\. 41 A CULTURAL HI ST KASIABCDDf BOXING A CULTURAL HISTORY KASIA BODDY REAKTION BOOKS For David Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street London eciv odx www.reaktionbooks.co.uk First published 2008 Copyright © Kasia Boddy 2008 All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in China British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Boddy, Kasia Boxing : a cultural history 1. Boxing - Social aspects - History 2. Boxing - History I. Title 796.8'3'o9 ISBN 978 1 86189 369 7 Contents Introduction 7 1 The Classical Golden Age 9 2 The English Golden Age 26 3 Pugilism and Style 55 4 'Fighting, Rightly Understood' 76 5 'Like Any Other Profession' 110 6 Fresh Hopes 166 7 Sport of the Future 209 8 Save Me, Jack Dempsey; Save Me, Joe Louis 257 9 King of the Hill, and Further Raging Bulls 316 Conclusion 367 References 392 Select Bibliography 456 Acknowledgements 470 Photo Acknowledgements 471 Index 472 Introduction William Roberts, The Boxing Match, Novices, 1914. The symbolism of boxing does not allow for ambiguity; it is, as amateur mid- dleweight Albert Camus put it, 'utterly Manichean'. The rites of boxing 'simplify everything. Good and evil, the winner and the loser.'1 More than anything, the boxing match has served as a metaphor for opposition - the struggle between two bodies before an audience, usually for money, representing struggles between opposing qualities, ideas and values. In the modern works that this book considers, those struggles involve nationality, class, race, ethnicity, religion, politics, and different versions of masculinity. As light heavyweight Roy Jones, Jr. once said, 'if it made money, it made sense.'2 But the conflicts dramatized in modern boxing also rework the fundamental oppositions set up in the very earliest texts: brawn versus brain; boastfulness versus modesty; youth versus experience. In literary and artistic terms, the clash is also often one of voices and styles. In the Protagoras, Plato even likens the moves and countermoves of Socratic debate to a boxing match.3 Boxing, it seems, has been around forever. The first evidence of the sport can be found in Mesopotamian stone reliefs from the end of the fourth millen- nium bc. Since then there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or ungloved fists to one other. William Roberts's 1914 watercolour The Boxing Match, Novices conveys the relentless succession of contenders, champions and palookas that makes up the history of boxing. Throughout this history, potters, painters, poets, novel- ists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of the bruising, bloody confrontation. 'For some reason,' sportswriter Gary Wills remarked, 'people don't want fighters just to be fighters.'4 Writing about boxing is often nostalgic, evoking a golden age long since departed. Today the period most keenly remembered is that of the late 1960s and early '70s, a time dominated by Muhammad Ali, a time, as a recent docu- mentary would have it, 'when we were kings'.5 Not long before, however, many were sure that the 1930s and '40s represented the peak of excellence, and lamented the arrival of televised sport as the end of a 'heroic cycle'.6 Further back still, early twentieth-century commentators considered the Regency as the time when pugilism flourished as never since; while for Regency writers, true glory and prowess resided in the sport's original manifestations in classical Greece. In the third century ad, Philostratus looked back to the good old days before 'the energetic became sluggards, the hardened became weak, and Sicil- ian gluttony gained the upper hand'.7 Although this book is about boxing in its modern form, myths about the golden ages of classical and Regency boxing have had such a lasting impact on ways of thinking about the sport that I begin with them. The first two chapters chart the early history of boxing and the establishment of ideas about courage and honour, ritual and spectatorship, beauty and the grotesque that are still in use today. The third chapter explores what pugilistic style meant to Regency painters and writers. The golden age of English boxing was over by 1830. Nevertheless, the sport continued to hold sway over the popular imagination throughout the nineteenth century. Chapter Four considers the divide between (dangerous, illegal) prize fighting and (honourable, muscular Christian) sparring in the Victorian era, and the appeal of each to writers as different as George Eliot and Arthur Conan Doyle. The fin de stick rise of professional boxing (and its association with the development of mass media such as journalism and cinema in America) is the subject of Chapter Five. Women (welcome participants in the eighteenth cent- ury) now re-entered the arenas as spectators. Chapter Six shifts the focus to questions of race and ethnicity, investigating the ways in which boxing was associated with assimilation for young Jewish immigrants and the ways in which black American boxers struggled against the early twentieth-century colour line. The career and enormous cultural impact of Jack Johnson, the first of the twentieth-century's great black heavyweights, is explored in some detail. Another iconic presence, Jack Dempsey, dominates Chapter Seven. The chapter considers the sports-mad twenties and argues that many of modernism's styles were self-consciously pugilistic. The final two chapters take us to the end of the twentieth century. Chapter Eight discusses mid-century representations of boxing and the ways in which the sport now featured largely as a metaphor for corruption and endurance - that is, until a young fighter called Joe Louis emerged on the scene. Finally, Chapter Nine examines the era of Muhammad Ali, television, Black Power, and further compensatory white hopes. The conclusion brings the story up to date, taking into account, among other matters, Mike Tyson and hip hop, conceptual art's glove fetishism and the enduring appeal of sweaty gyms. 1 The Classical Golden Age Looking back nostalgically from the third century ad to the glorious athletic past of Classical Greece, Philostratus claimed that the Spartans invented boxing.1 In fact, activities resembling boxing and wrestling were recorded much earlier, in third millennium bc Egypt and Mesopotamia. By the late Bronze Age (1600-1200 bc) images of pugilists could be found across the Eastern Mediterranean - some, like the figures on a Mycenean pot from Cyprus, are fairly sketchy (illus. 2); oth- ers, like the fresco of the young Boxing Boys from Thera (illus. 43), are striking and detailed.2 In both cases, the boxers adopt an attitude similar to that found in Greek vase paintings 1,000 years later. The earliest of Greek literary works, the Iliad and the Odyssey, written in the eighth century bc, describe athletic games held at the time of the Trojan war, traditionally dated around 1200 bc. The funeral games for Patroclus in the Iliad (c. 750 bc) include the 'first re- port of a prize fight' in literature.3 The games come late in the war, and in the penultimate book of the poem. Anthropologists and classical scholars have long debated the role of sports on such occasions. While some suggest that the fun- eral games simply served to celebrate the courage of the dead warrior, others argue that they were religious festivals and that sport was linked to ritual sacrifice. 4Discussions of the symbolic role of boxing and other forms of violent combat sport often draw on Clifford Geertz's essay on Balinese cockfighting, and Rene Girard's Violence and the Sacred. Geertz argues that the cockfight should not be seen merely as a form of popular entertainment, but as a blood sacrifice to the forces threatening social order. 'Deep play', a term that Geertz adopts from Bentham, is a game whose stakes are so high that, from a utilitar- ian point of view, it is irrational to play; this does not make the game unplayable, however, but elevates it. Instead of merely demanding the calculation of odds, the game works symbolically to represent the uncertain gamble that is life itself.5 The competitors involved in such contests are simultaneously derided and honoured, acting, as Girard put it, as 'substitutes for all the members of the community', while 'offered up by the community itself.'6 'The winner symbol- ically "lives" by winning the ritual contest, the losers "die"', and the spectators are vaccinated 'with the evil of violence against the evil of violence'.7 Two boxers on a fragment of a Mycenaean pot from Cyprus, c. 1300-1200 BC. The games described in the penultimate book of the Iliad certainly do more than simply provide more entertaining fight scenes. Most commentators read the funeral games for Patroclus as one of the poem's 'representative moments'; that is, they encapsulate the issues of honour and reward that the poem usually dramatizes on the battlefield.8 For some commentators, their function is to 'pu- rify' combat - that is, to imitate it but conceal its true deadly character.9 For others, though, the real point is that, to the watching gods, the horrors of war (involving such dramatic moments as Achilles' pursuit of Hector) is itself like an athletic spectacle.10 Prize-giving - the nature and function of reward - forms the topic of much debate. The boxing contest is preceded by Achilles giving Nestor a two-handled bowl 'simply as a gift', for now 'old age has its cruel hold' upon him. He accepts it, acknowledging that 'now it is for younger men to face these trials'. The prizes for the boxing match are then set forth: the winner will receive 'a hard-working mule', signifying endurance, the loser a two-handled cup. Prefiguring the boasts of Muhammad Ali, Epeios claims the prize before any competitor has even stepped forward: I say I am the greatest ... It will certainly be done as I say - 1 will smash right through the man's skin and shatter his bones. And his friends had better gather here ready for his funeral, to carry him away when my fists have broken him.11 Finally someone steps forward, Euryalos, another 'godlike man' of noble lineage, though we hear little about him. It seems to be an even match, but Homer presents it in very general terms - a 'flurry of heavy hands meeting', a 'fearful crunching of jaws', followed by a knockout blow to Euryalos's collarbone. All that matters is that Epeios's boasts are justified - he is the greatest (after all, he is also the man who designed the wooden horse). 'Godlike', he is also described as 'great-hearted' because, despite his threats, he does not kill his opponent, but lifts him to his feet. Symbolic conflict acts as the transition between combat with consequences and combat with none, between narrative complication and closure. It quarantines real violence (the crunching of jaws) by enfolding it be- tween two layers of symbolic violence (the bloodthirsty boast, the raising of the vanquished). Boxing, here, is the ultimate deep play. Justified boastfulness also features in the Odyssey (c. 725 bc). In book eight, the Phaeacians seek to impress the travel-weary Odysseus with a display of their athletic prowess. All goes well until Laodamas, son of the prince and a champion boxer, urges their guest to participate, telling him, 'there is no greater glory that can befall a man living than what he achieves by speed of his feet or strength of his hands'. When Odysseus declines, arguing that home is all he can think of, Laodamas rashly counters, 'You do not resemble an athlete.' Such a challenge does not go unanswered by the 'darkly resourceful Odysseus'. He grabs a heavy discus, and then offers to take on anyone at boxing, wrestling or running, 'ex- cept Laodamas / himself, for he is my host; who would fight with his friend?'12 The crisis is averted when the prince intervenes with music and dancing. Odysseus is less successful in avoiding a fight when, ten books later, disguised again, he returns home to Ithaca. There, Iros, a large and greedy beggar, insults him gratuitously. Egged on by Penelope's suitors, Iros rejects Odysseus's claim of solidarity between beggars and demands a 'battle of hands'.13 The suitors enjoy this tremendously and offer prizes. Here we find the first instance of spec- tators as villains in a boxing story: unwilling to fight themselves, but vicariously enjoying the risks someone else will run, and gambling on the outcome.14 Al- though Odysseus is outweighed and does not fight at full capacity (he is still anxious to conceal his identity), he manages to break some bones in Iros's neck, and as a final humiliation drags his opponent's prostrate body to the foot of the courtyard wall. Survival is the issue here, not prize-winning. The contest is 'a street fight that happens to involve a very skilful athlete in disguise'.15 If the Iliad reminds us of Ali's theatrical boasting, the Odyssey anticipates his resilience. Such pragmatism was of no use to subsequent idealizations of pugilism's golden age. As Tom Winnifrith points out, 'there is not in Homer the belief that behaving well somehow wins matches and battles'.16 However reluctant Odysseus is to fight, when persuaded he does not hold back. Honour and restraint, however, were central to the Virgilian ethos of the Roman Empire. It was Virgil, not Homer, who was evoked by the nineteenth-century muscular Christians, and the founding of the modern Olympics in 1896 was 'fired by Virgilian en- thusiasm'.17 Greater honour, paradoxically, was accompanied by even greater brutality. This is apparent if we compare the gloves used in Greek and Roman times.18 Today, boxers tend to use eight- to ten-ounce gloves in competition and anything up to eighteen-ounce gloves for sparring. Heavier gloves give greater protection both to the hands of the person striking the blow, and to the face and body of the blow's recipient. Until around the end of the fifth century bc, strips of leather of between ten and twelve feet long were used as 'soft gloves' (himantes). These protected the knuckles rather than the opponent's face. They were replaced by caestus, 'sharp gloves', lined with metal, which could maim and even kill an opponent (illus. 3). Dryden translated Virgil's caestus as: The Gloves of Death, with sev'n distinguish'd folds, Of tough Bull Hides; the space within is spread With Iron, or with loads of heavy Lead.19 This sounds like the kind of excessive violence, much more than sufficient to its purpose, that Odysseus tried hard to avoid. The fact that boxing gloves were made of bull hide may have been the rea- son that boxers and bulls were often compared with each other. In theArgonau- tica, Apollonius likens Amycus and Polydeuces to 'a pair of bulls angrily disput- ing for a grazing heifer', while Virgil, in the Georgics, describes a young heifer as he trains for a fight, learn [ing] to put / Fury into his horns' and 'sparring with the air'.20 The link between boxers and bulls continued into the twentieth cen- tury with men fighting under names like 'El Toro' and 'Bronx Bull', and their op- ponents figured as matadors. Hemingway admired the way a particular animal used his left and right horn, 'just like a boxer', while for Mailer, it was George Foreman's ability to use his gloves like horns' that made him so dangerous.21 The funeral games for Anchises staged in the Aeneid (19 bc) recall, and to some extent imitate, those of the Iliad. But Virgil's structure is more intricate and his tone is quite different from Homer's easy exuberance.22 The boat and foot races over, Aeneas sets out prizes for the boxing - a bullock for the victor, and a sword and helmet for the loser. As in the Iliad, one man comes forward immediately. Here is it Dares, the Trojan, 'who stood there with his head held high to begin the battle, flexing his shoulders, throwing lefts and rights and thrashing the air. They looked around for an opponent, but no one in all that company dared go near him or put on the gloves'. Thinking there is to be no contest, Dares goes to collect the bullock as his prize. Only then does Entellus, spurred on by Acestes, come forward. Dares is obviously modelled on the brash and youthful Epeios, but while Homer simply confirms that Epeios is 'godlike' with a straightforward victory, Vir- gil makes both character and action more complicated. Entellus is not presented as just any opponent (as Euryalos had been in the Iliad); he is motivated less by a desire for prizes or boastfulness than by a complex mixture of emotions. Acestes' words have roused his sense of honour; he feels indebted to his teacher, the god Eryx; he does not want to be thought a liar, or a coward; he feels himself a repre- sentative of Sicily against Troy. In all things Entellus is the antithesis of Dares: Three types of early boxing glove. Dares had youth on his side and speed of foot. Entellus had the reach and the weight, but his knees were going. He was slow and shaky and his whole huge body heaved with the agony of breathing. Blow upon blow they threw at each other and missed. Blow upon blow drummed on the hollow rib cage, boomed on the chest and showered round the head and ears, and the cheekbones rattled with the weight of the punches. Dares begins well, knocking Entellus down; the giant man falls 'as a hollow pine tree falls, torn up by the roots on great Mount Ida' - a common simile in clas- sical, and subsequent, depictions of fights. But, as we might expect, this only spurs on Entellus: He returned to the fray with his ferocity renewed and anger rousing him to new heights of violence. His strength was kindled by shame at his fall and pride in his prowess, and in a white heat of fury he drove Dares before him all over the arena, hammering him with rights and lefts and allowing him no rest or respite. Like hailstones from a dark cloud rattling down on roofs, Entellus battered Dares with a shower of blows from both hands and sent him spinning.23 Dares may have the strength, youth and confidence of a young animal, but Entellus, armed with psychological demons as well as mere muscles, is a true force of nature - falling like a pine tree and retaliating with blows like hailstones. Nature, or 'savage passion', must, however, be controlled, and so 'Father Aeneas' intervenes and ends the fight. This is one of the first fight stories in which the restraining referee is the hero.24 Aeneas tells Dares to acknowledge that 'the 13 divine will has turned against you', while Entellus ritually slaughters the bull he has won in honour of Eryx, and retires from boxing. The two men play no further part in the poem: boxing itself seems like a relic from some long-gone mythic age. The values of Augustan Rome have been made clear: piety is the basis for power and success; temperance and restraint the mark of a military leader.25 In years to come, the fights described by Homer and Virgil would provide models for many writers. Both tell stories of drama and suspense, but each has a different emphasis. In Homer, fighting may come as a last resort but when it does, no punches are pulled, and there is no need to be modest about one's prowess. Virgil's fighters are equipped with lethal gloves, but checked by the need to govern their anger, and by vanity. BOXING BY ANALOGY Homer and Virgil both compare conduct in games to that in war. It is not always the case that the same man is good at both activities, merely that they are anal- ogous. In the Iliad, Epeios's boast begins, 'Is it not enough that I am less good in battle? ... a man cannot be expert in all things'.26 Less expert at boxing, but more so at battle, is Achilles, yet he shares with Epeios a firm belief in his own ability. He boasts that no one is a match for him, and we soon see that no one can chal- lenge his 'invincible hands'.27 And in theAeneid, we are reminded of Dares and Enthellus when later we come to compare the behaviour of Turnus and Aeneas in a real fight to the death.28 The relationship between pugilism and war is also at the forefront of many of Plato's references to boxing (three of his dialogues are set in the gymnasium and palaestra). In the Laws, he argues for the necessity of training soldiers to be prepared for war by comparing them with boxers training for fight ('if we were training boxers . . . would we go straight into the ring unpre- pared by a daily work-out against an opponent?'); in the Republic the analogy is extended further - as 'one boxer in perfect training is easily a match for two men who are not boxers, but rich and fat', so a well-prepared Athens could go to war against wealthier and more powerful enemies.29 Boxing similes were not only used in discussions of war and its attendant virtues and risks. They can also be found, for example, in debates about the qualities needed for successful political debating (Plutarch) and ways of dealing with the dishonest in everyday life (Marcus Aurelius).30 Aristotle evokes boxing in the Nicomachean Ethics (c. 330 bc) when he wants to explain the nature of pain and pleasure in courage. Men who withstand painful things, he writes, are brave, while those spurred on by passions such as revenge are 'pugnacious but not brave'. Sometimes, however, there is a gap between the pleasant end 'which courage sets before itself and the painful 'attending circumstances'. This is the case in athletic contests: the end at which boxers aim is pleasant - the crown and the honours - but the blows they take are distressing to flesh and blood, and painful, 14 and so is their whole exertion; and because the blows and the exertions are many the end, which is but small, appears to have nothing in it.31 Boxers are brave because, in the heat of the fight, it is not prizes but virtue (courage) that motivates them. Courage, like all Aristotelian virtues, operates as a mediating strategy between other qualities; here, confidence and fear. Too much confidence, or too little fear, and no courage is needed; too much fear or too little confidence, and one is paralyzed. The use of boxing analogies to discuss virtue was not restricted to class- ical philosophy. The nature of courage required for religious struggle (and the importance of keeping your eyes on the prize) was one of the subjects of the First Letter to the Corinthians (c. 48 ad). There Paul insists that he is a genuine fighter rather than a shadow boxer ('one that beateth the air', in the King James version). Moreover, he goes on, in a phrase that would prove res- onant for muscular Christianity, 'I keep under my own body, and bring it into subjection.'32 AT THE GAMES Boxing played an important part in the games of ancient Greece; both in the four great Panhellenic festivals - the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean and Isthmian - and in the numerous local games held in individual cities. The most presti- gious Games, the Olympic, began in 776 bc, and boxing was introduced in 688 bc.33 The festival spanned five days; the first and last were reserved for cere- monies and celebrations; boxing tookplace on the fourth day at midday so that neither competitor had the sun in his eyes. The sport was similar to modern boxing to the extent that each competitor attempted to injure or exhaust his opponent by punching him. There were, however, no rounds, rest periods, weight classes or points systems. There was no rule against hitting an opponent when down and no confined ring. Boxers were paired by lot; a single elimination format was used. A winner was declared when one boxer was no longer physi- cally able to continue (illus. 4). Although the Olympic ideal has long been evoked as a model of fairness and sportsmanship, often in contrast to modern corruption, Pausanias's Guide to Greece (170 ad) reveals that fight fixing actu- ally began at the 98th Olympics: Eulopos of Thessaly bribed the boxers who entered, Agetor of Arkadia and Prytanis of Kyzikos, and also Phormion of Halikarnassos, who won the boxing at the previous Olympics. This is said to have been the first crime ever committed in the games, and Eulopos and the men he bribed were the first to be fined . . .34 The Romans were generally disdainful of the Greek love of the gymnasium, but boxing also played a part in the Ludi Romani. According to Suetonius, 'none 15 Boxers with prize tripod in back- ground, fragment of Black-figure vase, mid-sixth century bc. of Augustus's predecessors had ever provided so many, so different, or such splen- did public shows'. He goes on to detail wild-beast hunts, mock sea-battles and gladiatorial shows of all kinds, but says that Augustus's 'chief delight was to watch boxing, particularly when the fighters were Italians - and not merely professional bouts, in which he often used to pit Italians against Greeks or Africans against each other, but slogging matches between untrained roughs in narrow city alleys' (illus. 5).35The boxers in these contests used the oxhide caestus, and injuries were severe. This perhaps accounts for Augustus's introduction of a series of regula- tions as to who could take part (a senatorial decree banned persons 'of good family' from events such as boxing) and who could watch such contests.36 Suetonius notes that whereas 'men and women had hitherto always sat together, Augustus confined women to the back rows even at gladiatorial shows': No women at all were allowed to witness the athletic contests; indeed, when the audience clamoured at the Games for a special boxing match to celebrate his appointment as Chief Pontiff, Augustus postponed this until early the next morning, and issued a proclamation to the effect that it was the Chief Pontiff 's desire that women should not attend the Theatre before ten o'clock.37 In a reassessment of Plato's Laws, Cicero argued that the theatre should be kept free from the bloody sport of the Games, but it is clear that some infiltration took place.38 Horace complained of crowds calling out for boxers or bears in the middle of a play, while Terence attributed the failure of one his plays to the rival attraction of boxing.39 A couple of millennia later, Bertolt Brecht was to make a new theatre out of such infiltrations. While Brecht felt that boxing fans viewed the sport with cool objectivity and rationally judged the performance 16 African boxers; terracotta, second or first century bo of each participant, the more common view (exemplified in every Hollywood fight film and first expressed in another classic work of the late Roman Empire, St Augustine's Confessions) was that boxing degrades its audience as much as its participants. St Augustine tells the story of a reluctant visit to the gladiator- ial arena by his pupil, Alypius. At first Alypius closes his eyes, but he cannot close his ears. When the crowd roars, he is unable to contain his curiosity and so opens his eyes. Immediately, and dramatically, he is corrupted by what he sees: 'he fell, and fell more pitifully than the man whose fall had drawn that roar of excitement from the crowd'.40 17 ODES TO VICTORY The funeral games of Homer's and Virgil's epics provide one enduring model for depicting sporting events. Another can be found in the odes, known as epinicians (epi-Nike-ans), written by the fifth-century bc poets Pindar and Bacchylides, in celebration of the victors in the athletic games. To the lyre the Muse granted tales of gods and children of gods, of the victor in boxing, of the horse first in the race, of the loves of swains, and of freedom over wine.41 Pierian Muses, daughters of Zeus who rules on high, you are famed for your skill with the lyre: strum and weave for us then intricate songs for Argeius, the junior boxer, the Isthmian games' victor.42 If epic poetry memorialized battles that spanned decades and had national significance, the epinician celebrated the fleeting triumphs of sport, giving last- ing form to the deed of the moment.'43 I look for help to the Muses with their blue-black hair, to bless my song of how, in this life, contingent, ephemeral, a few things somehow endure.44 The victories of the athletes were often represented as imitative of the bat- tle victories of epic heroes such as Achilles and Odysseus, whose triumphs in turn were compared to those of the gods. Let Hagesidamos Who has won in the boxing at Olympia, Thank Illas as Patroklos thanked Achilles. One born to prowess May be whetted and stirred To win huge glory If a God be his helper.45 Also located within this hierarchy of kinds of victory was the poet himself, with- out whom all heroes would be forgotten, and whose memorializing skill was itself worthy of praise (and medals).46 A different notion of honour emerges, 18 one less directly attached to the virtues necessary for combat and having more to do with those essential to art. According to Richmond Lattimore, it was the 'very uselessness of . . . [the athletic] triumphs which attracted Pindar': 'A victory meant that time, expense, and hard work had been lavished on an achievement that brought no calculable advantage, only honour and beauty.'47 Father Zeus, ruler on Atabyrion's ridges, Honour the rite of Olympian victory, And a man who has found prowess in boxing. Grant him favour and joy From citizens and strangers. For he goes straight on a road that hates pride, And knows well what a true heart From noble fathers has revealed to him.48 The odes of Bacchylides and Pindar, which firmly connect the activities of the poet with those of the athlete, were echoed in Roman times by Horace and by neo-classical poets in the eighteenth century.49 It might be argued that epinician tradition also lies behind some of the more extravagant claims made by sports- writers in modern times. THE BODY, BEAUTIFUL AND VULNERABLE Today classical Greek athletics continues to fascinate us, not simply because of the sporting principles it initiated, but because of the language it provides for talking about the human body, and, particularly, its glories. Training, and the culture of the gymnasium, are treated widely in Greek literature, and much writ- ing about that culture focuses on the beauties of the naked bodies displayed there. Disapproving of the violence of the Roman gladiatorial contests, Dio Chrysostom sets up an alternative in the gentler, more philosophical, world of the Greek gymnasium where his ideal boxer Melancomas 'did not consider it courage to strike his opponent or to receive an injury himself, but thought this indicated a lack of stamina and a desire to have done with the contest'. Melan- comas's unblemished beauty is directly linked to his moral virtues - his disci- pline, courage, modesty and self-control. Dio compares Melancomas to his closest rival, Iatrocles, whom he remembers in training. He was a very tall and beautiful young man; and besides, the exercises he was taking made his body seem, quite naturally, still taller and more beautiful. He was giving a most brilliant performance, and in so spirited a way that he seemed more like a man in an actual contest. Then, when he stopped exercising and the crowd began to draw away, we studied him more closely. He was just like one of the most care- 19 fully wrought statues, and also he had a colour like well blended 50 If Melancomas's beauty reveals his inner virtue, that of Iatrocles exists on the surface only.51 The comparison of (stationary) athletes with statues would prove endur- ing and later commentators were less inclined to worry about the gap between outer and inner beauty. Boxing's revival in the eighteenth century coincided with a revival of interest in the classics, and much writing about the male boxer, then and later, drew on notions of statuesque perfection as exemplified by Greek athletes. In 1755, for example, the German Hellenist, Winckelmann, famously argued that the excellence of Greek art was, in some part, due to the availabil- ity of fine models: The gymnasia, where, sheltered by public modesty, the youths exer- cised themselves naked, were the schools of art. These the philosopher frequented, as well as the artist. Socrates for the instruction of a Charmides, Autolycus, Lysis; Phidias for the improvement of his art by their beauty. Here he studied the elasticity of the muscles, the ever vary- ing motions of the frame, the outlines of fair forms, or the contour left by the young wrestler in the sand. Here beautiful nakedness appeared with such liveliness of expression, such truth and variety of situations, such a noble air of the body, as it would be ridiculous to look for in any hired model of our academies.52 Gymnasia were, of course, also places of seduction and athletic statues often highly eroticized, but Winckelmann insisted that 'ideal beauty' was about estab- lishing a connection to 'something superior to nature; ideal beauties, brain- born images' - what James Davidson defines as 'the sculptural complement to the idealism of Platonic philosophy'. 