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Joe, The Wounded Tennis Player
208 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1945
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December 7, 2023
review of
Morton Thompson's JOE The Wounded Tennis Player
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 5-6, 2023
These days, it's not bad enuf that I have hundreds of bks everywhere around me in my house that're high priorities for me to read before I die but now I have a tendency for readings whole series of bks. E.G.: I read a bk about Rojavo - but that wasn't enuf, I need to get a more well-rounded perspective so I have 4 more in a pile waiting to be read. Then there's my going thru my Mysteries section in my personal library & reading at least one bk by every author in there that I haven't read yet. There's a large pile of OPEN SPACE magazines to be read & reviewed in their entirety. There's still THE SCIENCE (volume 2) to be written so I have quite a few medical science bks to read for that. Now I'm starting on the complete works of Morton Thompson. I got interested in him thru reading Lee Server's Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (see my review here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticP... ). Now I'm reading all 4 of his bks in chronological order, starting here. I can see the potential for him to be one of my favorite writers.
There's an Introduction by Robert Benchley. I remember that Benchley was once one of the US's most popular humorist writers. I don't recall having ever read anything by him before. He may be somewhat forgotten now. Benchley, like Thompson, seems to me to represent a somewhat 'American' humor that's less in evidence these days. Maybe there's something too 'innocent' about it, too wry. In this age, stand-up comics who talk about their cunts & assholes in endless variation might be more to the common taste. Here's Benchley:
"Several years ago I ate a turkey prepared and roasted by Morton Thompson. I didn't eat the whole turkey, but that wasn't my fault. There were outsiders present who ganged up on me." - p 7
Note that there's not a single mention of the turkey's cloaca. I cd barely make it thru those 3 sentences w/o dying of boredom. If I hadn't been getting a blow-job at the time I wd've never made it.
Chapter 1 begins w/ an epigraph:
"A columnist is a reporter who got a lucky break that later turns out to be a fracture.
(From the diary of Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player)" - p 13
This bk is about the author's experiences as a newspaper columnist & his ruminations thereon. He's very funny. I repeat, he's balled & vernuncular.
"As a result I was continually encountering currents. My pores were open. People respected me. For some reason they got the idea that I couldn't be bought. I don't know how much this cost me, but I have always been a little stunned and reverent about it." - p 23
&, yes, he seems very honest. I like that. Maybe he really cdn't be bought. Like a Court Jester he was probably a good go-to man for a reality check. I wdn't say that about most newspaper columnists.
"Come behind the scenes with me and let us pick each other's pockets." - p 24
He's also handy w/ a phrase. & then he goes & mentions one of my favorite composers.
"Long ago I came to believe that the only perfect crimes are committed by nations. George Antheil does not agree with me." - p 54
Antheil, like Benchley, was probably much more of a public figure, someone who needed no introduction, in the '40s, when this bk was written, than now, when most people wd probably say Hunh?!
There're many stories rife w/ irony. One of them ends w/ this:
""Brought her in about three-thirty this morning, they did. Fished her out of the East River. Drowning case. And what do you suppose she had clutched in her hand?"
"The reporter halted, whirled at bay, hands on his hips.
""A locket!" he grimaced bitterly.
""No," said the morgue man. "It was a counterfeit five-dollar bill."" - p 58
In this day & age, the few 'news'paper columnists that I've pd attn to have been people pd to hawk their publisher's political viewpoint in a chatty way for the masses. It was very interesting, for me, to get Thompson's informed view from a time before I was born.
"There are one or two columnists in America who do nothing but column. They get enormous salaries. They employ secretaries, news-gathering staffs, pay office rentals and heavy taxes. Their money comes from syndication: a company sells their column to as many newspapers as possible, charging each newspaper according to its circulation, and paying the columnist on the basis of what he brings in." - p 59
Thompson even had an insider's scoop on pranks at Disney:
"He had a passion for cars. The car was his own. It was brand-new. In the back seat was a wheelbarrow. It was full of water.
"Such minds.
