The coming of age novel that I have written in my spare hours over the past few years is, in many respects, a fictional illustration of my belief, articulated in my paper, “The Adolescent Neurosis,” that, for many people, their late adolescent years have a powerful impact on their personalities, one that can endure for a lifetime.
It is that trauma, still raw after more than half a century, that I have attempted to work through and come to terms with by writing this book.
This is certainly true for me. I often find myself reminiscing about my high school years; about the characters in my class who took bets on ball games in a corner of our Latin class and about the principal, a Dickensian taskmaster, who announced one day when a heavy snowstorm was expected, “For those of you who come to school by subway, I want to say this; if the trains don't run, you will.” I relive my glory days on the basketball court, greatly exaggerated, no doubt, by the comforts of memory, especially the time our team played and won a championship at Madison Square Garden.
And I recall with fondness my stint covering the Brooklyn Dodgers for The Daily Worker, and making the trek to Ebbets Field, where I would watch with awe as Leo Durocher, the feisty manager of the Dodgers, took on the plate umpire in what seemed like a daily dust-up. In fact, I was a Giants fan and Mel Ott my hero; actually a tragic hero whose flaws—he could not hit a breaking curve—struck me as being of Macbethian proportions.
Still in my memory is that day of infamy when Durocher, our nemesis and my personal bete noire, deserted Brooklyn to become manager of the Giants. It is that trauma, still raw after more than half a century, that I have attempted to work through and come to terms with by writing this book. Whenever we met, a dear friend of mine who died a few years ago and I would talk about that trade, about the Dodger-Giant rivalry, and about Bobby Thompson's historic home run in 1951 that brought a championship to the Polo Grounds. He is gone, and perhaps it is because he is gone, and I have no one to reminisce with in quite the same way, that I have felt compelled to set down some of my memories on paper.
But The Year of Durocher is not only about sports, it is about girls and friendship and the betrayal of friendship, and young love and the ambitions, narcissism, crushing disappointments, and triumphs of our adolescent years. And it is about certain truths that we discover in those years; truths not only about friends and family and the wider world, beyond our own, but about ourselves; truths that remain with us as a precious legacy of our adolescent experiences, of those special and memorable years.
Theodore Jacobs, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, training and supervising analyst at New York and IPE Psychoanalytic Institutes, and author of The Use of the Self and the forthcoming book, The Possible Profession.