'The ideal body is not at all earthly or earthy: it provides an accurate material reflection of the heavenly, the insub- stantial and the divine.'53 There was, however, one undeniable difference between artistic and real life bodies. Whereas art is long, the real bodies exemplifying physical perfec- tion, were, of course, perishable. Pindar's odes capture the fleeting moments of an ideal physical state as well as those of victory. The very transience of the ideal body is made all the more poignant by the less than perfect bodies that sur- round it. This phenomenon is foregrounded in boxing - and not in other Olympic sports such as the discus or running - by the fact that while the processes of training are all about perfecting the body, and while at the moment of triumph, the body may move beautifully, the sport itself is all about damag- ing (and making ugly) the body.54 Apollonian form could only temporarily con- tain Dionysian energy. The odd exception only serves to prove the rule. Dio Chrysostom praises Melancomas - 'although boxing was his speciality, he Etruscan engraved bronze; probably Polydeuces training with a punch bag, with Amycus to his right; late fourth century bc. remained as free from marks as any of the runners' - while, much later, the thought of 'pretty boy' Janiro's unmarked face fuels Jake La Motta's paranoia in Martin Scors- ese's Raging Bull.55 The damaged body of the boxer appeared in literature and art as early as its beautiful counterpart. A popular model for later writ- ers, Theocritus's version of the mythical fight between Polydeuces and Amycus in the Idylls (third century bc) was based on real fights he had seen in the stadium. His account is alert to technical detail and strat- egy, but perhaps even more memorable are his graphic descriptions of the wounds that fighters carry and inflict.56 While searching for the legendary golden fleece, Castor and Polydeuces - sons of Leda and Zeus, and brothers of Helen of Troy- are shipwrecked on Bebrycia. There, in a grove, Polydeuces, an Olympic champion, encounters Amycus, the King of the Bebryces, brother of the Cyclops and 'a giant of a man' (illus. 6): He was an awesome spectacle: His ears were thickened By blows from leather mitts, and his huge chest and broad back swelled Like the iron flesh of a hammered statue. Where his shoulders and hard arms Met, the muscles jutted out like rounded boulders, polished smooth By the whirling onrush of a winter torrent. One thing leads to another and soon the 'son of Zeus' has challenged the aggressive and inhospitable 'son of Poseidon' to a fight, the loser agreeing to become the winner's slave. The description that follows relishes the damage done to 'this huge / Mound of a man': A loud cheer rose from the heroes, when they saw the ugly wounds Around Amycus' mouth and jaw, and his eyes narrowed to slits in his Swollen face. . . Another punch and Amycus's nose is skinned; a few more and his face is 'smashed' into 'a dreadful pulp. / His sweating flesh collapsed, and his colossal form shrank in on itself. Finally, Polydeuces finishes off the fight with a blow to his opponent's mouth, head and left temple ('The bone cracked open, and the dark blood spurted out'). With Amycus lying 'near to death', Polydeuces, clear- skinned and with limbs enlarged', walks away.57 He lets his opponent live.58 The contest between modern Greek speed, skill and 'guile', and mythic bulk has proved unsatisfyingly one-sided.59 The main purpose of Theocritus's description seems to be to dwell on the damage done, a purpose not unheard-of in sub- sequent representations of pugilism. Not all depictions of a boxer's injuries are marked by such gruesome relish. Many are simply documentary; vase paintings often depict blood streaming from the boxer's nose as well as from cuts on his cheeks. A more sophisticated realism can be found in the fourth-century statue of a battered boxer, some- times known as 'The Pugilist at Rest' (illus. 7).61 In a 1993 short story of that title, the American writer Thorn Jones describes it: The statue depicts a muscular athlete approaching his middle age. He has a thick beard and a full head of curly hair. In addition to the telltale broken nose and cauliflower ears of a boxer, the pugilist has the slanted, drooping brows that bespeak broken nerves. Also, the forehead is piled with scar tissue . . . The pugilist is sitting on a rock with his forearms balanced on his thighs. That he is seated and not pacing implies that he has been through all this many times before. It appears that he is conserving his strength. His head is turned as if he were looking over his shoulder - as if someone had just whispered something to him. It is in this that the 'art' of the sculpture is conveyed to the viewer. Could it be that some- one has just summoned him to the arena? There is a slight look of befuddlement on his face, but there is no trace of fear . . . Beside the deformities on his noble face, there is also the suggestion of weariness and philosophical resignation.62 The sculpture is notable for the acute detail in its rendering of wounds both long-accumulated and from the immediate fight. Scars are visible all over the body but especially on the face, the nose is broken, the right eye swollen. More- over, the bronze statue has red copper inlaid in order to indicate fresh facial wounds and blood that has dripped down on to the right arm and thigh. Attention is also drawn to the athlete's tangled hair, his finger and toenails, weary face and sagging muscle. 'No other work of art from antiquity,' writes Harris 'takes us into the stadium with such intimacy as this statue.'63 The destruction of the boxer's body, and in particular his face, also provides the basis of much gruesome humour in Lucilius's debunking epigrams: Your head, Apollophanes, has become a sieve, or the lower edge of a worm-eaten book, all exactly like ant-holes, crooked and straight . . . But go on boxing without fear, for even if you are struck on the head you will have the marks you have - you can't have more.64 With loss of face comes loss of identity: The Pugilist at Rest, also known as the Terme Boxer, bronze copy, 1st century ad, of a signed 4th-century sculpture by Apollonius. ■ When Ulysses after twenty years came safe to his home, Argos the dog recognized his appearance when he saw him, but you, Stratophon, after boxing for four hours, have become not only unrecognizable to dogs but to the city. If you will trouble to look at your face in a glass, you will say on your oath, 'I am not Stratophon. 5 23 Narcissus died because he fell in love his own reflected image. By this reckoning, however, the vanity of boxers is likely to prove short-lived: Having such a mug, Olympicus, go not to a fountain nor look in any transparent water, for you, like Narcissus, seeing your face clearly, will die, hating yourself to the death.66 While ancient literature and art have provided models for subsequent depic- tions of the boxer as an exemplar of either statuesque beauty or grotesque injury (often contrasted as the ideal and the real), it is worth remembering that the figure that most appealed to aficionados was neither. Philostratus notes that while the best fighters have small bellies, 'such people are light and have good respiration', a big-bellied boxer also has a certain advantage, 'for such a belly hinders blows at the face.'67 BOXING AGAINST EROS The body was never, of course, merely a sign of temporal vulnerability and meta- physical dissolution. The palaestra was also the setting for homoerotic admir- ation and seduction, where the vulnerable as well as the statuesque body proved attractive: When Menecharmus, Anticles's son, won the boxing match, I crowned him with ten soft fillets, and thrice I kissed him all dabbled with blood as he was, but the blood was sweeter to me than myrrh.68 Although most writing about exercise focuses on men, women also used gym- nasia and, in Greece, participated in women's games.69 This fuelled heterosex- ual fantasies, particularly among nostalgic Romans. One of Ovid's Heroides, a series of imaginary letters from mythical figures to their lovers, is a letter from Paris to Helen. In it he describes the power of her beauty and imagines Theseus coming upon her competing in ihepalaestra, 'a naked maiden with naked men'. 'I revere his act, I can only wonder / why he ever let you be returned.'70 Another Augustan love poet, Propertius, also evokes Helen in recalling the glory days of Spartan athletics. Particularly commendable was the Spartan practice of having naked men and women competing together. Propertius waxes lyrical about naked women 'covered in dust' at the finishing-post, and with swords strapped to 'snow-white thighs'. Even the binding of 'arms with thongs for boxing' excites him, and he imagines two bare-breasted Amazons resembling Pollux and Castor '(One soon to be prize boxer, the other horseman)/ Between whom Helen with bare nipples took up arms.' Roman women, in contrast, pay 'boring attention to perfumed hair'.71 If pugilism had its erotic qualities, erotic love could also be seen as a poten- tially pugilistic activity: 24 Bring water, bring wine, O boy, and bring me the flowery Crowns. Bring them, since I am indeed boxing against Eros! (Anacreon) Whoever challenges Eros to a match Like a boxer fist-to-fist, he is out of his wits. (Sophocles)72 Multiple contests are possible: the lover struggles against the conventional re- sistance of the beloved; rival lovers compete; the lover's desire struggles for ex- pression. Boxing might even be easier than love. In another epigram by Lucilius, sexual yielding is more devastating than any acknowledgment of defeat in the stadium: Cleombrotos ceased to be a pugilist, but afterwards married and now has at home all the blows of the Isthmian and Nemean games, a pug- nacious old woman hitting as hard as in the Olympian fights, and he dreads his own house more than he ever dreaded the ring. Whenever he gets his wind, he is beaten with all the strokes known in every match to make him pay her his debt; and if he pays it, he is beaten again.73 But love and pugilism are not only comparable as amateur sports; in some ways the analogy works better on the professional level. Thomas F. Scanlon notes that athletes and courtesans are paired in many poems, and describes a fifth- century bc column-krater which places on opposite sides, and in near-identical poses, an athlete and a courtesan. 'The pun may be interpreted on several levels,' he writes: 'she is "athletic"; he is a "courtesan" whose prizes are her payment; both place a premium on the beauty of the body; both possess erotic attraction.'74 In the classical era, then, boxing was the literal or metaphoric subject of a great variety of representations, many of which will recur in the chapters which follow. More often than not, whether it is Homer describing the contest be- tween Epeios and Euryalos, or Aristotle defining courage, or Pindar the function of poetry, or Lucilius marriage, the representations turn on a violence which is at once actual and symbolic. It is the inextricable mixture in pugilism of high decorum and low cunning, of beauty and damage, of rhetoric and bodily fluids, which has made it for so long and so productively a way to imagine conflict. 25 The English Golden Age There is some evidence, from thirteenth-century legal records and fourteenth- century psalters, that sports resembling wrestling, cudgelling and boxing existed in Britain in the Middle Ages (illus. 8).1 These references, however, are fleeting; fighting with hands and sticks was a plebeian rather than an aristocratic activity, and as such did not feature in medieval art and literature to the same extent as sports such as jousting, archery or hunting. By the sixteenth century, British box- ing's Greek origins had been largely forgotten and if the sport was considered at all, it was grouped with other rowdy rural pastimes such as cock-fighting and bear- baiting; all were outlawed under the Puritan government of Cromwell.2 When the Restoration brought a relaxation of public morality, many traditional rural sports became popular in the expanding cities, 'supported by city nobles, local squires migrating to the commercial centers, and growing numbers of working- class men.'3 In the cities these sports began to change. Between 1500 and 1800, Peter Burke notes, 'there was a gradual shift taking place from the more sponta- neous and participatory forms of entertainment towards the more formally-organ- ised and commercialised spectator sports, a shift which was, of course, to go much further after 1800'.4 Samuel Pepys's diary for 5 August 1660 notes (in one short paragraph) a trip to the doctor to fetch an ointment for his sick wife, dinner at Westminster, attending Common Prayer at St Margaret's church, and, undoubt- edly the highlight of his day, 'a fray' at Westminster stairs between 'Mynheer Clinke, a Dutchman, that was at Hartlib's wedding, and a waterman, which made good sport'.5 The first boxing-match recorded in a newspaper, The Protestant Mercury , took place in 1681 in the presence of the Duke of Albemarle, with the winner, a butcher, already recognized 'the best at that exercise in England'.6 The trades- men who most depended on upper-body strength - watermen, butchers and blacksmiths - were the ones most frequently associated with pugilism in the days before the sport became 'scientific'. In 1719, James Figg opened an indoor arena, or, as he called it, Amphi- theatre', and school near Adam and Eve Court off London's Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), where he taught boxing along with quarterstaff, backsword and 26 MM* ittittujgimf Two men wrestling, flanked by spectators, one of whom holds a pole surmounted by a cockerel, a prize for the winner; Bas-de-page scene, detail from the Queen Mary Psalter, c. 1310-20. Anonymous printmaker, Figg's Card, c. 1794. cudgelling. A promotional card (once attributed to Hogarth) was distributed at Figg's booth at Southwark Fair, and his advertisements promised that the booth was 'fitted up in a most commodious manner for the better reception of gentle- men' (illus. 9). Samuel Johnson's uncle, Andrew, ran a similar booth at Smithfield meat market.7 Although boxing matches were frequently advertised as 'trials of manhood', women as well as men could often be found fighting at the booths and bear- garden (illus. 10). 8 In August 1723, The London Journal noted that 'scarce a week passes but we have a Boxing-Match at the Bear-Garden between women'.9 It would not have been unusual, while browsing the newspaper, to come upon a challenge and reply such as this (from 1722): CHALLENGE I, Elizabeth Wilkinson of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Hyfield, and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me upon the stage, and box me for three guineas, each woman holding half a crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops the money to lose the battle. ANSWER I, Hannah Hyfield, of Newgate-market, hearing of the resoluteness of Elizabeth Wilkinson, will not fail, God willing, to give her more blows than words - desiring home blows, and from her no favour; she may expect a good thumping!10 Most reports of women's fighting (all are written by men) focused on the scanty dress rather than the skill of the participants. Foreign visitors to London were particularly intrigued. Recalling his visit to London in 1710, von Uffenbach described a fight between two women 'without stays and in nothing but a shift', while Martin Nogiie's Voyages etAventures (1728) reported matches between girls and women 'stripped to the waist'; William Hickey, meanwhile, described com- ing upon two women boxing near Drury Lane in 1749, 'their faces entirely cov- ered in blood, bosoms bare, and the clothes nearly torn from their bodies'.11 Pierre Jean Grosley was particularly outraged to see a fight between a man and a woman in Holborn: 'I was witness to five or six bouts of the combat; which sur- prised me the more, as the woman had, upon her left arm, an infant a year or two old, which was so far from crying out, as is natural for children to do even in circumstances of less danger, that it did not so much as seem to knit its brow, but appeared to attend to a lesson of what it was one day to practice itself.'12 The quality of English fighting women received patriotic endorsement in the anonymous Sal Dab Giving Monsieur a Receipt in Full of 1766 (illus. 11). Sal bloodies the nose of a dandyish Frenchman who, despite his general hopeless- ness, has managed to lay bare her bosoms; another woman, meanwhile, applies a lobster to his naked bottom. A pub-sign above advertises 'The Good Woman'.13 28 Butler Clowes (after JohnCollett), The Female Bruisers, 1770, mezzotint. Boxing began to flourish in the early eighteenth century, at the expense of other sports such as quart erstaff and backsword, by attracting the support of the wealthy and powerful. In 1723 a ring was erected in Hyde Park 'by order of his Majesty' George I, and the next champion of note, a former Thames waterman called John Broughton, secured the patronage of the Duke of Cumberland. The early patrons supported their fighters in training and wagered huge sums on their fights; The Gentleman's Magazine reported in one instance that 'many thousands depended' on the outcome of a fight.14 Without the eighteenth-century love of gambling, argues Dennis Brailsford, 'pugilism . . . would have been unthinkable', and with large bets came a need for rules to limit disputes.15 The great Enlighten- ment project of systemization and law-making thus extended to pugilism, with the first written rules of prize-fighting published under Broughton's name in 1743. l6 Although the rules were intended simply to regulate his own establishment, they were soon widely adopted. 'No one sport', claims Brailsford, 'owed more for its be- ginnings to one man than boxing owed to him' (illus. 12). ly The rules specified how a round would begin and end; how the seconds and umpires should conduct themselves; how the money should be divided; and that a fight was over when one man could not be brought back to the scratch line in the centre of the ring. After 1746, English gamblers adapted the notion of 29 Sal Dab Giving Monsieur a Receipt in Full, 1766, mezzotint. horse handicapping and began dividing boxers into light, middle, and heavy- weight classes (there was, however, only one 'champion' who tended to be the heaviest). By 1838, these rules had developed into the 29 English Prize Ring Rules. Wrestling holds, such as the cross-buttocks, remained a part of boxing until the Queensberry rules abolished them in the 1860s. Champion from 1734 to 1750, Broughton promoted bareknuckle bouts at his Amphitheatre near Marylebone Fields, including Battles Royal in which a champion took on up to seven challengers at a time. The fights took place on an unfenced stage with several rows of seating for gentlemen; these rows were sep- arated from the platform by a gap where the other spectators stood, their eyes level with the pugilists' feet. 30 Broughton's Rules, 16 August 1743. RULES TO RE QHtf.RYF.n IS ALL RATTLI-S ON THt M U I t TlUT 1 hpur* d t V«d b. [rulknJ in ih- ■MUk nl ihr JiaJs-r. tnj flfl ttcfj fruit t.t.11 'fit* 1 flit, or t*in( juricJ fnim rrw null. «,h Jwral n [o tain)j hit Mm 10 tilt fldc ur' Ihr i^uiir^inJ pkjii! him opfufiir tji ePic *iphnr ir.,r nil rhty tn fufly itt.io 41 ih? Lim->,.i ihiH .n bv la"iyl Iik yn* ui llnL* ■■ Erie, othrf II TfUl.mOfltef t* eMKW «!)■ f Hfjmiri, thrnmr 1 Mm Ln jrrrr i lilt, if I he Snwkj don not brind h« Mui 10 tin Car ol tJv tjin, niijim the If Kt of Ju'i 1 mirwor. be 111 jIP b* Jflips J J tiidn >1 in. III 1 jut mnrrj nsiii> fUjilc, IW JtfHMI WHSKTfT rV jil b* up-.11 litin IjxflckBiiLPi in ptrfrii^j; su- iU .1 | . ^cd ilnmk bedoo. rKinnnrlu^ in rb\ IU:|lt, I whuctET prctcndi ti* iniiinp: 1 1ic4c Ruli'% |n Mvrtvd imrHt'Siiri.11 Fn,t frjin ' " .fd. 3l t* puMimlt Jn bJfd upun Dm Siifi'i natmilllnJuldlBf im rfiijli ^^^c^^l;p^H Hi> Iht iiKHiftfy 'ITiid 1-t p«TL'i 1 l'i I'j ir..-.f.i l> lKi4l,o* Cvnlirtft. oft tbr S< jp. nhm lluH inMuExIl JmJi ill IVIjjmm ihil rn>) j'.i. dt.up (hf ItinV, i-*J ii '-K fikn l'nf-% > inn .1 jji'L-r. ill. En:! ( i: f in pn JbviV , ihi.J, «lv» t» m Jniffnims 11 I'll. 'I'hir nu prrlitn ik ni hn hn .Idiiilir^ »Twn fa ■■ Jmm,«c tafBlmr! b) IK Idbi. ik- lnulxt. V %_'^*' *-»**t J-h* F**"* «""vtH-* tL «* «!.*-». i f-uT- n kl an »l*^i 1 fevJ* H- ■&] ^»J*Jl 1 Uj"J»»W U • • AH. V*. >■ M 4 h fci£ itlla) r.V # _ 13 School for Boxing, 1788. 40 14 Thomas Rowland- son, Six Stages of Marring a Face, May 1792, etching. SIX S&SES Cribb to a second meeting, 'expressing the confident hope, that the circumstance of my being a different colour to that of a people amongst whom I have sought protection will not in any way operate to my prejudice.'93 The following year (before a crowd estimated at 15-20,000) Cribb, who had spent eleven weeks with the noted trainer, Captain Barclay, defeated an ill- prepared Molineaux in what the Times described as a 'most obstinate and san- guinary combat'.94 Once Cribb was safely champion, the fans could once more become magnanimous, and soon songs were sung about Molineaux's bravery - Tho' beat, he proved a man my boys, what more could a man do' - and he too was co-opted into imaginary contests with Boney. The blurring of the language of war and the language of sport was not restricted to those who watched from the sidelines. Wellington himself famously described Waterloo as 'a pounding match' and said of its opposing armies, 'both were what the boxers call gluttons'.95 The war ended in 1815, and Thomas Moore's 'Epistle from Tom Cribb to Big Ben, Concerning some Foul Play in a Late Transaction' (1818), satirically compares the conduct of the allies in exiling Napoleon to St Helena to kicking a man when he is down. 'Foul! Foul!' all the lads of the Fancy exclaim - Charley Shock is electrified - Belcher spits flame - And Molyneux - ay, even Blacky cries 'shame!' Time was, when John Bull little difference spied 'Twixt the foe at his feet, and the friend at his side; When he found (such his humour in fighting and eating) His foe, like his beefsteak, the sweeter for beating.96 In the years that followed, although Boney remained in St Helena, pugilistic jingo- ism showed no signs of abating. 'In the mythology of the Ring,' writes Peter Bailey, 'the fist was England's national weapon and the skilful and courageous wielding of it in public kept alive the spirit of Waterloo.'97 Many found it useful to recall foreign enemies in the period of increased civil unrest that followed the war's end. 'having the luck to be born an englishman' A rhetoric of nationalist masculinity was not new to the Napoleonic period, but what was new, perhaps, was the anxiety, and urgency, with which it was deployed. The spectre of effeminacy was constantly evoked. Boxing was not merely British and democratic, but, in its direct physicality, a more masculine way of fighting than relatively at-a-distance foreign methods (the dagger and knife) mentioned in popular songs such as 'A Boxing We Will G0'.98 Works such as 'Defence of Box- ing' (a 'political view of the subject'), by Windham's friend, William Cobbett, make much of supposed links between effeminacy and tyranny. Boxing, Cobbett claimed, could stave off 'national degradation' and help prevent 'submission to a foreign yoke'. 'Commerce, Opulence, Luxury, Effeminacy, Cowardice, Slavery,' 46 he maintained, 'are the stages of national degradation.' By threatening to replace 'hardy' sports by those 'requiring less strength, and exposing the persons engaged in them to less bodily suffering', Britain was already showing symptoms of effeminacy and edging dangerously towards 'national cowardice'.99 And if the effeminate nation then turned to undemocratic weapons such as the knife or the dagger, a decline into slavery was practically inevitable.100 But while Cobbett saw in boxing an unambiguous solution to the threat of national effeminacy, others were less certain both about nation and about mas- culinity. In Boxiana, the Protestant Irish Pierce Egan sometimes claimed box- ing for England and sometimes for Britain. In 'The Two Drovers' (1827), Walter Scott kept the distinction clear; boxing is an English sport. The story is set in the 1780s, and presents a conflict between two friends - a Highlander, Robin Oig, and an Englishman, Harry Wakefield - two different forms of combat - the sword and the fists - and two versions of masculinity.101 The drovers are phys- ically very different. Robin Oig was 'small of stature, as the epithet Oig implies, and not very strongly limbed'; on the other hand, he was 'as light and alert as one of the deer of his mountains'. Harry Wakefield was 'nearly six feet high, gal- lantly formed to keep the rounds at Smithfield, or maintain the ring at a wrestling match; and although he might have been overmatched, perhaps, among the regular professors of the Fancy, yet, as a yokel or a rustic, or a chance customer, he was able to give a bellyful to any amateur of the pugilistic art.'102 The men quarrel over who has the right to graze his sheep in a particular field, just on the English side of the Border. Harry wants a 'turn-up' and even offers to wear gloves. But Robin prefers the broadsword - 'I have no skill to fight like a jackanapes, with hands and nails'. Neither is a gentleman, but both are anxious to claim that status - Robin by evoking the Highland and European traditions of sword-fighting; Harry by boasting prowess in the fashionable English 'puglistic art'. They start with Harry's game, at which he beats Robin 'with as much ease as a boy bowls down a nine-pin'. In victory, Harry offers dubious consolation to his friend: 'Tis not thy fault, man, that not having the luck to be born an English- man, thou canst not fight more than a school-girl.' 'I can fight,' answered Robin Oig sternly, but calmly, 'and you shall know it. You, Harry Waakfelt, shewed me today how the Saxon churls fight - 1 shew you now how the Highland Dunniewassal fights.' He seconded the word with the action, and plunged the dagger, which he suddenly displayed, into the broad breast of the English yeo- man, with such fatal certainty and force, that the hilt made a hollow sound against the breast-bone, and the double-edged point split the very heart of his victim. Both men are aware of the physical intimacy of fighting. Harry had hoped that the boxing match would end up with a clasping of hands and the two men 47 'better friends than ever'; it would be a 'tussle for love on the sod'. Although Robin suggests that boxing, a form of fighting 'with hands and nails', is unseemly, even animalistic, in its intimate physicality, his later plunge of the dirk into his friend's heart might be read as a more complete consummation of their uneasy relationship; it is certainly more suggestively phallic than the mere touch of hands.103 Slurs of effeminacy (fighting like a schoolgirl, etc.) have given way to something else. 'The Two Drovers' ends with Robin Oig on trial, and with the judge reflecting on the cultural relativity of codes of honour. This has been, after all, a tale of the Borders. A rather different interpretation of effeminacy, one with personal rather than political implications, is also introduced in Cobbett's essay when he refers to the prize-fighter Jem Belcher. Egan had described Belcher as having a 'prepossessing appearance, genteel and remarkably placid in his behaviour'.104 He was generally thought to be a bit of a dandy, and wore 'immaculate dark clothes, set off by a vivid and extravagant neckcloth (usually blue with white spots)' which became known as a 'belcher' (illus. 17). los Cobbett, however, did not refer to Belcher's rep- utation for elegance (perhaps because he believed that 'women . . . despise personal vanity in men) and instead characterized him as 'a monster, a perfect ruffian'.106 Nevertheless, there is 'scarcely a female Saint, perhaps, who would not, in her way to the conventicle, or even during the snuffling there to be heard, take a peep at him from beneath her hood. Can as much be said by any one of those noblemen and gentlemen who have been spending the best years of their lives in danc- ing by night and playing cricket by day?' No wonder, Cobbett - the ex-soldier - added, women like soldiers. Effeminacy in this passage seems simply to mean sexual unattractiveness; war is forgotten in the face of more pressing issues. A little monstrous manliness would get you the girl. Sometimes it would also get you the guy. References to boxers' groupies or 'macaronis' can be found in several eigh- teenth-century poems. 'Macaroni' was a derogatory label for young men who had travelled to France and Italy and came back with long hair and a taste for foreign food. In June 1770 the Oxford Magazine noted that 'a kind of animal, neither male not female, a thing of the neuter gender' had 'lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without mean- ing, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion .'107 Three years 17 Benjamin Marshall, James Belcher, Bare- Knuckle Champion of England, c. 1803, oil on canvas. 48 later, mAuldReikie, his poem of Edinburgh life, Robert Fergusson describes the drunken procession of the presumably beef-eating 'Bruiser' and the 'feckless Race o' Macaronies' who pursue him.108 Christopher Anstey's burlesque The Patriot (1767) expressed the hope that Buckhorse's 'manly Strength' might 'greatly discompose': The Features of our modern Beaux, And from their Macaroni Faces Send packing all the Loves and Graces;109 By the early nineteenth century, raucous descriptions of men pursuing boxers and women participating in fights (both, for eighteenth-century men, unfail- ing sources of comedy) had ceased; fighting was now a serious manly business and women largely featured as imaginary witnesses to this manliness. (Many historians have argued that from the 1770s onwards there was an increased cultural insistence on separate spheres for women and men.110) Sometimes descriptions of women spectators contain the frisson that Cobbett seems to experience in imagining the 'female Saint' peeping at the boxer from beneath her hood, but most often women are evoked precisely to show how alien their presence would be in the manly world of the Fancy. B. W. Proctor, for example, speculated in 1820 that 'if women were to attend the prize-fight how charming might it become': With what an air would our boxers strike, did they know that bright eyes were looking on them! How delicately would they 'peel!' and with what elegant indifference would they come up to 'the scratch!' The con- sciousness in question would generate the finest feeling amongst them : honour would ever be upper-most in their thoughts, even in a fall.111 Proctor clearly thought that any feminine involvement would ruin boxing. Not everyone agreed. After reluctantly attending a fight in 1818, Thomas Moore noted in his diary that it was not as 'horrid' as he had expected; indeed, 'had there been a proportionate mixture of women in the immense ring formed around, it would have been a very brilliant spectacle'.112 GENTLEMAN JACK, PROFESSOR OF PUGILISM John Jackson became Champion of the Prize Ring in 1795 when, in a clear breach of the rules - grabbing and pulling an opponent's hair was not permitted - he de- feated Daniel Mendoza. A shrewd businessman, Jackson soon retired to join forces with fencing instructor Harry Angelo in his rooms at 13, New Bond Street. As one boxing historian put it, this initiated a new era in the 'gymnastic education of the aristocracy. Not to have had lessons of Jackson was a reproach. To attempt a list of his pupils would be to copy one-third of the then peerage.'113 All the young 49 nobility flock to his standard,' proclaimed Eaton Stannard Barrett in 1817, 'and, after a few months, find, with great delight, that they are matches for any drayman in town.'114 Pupils included the Prince Regent, who had been a fan of Jackson's since watching him fight in Croydon in 1788. In 1821, the Prince turned to Jackson to provide eighteen prize-fighters as ushers at his coronation. Their presence had more than ceremonial purpose, for when George's estranged wife, the notorious Queen Caroline, arrived at Westminster Abbey to claim her position as Consort, the pugilists rushed to the door. William Cobbett was affronted, 'When she got to the door, and made an attempt to enter, she was actually thrust back by the hands of a common prize-fighter.'115 A less demanding, but no less devoted, pupil of Jackson's was George Gordon Byron, whose 1811 poem 'Hints from Horace' instructed that 'men unpractised in exchanging knocks / Must go to Jackson ere they dare to box.'116 On leaving Cam- bridge in 1806, Byron took up boxing with great passion, initially as part of a rig- orous regime of exercise and dieting; he quickly lost 31/ stone. When he moved to London in 1808, he spent a great deal of time in Jackson's company (Thomas Moore's Life features some of Byron's rather bossy letters to Jackson from that time) and later visits to the capital always included a trip to the New Bond Street rooms.117 On 17 March 1814, for example, he noted that he had 'been sparring with Jackson for exercise this morning, and mean to continue and renew my acquain- tance with my muffles'. My chest, and arms, and wind are in a very good plight, and I am not in flesh. I used to be a hard hitter, and my arms are very long for my height (5 feet 8/2 inches); at any rate exercise is good, and this, the severest of all; fencing and the broad-sword never fatigued me so much.118 Some years later, in a note to the Eleventh Canto of Don Juan, he paid tribute to 'My friend and corporeal pastor and master, John Jackson, Esquire, professor of pugilism, who I trust still retains the strength and symmetry of his model of a form, together with his good humour, and athletic as well as mental accomplish- ments.'119 Byron, whose Achilles tendons were so contracted he could only walk on the balls of his toes and who had been reviled as 'a lame brat' by his mother, remained, throughout his life, anxious about his own looks and an admirer of good looks in others.120 Although this is never mentioned in his writings, boxing and swimming surely appealed to Byron as sports in which the impact of his lame- ness was minimal.121 Jackson's portrait was hung among the family pictures at Newstead Abbey, Byron's family home, and included in a collage of boxers on his dressing screen. The four-panel, six-foot high screen features theatrical portraits on one side and, on the other, coloured prints of prize-fighters and fights; some reports from Boxiana are included and some accounts of fights are handwritten. Both sequences are arranged chronologically; the boxing sequence begins with Figg and Broughton and ends with Jackson (illus. 