The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Norman Mailer's The Fight: Hemingway, Bullfighting, and the Lovely Metaphysics of Boxing: Difference between revisions

{{byline|last=Cirino|first=Mark|abstract=Mark Cirino is an author and academic. He teaches American literature at the University of Evansville.}}

Lillian Ross reports Hemingway re-telling the story in 1950, about a quarter-century later: “‘One time I asked Jack, speaking of a fight with Benny Leonard,’“How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?” “Ernie,” he said,“Benny {{pg|124|125}}is an awfully smart boxer. All the time he’s boxing, he’s thinking. All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him.” Hemingway gave a hoarse laugh, as though he had heard the story for the first time . . . He laughed again. ‘All the time he was thinking, I was hitting him’”(64). Ross implies surprise that this stale anecdote is so alive for Hemingway, standing in for the readers who may not have appreciated its importance. In his obnoxious essay “The Art of the Short Story,” written in 1959 and unpublished in his lifetime, Hemingway recollects of “Fifty Grand”: “This story originally started like this: “‘How did you handle Benny so easy, Jack?’ Soldier asked him. ‘Benny’s an awful smart boxer,’ Jack said. ‘All the time he’s in there, he’s thinking. All the time he’s thinking, I was hitting him’” (88–89). These examples demonstrate that his acquiescence to Fitzgerald’s editorial judgment in 1927 haunted him for three-and-a-half decades, literally until his death.1

To Mailer and Hemingway, the men who prevail within this organized violence transcend athletic excellence and attain the status of aesthetic and artistic exemplars. Mailer begins The Fight by describing Ali as “our most beautiful man” (3), just as Jake says that bullfighting prodigy Pedro Romero is the “best-looking boy I have ever seen”(167).2 Ali was thirty-two when the Rumble in the Jungle took place; Romero is no more than twenty. Mailer was fifty-one in Zaire; Hemingway turned twenty-six in the summer of 1925, when The Sun Also Rises was composed. If Ali and Romero serve as embodiments of male beauty, Hemingway also uses Romero as a counterbalance to the malaise that had infected the “lost” members of the post-war generation. When Robert Cohn laments, “my life is going so fast and I’m not really living it,” Jake responds, “Nobody ever lives their life all the way up except bull-fighters” (18). Fitzgerald texts like The Great Gatsby impute an additional intensity of experience to the wealthy; Hemingway ascribes this same quality to the courageous activity of bullfighters. Boxing is precisely the same. In the extended set-piece of the Ledoux-Francis fight that Hemingway sketched in the first draft of SAR, the characters remark on the fight and Ledoux in a way that previews their same awe of bullfighters. Bill Gorton tells Jake, “By God Ledoux is great”(Facsimile 233) and asks, “Why don’t they have guys like that in my business [that is, writing]?” (234). Bill later deflects a compliment by telling Jake,“I’m not such a good man as Ledoux” (234). In the same way, the bullfighter Maera, whom Hemingway kills off in Chapter XIV of In Our Time, is declared by Nick Adams to be “the greatest man he’d ever known”(NAS 237). Between Maera and James Joyce, Hemingway wrote Ezra Pound in 1924, there is “absolutely no comparison in art . . . Maera by a mile”(SL 119). Boxing and bullfighters emerge in these texts as ideals, both masculine and artistic.  

The artistic component of the allure of these sports is Mailer’s explicit{{pg|128|129}} reason for attending the Rumble in the Jungle. When Mailer attributes Fore- man’s reference to himself in the third person as equivalent to the “schizophrenia” that “great artists” possess (Fight 56), it echoes Hemingway’s Romero who “talked about his work as something altogether apart from himself” (SAR 178). For Mailer, though, the real artist is of course not Foreman, but Ali. “If ever a fighter,” Mailer writes, “had been able to demonstrate that boxing was a twentieth century art, it must be Ali” (Fight 162). Hemingway writes in Death in the Afternoon that the only trait separating bull-fighting from its inclusion as one of the major arts is its impermanence. In The Dangerous Summer, Hemingway pointedly compares bullfighting to art: “A bullfighter can never see the work of art that he is making. He has no chance to correct it as a painter or writer has. He cannot hear it as a musician can  All the time, he is making his work of art he knows that he must keep within the limits of his skill and the knowledge of the animal” (198).3 Whether Hemingway is posturing in an intentionally provocative way or not—he surely enjoyed presenting himself as the only novelist who would prefer to be Maera killing a bull than Joyce writing Ulysses—it is sufficient to note that in his career-long characterizations of bullfighters, he saw artistry and exemplary conduct when they excelled during their performances, and displayed high and noble aims in their approaches to their work. The crucial way that bullfighting is instructive to a reading of The Fight emerges when Mailer captures Ali’s demeanor in the ring and the strategy he uses to dismantle and ultimately defeat Foreman. This exalted strategy is two-fold: in the first round, Ali relies on the enormously dangerous right-hand leads to score against Foreman. The audacity of this means of attack is captured in italicized awe in The Fight. It is not a right, but a right. “Right-hand leads!” Mailer exults, “My God!” (180). He explains the technicality that leading with the right “is the most difficult and dangerous punch. Difficult to deliver and dangerous to oneself”(179). Hemingway makes the same observation in Romero’s code of performance, which is that he has “the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure” (SAR 172). Ali might have danced his way to victory against Foreman, but he did not. He deftly took on the punishment of a much stronger man, and attacked in a way that would leave himself vulnerable, all in the hopes of sapping Foreman’s power. These are the qualities which Hemingway and Mailer extol.  

