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{{dc|dc=A|LTHOUGH NORMAN MAILER’ S ''THE FIGHT'' IS OSTENSIBLY REPORTAGE}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa. | {{dc|dc=A|LTHOUGH NORMAN MAILER’ S ''THE FIGHT'' IS OSTENSIBLY REPORTAGE}} about the Muhammad Ali-George Foreman championship heavyweight boxing match in Zaire on 30 October 1974, we learn more about Mailer and his aesthetic and artistic values than we do about either fighter. We also learn far more than Mailer’s thoughts on boxing; we glean a broader metaphysical and philosophic notion of action and danger, and the writer’s own role in recording it in prose. One of Mailer’s methods for capturing his Zaire experience is to employ Ernest Hemingway as a ghostly father figure, a ''doppelgänger'', both an inspiration and a nagging reminder of his own inadequacies. Hemingway, whose suicide was thirteen years before the fight, is still active in Mailer’s text, who was enjoying a consciously Hemingwayesque project in Africa. | ||
In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face” {{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}. This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In [[The Fight]], Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite {{pg|123|124}}comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in | In Chuck Klosterman’s recent assessment of Norman Mailer as a boxing writer, he writes that “there is nothing metaphysical about getting punched in the face” {{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}. This assertion suggests that Klosterman either has never been punched in the face or was concentrating on the wrong sensation when he was. Mailer and Hemingway represent the boxing ring and the bullfighting arena as possessing such metaphysical possibilities that they invite us to appreciate each of their values in human behavior and the qualities they demand their artists to possess. In [[The Fight]], Mailer’s conspicuous comparisons of boxing to bullfighting, Hemingway, and to art further invite {{pg|123|124}}comparison to Hemingway’s earlier texts. In all instances, we see Mailer and Hemingway with their incisive, intellectual evocations of men of thought (that is, Ali, and any quintessential Hemingway Hero, such as Robert Jordan in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'' or his short story alter ego Nick Adams) in moments of peak activity. So, if Klosterman limits the transcendence of boxing simply to “primordial reality” and the “base qualities of being alive” {{sfn|Klosterman|2008|p=56}}, he sharply diverges from Mailer and Hemingway, who find in the maelstrom of a boxing match or the murderous possibilities of a bullring, life’s truest, most elevated and aesthetic moments. “Every wound,” Mailer observes in [[The Fight]], “has its own revelation” {{sfn|Mailer|1975|p=214}}, both promising the importance of chronicling the defeated and the damaged and signaling his own fascination and debt to the warriors and athletes and even artists of the Hemingway canon. While Mailer may be overly epigrammatic, this aphorism accurately synopsizes the “wound theory” of criticism that defined (and later encumbered) Hemingway Studies for decades. | ||
To Hemingway, boxing might have been important for more complex reasons than many readers ever understood. A celebrated example of this tension offers a useful illustration. The sordid history behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” is relevant not as a salacious biographical anecdote or to provide retrospective textual minutiae. Instead, this conflict’s enduring controversy is itself the issue, one that reveals a major facet of Hemingway’s approach to character, and the larger importance of boxing to Hemingway and writers that would follow, primarily Mailer. | To Hemingway, boxing might have been important for more complex reasons than many readers ever understood. A celebrated example of this tension offers a useful illustration. The sordid history behind F. Scott Fitzgerald’s revisions to Hemingway’s short story “Fifty Grand” is relevant not as a salacious biographical anecdote or to provide retrospective textual minutiae. Instead, this conflict’s enduring controversy is itself the issue, one that reveals a major facet of Hemingway’s approach to character, and the larger importance of boxing to Hemingway and writers that would follow, primarily Mailer. | ||
“Fifty Grand,” included in Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, | “Fifty Grand,” included in Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, ''Men Without Women''{{sfn|Hemingway|2003|p=1927}}, was inspired by the anecdote with which the typescript draft begins: | ||
{{cquote|Up at the gym over the Garden one time somebody says to Jack, “Say Jack how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” And Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}}} | {{cquote|Up at the gym over the Garden one time somebody says to Jack, “Say Jack how did you happen to beat Leonard anyway?” And Jack says, “Well, you see Benny’s an awful smart boxer. All the time he’s in there he’s thinking and all the time he’s thinking I was hitting him.”{{sfn|Beegel|1988|p=15}}}} | ||