18/19). 122 50 18 Byron's screen: four panels, c, 1811-14, popular prints collaged onto a wooden frame. 19 Detail of Byron's screen, featuring Tom Molineaux. John Jackson, one of whose nicknames was 'Commander-in-Chief, may also have been the model for John Johnson, the 'British friend' with whom Don Juan fights the Turks in canto eight of Byron's satire.123 This is suggested by the description of their thrashing by 'Turkish batteries' as like a flail, / Or a good boxer' in stanza xliii, and the ambiguous phrasing in stanza xcvn, where 'Jack' could refer to the first or surname: Up came John Johnson (I will not say Jack) For that were vulgar, cold, and commonplace, On great occasions such as an attack . . . Johnson certainly inspires the sort of admiring devotion in Juan that Jackson did in Byron. While Juan is a 'mere novice' at war, Johnson is 'a noble fellow' who is frequently 'very busy without bustle'; in return, we are happy to learn, Johnson 'really loved him in his way'.124 Byron's interest in boxing did not stem wholly from its healthful benefits. The glamorous demi-monde of prize-fighting also appealed. An 1807 letter described London life as consisting of, among other diversions, 'routs, riots, balls and boxing matches', a lifestyle that would be duplicated by Don Juan, who passed his London afternoons 'in visits, luncheons, / Lounging and boxing'.125 At this time, the boxing world centred on a handful of London pubs in the back rooms of which boxers often trained, and where their managers might meet, and dine, with wealthy backers. On retiring, many boxers opened pubs attracting a sporting clientele with their trophies and their stories. Bob Gregson's Castle Tavern in High Holborn opened in 1810 and its snuggery soon became an inner sanctum for the Fancy. After Gregson was convicted for debt evasion, Tom Belcher took over, 'skimm[ing] the cream off the Fancy', as Egan put it, for another fourteen years.126 After Tom Spring defeated Bill Neate, Egan noted that 'Belcher's house, the Castle Tavern, was like a fair; Randall's was crowded to suffocation; Holt's hadn't room for a pin; Eales' was overstocked; and Tom Cribb's was crammed with visitors.'127 Byron was a regular customer at all these houses, especially Cribb's - 'Tom is an old friend of mine; I have seen some of his best battles in my nonage', Byron noted after an evening during which he 'drank more than I like'.128 Two of the most famous regulars at Jackson's Academy, Cribb's pub, and the London fights, were fictional - Corinthian Tom and his country cousin, Jerry Hawthorne, the rakish heroes of Pierce Egan's picaresque bestseller, Life in Lon- don (1821), a work lavishly illustrated by his friends, Robert and George Cruik- shank (George, 'not averse from using his fists in an up-and-down tussle', was sometimes compared to the fighter Tom Spring).129 The three men often worked together, and between them created a distinctive 'flash' style of commentary on Regency life (illus. 48). The next chapter will explore this style in some detail. The appeal of Life in London lay largely in its promising to bring together high and low life. A trip to the Royal Academy, for example, is followed by, 52 and juxtaposed with, one to the slums - cousin Jerry must enjoy the complete urban experience. When John Clare read Don Juan in 1824 he wrote in his journal that Byron's 'Hero seems a fit partner for [Egan's] Tom and Jerry'.130 Byron himself boasted of 'eternal parties', featuring 'Jockies, Gamblers, Boxers, Authors, parsons, andpoets ... a precious Mixture, but they go on well together.'131 Boxing culture throve on the promise of social promiscuity. The readers of Life in London were largely neither upper nor working class, but they could, with Egan's help, imagine themselves mingling with members of both. At the Castle Tavern, Egan wrote, 'You may be seated next to an m.p. without being aware of that honour; or you may likewise rub against some noble lord without com- mitting a breach of privilege. You may meet poets on the look-out for a hero, artists for subjects; and boxers for customers.'132 Readers, whether 'fire-side heroes' or 'sprightly maidens', could, he promised, '"see Life" without receiving a scratch.'133 Some found this picture of social promiscuity more frightening than ap- pealing. In Tales of a Traveller (1824), Washington Irving's Buckthorne described a boxing match as nothing more than 'an arena, where the noble and illustrious are jostled into familiarity with the infamous and the vulgar'. 'What, in fact, is The Fancy itself,' he continued, 'but a chain of easy communication, extending down form the peer to the pick-pocket, through the medium of which a man of rank may find he has shaken hands at three removes, with the murderer on the gibbet?'134 For Byron the effect of moving between high and low life had psychological as well as social consequences. In a journal entry for 23 November 1813, largely preoccupied with feeling 'wound up' after an unpleasant dream, he noted the therapeutic effects of such jaunts: I must not dream again; - it spoils even reality. I will go out of doors and see what the fog will do for me. Jackson has been here: the boxing world much as usual; - but the club increases. I shall dine at Crib's tomorrow. I like energy - even animal energy - of all kinds; and I have need of both mental and corporeal. I have not dined out, nor indeed, at all, lately: have heard no music - have seen nobody. Now for a plunge - high life and low life. Amant alterna Camaana; [The Muses love alternat- ing verses.]135 An insistence on the value of alternating between the mental and corpo- real, or more, an insistence on the necessity of the physical for 'the ethereal', re- curs throughout his notebooks. On 19 April 1814, he recorded having spent four days lovesick and alone, except, it emerges, for daily visits from Jackson: I have sparred for exercise (windows open) with Jackson an hour daily, to attenuate and keep up the ethereal part of me. The more violent the fatigue the better my spirits for the rest of the day . . . To-day I have 53 boxed an hour - written an ode to Napoleon Buonaparte - copied it - eaten six biscuits -drunk four bottles of soda water -redde away the rest of my time - besides giving poor [Webster?] a world of advice on this mistress of his . . .136 The detailed nature of Byron's accounting - including the perennial dieter's awareness of the precise number of biscuits he has consumed - suggests that he did not leave the balance of high and low, physical and emotional, to chance. On the day of his mother's funeral in 1811, Byron called for his page to bring his box- ing gloves for his daily exercise rather than follow the coffin to the family vault. The sparring that day, the page recalled, was more violent than usual.137 After his beloved brother Tom died in 1818, a distraught John Keats was taken to a prize-fight at Crawley Downs by well-meaning friends. Pugilism, the 'Regency answer to grief, stoical and worldly', did not seem to work in his case.138 54 Pugilism and Style All the great poets should have been fighters. Take Keats and Shelley, for an example. They were pretty good poets, but they died young. You know why? Because they didn't train. Cassius Clay, 19641 Byron consistently affected hauteur about those who took writing too seriously; a gesture characteristic of what Christopher Ricks terms his 'flippant lordli- ness'.2 In an 1821 journal entry, he noted that his mother, Madame de Stael and the Edinburgh Review had all, at various times, compared him to Rousseau. A page then follows in which he explains why he cannot see 'any point of resem- blance'. There are many points of contrast, and some interestingly odd conjunctions. The first comes in Byron's initial distinction - 'he wrote prose, I verse; he was of the people, I the Aristocracy'. Prose then is aligned with 'the people'; poetry with the Aristocracy. The revelation that 'he liked Botany, I like flowers, and herbs, and trees, but know nothing of their pedigrees' further damns prose for its utilitarianism. Rousseau is little more than an Enlighten- ment taxonomist. From then on, it is a short step (a mere colon) from 'He wrote with hesitation and care, I with rapidity and rarely with pains' to an account of what 'better' things an aristocrat might find to do: He could never ride nor swim 'nor was cunning of the fence', I am an excellent swimmer, a decent though not at all dashing rider . . . sufficient offence . . . not a bad boxer when I could keep my temper, which was difficult, but which I strove to do ever since I knocked down Mr Purling and put his knee-pad out (with the gloves on) in Angelo's and Jackson's rooms in 1806 during the sparring . . . In a journal entry of 1813, written before going to dinner at Tom Cribb's with Jackson, Byron complained that 'the mighty stir made about scribbling and scribes' was a 'sign of effeminacy, degeneracy and weakness. Who would write, who had anything better to do?'3 55 Byron's concern with class is evident in the scorn he expressed five years later for Leigh Hunt's reference to poetry as a 'profession': 'I thought that Poetry was an art, or an attribute, and not a profession.'4 There was one profession, however, which Byron admired unreservedly. Pugilism was an activity in which the bound- aries between professional and amateur were clear. Nonchalance was not there- fore required, and proper training was desirable. Byron could train as hard as he liked to box, without anyone suspecting that he was not a gentleman. And even he thought that there were literary activities which required a comparable pro- fessional attitude. In 'Hints from Horace' (1811), Byron lambasted the Edinburgh Review critic Francis Jeffrey as unqualified to discuss his poems, suggesting that no boxer would presume to enter the ring without proper training.5 In this chapter, I shall explore some of the ways in which, during the early decades of the nineteenth century, writers and artists found in pugilism not only a subject-matter, but the basis for a method. LITERARY FLASH Writing about pugilism reached its zenith in the 1820s, at a time when the sport itself had begun to wane. At the forefront of the fad was undoubtedly Pierce Egan's Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism. The first volume appeared in 1812, followed by a second in 1818, a third in 1821, and a new series in two volumes in 1828 and 1829. His round-by-round accounts of fights be- tween Mendoza and Humphries, or Cribb and Molineaux, are still the major sources quoted today. In 1824, he began editing a weekly paper, Pierce Egan's Life in London and Sporting Guide, which later developed into the famous sport- ing journal, Bell's Life in London. What distinguished Egan's work from other boxing histories of the period (such as William Oxberry's 1812 Pancratia) was its great verve and distinctive style. Dubbed 'the Great Lexicographer of the Fancy', Egan did not just reflect the language of the Fancy, he created it.6 His 1822 edi- tion of Francis Grose's Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue included many of his own coinings. Egan's writing is characterized by a lively mixture of elaborate metaphors, dreadful puns and awful verse. In this passage from 'The Fancy on the Road to Moulsey Hurst', aided by a lavish supply of commas, italics and capitals, he describes a particular type of 'fancier': His heart is up to his mouth every moment for fear he should befloored, he is anxious to look like a swell, if 'tis only for a day: he has therefore borrowed a prad to come it strong, without recollecting, that to be a top- ofthe-tree buck requires something more than the furnishing hand of a tailor, or the assistance of the groom. It should also be remembered, that although the Corinthian at times descend hastily down a few steps, to take a peep into the lower regions of society, to mark their habits and customs, yet many of them can as hastily regain their 56 eminency, as the player throws off his dress, and appear in reality - a GENTLEMAN.7 The horseman's flash style is an unsuccessful attempt at assuming a higher class position - his gig is 'hired, his horse ('prad') borrowed, and his clothes reflect the taste of his tailor. The enterprise is doomed, Egan suggests; it is obvious to any- one really flash, really knowing, that he is an impostor, an 'empty bounce'. The Corinthian 's 'mark[ing]' of 'the habits and customs' of a lower class is not, however, subject to the same disparagement. He does not cling to his disguise, but readily, 'hastily', throws it off to resume his status. Slumming is temporary and permissible while social climbing, which strives for permanent change, is not. Class mobility was a key element in the spread of boxing and its idiom dur- ing this period. The early nineteenth century saw the establishment of numer- ous magazines, many of which catered for a growing 'army of bachelor clerks and lawyer's apprentices' whose aspiration to gentility often manifested itself as an interest in traditionally aristocratic pastimes.8 Flash slang involved the middle-class imitation of an upper-class imitation of lower-class idioms.9 The Tory Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was particularly keen on traditional squirish activities such as pugilism and published numerous reports, stories and articles on the sport. (In 1822 it declared itself 'a real Magazine of mirth, misanthropy, wit, wisdom, folly, fiction, fun, festivity, theology, bruising and thingumbob'.10) Most notable were the boxing writings of John Wilson, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh University, writing as Blackwood's fictional editor, 'Christopher North'. Wilson had boxed while a student at Oxford - his friend Thomas De Quincey recalled that 'not a man, who could either 'give' or 'take', but boasted to have punished, or to have been punished by, Wilson ofMallens [Magdalen]' - and often depicted himself in Blackwood's as a kind of critical pugilist.11 But while Hugh MacDiarmid later wrote scathingly of Wilson as 'the most extraordinary exponent' of the kind of 'verbiage' which is intended 'simply to batter the hearer into a pulpy state of vague acquiescence', others relished both the verbiage and the battering.12 'I cannot express . . . the heavenliness of associations connected with such articles as Professor Wilson's,' wrote Branwell Bronte in 1835, 'read and re-read while a little child, with all their poetry of language and divine flights into that visionary realm of imagination'.13 One of Wilson's finest flights of imagination can be found in the May 1820 issue of Blackwood's in the form of a '"Luctus" on the Death of Sir Daniel Don- nelly, Late Champion of Ireland.' The prize-fighter had died after a particularly heavy drinking session. Wilson included copiously footnoted tributes from imagined scholars in Greek, Hebrew and Latin, along with poems in the style of Byron and Wordsworth. While Byron is perhaps too obvious a target, and 'Child Daniel' not particularly funny, the 'extract from my great auto-biographical poem' contributed by W. W. is sharply attentive to both the Lake Poet's style and his distance from the world (and slang) of the Fancy: 57 . . . Yea, even I, Albeit, who never 'ruffian'd' in the ring, Nor know of 'challenge', save the echoing hills; Nor 'fibbing', save that poesy doth feign, Nor heard his fame, but as the mutterings Of clouds contentious on Helvellyn's side, Distant, yet deep, aguise a strange regret, And mourn Donnelly - Honourable Sir Daniel: - 14 Wordsworth enjoyed a rare immunity to 'boximania'.15 By the 1820s, it had become almost unthinkable in certain circles not to understand boxing slang or the 'flash'. The oed cites the first instance of 'flash' being used to mean 'dashing, ostentatious, swaggering, "swell"' in 1785: the slightly later meaning of 'belong- ing to, connected with, or resembling, the class of sporting men, esp. the patrons of the ring' dates from 1808. But the two meanings seem related. 'A flash man upon the town' is surely swaggering and dandyish, as well as knowledge- able about prize-fighting. A third, related, meaning is 'knowing, wide-awake, "smart", "fly"'. Egan opens Boxiana with a footnote explaining the Fancy 'as many of our readers may not be flash to the above term'. But it seems likely, as Egan must surely have realized, that if a reader was flash to 'flash', he would be flash to 'the Fancy'.16 Keats's description of Byron's Don Juan as 'a flash poem' seems to draw on all these meanings; few poems are so knowing, swaggering, and connected to practitioners and patrons of the ring.17 Canto xi presents an encounter between Juan, newly arrived in London from Spain, and an assailant called Tom, 'full flash, all fancy', whom Juan shoots and kills. '0 Jack, I'm floor'd' are his final words. Byron then devotes a stanza to the memory of Tom, 'so prime, so swell, so nutty, and so knowing'. Tom would have understood such flash language, but Juan does not even understand standard English.18 A note is supplied, which refuses to explain anything because, Byron says, 'the advance of science and of language has rendered it unnecessary to translate the above good and true Eng- lish, spoken in its original purity by the select mobility and their patrons'. He directs any readers who 'require a traduction' to Gentleman Jackson.19 In 1808, John Cam Hobhouse commented that his friend had been 'deeply admitted into the penetralia Jacksoniana'; some years later, in his Life of Lord Byron, Thomas Moore recalled his amusement at observing 'how perfectly familiar with the annals of "The Ring", and with all the most recondite phraseology of "the Fancy", was the sublime poet of Childe Harold'.20 (Byron's attachment to boxing and its language was, Moore felt, one of his several 'boyish tastes'.) Gary Dyer argues that Byron and his friends were attracted to the Fancy's dialect because it 'was fashioned to hide meanings from outsiders'.21 Indeed as Thomas Moore put it in the preface to his satirical poem 'Tom Crib's Memor- ial to Congress', flash 'was invented, and is still used, like the cipher of the diplo- matists, for purposes of secrecy'.22 What that secrecy meant to upper-class 58 'fanciers' like Byron is a matter for speculation. Dyer reads Byron's secrets as always ultimately referring back to sodomy. Byron's biographer, Benita Eissler, maintains that Jackson and Angelo were 'rumoured' to be lovers as well as busi- ness partners, and that the Academy served as a cover for illicit meetings.23 While there is no direct evidence for this, it is certainly true that Byron's London circle was interested in sodomy as well as in boxing. But a secret language surely holds other attractions. One is exclusivity, or, in the age of the beginnings of commercial journalism, the pretence of exclu- sivity. In the course of a general denunciation of the Fives Court as a 'college of scoundrelism' in 1824, Washington Irving's Buckthorne asks, 'what is the slang language of "The Fancy" but a jargon by which fools and knaves commune and understand each other, and enjoy a kind of superiority over the uninitiated?'24 Robert Southey's fictional Don Espriella, 'writing to the uninitiated' back in Spain in 1807, certainly takes great pleasure in explaining such terms as 'bot- tom', 'a pleasant fighter' and 'much punished'.25 In 1818, however, phrases such as these remain untranslated by Byron, although he tells us that only what he calls 'the select mobility and their patrons' will understand; only they speak 'good and true English'. Byron's play on 'select nobility' does more than suggest that boxers are like noblemen. His footnote also mocks the widespread ten- dency to explain flash language in footnotes. By freely coining his own new phrase, 'select mobility', Byron is attacking jargon's claim to provide unique access to knowledge. Many other poets made comparable play with boxing language. The narra- tor of Henry Luttrell's Advice to Julia: A Letter in Rhyme (1820) stops a perfectly adequate description of a fight to apologise for his lack of pugilistic vocabulary: But hold. - Such prowess to describe Asks all the jargon of the tribe; And though enough to serve my turn From 'Boxiana' I might learn, Or borrow from an ampler store In the bright page of Thomas Moore . . .26 Thomas Moore is an interesting choice of source, for he much disliked boxing. Nevertheless, Moore too sought out the company of Jackson, and once attended a fight (which was 'altogether not so horrid as I expected') for the sake of his verse; in order 'to pick up as much of the fiashfrom authority, as possible'.27 Although he 'got very little out of Jackson', he went on to write two popular poems on pugilistic themes. John Hamilton Reynolds, on the other hand, loved boxing (he was the box- ing correspondent, as well as theatre critic, for the London Magazine). As a young man he regularly attended fights and sparred, while writing poetry and work- ing as a clerk in an insurance office. The Fancy (1820) is semi-autobiography dis- guised as the fictional biography of Peter Corcoran, boxing groupie and 'Student 59 of Law' (the name was borrowed from an eighteenth-century fighter and had the advantage of sharing an acronym with the Pugilistic Club). Corcoran is also a poet, and much of The Fancy consists of his poems: 'pugilism', the editor notes, 'engrossed nearly all his thoughts, and coloured all his writings'. The writing is full of cringe-worthy pugilistic puns. Consider, for example, one of the 'Stanzas to Kate, On Appearing Before Her After a Casual "Turn Up"': You know I love sparring and poesy, Kate, And scarcely care whether I'm hit at, or kiss'd; - You know that Spring equally makes me elate, With the blow of a flower, and the blow of a fist. 'Spring' is asterisked, and the fictional editor writes, 'I am not sure whether Mr. Corcoran alluded here to the season, or the pugilist of this name.'28 Such pompous comments work to distance the reader from the editor as well as from Corcoran. In the preface, for example, he notes that 'this style of writing is not good - it is too broken, irresolute, and rugged; and it is too anx- ious in its search after smart expressions to be continuous or elevated in its sub- stance'.29 By the book's end, we become aware both of the compulsive appeal of such 'rugged' and punning language - particularly as a way of deflating the 'elevated' discourse of much poetry; again Wordsworth seems a target here - and of its repetitive limitations. A wider look at the literature of the 1820s (in particular magazine litera- ture) shows just how pervasive an addiction to flash really was. Thomas De Quincey, for example, savoured its use in a variety of contexts, some of which were more apposite than others. Boxing slang works particularly well in a July 1828 attack on 'The Pretensions of Phrenology', because both boxing and phrenology are interested in the human skull. Medical and sporting jargon are set against each other in a description of the phrenologists who, 'after receiving a few hard thumps on ihefrontal sinus and the cerebellum, . . . were fain to have recourse to shifting and shuffling; bobbing aside their brain-boxes'. In the debate De Quincey champions the philosopher Sir William Hamilton, who we soon learn is no 'shy fighter', no 'flincher, a 'tolerably hard hitter and 'rather an ugly customer: 'the chanceried nobs of his two antagonists exhibit indisputable proofs of his pugilistic prowess, and of the punishment he is capable of administering'. And this is only the opening paragraph.30 Later that same month, De Quincey became a co-editor of the Edinburgh Evening Post, contributing the latest news from London and writing many short editorial notices. One addressed a dispute between two Edinburgh intellectuals on the teaching of Greek at Scottish universities with the promise of organizing 'a set-to ... in our Publishing Office, between three and four' on any day of their choosing.31 De Quincey and his co-editor, the Reverend Andrew Crichton, did not get on, and Crichton's own articles often contained digs at De Quincey 's 'addiction' to metaphors drawn from the 'vile' sport of boxing. The 'defence of 60 . . . pugilism' is 'very shallow', and 'monstrously inconsistent with Christian principles', he wrote in a review of Blackwood's; an author who resorts to 'the slang of the fancy' has 'a rough lump of the brute in him, which ought to be cut out by the scalpel'.32 The surgical metaphor is itself an implicit rebuke to such authors. HARD WORDS AND HARD BLOWS IN HAZLITT In essays on topics ranging from parliamentary debate to sculpture to theatre to boxing, William Hazlitt talked about blows. The Reformation struck a 'death- blow' at 'scarlet vice and bloated hypocrisy'; William Godwin's Enquiry concern- ing Political Justice dealt a 'blow to the philosophical mind of the country'; Wordsworth's 'popular, inartificial style gets rid (at a blow) of . . . all the high places of poetry.'33 'On Shakespeare and Milton' (1818) reads like a comparison of the styles of two boxers rather than two writers. Shakespeare's blows are 'rapid and devious', 'the stroke like the lightning's, is sure as it is sudden'. Milton, on the other hand, 'always labours, and almost always succeeds'.34 'Milton has great gusto. He repeats his blow twice; grapples with and exhausts his subject.'35 And it is not only poems which deal blows. In an 1826 essay 'On the Prose- Style of Poets', Hazlitt asserts categorically that 'every word should be a blow: every thought should instantly grapple with its fellow'. 'Weight', 'precision' and 'contact' are needed to strike the best blow, and produce the best prose. Some writers display some of these virtues; few all. Byron's prose, for example, is 'heavy, laboured and coarse: he tries to knock some one down with the butt- end of every line'.3 Hazlitt foregrounds the relationship between fighting and writing styles in an 1821 essay on William Cobbett. The essay begins by comparing the radical politician to the boxer Tom Cribb. Initially the comparison seems to be based on the fact of Cobbett 's devotion to pugilism and his self-representation as, like Cribb, a living embodiment of John Bull.37 Hazlitt then moves on to mat- ters of style: His blows are as hard, and he himself is impenetrable. One has no no- tion of him as making use of a fine pen, but a great mutton-fist; his style stuns his readers, and he 'fillips the ear of the public with a three-man beetle'.38 The last phrase is a quotation from Henry iv part 2, and its inclusion, alongside sporting analogy, is a favourite technique of Hazlitt 's. In the pages that follow, the metaphor is developed more fully. Cobbett has a 'pugnacious disposition, that must have an antagonist power to contend with', but this is a 'bad propensity' since: If his blows were straightforward and steadily directed to the same object, no unpopular Minister could live before him; instead of which 61 he lays about right and left, impartially and remorselessly, makes a clear stage, has all the ring to himself, and then runs out of it when he should stand his ground.39 The essay concludes by shifting the comparison. Cobbett is now no longer Eng- land's hero, Tom Cribb, but 'Big Ben', Benjamin Brain, known to be 'bullying and cowardly'. Not so tall but very stocky, Brain had defeated the long-reigning champion Tom Johnson in 1791 in 'a most tremendous battle'.40 Johnson had been a favourite of the fashionable Fancy, and was even reputed to have worn pink laces in his boxing boots.41 Big Ben was less gentlemanly. He badly dam- aged Johnson's nose in the second round, and fought on regardless, even when, in his distress, Johnson soon after broke a finger on a ring post. For many com- mentators this victory marks the end of the first era of British boxing, when men stood toe-to-toe and punched away without much technique. For Hazlitt to compare Cobbett to Big Ben is to insult not just his bravery, but also his skill and intelligence. Cobbett, he concludes, is 'a Big Ben in politics, who will fall upon others and crush them by his weight, but is not prepared for resistance, and is soon staggered by a few smart blows'.42 Hazlitt 's most sustained comparison of fighting and writing can be found in 'Jack Tars', an essay originally published in 1826 under the title 'English and Foreign Manners'. 'There are two things that an Englishman under- stands,' Hazlitt begins, 'hard words and hard blows,' and he goes on to define the English character in terms of a sort of aggressive empiricism. French audiences appreciate Racine and Moliere, whose 'dramatic dialogue is frothy verbiage'; English audiences prefer to watch boxing, where 'every Englishman feels his power to give and take blows increased by sympathy', or, what is put forward as its equivalent, English plays whose dialogue 'constantly clings to the concrete and has a purchase upon matter'. Englishmen, in short, perceive the world through violent opposition. This makes them feel 'alive' and also manly. 'The English are not a nation of women ... it cannot be denied they are a pugnacious set.'43 A complex alignment of qualities is being made. Some are familiar -pug- nacity, masculinity and Englishness; new to the mix is empiricism, defined as the pugnacious, masculine, English way of perceiving the world. The Eng- lish 'require the heavy, hard, and tangible only, something for them to grap- ple with and resist, to try their strength and their unimpressibility upon'.44 English empiricism is, in Hazlitt 's terms, less concerned with what John Locke called secondary qualities (colour, taste and smell are, Hazlitt main- tained, of more interest to the French), than 'the heavy, hard and tangible' primary qualities.45 The solid materialism of Englishness ('our lumpish clay') is a favourite theme of Hazlitt 's, especially in opposition to light French live- liness. English criticism of French culture is difficult, he argued, because 'the strength of the blow is always defeated by the very insignificance and want of resistance in the object'.46 62 'The same images and trains of thought stick by me', Hazlitt wrote in his 'Farewell to Essay-Writing' (1828). 