In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews Page 11
Boxing has always been dominated by the heavyweight division, as the heavyweight division is dominated by the champion and his highest-ranked contenders; so long as the heavyweight champion is a considerable macho figure, especially if he happens to be handsome, charismatic, and controversial, boxing can be a highly lucrative sport—at least for managers and promoters, if not always for boxers. Boddy succinctly discusses the leading heavyweight champions in terms of their cultural significance: swaggering John L. Sullivan, “the Boston Strong boy,” the very embodiment of Irish-American machismo, who didn’t become simply a celebrity during his ten-year reign, but “a screen onto which a wide variety of feelings and attitudes could be projected” his more suave successor “Gentleman Jim” Corbett (heavyweight reign 1892–1897) who ended his career after retirement by staging boxing exhibitions and appearing in a number of plays—“Why a fighter can’t be careful about his appearance I don’t understand” the controversial Jack Johnson, our first black American heavyweight (1908–1915), whose astonishing dancer-like boxing skills revolutionized the sport and whose yet more astonishing defiance of wholesale white racism would set the tone for Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali five decades to come; and “The Manassa Mauler” Jack Dempsey (1919–1926) whose brilliant manager Jack Kearnes parlayed his boxer’s considerable but limited skills to unprecedented box-office bonanzas like the heavily promoted “Battle of the Century”—with the French lightweight champion Georges Carpentier in 1921, whom Dempsey beat handily in four rounds—the first million-dollar gate in ring history.
A talismanic figure to this day, as a champion, Dempsey fought relatively few contenders. He was shameless about eluding the reputedly best boxer of his era, “The Black Menace” Harry Wills, in 1925; if Dempsey had been a contemporary of Jack Johnson, he would never have stepped into the ring with the more skilled black boxer, and the great Jack Johnson’s name would be but a footnote in American boxing history. In an era of white racism, Dempsey was one of the tribe. Yet, as Boddy points out, like Joe Louis in a very different way, Jack Dempsey became an iconic figure throughout the thirties and beyond “both to those who identified with his losses and failures, and those who felt that they too could one day be champion if only they worked hard enough.”
Divided into nine chapters of different lengths and strategies—among them “‘Fighting, Rightly Understood,’” “Like Any Other Profession,” “Sport of the Future,” “Save Me, Joe Louis; Save Me, Jack Dempsey”—and a conclusion crammed with enough information and ideas to fuel an entirely new book, Boxing: A Cultural History must have been a considerable challenge to organize. Obliged to be a history of culture and not simply of boxing, this prodigious book begins to stagger under the weight of its Sargasso Sea of materials, at about midway, in Chapters 5 and 6. Though the chronological history of boxing is in itself enormously appealing, Boddy’s methodology requires her to frequently interrupt it with so much cultural detritus that the story becomes quickly snarled, even to one who is familiar with it; references to Jack Dempsey abound, but we drift far from the core individual, and we’re likely to feel mildly cheated—here, as elsewhere when Boddy “covers” such great fights as Louis–Schmeling II, Muhammad Ali–Joe Frazier I, II, III and Muhammad Ali–Foreman—by the relatively scant space spent on boxing set beside countless pages of cultural inquiry into, for instance, boxing posters advertising Hollywood fight films, lengthy exegeses of such texts as Budd Schulberg’s novel The Harder They Fall, the maelstrom of Black Muslim propaganda and Caucasian America reaction surrounding Muhammad Ali in the tumultuous 1960s. Certainly it is interesting, to a degree, to see to what extent contemporary American culture has been saturated with boxing/fighting references, but the instinct to “fight” is after all a primary human instinct, and might well have manifested itself in any number of other ways apart from boxing. Skilled though Boddy is in literary analysis and paraphrase, so many “examples” of boxing/fighting in culture quickly come to seem numbing, as in this (shortened) excerpt from Jack London’s Martin Eden in which seemingly sophisticated men revert to the Zolaesque “animal machine”:
Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of youth, with naked fists, and with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to destroy. All the painful, thousand years’ of gains of man in his upward climb through creation were lost…Martin and CheeseFace were two savages, of the stone age…
It’s hardly surprising that Jack London’s male protagonists revert to “savagery”—in this and every other work of fiction by the author of the American classic The Call of the Wild (1903); such is the inevitable trajectory of their fate. London lacked an imagination beyond the grimly determinist “naturalism” of his time; his “plots” could run in but one direction, like hurtling locomotives. His obsessive themes touch only tangentially upon the tradition, discipline, and culture of boxing, which is a very different matter from mere savagery, as observers of boxing are frequently required to explain. Boddy concedes, “The boxing ring is only one of many settings in which the validity of naturalist ideas can be tested and observed” but “naturalism” per se can be applied to an infinite variety of human, if not sub-human activities, always drawing the same very few conclusions: life is nasty, brutish, and short.
