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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Arthur Koestler and His Circle

To write a single book of true literary merit and enduring influence is no small accomplishment. Biographer Michael Scammell sees value in works by Arthur Koestler other than Darkness at Noon – mostly because of their prescience on politics – but it’s really because of that novel that anyone knows Koestler’s name.

And it’s impossible to consider Koestler’s work, life and legacy without invoking the names of other giants of twentieth-century literature, as I demonstrate in a Logos essay. Orwell, Camus, Conrad, Auden, Sartre and Hemingway, among others, factor into his story – and not always in exclusively literary ways.

Koestler sometimes vacillated on the core principle of his best writing – that ends do not justify means – but Darkness at Noon expresses it superbly and powerfully. Paul Berman sensibly groups Koestler with Orwell and Camus, whom he deems the best writers on totalitarian themes of their era. That trio still has few rivals.

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Kundera Stumbles

Convincing people that there’s something to mourn in a “post-art” era, and that what has been lost can be recovered with a renewed commitment to art, will take more than exclamation-point laden proclamations about art’s importance. Reviving interest in neglected artists requires more than italicized insistence on their meritorious achievements. Yet these sorts of inadequate maneuvers too often characterize Encounter, Milan Kundera’s latest tribute to the novel and other art forms. (I offer a more detailed discussion of the book in the September 2010 Open Letters Monthly.) I wish I could have mustered the enthusiasm for Encounter that John Simon does in the New York Times, but I simply couldn’t.

As it happens, I often agree with what Kundera says, but I know that asserting something and effectively making an argument aren’t the same things, which he seems to forget. The writer of some glorious novels and some superior nonfiction could have displayed a bit more care for the art of the essay this time around, in my opinion. (I say more about Kundera, as well as Albert Camus, whom I also discuss in connection with Encounter, in an essay in the forthcoming fall 2010 issue of Spot Literary Magazine.)

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Heroes’ Hearts

James Joyce is not one of the many authors I write about in Fighters & Writers, but he could have been.

I discuss many of my favorites in the book. Some of them, such as Albert Camus and A.J. Liebling, also wrote about boxing. With others, such as Herman Melville and George Orwell, connections between their work and the sport are less immediately apparent. Joyce might appear to fit in this category as well. His name doesn’t immediately bring pugilism to most readers’ minds, I’d bet. Yet with Ulysses he attempted to pack an entire world, or at least an entire city, into a novel, and he reinvented the literary form in order to do so. With all he put in there, it should come as no surprise that boxing shows up in its pages.

With characteristically fine craftsmanship, Joyce constructs a few alliterative sentences describing an image from a colorful moment from boxing history. Our hero Stephen Dedalus stops at a Dublin shop:

In Clohissey’s window a faded 1860 print of Heenan boxing Sayers held his eye. Staring backers with square hats stood round the roped prizering. The heavyweights in light loincloths proposed gently to each other his bulbous fists. And they are throbbing: heroes’ hearts.

According to boxing chroniclers Nat Fleisher and Sam Andre, “there are some tales which the fight fan is never tired of hearing,” and here Joyce alludes to one of them.

John C. Heenan fought Tom Sayers in the first contest for the title of world heavyweight champion. Known as “The Benicia Boy” for having worked for a steamship company in that California city, Heenan was actually born in Troy, New York, on May 2, 1833. As Joyce certainly knew, the American was of Irish descent. The 195-pound, 6’2” Heenan outweighed his 5’8” opponent by more than forty pounds when they met in Farnborough. Though small, Sayers was considered exceptionally clever, and, in An Illustrated History of Boxing, Fleisher and Andre call him an all-time great.

The first fight between American and English title holders saw the still-common practice of fans regarding athletes as upholders of national honor and declaring their allegiances accordingly. In the 37^th round, when Heenan had his opponent trapped against the ropes, Sayers supporters cut through the ropes to save their man. Though the referee fled the out-of-control scene, the bare knuckle boxers agreed to fight five more rounds without an official. After two hours and twenty minutes, the fight ended in a draw, though according to boxing lore, British observers were certain Sayers won, while Americans knew Heenan would have won had Sayers partisans not interceded. Both men received championship belts. When Sayers retired from the sport, Heenan was recognized as the world champion.

Though Fleisher and Andre don’t say whether the novelists were among the ring rope severers, they do note the presence of Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray in the audience on April 17, 1860. In The Half-Life of an American Essayist, Arthur Krystal mentions the pair being there as one of many, many examples of writers with an interest in fighters. He doesn’t mention Joyce, but he could have.

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Books That Changed My World

The books writers name as all-time favorites reveals something about their interests, outlook, attitudes and perhaps even their values. Illustrating this very point, The New Yorker’s Book Bench blog posted Susan Orlean’s list of the books that changed her life. She cites works by Joan Didion, John Hersey and Tom Wolfe, and it’s not hard to see why the author of The Bullfighters Checks Her Makeup, The Orchid Thief and other works of nonfiction would regard them as influences. She also includes fiction that I would include on my list, such as James Joyce’s Ulysses (appropriate for a Bloomsday post), Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

In the same spirit of giving some sense of what I’m about, here’s an incomplete first attempt at such a list of the books that made the most impact on me (in no particular order).