47 This is clearly true, but his use of boxing idiom and metaphor was not an unthinking tick. Indeed, it serves much more various and complex purposes in his work than it does in that of any other writer of the time. Contemporary discussions of Hazlitt's language, however, rarely went beyond politically motivated condemnation or praise. Blackwood's argued that prize-fighters were 'downright Tories' and therefore belonged in Black- wood's, but other journals were more interested in suggesting that neither Ha- zlitt or pugilists were suitable for their polite middle-class readers. The New Edinburgh Review was 'sorry to say' that some of Hazlitt's allusions were 'of the lowest and most shockingly indelicate description'. It joined the Quarterly Review in dismissing him as a 'Slang-Whanger': We utterly loathe him where he seems most at home, namely, among pugilists, and wagerers, and professional tennis-players, passing cur- rent their vain glorious slang. We protest against allusions to the very existence of the Bens and Bills and Jacks and Jems and Joes of 'the ring', in any printed page above the destination of the ale-bench; but to have their nauseous vocabulary defiling the language of a printed book, reg- ularly entered at Stationers' Hall, and destined for the use of men and women of education, taste, and delicacy, is quite past endurance . . . we strenuously protest against this bang up style, this 'fancy diction', in a series of 'original essays'. Our conclusion, at least, is irresistible, - the author has not kept good company . . .48 The anti-Cockney snobbery of the Tory journals would not have surprised Ha- zlitt, nor would the qualified support of John Hamilton Reynolds, author of The Fancy, and boxing correspondent of the liberal London Magazine. Indeed Reynolds's only criticism of the second volume of Table Talk - that Hazlitt's points are put forward too directly- is itself made in 'fancy diction': The style of this book is singularly nervous [i.e. sinewy, strong and vig- orous] and direct, and seems to aim at mastering its subject by dint of mere hard hitting. There is no such thing as manoeuvring for a blow. The language strikes out, and if the intention is not fulfilled, the blow is repeated until the subject falls.49 Fascinated by boxing's metaphorical possibilities, Hazlitt wrote only one essay on the thing itself, 'The Fight' (1822). One of the most influential and fre- quently anthologized pieces on boxing, the essay encompasses many of the themes already discussed - style, Englishness, masculinity, the material world - and presents them in a manner at once casual and densely considered. Consider the epigraph, which rewrites Hamlet's musings on what he hopes to accomplish by putting on a play for Claudius's benefit (or punishment): 63 — The fight, the fight's the thing, Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king.50 Hazlitt's substitution of 'fight' for 'play' has two implications: first, that a fight is a play, a kind of performance; secondly, that this particular fight/play is a per- formance from which something is to be learnt. Hamlet's play will catch the king's conscience. What about the fight Hazlitt witnesses? The contest is first of all a contest of performed styles; styles that we have come to think of as French and English. The champion, Bill Hickman, the Gasman, is 'light, vigorous, elas- tic', his skin glistening in the sun like a panther's hide'; his unfavoured chal- lenger, Bill Neate, is 'great, heavy, clumsy', with long arms 'like two sledge-hammers'. At one point, 'Neate seemed like a lifeless lump of flesh and bone, round which the Gasman's blows played with the rapidity of electricity or lightning.' The two men also differ in personality. Hickman is a Homeric boaster, who arrives to fight 'like the cock-of-the-walk'. Hazlitt is more judg- mental than Homer, however, and complains that Hickman 'strutted about more than became a hero'. Neate is modest and celebrates his eventual victory 'without any appearance of arrogance'. In general, though, both men wonderfully exemplify courage and en- durance. But of what kind? Classical comparison casts Neate as Ajax to Hick- man's Diomed, Hector to his Achilles. The fight itself amply confirms the 'high and heroic state of man'. It reminds Hazlitt of the 'dark encounter' between clouds over the Caspian, in Milton's Paradise Lost, as Satan faces Sin and Death at hell's gates.51 And yet the life actually lived during a fight is nasty, brutish, and (relatively) short. The fighter's triumph is not only transitory, but in essence banal ('The eyes were filled with blood, the nose streamed blood, the mouth gaped blood'), and invariably surreptitious (like a 1990s rave, the fight between Hickman and Neate took place, at the shortest possible notice, in a field near Newbury). Could it be that the literary form best suited to this brief battle was not epic poetry, but the essay? Hazlitt's essay, like the preparations made for the fight by participants and spectators alike, is much ado, if not exactly about nothing, then about some- thing as fleeting as it is pungent. He finds it difficult enough to get himself out of London. Missing the mail coach prompts a self-reproach that seems excessive, 'I had missed it as I missed everything else, by my own absurdity.' Finally, how- ever, he is on his way, and as he puts on a great coat, his mood improves. Leav- ing London behind, he enters another world with its own distinctive rules and customs. Joe Toms walks up Chancery Lane 'with that quick jerk and impatient stride which distinguishes a lover of the fancy'; in the coach to the fight Ha- zlitt meets a man 'whose costume bespoke him one of the fancy'; on the way back he describes his friend, Pigott, as being 'dressed in character for the occa- sion, or like one of the fancy; that is, with a double portion of great coats, clogs, and overhauls'. It is only on the journey home that Hazlitt himself is properly 'dressed in character'; Pigott supplies him with a 'genteel drab great coat and 64 green silk handkerchief (which I must say became me exceedingly).' The cos- tume gives him the confidence to deride a group of 'Goths and Vandals . . . not real flash-men, but interlopers, noisy pretenders, butchers from Tothillfields, brokers from Whitechapel' who brashly interrupt a discussion of the respec- tive merits of roasted fowl and mutton-chops. The essay ends with him reluc- tantly returning these clothes. So far, so Pierce Egan. Like Egan, Hazlitt relished flash language. 'The Fight' is littered with italicized idioms: 'turn-up', 'swells', 'the scratch', 'pluck'. But the great literary virtue of an essay is that it does not have to stick to one kind of performance. Hazlitt rapidly expands his repertoire of allusion beyond Homer, Shakespeare, and Milton. His allusions politicize pugilism. They enhance its democratic credentials. Riding in the coach with Toms, he recites, 'in an involuntary fit of enthusiasm', some lines of Spenser on delight and liberty; Toms promptly translates these 'into the vulgate' as meaning 'Going to see a fight'. The connection between boxing, sentiment and (political as well as psychological) liberty is reinforced on the return journey, when Pigott reads out passages from Rousseau's NewEloise. And if literature can enhance an appreciation of boxing, boxing also has literary potential. Hazlitt is enchanted by the conversation of a man he meets in the pub, and tells him that he talks as well as Cobbett writes. Perhaps in response to his critics, Hazlitt makes it clear that sporting interests are not the preserve of Tory squires; middle-class radicals can make them urban, modern and sophisticated. Hazlitt 's pleasure in joining this convivial, masculine world is palpable. This had been his first fight, he announces at the beginning of the essay, 'yet it more than answered my expectations'. But what were those expectations? In 'On Going A Journey', published four months earlier, Hazlitt had written of the desire to 'forget the town and all that is in it'. In the town was his landlady's daughter, Sarah Walker, whose charms and unfaithfulness form the subject of an autobiographical meditation, Liber Amoris (1823). She is never mentioned here, but Hazlitt does occasionally (and rather cryptically) evoke his misery. The essay begins by dedicating what follows to 'Ladies'. He compliments 'the fairest of the fair' and the loveliest of the lovely' and entreats them to 'notice the exploits of the brave'. But a rather sour note emerges when he urges ladies to consider 'how many more ye kill with poison baits than ever fell in the ring'. These words gain a poignant resonance when we consider that an early draft of the essay contained a passage about his lovelorn wretchedness. David Bromwich argues that an awareness of this passage reveals 'the under-plot' of the essay and explains its 'impetuous pace' and 'arbitrary high spirits'.52 'The Fight' tells the story of a man who is almost successful at escaping him- self. If romance is a 'hysterica passio, the Fancy is 'the most practical of all things', and its emphasis on mundane facts - its thoroughly English empiricism - dis- tracts him most of the time.53 'The fancy are not men of imagination', he is pleased to note. Occasionally, though, he slips back into self-pity. After describ- ing the pleasures of the training regime, he cannot help adding: 65 'Is this life not more sweet than mine?' I was going to say; but I will not libel any life by comparing it to mine, which is (at the date these pres- ents) bitter as coloquintida and the dregs of aconitum! But such passages of lovesick rhetoric (passages common in Liber Amoris) are in- frequent. As long as he can talk of boxing and mutton-chops, love and London can be kept at bay: A stranger takes his hue and character from the time and place. He is a part of the furniture and costume of an inn ... I associate nothing with my travelling companion but present objects and passing events. In his ignorance of me and my affairs, I in a manner forget myself.54 Hazlitt's language of the blow provided him with a means to compare poets and politicians to athletes and (democratically) to judge one against the other.55 The 'blows' of John Cavanagh, the fives-player, for example, were 'not undecided and ineffectual', unlike Coleridge's 'wavering' prose.56 Hazlitt also judged his own work by the standard of sport, and sometimes found it lacking. 'What is there that I can do as well as this?' he once asked on observing some Indian jugglers. 'Nothing', was his reply. 'I have always had this feeling of the inefficacy and slow progress of intellectual compared to mechanical excellence, and it has always made me somewhat dissatisfied.'57 'I have a much greater ambition to be the best racket- player, than the best prose-writer of the age.'58 But most of the time, Hazlitt did believe that prose could eventually achieve its own excellence, comparable (among other things) to relation between parts in the Elgin marbles; 'one part being given, another cannot be otherwise than it.'59 'The Fight' ends with a 'p.s.', in which Ha- zlitt agrees with his friend Toms's description of the fight as 'a complete thing'. The last sentence - 'I hope he will relish my account of it' - suggests that the essay is consciously striving to be something equally 'complete', something in which all the parts harmoniously create a whole (however ephemeral). SCULPTING AND PAINTING THE BOXERS In the same month that 'The Fight' appeared, Hazlitt published the first of three essays on the Elgin Marbles. His remarks there, and elsewhere, directly attack Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses (1769-1790), which argued that the beauty of a work of art was 'general and intellectual': 'the sight never beheld it, nor has the hand expressed it: it is an idea residing in the breast of the artist'.60 On this view, the artist is completely divorced from the craftsman who works with his eyes, hands and materials. Hazlitt, on the other hand, emphasized the ways in which art resembled craft and sport - and in all these spheres genius could emerge. One of the pleasures of painting, he maintained, was that, unlike writ- ing, it 'exercises the body' and requires 'a continued and steady exertion of muscular power'. The best paintings, and sculptures, were those in which the 66 muscular power of both sitter and artist remain apparent. The Elgin Marbles 'do not seem to be the outer surface of a hard and immovable block of marble, but to be actuated by an internal machinery'; in Hogarth's pictures, 'every feature and muscle is put into full play.' Both are 'the reverse of still life'; both are com- parable to the 'harmonious, flowing, varied prose' of the essayist.61 Hazlitt frequently included Hogarth in his pantheon of English geniuses, all of whom rejected notions of the ideal in order to grapple with matter as it is and who defined beauty in democratic and empirical terms. 'The eye alone must determine us in our choice of what is most pleasing to itself,' Hogarth wrote in The Analysis of Beauty (1753), and in that choice, sports fans have at least as good an eye as sculptors or anatomists: Almost everyone is farther advanced in the knowledge of this specula- tive part of proportion that he imagines; especially he hath been inter- ested in the success of them; and the better he is acquainted with the nature of the exercise itself, still the better the judge he becomes of the figure that is to perform it. In terms that would be echoed in the twentieth century by Bertolt Brecht and Ezra Pound, Hogarth argued against aesthetic contemplation as a disinterested activity. The more interested the spectator is (by which he presumably means the more money he has wagered) the better his judgment is. For this reason, no sooner are two boxers stript to fight, but even a butcher, thus skill'd, shews himself a considerable critic in proportion; and on this sort of judgment often gives, or takes the odds, at bare sight only of the combatants. I have heard a blacksmith harangue like an anatomist, or sculptor, on the beauty of a boxer's figure, tho' not per- haps in the same terms . . . Too many contemporary artists, Hogarth maintained, learn about the human body by looking at sculpture (particularly classical sculpture) rather than by looking at people. I firmly believe, that one of our common proficients in the athletic art, would be able to instruct and direct the best sculptor living, (who hath not seen, or is wholly ignorant of this exercise) in what would give the statue of an English-boxer, a much better proportion, as to character, than is to be seen, even in the famous group of antique boxers, (or as some call them, Roman wrestlers) so much admired to this day.62 Hogarth is referring to a sculpture, now knows as 'The Wrestlers', which was much praised and studied by the English Academicians, and formed the basis for an extensive discussion of muscles in both Joshua Reynolds's Tenth 67 Discourse (1780) and John Flaxman's Lectures on Sculpture (1829).63 Small bronze copies were widely disseminated.64 In order to understand and thus represent human movement, Flaxman argued, the sculptor must understand anatomy, geometry and mechanics: The forced action of the boxers renders the muscular configuration of their shoulders so different in appearance from moderate action and states of rest, that we derive a double advantage from the anatomical consideration of their forms: first, we shall learn the cause of each par- ticular form, and, secondly, we shall be convinced how rationally and justly the ancients copied nature.65 Hogarth, meanwhile, had looked to Figg, Broughton and George Taylor as his models. Two years before writing the Analysis, he had produced a series of drawings of the dying Taylor (supposedly intended for his tombstone), including Death giving George Taylor a Cross-Buttock and George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death (illus. 20). But it was Figg ('more of a slaughtererthan ... a neat, finished pugilist') who especially appealed to Hogarth, not only as an exemplar of English vigour and honesty, but also as a fellow modern urban professional.66 Figg appeared in several of Hogarth's satirical paintings and prints: in Southwark Fair (1732) he sits grimly upon a blind horse in the right-hand corner, in A Midnight Modern Conversation (1733) he is sprawled drunkenly in the foreground, and in plate two of The Rake's Progress (1735), 'Surrounded by Artists and Professors', he is pushed into the background by a dandyish French fencing master.67 William Hogarth, George Taylor's Epi- taph: George Taylor Breaking the Ribs of Death, pen and ink over pencil and chalk, c. 1750. 68 Fifty years on, boxing was much more respectable than it had been in Hog- arth's day, and Hazlitt noted approvingly that the actor Edmund Kean was not ashamed to admit to 'borrow[ing] . . . from the last efforts of Painter in his fight with Oliver' in his portrayal of Richard ill's final moments.68 Next door to the Fives Court, retired prize-fighter Bill Richmond ran the Horse and Dolphin, a pub where he was said to have initiated the fashion of sparring bare-chested in order that spectators could admire the muscular development of the fighters. Various members of the nearby Royal Academy, including Benjamin Haydon and the President, Joseph Farington, frequented the Fives Court and Horse and Dolphin, but more often the boxers posed at the Academy's life classes.69 Far- ington's diary for 19 June 1808 records a visit to the home of his friend Dr Anthony Carlisle, soon to be elected Professor of Anatomy at the Royal Academy, where the company were presented with 'Gregson, the Pugilist, stripped naked to be exhibited to us on acct. of the fineness of His form '. Farington's approach is not that of Hogarth, or Hazlitt. The real is only interesting in its relation to the ideal. Gregson the pugilist quickly becomes Gregson the anatomical specimen, the classical approximation: All admired the beauty of His proportions from the Knee or rather from the waist upwards, including His arms, & small head. The Bone of His leg West Sd [side] is too short & His toes are not long enough & there is something of heaviness abt the thighs - Knees & legs, - but on the whole He was allowed to be the finest figure the persons present had seen. He was placed in many attitudes.70 While Hogarth was always concerned about proportion in relation to function ('fitness') - what 'dimensions of muscle are proper (according to the principle of the steelyard) to move such or such a length of arm with this or that degree of swiftness of force' - the Academicians had very little interest in the use of the bones and muscles they were contemplating.71 Boxers were to be admired to the extent that their bodies approximated pre-determined ideals of beauty, not because they worked well. Ben Marshall's portrait of Jackson, copied as a mezzo- tint by Charles Turner in 1810, positions the clothed prize-fighter beside a clas- sical sculpture. We cannot help comparing their legs (illus. 21). Ten days after Farington first saw Gregson, the party reassembled at Lord Elgin's house to see him 'naked among the Antique figures', the newly arrived fragments of the Panthenon frieze now known as the Elgin Marbles. As soon as the fighters arrived, one recalled, 'ancient art and the works of Phidias were for- gotten'.72 At the end of July, four of the leading fighters of the day -Jackson, Belcher, Gulley and Dutch Sam - were brought to Elgin's for a 'Pugilistick Exhibition'. Farington noted that the sculptor John Rossi particularly admired Dutch Sam's figure 'on account of the Symmetry & the parts being expressed', and Sam is thought to be the model for Rossi's 1828 sculpture, Athleta Britannicus (illus. 22). 73 An attempt at pure classicism, we have no idea when looking at the 69 21 Charles Turner after Benjamin Marshall, Mr John Jackson, 1810. sculpture that the model was a nineteenth-century Jew from the East End of London.74 The pugilist's identity is also not apparent in Sir Thomas Lawrence's por- traits of his childhood friend, John Jackson. The first, exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1797, featured him, twice-lifesize, as Satan Summoning His Legions, to illustrate Milton's line, 'Awake, arise, or be forever fallen.'75 As Peter Radford notes, the painting makes an 'obvious boxing pun about having been knocked down and having to get up', but this was for private consump- tion. While the body was Jackson's - Egan had described him as 'one of the best made men in the kingdom'; others praised his 'small' joints, 'knit in the man- ner which is copied so inimitably in many of the statues and paintings of Michelangelo' - the face was that of the actor, John Kemble.76 The same combina- tion featured in an 1800 painting of Rolla, from Sheridan's Pizarro.71 Jackson's 70 22 Charles Rossi, Athleta Britannka, 1828. 23 Theodore Gericault, Les Boxeurs, 1818, lithograph. muscular body was a useful starting point from which to paint grand subjects; his face, and profession, were not important. Historical context returned, to be married with classical precedent, in the most widely known boxing image of the early nineteenth century, Theodore Geri- cault 's lithograph Les Boxeurs (illus. 23). On the one hand, it makes reference to contemporary events and setting. The boxers, dressed in modern clothes, are usually taken to be Cribb and Molineaux, and we can pick out a few men in suits and one in a prominent top hat in the crowd. Two beer tankards are prominently placed in the bottom right-hand corner. The anglophile Gericault had not attended either fight between the two men - he first visited England in 1820 - but he would have witnessed boxing matches in the Paris studio of painter Horace Vernet, a rendezvous for Restoration liberals, and perhaps, more importantly, he was familiar with English sporting engravings. His decision to depict the scene in a lithograph also signalled a commitment to the contemporary. Lithography was then a new technique and was associated mainly with political satire and other forms of ephemera.78 Gericault differs from Hogarth, however, in that he fuses references to the modern scene with allusions to classical and Renaissance art; he had recently returned to Paris after some years in Italy. Michelangelo's influence, in particu- lar, is apparent in the sharp contours, strained poses, bulging muscles and heroic stylization of the fighters.79 Several spectators are also portrayed naked to the waist. Most striking is one in the left foreground -perhaps having just 72 24 Theodore Gericault, Two Boxers Facing Left, 1818. been defeated himself? - who lies in a languid classical pose practically at the fighters' feet. The mixture of realist and classical conventions is disconcert- ing, but allows Gericault to present the fight as both sharply contemporary and grandly mythical. Les Boxeurs positions its opponents very deliberately in the centre of the work, in identical monumental stances. They are static, unlike the fighters in Gericault 's more naturalistic pencil and pen studies of the same year (illus. 24). The black man wears white trousers; the white man's trousers have black stripes. Gericault is obviously interested in tonal contrast, an interest that would be revived in George Bellows 's depictions of interracial boxing a hundred years later. But Gericault 's time, and his politics, were different from Bellows 's. Black men also feature in Gericault 's great paintings of 1819, The African Slave and The Raft of the Medusa, works that are often discussed in the context of liberal campaigns against France's complicity in the slave trade, and Toussaint L'Ouverture's heroic rebellion in Haiti.80 In most images of the contest between Cribb and Molin- eaux, the American appeared as little more than a caricature, often barefooted, 'blackamoor' (illus. 47). In Gericault 's lithograph, he is not only complementary but absolutely equal to his opponent; here, it seems possible that he might win. THE ERA OF BOXIMANIA Works of the early twenties, such as Hazlitt's 'The Fight' (1822), Egan's Life in London (1821) and John Hamilton Reynolds's The Fancy (1820) celebrated a cultural moment that was coming to an end. An elegiac air infects their 73 exuberance. In 1818, Reynolds abandoned poetry (and boxing) to become a lawyer, and in 1820, about to marry, and with his good friend, Keats, very ill, he wrote The Fancy as a 'final parting with his youth, his poetry, and the forbidden delights of youth'.81 But if Londoners were leaving the Fancy behind, out-of- towners were becoming increasingly interested. London's sporting pubs were fast becoming tourist attractions, and places like the Castle Tavern in Holborn assumed legendary status. In Howarth in Yorkshire, the Bronte children were keen readers of Black- wood's Magazine, which was passed to them by a neighbour until 1831. One of their parodies, The Young Men's Magazine, included an 'Advertisement' by Charlotte and Branwell, issuing a challenge to 'a match at fisty-cuffs'.82 Their juvenilia is populated by young noblemen, always 'masters of the art', who set at each other 'in slashing style'.83 Charlotte eventually lost interest, but Branwell continued to read Blackwood's and Bell's Life. Numerous references to, and sketches of, his pugilistic heroes can also be found in his letters.84 Bronte could not decide whether he wanted to be a painter or a poet. The poems he submitted to Blackwood's were always rejected. In July 1835, he wrote a letter to the Royal Academy of Art asking for an interview. His biographers have debated whether he actually sent this letter, and whether, as a result, he vis- ited London the following month. He claimed that he went. The uncertainty stems from the detailed account of London adventures he gave on his supposed return. Juliet Barker, who doubts the trip took place, maintains that Bronte's impressions of the Castle Tavern, and his account of conversations with its land- lord, Tom Spring, were lifted straight from the pages of Egan's Boxiana and Book of Sports (1832), which gives a particularly lively and detailed description of the tavern and its patrons.85 A country boy who really did visit the pilgrimage sights of the Fancy was the poet John Clare. On his third visit to London in 1824, Clare was taken by the painter Oliver Rippingille to the Castle Tavern, and to Jack Randall's Hole in the Wall in Chancery Lane - where Hazlitt's 'The Fight' begins - and to see some sparring at the Fives Court. Clare later recalled: I caught the mania so much from Rip for such things that I soon became far more eager for the fancy than himself and I watch'd the appearance of every new Hero on the stage with as eager curosity [sic] to see what sort of fellow he was as I had before done the Poets - and I left the place with one wish strongly in uppermost and that was that I was but a Lord to patronize Jones the Sailor Boy who took my fancy as being the finest fellow in the Ring.86 Iain McCalman and Maureen Perkins speculate that Clare may also have attended one of the numerous theatrical adaptations of Egan's Life in London, and argue that 'there can be little doubt that he modelled his own metropolitan tourist programmes on the "sprees and larks" of Egan's fictional heroes'.87 74 In the Northampton asylum in which he spent the last years of his life, Clare adopted many pseudonyms and alter egos, including those of some of the prize- fighters he had watched on that trip to London. Inventing new names was of course a speciality of prize-fighters, but Jonathan Bate speculates that 'the per- sona of the pugilist became Clare's stance of defiance' in the violent atmosphere of the asylum.88 Clare was seen shadow-boxing in his cell, crying out 'I'm Jones the Sailor Boy', and 'I'm Tom Spring', or, as 'Jack Randall Champion of the Prize Ring', issuing a 'Challenge to All the World' for 'A Fair Stand Up Fight'.89 On one occasion Clare (soon to write his own 'Child Harold' and 'Don Juan a Poem') even referred to himself as 'Boxer Byron / made of Iron, alias / Box-iron / At Spring-field.'90 The personae of Box-iron and Boxer (Lord) Byron pull in differ- ent directions: Clare wanted to be both the self-made working-class prize-fighter and the kind of Lord who patronized such men. But his assumption of these roles brought no relief from his isolation and increasing alienation from both worlds. One letter (to an unidentified and possibly imaginary correspondent) laments that although 'It is well known that I am a prize-fighter by profession and a man that has never feared any body in my life either in the ring or out of it . . . there is none to accept my challenges which I have from time to time given to the public.'91 Two months before he died, an ailing Branwell Bronte wrote to Joseph Ley- land, signing off with the remark that he was 'nearly worn out'. The letter was accompanied by a sketch of a man lying in bed and a skeleton standing over him. The skeleton is saying that 'the half minute time's up, so come to the scratch; won't you?' The prostrate man replies, 'Blast your eyes, it's no use, for I cannot come', and above is written - 'Jack Shaw, the Guardsman, and Jack Painter of Norfolk'. Painter had been defeated by Shaw in 1815 (just weeks before Shaw died heroically at Waterloo). The fight was largely memorable for Painter's courageous resilience: he 'received ten knock-down blows in succes- sion; and, although requested to resign the battle, not the slightest chance appeared in his favour, he refused to quit the ring till nature was exhausted'.92 Branwell Bronte, a painter himself, died in 1848, and John Clare followed in 1864. Both men lasted longer than the Fives Court; built in 1802 at the start of pugilism's vogue, it was pulled down in 1826 as part of the development of Trafalgar Square (illus. 49). The golden age of boxing was over. 75 Fighting, Rightly Understood' 'Modern legislation is chiefly remarkable for its oppressive interference with the elegant amusements of the mob,' complained Punch, tongue largely in cheek, in 1841. Bartholomew-fair is abolished; bull-baiting, cock-pits, and duck-hunts are put down by act of Parliament; prize-fighting, by the New Police . . . The 'masses' see no pleasure now.1 The establishment of Robert Peel's New Police in 1829 had gradually made it possible to enforce a series of legal judgments to outlaw the prize-ring. But these judgments did little more than confirm the shift in public attitudes to the sport. By the time of Victoria's accession in 1837, prize-fighting was firmly in decline. Pugilists had served as ushers at George iv's coronation in 1821, but the patron- age of Queen Victoria or the presence of her Prince Consort at ringside was unthinkable. Respectable middle-class society saw no place for an unruly sport favoured by an alliance of the working and upper classes (the 'bawling, hustling, and smashing' Populace and the 'great broad-shouldered' Barbarians, as Matthew Arnold put it), while evangelical Christianity stressed its brutish nature.2 Only 30 years earlier, newspapers had extolled the manly virtues of pugilism; now they stressed its physical and moral dangers. The New Sporting Magazine, founded by R. S. Surtees in 1834, announced in its prospectus that 'prize-fighting, Bull-baiting and Cock-fighting' were low and demoralizing pur- suits' and would be excluded from its pages.3 In their place Surtees substituted the 'jaunts and jollities' of riding and hunting. A series of scandals ranging from thrown fights to murder was partly to blame. In 1824 fight-promoter John Thurtell was hanged for the murder of a gambling associate and the trial made sensational news; a few months later magistrates stopped a fight ('if it could be so termed', said Egan) at Moulsey Hurst and arrested both fighters.4 The following year even Hazlitt admitted that 'the Fancy have lately lost something of their gloss in public estimation; and, after the last fight, few would go far to see a Neate or a Spring set-to'.5 In the 76 years that followed the pugilists themselves tried to improve matters - Spring, for example, set up the Fair Play Club in 1828 - but without aristocratic backing and finance, the boxers lacked the necessary authority to regulate their sport. 