'''Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm''' throughout much
of Norman Mailer’s life and work. In his seminal essay entitled “Death” in
''The Presidential Papers''(1963), Mailer uses the first Sonny Liston/Floyd Patterson
championship bout as a point of departure from which to develop
a profound series of perceptions about the American national temperament,
particularly that of blacks. In ''King of the Hill''(1971) and more strikingly
in ''The Fight''(1975)the deals nominally with a specific championship
bout, but goes beyond journalism to find certain normative precepts in the
sport. But there is another level on which boxing informs and conditions
Mailer’s vision: In his fiction, most notably ''An American Dream''(1965)and
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance''(1984), boxing experiences help define the protagonists.
Stephen Richards Rojack and Tim Madden respectively find “the
reward of the ring” (''Dream 16'')applicable to their existential quests for self.
Ultimately, Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful
account of Benny Paret’s death in the ring at the hands of Emile Griffith
to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to Muhammad
Ali’s career to his 1988 article on Mike Tyson, “Fury, Fear, Philosophy,”
Mailer has found in this arena of ritualized violence a rich source of perception
about the human condition. In fact, in his 1993 essay in ''Esquire'',
“The Best Move Lies Next to the Worst” ~reprinted in ''The Time of Our
Time''!, he deals with his own boxing experiences at the Gramercy Gym with
José Torres, Ryan O’Neal, and others. The title of the piece comes from the
comparison of boxing to chess ''Time'' (1045–1052).

I believe it’s best to confront the central issue here at the outset. Mailer
has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central
metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment,
salvation.As he muses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during
his crises of the early 1960s,

[T]he review in Time @of Deaths for the Ladies# put iron into my
heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the enemy was more
alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and so one had to mend,
and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and
try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave
you, a glimpse of something like almighty prose. (''Existential''''Errands'' 204)

Very well, then: Mailer unabashedly uses violent confrontation as a touchstone
for his vision of life and art. He has persistently perceived himself as
embattled. But witness the artistic regeneration, the prolific and truly significant
output that resulted as a direct consequence of this attitude.
Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with ''The Presidential
Papers'' in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten
thousand words a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for Esquire. Not
only does this piece prefigure and announce the new mode of Mailer’s nonfiction
writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, notably ''The Armies of the Night'',
it is the key to his fascination with boxing.
The first Patterson/Liston fight provides mailer an opportunity to embark
on a series of sophisticated statements on boxing and the national disposition.
But the center of the piece, as the title suggests, is the brutal killing of
Benny Paret in the ring by Emile Griffith. Let us deal with the most hideous
aspects of boxing first. Unlike most bouts, this one was fueled by an intense
hatred between the fighters. Here is Mailer’s description of the climax:

In the twelfth, Griffith caught him. Paret got trapped in a corner.
Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat. He hit him eighteen right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering sound all the while he attacked, the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin... I had never seen one man hit another so hard and so many times. Over the referee’s face came a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its way through him,
and then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away. It was the act of a brave man. Griffith was uncontrollable. His trainer leaped into
the ring, his manager, his cut man, there were four people holding
Griffith, but he was off on an orgy, he had left the Garden, he was back on a hoodlum’s street. If he had been able to break
loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped
Paret to the floor and whaled on him there.
And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen
punches something happened to everyone who was in the psychic
range of the event. Some parts of his death reached out to us. One
felt it hover in the air. He was still standing in the ropes, trapped
as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as
if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and
then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to
breathe about him. (“Death” 244–245)
This event was not, of course, taken lightly by the public: “There was shock
in the land... There were editorials, gloomy forecasts that the Game was
dead. The managers and the prizefighters got together. Gently, in thick,
depressed hypocrisies, they tried to defend their sport” ~245!.
Mailer goes on to delve into that species of blood religion to which fight
people adhere and the kind of mystery it has lent to the works of such writers
as D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. And what of Mailer’s response?
Something in boxing was spoiled... I loved it with freedom no longer. It was more like somebody in your family was fighting now. The feeling one had for a big fight was no longer clear of terror in its excitement. There was awe in the suspense. (247–248)
Professional boxing, then, presents difficult moral problems trailer as well
as to any humane person. This does not, I submit, obviate its significance in
B A R R Y H. L E E D S { 387
Mailer’s work as a test of courage. I would suggest that it is in the exercise of
disciplined skill, resourcefulness, stoicism, the force of will in the face of risk,
that the human spirit is capable of reaching its peak expression.
Another case in point is King of the Hill, a modest little book originally
published as a long article in Life magazine ~with photographs by Frank
Sinatra!, dealing with Muhammad Ali’s hard-fought defeat at the hands of
Joe Frazier after his three year enforced layoff from boxing. As in “Death,”
the opponents assume symbolic, almost mythic proportions. Central to this
is Mailer’s pervasive Manichean vision of the cosmos, even down to Ali’s
twin poodles named “Angel” and “Demon.” But the conclusion is most significant
to Mailer’s last work:

[Y]et Ali got up, Ali came sliding through the last two minutes
and thirty-five seconds of this heathen holocaust in some last
exercise of the will, some iron fundament of the ego not to be
knocked out, and it was then as if the spirit of Harlem finally
spoke and came to rescue and the ghosts of the dead in Vietnam,
something held him up before arm-weary triumphant near crazy
Frazier who had just hit him the hardest punch ever
thrown in his life and they went down to the last few seconds of
a great fight, Ali still standing and Frazier had won.
The world was talking instantly of a rematch. For Ali had shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true. He was a man. He could bear moral and physical torture and he could stand. If he could beat Frazier in the rematch we would have at last a national hero who was a hero of the world as well. (''King'' 92–92)

Ali was a national hero, for his moral and physical courage. His heroism had
fascinated Mailer for years. In a short piece, “An Appreciation of Cassius
Clay,” he wrote: “[I] don’t want to get started writing about Muhammad Ali,
because I could go on for a book” (''Errands'' 264). He went on to condemn
Ali’s exclusion from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the
Vietnam War and concluded: “Therefore we are all deprived of an intimate
spectacle which was taking place in public—the forging of a professional artist
of extraordinary dimensions...he was bringing a revolution to the theory
of boxing....” (264). When I asked him,“... now that it’s pretty well documented that Ali has been damaged by boxing, do you love the sport as
much as you did?”Mailer responded, “Well, I don’t think I love it as much as I used to. One reason is because he’s out of it” (Leeds 1).

{{in5|n}}All of this of course points directly to Mailer’s most significant work on boxing, ''The Fight''. Suffice it to say that Mailer’s obsessive preoccupation with
existentialism and Manichean polarities, his newly found fascination with
African mysticism and the concept of ''N’golo'' (or force), his vision of
Muhammad Ali as an artist and hero, finds their serendipitous confluence here.
{{in5|n}}As in virtually all of his work after 1968, Mailer treats a factual situation,
and the people involved, in terms of highly subjective and fascinating digressions.
Thus, in addition to an in-depth account of the fight and the circumstances
preceding and following it, the reader is offered observations on
African religion and politics, allusions to Hemingway, Hunter Thompson,
and George Plimpton, and further candid insights into Mailer himself: the
status of his projected big novel, his compulsion to walk parapets, his hatred
of jogging. Most amusing, however, is the self-deprecating anecdote in which
Mailer, returning late at night along a jungle path on which he had been
doing road work with Ali, hears a lion roar. He proceeds through a series of
seriocomic reactions, culminating in the fantasy that he is about to be eaten
by “Hemingway’s lion” waiting all these years for a fit substitute, and the
final recognition that the lion he hears is probably caged in the city’s zoo ~91–
92!. This announces, I believe, an attractive new modesty in Mailer.
{{in5|n}}Such modesty pervades “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst,” in
which mailer recounts his adventures and misadventures in boxing in a consistently
self-deprecating manner. Boxing with José Torres is described thus
(''Time 1048''):

He was impossible to hit and that was an. interesting experience you felt as if you were sharing the ring with a puma... Over ten years of boxing with José Torres I was able to catch him with a
good right-hand lead twice, and the first occasion was an event.
He ran around the ring with his arms high in triumph, crying out, “He hit me with a right—he hit me with a right!” unconscionably proud that day of his pupil.

