Animal Voices Poem by gershon hepner

Writing Cheetah’s story as a chimp
enabled Moehringer to tell his story
from the primate point of view. We crimp
our style reporting one another’s glory
in our own voice, and ought to let them speak
with their own words. If they have none though, let
imagination figure their mystique,
when we compose a diary for our pet.

My cat’s called Cato. Though he can meow
and purr as loudly as a kitchen fridge,
he lacks completely literary know-how
to tell a tale I’d lengthen or abridge,
depending on my editor’s demand.
But I’ve a wife who is prepared to be
his ghostwriter, and help me understand
the life of Cato, her biographee.

Of course I can quite clearly see without
her help what Cato’s thinking while he shares
our home, but only she can bring him out
of his cat-closet where he daily tears
around, quite certain while he’s purring that
he’s more like a human beings than a quad-
ripedal beast, mere humble household cat,
believing, like moist humans, he’s a god.

Inspired by Charles McGrath’s article on Andre Agassi’s memoir, “Open” (“Though They’re a Team, Watch How You Put It, ” NYT, November 12,2009) and the diary that Linda is currently writing for our cat, Cato:
Mr. Agassi’s book is also an uncommonly well-written sports memoir, and part of the credit for that belongs to J. R. Moehringer, Mr. Agassi’s collaborator, who insisted that his name appear neither on the cover nor the title page. “The midwife doesn’t go home with the baby, ” he said on Tuesday. “It’s Andre’s memoir, not our memoir, not a memoir ‘as told to.’ It’s his accomplishment, and he made the final choices.” He added that in September, before the book went to press, he wanted to change the final line, but Mr. Agassi wouldn’t let him. “He explained the ending of the book to me. He understood it better than I did.” Writing in The New York Times, Janet Maslin said of “Open” that “somebody on the memoir team has great gifts for heart-tugging drama.” Mr. Moehringer, who at the beginning of his career worked briefly at The Times, is a former Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaperman and the author of “The Tender Bar, ” a well-received 2005 memoir about growing up fatherless in Manhasset, N.Y., and finding role models at a pub. Mr. Agassi, a ninth-grade dropout whose father was so tyrannical and tennis-crazed that his son has spent much of his life trying to create an alternate family for himself, read the book in 2006. He was so taken by it, he said, that he began to ration the pages, hoping to make it last longer. That August he called Mr. Moehringer, who was then working for The Los Angeles Times, and proposed they collaborate on a book. Mr. Moehringer was initially reluctant. He had a number of friends who had worked on book projects with athletes, he said, and they all advised against it. Typically, they warned, the athlete gives you about 30 hours and then never talks to you again until you turn in a manuscript, and then he draws a line through anything you’ve written that’s remotely interesting. But Mr. Agassi, known for wearing down opponents on the court, was dogged. “I wanted to see my life through the lens of Pulitzer Prize winner, ” he said, adding that he and Mr. Moehringer, who at almost 45 is about six years older, sometimes seemed like “brothers from a different mother.” Mr. Moehringer and his employer, meanwhile, were no longer getting along. “The paper asked me to go out to Palm Springs and write a profile of the world’s oldest chimp, Cheetah from the Tarzan movies, ” he recalled, rolling his eyes a little. “I wanted to be a team player, so I went out there, met the chimp and did the piece. I wrote it in the chimp’s voice.” The editors, he said, leaned on him for rewrite after rewrite of the article, to the point that he thought of quitting. “But my friends talked me out of it, ” he went on. “They said I would go down in history as the guy who quit over a chimp story.” There were still more rewrites, but in the end Mr. Moehringer didn’t quit over that. Instead he took a providential buyout and called Mr. Agassi…
“The ease with which Mr. Moehringer slips into telling someone else’s story is both consummate and spooky, ” Ms. Maslin wrote. Mr. Moehringer said that some of the book’s best passages come almost line for line from the transcripts and that he and Mr. Agassi went over and over the final text, sometimes word by word. “I felt like we were Gilbert and Sullivan, ” he said, and added: “Andre was always the final arbiter. When he attacks a book, he attacks it. It’s one of the great crimes: What would his life have been like if his father were language-obsessed instead of tennis-obsessed? ” Mr. Moehringer spent so many hours pretending to be Mr. Agassi, he recalled, that it was sometimes a jolt when the real Andre would turn up at the end of a day. “It was like, how can you be here when I’ve already been you? ” he said, adding, “It was good training for fiction writing, which is what I hope to do next. I hope to replicate the whole process with someone who doesn’t exist.”


11/12/09