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In 1998, Norman Mailer Published The Time of Our Time , a 1,300 page retrospective of his own work, covering not simply of the “fifty years of American time” which had passed since his first novel, The Naked and the Dead, had appeared but also the previous nineteen, as Mailer had understood them (ix). The book begins with two “preludes,” the first, an account of the “historic afternoon” in June 1929 when Morley Callaghan floored Ernest Hemingway in a boxing ring at the American Club in Paris, is entitled “Boxing with Hemingway."

It is often assumed that the relationship between Mailer, Hemingway and boxing is a matter of simple repetition. As Hemingway sought to “square up” Turgenev, Maupassant and Tolstoy in order to become the heavy weight “champion” of the literary world (Hemingway, Selected Letters 673),so Mailer aspired to become the next generation's “novelist as giant” by taking on and superseding Hemingway (Mailer, Cannibals 96). Mailer himself then became “the man to beat for the men and women who punch out words” (Healy 173) so Max Apple imagines being “Inside Norman Mailer” (49) while Joyce Carol Oates fantasizes about “eat[ing] Mailer’s heart” (Our Private Lives 335). But it may not be as straightforward as all that.

Mailer was certainly happy to use boxing to express competitiveness. If the original Romantic writer as boxer Lord Byron had dismissed the “quarrels of authors” as an inferior form of sparring, mere evidence of “an irritable set” (Gunn 142), Mailer believed that regular spats with other male writers at parties, during protest marches and, mostly, on TV was an essential part of “keep[ing] in shape” (Cannibals 217). The chat show provided an ideal forum for literary quarrels which Mailer repeatedly imagined as boxing matches. After an appearance with Nelson Algren, for example, he concluded that “[t]wo middleweight artists had fought a draw” (Cannibals 178). His much publicized quarrel with Gore Vidal on The Dick Cavett Show in 1971 was a less satisfactory affair. Sharing the couch with the two men was Janet Flanner, whom Mailer accused of being “Mr. Vidal’s manager” instead of the “referee” (Mailer, Pieces 65); at the end of the Show, Cavett asked the audience to “let us know who you think won” (73).

How seriously should we take all this? Mailer once declared himself the “Ezzard Charles of the heavyweight division” (Pontifications 161) and argued that to claim the title in the sixties was hardly hubris when the competition “was so minor” (Cannibals 124). To announce that “‘I’m going to be the champ until one of you knocks me off ’” was, Mailer suggested, simply a way of offering Baldwin, Bellow and the others a little encouragement (Pieces 70). But “champ” was just one of many “half-heroic and three-quarters comic” advertisements for himself that he cultivated (Pontifications 153). In The Armies of the Night (1968), for example, he noted the instability of his speaking voice at the Pentagon demonstration against the Vietnam war; how, without any plan, his accent shifted from Irish to Texan, from “Marlon Brando’s voice in The Wild One” (127) to some “Woo-eeeee’s" and grunts which showed “hints of Cassius Clay” (48). Eventually he tried “to imitate a most high and executive voice,” but that too came out as “[s]hades of Cassius Clay” (60). The extent to which Mailer played with, or cultivated for effect, a “false legend of much machismo” is often forgotten (Pieces 21).

Mailer's humor, and his self-mocking presentation of manliness as an elaborately constructed masquerade, has often been missed in discussions of his relationship with Hemingway. Most commentators read their respective claims of champ (or should that be “dumb ox”?) as indicators of a straightforward genealogy of decline of an easy to understand (and thus easy to dismiss) machismo; the passage from writer to writer providing a pale imitation of the “series of punches on the nose” said to connect the bare knuckle fighter Bob Fitzsimmons to his feeble, gloved successors (Liebling 1). As John Whalen-Bridge has noted, it was not unusual for Mailer’s obituaries to announce that he had “wanted,” and failed, “to be the Hemingway of his generation,” thus refusing to recognize “that Mailer, in presenting himself as a 'poor man's papa' offered a parodic, postmodern rejuvenation and not a wannabe” (181–82).

While it would be misleading to deny that, for both, to talk of writing in relation to boxing was a way of talking about ambition and manliness as well as literature, the precise “equation of masculinity with greatness in literature," as Oates puts it, is hardly self-evident (“Hemingway Mystique” 303).

