John Casey at Bat: A Winning Novelist : Books: Twenty-five years ago, the winner of the 1989 National Book Award for fiction defied his powerful father and quit a promising law career to become a writer.

It takes three firm raps on the door, but somewhere within the depths of his three-story home John Casey begins to stir. Two more knocks and he finally appears. His hair is dripping wet, he wears a half-size bathrobe and there is shaving cream clinging to one earlobe.

“You’re five minutes early,” Casey shouts, racing back upstairs. “Or am I five minutes late? Maybe you’re on time. Don’t worry, I’ll put coffee on. Do you want coffee? I hadn’t thought to ask. Coffee. Right. I’ll be back. Make yourself at home.”

Minutes later, the man who won the 1989 National Book Award for fiction last week appears in his kitchen looking somewhat less disheveled. But a mood of breathless disorder persists, much as it has ever since his novel “Spartina” beat out four other entries to win the prestigious $10,000 prize.

Asked about his good fortune, the author launches into a brilliant but baffling anecdote about his Irish-American ancestors. Then he tells another. “Now where were we?” he says, suddenly losing his train of thought. “I’ve forgotten what you asked, and I’ve forgotten what I wanted to say. Where the hell are we?”

Casey, whose aristocratic face and devilish smile look like a cross between Rex Harrison and Jack Nicholson, seems flustered by all the attention that has been coming his way. It has been 12 years since his last novel appeared, and his name has never been at the top of best-seller lists. Until recently, few publishing industry insiders thought “Spartina,” however highly praised, had a chance of winning this year’s prize.

But to those who know the 50-year-old author, including some of America’s most gifted writers, it was no surprise. Paul Theroux called Casey’s dark, brooding novel about a Rhode Island fisherman “a tremendous achievement,” while Ann Beattie praised the writer’s “tantalizing talent,” saying he “deserves to have the back of his hand kissed for this novel.”

The notoriety of winning the National Book Award might send other authors into a heady tailspin. Yet through it all, Casey has retained his wry outlook on life--not to mention his sense of humor. He was in excellent form last week at the annual New York hotel banquet where the award was announced. Asked by reporters why he thought his book had won, Casey flashed a wicked little grin and said, “I guess the judges were in the mood for my book. It’s like a date when you read a book. Some of them go well, some of them don’t go well. So I guess I lucked out. I was a good date.”

Explaining why he quit a promising law career 25 years ago to become a writer, the author borrowed a line from Conrad Aiken.

“The way you choose your life’s work is to find something that your father is very proud of but that is not the thing he’s best at,” Casey said. “My father practiced law and was a U.S. congressman, and he was a good storyteller . . . But not quite as good as me.”

Few critics would disagree about Casey’s literary gifts. In addition to the praise for “Spartina,” Casey won enthusiastic reviews for his 1977 novel “An American Romance,” and for his 1979 novellas, “Testimony and Demeanor.” He has shown remarkable range, exploring the foibles of New York professionals in his shorter works and the world of blue-collar workers in his latest book.

The author, who has been an English instructor at the University of Virginia since 1972, lives in a comfortable, rambling home with his wife, Roz, an artist, and their 5-year-old daughter, Clare. He has two grown daughters from a previous marriage, and his present wife surprised him the night of the awards banquet with the news that she is pregnant.

All in all, a pretty good year. Yet Casey complains half-seriously that he has always labored in the shadow of other family members. His late father, he explains, was a powerful Massachusetts congressman who expected him to be a lawyer and enter public service, despite his son’s lifelong stuttering problem.

Even now, Casey jokes, the notoriety of his award has been overshadowed by another relative’s prize. This week, he and other family members will travel to Stockholm, where his brother-in-law, Harold Varmus, a UC San Francisco microbiology professor, will receive the 1989 Nobel Prize for medicine.

“You learn to put this kind of award in perspective,” he says, settling into a comfortable chair in his study. “It’s not like I just did something and got a lot of applause, like an opera singer.

“I’ve been working very hard on a series of novels for nine years, and this is just an interval, a brief pause, before the work continues. I’ve always known the value of hard work and discipline.”

From his earliest memories, Casey says he was in the orbit of Joseph Casey, a brash and charismatic trial lawyer who raised his five children with a firm hand. Although he was born in Clinton, Mass., the boy grew up in Washington where his father, a New Deal Democrat, served four terms in Congress.

The Irish-American patriarch, who retired from politics after an unsuccessful campaign for the Senate, practiced law until he was 81. Financially successful, he expected young John to follow in his footsteps, and for some 25 years there didn’t seem to be much question that would happen.

“I was a shy, tubby kid with a crew cut who ate too many Hershey bars and had a stuttering problem. But I also had an Excalibur complex,” Casey says, referring to the legend of young King Arthur, who as a rite of manhood pulled a magical sword out of stone.

“All the kids I knew had fathers who held public office, and I didn’t think I would become a man until I held public office.”

With great affection, Casey describes his father as someone who would burst out singing in public, flirt with waitresses and generally do outrageous things. One St. Patrick’s Day, for example, the old man stunned his family by halting a marching band in front of a New York bar, raising his hands as a conductor and then leading the musicians up Fifth Avenue.

“That’s what he did, he simply walked right up to them, took over the band and marched away. He left us for an hour and then he returned. We had never seen such a thing, but for him it was nothing special.”

By the age of 13, Casey says he wanted to be a diplomat, largely because of his eccentric uncle Drew Dudley, who worked for the World Bank in Paris.

“Uncle Drew knew a lot of wonderfully sophisticated people. When I traveled to meet him, he introduced me to Europe, and I thought, well, maybe I can’t be like my father, but I could be a diplomat.

