recent years he has even worked as a screenwriter for the HBO show, Luck. He had always regarded Laughing In The Hills as something of a last shot at making it, unaware then of whatever that entailed and where it could take him.
VI
As we prepare to leave the café, I realise that I haven’t really asked Bill how he ended up living in Dublin.
The great contradiction of Laughing In The Hills is how he took an enormous risk in the real life sense while remaining quite a cautious gambler. “Of my initial five hundred dollars,” he wrote in the book’s closing chapter, the set amount he allowed himself from his first day at Golden Gate Fields, “I had three hundred sixty-four dollars left.” It’s always been this way with him, he explains. Like Degas looking at the racetrack from afar, there is some of that wild horse in Bill Barich looking back out at us from within. He has no issue hedging everything on an impulse of the heart. Holidaying in London he met an Irish woman named Imelda, fell in love and decided to act on it.
“I had friends who thought I was being rash or just plain foolish,” he later wrote, “but trust and conviction grow if real love is in the mix.”
We depart the building and walk a short distance until our paths are set to diverge. He is heading down Anthony Cronin Walk and we briefly discuss Dead As Doornails, Cronin’s memoir of life in literary Dublin.
“I met him once,” Bill says, “I heard he liked horses.”