Norman, OK

Since Mongrel Empire Press published Fighters & Writers in 2010, I’ve come across a couple unexpected references to Norman, Oklahoma – the publisher’s base – in novels (by writers interested in fighters, as it happens). In Harlot’s Ghost Norman Mailer gives the narrator’s wife a professional rival from the city. In Tabloid City Pete Hamill has a damaged Iraq war veteran hail from the same town.

Both Mailer and Hamill were friends of José Torres, and they both dedicated books to the boxer. (I dedicated Fighters & Writers to Torres well after Mailer wrote Why Are We in Vietnam? but before Hamill’s Tabloid City came out in 2011). Hamill not only pledges Tabloid City to the memory of the former light heavyweight champion; he also describes a character donning “a robe from the 1957 Golden Gloves tournament, where his friend José won the middleweight championship.” (Torres was indeed a Golden Gloves champ, but in 1958… Artistic license on Hamill’s part, I guess.)

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Literary Miscellanea

A few things that caught my eye:

• Having never read any books by Bret Easton Ellis, I can’t say whether David Foster Wallace’s criticisms of the author of American Psycho (as relayed by Slate) have any merit; however, having slogged through a couple Wallace tomes, and having observed the witlessly earnest ardor of DFW fans, I tend to side with Ellis, who dismisses Wallace as a “fraud” and finds the “halo of sentimentality surrounding him embarrassing.”
• The New Yorker’s books blog, Page-Turner, has a fascinating item in which Philip Roth corrects mistaken allegations concerning the origins of The Human Stain (a novel I write about in Fighters & Writers).
• Volume VIII of The Chaffey Review, containing three poems of mine is out, as is the fall issue of San Pedro River Review, featuring a poem by my wife, Nancy (who also has work forthcoming in GreenPrints).
• The fall issue of The Paris Review includes an interview with James Fenton (whose A Garden from a Hundred Packets of Seed I recently read). The brief excerpt posted has me looking forward to reading the whole thing.
• Also looking forward to Ian McEwan’s Sweet Tooth. McEwan’s Canadian publisher provides some of the novel’s historical background.
• Despite negative assessments of the movies like Tom Carson’s in The American Prospect, I am undeterred in my curiosity to watch the just-released-on-DVD films of Norman Mailer.

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Healthy & Beautiful

In Fighters & Writers I mention several of the countless writers who expressed interest in, and were inspired by, boxing, such as Lord Byron, Albert Camus, Ernest Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg and George Plimpton. I could have, but didn’t, name another literary connoisseur of the fight game, Vladimir Nabokov. In a 1925 essay on the sport published in English for the first time this month by The Times Literary Supplement, the author of Laughter in the Dark and Lolita says “there are few spectacles as healthy and beautiful as a boxing-match.”

 

Clearly writing for a non-expert audience, Nabokov points out some salient facts that should be widely know but, even decades later, still are not. For example, it was not “commonplace humanity that led to the appearance of boxing gloves,” he points out, but instead a wish to protect fighters’ hands. He astutely observes that calling Jim Jeffries the “great white hope” hinted that “black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.” He’s a little shaky on dates, estimating that the championship fight between Jeffries and Jack Johnson occurred “twenty-five or more years” before he was writing (when it was 15), but he gets something essential right, something that gets to the heart of what Nabokov call “the art of boxing” and its appeal for writers. Recounting the crowd dispersing after a heavyweight bout, he states his conviction that within the witnesses “there existed one and the same beautiful feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two great boxers, – a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, manliness, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called “elevated pleasures.” Even if not everyone who saw the fight Nabokov took in at the Sports Palace in Berlin walked away with this “beautiful feeling,” he and many scribblers before and since certainly did.

 

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Alaa Al Aswany and Other Boxers

Since Fighters & Writers was published, I’ve continued to come across items reaffirming ideas I explore in the book: that boxing’s implicit philosophy rests on qualities, like discipline and tenacity, which writers require and that this results in an ongoing productive relationship between the sport and literature. The January 16, 2012, issue of The New Yorker, for example, includes a profile of Alaa Al Aswany in which the Egyptian novelist likens himself to a boxer:

“I have to feel myself a fighter,” he said, hunching his shoulders, lowering his head, and bringing his fists up to his face…. “I am fighting for my career, for my writing, and for my success,” he went on. “Every day, I wake up early. And often I am tired, and my wife says ‘No, no.’ And I think, ‘I must get up and work.’” It is this determination that keeps him moving: “I tell my wife, ‘I am a boxer.’”

