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‘It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously. ‘I’ll bust him.’. . . . . . . . . . . ‘All you kids are tough.’‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.‘That’s what I said.’ (131)

Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light

Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light of the World”) seem to be Nick’s as he struggles to understand the relationship between the two men. White prizefighters, after all, were not supposed to have black friends. Bugs tells Nick a story about Ad which adds to his confusion. Ad had a woman manager, and it was always being “written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness” (136-37). Nick vaguely remembers this, but then Bugs adds,“[O]f course they wasn’t really brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way” (137). Bugs repeatedly stresses how “awful good-looking” the woman was, and how she “looked enough like him to be twins” (137). Some have read this admiring comment (along with the description of Ad’s face as “queerly formed” and his lips as “queer shaped” (131)) as a suggestion that the two men may be lovers. Less directly, like “The Light of the World,” the story slides anxiously between taboos—incest becomes homosexuality becomes miscegenation. The “perplexing behavior” of boxers once more promises to reveal the perplexing nature of masculinity, and again the boy flees (Brenner 159).

What boxers reveal again and again is that the biggest of men are just “not big enough” to take on the “dark” and ambiguous world that surrounds the most well-regulated and well-lit ring, as the narrator of “Fifty Grand” notes (Hemingway 320). The first quotation above is from Mailer’s response to a question from his son, John Buffalo Mailer, about the relation between boxing and writing. A writer, he said, like a fighter, can come to realize that he’s “[b]ig, but not big enough” (''Big Empty'' 189). This is an insight that Nick Adams tries to avoid in “The Killers” (1927). Two men show up in a small-town café and hold the staff hostage as they wait for the man they want to kill, Ole Andreson, a former heavyweight boxer. When Nick, who has been in the café, tells Andreson about the men, the boxer says that nothing can be done to save him and turns his face to the wall. Little more than a page of this eleven-page story is devoted to Nick’s encounter with Andreson, but it changes everything. The gangsters dub Nick “bright boy,” but the story reveals how little he knows about power and powerlessness (Hemingway,“Killers” 283). In an attempt to escape his revelation—that the heavyweight, the epitome of masculinity, is not prepared to fight back—Nick decides to move on. “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it” (289). As in the case of “The Battler” and “The Light of the World,” the story ends with Nick preparing to “get out of this town” (289).

'''BOXING AS AMERICAN WAR'''

The boxers in these stories reveal the ways in which seemingly solid distinctions between hypermasculinity and homosexuality, between whiteness and blackness or Jewishness—confront and often threaten to collapse into each other. As Walter Benn Michaels remarks of ''The Sun Also Rises'', “Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable” (''Our America'' 27). For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both “taken in hand” by Brett Ashley, “manipulated” in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capuchines (Hemingway, ''The Sun'' 8). There, a “girl assistant lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance, while she stands with “folded hands,” “looking away” (32).

America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).

If all relationships have a comparable dialectic structure, then it makes equal sense to use the language of sex to describe boxing—the first fifteen seconds of a fight are equivalent “to the first kiss in a love affair”—and the language of boxing to describe sex (Existential 29). For the narrator of “''The Time of Her Time''” (1959), for example, the ''dialectic'' of sex stages conflicts between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, high culture and low culture, and even the competing therapeutic claims of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich (''Advertisements'' 495). If conflict is the model for the relationship between men and women, men additionally face an internal battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Mailer does not think that women have this problem). So the brutal outcome of the 1962 fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret is said to dramatize the ''biological force'' with which men disavow their inherent homosexuality (''Presidential'' 243). Paret had taunted Griffith with homophobic remarks at the weigh-in and during the fight, and Griffith responded by beating him to death. For Mailer, this is an example of the ring not doing its usual job of containing and controlling (or sublimating) sexual desire.