"It had taken them half a day to buy the wheelbarrow, get it into the back of the car, and fill it with water. Most of those four hours were spent simply getting it in. At midnight the poor chap was still trying to figure out how to get it out without spilling a ruinous flood over his brand-new upholstery. He got the water out finally, and then it took him until daylight to get the wheelbarrow out." - p 67
Thompson cd take a shark in a swimming pool eating his girlfriend & make it funny (but probably not for her).
"I'd like to report for work early to hear Bob Benchley straggling off the set after twenty minutes under the klieg lights, his garment utterly wilted, sweat sloshing from him in puddles, crying out hoarsely:
""For God's sake, get me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini!"" - p 73
TV was new when this was written.
"Television: Something to put on a radio so that folks can see things are really as bad as they heard they were.
(From the diary of Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player)" - p 74
He goes into a long section about his mom not particularly flattering to her.
"The smallest item about a sunspot gives her intuitions. It's no good being reasonable about those either.
""It's just a sunspot, Mother. A quirk of flaming gas. What's a sunspot got to do with prophecies?"
""Never mind! I know all about you, Mr. Know-It-All! Don't think you're putting anything over on me. How much money did you lose three weeks ago playing poker?"
""What's that got to do with it?" (God knows how she found out.)" - p 79
""The idea of throwing thousands and thousands of dollars into a stone monument! A dead, lifeless thing! God is going to punish them! Someday they'll have to answer for it. Think of the milk it would buy! Think of the children, starving! Write a column about it! That's what you ought to do instead of that silly stuff."
"She is as bitter about it as she is about white sugar, which she regards as pure poison, and Hitler, and women who let dirty dishes lie around, and Dali and surrealism." - pp 80-81
"My mother thinks that all Republicans are thieves, panders, drunkards, adulterers, and fat slobs who go around stealing the country blind. I do not know how she privately adjusts my being a Republican and a very conservative, Tory, reactionary Republican, to her fixed views on the subject of Republicanism." - p 84
Ha ha! I'm going to have to seek out more Republican humorists. Prior to Thompson I'm not sure I wd've found it easy to believe that there might be one I'd think is funny.
"She dashed into her bathroom. She put her hand through the shower curtain. She grabbed.
""Dingdong, darling!" she caroled. "Supper's ready!"
"There was a muffled sound that rose above the shower noise behind the curtain. She smiled, looked at herself in the mirror, walked out of the room, and started downstairs.
"Halfway down the stairs she met her husband, coming up.
"She stared at him one awful, stricken moment.
""Oh, Lord! Lord God!" she cried, and fled the house.
"She wouldn't come home for two days." - p 108
I made a reviewer's note to myself saying that Chapter VIII is like O'Henry. Do people read O'Henry anymore? Is the irony of O'Henry & Thompson a thing of the past, replaced by whatever?
"O'Henry wrote a great story about an editor and a writer" - p 148
Thompson's criticisms are well-aimed but not necessarily vicious:
"Men bustled around prescribing orange juice for rickety children around San Francisco, but they weren't working any harder or more scientific than government men down South destroying as many as a thousand tons of surplus oranges a day." - p 132
Benchley's intro has a special twistyness to it & Thompson alludes to this when he gets to Chapter XII:
"Someday I will get the manuscript for The Naked Countess back from Benchley and he will write me the introduction for Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player for it.
"In the interval which has sagged away since this book was almost finished I have been in the Army and I am consequently in a position to write very feelingly about food, but as I am still in the Army this sometimes does not appear altogether expedient." - p 165
Where will he go next?
"But Mark Hellinger's column cannot have earned him any enemies, for the people of whom he writes are anonymous; I remember not so long ago his house in Hollywood was robbed, and when the fact was published in the newspaper five gangsters read the article, went their devious ways, collared the thieves, got back the loot, and left it, intact, with an explanatory note, on his doorstep, less than seventy-two hours after the theft was committed." - p 195
Really?! In a superficial search online I found plenty on Hellinger but nothing about this.