'When honour and fame cease to influence the combatants,' lamented Vincent Dowling, editor of Bell's Life, 'a system of low gambling is substituted.'6 Many also considered large gatherings of unruly fight fans to be threaten- ing, as large-scale popular protest, from the Luddites to the Chartists, continued into the 1820s. William Cobbett had noted in 1805 that boxing matches do not merely 'give rise to assemblages of people; they tend to make the people bold'.7 But without an obvious foreign enemy, such boldness was no longer welcome. Increasingly, reforming magistrates clamped down on those involved in staging fights. They even began to appear in this capacity in novels. In Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836-7), George Nupkins boasts of having 'rushed into a prize- ring . . . attended only by six special constables; and, at the hazard of falling a sacrifice to the angry passions of an infuriated multitude, prohibited a pugilis- tic contest between the Middlesex Dumpling, and the Suffolk Bantam'.8 The magistrate in George Borrow 's Lavengro (1851), meanwhile, confesses that although 'of course, I cannot patronize the thing very openly, yet I sometimes see a prize-fight'.9 In Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), set in the 1840s, the town's Roman Amphitheatre is described as a popular venue for 'pugilistic encounters' because it is 'secluded' and 'entirely invisible to the out- side world save by climbing to the top of the enclosure'.10 The era of the great boxers also seemed to be over. New champions such as Tom Spring continued to attract a following, but the tone of much journalism was resolutely elegiac. A newspaper account of Spring's defeat of the aging Tom Oliver on 20 February 1821 (a fight attended by the schoolboy William Glad- stone, bunking off from Eton), described the pair as 'first-raters of the present day' but greatly inferior to their predecessors.11 The great fighters, and com- mentators, of the Regency died soon afterwards: 'Gentleman John' Jackson in 1845; Tom Cribb in 1848; Pierce Egan in 1849; and Tom Spring in 1851, the year in which, in Lavengro, George Borrow lamented the passing of the great days of prize-fighting. I have known the time when a pugilistic encounter between two noted champions was almost considered in the light of a national affair; when tens of thousands of individuals, high and low, meditated and brooded upon it, the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night, until the great event was decided. But the time is passed, and people will say, thank God that it is; all I have to say is, that the French still live on the other side of the water, and are still casting their eyes hitherward - and that in the days of pugilism it was no vain boast to say, that one English- man was a match for two of t'other race; at present it would be a vain boast to say so, for these are not the days of pugilism.12 17 AMERICAN BEGINNINGS AND BRITAIN S GREAT PUGILISTIC REVIVAL' Although the Molineaux-Cribb fights had generated much British excitement in 1810, for 'the first quarter of the nineteenth century most Americans were unaware that boxing matches even took place in their country'.13 In the decades that followed, however, ever-increasing numbers of immigrants began to estab- lish the sport. An Irishman vs. an Englishman was a reliable crowd-puller, but very few of the early immigrants made a living through prize-fighting. During the 1830s, some British fighters, facing ever-more limited opportu- nities at home, decided to cross the Atlantic to capitalize on budding Ameri- can interest in bare-knuckle bouts. The first to make the journey was James ('Deaf') Burke, who had been unable to find an opponent since a 98-round bat- tle ended in his adversary's death. Burke arrived in New York in 1836, where he appeared on stage at Conklin's Hall 'as the Venetian statue' - poses included 'Hercules struggling with the Nemean lion, in five attitudes' and 'Samson slay- ing the Philistines with a jaw bone'.14 The following year he had two fights against Irishmen; one in New Orleans, which degenerated into chaos (Irish sup- porters attacked Burke, accusing him of unfair play), and the other on Hart's Island, New York, which he easily won. The New York Herald reported the sec- ond match with showy reluctance; although we 'regret and detest' the kind of exhibition the British are so fond of, the paper declared, 'our duty as chroni- clers compels us to make public what otherwise we should bury in oblivion'.15 While Burke had been in America, a quick-witted Nottingham fighter called William Thompson, or more usually Bendigo, had emerged as a real contender for the Championship. Burke fought Bendigo on his return to England in 1839, but was disqualified for head-butting; Bendigo lost the championship to Ben Caunt in 1842, and regained it from him in 1845 (both were bitterly contested fights). In 1850, he retired from the ring and, in a development considered to be a sign of the times, became a Methodist preacher.16 Burke and Bendigo are both mentioned in Herman Melville's 1851 novel, Moby-Dick. While there is no evidence that Melville attended any of their fights, these were widely reported in the American press. Certainly Melville felt that Bendigo was well enough known to refer to him in an 1847 letter to a sick cousin in Rio: 'come back to us again and send a challenge across the water to fight Bendigo for the Champion's Belt of all England'.17 Nationalist bravado also informs Chapter 37 of Moby-Dick, which ends with a famous passage in which Captain Ahab challenges the 'great gods' to 'swerve' him from his goal of taking revenge on the White Whale to whom he had lost a leg. In evoking his 'fixed purpose', Ahab compares himself to a train: 'Over unsounded gorges, through the rifled hearts of mountains, under torrents' beds, unerringly I rush! Naught's an obstacle, naught's an angle to the iron way! ' Less often noted is Ahab's comparison of the unswerving nature of a train on its iron way to a boxer facing his opponent. Ahab begins his soliloquy by evoking his 78 own 'steel skull . . . the sort that needs no helmet in the most brain-battering fight!' He then addresses 'ye great gods' directly: I laugh and hoot at ye, ye cricket-players, ye pugilists, ye deaf Burkes and blinded Bendigoes! I will not say as schoolboys do to bullies, - Take some one of your one size: don't pommel me! No, ye've knocked me down, and I am up again; but ye have run and hidden. Come forth from behind your cotton bags! I have no long gun to reach ye; come and see if ye can swerve me. Swerve me? Ye cannot swerve me, else ye swerve yourselves! Man has ye there.18 Ahab's claim that the English bruiser gods will not be able to stop his advance on the whale is pure (and characteristic) bluster. Only a few years later, however, an American boxer, with a more credible claim to be unswervable, appeared on the scene. In 1858, the Irish-American fighter John C. Heenan sent a real 'challenge across the water', not to Bendigo but to the then 'Champion of England', Tom Sayers. In January i860 Heenan set off for England carrying a considerable burden of expectation. He appealed to both ethnic and national loyalties - to Irish- Americans, he was fighting as 'a son of Erin', to American-born nativists (many of whom had supported his opponents at home), Heenan was now a represen- tative of 'Uncle Sammy', a defender of 'dear Columbia's pride'.19 (A similarly convenient move took place 100 years later when, by taking on the German Max Schmeling, Joe Louis became an American' as well as a 'Negro' fighter.) In England, meanwhile, the Heenan-Sayers fight was greeted as the begin- ning of a 'Great Pugilistic Revival'; in truth, however, it represented old-style English pugilism's last stand.20 This round of Britain vs. the United States dif- fered in many ways from that which had taken place 50 years earlier. Steadily if slowly growing in the United States, prize-fighting had continued to decline in Britain, a shift in the balance of power reflected in the fact that it was now an English David (5ft 8in and 150 pounds) who was to face an American Goliath (4 inches taller and nearly 40 pounds heavier). Heenan, named for his home- town as the 'Benicia Boy', was also nine years younger than Sayers.21 While much of the American press looked forward to a test of national supremacy, the British press treated the event as a brutal anachronism and campaigned to stop it taking place. The Manchester Guardian, for example, argued against the association of healthy 'muscular art' with the 'unhealthy excitement' which sur- rounded prize-fighting: The fighters . . . perform their part for money; not to develop their manly energies; nor do they assist in developing the physical powers of those around them. Instead of going to witness a prize-fight, let men don the gloves and learn and practice the art of fighting for themselves.22 79 The rhetoric intensified, culminating in a parliamentary debate four days before the fight took place. One mp called for the Home Secretary and the Prime Min- ister to intervene and stop what was clearly a 'meditated breach of the peace'. Pursuing what he described as a 'moderate path', Palmerston argued that he could see no reason why a prize-fight should constitute a greater breach of the peace than a 'balloon ascent'.23 Heenan vs. Sayers went ahead on 17 April i860, in Farnborough, Hamp- shire, the town having been chosen partly because of its excellent rail links.24 Thousands of spectators attended. After 37 rounds, over two hours, and many injuries - Heenan was reduced to near-blindness in his right eye - the contest ended in chaos and a draw was declared.25 Although Bell's Life cheerfully debated who had come off worse, concluding that 'Heenan's mug was decidedly the most disfigured', the extreme violence of the fight shocked many.26 The New York Herald, meanwhile, complained that 'the Britons . . . stopped the fight in order to save their money': Let Mr. Bull, who seems to be growing old and shaky about his pins, keep his five-pound notes - we are rich enough to do without them. We do not really want his money, but simply desired to let him know that we could whip him in a matter of muscle as well as in yachts, clip- per ships, steamboats, india-rubber shoes and other things, city rail- ways, sewing machines, the electric telegraph, reading machines, pretty women, and unpickable bank locks.27 The following month, in an essay on his walks into 'shy neighbourhoods', Charles Dickens, as 'the uncommercial traveller', noted 'the fancy of a humble artist' in small shop windows, 'as exemplified in two portraits representing Mr Thomas Sayers, of Great Britain, and Mr John Heenan, of the United States of America': These illustrious men are highly coloured, in fighting trim and fighting attitude. To suggest the pastoral and meditative nature of their peaceful calling, Mr Heenan is represented by an emerald sward with primroses and other modest flowers springing up under the heels of his half-boots; while Mr Sayers is impelled to the administration of his favourite blow, the Auctioneer, by the silent eloquence of a village church. The humble homes of England, with their domestic virtues and honeysuckle porches, urge both heroes to go in and win; and the lark and other singing birds are observable in the upper air, ecstatically carolling their thanks to Heaven for a fight. On the whole, the associations entwined with the pugilistic art by this artist are much in the manner of Izaak Walton.28 Dickens's target is, as ever, hypocrisy and affectation: not boxing itself, but attempts to take the edge off a violent sport by wrapping it in a highly romanti- cized pastoralism. 80 ft &^te$& , r*»*tt>, I ((.kfr. !«jt; and I tmm TIlAf TOti cm fisd iJrxmaa TO INTHltaT totf IK TOX LHJSMITWIf «P * DlitilWTIXU I'lmtf-lUHT ! " In i860, the joke seemed never ending in Punch cartoons, which showed men 'initiating' women (readers of Belle's Life, sic), and mothers handing over their babies to a burly boxing tutor (illus. 28). The association of The Mill on the Floss with 'milling' is actually not as absurd as Punch had implied. A novel of childhood and adolescence, it focuses on the relationship between a brother and sister, Tom and Maggie Tulliver. Tom Tulliver is consistently depicted as a lad of honour' and a keen fighter. He particularly likes to read, and relate, 'fighting stories', and so his fellow pupil, Philip Wakem, who is said to have been 'brought up like a girl' and whose deformity makes him 'unfit for active sports', tells him the story of Ulysses, 'a little fellow, but very wise and cunning', in his battle against the Cyclops, Polyphemus. '0 what fun!' says Tom, but his words have an ironic resonance later in the novel when, some years later, he accuses Philip Wakem of not 'acting the part of a man and a gentleman' with his sister, Maggie. Philip replies, 'It is manly of you to talk in this way to me. Giants have an immemorial right to stupidity and insolent abuse.' Wakem 's response recalls the Homer of their youth, and Tom is now cast as Cyclops. Tom's pugnacity exemplifies what Eliot terms 'masculine philosophy', yet it is a mas- culinity of a particularly limited (schoolboy) type, one whose morality is based on strength. However many Greek verbs he learns, Tom is unable to be anything other than 'an excellent bovine lad' who believes in the 'boys' justice' of the fist.56 87 28 'Muscular Educa- tion - The Private Tutor', Punch, 26 May i860. MUSCULAR (etlGATlOH-THe PRIVATE TUTffltt 1 Hii lit. Ux'ia ! " The guilt-free pleasure of eighteenth-century fight scenes was no longer possible for Victorian writers or readers. Fighting could not be condoned, except, of course, in the service of a moral cause. Happily, moral causes were not hard to find; so much so that in 1901 George Bernard Shaw felt able to condemn what he described as the 'abominable vein of retaliatory violence all through the literature of the nineteenth century'.57 An exemplary case of morally justified retaliation occurs in Chapter Five of Vanity Fair. This is a very different occasion from the prize-fights mocked elsewhere in the novel. At 'Dr Swishtail's famous school', Dobbin, the son of a grocer, is consistently tormented by boys only slightly more secure in their status. Known to them by the name of 'Figs', he is neither a dandy nor a 'bruiser'. Although at his happiest when left alone to read the Arabian Nights while the rest of the school pursue sports, Dobbin cannot ignore the spectacle of 'the great chief and dandy' Cuff tormenting a smaller boy. The narrator speculates that Dobbin may be 'revolting' against the 'exercise of tyranny' or perhaps hankers after revenge. Whatever the reason, his coming forth is compared to that of 'little David' against 'brazen Goliath', and the North American colonies against George 111.58 The narrator, claiming that he has not 'the pen of a Napier or a Bell's Life', nonetheless describes the thirteenth, and final, round of the ensuing fight in the manner of that sporting journal: It was the last charge of the Guard (that is, it would have been, only Waterloo had not yet taken place) - it was Ney's column breasting the hills of La Haye Sainte, bristling with ten thousand bayonets, and crowned with twenty eagles - it was the shouts of the beef-eating 88 British, as leaping down the hill, they rushed to hug the enemy in the savage arms of battle -in other words, Cuff coming up full of pluck, but quite reeling and groggy, the Fig-merchant put in his left as usual on his adversary's nose, and sent him down for the last time.59 In this passage, which was to inspire similar parodies by James Joyce and Ralph Ellison in the twentieth century, Thackeray does more than simply show his familiarity both with the work of the military historian Sir William Napier and the popular magazine, Bell's Life in London. His target is the all too easy interchange between the discourses of prize-fighting and war (illus. 46). 6o SCHOOLBOY BOXERS: 'THE NATURAL AND THE ENGLISH WAY' The 1850s and '60s saw the creation of many new public schools, in which 'rep- resentatives of old families [mixed] with the sons of the new middle classes'. These schools, claims Asa Briggs, instigated 'a gradual fusion of classes', by 'drawing upon a common store of values'.61 Sport, placed at the heart of the cur- riculum, was one of the central ways in which those values were transmitted. Public school sporting stories became enormously popular, with Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's Schooldays (1857) starting the trend and reinventing the schoolboy as a heroic character.62 Thomas Hughes's school was Rugby, whose headmaster, Thomas Arnold, epitomized the values of what became known as muscular Christianity.63 Good character depended on a healthy mind in a healthy body - mens sana in corpore sano.64 Although rugby and cricket are also considered, the delicate relation- ship between physical prowess and moral character finds its most vivid expres- sion in the novel's depiction of boxing. Hughes begins a chapter entitled 'The Fight' with a warning: Let those young persons whose stomachs are not strong, or who think a good set-to with the weapons which God has given us all, an uncivi- lized, unchristian, or ungentlemanly affair, just skip this chapter at once, for it won't be to their taste. The chapter chronicles Brown's initiation into muscular and manly Christian ways through a fight with, of course, a bigger boy. After the fight is over, Tom and 'the Slogger' shake hands 'with great satisfaction and mutual respect'. 'Fighting', Hughes concludes, 'is the natural and English way for English boys to settle their quarrels' (illus. 29). 65 Throughout the next hundred years, in the pages of magazines at least, English boys continued to find quarrels which needed settling. In 1866 Edwin Brett's Boys of England was founded as 'A Magazine of Sport, Travel, Fun and Adventure', but it was not until 1879 and the launch of The Boy's Own Paper that sport became a staple of schoolboy stories. In 1948 E. S. Turner joked that 29 Arthur Hughes, illustration for Tom Brown s Schooldays (1869 edition). 'any historian of the remote future relying exclusively on old volumes of boys' magazines for his knowledge of the British way of life in the early twentieth century . . . will record that the country was the battleground of an unending civil war between a small vigorous race known as Sportsmen and a large, slug- gish and corrupt race known as Slackers'.66 The battleground extended far beyond the school walls. After the First World War, Marvel ran a series of stories by Arthur S. Handy in which parsons, newspaper editors, farmers, dockers, millionaires, plumbers and taxi drivers all ended up as boxing heroes, while in the Champion, 'sport grew from a fetish to a frenzy' (illus. 57). 6? In his advocacy of boxing, Thomas Hughes had higher ambitions than the mere settling of schoolboy quarrels and desires, or the exercising of 'the temper, and . . . the muscles of the back and legs'. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them.68 On the one hand, fighting is 'natural', especially if you are English; on the other, 90 'rightly understood', it must always have a 'chivalrous' and Christian purpose behind it.69 In Tom Brown at Oxford (1861), Hughes distinguished the self- indulgent 'muscleman' from the 'muscular Christian' who, like St Paul, brings his body into 'subjection'.70 Hughes's determination to avoid celebrating the mere 'muscleman' meant that for all his descriptions of sports and fighting, his works give very little sense of the bodies involved in them. The male body is present less as something con- crete and material than as a sign of, or instrument for, chivalry. This was not the case in the work of Hughes's near contemporary, Walter Pater, whose essays, from 'Winckelmann' (1867) to 'The Age of Athletic Prizemen' (1894), marked yet another revival of interest in Greek sculpture and the 'Hellenic ideal' of the male body.71 Published just two years before the modern Olympics began, 'The Age of Athletic Prizemen' celebrates 'peaceful combat as a fine art': an art mani- fested in sculptures of athletes and their poetic equivalents, Pindar's poems, 'sung in language suggestive of a sort of metallic beauty'.72 For Pater the beauty of these works derived from their celebration of the fleeting moment: the ath- lete is poised 'just there for a moment, between the animal and spiritual worlds', between actions, and between youth and maturity. The emphasis on stillness ('repose' is Pater's word) suggests in turn what he calls 'sexless beauty': the white marble statues have been 'purged from the angry, bloodlike stains of action and passion'. The young athletes memorialized are curiously 'virginal yet virile'.73 They represent the unity of unstained mind and unstained body. St Paul's emphasis on subjugation appealed to both Hellenists and Muscu- lar Christians. Pater stressed 'the religious significance of the Greek athletic service' and argued that 'the athletic life certainly breathes of abstinence, of rule, of the keeping un der of oneself \74 But while Hughes promoted the moral conse- quences of such subjugation, Pater's emphasis was aesthetic.75 QUEENSBERRY AND THE PROFESSIONALIZATION OF THE AMATEUR IDEAL In many different contexts in nineteenth-century Britain, Asa Briggs wrote, there was 'an interplay between what happened nationally and what happened in the schools'.76 Common to both was the codification of sports. The Football Association was founded in 1863, the cricketing yearbook Wisden was first pro- duced in 1864, the Rugby Union rules (based on the Rugby School rules) were formulated in 1871, and in 1866 the Pugilists' Benevolent Association adopted a series of rules partly devised by the lightweight champion boxer, Arthur Cham- bers, but famously published, the following year, under the name of their 24- year-old endorser, the eighth Marquess of Queensberry, John Sholto Douglas.77 Boxing regulations had gradually become more rigorous during Victoria's reign: Broughton's 1743 rules were superseded in 1838 by the London Prize Rules (which were revised in 1853). These specified the size of a boxing ring, the use of turf, the role of seconds and umpires, and outlawed head-butting, kicking and 91 biting. Most importantly, they also decreed that if the contest was undecided all bets were off.78 The Queensberry Rules (essentially a modified version of those which had governed sparring for many years) went much further towards bridg- ing the gap between the amateur and professional sport. All the grappling holds now associated with wrestling were disallowed, thus ensuring a more upright con- test; weight categories for boxers were to be strictly observed, and gloves, which had been used mainly in training, were now to be compulsory in fights. Under the London Prize Rules, fights were to the finish, although exhausted fighters or their seconds might agree to a draw (as happened after 37 rounds in the case of Heenan vs. Sayers). Under the Queensberry rules, there would be a set number of rounds (usually no more than twenty), limited to three minutes each, with one minute between rounds; a man who was knocked down was allowed ten seconds to get to his feet or lose the fight by a knockout). After the 1860s old-style prize-fights continued clandestinely, but they were no longer the national events that Sayers vs. Heenan had been. Endorsed by organizations such as the Amateur Athletic Club, the Queensberry rules were increasingly chosen over the London Prize Rules. Bare-knuckle boxing was giving way to boxing in its modern form. Shortly after the end of the Civil War, the Marquess of Queensberry, accompanied by Arthur Chambers, visited the United States for, as his grand- son notes, 'agreement with American supporters of the game was essential'.79 Queensberry 's rules came into effect slightly later in America than in Britain; John L. Sullivan's last contest under the London Prize Ring rules took place in 1889. In the United States, the dichotomy between attitudes towards profes- sional and amateur boxing was particularly pronounced, perhaps because pro- fessional prize-fighting was even more violent and disorderly there. From the late 1840s until the Civil War, tension between 'natives' and the growing num- bers of Irish immigrants found expression in a series of fiercely contested fights 30 Mathew Brady, two soldiers posed as boxers at a Federal camp at Petersburg, Virginia, April 1865. 92 between various pairings of Tom Hyer, Yankee Sullivan, John Morrissey and John C. Heenan. The most colourful of these fighters was John Morrissey. Prize- fighting was only one element in what was effectively a wrong-side-of-the-tracks Benjamin Franklin career, ranging from street gangs to political 'shoulder-hit- ting' (persuading voters to make the 'right' choice) to the founding of the Saratoga race-track (with accompanying lucrative gambling opportunities) to serving two terms in Congress. Today, Morrissey is remembered for his involve- ment in the murder of William Poole - Bill the Butcher - the leader of a so- called Native American (anti-Irish) gang. Herbert Asbury told the story in The Gangs of New York (1927) and Martin Scorsese adapted it for the cinema in 2002. 8o The passing of legislation to outlaw prize-fighting (in Massachusetts in 1849; in New York in 1859) coincided with a boom in sparring academies and cheap boxing manuals. Partly as a result of the Heenan-Sayers contest, boxing also became a popular form of camp recreation during the American Civil War; 'a poignant if fleeting alternative to the ghastliness of battle' (illus. 30). 8l From the antebellum period onwards, working-class prize-fighting was considered corrupt and deplorable, while genteel sparring was welcomed as a means of restoring 'vigour' (a popular word particularly by the end of the century) to middle-class men. Reformers such Thomas Wentworth Higginson argued that sports such as boxing counteracted what they saw as the inherently emasculat- ing effects of city life.82 'I am satisfied', announced Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., the asthmatic Autocrat of the Breakfast Table', in 1858, 'that such a set of black- coated, stiff-jointed, soft-muscled, paste-complexioned youth as we can boast of in our Atlantic cities never before sprang from loins of Anglo-Saxon lineage.'83 One of the delights of 'a manly self-hood' that Walt Whitman celebrated in his i860 'Poem of Joys' was the 'joy of the strong-brawn'd fighter, towering in the arena, in perfect condition, conscious of power, thirsting to meet his opponent' (illus. 31).84 In the late 1870s and '80s, Henry James created American protagonists whose masculinity was directly shaped by the Civil War and its aftermath. Vet- erans of the war like Basil Ransom (in The Bostonians, 1886) and Christopher Newman (in The American, 1877) were 'national types' whose instinct for battle had been redirected into commercial and romantic ventures. To be 'a powerful specimen of an American', Newman must first of all be physically fit, strong and vigorous. A product of 'the elastic soil of the West', he was 'not a man to whom fatigue was familiar'; his rhetoric, too, involves delivering blows to his competitors and generally putting their noses 'out of joint'. It is not simply that Newman's 'physical capital' correlates with his financial and moral worth; rather, James suggests, it is his natural physical 'vigour' that allows his other accomplishments. 'What should I be afraid of?', he announces, 'I am too ridicu- lously tough'.85 But Basil Ransom worries that men like Newman are becoming rare. The 'masculine tone', he complains, is under threat.86 Perhaps America was growing 'old and soft'.87 93 31 George A. Hayes, Bare Knuckles c. 1870-85. 32 George Bellows, Business-men's Class, ymca, lithograph, 1916. Theodore Roosevelt wrote directly of the nationalistic (Anglo-Saxon American) imperative behind 'the strenuous life': 'There is no place in the world for nations who have become enervated by the soft and easy life, or who have lost their fibre of vigorous hardness and masculinity'.88 Roosevelt also believed that boxing was also an ideal sport for city dwellers. 'When obliged to live in cities,' he wrote in his 1913 autobiography, 'I for a long time found that boxing and wrestling enabled me to get a good deal of exercise in condensed and attractive form.' But it was not only the possibility of a vigorous workout in a limited space that appealed. 'Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development', he maintained, 'must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent' (illus. 32). 89 'box, don't fight' In Britain, finding vent for dangerous urban 'animal spirits' was one of the am- bitions of the Christian socialist movement, which Thomas Hughes founded with F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley. One of their earliest initiatives was a night school and a series of Working Men's Associations. In 1854 the evening classes developed into the establishment of the Working Men's College. When Hughes proposed to teach boxing there, Maurice was alarmed, and indeed 'was afraid that the fighting in Tom Brown's Schooldays might be used to justify the brutalities of professional prize-fighting', in particular the notorious contest between Sayers and Heenan.90 Maurice need not have worried about associations of amateur sparring with the dying days of bare-knuckle prize-fighting for, even in the 1860s, and even in Britain, the two sports were coming to be seen as radically different.91 Hughes loathed prize-fighting, writing in an 1864 letter that 'fighting in cold blood for money is under any conditions as brutal and degrading a custom as any nation can tolerate'.92 But that was not to say that 'round shoulders, narrow chests, stiff limbs' were to be condoned; they were 'as bad as defective grammar and arithmetic'. Everybody at the college had to box with Hughes, and the sparring classes 'grew into informal social gatherings'.93 In 1880, the British Amateur Boxing Association was founded with the motto, 'Box, don't fight', and with this in mind, social and religious reformers encouraged the setting up of boxing clubs in working-class areas. The violence of the street, it was thought, could be redirected into the gym. In his 1899 study of East London, Walter Besant wrote of the importance of bringing the public school ideal into poor neighbourhoods: They work off their restlessness and get rid of the devil in the gym- nasium with the boxing-gloves and with single stick; they contract habits of order and discipline; they become infected with some of the upper-class ideals, especially as regards honor and honesty, purity and temperance. 95 The language Besant uses here is suffused with, and indeed confuses, religious and medical imagery. Boxing would not only enact a kind of exorcism ('fifteen minutes with a stout adversary knock the devil out of a lad - the devil of restlessness and pugnacity'), but also, he suggests, become a kind of beneficial contagion.94 This might also have other, more immediately practical, advantages. When, in Besant's novel All Sorts and Conditions of Men (1882), Angela Messenger worries about security in her Utopian Palace of Delight (a model for the real People's Palace) her friend, the aristocrat-in- disguise Harry Le Breton, suggests engaging 'a professor of the noble art of self-defence'.95 In East London, Besant recalled the success of a church boxing club in Shoreditch, and urged readers who 'think that this is not the ideal amusement for a clergyman' to think again (illus. 33). 96 In fact many churches and later synagogues ran gyms and supported fighters.97 The close involvement of organizations such as the Boy Scout Movement, the Jewish Lads' Brigade and Boys' Town in amateur boxing forms the basis of many fictional (as well as true) boxing stories well into the twentieth century.98 The 'boxer-and-the priest' movie did particularly well during the thirties.99 Needless to say, Hollywood notwithstanding, boxing did not always succeed in ridding the streets of the devil. In his book on the Kray twins, John Pearson describes their early, highly successful, boxing careers in the London East End of the 1950s. Their father, he writes, 'thought that boxing would be the making of the twins, give them the discipline they needed, take them off the streets and give them something other than mischief to occupy their minds'. As amateurs, the twins won every bout they fought, and at the age of sixteen, they turned 33 A. S. Hartnet, 'Men's Club in Connection with Holy Trinity Church, Shoreditch - A Boxing Match', The Graphic, 19 October 1889. 96 professional. But soon afterwards, Pearson notes, 'the street violence they were involved in mysteriously increased as well'.100 In the 'social problem' discourse of the late nineteenth century, reformers often talked about 'the way out' and here too boxing played a part.101 In Arthur Morrison's 1896 novel of London's East End, A Child ofthejago, Father Sturt tries to 'wipe out the blackest spot in the Jago' by creating a lodging-house, a night-shelter, washhouses and a club where 'he gathered the men of the Jago indiscriminately, with sole condition of good behaviour on the premises'. 'And there they smoked, jumped, swung on horizontal bars, boxed, played at cards and bagatelle, free from interference save when interference became neces- sary.'102 But despite the best efforts of Father Sturt, the violence of the streets is never channelled. A novel full of street battles, A Child ofthejago ends with a fight in which the protagonist, Dicky, is killed. With his dying breath, he says to Father Sturt that he's found another 'way out - better'.103 THE FISTIC PHRASEOLOGY OF CHARLES DICKENS George Orwell, claiming Dickens as a fellow pacifist in 1939, argued that he 'has no interest in pugilism': Considering the age in which he was writing, it is astonishing how lit- tle physical brutality there is in Dickens's novels ... he sees the stupid- ity of violence, and also he belongs to a cautious urban class which does not deal in socks on the jaw, even in theory.104 Others have disagreed with this reading. John Carey, for example, notes that while Dickens 'saw himself as the great prophet of cosy, domestic virtue, pur- veyor of improving literature to the middle classes . . . violence and destruction were the most powerful stimulants to his imagination'.105 This violence mani- fests itself in many ways; in murder, fire and cannibalism. 'Socks on the jaw' are also not uncommon. The shift in the cultural meanings of boxing in the Victor- ian era is nowhere better reflected than in a body of work which began in the 1830s and ended in the 1870s. In an 1852 letter, Dickens wrote that 'Nobody can for a moment suppose that "sporting" amusements are the sports of the people . . . they are the amusements of a peculiar and limited class', and boxers (and their supporters) often figure in his novels as hangovers from that peculiar class and a fading Regency world.106 But while upper-class members of the Fancy, such as Sir Mulberry Hawk in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), are villains as well as fools, working-class or shabby-genteel sporting types, such Sam Weller, Pickwick's cheerfully cynical and pugilistic manservant, are usually treated with affection. In Dickens's first novel, The Pickwick Papers (1836-8), the joke on the nostalgic boxing fan is similar to that on the boxing prints in the i860 'Uncommercial Traveller' piece. When Mr. Roker recalls the glory days of the butcher-pugilist 97 with whom Pickwick is to share a room in the debtors' jail, he gazes 'abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth': It seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox- under-the-Hill by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by the bruising, with a patch o' winegar and brown paper over his right eye- lid, and that 'ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a- following at his heels.107 Another recurrent joke features the pugilistic pretensions of clerks as a form of ersatz gentility. In The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) Dick Swiveller (bearer of a 'small limp' calling card and dandyish attire) attempts fisticuffs at the door of Daniel Quilp, where he 'hammer[ed] away with such good will and heartiness' that it takes Quilp a couple of minutes to dislodge him, and even then Swiveller 'perform [ed] a kind of dance round him and require[ed] to know "whether he wanted any more?"'