The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work

Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman Mailer’s life and work. In his seminal essay entitled “Death” in The Presidential Papers(1963), Mailer uses the first Sonny Liston/Floyd Patterson championship bout as a point of departure from which to develop a profound series of perceptions about the American national temperament, particularly that of blacks. In King of the Hill(1971) and more strikingly in The Fight(1975)he deals nominally with a specific championship bout, but goes beyond journalism to find certain normative precepts in the sport. But there is another level on which boxing informs and conditions Mailer’s vision: In his fiction, most notably An American Dream(1965)and Tough Guys Don’t Dance(1984),boxing experiences help define the protagonists. Stephen Richards Rojack and Tim Madden respectively find “the reward of the ring” (Dream 16)applicable to their existential quests for self. Ultimately,Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful account of Benny Paret’s death in the ring at the hands of Emile Griffith to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to Muhammad Ali’s career to his 1988 article on Mike Tyson, “Fury, Fear, Philosophy,” Mailer has found in this arena of ritualized violence a rich source of perception about the human condition. In fact, in his 1993 essay in Esquire, “The Best Move Lies Next to the Worst” ~reprinted in The Time of Our Time!, he deals with his own boxing experiences at the Gramercy Gymwith José Torres, Ryan O’Neal and others. The title of the piece comes from the comparison of boxing to chess Time (1045–1052).

I believe it’s best to confront the central issue here at the outset.Mailer has, indeed, perceived gladiatorial confrontation and violence as a central metaphor for his own artistic and personal struggles for growth, fulfillment, salvation.As hemuses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during his personal crises of the early 1960s,

[T]he review in Time @of Deaths for the Ladies#  put iron into my
 heart again, and rage, and the feeling that the   enemy was more
 alive than ever, and dirtier in the alley, and   so one had to mend,
 and put on the armor, and go to war, go out to war again, and
 try to hew huge strokes with the only broadsword God ever gave
 you, a glimpse of something like almighty prose.     (Existential'Errands 204)

Very well, then: Mailer unabashedly uses violent confrontation as a touchstone for his vision of life and art. He has persistently perceived himself as embattled. But witness the artistic regeneration, the prolific and truly significant output that resulted as a direct consequence of this attitude. Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with The Presidential Papers in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten ThousandWords a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for Esquire. Not only does this piece prefigure and announce the newmode of Mailer’s nonfiction writing in the late 1960s and 1970s, notably The Armies of the Night, it is the key to his fascination with boxing. The first Patterson/Liston fight providesMailer an opportunity to embark on a series of sophisticated statements on boxing and the national disposition. But the center of the piece, as the title suggests, is the brutal killing of Benny Paret in the ring by Emile Griffith. Let us deal with the most hideous aspects of boxing first.Unlike most bouts, this one was fueled by an intense hatred between the fighters. Here is Mailer’s description of the climax:

 In the twelfth, Griffith caught him. Paret got    trapped in a corner.
 Trying to duck away, his left arm and his head became tangled
 on the wrong side of the top rope. Griffith was in like a cat
 ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat.He hit him eighteen
 right hands in a row, an act which took perhaps three or four
 seconds, Griffith making a pent-up whimpering   sound all the while he attacked, the right hand   whipping like a piston rod
 which has broken through the crankcase, or like a baseball bat
 demolishing a pumpkin.... I had never seen one man hit
 another so hard and so many times. Over the  referee’s face came
 a look of woe as if some spasm had passed its way through him,
 and then he leaped on Griffith to pull him away.   It was the act of a brave man. Griffith was   uncontrollable.His trainer leaped into
 the ring, his manager, his cut man, there were four people holding
 Griffith, but he was off on an orgy, he had left the Garden, he
 was back on a hoodlum’s street. If he had been able to break
 loose from his handlers and the referee, he would have jumped
 Paret to the floor and whaled on him there.

And Paret? Paret died on his feet. As he took those eighteen punches something happened to everyone who was in psychic range of the event. Some part of his death reached out to us.One felt it hover in the air.He was still standing in the ropes, trapped as he had been before, he gave some little half-smile of regret, as if he were saying, ‘I didn’t know I was going to die just yet,’ and then, his head leaning back but still erect, his death came to breathe about him. (“Death” 244–245) This event was not, of course, taken lightly by the public: “There was shock in the land.... There were editorials, gloomy forecasts that the Game was dead. The managers and the prizefighters got together. Gently, in thick, depressed hypocrisies, they tried to defend their sport” ~245!. Mailer goes on to delve into that species of blood religion to which fight people adhere and the kind of mystery it has lent to the works of such writers as D. H. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway. And what of Mailer’s own response?

 Something in boxing was spoiled.... I loved it with freedom no
 longer. It was more like somebody in your family   was fighting
 now.And the feeling one had for a big fight was no longer clear of
 terror in its excitement.There was awe in the suspense. (247–248)

Professional boxing, then, presents difficultmoral problems toMailer as well as to any humane person. This does not, I submit, obviate its significance in B A R R Y H. L E E D S { 387 Mailer’s work as a test of courage. I would suggest that it is in the exercise of disciplined skill, resourcefulness, stoicism, the force of will in the face of risk, that the human spirit is capable of reaching its peak expression. Another case in point is King of the Hill, a modest little book originally published as a long article in Life magazine ~with photographs by Frank Sinatra!, dealing withMuhammad Ali’s hard-fought defeat at the hands of Joe Frazier after his three year enforced layoff from boxing. As in “Death,” the opponents assume symbolic, almostmythic proportions. Central to this is Mailer’s pervasive Manichean vision of the cosmos, even down to Ali’s twin poodles named “Angel” and “Demon.” But the conclusion is most significant to Mailer’s last work:

 [Y]et Ali got up, Ali came sliding through the last two minutes
and thirty-five seconds of this heathen holocaust in some last

exercise of the will, some iron fundament of the ego not to be

 knocked out, and it was then as if the spirit of Harlem finally
 spoke and came to rescue and the ghosts of the   dead inVietnam,
 something held him up before arm-weary triumphant near crazy
 Frazier who had just hit him the hardest punch ever
 thrown in his life and they went down to the last few seconds of
 a great fight, Ali still standing and Frazier had won.
 The world was talking instantly of a rematch. For Ali had
  shown America what we all had hoped was secretly true.He was
   a man.He could bear moral and physical torture and he could
  stand.And if he could beat Frazier in the rematch  we would have
  at last a national hero who was hero of the world as well. (King 92–92)