"The danger of such a column appears to be that unless you are a superlative writer you must constantly be capping yesterday's bombshell with an equal or bigger bombshell—and even if you are successful in this literary bombardment you will eventually callous your reading public and by the very violence of your daily assault rob your spectacle of its interest and glut the public taste." - p 196
Ahhhhh.. if only that were still true. The diabolical 'genius' of the plandemic is that it's so convinced the public, despite all empirical signs to the contrary, of their impending death that ongoing sensationalist fear-mongering of the most ludicrous nature still keeps the audience enthralled & enslaved.
"In America the four estates are the church, business, the people, and the press.
"Such is our national construction that, except in a few localities, it is impossible for religion to control the press. It is impossible for the people to control the press. It is only possible that business can control the press. On the day when business utterly controls the press it will also control the other three estates. The control by any one of the four estates of any one of the others means the control of all." - 202
& the people who want such control for themselves are well aware of this. IMO we've reached an unprecedented level for such control in this country & elsewhere. BIG MONEY, getting bigger every day, controls what the press, in almost all its forms, is telling you & that's controlling opinion to an astounding degree. The few media sources that are still fighting against this are being character assassinated by the Fact Chokers.
"He should have a knowledge of economics and government and finance and medecine and law and religion and health and, last but most fundamental of all, he should have a knowledge of the principles of journalism. Given these things, given these things as a start, as a basis, cemented and implemented by a proven integrity and desire for the public welfare, bedrocked by proven character, integrity, and desire for truth, a man has a right to try to prove himself as a publisher. Such a man is worthy of the responsibility of a free press." - p 206
May such people still exist, may they have wiggle room against the 4 estate walls that're closing in.
Morton Thompson's JOE The Wounded Tennis Player
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 5-6, 2023
These days, it's not bad enuf that I have hundreds of bks everywhere around me in my house that're high priorities for me to read before I die but now I have a tendency for readings whole series of bks. E.G.: I read a bk about Rojavo - but that wasn't enuf, I need to get a more well-rounded perspective so I have 4 more in a pile waiting to be read. Then there's my going thru my Mysteries section in my personal library & reading at least one bk by every author in there that I haven't read yet. There's a large pile of OPEN SPACE magazines to be read & reviewed in their entirety. There's still THE SCIENCE (volume 2) to be written so I have quite a few medical science bks to read for that. Now I'm starting on the complete works of Morton Thompson. I got interested in him thru reading Lee Server's Encyclopedia of Pulp Fiction Writers (see my review here: http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/CriticP... ). Now I'm reading all 4 of his bks in chronological order, starting here. I can see the potential for him to be one of my favorite writers.
There's an Introduction by Robert Benchley. I remember that Benchley was once one of the US's most popular humorist writers. I don't recall having ever read anything by him before. He may be somewhat forgotten now. Benchley, like Thompson, seems to me to represent a somewhat 'American' humor that's less in evidence these days. Maybe there's something too 'innocent' about it, too wry. In this age, stand-up comics who talk about their cunts & assholes in endless variation might be more to the common taste. Here's Benchley:
"Several years ago I ate a turkey prepared and roasted by Morton Thompson. I didn't eat the whole turkey, but that wasn't my fault. There were outsiders present who ganged up on me." - p 7
Note that there's not a single mention of the turkey's cloaca. I cd barely make it thru those 3 sentences w/o dying of boredom. If I hadn't been getting a blow-job at the time I wd've never made it.
Chapter 1 begins w/ an epigraph:
"A columnist is a reporter who got a lucky break that later turns out to be a fracture.
(From the diary of Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player)" - p 13
This bk is about the author's experiences as a newspaper columnist & his ruminations thereon. He's very funny. I repeat, he's balled & vernuncular.
"As a result I was continually encountering currents. My pores were open. People respected me. For some reason they got the idea that I couldn't be bought. I don't know how much this cost me, but I have always been a little stunned and reverent about it." - p 23
&, yes, he seems very honest. I like that. Maybe he really cdn't be bought. Like a Court Jester he was probably a good go-to man for a reality check. I wdn't say that about most newspaper columnists.
