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

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” (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.  

“Fifty Grand,” included in Hemingway’s second volume of short stories, Men Without Women (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|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’”(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.{{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” (Reynolds, Paris Years 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” (Reynolds, Young Hemingway 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 The Sun Also Rises, what he perceived to be Hemingway’s “tendency to envelope or . . . to ''embalm'' in mere wordiness an anecdote or joke” (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” (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” (King of the Hill 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.  

Beegel, Susan F. (1988). Hemingway’s Craft of Omission: Four Manuscript Examples (Print). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press.

Bruccoli, Matthew J. (1996). The Only Thing That Counts: Ernest Hemingway-Maxwell Perkins Correspondence (Print). -New York: Scribner.

____ (2003). The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway: The Finca Vigía Edition (Print). New York: Scribner’s.