The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/All You Need is Glove: Difference between revisions

Byron and Keats were boxing fans. Conan Doyle made Sherlock Holmes an amateur pugilist. Jack London led a search for a “Great White Hope.” George Orwell, who would have much to say about violence, was a schoolboy boxer, and Albert Camus a capable amateur. George Bernard Shaw, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Bukowski ... the roster of boxing’s bedazzled is both pedigreed and diverse.

Scott Fitzgerald, object of platonic passion, manages to bruise a hapless Papa, head and heart, without tossing a punch, and even Oscar Wilde makes an unexpected appearance.

Rodwan helps to sort out this heavyweight welter of sport, politics, celebrity and pop psychology in which so many were able to see exactly what they wanted to see (a McLuhanism comes to mind: “I wouldn‘t have seen it if I hadn’t believed it”): prismatic Ali the apparent envy of scribes less facile at persuasive charm, guile and misdirection, without which narrative does not dance, but sags into the canvas.

We gawk in ''Tyson'' at a haunted man, strange yet familiar, his remorse and self-loathing convincing beyond craft, bizarrely framed by a filmmaker more arch than artist. The savage mauler of memory sits stonily in mood-lit profile, Hamlet as Elephant Man, and fed doctored reflections.

In ''The Cinderella Man Fairytale,'' Rodwan brings to earth the myth of James J.Braddock, “a strong but limited fighter” who succeeded little in life’s basic tests, but rode an inspirational wave as one of the first to tap a boxer’s “special capacity to become emblematic figures of their time.” Rodwan echoes the familiar—and cinematic—notion that certain eras in history cry out for heroes, searching for the genuine and admirable in the contrasting personalities of the prosaic stevedore Braddock and the flashy but lackadaisical Max Baer, who presaged the media-milkers to come more than the laconic Louis, who was soon to stand colossus-like astride a rare, exhilarating confluence of fistic spectacle and world history.

Although a bit disjointed—the essays are neither closely connected nor presented as such—Rodwan is steadily engaging. Some of Rodwan’s personal essays, as much of life’s soft parade, are trivial. In ''Weight Loss: A Love Story,'' Rodwan weds logic to romance through the scrupulous gleaning of the proper foods for his hypoglycemic wife, while providing quixotic inspiration through his own gut-busting exertions. We get the practical appreciation of a fighter’s heart in a slightly-saggy everyman’s body. Boxing, the author maintains, being a sport where a fighter’s inattention to his weight can have fell consequence, gave him “a perspective on size, one that I found changed as my body did.” The equation between self-image and exercise as a habit, then, defines the price of admission to the boxer’s world.

''A First Class Sport'' is a breath of fresh air along Rodman’s promenade. The phrase was coined by everybody’s favorite tough-guy president, Teddy Roosevelt, who as New York’s police commissioner, when cops still rode horses, staunchly averred that “the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs.” First as governor, then as president, he would occasionally don the gloves, not leery of making a bad impression.

A twelve-year-old Cassius Clay’s first trainer is a policeman in a neighborhood gym, where the pumped-up boy has come to report a stolen bicycle. Larry Holmes, who before following Ali as heavyweight champion had been a petty criminal and drug dealer, boxes first as a boy in PAL-organized bouts in Pennsylvania. Few writers could more eloquently express than the stolid ex-champion why he found himself through boxing, or the sport’s broader significance: “People express themselves differently. Painters paint, writers write, dancers dance. I discovered I needed physical contact to let what was in me come out.”

Over the years, muscular exercises in ribald badinage such as Pat and Mike and ''The Philadelphia Story'' established a salutary pugilism between clever men and women, toothsome adversaries, bent on loosing kindred angels from first row to balcony. Violence was mostly theatrical, and the theater had walls.

The journalist, however intrepid or self-possessed, confronting what Amis calls “a world of perfect terror and perfect boredom,” is faced with the same dilemma as the other-directed, would-be reader. He is caught in a world where the numbing possibility of extreme, sudden violence is all around, while incidents of personal involvement with violence and tests of imminent physical danger become ever fewer, an inexpressible irony no poultice of gadgetry and spattered crimson image can mollify.

There is in Rodwan the suggestion that today’s writer, self-appointed priest in a vanishing church of print, wears uneasily a burden of responsibility to taste life at its extremes, the better to proffer menus to the meek. The parallel between fighter and writer becomes more the whimsical conceit of the writer, anxious of the masculinity of his chosen bread and butter, sublimating with virtuosity what cannot be shown in action.

Although he likens the “artful evisceration” of critics trying to “outshine Amis’s authorial flair” to “a degraded version of Ali’s style of taunting his opponents,” it is clear that the tenuous metaphor between boxing and violence has come under considerable strain, with ad hominem and hyperbole increasingly the arsenal of the infuriated and morally outraged, where pointed plain speaking once sufficed. Fathers who did not dance have sons who play air guitar. While the spectacle of boxing has, to be sure, changed little, the nature of violence, as Amis insists in his “The Second Plane,” has.

As Rodman’s many-voiced analysis of this episode infers, the lippy Ali and the laconic Louis each jogged people free of preconceptions, but did it in different ways. To some extent each was a helpless fulcrum for forces playing out about them. Louis, by and large, had only to go with history’s flow, Fate having provided no lesser dragon than Hitler for him to slay. Before even entering the ring for Louis-Schmeling II, Louis was a champion on multiple levels. He was not, as Jack Johnson had been, the black fighting the white; he was the American fighting the German.

You can almost hear Mailer chuckling when, in ''The Spooky Art,'' he refers to his being provided “a false legend of much machismo.” Yet, as one who had the pleasure of sharing a ring with the man, I can tell you it is true: when style failed, Norman would just block a punch or three with his face, bearing down, relentless, clubbing like a Kodiak bear. Those jealous of his galling facility with language, as with Amis’s detractors, will conveniently question the manhood behind the words. In the case of Norman Mailer, there was nothing false about it.

Recognizing that pernicious streak in man that delights in finding inconsistencies in those we hate—or grudgingly admire—Rodwan asks, “Was Orwell, decency’s advocate, merely a fraud?” The author, plainly troubled that the reputation of one synonymous with clarity and justice might be vitiated by even the rumor of a single incongruous ugliness, finds himself poring over Orwell’s collected work for any clues about his attitudes toward women. In the end,he bemoans “the inevitability of failure in reaching complete truth.”

The title essay in ''Fighters and Writers'' offers a last hurrah to all working stiffs blessed to have just enough Mickey Spillane in the blood to hear their romantic inner drummer over the clatter of the morning commute. It opens with a banner on the wall of Gleason’s Gym—from Virgil: “Now, whoever has courage and a strong and collected spirit in his breast let him come forward, lace on the gloves and put his hands up.”

For all, ugliness and beauty blur in the beholder’s fevered eye. In arenas of dreams, you pays your money and you takes your chance.

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