Mailer’s hagiography of Ali, then, becomes the more vital when we go be- yond his admiration for the fighter to recognize why this admiration was so profound. Ali’s preparation for the Foreman fight (in the 234-page Vintage edition of The Fight, the opening bell to the knockout is confined to pages 177–210; thus, in a book called The Fight, only fourteen percent of the book chronicles the fight)4 follows El Gallo’s logical yet somewhat counter-intuitive training procedure. Mailer reports that Ali confesses, “Foreman can hit harder than me”(16). During the uninspired sparring session that opens The Fight, Ali’s strategy is presaged. Since he knows he cannot compete with Foreman’s strength, Ali contrives to use Foreman’s strength against him. Mailer chronicles this strategy meticulously, writing of Ali that “part of his art was to reduce the force of each blow he received to the head and then fraction it further” (4). Art? An art to getting hit in the face? If so, it is coupled by fractioning, a melding of the art of war and the sweet science of boxing. Ali consciously courts the same dichotomy that Mailer proposes. Skipping rope in his training quarters, he barks out, “I’m a brain fighter. I’m scientific. I’m artistic” (When We Were Kings). The marriage of art and science continues when Mailer describes “the second half of the art of getting hit was to learn the trajectories with which punches glanced off your glove and still hit you” (Fight 5). If the study of trajectories is associated with physics, Ali the artist is associated with dance and writing and theatre. This almost suicidal strategy—unappreciated, Mailer suggests, by lesser minds like sportswriters and fight critics—recalls the “calculus” with which {{pg|130|131}}Hemingway claimed he wrote Across the River and Into the Trees, destined for dismissal by ignorant critics. Mailer is unapologetic about twinning art and boxing: he references Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” Moby Dick, and even Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, reaching to masterpieces of art and literature to evoke athletic performance.  

But Mailer is not through. When he puts forth Ali’s quandary once the fight is under his control, that he must choose between a victory by either a lethargic decision or the flourish of a spectacular knockout, he is compared to “a torero after a great faena who must still face the drear potential of a protracted inept and disappointing kill,” while Foreman remains “a bull”(200). In the sixth round, by which time the bout’s fate is foretold, Ali sizes {{pg|132|133}}up Foreman “the way a bullfighter lines up a bull before going in over the horns for the kill . . . a fair conclusion was that the bull still had an access of strength too great for the kill” (202). In a sequence where Mailer would make dozens of comparisons, frantically seeking metaphorical images to convey the magnitude of the scene, his clinging to bullfighting imagery is striking thematically and strategically, even if the image might only resonate with a specialist, with himself, or with a fellow aficionado of Death in the Afternoon.5 When Mailer compares Foreman’s clumsiness to “a street fighter at the end of a long rumble” (204), the reader does not require any special base of knowledge to access the comparison.  

Mailer shares Hemingway’s fascination with a matador killing recibiendo. His miniaturized version of Death in the Afternoon, published in 1967, called simply The Bullfight,6 describes this classic style of killing with a sense of awe, and is worth quoting at length:  

By leaning back against the ropes and inciting Foreman’s charge, Ali displays the same bravado, courage, and panache in dominating his opponent as these matadors who Mailer and Hemingway laud with such emotion.7

Just as Hemingway mimics Romero’s clarity, classicism, and linearity in prose,8 Mailer links the passes of his narrative, endeavoring to reach a narrative climax just as the fight reaches its dramatic climax in the eighth round. Unlike Hemingway, who did not cling to figurative language in a conspicuous quest to have the reader understand perfectly a situation which he might not have ever seen before, Mailer’s sequence of comparisons rises to the task as the most memorable writerly performance in his account of the “Rumble in the Jungle.”