"Come behind the scenes with me and let us pick each other's pockets." - p 24
He's also handy w/ a phrase. & then he goes & mentions one of my favorite composers.
"Long ago I came to believe that the only perfect crimes are committed by nations. George Antheil does not agree with me." - p 54
Antheil, like Benchley, was probably much more of a public figure, someone who needed no introduction, in the '40s, when this bk was written, than now, when most people wd probably say Hunh?!
There're many stories rife w/ irony. One of them ends w/ this:
""Brought her in about three-thirty this morning, they did. Fished her out of the East River. Drowning case. And what do you suppose she had clutched in her hand?"
"The reporter halted, whirled at bay, hands on his hips.
""A locket!" he grimaced bitterly.
""No," said the morgue man. "It was a counterfeit five-dollar bill."" - p 58
In this day & age, the few 'news'paper columnists that I've pd attn to have been people pd to hawk their publisher's political viewpoint in a chatty way for the masses. It was very interesting, for me, to get Thompson's informed view from a time before I was born.
"There are one or two columnists in America who do nothing but column. They get enormous salaries. They employ secretaries, news-gathering staffs, pay office rentals and heavy taxes. Their money comes from syndication: a company sells their column to as many newspapers as possible, charging each newspaper according to its circulation, and paying the columnist on the basis of what he brings in." - p 59
Thompson even had an insider's scoop on pranks at Disney:
"He had a passion for cars. The car was his own. It was brand-new. In the back seat was a wheelbarrow. It was full of water.
"Such minds.
"It had taken them half a day to buy the wheelbarrow, get it into the back of the car, and fill it with water. Most of those four hours were spent simply getting it in. At midnight the poor chap was still trying to figure out how to get it out without spilling a ruinous flood over his brand-new upholstery. He got the water out finally, and then it took him until daylight to get the wheelbarrow out." - p 67
Thompson cd take a shark in a swimming pool eating his girlfriend & make it funny (but probably not for her).
"I'd like to report for work early to hear Bob Benchley straggling off the set after twenty minutes under the klieg lights, his garment utterly wilted, sweat sloshing from him in puddles, crying out hoarsely:
""For God's sake, get me out of these wet clothes and into a dry martini!"" - p 73
TV was new when this was written.
"Television: Something to put on a radio so that folks can see things are really as bad as they heard they were.
(From the diary of Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player)" - p 74
He goes into a long section about his mom not particularly flattering to her.
"The smallest item about a sunspot gives her intuitions. It's no good being reasonable about those either.
""It's just a sunspot, Mother. A quirk of flaming gas. What's a sunspot got to do with prophecies?"
""Never mind! I know all about you, Mr. Know-It-All! Don't think you're putting anything over on me. How much money did you lose three weeks ago playing poker?"
""What's that got to do with it?" (God knows how she found out.)" - p 79
""The idea of throwing thousands and thousands of dollars into a stone monument! A dead, lifeless thing! God is going to punish them! Someday they'll have to answer for it. Think of the milk it would buy! Think of the children, starving! Write a column about it! That's what you ought to do instead of that silly stuff."
"She is as bitter about it as she is about white sugar, which she regards as pure poison, and Hitler, and women who let dirty dishes lie around, and Dali and surrealism." - pp 80-81
"My mother thinks that all Republicans are thieves, panders, drunkards, adulterers, and fat slobs who go around stealing the country blind. I do not know how she privately adjusts my being a Republican and a very conservative, Tory, reactionary Republican, to her fixed views on the subject of Republicanism." - p 84
Ha ha! I'm going to have to seek out more Republican humorists. Prior to Thompson I'm not sure I wd've found it easy to believe that there might be one I'd think is funny.
"She dashed into her bathroom. She put her hand through the shower curtain. She grabbed.
""Dingdong, darling!" she caroled. "Supper's ready!"
"There was a muffled sound that rose above the shower noise behind the curtain. She smiled, looked at herself in the mirror, walked out of the room, and started downstairs.