The boxing ring also enacts, and thus mostly contains, another conflict that Mailer saw as fundamental to American culture of ''our time'', one between blacks and whites (''Time'' x). Again, the challenge is to foreground and disrupt familiar stereotypical dichotomies: between whites, who are civilized, sophisticated, cerebral, literate, and literary; and blacks, who are primitive, illiterate, attuned to the pleasures of the body, and fluent in its language (''Advertisements'' 341). James Baldwin (and many others) complained about Mailer’s tendency to see “''us as goddam romantic black symbols''” (''Weatherby'' 78). But Mailer saw everyone and everything symbolically. For Patterson vs. Liston, therefore, read Art vs. Magic, Love vs. Sex, God vs. the Devil.

'''HEMINGWAY AND ALI: EXISTENTIAL EGO''' “I think there is a wonderful study to be made about the similarities between Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali,” Mailer told Michael Lennon in 1980, making a start himself. Both men, he argued, “''come out of that same American urgency to be the only planet in existence''. ''To be the sun''”—and at the heart of each was a dialectical struggle that was somehow both personal and national (''Pontifications'' 161–162). The fact that “''the mightiest victim of injustice in America''” was also “the mightiest narcissist in the land,” he observed of Ali in 1971, proved that “''the twentieth century was nothing if not a tangle of opposition''” (''Existential'' 28). “''Ego''” (later renamed “''King of the Hill''”), an account of Ali’s comeback fight against Joe Frazier, is not only about a “''dialogue between bodies''” (''Norman'' 19) but about a dialogue within Ali himself. For Mailer, the triumph of the fight’s end is that Ali has somehow managed to reconcile his two ''sides''—he could dance, displaying ''exquisite'' grace, figured as black and feminine (86)—but he could also ''stand'', revealing, for the first time, qualities of endurance to ''moral and physical torture'', figured as white and masculine (93).

Troublesome ''contradictions'' also “''[fall] away''” in ''The Fight'' (1974), an account of Ali’s “''Rumble in the Jungle''” with George Foreman. Once again, the issue is survival as much as victory. Mailer models his essay on Hazlitt’s 1821 piece of the same name. As Hazlitt’s narrator-protagonist begins by announcing his desire to escape the sentimental complications of daily life, Mailer declares his disappointing love affair with himself. As Hazlitt travels companionably to the heart of the country, discussing Cobbett and Rousseau en route, Mailer flies Pan Am to Conrad’s “''Heart of Darkness''” in Vachel Lindsay’s “''Congo'',” and on the return journey, plays dice with the air stewardess. Both men experience a “''restoration of being''” through journeys to watch boxing (''The Fight'' 239). But while Hazlitt ends by simply acknowledging the ephemeral achievement of both the boxing match and his own essay, Mailer wants more—nothing less, in fact, than the restoration of the title “''champ among writers''” (33). The book plays with various versions of magical thinking, but all are designed to the same end: “''the powers of regeneration in an artist''” (162). Ali works magic on Mailer by showing him that regeneration is possible; and set against his example is that of Hemingway, whose suicide fourteen years earlier haunts the book (123, 162). Ali, in other words, is both Hemingway and a kind of anti-Hemingway.

'''BOXING WITH HEMINGWAY'''

So what does it mean to box with another writer? For Hemingway, at least in his youth, the analogy expressed the inevitability of succession. Once a great boxer or writer had lost his crown, there was no reclaiming it. The old must give way to the new. So in 1924 he complained to Ezra Pound that the writers Ford Madox Ford was selecting for transatlantic review were the literary equivalents of Great White Hope Jim Jeffries, dragged out of retirement for one last fight: “''The thing to do with Ford is to kill him.... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary''” (''Ernest'' 116). Killing is also what Hemingway envisaged for Sherwood Anderson, reimagined as the has-been heavyweight Ole Andreson in “''The Killers''”; “''a sock on the jaw''” was not enough to settle the score.In an early draft of the story, the fighter was called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson.

