Seeing Life in a Day at the Races : New Yorker Writer Ranges From the Track to Italy

DEL MAR — William Murray loves the track. He spends every day of the Del Mar season where the turf almost meets the surf. He bets, sizes up the horses and listens. He can really listen.

The quote that opens “The Hard Knocker’s Luck,” his most recent in a series of horse racing novels (all set in Del Mar) was overheard coming from what he calls “an anonymous hard knocker, after losing a photo in the fifth at Del Mar.”

The quote:

Life is hard. And then you die.

In describing Murray’s life, a stable of adjectives come galloping forth. Hard seems to be running a distant last, behind exotic, dynamic, passionate, even lucky. Not to mention skilled, professional, even charmed.

Murray--and his work--are all of those things. They are easily as charismatic as his gentle, expansive laugh, as poignant and introspective as a passage from one of his books.

In “Italy: The Fatal Gift,” a moving memoir about the country of his mother’s birth, Murray writes of an argument in which he shames his mother, disrespectfully, telling her she is not American, despite her protestations to the contrary.

It is not long after 1934, when he and his mother came back to the United States, she believing he should be raised an American, just because he was born in New York. That was her design but probably not her intent. She also seemed bent on escaping Mussolini and Fascism and the evil of an oncoming war. Unbeknownst to her son, she engineered the move at expense to the heart.

Murray spent his first eight years in Italy, and at the time, French and Italian came forth much more readily than English.

“No,” my mother said, “I’m as American as you are.”

“Of course you aren’t,” I said. “How can you be?” . . . My mother got up and left the room; I heard a door close . . . She was behind the bathroom door, crying soundlessly to herself. I didn’t know what to do or say, so I simply put a hand on her shoulder.

“It’s very hard, Bill,” my mother said. “It’s very hard not belonging anywhere. The distances are hard and the people are hard.”

Murray has since spent a lifetime trying to bridge that distance. Duality seems a common theme. He appears to have one foot in Italy, the other in America. He’s forever casting one glance at New York and the other at California. Since 1966, he has lived much of the time in either Los Angeles or San Diego.

The rest of the year, he writes the splendid “Letter from Italy” for the New Yorker, a task he has managed for the magazine since 1961. For eight months of the calendar, he is in Del Mar, spending summers racing to the track, betting that the next run will somehow be better than the last.

For Murray, Del Mar--technically, the very northern tier of San Diego--is a happy postmark. He and his wife moved to North City West last February. He jokes about it now, saying he tries to keep it secret so as not to offend longtime Del Mar cronies. Fearing Del Mar’s ever-encroaching development, some consider North City West a profanity.

“I never would have guessed two years ago that I’d be living in a suburb,” Murray said. “I mean, me, of all people.”

But, he’s a practical man--not one to bet unwisely--and buying a home near the beach was a laughably expensive proposition.

Murray is a candid, attractive man, with a balding pate and shades of gray around the sideburns. It’s a safe and fair bet that the artifacts in his home are somehow different from those in his neighbors’. He has pictures of Janet Flanner, who wrote the New Yorker’s “Letter from Paris” for years. She also was a lover to Murray’s mother.

A chronicle of that affair, told mostly through memorably moving letters, is in his mother’s book, “Darlinghissima,” by Natalia Danesi Murray.

Murray’s father, William Murray Sr., was a Scottish-Irish American, with drinking habits to match and a history of being a scholar, an agent, a mover and shaker in entertainment and journalism. He had once been head of the William Morris agency. He and Murray’s mother separated when the boy was 2, and Murray Sr. died in 1959. Considerably older than Murray’s mother, he never got close to their son. It may have been the father’s loss.

Murray’s childhood seems colorful at best, unconventional, eccentric, even bizarre. Not to mention blessed--existentially charmed. He finds his mother’s relationship with another woman not at all unusual, except that it provided an endearing closeness to a woman he considers simply divine in shaping his life and the talent that moved it.

Flanner was the greatest writing influence he has known.

“I came from a quite liberal tradition,” he said. “I simply had no (ill) feeling about race, or people’s preferences in bed.”

They are attitudes that continue to shape. Currently at work on a New Yorker piece about San Diego County, he figures much of its focus will be the strange and tenuous relationship between “America’s Finest City” and the sleeping giant to the south. He finds the finest-city moniker accurate in terms of beauty; ironic, even twisted in terms of thinking.

San Diego--and America--don’t know how to take care of their poor, he said. He cringes at the “callousness and evil” of the Reagan Administration. Nowhere is the antipathy more evident, he finds, than in the coldness with which the city regards Tijuana.

Murray got much of his yen for writing, as well as his values, from his mother and her lover.

“I immediately liked Janet,” he said. “I knew right away she was one terrific person. She filled the void in my life left by not being close to a father. She was a strong and interesting character. She lived with us for only brief periods. She and mother had maybe a year or two, 1941 to 1943, but their incredible correspondence took place over maybe 35 years. They would see each other when Janet was in New York, or when mother would go to Italy, or to Paris. They never really were apart .

