29
edits
User:JSheppard/sandbox: Difference between revisions
no edit summary
No edit summary |
No edit summary |
||
| Line 6: | Line 6: | ||
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 he muses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during his crises of the early 1960s, | 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 he muses retrospectively upon a turning point in his career during his crises of the early 1960s,{{quote|The 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.{{sfn|''Existential''''Errands''|1960|p=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 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. The first Patterson/Liston fight provides mailer an opportunity to embarkon 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 | 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 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. The first Patterson/Liston fight provides mailer an opportunity to embarkon 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: | hatred between the fighters. Here is Mailer’s description of the climax: {{quote|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 the psychic range of the event. Some parts 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.{{sfn|“Death”|1960|p=244-245}}}} | ||
{{quote| | This event was not, of course, taken lightly by the public: {{quote|“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”.{{sfn|“Death”|1960|p=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 response? {{quote|Something in boxing was spoiled... I loved it with freedom no longer. It was more like somebody in your family was fighting now. The feeling one had for a big fight was no longer clear of terror in its excitement. There was awe in the suspense. {{sfn|“Death”|1960|p=247-248}}}} | ||
Professional boxing, then, presents difficult moral problems trailer as well as to any humane person. This does not, I submit, obviate its significance in 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 with Muhammad 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, almost mythic 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: {{quote|Yet 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 in Vietnam, 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. If he could beat Frazier in the rematch we would have at last a national hero who was a hero of the world as well.{{sfn|“King”|1960|p=92-92}}}} | |||
Ali ''was'' a national hero, for his moral and physical courage. His heroism had fascinated Mailer for years. In a short piece, “An Appreciation of Cassius Clay,” he wrote: {{quote|I don’t want to get started writing about Muhammad Ali, because I could go on for a book.{{sfn|“Errands”|1960|p=264}}}} He went on to condemn Ali’s exclusion from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War and concluded:{{quote|Therefore we are all deprived of an intimate spectacle which was taking place in public—the forging of a professional artist | |||
of extraordinary dimensions...he was bringing a revolution to the theory of boxing....{{sfn|“Errands”|1960|p=264}}}}. When I asked him,“... now that it’s pretty well documented that Ali has been damaged by boxing, do you love the sport as much as you did?”Mailer responded,{{quote|Well, I don’t think I love it as much as I used to. One reason is because he’s out of it.{{sfn|“Leeds”|1960|p=1}}}} | |||
{{quote| | |||
{{quote| | |||
All of this of course points directly to Mailer’s most significant work on boxing, ''The Fight''. Suffice it to say that Mailer’s obsessive preoccupation with existentialism and Manichean polarities, his newly found fascination with African mysticism and the concept of ''N’golo'' (or force), his vision of Muhammad Ali as an artist and hero, finds their serendipitous confluence here. As in virtually all of his work after 1968, Mailer treats a factual situation, and the people involved, in terms of highly subjective and fascinating digressions. | |||
Thus, in addition to an in-depth account of the fight and the circumstances preceding and following it, the reader is offered observations on | |||
African religion and politics, allusions to Hemingway, Hunter Thompson, and George Plimpton, and further candid insights into Mailer himself: {{quote|the status of his projected big novel, his compulsion to walk parapets, his hatred of jogging. Most amusing, however, is the self-deprecating anecdote in which Mailer, returning late at night along a jungle path on which he had been doing road work with Ali, hears a lion roar. He proceeds through a series of serio-comic reactions, culminating in the fantasy that he is about to be eaten by “Hemingway’s lion” waiting all these years for a fit substitute, and the final recognition that the lion he hears is probably caged in the city’s zoo {{sfn|“”|1960|p=91-92}}}}. This announces, I believe, an attractive new modesty in Mailer. Such modesty pervades “The Best Move Lies Close to the Worst,” in which mailer recounts his adventures and misadventures in boxing in a consistently self-deprecating manner. Boxing with José Torres is described thus: | |||
{{ | {{quote|He was impossible to hit and that was an. interesting experience you felt as if you were sharing the ring with a puma... Over ten years of boxing with José Torres I was able to catch him with a | ||
good right-hand lead twice, and the first occasion was an event. | |||
He ran around the ring with his arms high in triumph, crying out, “He hit me with a right—he hit me with a right!” unconscionably proud that day of his pupil.{{sfn|“Time”|1960|p=1048}}}} | |||
{{ | |||
The story, in a mildly oversimplified form, has circulated for years that Mailer gave Torres writing lessons in return for boxing lessons. Actually, Mailer first began to learn boxing under the tutelage of the father of Adele Morales, his second wife. In the “Sixth Advertisement for Myself,” Mailer states: | |||
{{quote|I was doing some boxing now. My father-in-law had been a professional; he was always putting on the gloves with me... I was in nice shape, and my senses were alert.{{sfn|“Adventisements”|1960|p=331}}}} | |||
Most interesting in the later collaboration are the parallels that Torres and Mailer found between the two occupations. When asked if there is a difference in the discipline required for writing and boxing ~in an interview with Jessica Blue and LegsMcNeil for Details!, Torres responded, “No fucking difference” {{sfn|“Details”|1960|p=86}}}}. But earlier in the same interview, he tells of how Mailer {{quote|“told me that writing was about truth... He knew that boxing was the opposite. It’s about cheating and deceiving and lying, and he said that it’s a very hard transition... You’re cheating the other guy by feinting with a left and cheating with a jab” (''Details'' 85).{{sfn|“Details”|1960|p=85}}}} | |||
{{in5|n}}Another regular at the Gramercy Gym in the 1980s was Sal Cetrano, who | {{in5|n}}Another regular at the Gramercy Gym in the 1980s was Sal Cetrano, who | ||