For all that he joshed about minor and major contenders, Mailer’s sense of literary influence was—like everything else in his worldview—less teleological than dialectical, less a matter of drastic, once-and-for-all Oedipal action than a conversation between competing tastes and loyalties (Mailer, ''Pontifications'' 149). To develop as a writer, Mailer did not want to kill Hemingway off so much as to continue to spar with him, while also sparring with (among many others along the way) Henry Miller and Herman Melville. If “''Prelude—I''” of ''The Time of Our Time'' evokes Hemingway, the presiding figure of its concluding “''Acknowledgments and Appreciations''” is Dos Passos, whose 1936 trilogy ''USA'' Mailer once described as “''the most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century''” (Bruce and Webster 173). Setting up one “''great American author''” (Mailer, ''Pieces'' 87) or “''literary athlete''” (92) against another while, at the same time, looking forward to other juxtapositions—that was what boxing meant to Mailer: a way of exposing the truth that, in the ring or on the page, “''no two Americas will prove identical''” (''Time'' x). Nothing, as he liked to say, “''is settled after all''” (''Pieces'' 86).

===Works Cited===

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* {{cite book |last=Anderson |first=Sherwood |date=1933 |title=Death in the Woods and Other Stories |publisher=Liveright |location= |pages=95–108 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Anderson |first=Sherwood |date=1984 |title=Selected Letters |editor=Charles Modlin |publisher=University of Tennessee Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Apple |first=Max |date=1986 |title=The Oranging of America |publisher=Faber and Faber |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Baker |first=Carlos |date=1969 |title=Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story |publisher=Scribner’s |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Boddy |first=Kasia |date=2008 |title=Boxing: A Cultural History |publisher=Reaktion Books |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Bruccoli |first=Matthew J. |editor-last=Bruccoli |editor-first=Matthew J. |date=1971 |title=Ernest Hemingway’s Apprenticeship: Oak Park, 1916–1917 |publisher=NCR Microcard |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Callaghan |first=Morley E. |date=1963 |title=That Summer in Paris |publisher=Coward-McCann |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Dearborn |first=Mary V. |date=1999 |title=Mailer: A Biography |publisher=Houghton |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Donaldson |first=Scott |date=1999 |title=Hemingway vs. Fitzgerald: The Rise and Fall of a Literary Friendship |publisher=Overlook Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Early |first=Gerald |date=1989 |title=Tuxedo Junction: Essays on American Culture |publisher=Ecco Press |location= |pages=183–195 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Fiedler |first=Leslie |date=1964 |title=Waiting for the End |publisher=Penguin |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Gunn |first=Peter |date=1972 |title=Byron: Selected Letters and Journals |publisher=Penguin |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Healy |first=Thomas |date=1996 |title=A Hurting Game |publisher=Picador |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Heller |first=Peter |date=1994 |title=In This Corner...! 42 World Champions Tell Their Stories |publisher=Da Capo Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1966 |title=The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway |publisher=Scribner’s |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1985 |title=Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters, 1917–1961 |editor-first=Carlos |editor-last=Baker |publisher=Panther |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=2009 |title=A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition |publisher=Scribner’s |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Hemingway |first=Ernest |date=1976 |title=The Sun Also Rises |publisher=Flamingo |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Inglis |first=David L. |date=1974 |title=Morley Callaghan and the Hemingway Boxing Legend |publisher=Notes on Contemporary Literature |location= |pages=4–7 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Kazin |first=Alfred |date=1973 |title=Bright Book of Life |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Lennon |first=J. Michael |date=2003 |title=The Spooky Art: Some Thoughts on Writing |publisher=Random House |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Liebling |first=A. J. |date=1982 |title=The Sweet Science |publisher=Penguin |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1959 |title=Advertisements for Myself |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1965 |title=An American Dream |publisher=Dial Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1968 |title=The Armies of the Night |publisher=New American Library |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |publisher=Dial Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1955 |title=The Deer Park |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1975 |title=The Fight |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1991 |title=Harlot’s Ghost |publisher=Random House |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1973 |title=Marilyn |publisher=Grosset & Dunlap |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |title=King of the Hill |publisher=New American Library |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1982 |title=Pieces and Pontifications |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1963 |title=The Presidential Papers |publisher=G.P. Putnam’s Sons |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1971 |title=The Prisoner of Sex |publisher=Little, Brown & Co. |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=1998 |title=The Time of Our Time |publisher=Random House |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |date=2006 |title=The Big Empty |publisher=Nation Books |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Messenger |first=Christian |date=1987 |title=Norman Mailer: Boxing and the Art of His Narrative |publisher=Modern Fiction Studies |location= |pages=85–104 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Michaels |first=Walter Benn |date=1995 |title=Our America |publisher=Duke University Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Monteiro |first=George |date=1990 |title=This is My Pal Bugs: Ernest Hemingway’s “The Battler” |editor=Jackson J. Benson |publisher=Duke UP |location= |pages=224–228 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |date=1988 |title=The Hemingway Mystique |publisher=E. B. Dutton |location= |pages=301–309 |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |date=1974 |title=New Heaven, New Earth |publisher=Vanguard Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |date=1988 |title=On Boxing |publisher=Pan |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Oates |first=Joyce Carol |date=1988 |title=Our Private Lives |editor=Daniel Halpern |publisher=Ecco Press |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Poirier |first=Richard |date=1972 |title=Mailer |publisher=Fontana |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Roberts |first=Randy |date=1986 |title=Papa Jack: Jack Johnson and the Era of White Hopes |publisher=Robson Books |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=St. John |first=Bruce |date=1965 |title=John Sloan’s New York Scene |publisher=Harper |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