The story, in a mildly oversimplified form, has circulated for years that
Mailer gave Torres writing lessons in return for boxing lessons. Actually,
B A R R Y H. L E E D S { 389
Mailer first began to learn boxing under the tutelage of the father of Adele
Morales, his second wife. In the “Sixth Advertisement for Myself,” Mailer
states:

I was doing some boxing now. My father-in-law had been a professional;
he was always putting on the gloves with me... I was in nice shape, and my senses were alert. (''Advertisements'' 331)

Most interesting in the later collaboration are the parallels that Torres and
Mailer found between the two occupations. When asked if there is a difference
in the discipline required for writing and boxing ~in an interview with
Jessica Blue and LegsMcNeil for Details!, Torres responded, “No fucking difference”
(''Details'', nd., 86). But earlier in the same interview, he tells of how
Mailer “told me that writing was about truth... He knew that boxing was
the opposite. It’s about cheating and deceiving and lying, and he said that it’s
a very hard transition... You’re cheating the other guy by feinting with a left
and cheating with a jab” (''Details'' 85).

{{in5|n}}Another regular at the Gramercy Gym in the 1980s was Sal Cetrano, who
is mentioned ~though not by name! in “The Best Move.” In a hitherto
unpublished interview with J. Michael Lennon (dated May 24, 2007),
Cetrano disarmingly recounts a series of anecdotes regarding his experiences
with Mailer, Torres, and Ryan O’Neal.
{{in5|n}}Cetrano first met Mailer by accident on Broadway in 1980, and the first
thing they talked about was the Paret/Griffith fight. Subsequently, Cetrano
wrote Mailer a letter which was reciprocated by a postcard that simply said,
“Be at the Gramercy Gymat 10:30 AM Saturday.” Sal had been in the Golden
Gloves as a kid, but he“weighed about 145 pounds and everyone seemed bigger.”
His solution to this problem, since “I had been a distance runner as a
kid,” was to keep opponents at arm’s length. Of the relationship between
Mailer and Torres, he describes it as one of “power to power: Norman was a
king of literature; Jose a king of boxing.”
{{in5|n}}When asked by Michael Lennon of the parallels between Mailer as a boxer
and as writer, Cetrano responds ~with deprecating laughter as risking a cliché!
that he’s “existential” in both: “He does things to their fullest.” Although
Norman had a “wonderful teacher in Jose,” he’s not a fast boxer.“He wades
in and clubs you to death.” This suggestion of Mailer’s legendary fearlessness will echo for anyone who knows his life and work, in every act or stunt
as well as every piece of prose.

{{in5|n}}Since Mailer’s death on November 10, 2007, there has (not surprisingly)
been an outpouring of retrospective summaries and evaluations of his life
and career in magazines, newspapers, radio, and television, virtually all mass
media. Equally unsurprising is the fact that Mailer has been almost universally
portrayed as a fighter for everything he believed in, and more precisely,
in many cases as a boxer. For example, in an article in ''The New York Observer''(Nov. 19, 2007, 8) Leon Neyfakh tells the story of how Mailer acquired the
original David Levine illustration of Mailer “as a boxer, his ... body in a
crouch and his gloves at his face.”Mailer had just published “Some Children
of the Goddess” in ''Esquire'' (July 1963, rpt. ''Cannibals and Christians'',
1966) in which he took on his major novelistic contemporaries and rivals and
was photographed posed in the corner of a boxing ring. Neyfakh goes on to
recount how Mailer took the cardboard-mounted illustration to show Jose
Torres, who teasedMailer’s vanity by idly bending it almost to the breaking
point. Apparently, by remaining silent (if not unperturbed) Mailer passed the
Torres modesty requirement.