“Janet was the most quintessentially gifted writer I ever knew. The only thing she believed in--fundamentally, deeply--was her work. She thought a writer should travel through life unencumbered. She taught me one hell of a lot.”

Flanner as greatest influence is high praise, considering that other candidates include the likes of longtime New Yorker editor William Shawn, former fiction editor Katharine S. White and her son, baseball laureate Roger Angell.

A Gift for Writing

“Shawn is the greatest editor in the history of journalism,” Murray said, putting the issue to rest.

He does two to three stories a year for Shawn. He says they are long and tough to do; Shawn’s editing demands the utmost in quality. And yet he is hardly an editor to make wholesale changes.

“They don’t ‘edit’ me,” he said. “They edit you only if you don’t know how to write. They don’t cut copy for reasons of space. They don’t care what I write about. . . . They’re just wonderful.”

Murray’s style is one of listening and waiting. He goes to a city and listens, then sizes it up. The last time he tried his pen, his target was Venice. The result was matchless, the kind of piece that James Morris--who became the transsexual Jan Morris--set the tone for in her inimitable words on Venice. (Actually, Murray writes in longhand, with pencil, cursing the boom of word processors as so much fodder for the insecurity of writers.)

“Italy is really about 12 different countries,” he said. “Venice has almost nothing in common with Naples. Milan has nothing in common with Naples or Rome. Every section has its own dialect. For a long time, Italy was nothing but foreign-dominated city states. It’s an artificially united country. To northern Italy, everything south of Rome is Africa. After World War II, Sicily even wanted to secede.”

Always one of his favorite cities, Rome is taking on tarnish in Murray’s eyes. It simply has too many cars.

“I hope the gas crunch comes back,” he said with perfect seriousness. “I loved it.”

He feels the same way about L.A.

“It’s just going to pieces,” he said. “Every freeway is clogged, all the time, the air is unsniffable, and I fear we may have only five to 10 years in San Diego before the same nightmare repeats itself. Let’s get it while we can.”

Putting Down Roots

At 60 he seems to be putting down roots. (He jokes about his age, saying the first “perk” he has acquired is qualifying for the “scramble burger” at Denny’s on the “senior citizens’ menu.”) Soon he’ll be teaching at UC San Diego, where his offerings in winter and spring will be dramatic writing and advanced short fiction.

A candidate for 1980s renaissance man if ever there was one, Murray has translated into English the plays of Italian dramatist Luigi Pirandello. He has also drafted three of his own, in addition to more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction.

Soon he will leave again for New York--”You have to let those people in publishing know you’re still alive,” he said--and then go to Italy to write more letters. In New York he might even see some playoff baseball with friend Angell. A numbers freak, he loves the statistical side of sports. What Murray likes about baseball and horse racing is the inescapable uniqueness.

“I like the geometric progression of baseball,” he said. “Every pitch represents an entirely new set of possibilities. Each horse race is a different set of probabilities and possibilities.”

In that sense, horse racing may be a metaphor for life. Murray is “fascinated by self-enclosed worlds, with a language and rules all their own.”

“It’s a terrific, intense way of living life,” he said. “It’s true of opera, the theater, the track. Red Smith once said he could go to the track and find hundreds of stories. I now know what he was talking about.”

Murray has played so many roles in life it seems only natural that he hasn’t just written for the stage--he has acted on it. He has been an opera singer, his first great love and one he surrendered with a fair amount of torture and pain. He just didn’t have the voice he felt was needed.

He was educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and at Harvard. He served in the Army Air Force. He has written for scores of magazines and sometimes has watched articles and books grow into movies, even television dramas. One was “Malibu,” whose steamy sex scenes (recommended by an editor) went “against every instinct I had as a writer.” It became, in Murray’s words, “regrettable” TV fare.

Of course, not a moment at the track has caused anything remotely resembling regret. He discovered its beauty through the influence of “Harry,” a horse “degenerate” from Virginia who married Murray’s cousin. As a teen-ager, Harry took Murray to the track, and he lost his innocence forever.

Murray’s father thought it a lesson worth learning--watching a bettor blow his money. Harry won $14,000, Murray $400, all in one day at the races.

He came in at 4 in the morning and announced to his outraged father: “I don’t know why we don’t do this all the time.”

He now has his wish. In “Horse Fever,” a nonfiction book about Del Mar, he wrote of the magic of thundering hoofs:

An escape, a refuge from the mundane world of bills and personal problems and disasters of all sorts. . . . As you sit there and the horses come out onto the track, there is only one reality beyond the beauty of the spectacle itself and that is the outcome of the race and your ability to predict it, as confirmed by the risk of money on the line.

It, like life, is a risk Murray finds worth taking.