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The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work: Difference between revisions
The Mailer Review/Volume 2, 2008/He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work (view source)
Revision as of 17:49, 25 September 2020
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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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|p=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.”{{sfn|Mailer|1963|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|Mailer|1963|p=247–248}} }} | 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|Mailer|1963|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. | 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 [[w:Joe Frazier|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 [[w:Manichean|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| | |||
[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 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. 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.{{sfn|Mailer|1971|p=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: “[I] don’t want to get started writing about Muhammad Ali, because I could go on for a book.”{{sfn|Mailer|1972|p=264}} He went on to condemn Ali’s exclusion from boxing because of his conscientious objection to the Vietnam War and concluded: “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|Mailer|1972|p=264}} And 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, “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|2008|p=1}} | |||
===Citations=== | ===Citations=== | ||
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* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1993 |title=The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst |url=https://classic.esquire.com/article/1993/10/1/no-3-the-best-move-lies-very-close-to-the-worst |magazine=Esquire |pages=60–64, 186 |access-date=2020-09-25 |ref=harv }} | * {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1993 |title=The Best Move Lies Very Close to the Worst |url=https://classic.esquire.com/article/1993/10/1/no-3-the-best-move-lies-very-close-to-the-worst |magazine=Esquire |pages=60–64, 186 |access-date=2020-09-25 |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1966 |title=Cannibals and Christians |url= |location= New York |publisher= Dial |pages= |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first= | * {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date= 1963 |chapter=Death |title=The Presidential Papers |url= |location= New York |publisher= Putnam |pages=213-267 |isbn= |author-link= |ref=harv }} | ||
* . . . | |||
* {{cite magazine |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=March 19, 1971 |title=King of the Hill |url= |magazine=Life |pages=18F-36 |access-date= |ref=harv }} | |||
* . . . | * . . . | ||
* {{cite book |last=Mailer |first=Norman |author-mask=1 |date=1972 |title=Existential Errands |url= |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown |ref=harv }} | |||
{{Refend}} | {{Refend}} | ||
{{Review}} | {{Review}} | ||
{{DEFAULTSORT:He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work}} | {{DEFAULTSORT:He Was a Fighter: Boxing in Norman Mailer’s Life and Work}} | ||
[[Category:Articles (MR)]] | [[Category:Articles (MR)]] | ||