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’”{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=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{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=88}}'". 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.{{efn|Elsewhere, Hemingway remarks on the intelligence of fighters just as he evaluates their physical skill: in 1922, Hemingway describes Battling Siki, the challenger to Georges Carpentier, “siki tough slowthinker but mauling style may puzzle carp” | 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’”{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=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{{sfn|Ross|1961|p=88}}'". 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.{{efn|Elsewhere, Hemingway remarks on the intelligence of fighters just as he evaluates their physical skill: in 1922, Hemingway describes Battling Siki, the challenger to Georges Carpentier, “siki tough slowthinker but mauling style may puzzle carp” {{sfn|Reynolds|1989|p=73}}, . In his early journalism, Hemingway reports that, “Jack Dempsey has an imposing list of knockouts over bums and tramps, who were nothing but big slow-moving, slow-thinking set ups for him” {{sfn|Reynolds|1976|p=192}}. Indeed, the payoff of “Fifty Grand”—when Jack Brennan double crosses the double crossers—comes when Jack says, “It’s funny how fast you can think when it means that much money” (CSS 249).}} | ||
Fitzgerald’s objection to Hemingway opening the short story with the boxing anecdote was like his misgivings about the original beginning of | Fitzgerald’s objection to Hemingway opening the short story with the boxing anecdote was like his misgivings about the original beginning of ''The Sun Also Rises'', what he perceived to be Hemingway’s “tendency to envelope or . . . to ''embalm'' in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke” {{sfn|Hemingway|p=142|emphasis in original}}. As Susan Beegel notes in her discussion of Hemingway’s impulse to include the anecdote, “Thinking takes time, and boxing is a sport in which speed is of the essence” {{sfn|Beegel|p=15}}. Beegel’s point must be extended: life, at times, is a sport in which speed is of the essence, particularly if it is to be lived to its fullest. As we see in Mailer—think of [[The Naked and the Dead]] and certainly [[The Fight]]—Hemingway placed all his characters in situations in which a quick, strategic, pragmatic response is more appropriate than contemplation and conceptualization, despite the characters’ natural inclinations to indulge their memories, imaginative speculation, and ruminations. Muhammad Ali, after all, is no mindless slugger; he is portrayed as a genius, a scientist, an artist, or a “brain fighter,” in the champ’s own words. More than a boxer, Mailer considers Ali “the first psychologist of the body” {{sfn|Mailer|p=23}}, suggesting that his power is in his mind, as opposed to the brute force, the rage, and the animalistic approach of Foreman and Joe Frazier. | ||
But why did Hemingway’s remorse over deferring to Fitzgerald’s suggestions for “Fifty Grand” fester for the rest of his life? After all, what does one paragraph matter? In “The Art of the Short Story,” Hemingway recounts his version of the circumstances behind the editorial change, and his regret over excising “that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing” | But why did Hemingway’s remorse over deferring to Fitzgerald’s suggestions for “Fifty Grand” fester for the rest of his life? After all, what does one paragraph matter? In “The Art of the Short Story,” Hemingway recounts his version of the circumstances behind the editorial change, and his regret over excising “that lovely revelation of the metaphysics of boxing” {{sfn|Hemingway|p=89}}. {{pg|125|126}} | ||
Hemingway’s essay taunts Fitzgerald for not appreciating that Hemingway was “trying to explain to him how a truly great boxer like Jack Britton functioned” | Hemingway’s essay taunts Fitzgerald for not appreciating that Hemingway was “trying to explain to him how a truly great boxer like Jack Britton functioned”{{sfn|Hemingway|p=89}}. The manuscript of “Fifty Grand” betrays Hemingway’s bitterness: on it, he scrawled, “1st 3 pages mutilated by Scott Fitzgerald” {{sfn|Burwell|p=148}}. How can one writer—particularly an established one, which by 1927 Hemingway was—blame a colleague for ruining his own text? This irrational grudge must have endured so persistently because Hemingway disobeyed his instincts as a writer, ironically behaving with the same lack of intuitive trust as the excerpt negatively portrays Benny Leonard. Hemingway obeyed Fitzgerald to great success with ''The Sun Also Rises'', did so again the following year with “Fifty Grand,” and, by 1929, responded to Fitzgerald’s criticisms of A Farewell to Arms with “Kiss my ass” {{sfn|Reynolds|p=78}}. | ||
Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action. Hemingway’s portrayal of thinking during war takes this idea to the extreme. In Hemingway’s introduction to Men at War, the anthology of war writing he edited, he writes, “Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have” | Fitzgerald and others have misconstrued aspects of Hemingway’s objectives, which Mailer grasped intuitively and intellectually. The central thrust to Hemingway’s literary project was to dramatize the compromised functioning of thought as the modern consciousness is incorporated into the violent activities of the twentieth-century man of action. Hemingway’s portrayal of thinking during war takes this idea to the extreme. In Hemingway’s introduction to ''Men at War'', the anthology of war writing he edited, he writes, “Cowardice, as distinguished from panic, is almost always simply a lack of ability to suspend the functioning of the imagination. Learning to suspend your imagination and live completely in the very second of the present minute with no before and no after is the greatest gift a soldier can acquire. It, naturally, is the opposite of all those gifts a writer should have” | ||
