The Mailer Review/Volume 4, 2010/Inside Norman Mailer: Difference between revisions

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 ==IV==
+The problem now is as old as realism. You don’t want all the grunts, the
+shortness of breath, the sound of leather on skin, and I don’t want to tell you in great detail. But it’s all there, the throwing of punches, the clinches, the head butting, the swelling of injured faces. If I forget to, then you put it in. For I am too busy taking the measure of my opponent to feel the slap of his glove against my flesh. The bell has moved us into a new field of force. We drop our pens. The spotlight is the glare of eternity, and what it has all come to is simply the matter of Truth. “Existentialist” I call him, spitting out my mouthpiece, though in practice I have recited Peter Piper a dozen times and kept the mouthpiece in. “Dated existentialist. Insincere existentialist.
+Jewish existentialist . . . ” I hit him with this smooth combination, but he continues to rush me bearlike, serene, full of skill and power.
+“Campy lightweight,” he yells, in full charge as I sidestep his rush and he
+tangles his upper body in the ropes.
+I come up behind, and as well as I can with the gross movement of the
+glove I pull back his head and expose the blue gnarled cacophony of his neck.
+“I am Abraham and you the ram caught in the thicket,” I announce from behind. “I have been an outcast in many lands, I bear the covenant, and you {{pg|509|510}} full of power and goatish lust, you carry the false demon out of whose curved horn I will blow my own triumph and salvation.”
+“How unlike an Abraham thou art,” he responds, gasping from his entanglement in the ropes. “Where is thy son then and where thy handmaiden Hagar, whom thou so ungenerously got with a child of false promise and then discarded into the wilderness? Thou art an assumer of historical identities, a chameleon of literary pretension.”
+I reach into the empty air for the sword of slaughter when Archie Moore separates us, rights Mailer, and warns me about hair pulling and exposing the
+jugular of my opponent.
+Now we stalk one another at center ring. He, not having trained, not having rested, not having regarded my challenge as serious, he is ready almost at once to revert to instinctive behavior. He wants it all animal now and tries
+to bite off his glove so that he can come atme with ten fingers. But I am still in the airy realms of the mind. I see and discern his actions. How coarse appears the Mailer saliva upon his worn gloves, how disgusting his tongue and
+crooked teeth as they nibble at the strings. His mouth has become as a loom with the glove lace moving between his teeth on the slow, feeble power of his
+tongue.
+“The Industrial Revolution,” I yell across the ring, and his gloves drop, his mouth is open and agape. I land a hard right to his jaw and feel the ligaments stretch. At the bell he is dazed and hurt. He moves to his corner like an old man in an unemployment line.
+I stand in the middle of the ring and watch the slow shuffle toward comfort of this man whom most enlightened folks thought I could not withstand for even three minutes. So carefully have I trained, so honest has been
+my fifteen miles of daily roadwork that the first round of exertion has
+scarcely left me breathless. While Norman is in his corner swishing his
+mouth, having his brow mopped, I am in mid-ring, stunned with my opening achievement. I have stayed a full round with him. I have seen the fear in his eyes and the beast in his soul. I have felt the heft of his sweating form in a heavy embrace. In the clinch, as our protective cups clicked against each other, there have I surmised his lust. For three metaphysical moments we two white men have embraced in violence while old black Archie pares his perfect fingernails in the midst of us.
+“Don’t forget the game plan,” Teddy is yelling from my corner. He wants
+my help in pulling the blackboard through the ropes. I come out of my {{pg|510|511}}reverie to help him. Oh, I have been waiting for this moment, and now but
+for good old Teddy I might have forgotten. Like the most careful teacher printing large block letters for an eager second grade, I inscribe and turn to four sides so all can see, “The Naked and the Dead Is His Best Work.”
 {{Review}}
 {{DEFAULTSORT:Inside Norman Mailer}}
 [[Category:Short Stories (MR)]]