• George Orwell’s Ninety Eighty-Four, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia and his essays – just about all Orwell, actually.
•  Herman Melville’s The Confidence Man and The Piazza Tales as well as M-D.
•  A.J. Liebling’s The Sweet Science and A Neutral Corner (Liebling raised writing about boxing to an art, and Fighters & Writers certainly owes something to his example, if only in aspiration.)
•  Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love and Saturday
•  Albert Camus, The Plague and The Myth of Sisyphus, at least
•  Philip Larkin, Collected Poems
•  Salman Rushdie, Step across This Line
•  Philip Roth, The Counterlife, The Facts and The Human Stain
•  Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act
•  Martin Amis, The War against Cliché
•  Anne Fadiman, At Large and At Small
•  Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
•  Zadie Smith, On Beauty (which I liked better than the novel that inspired it)
•  Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness
•  Anne Hathaway, The Year of the Goat
•  The Life of P.T. Barnum, Written by Himself

This is by no means exhaustive…

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Read Every Page

Though I’ve used this site to broadcast shameless advertisements for myself, I’ve also offered some background on Fighters & Writers that I hope is somewhat amusing, at least to anyone interested the book’s dual subjects. I’ve given the story behind the photo on the cover. (My wife, I should add, also took several of the pictures illustrating pages inside.) I’ve described literary boxing moments I probably would have discussed if I’d found them before I’d finished writing the essays. I’ve explained the book’s dedication.  

Not coincidentally, Fighters & Writers includes an essay that explores writers’ dedications and what they reveal. Those and other elements bracketing the main portions of books, the parts many readers only flip through, can also shed light on authors’ aims and intentions. “Writers deliberately make meaningful use of all their books’ pages,” I say at the start of that piece, “including the frequently ignored dedications and acknowledgements.” Even indexes can offer surprises. What’s Jane Austen doing in a book like mine, for instance?

Fighters & Writers includes a section plainly entitled “Sources” that might first look like no more than a list of the books, articles, interviews and other resources that I used when doing research (as well as the place where I indicate where the individual first appeared). But it is more than that. Some of these previously unpublished portions explain the origins of my essays or offer extra bits that give some sense of my at times idiosyncratic approach to boxing-books combinations.

Here, for example, is part of what I say about one of the essays: “Clive James boasts that Cultural Amnesia ‘might well be the only serious book to explore the relationship between Hitler’s campaign on the eastern front and Richard Burton’s pageboy hairstyle in Where Eagles Dare….’ I could similarly suggest that ‘Ink’ … probably stands alone among personal essays by combining contemplation of car crashes, jaguars, Camus, the Bad Brains, tattoos, boxing, T.E. Lawrence and Bond girls.” 

My point here is that readers of Fighters & Writers should not skip a single page.

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Fighters & Writers is at the printer!

As I write this post, Fighters & Writers is at the printer. Here’s a bit of background on my forthcoming book.   

Fighters & Writers is neither a traditional sports book nor a conventional collection of literary essays. It blends literary criticism, journalism and memoir and considers both the lively body of literature directly related to boxing and the ways the sport relates to writers not usually identified with it.

Essays in Fighters & Writers discuss works about boxing by authors such as Albert Camus, W.C. Heinz, A.J. Liebling, Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Philip Roth, New Yorker editor David Remnick, Darin Strauss and José Torres – a boxing champion who became a writer – as well as the cultural impact made by boxers like Muhammad Ali, Max Baer, James Braddock, George Foreman, Joe Frazier, Larry Holmes, Joe Louis and Mike Tyson. Rodwan also considers the sport in connection with figures such as Martin Amis, Christopher Hitchens, John McCain, Ian McEwan, George Orwell, Henry Rollins and Oscar Wilde.

The title essay surveys a selection of the mammoth body of literature involving boxing in addition to writing on closely related topics such as confidence games. “The Ali Act” considers writers’ undiminished interest in one extraordinary boxer. “The Fighting Life” looks at two prominent writers’ use of boxing in their fiction. “A First-Class Sport” assesses boxing’s frequently overlooked positive aspects by examining the memoirs and autobiographies of several boxing enthusiasts, including a former heavyweight champion, a well-known trainer and television analyst, and prominent public figures including a former president and a U.S. senator. Other pieces in the collection explore how boxing inserts itself in writers’ imaginations even when they write about other subjects. Essays on diverse topics such as book dedications, Orwell’s Spanish Civil War memories, digressions, tattoos and weight loss reveal the close, if not always recognized, connections between fighters and writers.

Carlo Rotella, author of Cut Time: An Education at the Fights, called Fighters & Writers “a spirited and far-ranging meditation on boxing that’s also a thoughtful inquiry into the relationship between the writer’s craft and the fighter’s.”

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