We All Love To Hate
This column was written by Alston B. Ramsay.
If ever someone devises a Pantheon of Hate, surely William Hazlitt, the 19th-century essayist, ought to have a place of honor. He made hatred a high art, spewing bile the way most people issue pieties. He hated his friends. He hated his lovers. He hated his family. And he even hated himself — but only for not hating the world enough.
His infamous treatise, "On The Pleasure Of Hating," is remarkable for many things, not least of which is Hazlitt's willingness to probe that dark secret harbored by all, yet discussed by few: Hating can be extremely pleasurable. It can, in fact, be the very elixir of life: "Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring and thought of action. Life would turn to a stagnant pool, were it not ruffled by the jarring interests, the unruly passions, of men."
Woe be upon Hazlitt if he were alive today to witness the vast maze of social proscriptions erected to combat hate in all its multitudinous forms. So what is a modern-day, unregenerate hater to do in these meek and mild times? Well, if you're Will Blythe, former literary editor of Esquire, there's an obvious solution: Embrace the hate, let it flow in all its glorious splendor, massage it with delicate fingers so it will fully blossom into a magnificent creature.
That, at least, is the premise of "To Hate Like This Is to Be Happy Forever." It would be a mistake to believe that this account of the Duke-North Carolina rivalry is little more than a provincial work. Though the noble purpose of Blythe's account is to explore his hatred, to plumb the very depths of his soul, what emerges, instead, is a meditation on the intricate, often tangled, web that ties college basketball to North Carolina, to Blythe's family, and ultimately to the homespun Southern values his father imparted to his family. (By the end of the book Blythe admits that his yearlong exploration was a "dialogue with a dead man." His father is not long in the ground when Blythe heads south from New York City at the beginning of the 2004 season.)
In that respect, "To Hate Like This" is more than just a snack to tide over college hoops fans facing the months-long purgatory before next season begins; it is a touching, hilarious, beautifully written portrait of a man and his obsession.
"I am a sick, sick man," Blythe intones in his opening. "Not only am I consumed by hatred, I am delighted by it." It's that self-effacing humor and cantankerous charm that carries the book through its vast, sprawling series of vignettes, anecdotes, game days, profiles, pathologies, and theories on hate — some tested, others rejected. The higgledy-piggledy fashion in which the essays are arranged may be the only flaw here, but Blythe's delicious language more than covers any rough spots. Instead of sports patois, he offers up gems like: "Wojo was the kind of guy who ran to every huddle like Nutty Buddies were being handed out there by the Good Humor ice cream man." And: "They played like longshoremen trying to fight their way to the bar for a drink on Saturday night." Every paragraph is gilded with a similar edge, especially the recurring inner dialogue between the "beast," the rabid UNC fan that erupts and curses and burns and boils, and the "journalist," the quiet persona he dons to attempt to give his subject a fair shake.
The language alone is worth the price, but Blythe possesses a rare knack for not only discovering the quirky, but for translating it into words. It's a nonfiction work that reads more like fiction: The author is consoled by Uma Thurman after a UNC loss; he witnesses Michael Jordan miss almost every shot at a UNC practice (blame it on the shoes); he watches a game with a man known as Crazy Towel Guy, a longtime Duke fan who, after four heart attacks, decided to retire from his job — to root for Duke full-time.
These stories are hilarious, but the greatest strength of this book is Blythe's uncanny talent for profiles. He possesses the discerning power necessary to capture the essence of a man in only a few pages, those little things that are symbolic of greater values and virtues. His exposé of the Duke coach, Mike Krzyzewski — the Dark Lord himself, the living, breathing, physical manifestation of Duke — is typical of his craftsmanship. He uncovers a man with weaknesses, who savors time alone in his garden, and even gets weepy when discussing his mother. But he also captures Krzyzewski the ruthless competitor:
If Krzyzewski was any indication, the rocket fuel of American achievement was resentment, the desire to show someone, someone who never noticed you or your family, never believed in you or your family or anyone from your neighborhood, that you were not to be ignored, not then, not now, not ever. The past could never be quite shirked and the future that would cauterize the stings of that past could never quite get close enough.
That's enough to make any Carolina fan respect Coack K, and that is no small feat.
"To Hate Like This" is undoubtedly (and ironically) a labor of love. But it is also an opportunity for Blythe to exorcise the ghost of his father. To Blythe's father, "loving one thing seemed to require that you hate another, that you divide the world into two disproportionate pieces: the inherently local and familial, that which was known and loved, and the unknown, the foreignness that threatened the gentle people behind the boxwood hedge in their Carolina yard. . . . There were always two places in the world: home and everyplace else."
Carolina was home, those traditional values like family and memory; Duke was everywhere else, a pit stop for students on the thoroughfare to high-paying jobs. Carolina was on Will's father's mind when he worked on his children's accents: "He wanted his children to be able to speak with the ghosts of our ancestors, to preserve through language a realm outside of time. . . . And in doing things in the old way, we would link ourselves to family members both dead and gone and yet to come."
Duke was the Leviathan of post-modernism invading Blythe père's beloved North Carolina. "Memory emerged out of love," Blythe fils writes. "And it was these memories, the containers for the missing sacraments of scuppernongs and spring water and country hams, that were threatened by the new North Carolina, a place that seemed to be arriving first and foremost at Duke University."
Unfortunately, Blythe never chases that metaphorical Duke to its end, just as he never comes to a firm conclusion about the source of his (and thousands of others') hatred of Duke basketball. But ultimately, these concerns pale compared with the question that builds throughout, like black thunderheads on the horizon: What if Blythe's hatred proves evanescent under the withering power of cool, calm logic? Will Blythe wither away to a shadow of his former self, his life-sustaining hatred unceremoniously yanked away?
Thankfully, we'll never have to find out. All it takes to whip him out of his philosophical musings is a tightly contested Carolina game and — WHAM! — the clouds burst and the "beast" pounds that inner "journalist" into submission.
Hazlitt surely would applaud: "The wild beast resumes its sway within us, we feel like hunting animals, and as the hound starts in his sleep and rushes on the chase in fancy the heart rouses itself in its native lair, and utters a wild cry of joy, at being restored once more to freedom and lawless unrestrained impulses. Every one has his full swing, or goes to the Devil his own way."
By Alston B. Ramsay
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