In her rather too freewheeling association of boxing with mere fighting, which prevails throughout the book, Boddy needs to distinguish more responsibly between the “savage” and “instinctual”—that is, the “untrained” and “unstudied” nature of brute fighting—and what boxing is: a not-natural, not-unreflective, not-brainless but assiduously trained and reflective tradition somewhere between a “sport” and an “art” that places far more emphasis than most viewers could guess upon the stratagems of self-defense including indefatigably practiced footwork. To watch a boxer seriously training (as I’d once watched the twenty-year-old heavyweight contender Mike Tyson at his Catskill camp preparatory to Tyson’s defeat of Trevor Berbick in November 1986), is to realize firsthand how contrary to nature boxing actually is; how one might argue that when practiced on the highest levels, the discipline of boxing bears more relationship to a shrewdly cerebral contest like chess than to anything like street-fighting, and boxing’s essential establishment of a mysterious and often profound bond between boxers—all the more brotherly for its being baptized in blood—is a crucial component in boxing culture which is largely invisible to the “public” eye.
Boddy’s methodology as a cultural critic reduces what was once living to its symbolic representations. To some extent this is the natural process of criticism, analysis, quantification. It is the external—“public”—nature of boxing that engages her, the deciphering of large public texts in which individuals figure as mere hieroglyphics:
Today much of the visual representation of boxing capitalizes on, or interrogates, the symbolic resonance of specific individuals, objects and events. Certain fights have a particularly powerful resonance or aura—a “uniqueness” that can only be understood by saying “I was there,” or “I remember where I was when it happened.”
But how does this distinguish boxing from any other public event? Woodstock or Altamont, the Red Sox winning the World Series, a “historic” event seen “live” on television? Cultural criticism quickly reaches a point of saturation at which all iconographies are equal: those that are “real” (an actual boxing match) and those that are “fiction” (Sylvester Stallone’s fairy-tale Rocky franchise); those that begin with historic “persons” (Muhammad Ali, Marilyn Monroe) but are transmogrified by art, or a process to which the term “art” is applied (Andy Warhol’s 1977 lithograph Muhammad Ali: Hand on Chin,* Andy Warhol’s 1964 lithograph Blue Marilyn). Where the critic’s predominant focus is a theory of media manipulation, the subject itself may be irrelevant:
The story of boxing (and indeed of most sports) from the early nineteenth-century onward has been one of gradual transformation into mass-market entertainment. Each new technological development (film, radio and telev
ision) has brought a larger audience to individual contests.
True of boxing but perhaps truer of football, basketball, pop music and national politics. And it might be argued that with the demise of Friday night boxing matches in the 1960s, there are far fewer fights, and fewer boxers involved in the sport; millions of viewers may watch pay-per-view to see a much-hyped championship fight broadcast in Las Vegas, but audiences for boxing overall may well be declining, with the rise of so many competing sports.
What is the most valuable about Boxing: A Cultural History isn’t its ideas so much as its wonderfully heterogeneous gathering of specifics. To read Boddy’s book is to confront dozens—hundreds?—of inspired mini-essays. One has to do with the transformation of dashing young Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali as a “Muslim Saint Sebastian” in 1966—the “White Liberal Hope”—through the deification of Ali in such films as When We Were Kings (1996) and his transformation into a sort of “New Age spiritual guru.” Succumbing to the neurological disorder Parkinson’s disease “merely added poignancy to his story” as Boddy observes: in 2005, Ali was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush. (He who’d once been, in the prime of his life, a member of the Nation of Islam and an unabashed black racist!) Another illuminating digression, in a chapter already crammed to bursting, is the wittily titled “Two Nice Jewish Boys in the Age of Ali”—the “nice Jewish boys” being Bob Dylan and Norman Mailer.
Nearing the end of her massive book, like a valiant boxer staggering with exhaustion in the twelfth, final round of a championship fight, Boddy simply stops and tell us: “My aim [has been] less to offer a comprehensive survey than to propose further lines of inquiry:…dialectical, iconographic, and naturalist.” To the very end she is searching still for the mysterious essence of boxing, which, as Nietzsche would have perceived, is a far deeper and more “sacred” human activity than its mass-market appropriation can suggest:
To accept that the “essence” or “basic fact” of boxing is “the fact of meat and body hitting meat and bone” is to reject, or at least downplay, the intricate conceptual and iconographic constructions that surround it.
Boddy quotes Carlo Rotella: “It takes constant effort to keep the slippery, naked, near-formless fact of hitting swaddled in layers of sense and form.”
This is a problem, if it is a problem, exclusively for the critic; the boxer knows a deeper truth, as Mike Tyson once said: “Other than boxing, everything is so boring.”
II.