.108 Swiveller is not the only one of Dickens's characters to enjoy a little sparring dance or shadow boxing (which Addison had described as giving a man 'all the pleasure of boxing, without the blows').109 Later in The Old Curiosity Shop, little Nell's gambling-addicted grandfather is tempted off the straight and narrow at a pub run by Jem Groves, a retired prize-fighter. Groves very much admires his own portrait upon the wall and is introduced 'sparring scientifically at a counterfeit Jem Groves, who was sparring at society in general from a black frame over the chimney-piece'.110 Real and (safely) coun- terfeit violence, here and elsewhere in Dickens's work, exist side by side. Unable to take on his master directly ('I should have spoilt his features ... if I could have afforded it', he later confesses), Newman Noggs, clerk to the odious Ralph Nickleby, shadow boxes outside his office door. He stood at a little distance from the door, with his face towards it; and with the sleeves of his coat turned back at the wrists, was occupied in bestowing the most vigorous, scientific, and straightforward blows upon the empty air. At first sight, this would have appeared merely a wise precaution in a man of sedentary habits, with the view of opening the chest and strengthening the muscles of the arms. But the intense eagerness and joy depicted in the face of Newman Noggs, which was suffused with perspiration; the surprising energy with which he directed a constant succession of blows towards a particular panel about five foot eight from the ground, and still worked away in the most untiring and per- severing manner; would have sufficiently explained to the most atten- tive observer, that his imagination was thrashing to within an inch of his life, his body's most active employer, Mr. Ralph Nickleby.111 98 Dickens enjoyed the language of boxing as much as he did boxers, and nowhere more than in Dombey and Son (1846-8); indeed he stole the name (but little else) of a real prize-fighter, 'The Game Chicken' (Henry - 'Hen' - Pearce) for one of its characters. After coming into his inheritance, Mr Toots, a Corinthian past his sell-by-date, devotes himself to learning 'those gentle arts which refine and humanize existence, his chief instructor in which was an interesting character called the Game Chicken, who was always heard of at the bar of the Black Bad- ger, wore a shaggy great-coat in the warmest weather, and knocked Mr. Toots about the head three times a week, for the small consideration often and six per visit'. We learn about the Game Chicken's past exploits, his glory against the Nobby Shropshire One, and his defeat ('he was severely fibbed . . . heavily grassed') by the Larkey Boy. When Mr Toots despairs of winning the love of Florence Dombey against the wishes of her father, the Chicken reassures him that 'it is within the resources of Science to double him up, with one blow in the waistcoat'.112 When, in Bleak House (1852-3), Mr Snagsby comments that 'when a time is named for tea, it's better to come up to it', his wife is appalled. 'To come up to it!' Mrs Snasgby repeats with severity. 'Up to it! As if Mr Snagsby was a fighter!' 'Not at all, my dear,' says Mr. Snagsby.113 Mrs Snagsby views the use of boxing jargon as a sign of vulgarity, which must be avoided at all costs. Dickens, though, had no such qualms. A boxing pun may even be intended in the title of the opening chapter of Bleak House, 'In Chancery'. The oed gives as the slang meaning of the term, 'the position of the head when held under the opponent's left arm to be pommelled severely, the vic- tim meanwhile being unable to retaliate effectively.'114 The meaning derives, the Dictionary adds, 'from the tenacity and absolute control with which the Court of Chancery holds anything'. This legal metaphor was frequently used in boxing slang, and, with the new meaning attached, occasionally reapplied to law. In August 1841, Punch enjoyed a typical joke on legal pugilism': The Chancery bar has been lately occupied with a question relating to a patent for pins' heads . . . The lawyers are the best boxers, after all. Only let them get a head in chancery, even a pin's, and see how they make the proprietor bleed.115 Dickens used the phrase himself in The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) when the Revd Crisparkle affectionately takes on his mother and 'wound up by getting the old lady's head into Chancery, a technical term used in scientific circles, with a lightness of touch that hardly stirred the lightest lavender or cherry riband in it'.116 In Bleak House, he may have wanted the phrase's additional meaning to reinforce the novel's emphasis on deadlock of various kinds. 99 Elsewhere, what Dickens terms 'fistic phraseology' proves remarkably ver- satile, and his relish in its use is palpable. Some metaphors have only fleeting comic potential, often to characterize a marriage: in the above example, the joke rests in the fact that Mrs rather than Mr Snagsby is clearly the pugilist in the family; in the opening chapter of Nicholas Nickleby, on the other hand, Mr. God- frey Nickleby and his wife are described as 'two principles in a sparring match, who, when fortune is low and backers scarce, will chivalrously set to, for the mere pleasure of the buffeting.'117 When Wemmick, in Great Expectations (1861), tries to put an arm around Miss Skiffins, she stops it with her green-gloved hands and 'the neatness of a placid boxer'.118 By putting pugilistic slang in the mouths of unlikely speakers in unlikely contexts, Dickens encourages his readers to think about the values such idioms conventionally entail. When the tender-hearted and literal-minded Mr Pick- wick says 'Take that, Sir' to the wretched Job Trotter, Dickens intervenes with 'Take what?' In the ordinary acceptation of such language, it should have been a blow. As the world runs, it ought to have been a sound, hearty cuff; for Mr. Pickwick had been duped, deceived, and wronged by the destitute outcast who was now wholly in his power. Must we tell the truth? It was something from Mr. Pickwick's waistcoat, which chinked as it was given into Job's hand . . . 119 Pickwick just does not do metaphors. However, it is not only in 'the Pickwick- ian sense' that words can be redefined.120 In David Copperfield (1850), Mr Mi- cawber repeatedly 'cull[s] a figure of speech from the vocabulary of our coarser national sports'. On several occasions Micawber describes himself as 'floored' by circumstances and at one point he tells David, 'I can show fight no more'. But the point about Mr Micawber is that he never gives up; however often he finds himself on the floor, he always does fight on. And the last time he tells David he is 'floored', it is by the friendliness of Mr Dick.121 Other metaphors are more fully developed. In Chapter Two of Hard Times (1854), the 'government officer' who accompanies Mr Gradgrind on his school inspection is given 'in his way (and in most other people's too)', the supplement- ary identity of 'professed pugilist; always in training'. This allows for consider- able elaboration. Gradgrind came prepared always with a system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England. To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly customer. He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right, follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly. He was certain to knock the wind out of common- sense, and render that unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.122 The pugilistic energies of the Regency have been diverted by utilitarian Eng- land, Dickens seems to be suggesting, and that is perhaps not wholly a good thing: in the classroom, the pugilist-turned-bureaucrat (once hero of 'the Fancy') is reduced to fighting 'fancy' in the form of flowered carpets, and pictures of horses on the walls. While references to boxers and boxing slang remain incidental in Dickens's novels, fights in which boxing skills are employed occur remarkably frequently. Such fights, in particular those with a strong moral impetus behind them, were, of course, popular with readers. When Nicholas Nickleby asks Mr Crummies why he stages combats between mismatched opponents, Crummies replies, 'it's the essence of the combat that there should be a foot or two between them. How are you to get up the sympathies of the audience in a legitimate manner, if there isn't a little man contending against a big one'.123 Such contests also serve a structural purpose, often marking turning points in the novels; in defending the honour of another (a sister or a mother or a small boy) the hero embarks on a new stage in his adventure. For example, after Noah Claypole insults his mother, Oliver Twist, 'crimson with fury', knocks him down with a blow that 'contains his whole force'; beaten in turn, he decides to run away from the work- house-to London and into the clutches of Fagin (illus. 34). 124 Nicholas Nickleby experiences several such turning points, the most important occurring after his defeat of the cruel schoolmaster, Squeers. This fight is presented as the key incident of what can only be described as a kind of slave narrative. On Nickleby's arrival at the school, Squeers tells his wife that he now feels like 'a slave-driver in the West Indies [who] is allowed a man under him to see that his blacks don't run away, or get up a rebellion'; Nickleby is 'to do the same with our blacks'. On this analogy, the abject child, Smike, who runs away only to be recaptured, takes on the role of the beaten slave. But while in the classic American slave-narra- tives, he would fight either his master or overseer, here the overseer (Nickleby) intervenes on the slave's behalf and then the two run away together.125 Many of Dickens's fights combine a defence of vulnerable virtue with an awareness of class status and conflict, in a manner that recalls Adam Bede's bat- tle. In Dickens, however, the fight is not usually between a decadent aristocrat and a humble peasant, but between various members of the middle class. John Carey argues that whenever 'virtuous muscles' are involved, Dickens's writing 'deteriorates'. 'Hopelessly dignified, the good characters brandish their sticks or fists, and the villains tumble. Dickens beams complacently. It is dutiful, perfunctory business.'126 Although Carey's assessment rings true for some of the instances given above, there are other cases in which virtue and violence have a less easy relationship, and where the writing is far from perfunctory. Often considered as alternative versions of Dickens's own autobiography, David 34 George Cruikshank, 'Oliver plucks up spirit', illustration for Oliver Twist (1837). Copperfield and Great Expectations present their fisticuffs rather more anxiously and interestingly. Aware of himself from an early age as a 'little gent', David Copperfield strug- gles to establish this fact in the world.127 Chapter Eighteen presents some of the events that, in retrospect, he believes 'mark' the course of coming of age: these are falling in love, twice, and fighting the local butcher, twice. 'The terror of the youth of Canterbury', the butcher is reputed to have 'unnatural strength' because of 'the beef suet with which he anoints his hair'. He taunts David and punches some younger boys about the head, and so David decided to fight him. David loses the fight and goes home to tell Agnes (the girl he does not yet know he loves) all about it. Her response is perfect: 'she thinks I couldn't have done otherwise than fight the butcher, while she shrinks and trembles at my having fought him'. Following beef-steaks to the eyes, some bear's grease to the hair, another thwarted love, and 'new provocation', David fights the butcher again and this time wins, knocking his adversary's tooth out. Al- though David says of the first contest, 'I hardly know which is myself and which the butcher, we are always in such a tangle and tussle, knocking about the trod- den grass', it is precisely to establish who he is, and particularly to make it clear to which class he belongs, that he fights.128 At the end of the chapter, the young David believes he is now prepared for life as a Regency gentleman manque; indeed next time he sees the butcher he contemplates the gentlemanly act of throwing him 'five shillings to drink'. But David has not yet, his older self admits, fallen in love 'in earnest', nor has he yet fought in earnest. When, a few chapters later he takes sparring lessons with James Steerforth, he feels himself 'the greenest and most inexperienced of mor- tals'. (Mildly embarrassed about his lack of boxing skill in front of Steerforth, he could, however, 'never bear' to show it in front of a man he feels is his infe- rior, Steerforth's servant, Littimer.)129 The real fight in David's life is against Uriah Heep, a man whose social am- bition is unsettlingly similar to his own (Heep calls David an 'upstart'; David calls Heep an over-reacher). Heep is described as creepy and fawning - a 'crawl- ing impersonation of meanness'. He gives David 'damp fishy' handshakes, but he is not harmless. His hand may be damp but it is also revengeful, a 'cruel-look- ing hand'. It takes David a long time to realize this, and even longer to act on his feelings of disgust. When he first sees Heep admiring Agnes, he wishes he had leave to knock him down'; 30 pages later, he recalls another leer' and wonders 'that I did not collar him'; it takes another five pages before, 'enraged as I never was before and never have been since', he strikes the cheek that is 'invitingly' before him. 1 struck it with my open hand with that force that my fingers tingled as if I had burnt them'. By assuming a gentlemanly persona, David could break the butcher's tooth, but here there is not enough class distance for fists to be clenched. Fortunately for David, Mr. Micawber, who defines equality as being able to look my fellow man in the face, and punch his face if he offended me', has fewer class anxieties. He steps in and breaks Heep's wrist with a ruler wielded as a sword. David says he has never seen 'anything more ridiculous', but it is clear that he could not have done as much.130 David's uneasy sense of his own hands might be compared to his reading of the other pairs he encounters in the novel. Some are easily understood: Trad- dies, a clerk, has 'soft' hands; Ham Pegotty, a fisherman, has 'manly' hands. Others are more confusing. Heep's hands are both 'damp' and 'cruel'. Steerforth, the Byronic 'Oxford man', conceals his hands with gloves when he spars; he 'knew everything' about sports, says David, but this is a misreading. What he sees as Steerforth's harmless sporting 'skirmish with Miss Dartle', for example, is the gloved aftermarth of an unsporting, ungloved, attack, for at the end of the novel we learn that it is Steerforth who has scarred her.131 An understanding of the social and moral weight carried by different kinds of hands features even more centrally in Great Expectations. When Pip first 103 visits Satis House, he is overwhelmed by Estella's contempt for him; it is, he says, 'so strong, that it became infectious and I caught it'. 'I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began to consider them a very indifferent pair.' Nevertheless, Estella instructs him to use his 'coarse hands' to play cards with her (she wins every game), and then feeds him outside on the courtyard stones. Pip's reaction to this is so powerful as to be inexpressible ver- bally - 'humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry -I cannot hit upon the right name for the smart' - the only 'counteraction' he finds to 'the smart with- out a name' is to twist his hair, kick the wall and cry.132 A second visit to Satis House follows much the same pattern - cards fol- lowed by food in the yard 'in the former dog-like manner'. This time, however, Pip's wandering in the grounds leads not to self-flagellation, but the flagellation of the Pale Young Gentleman (Herbert Pocket). He has 'hit upon' something more than the right name. It is Pocket who initiates the bout by inviting Pip to 'come and fight'. As a young Regency gentleman, Pocket considers fighting a jolly game whose pleasure derives primarily from the following of laws', 'regu- lar rules' and numerous 'preliminaries'. The first requirement is 'a reason for fighting' and so he pulls Pip's hair and charges his head into his stomach; next, proper ground must be found, along with 'a bottle of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar'; then one must 'denude for battle'. Pip finds this behaviour 'at once light-hearted, business-like, and blood-thirsty'. But of course Pip does not un- derstand the nature of the game, or indeed that it is a game. He is 'morally and physically' offended by the attack on his hair and stomach ('particularly dis- agreeable after bread and meat') and just wants to hit his attacker and be done with it. Fighting, for him, in other words, should be a natural response to hurt, but instead he has to wait until the preparations are complete. When his first blow sends Pocket to the ground, he thinks that is the end of it, but Pocket keeps coming back for more - Pip floors him with every punch - stopping only for the pleasure of 'sponging himself or drinking out of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself according to the form'. Finally Pocket throws his sponge in, and then has to explain to Pip that that means he has won.133 At first glance, the fight seems a perfect 'counteraction' to Estella's humili- ating behaviour. The gentleman's spurious 'reason' - a butt to the stomach - has unwittingly hit Pip where it hurts, for his stomach is full of Estella's bread and meat. Now Pip no longer needs to hurt himself (by kicking at walls and twisting his hair), but can hurt someone else, someone who, like Estella, wants to play silly games with his hands. Pip even admits that 'the more I hit him, the harder I hit him'. But ultimately Pip finds only 'gloomy satisfaction' in his vic- tory. Failing to understand that the fight was a game (the only game in which a blacksmith's apprentice could strike a gentleman), he is consumed by guilt and fear - 'I felt that the pale young gentleman's blood was on my head, and that the law would avenge it'. (That this is an extreme misinterpretation of events is confirmed later in the book when the two meet again, and Pocket asks Pip to 104 forgive him 'for having knocked you about so.') Nor is his nameless smart (might 'nausea' be the word?) any better, despite the fact that he soon encounters Estella with 'a bright flush upon her face'. Aroused by what she sees as his instinctive vitality, she invites him to kiss her and he does. 'But I felt that the kiss was given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and that it was worth nothing.' We might compare her response to that of the shrinking and trembling Agnes in David Copperfield.m For all his considerable technical knowledge, Pocket is a poor physical spec- imen: 'pale', with 'red eyelids', 'pimples on his face and a breaking out in his mouth'. He is tall, but 'his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels' are the most devel- oped parts. Pocket is also, Pip observes, 'inky', and 'has been at his books', al- though we do not learn if it is those that taught him about boxing. Pip knows nothing about the science of boxing, but fights with the 'coarse hands' that, at this point in the story, he feels are his only inheritance. His victory over a gen- tleman, and Estella's reaction, merely confirm that coarseness (while David's victory over a butcher briefly gave him gentlemanly airs). Like Joe, Pip is a black- smith and blacksmiths, along with butchers, were famous as fighters. Joe strikes his horseshoes 'complete, in a single blow'; Pip has struck Pocket in the same way. Soon after, Mr Jaggers announces Pip's great expectations, and offers Joe financial compensation. Joe's reaction is remarkably like Pip's had been earlier: first, masochistic (he 'scooped his eyes with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself) and then, pugilistic. Jaggers 's patronizing words are finally stopped 'by Joe's suddenly working round him with every demonstra- tion of pugilistic purpose'. The lawyer soon departs. It is only later (when he can 'see again' in writing his story) that Pip realizes that a 'muscular blacksmith's arm' is also the arm most likely to have a gentle and loving touch.135 One of the ideas that Dickens explored in Great Expectations was what it meant to be a gentleman. For much of the novel, Pip believes it is a matter of playing games, and Pocket soon proves a genial teacher of all manner of rules. Although David Copperfield had been happy to be treated like a plaything' by Steerforth, Pip will not assume that role for long.136 Instead he learns the rules that govern the gentlemanly use of cutlery, domestic life, being an employer and financial management. It is only later, when he realizes the source of his wealth, that he comes to appreciate Mr. Pocket Senior's comment that 'no man who was not a true gentleman at heart, ever was ... a true gentleman in man- ner'. In other words, Herbert Pocket is a gentleman not because he knows the many and complex rules of boxing, but because, when he plays that game (and when he does not), 'he bears all blows and buffets'.137 If Dickens's first novels explored the comic remnants of the Regency world, his last, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (unfinished at his death in 1870), presents one of the most appealing literary portraits of a Muscular Christian.138 Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle is a man who is not ashamed to follow Hughes's advice and fight with 'the weapons which God has given us all'. Crisparkle is another of Dickens's shadow boxers, but in his case it is not a 105 matter of imaginative thrashing. Rather he merely assist[s] his circulation by boxing at a looking glass with great science and prowess . . . while his radi- ant features teemed with innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing gloves'. As a prelude to breakfast he takes his mother's face between his boxing gloves and kisses it; 'Having done so with tenderness, the Reverend Septimus turned to again, countering with his left, and putting in his right, in a tremendous manner.'139 Later in the novel, Crisparkle uses his boxing knowledge to make an ex- tended comparison of gentle pugilists and pugnacious philanthropists. When he arrives at the office of the Haven of Philanthropy, he finds it populated by 'Professors . . . ready for a turn-up with any Novice who might be on hand'. Preparations were in progress for a moral little Mill somewhere on the rural circuit, and other Professors were backing this or that Heavy- weight as good for such or such speech-making hits, so very much after the manner of the sporting publicans, that the intended Resolutions might have been Rounds. Although both pugilists and philanthropists have 'a propensity to "pitch into" [their] fellow-creatures', differences between the two 'professions' soon emerge. While the philanthropists cannot claim to be in good physical condition (they present a 'superabundance of what is known to Pugilistic Experts as Suet Pud- ding'), they easily top the prize-fighters in aggression, bad language, bad tem- per and foul play. Although much involved in charitable causes himself, Dickens objected strongly to what he called 'the cant of philanthropy' and its profession- alization.140 'The Professors of the Noble Art,' Crisparkle concludes, are 'much nobler than the Professors of Philanthropy.'141 'IT WAS DIFFERENT IN THE DAYS OF WHICH I SPEAK . . ,'142 As the nineteenth century drew to a close, English nostalgia for the golden age of Regency prize-fighting returned with fervour. There are various possi- ble explanations for this. As the Queensberry rules took hold, it became clear that the new sport of gloved boxing was entirely different from the old bare- knuckle prize-fighting. That sense of loss was perhaps intensified by that fact that the golden age of pugilism had also been the time when British sporting and military superiority was clear. In 1884 Francis Galton observed the dis- turbing fact that the 'rising generation' simply couldn't hit straight. Describ- ing a machine for measuring the swiftness and force of a person's blow, Galton noted, 'it was a matter of surprise to me, who was born in the days of pugilism, to find that the art of delivering a clean hit, straight from the shoulder, as re- quired by this instrument, is nearly lost to the rising generation. Notwith- standing the simplicity of the test, a large proportion of persons bungled absurdly over it.'143 106 By the 1890s boxing was not simply a modern sport, but increasingly an Amer- ican one. The last British heavyweight champion (until Lennox Lewis in 2002) was Robert Fitzsimmons, who won his title from 'Gentleman Jim' Corbett in 1897, and lost it two years later to Jim Jeffries.144 The relinquishing of the heavyweight box- ing crown was seen by some as symptomatic of the way in which America was forging ahead (economically and militarily) of a colonially overstretched Britain. Angus Wilson described 'the naughty nineties' as a period in which the 'old unregenerate manliness of the Regency' resurfaced. His father is proposed as a representative figure: 'a middle class rentier', to whom 'being a man' meant 'pay- ing a quid or two to a Covent Garden porter to fight him barefisted when he rolled home to the Tavistock Hotel after a night's card playing.' This was the old manliness that had united the ungodly upper class and the ungodly poor which had hidden its face from the blinding light of Queen Victoria's overwhelmingly pure home life; nothing to do with the manly thrashing which Tom Brown would administer to bullies after hearing the Doctor preach a heartening, noble and manly sermon in Rugby Chapel.145 This 'old manliness' reasserted itself against the watered-down Christian kind in a variety of different quarters. In his 1894 autobiography, novelist David Christie Murray confidently asserted that 'few greater blunders have been made by those who legislate for our well-being than by those moral people who abol- ished the Prize-Ring'. Many, he admits, will think him an 'irredeemable barbar- ian' for saying so, but he is keen to observe that a 'marked deterioration has been noticeable in the character of our people since the sport of the ring ceased to be a source of popular amusement'. Lost national pride is once again closely aligned with lost masculine 'virtue'. Looking back to his youth, Murray recalled the exploits of the Tipton Slasher (who 'trained my youthful hands to guard my youthful head') and the man who took his crown, Tom Sayers. Murray's empha- sis is largely on the inevitability of champions (and men in general) succeeding each other, and the chapter, and indeed, the memoir, ends with Sayers 's reflec- tion that, 'It is my turn to-day and somebody else's tomorrow.'146 Among the many novels of the 1890s to evoke romantically the days of the great bare-knuckle champions is Arthur Conan Doyle's Rodney Stone (1896). 147 Like many of Doyle's historical novels, it is narrated by an old man looking back to his youth. Stone's Corinthian coming of age is interwoven with a Dickensian mystery story and a detailed account of the development of the sport, largely culled from Boxiana. In terms that recall Hazlitt's eulogy to male camaraderie in 'The Fight', Stone evokes the 'solid and virile' values of the past: The ale-drinking, the rude good-fellowship, the heartiness, the laughter at discomforts, the craving to see the fight - all these may be set down as vulgar and trivial by those to whom they are distasteful; but to me, listen- 107 35 Sidney Paget, illustration for Arthur Conan Doyle, Rodney Stone (1912). ing to the far-off and uncertain echoes of our distant past, they seem to have been the very bones upon which much that is most solid and virile in this ancient race was molded.148 Asked by his publisher George Newnes, 'Why that subject, of all subjects on earth?', Doyle replied, 'Better that our sports should be a little too rough than that we should run the risk of effeminacy' (illus. 35). 149 Conan Doyle was reputed to have been a fine boxer himself, and an interest in the sport seeps into works in several different genres.150 The French anti-hero 108 of his 1903 Napoleonic romp, The Exploits of Brigadier Gerard, for example, has several comically inept bouts against a 'solid and virile' Englishman.151 It is from such Englishmen that Sherlock Holmes is descended. Although Holmes assures Watson that he is in large part 'a brain' and the rest of him 'mere appendix,' that appendix often proves quite useful. In The Sign of Four (1889), he encounters an ex-champion prize-fighter now working as a bodyguard.152 Refused entrance, Holmes reminds the man of their acquaintance 'at Alison's rooms on the night of your benefit four years back'. 'Not Mr Sherlock Holmes!' roared the prize-fighter. 'God's truth! How could I have mistook you? If instead o' standin' there so quiet you had just stepped up and given me that cross-hit of yours under the jaw, I'd ha' known you without question. Ah, you're the one that has wasted your gifts, you have! You might have aimed high, if you had joined the fancy.'153 Holmes's jokey aside to Watson - 'if all else fails me, I have still one of the scientific professions open to me' - relies on the fact that both pugilism and detection were deemed 'scientific'. Yet this is no mere coincidence of terminology. Both prize- fighting and crime-solving, as depicted by Doyle, require the careful application of method and technique to an often elusive opponent. Furthermore both are solitary pursuits, shunning the support of team-members or a uniformed force. At the end of Tom Brown's Schooldays 'young master' tells his pupils that cricket 'ought to be such an unselfish game. It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn't play that he may win but that his side may.' Tom agrees with this view, 'now one comes to think of it', but Holmes is a different case.154 In the Memoirs, he confides in Watson about his college days. 'I was never a very sociable fellow, Watson, always rather fond of moping in my rooms and working out my own little methods of thought, so that I never mixed with the men of my year. Bar fencing and boxing I had few athletic traits'.155 Boxing, as Holmes had known it, was the sport of loners and intellectuals, an amateur pursuit that depended on the cultivation of 'little methods of thought' as well as chivalric intentions . That, however, was no longer strictly the case by the 1890s. Boxing was becoming a business and a profession. 109 Like Any Other Profession' From the 1880s to the 1920s boxing was in a state of flux. One set of codes and regulations replaced another, British dominance collapsed in the face of new American prowess, and new audiences emerged through the development of popular mass media from magazines to film. By the mid-i920s, boxing had be- come a mainstream spectator sport in the United States, and its associations with an illegal subculture loosened, for a while at least. These changes are epitomized in the career of the 'Boston strong boy', John L. Sullivan. In 1881, Sullivan was a bare-knuckle pugilist, scrapping on a barge on the Hudson River in order to evade the attention of police; less than a decade later he was boxing in gloves according to the Queensberry rules in an indoor arena, lit by electricity, in front of a crowd that included middle-class business- men and their wives. Described by his biographer as 'the first significant mass cultural hero in American life', Sullivan was one of the first sportsmen to become a celebrity through the services of the national popular press in general, and one maga- zine in particular.1 Founded in 1846, the Police Gazette reached its heyday in the 1880s and '90s under the editorship of Richard Kyle Fox. Fox introduced a po- tent mix of celebrity gossip, racial stereotyping, and sport, all lavishly illustrated with woodcuts. The Police Gazette's interest in sport, as Tom Wolfe points out, had 'nothing to do with the High Victorian ideal of "athletics", and everything to do with gambling'.2 Readers, it seemed, would bet on absolutely anything, from cock-fighting, badger-baiting, rat-killing and butchery to wood-chopping, hairdressing, speedy water-drinking, weightlifting by the teeth, sleep depriva- tion, and fasting. The magazine awarded championship belts in all these 'events' and so challenges were regularly issued. But the Police Gazette was particu- larly interested in boxing. Gene Smith argues that, 'almost alone', Fox's mag- azine 'made boxing big business and so popular that [in 1882] the result of a Sullivan-Ryan fight was of immensely more interest to citizens than the result of a Garfield-Hancock Presidential election'.3 Sullivan had publicly humiliated Fox in 1881 by refusing to visit his table in a Boston saloon. 'If he wants to see John L. Sullivan,' the prize-fighter blustered, 36 The 45th round of Sullivan vs. Kilrain, as illustrated in the Police Gazette (1889). *0a 'he can do the walking.' From then on, the Police Gazette devoted itself to slander- ing Sullivan, and Fox set about finding a fighter who could defeat him. English, Irish, American and New Zealand contenders were all featured in the magazine as they prepared to take him on. None succeeded. Finally, in 1889, Sullivan faced Jake Kilrain, whom Fox had dubbed champion of the world (although in fact he had only drawn with the British champion, Jem Smith).4 Each side posted a $10,000 bet, winner to take all. Unfortunately for Fox, after 75 bloody rounds under the Mississippi sun, Sullivan also beat Kilrain (illus. 