One can imagine Norman Mailer or Ernest Hemingway, some of the authors I discuss in Fighters & Writers, having similar conversations with their spouses.

Although the magazine might not carry as much boxing coverage as it did when A.J. Liebling was on the staff, the same edition of The New Yorker does include several more references to the sport. In a review of Jodi Kantor’s The Obamas, editor (and Muhammad Ali biographer) David Remnick writes that “in many black communities the celebrations surrounding the Obama election victory and the Inauguration were on a par with Joe Louis’s one-round knockout of Max Schmeling, in 1938.” Remnick also invokes “the Italian-American philosopher Rocky Balboa.” An article about efforts to build a football stadium in Los Angeles notes that the planned structure could also stage boxing matches and other events. Demonstrating that scribblers aren’t alone in their pugilistic interests, the magazine’s “Goings on about Town” section decorates its list of art gallery shows with an image created by Jeff Wall showing two gloved boys sparring in a living room. It’s titled “Boxing.”

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Coincidences Continued

Once or twice before on this site, I’ve recorded what struck me as curious, almost uncanny coincidences. While I assign no special meaning to such occurrences and discern nothing supernatural in them, I do find them intriguing. A couple more happened in connection with book festivals.

The first thing my wife and I did when we reached Little Rock was drive to Central High School, site of the Little Rock Nine’s brave challenge to racially segregated schooling in 1957. In the visitor center at the National Historic Site, we started talking with a Park Service employee who not only was planning to attend the poetry slam organized as part of the opening night of the Arkansas Literary Festival but who was also slated to moderate a conversation a couple of days later. (We did see Spirit Trickey during the Spoken Word Live! competition at the Mosaic Templers Cultural Center, but weren’t able to attend her talk with Jay Jennings about his book Carry the Rock.)

Often, it seems, Norman Mailer factors in these synchronous episodes. (Coincidences fascinated the novelist, even if he didn’t actually like them. “If psychic coincidences give pleasure to some, I do not know if they give them [sic] to me,” he writes in Cannibals and Christians, while the narrator of his Tough Guys Don’t Dance reminds himself that “not all coincidence was diabolical or divine.”) A week before we met Spirit in Arkansas, we met Paul Austin in Oklahoma. At the Scissortail Creative Writing Festival authors’ reception at the Oak Hills Country Club, Austin told me about time he spent with Mailer and José Torres, both of whom figure prominently in Fighters & Writers, including one of the passages I’d planned to read during the festival. (Austin worked on Mailer’s movie Maidstone.)

With Paul Austin at East Central University, Ada, Oklahoma, April 2, 2011

When she learned of our intention to drive from Ada to Little Rock, Austin’s wife, novelist Rilla Askew, wrote out directions to various sites that factor in True Grit, whose author, Charles Portis, turned out to be the subject of a panel discussion we did attend at the Arkansas Literary Festival (one led by Jay Jennings, in fact). The route we ultimately took involved a stop in a town with another cinematic connection, McAlester, the location of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, which we drove past and which a few years earlier staged the contests chronicled in the documentary Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo, which we’d seen at the Indie Memphis film festival.

Prison Rodeo Statue, McAlester, Oklahoma

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Best Books of 2010

In order to write about them for The Oregonian, The American Interest and other publications, I read a fair number of brand new books in 2010. Nevertheless, I can’t make an honest top-ten list. Here are six that truly stood as exceptional:

1. Martin Amis’s The Pregnant Widow (Alfred A. Knopf)
2. Kevin Canty’s Everything (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday)
3. Don DeLillo’s Point Omega (Scribner)
4. Charles Goodrich’s Going to Seed: Dispatches from the Garden (Silverfish Review Press)
5. Randy Robert’s Joe Louis: Hard Times Man (Yale University Press)
6. Richard Williams’s The Blue Moment: Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and the Remaking of Modern Music (W.W. Norton & Company)

The short list reflects my tendency to read roughly proportional amounts of fiction and nonfiction. I probably read more poetry in 2010 than in most years, and Goodrich’s small volume was my favorite of several contenders.