{{in5|n}}It is, in fact, almost impossible to enumerate the many retrospectives
appearing immediately after Mailer’s death which either pictured him in a
boxing contest: with gloves on or actually in a ring. Many others referred
pointedly to his predilection for fisticuffs both in and out of the ring. Thus,
it is clear that boxing has always been and will always be associated with the
Mailer legend. ''Sports Illustrated'' titled Kostya Kennedy’s tribute, “The Pugilist
at Rest.”

'''Violence in Personal Confrontation Outside the Ring'''

What I further consider significant here is Mailer’s fictive vision of fighting.
Violence in personal confrontations outside the ring, both in heterosexual
relationships and between male adversaries, is central toMailer’s fiction.
ChristianMessenger, in a related article, makes some interesting points, but
I think it’s a critical commonplace to trot out Mailer’s 1959 story, “The Time
of Her Time,” as the beginning of all this. As early as ''A Transit to Narcissus''
(1978),Mailer was already concerned with the smoldering violence between
sexual partners, alluding to “the most terrible themes of my own life: the
nearness of violence to creation, and the whiff of murder just beyond every
embrace of love” (Introduction x).
{{in5|n}}And the darkest side of this vision is disturbingly revealed in ''The Armies
of the Night'' (1968), when Mailer writes with horror of federal Marshall and
American soldiers brutally beating young women during the night after the
1967 march on the Pentagon: Such men, he suggests, “may never have
another opportunity like this—to beat a woman without having to make
love to her” (304).
{{in5|n}}It’s true that in “The Time of Her Time,” Sergius O’Shaugnessy, just back
fromMexico after the end of ''The Deer Park'' (1955), does throw Denise Gondelman
“a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen round fight” (“Time” in ''Advertisements
''501). Sergius has been a boxer in the Air Force, and in bed he and
Denise are “like two club fighters” ~490!. But it is shewho gets in the last literal
punch: “I might have known she would have a natural punch. My jaw
felt it for half an hour after she was gone...” (494–495).And in the story’s last
line, he muses that “[L]ike a real killer, she did not look back, and was out the
door before I could rise to tell her that she was a hero fit for me” (503). This
is, therefore, a battle of equals, which prefigures embryonically the growth
toward the graceful, loving equality of the central Rojack/Cherry passage in
''An American Dream.
''
The extended fighting metaphor reaches its peak in An American Dream.
Stephen Rojack is an amateur boxer, and clearly the central bout of the novel
is the vitriolic and deadly scene in the opening chapter when, in a surprisingly
even match, he fights and kills his powerful, witch-like wife,Deborah.
But I must point out yet again that Rojack does not, as KateMillet suggests,
“get away with murder” ~Sexual Politics 15!. Instead, this scene, with its pervasive
parallel imagery of combat and sex is part of a cohesive and symmetrical
pattern of symbolism which unifies the novel tonally, structurally and
thematically. After a series of mutual insults and the escalating fury of an
intense physical struggle, Rojack strangles Deborah:

[S]pasms began to open in me, and my mind cried out then,
“Hold back! you’re going too far, hold back!” I could feel a series
of orders whiplike tracers of light from my head to my arm, I was
ready to obey. I was trying to stop, but pulse packed behind pulse
in a pressure up to thunderhead; some blackbiled lust, some
desire to go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman
against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with
rage from out of me. (35–36)