“My uncle never made a penny in his life, but he always had a set of tails and black tie and was a social butterfly. He knew everyone who was charming, including theater people.”

One person who got to know Dudley was Benjamin C. Bradlee, now executive editor of the Washington Post. Casey says that Bradlee, who was his current wife’s former stepfather, once said of Dudley: “I never knew a more socially adept, charming, useless man.”

As expected, Casey entered Harvard College, where he dutifully took courses in economics, political science and Russian. But he had shown a flair for creative writing in high school, and quietly enrolled in a theater course. It was an “outlaw activity” to his father, but Casey says he found it exciting.

Soon, however, he rebelled against the regimen of campus life and began cutting classes. After his second year, Casey was kicked out of school as a “discipline” problem and entered the U.S. Army Reserve from 1959-60. He finally graduated in 1962 and enrolled in Harvard Law School. But his legal career would be short-lived.

“I liked part of law school but I was also terrified by it,” he says. “They’d call on me and I could only argue the side of the case that had the fewest consonants in it, because I stuttered. Meanwhile, there were 150 people in the room ready to tear you apart verbally. I mean, this was not speech therapy class.”

All the while, Casey had been experimenting with writing and actually produced a novel in his spare time. A turning point came when he sought out Peter Taylor, one of America’s most respected short story writers, who taught at Harvard. Taylor suggested that Casey try his hand at short stories.

Encouraged, the young author kept writing. By now it was graduation day, 1964, and Casey was troubled about his future. His father objected to a literary career, but Taylor strongly urged him to become a writer.

“When he said that to me, I was thrilled,” Casey recalls. “It was like someone had said for just a minute, here is this beautiful garden. And the idea that I could actually live in it seemed unlikely. It still seems unlikely.”

Although Casey hedged his bets by passing the Washington bar, he enrolled in the University of Iowa’s writing school that fall, surviving on a $1,750 yearly stipend. His father was furious at first, but later approved after reading some his son’s short stories.

Like any other writer, Casey had his share of early disappointments. A second novel was rejected by a publisher, and the experience devastated him. By now he had married his first wife and was desperate for some professional success. Then suddenly, in less than a month, he sold short stories to the New Yorker and Sports Illustrated.

“I had made more money in three weeks than I had in the previous year. I was suddenly rich on my own, not by anyone’s else’s standards, but by my own,” he says. “So I bought an island.”

Scraping together loans and what little savings he had, Casey purchased a 4.2-acre island off Rhode Island, near his in-law’s summer home. For the next four years, he earned just enough from his writing to get by.

Immersing himself in the local culture, Casey lived and worked alongside retired naval chiefs, gentry and dirt-poor fisherman. He learned how to fish and feed his family, and became skilled at repairing boats in the local dockyards. In his spare time, he developed a passion for competitive rowing, a hobby that he enjoys to this day.

These rich experiences would eventually generate a treasure trove of people, events, images and language for Casey’s bulging notebooks. Years later, they became the basis for a trilogy of Rhode Island novels, of which “Spartina” is the first installment.

In 1972, Peter Taylor invited Casey to help him develop a writing program at the University of Virginia, an offer that the struggling author gratefully accepted. Meanwhile, he produced new short stories and “An American Romance.” He later published “Testimony and Demeanor,” the title story of which reflected his impressions of the legal profession.

Casey was hard at work on a light comedy about life in Charlottesville, Va., when tragedy struck in 1979: Breece D’J Pancake, a gifted young writer whose career he had been encouraging, committed suicide. On a trip to Ireland, the writer learned that his father was dying back in America. Later that year, he and his first wife separated.

“It was a bad year, I was distraught,” says Casey. “As for the comedy I was writing, well, I certainly couldn’t keep it light.”

In the next several years, Casey regrouped and decided to write about his Rhode Island experiences. At first, he planned a series of modern fairy tales set in the New England state. Then various novellas began to take shape. It was not until the mid-1980’s that he hit on the idea of casting “Spartina” as a free-standing novel to be followed by two others.

The book, which tells the story of fisherman Dick Pierce, reflects Casey’s fascination with blue collar workers. By working with them, he grew to respect their strong character and intelligence, which Casey says is under-valued by American society. He also developed a keen knowledge of fishing lore and, like a modern-day Melville, used it with great effect throughout “Spartina.”

“I had a lot of friends there who were manual laborers, and their life was really tough,” he says.” They’re very smart people who have an enormous amount of understanding and history, and yet they’re not very articulate.

“The discipline of ‘Spartina’ to some extent is to make that intelligence verbal through metaphors of Dick’s craft.”

When Pierce first embraces a woman with whom he will have an affair, for example, Casey writes, “he felt their weight against each other, as though they were small boats at sea rising on the swell, jostling, fendered by their flesh.”

When he is irked by party chitchat, Pierce describes it as a school of minnows, darting back and forth. A woman who is always dissatisfied “was like one of those fish who take the hook and just sulk on the bottom--no runs, no jumps, no play.”

The word Spartina refers to a tough genus of marsh grass along Narragansett Bay that somehow survives in salty water. It becomes a symbol for Pierce, whose struggles with infidelity, class rage and a killer hurricane trigger in him profound changes by the end of the book.

But it might also refer to Casey, whose belief in himself as a writer has stubbornly persisted over the years--and will now reach a wider audience than ever before.

The night he won the National Book Award, Casey was asked if his demons about living the “public life” his father expected had finally been exorcised. Was he finally freed of that childhood burden?

“No, this is still very private, the writing that I do,” he said quietly. “But now it seems to be becoming public at last.”