{{sfn|Hemingway|p=xxiv}}. Hemingway’s articulation of this conflict is a revelation: he is disclosing the tension that defines his work, the internal struggle between a man of action and a man of thought. Hemingway is distinguishing between the curse of Ishmael and the curse of Stubb in ''Moby-Dick'': Ishmael cannot turn the thinking off; for him, the sea and meditation are inextricable, even when he is on the night watch; Ahab’s eleventh commandment, on the other hand, is: do not think. | |||
This dichotomy is always in play in the Hemingway text, and sometimes baldly explicit. Early in ''For Whom the Bell Tolls'', for example, Robert Jordan coaxes himself, “Turn off the thinking now . . . You’re a bridge-blower now. Not a thinker”{{sfn|Hemingway|p=17}}, just as he later disingenuously asserts, “My mind is in suspension until we win the war”{sfn|Hemingway|p=245}}. In a 1938 letter to Maxwell Perkins, {{pg|126|127}}Hemingway blames his depressed mood on the rigors of living in a Spanish war zone while simultaneously trying to write his stories of the Spanish Civil War: “If I sound bitter or gloomy throw it out. It’s that it takes one kind of training and frame of mind to do what I’ve been doing and another to write prose”{{sfn|Bruccoli|p=253}}. Ultimately, Hemingway’s contribution to the psychological novel, and to literary Modernism’s conception of mind, is his depiction of how a human being thinks during episodes of great stress, including matadors, boxers, and soldiers, as well as those haunted by their memories of those experiences. | |||
For the purposes of Mailer’s and Hemingway’s intertextuality, boxing and bullfighting are virtually synonymous. Each sport affords the spectator an opportunity to witness violence in a largely—but not completely—sanitized outlet. ''In The Sun Also Rises'', a novel that essentially introduced the bullfight to mainstream American consciousness, boxing and bullfighting are explicitly compared. In addition to the scapegoat Robert Cohn’s dubious (but eventually demonstrable) boxing background, Jake Barnes and his friend Bill Gorton attend the Ledoux-Kid Francis fight in Paris less than a week be- fore their excursion to the Pamplona bullfights. Later, during the ''desencajonada'', or unloading of the bulls, however, Jake constructs the simile of bullfighting to boxing. He tells Brett Ashley, “Look how he knows how to use his horns . . . He’s got a left and right just like a boxer.” As Brett confirms, “I saw him shift from his left to his right horn”{{sfn|Hemingway|1996|p=144}}. The two activities are clearly appealing to Hemingway: one man, by himself, confronting his own limits as he encounters an attacker with his skill, knowledge, courage, and mind control. Both activities are ritual performances, yet both flirt with the possibility of death, danger, crippling injury, as well as murder. | |||
In Mailer, similarly, the allure of boxing seems to be the formalized structure of a violent situation as an attenuated restatement of war experience. Mailer has suggested as much, saying that boxing presents “a way for a violent man to begin to comprehend that living in a classic situation—in other words, living within certain limitations rather than expressing oneself uncontrollably is a way to live that he didn’t have before”{{sfn|Mailer|2006|p=185}}. Mailer’s articulation is anticipated by Jake Barnes himself, who explains the process to Brett so that the bullfight “became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors” (171); in other words, the difference between bullfighting/boxing and war. Just as Mailer differentiates between a championship boxing match between {{pg|127|128}}professionals and a street fight, Hemingway distinguishes between a properly sanctioned bullfight and an amateur bullfight: “The amateur bullfight is as unorganized as a riot and all results are uncertain, bulls or men may be killed; it is all chance and the temper of the populace. The formal bullfight is a commercial spectacle built on the planned and ordered death of the bull and that is its end” (DIA 372). If the Marquis of Queensbury rules codify violence in boxing and allow it to transcend a back-alley brawl, Hemingway and Mailer are always conscious of this spectrum of violence and its relative level of chaos. | |||
In Mailer, similarly, the allure of boxing seems to be the formalized structure of a violent situation as an attenuated restatement of war experience. Mailer has suggested as much, saying that boxing presents “a way for a violent man to begin to comprehend that living in a classic situation—in other words, living within certain limitations rather than expressing oneself uncontrollably is a way to live that he didn’t have before” | |||
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).{{efn|After Ali’s victory, Mailer suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome” (212)}} 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. | 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).{{efn|After Ali’s victory, Mailer suggests that “Maybe he never appeared more handsome” (212)}} 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. | ||