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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work (view source)
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{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|abstract=Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman {{NM}}’s life and work. 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.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08leed}} | {{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|abstract=Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman {{NM}}’s life and work. 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.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08leed}} | ||
{{dc|dc=B|oxing 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 [[w:Sonny Liston|Sonny Liston]]/[[w:Floyd Patterson|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) he 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”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=16}} applicable to their existential quests for self. Ultimately, Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful account of [[w:Benny Paret|Benny Paret]]’s death in the ring at the hands of [[w:Emile Griffith|Emile Griffith]] to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to [[w:Muhammad Ali|Muhammad Ali]]’s career to his 1988 article on [[w:Mike Tyson|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 | {{dc|dc=B|oxing 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 [[w:Sonny Liston|Sonny Liston]]/[[w:Floyd Patterson|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) he 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”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=16}} applicable to their existential quests for self. Ultimately, Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful account of [[w:Benny Paret|Benny Paret]]’s death in the ring at the hands of [[w:Emile Griffith|Emile Griffith]] to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to [[w:Muhammad Ali|Muhammad Ali]]’s career to his 1988 article on [[w:Mike Tyson|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,” he deals with his own boxing experiences at the Gramercy Gym with [[w:José Torres|José Torres]], [[w:Ryan O’Neal|Ryan O’Neal]] and others. The title of the piece comes from the comparison of boxing to chess.{{sfn|Mailer|1998a|pp=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, | 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, | ||
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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 Legs McNeil for ''Details''), Torres responded, “No fucking difference.”{{sfn|Blue|McNeil|1984|p=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.”{{sfn|Blue|McNeil|1984|p=85}} | 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 Legs McNeil for ''Details''), Torres responded, “No fucking difference.”{{sfn|Blue|McNeil|1984|p=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.”{{sfn|Blue|McNeil|1984|p=85}} | ||
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 {{harvtxt|Lennon|2007}}, Cetrano disarmingly recounts a series of anecdotes regarding his experiences with Mailer, Torres, and Ryan O’Neal. | |||
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 Gym at 10:30 AM Saturday.” Sal had been in the [[w:Golden Gloves|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.” | |||
When asked by Michael Lennon of the parallels between Mailer as 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. | |||
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'', 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.”{{sfn|Neyfakh|2007|p=8}} {{harvtxt|Mailer|1963}} had just published “Some Children of the Goddess” in ''Esquire'' 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 teased Mailer’s vanity by idly bending it almost to the breaking point. Apparently, by remaining silent (if not unperturbed) Mailer passed the Torres modesty requirement. | |||
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 to Mailer’s fiction. Christian Messenger, 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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1978|p=x}} | |||
And the darkest side of this vision is disturbingly revealed in ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' (1968), when Mailer writes with horror of federal marshal and American soldiers brutally beating young women during the night after the [[w:National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam#1967 "March on the Pentagon"|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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=304}} | |||
===Citations=== | ===Citations=== | ||
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* {{cite magazine |last=Kennedy |first=Kostya |date=November 19, 2007 |title=The Pugilist at Rest |magazine=Sports Illustrated |pages=28–29 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite magazine |last=Kennedy |first=Kostya |date=November 19, 2007 |title=The Pugilist at Rest |magazine=Sports Illustrated |pages=28–29 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite journal |last=Leeds |first=Barry |date=2008 |title=A Conversation with Norman Mailer |journal=Connecticut Review |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=1–15 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite journal |last=Leeds |first=Barry |date=2008 |title=A Conversation with Norman Mailer |journal=Connecticut Review |volume=10 |issue=2 |pages=1–15 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite AV media |people= | * {{cite AV media |people=Lennon, J. Michael. Centrano, Sal. |date=May 24, 2007 |title=A Conversation with Sal Cetrano |trans-title= |medium=Audio Tape |language= |url= |access-date= |archive-url= |archive-date= |format= |time= |location= |publisher=Unpublished |id= |isbn= |oclc= |quote= |ref={{Sfnref|Lennon|2007}} }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location= New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |url= |location= New York |publisher=Putnam |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last= Mailer |first= Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1965 |title=An American Dream |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||