The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/Fighters and Writers: Difference between revisions

{{quote|Ali is not a great fighter in the conventional sense that Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep and Joe Louis were. Each of these fighters knew every punch and every move and added some tricks to the book, that unwritten book whose teachings are passed on from gym to gym and are the nearest thing we have to our own culture.... We have a man who does not have the physical greatness of the greatest men of other times, yet no professional has been able to beat him.... The explanation is simple. Muhammad Ali is a genius.... Don’t watch Ali’s gloves, arms or legs when he’s fighting. Watch his brains.}}

a mathematical problem are really not very different from the ring-craft displayed by a well-trained body.” A. J. Liebling, who composed numerous entertainingly digressive, erudite articles on boxing for ''The New Yorker'' in the

1950s and early 1960s, distinguishes between “the ''ruffian'' approach” and that of “the ''reasoner'' inside the ring.”

the ability to lie successfully. As Jeremy Campbell notes in his so-called history of falseness, ''A Liar’s Tale'', “when winning is the important factor, deceitfulness is a kind of ethic....” From a technical standpoint, Ali did plenty

cause some to doubt that Torres actually wrote his books (he also published

a biography of Tyson). A rumor suggested that Mailer actually wrote Torres’s

portions of the Ali book. Jonathan Rendell, in his brilliantly titled ''This Bloody Mary Is the Last Thing I Own'', recounts hearing a version of it. “Mailer

slouching at a desk seems worlds apart from a well-conditioned fighter confronting an opponent in a ring, Mailer saw them as very similar. In ''The Spooky Art'', he insists the demands writing makes on a novelist, including

{{quote|Only a writer can know how much damage writing a novel can do to you. It’s an unnatural activity to sit at a desk and squeeze words out of yourself. Various kinds of poisons—essences of fatigue—get secreted through your system. As you age it grows worse. I believe that is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in prizefighters. I think often of the aging boxer who has to get into shape for one more fight and knows the punishment it will wreak on his body.... Even if he wins the fight—even if he wins it well—he is not going to get a new purchase on life out of a dazzling success, not in the way he did as a young fighter. That’s also true of my profession. Often, you have to make grave decisions: Am I going to attempt this difficult venture or not?}}

 

{{quote|Just as a fighter has to feel that he possesses the right to do physical damage to another man, so a writer has to be ready to take chances with his readers’ lives. If you’re trying for something at all interesting or difficult, then you cannot predict what the results of your work will be. If it’s close enough to the root, people can be physically injured reading you. Full of heart, he was also heartless—a splendid oxymoron. That can be the epitaph for many a good novelist.}}

 

Mailer’s “splendid oxymoron” clearly applies to many a good boxer. How- ever, he almost certainly exaggerates both the challenges a novelist faces and the effect he or she can have on a reader. Yet he clearly liked the idea of having a fighter’s heartless heart—his will, determination, drive and competitiveness—beating in his chest. For him, boxing serves as a handy metaphor for what he imagined was his risky, intensely masculine style of writing.

a character,” he writes in ''Only in America: The Life and Crimes of Don King''.

Joyce Carol Oates, for one, expresses impatience with the sort of “hellish-writerly metaphor” in which boxing serves to stand for something else. She concedes that skill, courage and intelligence can all be observed in a boxing match. She even “can entertain the proposition that life is a metaphor for boxing.” However, boxing itself is, quite simply, “the most primitive and terrifying of contests.” Her ''On Boxing'' does not offer extravagant assertions of fighters as avatars of artistry or as unrecognized geniuses. She briefly surveys other writers’ writing on boxing and is impressed by little of it. She dislikes Liebling and does not think Ernest Hemingway’s boxing stories rank among his best. She admires aspects of Mailer’s work on the subject, but

Rendell fell into the Johnson camp, the camp that sought truth in the sport, only to conclude that viewing boxing as expressive of some deep meaning can only lead to disappointment. In ''This Bloody Mary'', his memoir of experiences in the boxing world, he recalls being a teenager looking at the photos in ''Ring'' magazine of ritualistic post-fight events—the announcement of the decision and the victor consoling the vanquished—and thinking: “It was as if all of them, the winners and losers and the managers and trainers, had touched something that only they could know about, something big, like truth.” Later, when the romance was gone and he’d seen enough of the fight game, he concludes that its connection to the truth was very different than he’d initially thought. “Boxing had been leading me to a truth after all, but only to the truth about boxing. And the truth was just a story itself, the first addictive dance under the chandeliers,and then the doomed roller coaster ride on thousands of blue curves.” The sort of truth he discovers is fighters dying in their twenties or living but with irreparable damage. For him, too, Ali becomes symbolic of boxing’s truth. Rendell describes meeting the former champion, who required an hour to eat a bowl of soup. The fighter once famous for his quickness and

prowess now had to move carefully, deliberately, and slowly in order not to dribble.