* {{cite book |last=Weatherby |first=W. J. |date=1977 |title=Squaring-Off: Mailer v. Baldwin |publisher=Robson Books |location= |pages= |ref=harv }}

@@ Line 58: / Line 58: @@
   ‘It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously. ‘I’ll bust him.’. . . . . . . . . . . ‘All you kids are tough.’‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.‘That’s what I said.’ (131)
-Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light
+Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light of the World”) seem to be Nick’s as he struggles to understand the relationship between the two men. White prizefighters, after all, were not supposed to have black friends. Bugs tells Nick a story about Ad which adds to his confusion. Ad had a woman manager, and it was always being “written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness” (136-37). Nick vaguely remembers this, but then Bugs adds,“[O]f course they wasn’t really brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way” (137). Bugs repeatedly stresses how “awful good-looking” the woman was, and how she “looked enough like him to be twins” (137). Some have read this admiring comment (along with the description of Ad’s face as “queerly formed” and his lips as “queer shaped” (131)) as a suggestion that the two men may be lovers. Less directly, like “The Light of the World,” the story slides anxiously between taboos—incest becomes homosexuality becomes miscegenation. The “perplexing behavior” of boxers once more promises to reveal the perplexing nature of masculinity, and again the boy flees (Brenner 159).
+What boxers reveal again and again is that the biggest of men are just “not big enough” to take on the “dark” and ambiguous world that surrounds the most well-regulated and well-lit ring, as the narrator of “Fifty Grand” notes (Hemingway 320). The first quotation above is from Mailer’s response to a question from his son, John Buffalo Mailer, about the relation between boxing and writing. A writer, he said, like a fighter, can come to realize that he’s “[b]ig, but not big enough” (''Big Empty'' 189). This is an insight that Nick Adams tries to avoid in “The Killers” (1927). Two men show up in a small-town café and hold the staff hostage as they wait for the man they want to kill, Ole Andreson, a former heavyweight boxer. When Nick, who has been in the café, tells Andreson about the men, the boxer says that nothing can be done to save him and turns his face to the wall. Little more than a page of this eleven-page story is devoted to Nick’s encounter with Andreson, but it changes everything. The gangsters dub Nick “bright boy,” but the story reveals how little he knows about power and powerlessness (Hemingway,“Killers” 283). In an attempt to escape his revelation—that the heavyweight, the epitome of masculinity, is not prepared to fight back—Nick decides to move on. “I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it” (289). As in the case of “The Battler” and “The Light of the World,” the story ends with Nick preparing to “get out of this town” (289).
+'''BOXING AS AMERICAN WAR'''
+The boxers in these stories reveal the ways in which seemingly solid distinctions between hypermasculinity and homosexuality, between whiteness and blackness or Jewishness—confront and often threaten to collapse into each other. As Walter Benn Michaels remarks of ''The Sun Also Rises'', “Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable” (''Our America'' 27). For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both “taken in hand” by Brett Ashley, “manipulated” in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capuchines (Hemingway, ''The Sun'' 8). There, a “girl assistant lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance, while she stands with “folded hands,” “looking away” (32).