CONTEMPORARIES
REMEMBERING JOHN UPDIKE
The New Yorker
“Book Bench,” January 28, 2009
John was a slightly older classmate in a vast high school populated by not-prosperous rural youths in some netherland of the 1950s. Of course, John was president of this class; no doubt, I was secretary. I’ve been reading John’s work since I became an adult and can only content myself with the prospect of his new, so sadly posthumously published Endpoint and Other Poems and My Father’s Tears and Other Stories and rereading the newly reissued The Maples: Stories as well as rereading his work through the remainder of my life. I think there must be a story or two, and even one of his more slender novels, which, unaccountably, I have not yet read. My students love “Friends from Philadelphia,” which was John’s first published story in The New Yorker. What a seemingly artless little gem! My students are stunned by it and by the fact that John wrote it when he was hardly older than they are.
We had met a number of times—my (late) husband Raymond Smith and I visited John and Martha in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, on several very nice occasions. John was always gracious, warmly funny, kind, and bemused—and of course very bright, informed, and ardent when it came to literature. When he gave a brilliant talk and reading at Princeton some years ago I was honored to introduce him to a large, packed auditorium. I teach his lovely stories each semester—John’s language is luminous, sparkling, and glinting, with a steely sort of humor. Think of an iridescent butterfly of surpassing beauty that yet—if you persist in examining it—will yield a considerable sting. I could never gauge how serious John was about his Christian faith—or, rather, the Christian faith—though some sense of the sacred seems to suffuse his work in its most ordinary, even vulgar moments, at which Updike was a master at transcribing. “Snow makes white shadows, there behind the yews, dissolving to the sun’s slant kiss, and pools itself across the lawn as if to say Give me another hour, then I’ll go” (“Endpoint”). I will miss John terribly, as we all will.
HOMER & LANGLEY
by E. L. Doctorow
Of archetypal domestic horrors that haunt Americans—an unnerving panoply of tabloid possibilities that includes the post-partum-depressed mother who drowns her children, the deranged father who slaughters his family and then himself, the formerly tractable teenager who becomes a drug addict, a serial killer, a goth practitioner of satanic rites, an Ivy League dropout—none is more terrifying than the agoraphobic-recluse-hoarder: the individual, usually though not invariably elderly, who has retreated into his dwelling-place as into a burrow, creates of his household a labyrinth of stacked newspapers and magazines, “collectibles” and trash, very often raw garbage, and very often domestic pets—dogs, cats—that, allowed to breed haphazardly, make of the dwelling-place a worse sinkhole of squalor. Few of us can imagine ourselves involved in deranged acts of violence but all too many of us can imagine ourselves the hapless victims of our possessions—paralyzed by things we’re unable to sort out and discard, trapped by our own affluence, crushed, smothered, annihilated beneath tons of trash as in a grim allegory of Consumerism’s shadow-side. How else to explain our ongoing fascination with the Collyer brothers, Langley and Homer, whose decaying bodies were discovered in March 1947 amid more than one hundred tons of trash in the Collyer family brownstone on once-fashionable Fifth Avenue at 128th Street, and who were the subjects of a high-profile series of articles for the New York Times and, in 1954, a Book-of-the-Month Club best seller titled My Brother’s Keeper by Marcia Davenport. (Davenport’s novel, derided by literary critics for its tabloid melodrama, remains warmly recalled by readers well into the twenty-first century, as passionate testimonies on Amazon attest.) Once merely eccentric bachelor-brothers from a highly respectable Manhattan family who came to tragic ends, the Collyer brothers have become mythopoetic, larger than life. Once merely sensational, their story has become a kind of cautionary tale as memorable as any of Grimms’ fairy tales.
E. L. Doctorow, a writer of dazzling gifts and seemingly boundless imaginative energy, our great chronicler of American mythopoetics in such brilliantly and variously executed novels as The Book of Daniel (1971), Ragtime (1975), Loon Lake (1980), Billy Bathgate (1989), The Waterworks (1994), World’s Fair (1985), and more recently City of God (2000) and The March (2005) has turned his attention to the Collyer legend in his new, eleventh novel Homer & Langley. In contrast to the ambitious and multi-faceted The March, a chronicle of the Union Army’s notorious march through Georgia and South Carolina under the generalship of Sherman, in the closing months of the Civil War, Homer & Langley is a subdued, contemplative and resolutely unsensational account of the brothers’ fatally imbricated lives. Told in the form of a first-person narrative by the elderly Homer—“the blind brother”—it’s addressed to a French woman journalist whom Homer has encountered on the street, and with whom he becomes naively infatuated, in the final months of his life, though he scarcely knows “Jacqueline Roux” and will never encounter her a second time; it’s a Bildungsroman in which virtually nothing happens to the protagonist except that, with the passing of years, and the diminution of his hearing as well as his blindness, Homer succumbs ever more passively to his elder brother Langley’s paranoid fantasies and predilection for compulsive hoarding—“It was as if the times blew through our house like a wind.”