{{in5|n}}This inflammatory scene introduces a more significant bout: that of
Rojack with himself, in the heroic struggle to purge his own moral weakness
and set out on that terrifying journey into the labyrinthine recesses of
the self, on the existential quest for the true identity that lies at his core. This
quest is punctuated by successively more frightening confrontations: first the
scene of hellish fornication with the “Nazi” maid, Ruta, which establishes the
allegorical nature of Rojack’s pilgrimage to salvation in an infernal world of
Manichaean choices; then with Ike “Romeo” Romalozzo, a brutal and corrupt
ex-boxer; and with police Lieutenant Roberts, who is described after
Rojack outwits him as a crooked wrestler who hadn’t known it was his night to lose.
{{in5|n}}Penultimately, he faces ShagoMartin, who in a scene of intimate violence
redolent of sexual connection ~“I got a whiff of his odor ... a smell of full
nearness, as if we’d been in bed for an hour.” @Dream 182#! teaches Rojack
something about nobility and forgiveness and passes on to him the phallic
power ~as epitomized in Shago’s totemic umbrella! necessary for his climactic
confrontation with Barney Oswald Kelly.
{{in5|n}}Insofar as each of these characters has allegorical as well as literal value in
the novel, Rojack’s struggles with them may be seen as confrontations with
the worst aspects of himself, which hemust overcome and purge. On a larger
scale, his progress is a peculiarly American one, a repudiation of the false
American dream of meretricious corruption and an embracing of a new,
true American Dreamof authenticity of self. Rojack comes to represent what
was best in the American character after WWII, what was shamelessly corrupted,
and what Mailer suggests may be redeemed by courage, discipline,
and a commitment to selfless heterosexual love. And he does this with the
aid of representatives of marginalized groups: Shago and Cherry.
''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is a lesser novel: a pale reflection, a distant echo
of the masterful An American Dream. But a few points are worth touching
on. Again, Tim Madden has been an amateur boxer in his youth. He does
fight and defeat Spider Nissen and Stoodie, the badness twins, with the aid
of “Stunts,” his dog, who dies with Spider’s knife in his heart. But despite initial,
ambiguous appearances, Tim does not hurt, does not kill women, or kill
anyone for that matter. But Patty Lareine, his wife, does kill Jessica Pond. In
fact, two women are murderers: Madeleine Falco also shoots her husband,
the corrupt Chief of Police Alvin Regency. Significantly, TimMadden refuses
the tempting suggestion of Patty Lareine that he kill her then husband,MeeksWardley Hilby III, and by the novel’s end is capable of compassionate
tenderness toward the suicidal, homosexualWardley. Further, Tim establishes
an almost friendly relationship with Patty’s hostile, dangerous black
lover, Bolo Green ~a.k.a. “Mr. Black”!. Most important, like Rojack at the
conclusion of An American Dream, Timis shown to fight his true battlewith
himself and his own fears and weaknesses.
Thus, in this novel as in virtually all of Mailer’s work as well as his personal
and public life, combat with adversaries is most pivotal as an external
manifestation of the true central struggle within oneself against the ignoble,
ignominious emotions of cowardice and moral sloth. Courage, personal
discipline, stoicism, the leap of faith essential to love, the definition and celebration
of the existential self: these values are not outmoded. They never
will be.
And what of theman who wrote of these all his life? He is gone now from
this sphere, from our limited purview. But his work will be with us forever,
and we will remember: He was a fighter.

===Works Cited===

{{Refbegin}}

* {{cite book|last= Blue |first= Jessica |date= |title= “The Maler Side of Mailer.” |url= |location= |publisher= |pages= 84-87 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Leeds|first= Barry|date=2008 |title=He was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer's Life and Work|url= |location= |publisher= |pages=385-394 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kennedy|first=Kostya |date= 19 November 2007 |title= “The Pugilist at Rest.” Sports Illustrated|url= |location= |publisher= |pages=28-29 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }}

2020-09-09T00:19:16Z

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2020-09-06T00:26:46Z

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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work

2020-09-05T02:34:19Z

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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work

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