+America (condensed into American masculinity) was, to use a favorite Mailer word, “schizoid,” and the boxing match—for Mailer much more persistently than for Hemingway—provided a metaphor or structure within which to explore its violently felt divisions. Like a literary Tex Rickard or Don King, Mailer specialized in setting up big matches: an essential masculinity is pitted against an essential femininity; an idealized heterosexuality confronts a mythical homosexuality; imaginary “blacks” encounter imaginary “whites.” The continuing clash of one hero against each other is what constitutes “[e]xistential politics” (Mailer, ''Presidential'' 6), and “form . . . is the record of a war . . . as seen in a moment of rest (''Cannibals'' 370). In fiction then, Mailer’s characters became the embodiments of opposing positions which need to be argued through; in non-fiction, he favored the Q&A, in which he could have “A Rousing Club Fight” with an interviewer (''Presidential'' 125), or sometimes enter the “arena” with an imagined alter ego (Existential 182-90). And sometimes genres—in particular, fiction and history—argue with each other. “[T]he element which is exciting, disturbing, nightmarish perhaps, is that incompatibles have come to bed” (''Advertisements'' 342).
+If all relationships have a comparable dialectic structure, then it makes equal sense to use the language of sex to describe boxing—the first fifteen seconds of a fight are equivalent “to the first kiss in a love affair”—and the language of boxing to describe sex (Existential 29). For the narrator of “''The Time of Her Time''” (1959), for example, the ''dialectic'' of sex stages conflicts between Jewishness and non-Jewishness, high culture and low culture, and even the competing therapeutic claims of Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich (''Advertisements'' 495). If conflict is the model for the relationship between men and women, men additionally face an internal battle between heterosexuality and homosexuality (Mailer does not think that women have this problem). So the brutal outcome of the 1962 fight between Emile Griffith and Benny (Kid) Paret is said to dramatize the ''biological force'' with which men disavow their inherent homosexuality (''Presidential'' 243). Paret had taunted Griffith with homophobic remarks at the weigh-in and during the fight, and Griffith responded by beating him to death. For Mailer, this is an example of the ring not doing its usual job of containing and controlling (or sublimating) sexual desire.
+The boxing ring also enacts, and thus mostly contains, another conflict that Mailer saw as fundamental to American culture of ''our time'', one between blacks and whites (''Time'' x). Again, the challenge is to foreground and disrupt familiar stereotypical dichotomies: between whites, who are civilized, sophisticated, cerebral, literate, and literary; and blacks, who are primitive, illiterate, attuned to the pleasures of the body, and fluent in its language (''Advertisements'' 341). James Baldwin (and many others) complained about Mailer’s tendency to see “''us as goddam romantic black symbols''” (''Weatherby'' 78). But Mailer saw everyone and everything symbolically. For Patterson vs. Liston, therefore, read Art vs. Magic, Love vs. Sex, God vs. the Devil.
+'''HEMINGWAY AND ALI: EXISTENTIAL EGO''' “I think there is a wonderful study to be made about the similarities between Ernest Hemingway and Muhammad Ali,” Mailer told Michael Lennon in 1980, making a start himself. Both men, he argued, “''come out of that same American urgency to be the only planet in existence''. ''To be the sun''”—and at the heart of each was a dialectical struggle that was somehow both personal and national (''Pontifications'' 161–162). The fact that “''the mightiest victim of injustice in America''” was also “the mightiest narcissist in the land,” he observed of Ali in 1971, proved that “''the twentieth century was nothing if not a tangle of opposition''” (''Existential'' 28). “''Ego''” (later renamed “''King of the Hill''”), an account of Ali’s comeback fight against Joe Frazier, is not only about a “''dialogue between bodies''” (''Norman'' 19) but about a dialogue within Ali himself. For Mailer, the triumph of the fight’s end is that Ali has somehow managed to reconcile his two ''sides''—he could dance, displaying ''exquisite'' grace, figured as black and feminine (86)—but he could also ''stand'', revealing, for the first time, qualities of endurance to ''moral and physical torture'', figured as white and masculine (93).