BOXING AS AMERICAN CRAFT For Mailer, Hemingway represented a distinct variety of the “quintessentially American”— the kind that responds to “legitimate” fears of “the river,” or “chaos,” by writing about, and indeed enacting, the effort to secure “the camp” (Pieces 92). By constructing, and reducing, style, Hemingway created both a circumscribed “mold into which everything else had to fit” and a kind of “rabbit’s foot” (Kazin 5).

Hemingway’s view of boxing is closely connected to this conception of style—what Alfred Kazin describes as the modernist “dream of literature as perfect order” (15). But, of course, it was only ever a dream. In practice, as The Sun Also Rises (1926) suggests, boxing and writing are seldom perfectly ordered. Boxing is first introduced into the novel as the sport of amateurs such as Robert Cohn, whose dilettante dabbling in the gymnasiums of Princeton and Paris is straightforwardly aligned with his “very poor novel” (10) from a “fairly good publisher”(9). Cohn is contrasted with two professionals: first Jake himself, a journalist who is happiest after a “good morning’s work” (13), and then Bill Gorton, who has “made a lot of money on his last book, and was going to make a lot more” (34). Gorton arrives in Paris from New York Where he has seen a “whole crop of great light heavyweights. Any one of them was a good prospect to grow up, put on weight and trim Dempsey” (33-34). The suggestion is that Gorton is himself a literary contender, although his experience of crooked prize fighting in Vienna reminds us how impure the profession of boxing (and, by extension, the profession of writing) really is.

Bullfighting is like boxing should be—Jake describes a bull having "a left and a right just like a boxer" (116). Pedro Romero, the only completely admirable character in the novel, represents the professional ideal. His "work"—neither he nor Jake call it "sport" or "art" (140)—is characterized by its "sincerity" (he does not "simulate") and its "absolute purity of line" (144).“It was not brilliant bull-fighting,” Jake says,“it was only perfect bull-fighting” (178). But such perfection can only exist in what Jake characterizes as the primitive culture of Spain; elsewhere, all that fighters or writers can do is try to work as “hard” (181) and as “clean” (14) as the modern world will allow.

Mailer evoked the boxing-and-bullfighting combination in The Deer Park (1955), his third novel and the one in which he most directly confronts the Hemingway persona and style. It is the story of an Irish-American orphan called Sergius O’Shaugnessy, who before the story begins had “boxed [his] way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man's tournament” (45) and therefore into flying school. O’Shaugnessy goes first to Hollywood, where the producers are initially dismissive ("I didn’t even know the athlete could read" (198)); and then, when he gets depressed—becoming “a boxer without a punch” (325)—he goes to Mexico. There he plans to learn to be the “first great and recognized American matador” (352), but finally he gives up his novel on bullfighting as “inevitably imitative” of Hemingway (353). O’Shaugnessy’s crisis of confidence reflected that of his creator. On receiving the novel’s proofs, Mailer decided that The Deer Park needed substantial revision. He would abandon its “poetic prose,” rip up its “silk,” smash its “porcelain,” create a first person voice “bigger” and more “muscular” than himself (Advertisements 235–37), and, “like a fighter who throws his right two seconds after the bell,” think much more closely about variations in pace (239). In leaving the controlled Hemingway style behind, in other words, the novel would regain punch. His next book, Advertisements for Myself (1959), he later said, was the first one to be “written in what became my style” (Pontifications 145).

That style was never again going to be confused with Hemingway’s—not that it ever really was.However much O’Shaugnessy might worry about imitation, no one had ever thought of Mailer as a pure and orderly minimalist. And yet, throughout his career Mailer nevertheless felt the need to speak out forcefully against the modernist credo of technique as mere “craft,” its tendency to reach for “a grab bag of procedures, tricks, lore, formal gymnastics, symbolic superstructures—methodology, in short” (Spooky 104).“Craft” was a dirty, or at least dismissive, word—one Mailer elsewhere associates with “light and middleweight” boxers. Heavyweights are always something more than “hardworking craftsmen”; they have “inner lives”(Existential 10). As late as Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Mailer was linking a devotion “to craft” and “Procedures ”with a misplaced desire for order—here employed by the CIA all over the globe—with the American camp-building (or Hemingwayesque) tradition. Hemingway himself crops up many times in the novel. The narrator, Harry Hubbard, recalls getting an “A”on a college paper about Shakespearean quality of the “consciously chosen irony of the later style” (167). When he expands on this to Rodman Knowles Gardiner, the Shakespeare scholar retorts,“‘Why concern yourself with the copyist?’” But Gardiner himself is a kind of copyist, naming his daughter for Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, whose hair (“cut short like a boy’s”) is also in imitation of the original (Harlot’s 167). Harry marries the girl. Still other characters are associated either with Hemingway hangouts—Oak Park or Sloppy Joe’s bar in Havana—or quote his bon mots. But the key connection comes in the form of the narrator’s father, Cal Hubbard, who bears a considerable “degree of resemblance” (116–7) to the writer in build, mustache and presence; he’s a drunk and a “prodigious philanderer” (114) who’s fond of big-game hunting and cross-country skiing and who hangs elephant tusks and a pair of miniature boxing gloves said to belong to Jack Dempsey above his drinks cabinet. He is also, as a CIA operative, a great proponent of “protocol” (869), “craft” (445) and the “rules of procedure” (241).

Harry Hubbard is only half Hubbard, of course—his mother is a Silberzweig—and as well as reading Hemingway, he enjoys Irwin Shaw’s The Young Lions because “Noah Ackerman, the Jew, had appealed to me” (145). Harry also reflects upon the character of Robert Cohn (422)—whose upper class New York background he shares—and to some extent, he belongs to the ranks of Cohn’s literary “avengers” (Fiedler 71). Harlot’s Ghost reveals the limits of methodology and “purity of intent” (1021) and instead asserts the virtues of division and dialectic, of ongoing “war”and “relation”(594).

And yet, in Mailer’s eyes Hemingway was divided, too. He may have been a craftsman but he was not a mere craftsman. As much as D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller—indeed, every major figure in the Mailer pantheon—Hemingway was a “great writer, for he contained a cauldron of boiling opposites” (Mailer, Prisoner 137). Reviewing Morley Callaghan’s That Summer in Paris in 1963, Mailer declared that Hemingway’s bravery was “an act of will”; the “heroic”product of a lifelong struggle with “cowardice” and an ability to carry “a weight of anxiety within him” which would have “suffocated any man smaller than himself" (Cannibals 159). His decision to reprint these comments as the first “prelude” to The Time Of Our Time suggests that they should be thought of, in some way, as initiating his own work (Time 4). What Hemingway’s example initiated was not a style or methodology—not camp—building—but a fascination with the futile effort involved in such constructions and an awareness of the incapacity of all camps to remain secure, to keep the river away.

For all that Hemingway strove to be “classic,” “sophisticated,” “purer,” and “graceful,” for all that he represented the ideals of “scrupulosity,”“manners,” and “gravity” (Pieces 912), the chaos of his “inner” life was still apparent to Mailer (Existential 10). In other words, like Cal Hubbard,"[t]he two halves of his soul were far apart" (Harlot’s 117). The question was one of balance. At his best, like Hubbard, Hemingway’s “strength was that he had managed to find some inner cooperation between these disparate halves” (Harlot’s 117). At “his worst” (Advertisements 474) shortly before his death, the “old moldering” (477) writer was adding to “the nausea he once cleared away” (474).

“BEING MACHO IS NO FUN” (THE BIG EMPTY 185) Nowhere in Hemingway’s fiction does what Mailer called the “continuing battle” of “being a man” emerge more clearly than in his representation of boxers (Advertisements 222). T o consider a boxer (especially a heavyweight) is to consider a man who should—at least in the world into which Hemingway was born—epitomize a straightforward, unambiguous Anglo-Saxon heterosexual manliness. But, for one reason or another, Hemingway’s boxers are unable to fulfill the brief. Cooperation between one’s disparate halves— “the Champ and the Fraud” —is not always possible (Pontifications 160).

Consider “The Light of the World” (1933), in which the teenage narrator and his friend, Tom, encounter a motley crew of late-night travelers at a rail-way station: “five whores . . . and six white men and four Indians” (Hemingway, Short Stories 385). Among the prostitutes are two “big” women, Alice and Peroxide, who argue about who really knew “Steve” or “Stanley” Ketchel (they also can’t agree on the first name). The cook remembers Stanley Ketchel’s 1909 fight with Jack Johnson, in particular how Ketchel had floored Johnson in the 12th round just before Johnson knocked him out. Peroxide attributes Ketchel’s defeat to a punch by Johnson (“the big black bastard” (389)) when Ketchel, “the only man she ever loved” (388), smiled at her in the audience. Alice remembers Steve Ketchel telling her she was “a lovely piece” (390). Both women refer continuously to Ketchel’s “whiteness”—“I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful,” says Peroxide (388). “White,” as Walter Benn Michaels notes, “becomes an adjective describing character instead of skin” (“The Souls” 193); and so, Ketchel is figured as a kind of Christ-like figure, while Johnson, “that black son of a bitch from hell” (Hemingway,“The Light” 389), is the devil.

Ketchel’s pseudo-divinity is further suggested by such statements as “I loved him like you love God”; “His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father” (388); and, of course, the title. Philip Young points out that Hemingway placed this story after “the most pessimistic of all his stories,” “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” in Winner Take Nothing, “as if the point of the story is really that the light of the world has gone out” (50).

But there seems to be more going on under the surface of this particular iceberg. First, the confusion of names and facts is important. Stanley Ketchel was not killed by his father—that was Steve Ketchel, a lightweight boxer, who never got near Johnson. Stanley was shot in 1910 by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Second, of all boxers, Stanley Ketchel was perhaps the most unlikely possible candidate for Redeemer. His nickname was the “Michigan Assassin,” and, according to one reporter, “he couldn’t get enough blood” (Roberts 82). While the prostitutes may be seeking salvation, the story that they tell is absurd. So what is going on? Howard Hannum argues that much of the dialogue between the two women “has the quality of counterpunching,” as if they are restaging Ketchel’s contest against Johnson: here, the (bleached) blonde versus the heavyweight (325). But the cook’s role also needs to be considered. The discussion of whiteness begins when the narrator notices a “white man” speaking; “his face was white and his hands were white and thin” (Hemingway, “The Light” 385). The other men tease the cook about the whiteness of his hands (“he puts lemon juice on his hands” (386)) and hint that he is gay. Are these two things connected? And, if they are, what does that suggest about clean, white, beautiful Ketchel? When asked his age, Tom joins in the sexual bantering with hints at “inversion”—“I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine” (387)—but throughout the boys remain uneasy and confused. By the end of the story, the narrator seems quite smitten with Alice (“she had the prettiest face I ever saw” (391)). Tom notices this and says it is time to leave. The supposedly natural order of whites beating blacks, men having sex with women, and “huge” whores being unappealing has been unsettled (386). When the cook asks where the boys are going, Tom replies, “the other way from you” (391).

Racial and sexual ambiguities also trouble “The Battler,” one of the Nick Adams initiation stories in In Our Time (1925). The story begins with Nick himself having just survived a battle with a brakeman on a freight train. He has been thrown off the train and lands with a scuffed knee and bruise on the face, of which he is rather proud— “He wished he could see it” (“Battler” 129)—but he is still standing. “He was all right” (129). Nick then ventures into another battling arena—a fire-lit camp that seems to be a refuge but which also turns out to be a kind of boxing ring. There he encounters Ad Francis, an ex-champion prizefighter whose bruises are more impressive, and much more disgusting, than his own:

In the firelight Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were like slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man’s face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight. (131)

That “Nick did not perceive all this at once” suggests that he kept looking away (131). “Don’t you like my pan?” the fighter asks, revealing even worse: “He had only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other one should have been there was a stump” (131). Although Nick is “a little sick,” he counters Ad’s pugnacious assertions with gusto:

‘It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’the man said seriously. ‘I’ll bust him.’. . . . . . . . . . . ‘All you kids are tough.’‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.‘That’s what I said.’ (131)

Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (“crazy”), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him from battling (132). When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in “an ugly parody of a boxing match” (Strychacz 252), Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls Hemingway’s very first story, “A Matter of Color” (Bruccoli 98-100). Color is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his “negro's voice,” the “negro” way he walks, and his “long nigger’s legs” (Hemingway,“Battler” 133). Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in “The Light