36). Fox finally gave up the feud and awarded him the Police Gazette championship belt. Following his defeat of Kilrain, Sullivan did not simply become a celebrity; like Heenan and Sayers before him, he became a screen onto which a wide variety of feelings and attitudes could be projected. In the late nineteenth century, many of those feelings concerned doctrines of materialism, whether economic, aesthetic, physical, or national. The Cuban essayist, poet, and revolutionary leader, Jose Marti, for example, saw the 1882 Ryan-Sullivan fight as proof of the uncivilized, and outmoded, nature of North American life.5 Robert Frost, on the contrary, used Sullivan's name to demonstrate 'the level of intelligence' in New Hampshire. 'The matter with the Mid-Victorians,' a farmer states in his poem, 'New Hampshire', 'Seems to have been a man named John L. Darwin.'6 The farmer's conflation of the brute materialism of prize-fighting and that of Darwinism, Frost suggests, demonstrated high intelligence. To young newspaperman Theodore Dreiser, 'raw, red-faced, big-fisted, broad-shouldered, drunken' Sullivan, 'with gaudy waistcoat and tie, and rings and pins set with enormous diamonds and rubies', embodied another kind of materialism, that of Gilded Age conspicuous consumption. Sullivan, Dreiser claimed, was 'the apotheosis of the humourously gross and vigorous and mate- rial ... a sort of prize-fighting J. P. Morgan ... I adored him'.7 Dreiser drew on their 1893 meeting in his later fiction; most notably in a crucial scene in Sister Carrie (1900). 8 Having just helped Carrie take a step up in her inexorable rise, George Hurstwood goes to the 'gorgeous saloon' which he manages, and there encounters his rival for her affections, Charles Drouet. It was at five in the afternoon and the place was crowded with mer- chants, actors, managers, politicians - a goodly company of rotund, rosy figures, silk-hatted, starchy-bosomed, be-ringed and be-scarf- pinned to the queen's taste. John L. Sullivan, the pugilist, was at one end of the glittering bar, surrounded by a company of loudly dressed sports who were holding a most animated conversation. Drouet came across the floor with a festive stride, a new pair of tan shoes squeaking audibly his progress. Sullivan's presence foreshadows the conflict between the two men for the prize of Carrie. It also suggests the terms in which the fight will be played out. If Sul- livan is 'the apotheosis of the humourously gross and vigorous and material', Drouet, a travelling salesman in 'new tan shoes' is following, squeakily, in his footsteps. Saloon-manager Hurstwood has a solidity- 'composed in part of his fine clothes, his clean linen, his jewels, and, above all, his own sense of his importance' - which, in Carrie's eyes raises him above Drouet. By the end of the novel, however, he too will have met his match. The apotheosis of vigorous materialism, of course, turns out to be Carrie herself.9 Vachel Lindsay, meanwhile, considered Sullivan's materialism primarily in literary terms. His poem about the defeat of Kilrain describes the effect 'the Strong Boy of Boston' had on his nine-year-old self. Sullivan's example, Lindsay claimed, injected a much-needed infusion of red-blooded masculinity into his feminized late-Victorian life. Until hearing the 'battle trumpet sound' of John L., he had dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, and, when not under the sway of 'the cult of Tennyson's Elaine', had taken Louisa May Alcott as his 'gentle guide'.10 After Sullivan's victory, it seems, being a Bostonian meant something differ- ent.11 As a poem, 'The Strong Boy' is a good example of what Lindsay described as his deployment of 'the Higher Vaudeville imagination'. Like his more famous 'The Congo', it was meant to be chanted, and has a cheerful refrain: 'London Bridge is falling down.' And . . . John L. Sullivan The strong boy OfBoston Broke every single rib of Jake Kilrain.12 But only three years after his defeat of Kilrain, Sullivan's great bare-knuck- led strength had begun to seem old-fashioned; the future came in the form of James J. Corbett, 'Gentleman Jim', a bank clerk who taught sparring at San Fran- cisco's Olympic Club. Corbett defeated Sullivan under the Queensberry rules in 1892, thus becoming the first gloved fighter to be recognized as heavyweight champion. The fight played out the classic antimonies of youth versus age, and science versus strength, but it also represented two different eras. Indeed some saw Sullivan's defeat as representing, once and for all, America's fall from grace (when hard-drinking men were hard-drinking men) into an age where even prize- fighters wore evening dress and sipped cocktails. Sullivan described Corbett as a 'damned dude'. 'Pompadour Jim', or more commonly 'Gentleman Jim', Corbett took his celebrity status and good looks seriously - 'why a fighter can't be careful about his appearance I don't understand' - and, with the help of his manager, William A. Brady, skilfully capitalized on them.13 Not much had changed financially for boxers since Mendoza's day. They made little money from fighting itself. Any boxer with a well-known name took to the stage. All this would change with the introduction of film in the late 1890s, but until then Corbett toured the coun- try, staging boxing exhibitions and appearing in a series of successful plays.14 An example of his awareness of the tight control needed to maintain his celebrity can be found in his meeting with Mark Twain in 1894. When Twain jokingly challenged him to a contest, Corbett declined, 'so gravely', noted Twain, 'that one might easily have thought him in earnest'. Corbett, it seemed, was worried that Twain might knock him out 'by a purely accidental blow': 'then my repu- tation would be gone and you would have a double one. You have got fame enough already and you ought not to want to take mine away from me.'15 Fox's Police Gazette campaigned to make boxing legal as well as popular, but the sport continued to move in and out of legality until the 1920s, with differ- ent restrictions operating in different states at different times. Following their fight in Mississippi, for example, Sullivan and Kilrain were arrested and had to pay substantial fines to avoid imprisonment, while in 1895 legal obstructions meant that a planned fight between Jim Corbett and Bob Fitzsimmons had to move around the country several times before it finally took place two years later in Carson City, Nevada.16 The desire to suppress prize-fighting during this period was not, as now, based on concerns about the health of the boxers. Rather, arguments about the legalization of boxing centred on its associations with crime and political corruption. In 1910 Corbett wrote that he hardly ever had a fight without a bribe being offered. 'The only objection I have to the prize ring', declared Theodore Roosevelt in 1913, 'is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development.'17 113 In the 1880s New York became one of the main centres of prize-fighting, despite frequent police disruption and calls from the press to end events 'which attract the worst ruffians and criminals in the city'.18 Pushed out of the city, boxing clubs simply moved to nearby Long Island and Coney Island (popu- larly known as 'Sodom-by-the-Sea') where they continued to flourish. In order to try and control this spiralling illegal activity, New York became, in 1896, the first state to legalize a version of boxing by statute. Sparring with five-ounce gloves for a maximum of twenty rounds in buildings owned by incorporated athletic associations was now allowed, but 'disorderly gatherings' and police intervention continued, and, with the support of Governor Roosevelt, the law was repealed in 1900. Outlawing professional boxing made little difference to the growth of its popularity, however, and in many places fights continued to be staged almost nightly. Those who were interested had no difficulty finding out where to go. One scam was to stage 'exhibitions' or, more commonly, to operate politically supported 'membership clubs'; anyone who paid a dollar could join the club and watch the fight. The status of athletic associations and saloon-based clubs shifted during the years that followed, until, in New York at least, boxing was finally legalized, and properly licensed, in 1920 (illus. 37). 19 In his 1906 novel of the Chicago stockyards, The Jungle, Upton Sinclair described a club run by the Democratic Party's 'War-Whoop League', where cock fights, dog fights and boxing take place. 'The policemen in the district all belonged to the league, and instead of suppressing the fights, they sold tickets for them.' The clubhouse is a hotbed of 'agencies of corruption' including, among others, 'the prize-fighter and the professional slugger, the race-track 37 Kid McCoy at the Broadway Athletic Club, 1900. 114 "tout", the procurer, the white-slave agent, and the expert seducer of young girls', all of whom are, in turn, in 'blood brotherhood with the politician and the police'. 'More often than not', Sinclair wrote, 'they were one and the same person - the police captain would own the brothel he pretended to raid . . . On election day all those powers of vice and corruption were one power; they could tell within one per cent what the vote of their district would be, and they could change it at an hour's notice.'20 The boxing membership clubs were not merely magnets for criminals and corrupt politicians. As Jack London pointed out in his 1913 'alcoholic memoirs' of 'bouts' with John Barleycorn, the saloon was a place where men believed they could escape 'from the narrowness of women's influence into the wide free world of men'.21 A steady stream of middle-class men, in pursuit of the strenuous life, passed though the doors of the boxing clubs, some more anxiously than oth- ers. In his Life and Confessions, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall admitted a com- pulsive interest in the 'raw side of human life', so much so that he 'never missed an opportunity to attend a prizefight if I could do so unknown and away from home'.22 The artist Thomas Eakins was quite open about his interest in prize- fights, and, with his friend, sportswriter Clarence Cranmer, regularly attended the amphitheatre of the Philadelphia Arena, which was on the other side of Broad Street from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.23 His three major paintings of 1898 and 1899 feature fighters who appeared there during this time, and two of these were exhibited in the Academy's annual exhibitions. The ille- gal world of boxing had crossed the road. (Was Sylvester Stallone alluding to this when he has Rocky train on the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art?) Eakins was uninterested in painting boxers exchanging blows. His paintings rather explore the moments within a fight when the action stops (Takingthe Count and Between Rounds) and the moment when it is all over (Salutat). The profes- sional activities surrounding the fight - involving the boxers' attendants, the ref- eree, the press, and the police - interested him as much as the boxers themselves. In the first two paintings, large banners advertising a circus hang from the balcony. Salutat also alludes to gladiatorial combat (carved into the original frame of the painting were the words dextra victrice conclamentes salutat, 'the right hand of the victor salutes those acclaiming him'). Eakins wanted to show that the artist could find heroism and beauty in male semi-nudity without having recourse to Rome; modern America, he believed, provided ample material.24 Salu- tat features Billy Smith, a local professional featherweight, known as 'Turkey Point'. While his chiselled white body evokes classical sculpture, his tanned face, neck and hands remind us that he is a working-class American boy (illus. 38). 25 The victorious boxer's body, and in particular his musculature, is high- lighted by bright electrical light, but the painting seems equally interested in celebrating his intimate involvement with the spectators (and indeed their intimate involvement with the artist, since all six men sitting along the railing are identifiable from Eakins's personal circle; his father is on the far right). Although a contemporary reviewer complained that these men are brought 'so 115 Thomas Eakins, Salutat, 1898. far forward as to give the impression that both victor and audience might shake hands', this seems to be one of the painting's great strengths.26 The triumphantly raised right hand of Billy Smith is reflected in the raised right hand (with hat) of Eakins's friend, Clarence Cranmer; patches of blue (in Smith's sash and Cran- mer's bow tie) also connect them. Without sportswriters such as Cranmer, Eakins may be suggesting, news of a boxer's victory would not travel far; more personally, without Cranmer 's encouragement and support, Eakins might never have attended prize-fights or have gained access to boxers as models. And with- out such venues as the Philadelphia Arena, men could not gather together to gaze admiringly at other men. (As Michael Hutt points out, 'Salutat reveals more of the male body than is strictly necessary'.27) The barrier that divides specta- tors and participants is less important than the links which connect them. 116 39 John Sloan's Philadelphia studio, December 1895. Sloan, second from the left, is watching a mock boxing match; George Luks is the boxer on the left. Several of Eakins's followers pursued his interest in boxing, finding in it a subject matter which would both challenge academic painting, and American- ize it in a properly 'manly' way. In the mid-i890s, Robert Henri, who had stud- ied in Philadelphia with a pupil of Eakins, held regular gatherings where up-and-coming artists such as John Sloan and George Luks sometimes staged mock boxing matches. Luks invented numerous pugilistic personae for himself (Lusty Luks, Socko Sam, Curtain Conway, Monk-the-Morgue and Chicago Whitey). When he later became famous, he enjoyed telling journalists that, as Chicago Whitey, he fought some 150 fights, or that, as Lusty Luks, he was the former holder of the light heavyweight crown (illus. 39). 28 In 1900 Henri moved to New York where, along with Sloan and Luks, he became successful as a member of the 'Immortal Eight', later dubbed the 'Ash- can school'. At the New York School of Art, he instructed his students to attend football games and boxing matches, in short to 'be a man first, an artist later'.29 Nevertheless, art was the primary object of this manly activity. Henri believed that he could tell which students were 'fighters' and had 'guts' by looking at their work. Some ways of painting were, he maintained, more masculine than others and students were forbidden to use small brushes (which he considered effeminate) and urged to paint in 'the straightforward unfinicky manner of the 117 male'.30 The most prominent of Henri's students, and one who took this advice to heart, was George Bellows. Bellows frequently told journalists that his aim was to introduce 'manliness, frankness, love of the game' into his painting. 'Things that Henri only paid lip service to,' Edward Lucie-Smith argues, 'Bellows put into practice'.31 Bellows 's studio was situated across the street from retired prize-fighter Tom Sharkey's saloon-cum-boxing club on Broadway, and, before he 'married and became semi-respectable' in 1910, he was a frequent visitor there.32 The back- room at Tom Sharkey's, as depicted in Bellows 's paintings, Club Night (1907) and Stag at Sharkey's (1909), is a rather hellish place (illus. 40). While Eakins depicted boxing spectators as decent sober middle-class men - many of whom are worthy of their own portraits - Bellows saw a mass of Goya-like grotesques. Those figures who can be distinguished, not so much by their faces as by their waistcoats and shirts, represent a mix of social classes and, as Marianna Doezema points out, 'a stereotypical range of reactions, from horror to fascination.'33 ('The best part of a prize fight', wrote Charles Belmont Davis in 1906, 'is not the sight of two human brutes pounding each other into insensibility on a resined floor, but rather the yelling, crazy mob with its innate love of carnage that the two brutes have turned into the principal actors.'34) The claustrophobic atmosphere of Stag at Sharkey's is further intensified by the fact that the spectators encircle the boxers, and that they look up, rather than down, at the action. The viewer is situated among those spectators, virtually, but not quite, at ringside. The artist too may be included in the half-hidden portrait of a bald man whose eyes and raised eyebrows poke above the floor of the ring, 'as if he is here only to look. His head is inclined down- ward, perhaps toward a sketchbook, so he must glance sharply up to catch the action.' Bellows presents himself, Doezma argues, 'as a relatively detached observer, the professional artist in the act of gathering visual material'.35 Yet the painting is anything but detached. 'I didn't paint anatomy,' Bellows declared, 'I painted action'.36 Some have read the immediacy and energy of this action, in which the limbs of nearly naked men are intertwined, as conflating a violent sexuality and a sexualized violence.37 The club is so dark that little can be distinguished within it, except where a light from the left illuminates the white bodies of the boxers. The only colour present is the red of their faces (from exertion or blood?) which is reflected in the face of a bloodthirsty ringside spec- tator. Bellows is not interested in individual psychology or muscular precision. Instead he presents a thickly painted and almost abstract composition. Bellows's early critics praised the 'manliness' of his style as well as his sub- ject matter, but did not really explain what this meant. What was involved in translating manly subject matter, such as boxing, into style? Was it merely a matter of bold brush strokes and impasto? When James Huneker said that Bellows's 'muscular painting' hit the viewer 'between the eyes', he was suggest- ing that painting was itself a form of boxing.38 Such claims recall Hazlitt's comments on Byron's masculine style some hundred years earlier, but a more relevant comparison might be with Hogarth's quarrel with academic painting. 118 40 George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey's, 1909. Both Hogarth and Bellows co-opted low-life activities such as boxing to epito- mize 'the real' in their propaganda battles against the artificiality of established conventions. Hogarth set low against high, down-to-earth Englishness against continental neo-classicism; Bellows set low against middle, American virility against Victorian sentimentality and the 'genteel tradition', John L. Sullivan against Louisa May Alcott.39 Frank Norris's advocacy of literary realism made similar connections. In a 1903 essay on the 'fakery' involved in most historical fiction, he proposed that novelists try harder to 'get at the life immediately around you'. Since 'we are all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of a fight', he argued, surely our litera- ture should strive to convey 'the essential vital, elemental, all-important true life within the spirit' evident at the best of these occasions; the novelist should strike to 'get at' 'Mr. Robert Fitzsimmons or Mr. James Jeffries'. The novelist's 'heavy' responsibility, he concluded, was not to make money but to write with 'sincerity'.40 Realism was again proposed as the manly literary equivalent of pugilism, but this very move required romanticization. Norris did not consider the possibility that Fitzsimmons and Jeffries (both of Irish rather than Anglo- Saxon descent) might have been more interested in making money than in ex- pressing vitality, virility or sincerity. 119 MEN OF BUSINESS Early nineteenth-century artists and writers had considered boxers wholly from the outside, as sub-cultural heroes or villains who, although their clothes, lan- guage or behaviour might be imitated, remained apart. In the 1880s, however, some artists and writers began to suggest that the fighter's life and experience might, in certain ways, resemble that of everyone else; it might even usefully be considered a representative life. This shift in attitude changed the way that box- ers were represented in art. Increasingly boxers had more than satirical or metaphorical significance and the occasional walk-on part in a story. By the end of the nineteenth century, they began to feature in forms of representation, such as the novel and genre painting, that encouraged some degree of identification. Thomas Eakins's boxing paintings, I have suggested, brought together policemen, sportswriters, sketch artists and boxers as men engaged in compa- rable professional activities. George Bernard Shaw made a similar claim in Cashel Byron's Profession (1886), which he intended as the first serious boxing novel. Instead of 'retaliatory violence' and 'romantic fisticuffs', it would deal with the challenges and injustices of the modern world. It would be about work and about sex, 'a hymn to skill and science over incoherent strength' and 'a dar- ing anticipation of coming social developments'.41 The book was a huge popu- lar success. Running to many editions, it was pirated for the stage in the United States, prompting Shaw in 1901 to write a dramatic version (in blank verse), The Admirable Bashville.42 But the novel's popularity, Shaw later lamented, did not stem from the pertinent social and political debates it addressed, but from its depiction of Cashel's 'professional performances'.43 'Here lay the whole schoolboy secret of the book's little vogue,' he complained. In 1902, P. G. Wode- house praised Cashel Byron as 'the best drawn pugilist in fiction', and laughed at Shaw's dismissal of the English novel's 'gospel of pugilism'. 'And why not?' declared Wodehouse. 'All fights are good reading, and if the hero invariably wins, well, what does it matter?'44 Shaw had become interested in boxing in the late 1870s when his friend, Pakenham Beatty, an aspiring poet and keen amateur fighter, introduced him to Ned Donnelly, a 'Professor of Boxing' who ran a gymnasium near the Hay- market Theatre. In February 1883 Shaw completed Cashel Byron 's Profession and a month later the two men entered for the Amateur Boxing Championship. (The first championship meeting of the Amateur Boxing Association had taken place in 1881.) Neither was chosen to compete. In a 1917 interview Shaw recalled this time, and in particular the 'brilliant boxer' Jack Burke. 'It was an exhibition spar of his that suggested the exploits of Cashel Byron.'45 After 1900 Shaw came to reject his boxing novel, and for twenty years largely stopped attending fights, primarily, he claimed, because the 'second- rate boxing' on offer 'reduced me to such a condition of deadly boredom that even disgust would have been a relief.'46 In 1919, however, Shaw was persuaded to write an article for The Nation on Joe Beckett's European Heavyweight Cham- pionship fight against a man he considered a 'genius', Georges Carpentier (Arnold Bennett was The New Statesman's correspondent), and in the 1920s, he became great friends with another scholarly fighter, Gene Tunney.47 Tunney's reading was often commented upon by the press: on the eve of his first fight with Jack Dempsey in 1926, he was caught with Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. Michael Holroyd reads Tunney's career as 'a Shavian romance' while Shaw himself praised Tunney for winning 'by mental and moral superiority . . . You might almost say that he wins because he has the good sense to win.'48 The main argument of Cashel Byron's Profession (and it is a very argumen- tative novel) is that 'the pugilistic profession is like any other profession'. 'The intelligent prize-fighter is not a knight-errant: he is a disillusioned man of busi- ness trying to make money at a certain weight and at certain risks, not of bod- ily injury (for a bruise is soon cured), but of pecuniary loss.'49 What profession, the novel asks, might be open to Cashel Byron, son of an actress and pupil at a minor public school which promotes 'bodily exercises'? The school had encour- aged Cashel to believe that the army was 'the only profession for a gentleman', but it is one that he cannot afford. He runs away as a sailor to Australia where he is taken in and trained by an ex-champion boxer (modelled on Ned Don- nelly) who sagely tells him 'when you rise to be a regular professional, you wont care to spar with nobody without youre well paid for it'. This is confirmed later in the book when, like a Victorian hero, Cashel is forced to fight to defend the honour of a wealthy lady. But after the fight is over, he tells her, without Victor- ian chivalry, 'It's no pleasure to me to fight chance men in the streets for noth- ing; I don't get my living that way.' When he marries her, he gives up pugilism. 'He had gone through with it when it was his business; but he had no idea of doing it for pleasure.'50 Another man who turns to fighting purely to make some money is Robert Montgomery, the protagonist of Arthur Conan Doyle's 'The Croxley Master' (1905). Montgomery is a medical student who cannot afford the £60 needed to complete his degree. He is employed by a doctor who refuses to advance his wages and no other source of money seems forthcoming. 'His brains were fairly good, but brains of that quality were a drug in the market. He only excelled in his strength; and where was he to find a customer for that?' Fortunately, an op- portunity arises for Montgomery to earn £60 if he beats the 'Croxley Master' ('twenty rounds, two-ounce gloves, Queensberry rules, and a decision on points if you fight to the finish'). Montgomery had excelled in university boxing, but had had 'no particular ambition' to enter amateur championships. Fighting for money is a different matter. 'He had thought bitterly that morning that there was no market for his strength, but here was one where his muscle might earn more in an hour than his brains in a year.' Montgomery is realistic about his chances: 'he knew enough to appreciate the difference which exists in boxing, as in every sport, between the amateur and the professional'. One of the Crox- ley Master's 'iron blows was worth three of his, and . . . without the gloves he could not have stood for three rounds against him. All the amateur work that he had done was the merest tapping and flapping when compared to those frightful blows, from arms toughed by the shovel and the crowbar.' However, he is in good physical shape, and can rely on 'that higher nerve energy which counts for nothing upon a measuring tape'. Furthermore, the Queensberry rules favour the scientific amateur over the old-style artisan pugilist. When Montgomery wins the fight, the Master urges him to a rematch, 'old style and bare knuckes'. But he refuses this offer, and one to become a professional fighter, in order to re- turn to medical school.51 In 'The Croxley Master', Conan Doyle had come a long way from the Re- gency romance of Rodney Stone (published nine years earlier) to an almost Sha- vian position. 'It's not what a man would like to do that he must do in this world; it's what he can do,' declares Cashel Byron, 'and the only mortal thing I could do properly was fight.' Shaw reiterated this point in his own words nearly 40 years later: 'It was worth Carpentier's while to escape from the slavery of the coal pit and win £5,000 in 74 seconds with his fists. It would not have been worth his while if he had been Charles xn.'52 As work of last resort, Shaw further maintained, boxing had much in com- mon with prostitution. His 1893 play Mrs Warren's Profession was originally sub- titled 'A tragic variation on the theme of Cashel Byron's Profession' ', and he considered subtitling Major Barbara (1905) Andrew Undershaft's Profession'. Like Mrs Warren, arms dealer Andrew Undershaft and pugilist Cashel Byron 'do things for money that they would not do if they had other assured means of livelihood'.53 If the word 'prostitution' is to be applied to one of these jobs, Shaw wrote, it should be applied 'impartially' to all. As long as society is so organized that the destitute athlete and the destitute beauty are forced to choose between underpaid drudgery as industrial producers, and comparative self- respect, plenty, and popularity as prize-fighters and mercenary brides, licit or illicit, it is idle to affect virtuous indignation at their expense.'54 Although prosti- tution, arms-dealing and prize-fighting were professions which 'society officially repudiates', each of them, he maintained, could serve 'as a metaphor for the way in which that larger society is really conducted'. The 'prostitute class of men' did not only consist of prize-fighters: lawyers, doctors, clergymen, politicians, journalists and dramatists 'daily [use] their highest faculties to belie their real sentiments'.55 On this reading, boxing was not merely 'a profession like any other', but expressive of the very nature of modern working life, its injustices and brutalities (illus. 41). While Shaw and Conan Doyle maintained a clear distinction between the (degrading) professional and the (invigorating) amateur versions of boxing, their near contemporary, the American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, drew attention to a common element. Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) includes a chapter entitled 'Modern Survivals of Prowess', which considers the value of sport to the industrial and leisure classes. On the one hand, 'the leisure- class canon demands strict and comprehensive futility', which sport provides; on the other, the 'manly virtues' cultivated by sport 'do in fact further what may 41 Jack Yeats, Not Pretty hut Useful, 1897-9. broadly be called workmanship'. Sport, in short, cultivates 'two barbarian traits, ferocity and astuteness', both of which 'are highly serviceable for individual expediency in a life looking to invidious success . . . Both are fostered by the pecuniary culture. But both alike are of no use for the purposes of the collective life.'56 Veblen's ideas recur in many subsequent accounts of sport. Theodor Adorno, for example, argued that while modern sports might seem 'to restore to the body some of the functions of which the machine has deprived it . . . they do so only to train men all the more inexorably to serve the machine'.57 A MEATY BUSINESS When the body was considered a machine, its workings were discussed in terms of 'fuel', 'efficiency' and 'waste'. The early twentieth century saw the develop- 123 ment of nutrition as a field, led by Horace Fletcher, champion of mastication and 'rationally economic alimentation'. The body could, Fletcher promised, be run on the same principles as an efficiently managed factory.58 These ideas quickly filtered through into popular fiction. The 'decivilization' of the dog Buck in Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) is, rather oddly, signalled by his adoption of Fletcherite principles. Buck is said to have 'achieved an internal as well as an external economy. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible and once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the least par- ticle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building into the toughest and stoutest of tissues.'59 But while Buck might have been able to eat anything and still flourish as an efficient organism, human workers tended to have more particular nutri- tional needs. In the boxer's case, this invariably meant lots of meat. Discus- sions of meat in boxing stories (fictional and non-fictional) have traditionally assumed a rather magical aura: the boxer must eat meat in order to be meaty enough to fight against other slabs of men. It was easy for these activities to get confused. While Rocky, 'the Italian stallion', trains by punching sides of frozen beef, Jake La Motta (alternately described as a 'fucking gorilla', a 'fat pig' and a 'raging bull' in Martin Scorsese's film) hurls a steak across the room at his wife: 'You overcook it, it's no good. It defeats its own purpose.'60 When Oliver Twist knocks out Noah Claypole in Dickens's 1838 novel, Mrs Sowerberry thinks the boy has gone mad. Mr Bumble soon puts her right: 'It's not Madness, ma'am . . . It's Meat.'61 Boxing became linked with meat partly because of the sport's early associ- ation with John Bull Englishness, and partly because many early boxers, includ- ing Tom Spring, Jem Belcher and Peter 'Young Rumpsteak' Crawley, were butchers; Moses Browne's 1736 poem, 'A Survey of the Amphitheatre', describes 'gentle butchers' engaged in 'that brotherhood's peculiar sport'.62 Butchery was a trade that required considerable upper-body strength and provided a ready supply of prime steaks. The latter, rather than the former, was considered the significant factor, and early training manuals paid a great deal of attention to what should and should not be consumed. Francis Dowling, in Fistiana (1841), rejected 'young meat such as veal and lamb, [and] all white flesh, whether game or poultry' as 'good for nothing'. Only bloody beef contained sufficient 'nour- ishment for the muscle', and some maintained, the spirit.63 Over a hundred years later, Norman Mailer was appalled at the thought of Ali eating fish and re- lieved to hear he had 'resumed the flesh of animals'. 