"Halfway down the stairs she met her husband, coming up.
"She stared at him one awful, stricken moment.
""Oh, Lord! Lord God!" she cried, and fled the house.
"She wouldn't come home for two days." - p 108
I made a reviewer's note to myself saying that Chapter VIII is like O'Henry. Do people read O'Henry anymore? Is the irony of O'Henry & Thompson a thing of the past, replaced by whatever?
"O'Henry wrote a great story about an editor and a writer" - p 148
Thompson's criticisms are well-aimed but not necessarily vicious:
"Men bustled around prescribing orange juice for rickety children around San Francisco, but they weren't working any harder or more scientific than government men down South destroying as many as a thousand tons of surplus oranges a day." - p 132
Benchley's intro has a special twistyness to it & Thompson alludes to this when he gets to Chapter XII:
"Someday I will get the manuscript for The Naked Countess back from Benchley and he will write me the introduction for Joe, the Wounded Tennis Player for it.
"In the interval which has sagged away since this book was almost finished I have been in the Army and I am consequently in a position to write very feelingly about food, but as I am still in the Army this sometimes does not appear altogether expedient." - p 165
Where will he go next?
"But Mark Hellinger's column cannot have earned him any enemies, for the people of whom he writes are anonymous; I remember not so long ago his house in Hollywood was robbed, and when the fact was published in the newspaper five gangsters read the article, went their devious ways, collared the thieves, got back the loot, and left it, intact, with an explanatory note, on his doorstep, less than seventy-two hours after the theft was committed." - p 195
Really?! In a superficial search online I found plenty on Hellinger but nothing about this.
"The danger of such a column appears to be that unless you are a superlative writer you must constantly be capping yesterday's bombshell with an equal or bigger bombshell—and even if you are successful in this literary bombardment you will eventually callous your reading public and by the very violence of your daily assault rob your spectacle of its interest and glut the public taste." - p 196
Ahhhhh.. if only that were still true. The diabolical 'genius' of the plandemic is that it's so convinced the public, despite all empirical signs to the contrary, of their impending death that ongoing sensationalist fear-mongering of the most ludicrous nature still keeps the audience enthralled & enslaved.
"In America the four estates are the church, business, the people, and the press.
"Such is our national construction that, except in a few localities, it is impossible for religion to control the press. It is impossible for the people to control the press. It is only possible that business can control the press. On the day when business utterly controls the press it will also control the other three estates. The control by any one of the four estates of any one of the others means the control of all." - 202
& the people who want such control for themselves are well aware of this. IMO we've reached an unprecedented level for such control in this country & elsewhere. BIG MONEY, getting bigger every day, controls what the press, in almost all its forms, is telling you & that's controlling opinion to an astounding degree. The few media sources that are still fighting against this are being character assassinated by the Fact Chokers.
"He should have a knowledge of economics and government and finance and medecine and law and religion and health and, last but most fundamental of all, he should have a knowledge of the principles of journalism. Given these things, given these things as a start, as a basis, cemented and implemented by a proven integrity and desire for the public welfare, bedrocked by proven character, integrity, and desire for truth, a man has a right to try to prove himself as a publisher. Such a man is worthy of the responsibility of a free press." - p 206
May such people still exist, may they have wiggle room against the 4 estate walls that're closing in.
May 20, 2025
grailed a 1946 print of this at the strand for $6 based on the cover alone.
jesus i did not read this fast enough. it was cool to read something so funny and also old lol. he plays w tragedy and comedy in a cute way. there’s like a whole chapter about women and cooking that did not age well. the stuff at the end about publishers and news and business and profit and stuff was timeless.
jesus i did not read this fast enough. it was cool to read something so funny and also old lol. he plays w tragedy and comedy in a cute way. there’s like a whole chapter about women and cooking that did not age well. the stuff at the end about publishers and news and business and profit and stuff was timeless.
November 7, 2025
I really love reading old books. However, although this book is funny, it was also plodding.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews