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

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-{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|abstract=Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman {{NM}}’s life and work. Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with ''[[The Presidential Papers]]'' in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for ''Esquire''. Not only does this piece prefigure and announce the new mode 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.|url=https://prmlr.us/mr08leed}}
+{{Byline|last=Leeds|first=Barry H.|abstract=Boxing has provided a significant moral paradigm throughout much of Norman {{NM}}’s life and work. Mailer’s significant writing about boxing begins with ''[[The Presidential Papers]]'' in the long and riveting essay entitled “Death,” originally titled “Ten Thousand Words a Minute,” one of his “Big Bite” columns for ''Esquire''. Not only does this piece prefigure and announce the new mode 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.|note=This essay consists largely of previously published material with substantial additions and emendations. |url=https://prmlr.us/mr08leed}}
 {{dc|dc=B|oxing 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 [[w:Sonny Liston|Sonny Liston]]/[[w:Floyd Patterson|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”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=16}} applicable to their existential quests for self. Ultimately, Mailer’s views on boxing are far from simplistic. From the powerful account of [[w:Benny Paret|Benny Paret]]’s death in the ring at the hands of [[w:Emile Griffith|Emile Griffith]] to his statements to me about the ill-fated conclusion to [[w:Muhammad Ali|Muhammad Ali]]’s career to his 1988 article on [[w:Mike Tyson|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,” he deals with his own boxing experiences at the Gramercy Gym with [[w:José Torres|José Torres]], [[w:Ryan O’Neal|Ryan O’Neal]] and others. The title of the piece comes from the comparison of boxing to chess.{{sfn|Mailer|1998a|pp=1045–1052}}
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 And the darkest side of this vision is disturbingly revealed in ''[[The Armies of the Night]]'' (1968), when Mailer writes with horror of federal marshal and American soldiers brutally beating young women during the night after the [[w:National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam#1967 "March on the Pentagon"|1967 march on the Pentagon]]: Such men, he suggests, “may never have another opportunity like this—to beat a woman without having to make love to her.”{{sfn|Mailer|1968|p=304}}
+It’s true that in “The Time of Her Time,” Sergius O’Shaugnessy, just back from Mexico after the end of ''[[The Deer Park]]'' (1955), does throw Denise Gondelman “a fuck the equivalent of a fifteen round fight.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=501}} Sergius has been a boxer in the Air Force, and in bed he and Denise are “like two club fighters.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=490}} But it is she who gets in the last literal punch: “I might have known she would have a natural punch. My jaw felt it for half an hour after she was gone.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|pp=494–495}} And in the story’s last line, he muses that “[L]ike a real killer, she did not look back, and was out the door before I could rise to tell her that she was a hero fit for me.”{{sfn|Mailer|1959|p=503}} This is, therefore, a battle of equals, which prefigures embryonically the growth toward the graceful, loving equality of the central Rojack/Cherry passage in ''An American Dream''.
+The extended fighting metaphor reaches its peak in ''An American Dream''. Stephen Rojack is an amateur boxer, and clearly the central bout of the novel is the vitriolic and deadly scene in the opening chapter when, in a surprisingly even match, he fights and kills his powerful, witch-like wife, Deborah. But I must point out yet again that Rojack does not, as Kate Millet suggests, “get away with murder.”{{Sfn|Millett|1970|p=15}} Instead, this scene, with its pervasive parallel imagery of combat and sex is part of a cohesive and symmetrical pattern of symbolism which unifies the novel tonally, structurally and thematically. After a series of mutual insults and the escalating fury of an intense physical struggle, Rojack strangles Deborah:
+{{quote|[S]pasms began to open in me, and my mind cried out then, “Hold back! you’re going too far, hold back!” I could feel a series of orders whiplike tracers of light from my head to my arm, I was ready to obey. I was trying to stop, but pulse packed behind pulse in a pressure up to thunderhead; some blackbiled lust, some desire to go ahead not unlike the instant one comes in a woman against her cry that she is without protection came bursting with rage from out of me.{{sfn|Mailer|1965|pp=35–36}} }}
+This inflammatory scene introduces a more significant bout: that of Rojack with himself, in the heroic struggle to purge his own moral weakness and set out on that terrifying journey into the labyrinthine recesses of the self, on the existential quest for the true identity that lies at his core. This quest is punctuated by successively more frightening confrontations: first the scene of hellish fornication with the “Nazi” maid, Ruta, which establishes the allegorical nature of Rojack’s pilgrimage to salvation in an infernal world of Manichaean choices; then with Ike “Romeo” Romalozzo, a brutal and corrupt ex-boxer; and with police Lieutenant Roberts, who is described after Rojack outwits him as a crooked wrestler who hadn’t known it was his night to lose.
+Penultimately, he faces Shago Martin, who in a scene of intimate violence redolent of sexual connection (“I got a whiff of his odor . . . a smell of full nearness, as if we’d been in bed for an hour.”{{sfn|Mailer|1965|p=182}}) teaches Rojack something about nobility and forgiveness and passes on to him the phallic power (as epitomized in Shago’s totemic umbrella) necessary for his climactic confrontation with Barney Oswald Kelly.
+Insofar as each of these characters has allegorical as well as literal value in the novel, Rojack’s struggles with them may be seen as confrontations with the worst aspects of himself, which he must overcome and purge. On a larger scale, his progress is a peculiarly American one, a repudiation of the false American dream of meretricious corruption and an embracing of a new, true American Dream of authenticity of self. Rojack comes to represent what was best in the American character after WWII, what was shamelessly corrupted, and what Mailer suggests may be redeemed by courage, discipline, and a commitment to selfless heterosexual love. And he does this with the aid of representatives of marginalized groups: Shago and Cherry.
+''Tough Guys Don’t Dance'' is a lesser novel: a pale reflection, a distant echo of the masterful ''An American Dream''. But a few points are worth touching on. Again, Tim Madden has been an amateur boxer in his youth. He does fight and defeat Spider Nissen and Stoodie, the badness twins, with the aid of “Stunts,” his dog, who dies with Spider’s knife in his heart. But despite initial, ambiguous appearances, Tim does not hurt, does not kill women, or kill anyone for that matter. But Patty Lareine, his wife, does kill Jessica Pond. In fact, two women are murderers: Madeleine Falco also shoots her husband, the corrupt Chief of Police Alvin Regency. Significantly, Tim Madden refuses the tempting suggestion of Patty Lareine that he kill her then husband, Meeks Wardley Hilby III, and by the novel’s end is capable of compassionate tenderness toward the suicidal, homosexual Wardley. Further, Tim establishes an almost friendly relationship with Patty’s hostile, dangerous black lover, Bolo Green (a.k.a. “Mr. Black”). Most important, like Rojack at the conclusion of ''An American Dream'', Tim is shown to fight his true battle with himself and his own fears and weaknesses.
+Thus, in this novel as in virtually all of Mailer’s work as well as his personal and public life, combat with adversaries is most pivotal as an external manifestation of the true central struggle within oneself against the ignoble, ignominious emotions of cowardice and moral sloth. Courage, personal discipline, stoicism, the leap of faith essential to love, the definition and celebration of the existential self: these values are not outmoded. They never will be.
+And what of the man who wrote of these all his life? He is gone now from this sphere, from our limited purview. But his work will be with us forever, and we will remember: He was a fighter.
 ===Citations===