The year 2010 saw new books by authors I once thought of as reliably remarkable – Christopher Hitchens, Ian McEwan, Milan Kundera – that I found disappointingly inferior to their earlier efforts. I could name several very good but not quite excellent books. Here’s one: George Kimball and John Schulian assembled a fine collection of boxing-related poems in The Fighter Still Remains. A few years earlier, however, Robert Hedin and Michael Waters edited Perfect in Their Art, an anthology containing much of the same material – and a great deal more.

This leads to the Achilles heel of year-end lists: the absence of the great older stuff. While I read many books published during 2010, I also read many from other years, which are automatically disqualified from “best of” contention but deserve mention all the same. I reread some classics, like Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. (I also read several books about Mailer, but these weren’t so good.) I also finally got around to some wonderful books I should have read much sooner, such as Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. If I were to list the ten books I most enjoyed during 2010 regardless of publication date, the four named in this paragraph could be added to the six above.

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Mailer Coincidences

“The most electric of nations must naturally provide the boldest circuits of coincidence,” Norman Mailer proclaimed. My coincidences involving the writer my not amount to anything grand or revealing, but they might be worth mentioning all the same. Twice now Mailer-related work of mine which was written earlier appeared in print very soon after one of my subject’s death.

The title essay of Fighters & Writers was first published in an edition of The Mailer Review commemorating the novelist’s life soon after it ended. I discuss several writers, but Mailer does figure prominently in the piece. I’d started composing it years earlier and finally finished it soon before he died in 2007. In another essay in the collection, I mention a critic who made a derisive remark about Mailer in something that ran soon after the public memorial service held to honor the author of The Naked and the Dead, The Fight and The Executioner’s Song.

Which brings me to coincidence number two. The January/February 2011 issue of The American Interest contains my assessment of three Mailer-focused memoirs, including A Ticket to the Circus by Norris Church Mailer, who died on November 21, 2010. I wrote the not-very-kind review essay a few months before it actually ended up in the magazine.  

While my essays about Mailer and his wife simply happened to show up soon after their deaths, two instances of this put me in uncomfortably proximity to the narrator of J.G. Ballard’s story “Now: Zero” who believes his writing about people can spell their demise…

Flipping through a copy of TAI, I stumbled on minor coincidences of another kind. On one page I saw a reference to Edith Wharton; on another, a poem by Walt Whitman. As it happens, the fourth short film in the Poetry In Pictures Series is based on a Wharton poem; the second, on a Whitman poem. (I wrote the third.)

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Still More Mailer

Norman Mailer is by no means the writer I write about most frequently. He makes just part of a large crowd of authors who people their novels with boxers and fuel their nonfiction with fights.

But I can’t deny that I have found much to say about his work. The index to Fighters & Writers lists many writers – more of them than boxers, I’d bet – but there admittedly are quite a few page numbers after Mailer’s name. He even rivals Muhammad Ali in the number of mentions, though the two are often discussed in conjunction.

 As it turns out, Fighters & Writers doesn’t contain all my musings to date on the function of boxing in Mailer’s work. Open Letters Monthly: An Anthology, 2007 – 2010 appeared in print at almost exactly the same time as Fighters & Writers. The “best of” collection from the art and literature review’s first three years includes “Mailer’s Victory,” a survey of the sport’s impact on the writer’s attitude and “moral code” as expressed in multiple books.

I consider ”Mailer’s Victory” a companion piece to “The Fighting Life,” an essay in Fighters & Writers that examines Mailer’s use of boxing in his fiction and compares it with Philip Roth’s use of it in novels including The Human Stain and Exit Ghost.

(The anthology’s cover contains “praise for Open Letters Monthly” including a line – “Astute and meticulous” – that The Millions applied to a particular essay of mine on another novelist, but I don’t mind. Why would I?)

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Norman Mailer and…Martin Amis?