+Troublesome ''contradictions'' also “''[fall] away''” in ''The Fight'' (1974), an account of Ali’s “''Rumble in the Jungle''” with George Foreman. Once again, the issue is survival as much as victory. Mailer models his essay on Hazlitt’s 1821 piece of the same name. As Hazlitt’s narrator-protagonist begins by announcing his desire to escape the sentimental complications of daily life, Mailer declares his disappointing love affair with himself. As Hazlitt travels companionably to the heart of the country, discussing Cobbett and Rousseau en route, Mailer flies Pan Am to Conrad’s “''Heart of Darkness''” in Vachel Lindsay’s “''Congo'',” and on the return journey, plays dice with the air stewardess. Both men experience a “''restoration of being''” through journeys to watch boxing (''The Fight'' 239). But while Hazlitt ends by simply acknowledging the ephemeral achievement of both the boxing match and his own essay, Mailer wants more—nothing less, in fact, than the restoration of the title “''champ among writers''” (33). The book plays with various versions of magical thinking, but all are designed to the same end: “''the powers of regeneration in an artist''” (162). Ali works magic on Mailer by showing him that regeneration is possible; and set against his example is that of Hemingway, whose suicide fourteen years earlier haunts the book (123, 162). Ali, in other words, is both Hemingway and a kind of anti-Hemingway.
+'''BOXING WITH HEMINGWAY'''
+So what does it mean to box with another writer? For Hemingway, at least in his youth, the analogy expressed the inevitability of succession. Once a great boxer or writer had lost his crown, there was no reclaiming it. The old must give way to the new. So in 1924 he complained to Ezra Pound that the writers Ford Madox Ford was selecting for transatlantic review were the literary equivalents of Great White Hope Jim Jeffries, dragged out of retirement for one last fight: “''The thing to do with Ford is to kill him.... I am fond of Ford. This ain’t personal. It’s literary''” (''Ernest'' 116). Killing is also what Hemingway envisaged for Sherwood Anderson, reimagined as the has-been heavyweight Ole Andreson in “''The Killers''”; “''a sock on the jaw''” was not enough to settle the score.In an early draft of the story, the fighter was called Nerone; Hemingway changed the name to Anderson and then, finally, to Andreson.
+For all that he joshed about minor and major contenders, Mailer’s sense of literary influence was—like everything else in his worldview—less teleological than dialectical, less a matter of drastic, once-and-for-all Oedipal action than a conversation between competing tastes and loyalties (Mailer, ''Pontifications'' 149). To develop as a writer, Mailer did not want to kill Hemingway off so much as to continue to spar with him, while also sparring with (among many others along the way) Henry Miller and Herman Melville. If “''Prelude—I''” of ''The Time of Our Time'' evokes Hemingway, the presiding figure of its concluding “''Acknowledgments and Appreciations''” is Dos Passos, whose 1936 trilogy ''USA'' Mailer once described as “''the most successful portrait of America in the first half of the twentieth century''” (Bruce and Webster 173). Setting up one “''great American author''” (Mailer, ''Pieces'' 87) or “''literary athlete''” (92) against another while, at the same time, looking forward to other juxtapositions—that was what boxing meant to Mailer: a way of exposing the truth that, in the ring or on the page, “''no two Americas will prove identical''” (''Time'' x). Nothing, as he liked to say, “''is settled after all''” (''Pieces'' 86).
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+{{Refbegin}}