Certain authors are so closely identified with boxing that it becomes difficult to write about them without mentioning the sport. Ernest Hemingway, for example, not only wrote about boxing; he fancied himself as something of a boxer too. Indeed, boxing factored hugely in how he thought of himself both as a man and as a writer. “My writing is nothing,” he ventured, “my boxing is everything.” Though “Hemingway couldn’t box worth his hat,” as critic Wilfrid Sheed says of the novelist’s ring prowess, that unacknowledged deficiency didn’t lessen his personal and artistic investment in the sport. 

Other writers aren’t generally associated with boxing but still end up writing about it when they consider literary fight aficionados. Martin Amis, for instance, has written numerous reviews of books by Norman Mailer, which means he at least briefly touches on boxing, a subject Mailer returned to frequently. In doing so, Amis reveals an uncharacteristic uncertainty. Or, to put it another way, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. “In 1975 he wrote The Fight, an extended waffle on the Ali-Frazier match,” Amis writes in a piece included in The Moronic Inferno (1986). As anyone familiar with boxing history knows, there was not just one Ali-Frazer fight, and as anyone who’s actually read The Fight knows, Mailer covered Muhammad Ali’s fight with George Foreman. (Arthur Ashe makes the same mistake in A Hard Road to Glory.)

Amis also looks over the ring ropes to assess Mailer’s boxer poses. In The War against Cliché (2001), he judges an often-reproduced image taken in a boxing gym to be “the second worst photograph of Mailer ever published.” He says the worst picture decorated the back of Why Are We in Vietnam? (1967), and it’s hard to disagree with him there.

Still, Amis’s superficial and sometimes inaccurate glances at boxing lore led me to conclude the he had “no special interest in clashes where the Queensbury Rules apply,” as I phrase it in Fighters & Writers (where I also invoke Ali in an essay on Amis). But then – apropos of my comments on unlooked-for references to boxing – I found this in The Pregnant Widow (2010): “male disaffection was mere male sullenness, with its Queensbury rules….” It’s not much, granted, this suggestion that men (unlike women) have clearly regimented rituals for resolving disputes, and that the regulated violence of boxing is one of them, but it suggests that Amis may have picked something up from Hemingway and Mailer, who also linked boxing and masculinity.

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José Torres & Me

I dedicated Fighters & Writers to José Torres (1936-2009), the world light heavyweight boxing champion from 1965 to1966 who later co-authored a book about Muhammad Ali and wrote a biography about Mike Tyson. In the title essay, I recount meeting and talking with the International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee. The piece first appeared in The Mailer Review. Though the essay was written prior to Norman Mailer’s death, the issue of the journal carrying it came out soon after – and immediately before his friend José died.

Mailer (1923-2007) also dedicated a book – 1967’s Why Are We in Vietnam? – to José. (Mailer, of course, wrote quite a lot about boxing, which means he comes up several times in Fighters & Writers). Mailer also writes (in the third person) about him in Miami and the Siege of Chicago when he explains his decision to leave the scene of police attacking antiwar protesters outside the 1968 Democratic convention: “And he had a legitimate excuse for leaving. One of his best friends was with him, a professional boxer, once a champion. If the police ever touched him, the boxer would probably be unable to keep himself from taking out six or eight men. The police would then come near to killing the boxer in return. It was a real possibility. He had a responsibility to get his friend out of there, and did…” Though Mailer doesn’t mention the fighter’s name, José told me the story of being in Chicago with Mailer. I remember him expressing gratitude for Mailer’s protectiveness.

Mailer’s wife Norris Church Mailer nicely captures José’s generosity, good humor and effect on others in A Ticket to the Circus (2010): “No one could laugh like José. He slapped his knee and fell off his chair laughing, which made everyone else laugh, too. I will always have a soft spot for José, who has now passed over like so many of our old friends, bless him. He was the kind of friend who would pick up dinner and visit a person he hardly knew, just because his friend asked him to.” I don’t claim to have known José very well, but I also developed a similar fondness for him.

Fighters & Writers contains several photographs, and I toyed with the idea of including this picture of José and me, which was taken at his apartment in Manhattan in 2002. I subsequently lost a great of weight (and I write about the process and the use of boxing weight classes as a frame of reference in an essay, also in Fighters & Writers, that first ran in Blood & Thunder). I decided to leave the unflattering photo out of the book, but it does bring back some nice memories.

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