4 Sporting nutritionists were not invented in the twentieth century. An obses- sion with the boxer's diet first aroused public interest in the 1810 run-up to Tom Cribb's rematch with Tom Molineaux. Cribb's trainer, Captain Barclay, was determined that his boxer should lose two-and-a-half stone before the fight, and put him on a strict regime, even reputedly monitoring his excrement. Black- wood's Magazine ran a satirical article on the subject: 124 In the morning, at four of the clock, a serving-man doth enter my cham- ber, bringing me a cup containing half one quart of pig's urine, which I do drink ... At breakfast I doe commonly eat 12 goose's eggs, dressed in whale's oil, wherefrom I experience much good effects. For dinner I doe chiefly prefer a roasted cat, whereof the hair has first been burned by the fire. If it be stuffed with salted herrings which are a good and pleasant fish, it will be better . . . 65 And so on. But while popular mythology maintained that boxers are never short of meat - in Sybil, Disraeli's novel of 'the hungry forties', the only customers whom Mother Carey believes might be able to afford her 'butcher's meat' are prize-fighters or the mayor himself- the fighters themselves frequently told a different story.66 The often-impoverished Daniel Mendoza concluded his reflec- tions on training by stressing that 'above all, a man should be kept easy and comfortable in his situation, and therefore not be suffered to want a guinea in his pocket, or a good table to resort to'.67 Turn-of-the-century socialist fiction developed this theme at length. Meat is so important to Jack London's 1909 short story A Piece of Steak' and Arthur Morrison's 'Three Rounds' (1894) that it might almost be a character itself. In 'Three Rounds', Neddy Milton arrives at the Regent Pub on the Bethnal Green Road in London's East End 'after a day's questing for an odd job'. He has put his name down to fight in an attempt to 'mend his fortunes' and pro- vide an 'avenue of advancement', but the match turns out to be merely more casual labour. Neddy is 'weary in the feet' from having walked all day; rain has dampened his shoulders and seeped into what he fears is a hole in his boot. More worrying is the hole in his stomach. Breakfast was ten hours ago and since then he has had only 'a half-pint of four-ale'. Now it 'lay cold on the stom- ach for want of solid company'. At home less than half a loaf remains, and he knows that if he goes there his mother will insist he have it. He has spent a shilling as his fee for the fight and he now contemplates all he could have bought with it: 'fried fish, for instance, whereof the aromas warm and rank, met him thrice in a hundred yards, and the frizzle, loud or faint, sang in his ears all along the Bethnal Green Road'. But he has invested, or gambled, the money in the fight and the promise it offers of something better than fish. For the time being, he must go hungry.68 Morrison continues the food theme in the pub. There, a potential backer asserts that 'it would be unsafe to back Neddy to fight anything but a beefsteak'; instead, unfortunately, his opponent is to be a butcher - 'red-faced, well-fed, fleshy, and confident', and a stone heavier. At the last minute, a friend gives Neddy a bite of his sausage roll - it is 'pallid', 'a heavy and a clammy thing' (processed rather than fresh meat) and, with the weight of a lump of cold lead', it sticks 'half-way', making breathing difficult.69 The situation is not promising and Morrison describes a fight that is hard labour for both men. Neddy, however, is 'a competent workman, with all his 125 tools in order', and he gets down to work. By the second round, Patsy, the well- fed butcher, is still going strong, but hungry Neddy has 'a worn feeling in his arm-muscles' and notices his strength going 'earlier than in the last round'. He seems to be fading fast; aware of himself only as 'somebody with no control of his legs and no breath to spit away the blood from his nose as it ran and stuck over his lips.' He is knocked down but the bell saves him from being counted out. Behind on points and with 'little more than half a minute's boxing left in him' - the machine running on empty - his only chance to win in the third, and final, round, is by a knockout. Somehow or other - it is a mystery to him - this happens. 'Business' over, Neddy returns to the bar, but 'the stout red- faced men who smoked fourpenny cigars and drank special Scotch' ignore him. This hasn't been his big break after all, just another meaningless job. Perhaps next time, or the one after that, he thinks as he lays his head on the table and falls asleep. At first glance, London's approach in 'A Piece of Steak' seems more roman- tic. He describes his has-been boxer-protagonist, Tom King, leaving to go out into the night', into the jungle: 'to get meat for his mate and cubs - not like the modern working-man going to his machine grind, but in the old, primitive, royal, animal way, by fighting for it'.7° London often brought up the distinction between the drudgeries and indignities of 'machine grind' and the 'old, primitive, royal, animal way'.71 'The Somnambulists', written in 1906 at the height of the intense concern about American meat production, imagines a meat manufacturer sitting down to a roast beef dinner. As the 'greasy juices of the meat' settle on his moustache, the manufacturer is 'fastidiously nauseated at the thought of two prize-fighters bruising each other with their fists'. And this is not the end of his hypocrisy: 'because it will cost him some money, he will refuse to protect the machines in his factory, though he is aware that the lack of such protection every year man- gles, batters, and destroys out of all humanness thousands of working-men, women, and children'.72 For traditional boxing butchers (sources of pure meat in two senses), the modern world has substituted factories in which machines 'batter' their operators as well as animal carcasses. 'Far better', London con- cluded, 'to have the front of one's face pushed in by the fist of an honest prize- fighter than to have the lining of one's stomach corroded by the embalmed beef of a dishonest manufacturer'.73 Discussing A Piece of Steak' in 1945, George Orwell expressed anxiety about the politics of London's 'instinctive tendency to accept via victis as a law of Nature': 'It is not so much an approval of the harshness of Nature, as a mystical belief that Nature is like that.'74 But London's opposition between work and honest natural pugilism soon breaks down. The language that he uses to de- scribe the fight continually confuses the primitive with the modern. If Tom King is presented as a 'fighting animal', he is also, like Neddy Milton, a modern urban worker, trying to scrape together a living. 'Sheer animal' that he is, fighting is nevertheless 'a plain business proposition' to King. In boxing terms at least, he 126 42 Jack London in boxing pose in an undated photograph. is 'old', and so he must fight with a 'policy of economy', in a manner that is 'par- simonious of effort', showing little 'expenditure of effort'. His experience is described as his 'chief asset'. The story revolves around another, missing, asset: the 'piece of steak' which he could not afford to have before the fight, and which, he thinks, would have enabled him to win. A great and terrible hatred rose up in him for the butchers who would not give him credit ... A piece of steak was such a little thing, a few pennies at best; yet it meant thirty quid to him. What Orwell terms London's 'natural urge towards the glorification of beauty' is thus checked by 'his knowledge, theoretical as well as practical, of what 127 industrial capitalism means in terms of human suffering'.75 While the meaty imagery that pervades this and other boxing stories evokes a world in which the 'old, primitive, royal, animal' ways still operate, it is clear that in the urban jungle, steak is simply what the modern worker requires to turn himself into the piece of meat that the capitalist 'machine' requires. The 'abysmal brute' is nothing more than a lean and hungry proletarian'.76 The 'fight game', Midge Kelly tells his brother in the classic 1949 noir movie, Champion, is like any other business - only the blood shows'.77 London's only (human) alternative to capitalist boxing comes in his 1911 story, 'The Mexican', in which Felipe Rivera becomes a fighter to earn money to buy guns for the Mexican revolution.78 Rivera's opponent, Danny Ward, is yet another casual worker who 'fought for money, and for the easy way of life that money would bring'. 'But the things Rivera fought for', London insists, 'burned in his brain.'79 PLOTS of exhaustion: muscle bankruptcy Both 'A Piece of Steak' and 'Three Rounds' are what Philip Fisher calls 'plots of exhaustion', plots concerned with strength and weakness rather than good and evil. 'Their essential matters are youth and age, freshness and exhaustion. Behind the plot of decline is the Darwinian description of struggle, survival, and extinction.'80 The naturalist story tells not of an individual's gradually improving social position, Fisher argues, but rather of a rapid rise to the sexual reproductive peak, followed by a long, slow physical decline. Most of life then, on this model, is the story of decline. What Fisher terms the 'chronicle of sub- traction' is exemplified in Sister Carrie: A man's fortune, or material progress, is very much the same as his bod- ily growth. Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood; or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive men- tally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states.81 The boxing story provides an accelerated version of this phenomenon. If the arc of a man's life in general is short and sharp, that of a boxer's is consider- ably shorter and sharper. This was a theme in boxing literature from its very beginnings in Homer and Virgil, where the 'aged' (i.e. 35-year-old) boxer faced callow youth. 'No men are more subject to the caprice or changes of fortune than the pugilists', wrote Pierce Egan; 'victory brings them fame, riches, and patrons; . . . their lives pass on pleasantly, till defeat comes and reverses the scene.' Finally, 'a premature end puts a period to their misfortune'.82 As Roland Barthes observed, the story of boxing is the story of 'the rise and fall offortunes'.83 The naturalist emphasis, however, was less on ironic reversal than on thermodynamic expenditure. 'Vitality cannot be used over again,' wrote Jack London, in the popular terms of the late nineteenth century. 'If it be expended on one thing, there is none left for the other thing.'84 London believed that the amount of vitality or energy available to an individual could be calculated quite precisely. In 1910, two days before Jack Johnson beat Jim Jeffries, he published an article applying 'a little science called histology', which, he claimed, 'has a lot of bearing on Jeff's case'. 'Each creature,' London wrote, 'is born with so many potential cell generations. When these generations are used up the crea- ture dies . . . Each man has only so many cell generations, which means each man has only so much work in him.' From this, he deduced, 'each fighter is born with so many fights in him. When he has made those fights he is finished.' Predicting the outcome of a fight is no longer, then, a question of comparing the training methods of the fighters or noting who has recently had steak for dinner. Rather, commentators (and gamblers) should devise a formula to cal- culate how many cells have been lost by asking how many fights the boxer had fought, and how gruelling those fights were. Jeffries, London concluded, has plenty of cells left 'alive in his muscles'. But 'can he whip Johnson? This is an- other story.'85 In a 1906 essay, on 'what life means to me', London explained his decision to give up manual work for writing in similar terms. Muscle-power, the labourer's sole form of capital, did not renew itself. Determined not to die a 'muscle bankrupt', the nineteen-year-old London made up his mind to sell brain-power instead.86 Authorship was not a matter of inspiration, but of rig- orous work habits, and a watchful eye on market demand. Writing, like box- ing, was supposed to be a way of escaping the factory, but somehow the logic of the factory remained.87 Byron may have had to tussle with metaphors and hostile critics, but London faced more serious opponents. He frequently de- scribed the effort of writing and publishing as physical, especially when deal- ing with the machines of literary production. In John Barleycorn, an encounter with a particularly uncomfortable typewriter is described as a 'bout', but that is nothing compared to Martin Eden (1909), where the eponymous hero must tussle with 'the editorial machine', a 'cunning arrangement of cogs that changed the manuscript from one envelope to another and stuck on the stamps'. Although he is 'a good fighter', Martin is soon 'bleeding to death, and not years, but weeks would determine the fight'.88 However much 'brain- power' the business of writing involved, no one could deny that it also was a vigorous, manly activity (illus. 42). TIME! Under the old prize-fighting rules, the precise amount of energy a boxer had in him was measured not in terms of the weight of his blows but of how long he lasted. Many of the classic fights of the nineteenth century ran to 80 or 90 rounds. A round, however, had no fixed duration, and was usually, as Bernard Shaw noted, 'terminated by the fall of one of the combatants (in practice usually 145 both of them), and was followed by an interval of half a minute for recupera- tion'. This meant that whenever a boxer needed a rest he could pretend to be knocked down. Under the Queensberry rules, the number of rounds was pre- determined, as was their duration (usually three or four minutes) and 'a com- batant who did not stand up to his opponent continuously during that time (ten seconds being allowed for rising in the event of a knock-down) lost the battle'. 'That unobtrusively slipped-on ten seconds limit', argued Shaw, 'has produced the modern glove fight.'89 Under the old rules, it would not have mattered if a man stayed down for twelve or fifteen seconds, and 30-second knockout blows were fairly rare. Indeed, without gloves, a big blow was as likely to break a fighter's hands as knock down his opponent. Exhaustion was the usual reason for a man to lose. But under the Queensberry rules, after 10 seconds, the fighter must either concede defeat or else 'stagger to his feet in a helpless condition and be eagerly battered into insensibility before he can recover his powers of self-defence'.90 It was not until 1927 that a rule was introduced forbidding a boxer to hover over his downed opponent. Following its introduction, Gene Tunney benefited from a fourteen-second rest while the referee tried to persuade Jack Dempsey to go to a neutral corner. The fight is remembered as the 'Battle of the Long Count', but charges of a long count were not uncommon. After Jim Corbett was defeated by Bob Fitzsimmons in 1897, his manager insisted that the film of the fight be shown so that the length of time Fitzsimmons spent on the floor in the sixth round could be checked. Several stopwatches confirmed thirteen seconds until it was discov- ered that the projectionist had slowed down the hand-cranked machine.91 Crafty boxers, and their managers, always did what they could to extend their rest and cut short that of their opponents. Some fighters were renowned for 'accidentally' stepping on the bell to cut a round short. The new rules made knockout blows much more likely. This development had serious medical consequences, greatly increasing 'the likelihood that fighters would become brain-damaged over a long career, for the trauma of repeated concussions had a cumulative effect, produc- ing lesions that resulted in the "punch-drunk" syndrome', argues Eliott Gorn. In other words, 'boxing might look a bit less brutal, but became more dangerous'.92 The increased frequency of the knockout blow, combined with a limitation on the number of rounds that could be fought, also meant that boxing matches now lasted, at most, little more than an hour. Faster-paced, more offensive, and always with the potential for high drama, boxing was now much more mar- ketable as a spectator sport; particularly so when film entered into the equa- tion. The 'most important result of the Queensberry rules', Gorn writes, 'was not too make the ring less violent but to make it more assimilable to the enter- tainment industry and to mass commercial spectacles'.93 In 1847 Karl Marx wrote that since the 'pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives', men have been 'effaced by their labour'. 'Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at most, time's carcase.'94 Certainly, as the nineteenth 146 64 George Belcher, Time & Judgement at the National Sporting Club (J. H. Douglas and E. Zerega), 1898. til J» « /f^w lit. . century (and the industrial revolution) progressed, the clock assumed an ever- increasing importance in determining the pace of working lives, and gradually both worker and employer internalized its regular rhythms of work and rest. Under the Queensberry rules, the sound of the gong and the ten-count become boxing's equivalents of the factory whistle.95 Once the precise measurement of time became paramount, and before auto- matic devices took over, the timekeeper assumed a key role in the story of the fight, intervening as a deus ex machina to determine the course of its action.96 Conan Doyle's Robert Montgomery is saved because the end of the round is announced ('Time!') before he can be counted out, while Neddy Milton wins because his opponent fails to rise while 'the time-keeper watched the seconds- hands pass its ten points' (illus. 64). It did not take long for writers to find metaphorical potential in the call of time. In Arthur Morrison's novel Cunning Murrell (1900), set during the Crimean War, Roboshobery Dove is happily watching a boxing match on Can- vey Island when he catches sight of a newspaper headline, 'The Baltic Fleet'. 'And then of a sudden, just at the cry of "Time", the paper went grey and blue before Roboshobery Dove's eyes, and the tumult of shouts died in his ears.' The paper had announced the death of a man he knew.97 147 The conjunction between calls of time in boxing and in life is further devel- oped in John Masefield's 1911 poem, 'The Everlasting Mercy'. The poem features a fight over poaching rights between Saul Kane and his best friend. They box according to the Queensberry rules and Masefield ends each stanza with the call of 'Time!' Timing proves significant to the outcome of the fight; the 'clink, clink, clink' of brandy flasks that mark time save Kane from defeat in one round, and he wins by a knockout in another. But Masefield also suggests that Kane's life can be divided into rounds. The first few stanzas measure its progress in decades, 'from '41 to '51', 'from '51 to '61', 'from '61 to '67'. But the fight marks a change of pace. The night following his victory, Kane lies drunkenly awake lis- tening to the village church clock 'ticking the time out' and ponders how it 'ticks to different men'. After several pages of soul-searching, he ends up in a pub where he is confronted by a Quaker woman, preaching temperance. As the clock chimes and closing time is announced, 'something broke inside my brain'. 'Miss Bourne stood still and I stood still, / And "Tick. Slow. Tick. Slow" went the clock.' Christ, it seems, has dealt his sin a knock-down blow.98 Referees and timekeepers also became the subjects of paintings, most notably Eakins's Taking the Count (1898) and Between Rounds (1898-9)." The tension of concentrated immobility is the most striking thing about these works, uniting all the participants in moments out of time.100 Taking the Count was Eakins's first prize-fighting painting and was never exhibited during his life- time. A huge work, it depicts, almost lifesize, the boxer Charlie McKeever stand- ing waiting while the referee, a portrait of sportswriter Henry Walter Schlichter, counts to ten. McKeever's opponent, Joe Mack, crouches in the right-hand cor- ner, seemingly waiting until the last moment to rise. His second can be seen offering advice between the legs of McKeever and Schlichter. A spectator sitting underneath one of the circus banners is looking at his watch, perhaps to confirm the accuracy of the count. Between Rounds depicts Billy Smith being attended to by his seconds (illus. 52). A poster advertising the fight between Smith and Tim Callahan hangs in the upper left corner of the painting. Smith's out- stretched arms are reflected in those of his manager, Billy McCarney, who fans him; on a lower level, those of the timekeeper, and on a higher level, those of spectators leaning over the balcony. But, unlike Salutat, which wholeheartedly brings participants and spectators together, Between Rounds suggests the limits of knowledge for both ringside spectators and viewers of the painting. For one thing, as Michael Fried notes, we can 'only barely glimpse the watchface being studied by the timekeeper'.101 The painting seems to distinguish those who, in various capacities, are engaged in some professional capacity from those who merely look on. The viewer is outside of, and slightly below, the ring. The time- keeper, the seconds, and the boxer are the central protagonists, but the police- man standing on the left, and the men in the press box (including perhaps an artist) are also active participants. The presence of each of these professional men is necessary for the fight to proceed. If this is a kind of circus, as the balcony banners suggest, it is also a keenly run business.102 148 BROBDINGNAGIAN ATTRACTIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge produced his first sequential photographs of mov- ing horses. In the 1880s his experiments (with Thomas Eakins) at the University of Pennsylvania resulted in over 100,000 negatives of animal and human bod- ies in motion, including photographs of men boxing and shadow-boxing (illus 50). By looking at these sequences, viewers could learn more about both the way that bodies moved and the way the brain constructed an image of that movement out of many still components. Muybridge's photographs were said to support various contemporary theories about human nature. On the one hand, they drew attention to the similarities between human and animal move- ment, and refused to discriminate between methods of viewing humans and traditionally lower' forms of life, and so were regarded as evidence for evolu- tionary theory. On the other hand, they supported the popular metaphor of the human machine whose every movement could be timed and quantified. Staging, and looking at, these images in the name of disinterested scientific curiosity, had, of course, nothing to do with the shocking and sensational world of prize-fighting. It was in the name of science that men (some from the univer- sity, others from local gyms) and women (most of whom were artists' models) allowed themselves to be photographed nude. Eakins conducted similarly stark and decontextualized motion studies, but many of his photographs from this period contain enough contextual setting and enough drama to complicate the scientific interest of his 'naked series'.103 The sparring figures in Two Male Stu- dents Posing as Boxers (1886), for example, are carefully positioned within an artist's studio in which a cast of a man's torso sits next to a closed easel from which boxing gloves hang; between the men we glimpse a painting of an inver- tebrate skeleton upon another easel. The aesthetic study of anatomy, in various forms, is carefully signalled (illus. 65). In its woodland setting and careful arrangement of spectators' limbs, Seven Males, Nude, Two Boxing at Centre (1883) is rather different (illus. 66); another genre scene, it evokes both pastoral clas- sicism and Manet's Dejeuner sur Vherbe (1863). Both Manet's painting and Eakins's photograph prominently position a reclining figure with knee bent in the bottom left-hand corner; in both cases a figure in the bottom left-hand cor- ner observes activity in the centre of the image. Like Manet, Eakins wanted to make the nude 'modern'; for the American artist, however, the essence of mod- ern nudity (like that of classical Greece on which it modelled itself) was com- munal and male.104 Eakins's 1890s paintings depict the enclosed all-male world of professional boxing; his 1880s photographs explore a parallel community made up of his students at the Pennsylvania Academy and the Arts Students' League. It is the easy intimacy of that community that is most apparent in these photographs. A desire to consider humanity scientifically also inspired literary work, but here too other interests tended to compromise a properly scientific methodol- ogy. In his classic 1880 exposition of naturalist technique, Emile Zola compared 149 65 Circle of Thomas Eakins, Two Male Students Posing as Boxers, c. 1886. Thomas Eakins, Seven Males, Nude, Two Boxing at Centre, c. 1883. writing a novel to performing a laboratory experiment; an experiment in which the effects of a specific heredity and environment on a character or group of characters was to be observed. One of the most frequently performed natural- ist experiments was to test (once again) the thesis that living bodies . . . [can be] brought and reduced to the general mechanism of matter . . . that man's body is a machine'.105 For the experiment to be successful, however, it had to be per- formed in a carefully controlled environment. The setting was to be both closely restricted and extreme enough to reveal what were thought of as the essentials 150 of human nature. Characters 'must be twisted from the ordinary, wrenched out of the quiet, uneventful round of life, and flung into the throes of a vast and ter- rible drama that works itself out in unleashed passions, in blood and in sudden death'.106 Examples of this type of extreme and restricted experiment include 'The Open Boat' (1897), in which Stephen Crane considers the effect of four ship- wrecked men unable to land their boat, and McTeague (1899) where Frank Norris ends his antagonists' struggle for gold in an inescapable Death Valley. Jack London's experimental settings range from the frozen snows of Alaska to ships in the violent seas of the Pacific, and to the socially brutal world of the boxing ring. In such environments, as this fight scene from Martin Eden suggests, sophisticated men swiftly revert (or devolve) to what Zola calls 'the animal machine': Then they fell upon each other, like young bulls, in all the glory of youth, with naked fists, with hatred, with desire to hurt, to maim, to de- stroy. All the painful, thousand years' gains of man in his upward climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a mile- stone on the path of the great human adventure. Martin and Cheese- Face were two savages, of the stone age, of the squatting place and the tree refuge. They sank lower and lower into the muddy abyss, back to the dregs of the raw beginnings of life, striving blindly and chemically, as atoms strive, as the star-dust of the heavens strives, colliding, recoil- ing and colliding again and eternally again. In this scene, Barthes's story of the 'rise and fall of fortunes' seems to be straight- forwardly reduced to the colliding of atoms and star-dust, but reading on, the issues are complicated considerably, as London introduces Martin's own per- spective on the scene. He is described as being 'both onlooker and participant': It was to him, with his splendid power of vision, like staring into a kine- toscope. . . His long months of culture and refinement shuddered at the sight; then the present was blotted out of his consciousness, and the ghosts of the past possessed him . . .107 If the boxing ring is only one of many settings in which the validity of natural- ist ideas can be tested and observed, it is one of the few in which the act of observa- tion itself is emphasized. In boxing narratives - where the protagonist performs his rite in front of an audience - there are several levels of spectatorship operating. The fighters survey each other and the crowd watches them, while the writer or painter or filmmaker observes, and interprets, both fighters and crowd. The scientific observation of atoms colliding or muscles moving always exists in tension with multiple and often conflicting (financial, erotic, even aesthetic) viewing interests. Martin Eden compares his sense of being both participant and observer in the fight to 'staring into a kinetoscope'. Thomas Edison's kinetoscope was the 151 first commercially produced device for viewing film, and according to Terry Ramsaye, the opening of the first Kinetoscope Parlor on Broadway in 1894 marks the birth of the film industry. Initially there were only ten machines and, Ram- saye noted, 'long queues of patrons stood waiting to look into the peep hole machines': 'the spectator paid his twenty-five cents admission, and passed down the line to peer into the peep holes, while an attendant switched on the machines one after another. Presently Edison supplied a nickel-in-the-slot attachment which eliminated the man at the switches.'108 London evokes two aspects of the kinetoscope experience. Unlike later cinema-going, hunching over the peephole machine was an essentially private experience - the viewer did not know whether those around him were watching what he was, and, because the world around had been blocked out, what he saw could seem to come from his own consciousness. The intimacy and powerfully engaging nature of kinetoscope films is also apparent. At the height of the fight, Eden is somehow detached enough from his own actions to imagine watching them, but, ironically, that very act of observation so involves him that he re- engages and feels himself a participant again.109 It is unsurprising that Eden (and London) associated film with boxing. The very earliest films featured boxing matches, staged and choreographed in Edison's 'Black Maria' studio.110 The first boxing film was made in August 1894 and consisted of six rounds of a minute each between minor prize-fighters, Mike Leonard and Jack Cushing. There was a seven-minute interval between rounds as the film was changed. Viewers paid 10c and, through the kinetoscope peep- hole, saw a round; paid another 10c, and saw the next. The result of the contest was kept secret, but 'some thrifty people went straight to the sixth Kinetoscope, to see only the end of the fight'. Since that portion of the film wore out, the secret remains.111 The film was so popular that the following month another was made, this time featuring Peter Courtney against then champion Jim Corbett, who was repeatedly instructed to turn his face to the camera.112 The technology was developing fast, and the following year the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company developed a method (known as the 'Latham loop' and used in most cameras and projectors ever since) of filming continuously for eight minutes (a seven-minute increase). They used this to make a four-minute film of 'Young Griffo' vs. 'Battling Charles Barnett' on the roof of Madison Square Gardens, and, by shining an arc lamp behind a kinetoscope, projected the film on 20 May 1895; only a small, indistinct image was produced, but this was 'the world's first commercial presentation of projected film'.113 From 1895 to 1897, attempts were made to stage, and film, the heavyweight championship fight between Corbett and Robert Fitzsimmons. Fight promoter Dan Stuart had great difficulties in securing a location that would be free from legal interference, and would also suit Enoch Rector, who had an exclusive con- tract to film the contest. Stuart was the first promoter to recognize that he could earn more in film distribution rights than in gate receipts. The fight (or in Stu- art's words, the 'fistic carnival') finally took place in Carson City, Nevada on 17 152 PTwe OreRtwt Vneltfw of tfcc A REVOLUTION IN JkMUSEWEMT fNTtRPHl&L Jj me Heart Bictgrapfl F1TZ5IMW0HS GOBBETT RECORD PRIZE FIGHT Tlje mi Mi Sua Cuttf1 4* iMm *** Tkt Hanatr _i t*-y ci.Li!>iLod id fm} nfc r- ma1 •Tih libitl*] OMh. Tbl ItLirf* hu jdu mra muni Ife i (hi alhiiii ■! 111 IMFBRIAXi THEATRE Hoyal ulta# HMCJLlrr&L V cfcHATUB -J, FUSSftS npntaH ta tin je»r* JUTWW *, SOJIEJtS. iO, Hmriatta Strut, tat «irfHL TO dU.iu hi i na tt III aktilTri tU HIM ■■" IP ! 67 Poster advertising film of the Corbett- Fitzsimmons Record Prize Fight, London, 1897. March (St Patrick's Day) 1897; Fitzsimmons won in the fourteenth round with his famous 'solar plexus punch'.114 'I consider that I have witnessed today the greatest fight with gloves that was ever held in this or any other country,' wrote gun-fighter Wyatt Earp for the New York World.115 Enoch Rector was at ringside with three cameras and 48,000 feet of film - he ended up using 11,000 (in other words, about two miles) which was finally edited to 2,880 feet, a figure whose significance becomes clear if we note that most films at this time used about 50 feet of film. The ring platform was painted with 'copy- right THE VERISCOPE COMPANY' SO that spectators would know they were watching the real thing and not a re-enactment. (Rec- tor was right to worry, for fake fight films were common, and Sigmund Lubin's 'Re- production of the Corbett and Fitzsim- mons Fight', played by two freight handlers from the Pennsylvania terminal, came out a week before the Veriscope film and did good business in Philadelphia. 'What do you expect for 10 cents, anyhow?' asked Lubin.116) Rector's four-reel Nevada fight film was the longest film yet seen, and it was shown as a prize exhibit at such up- market venues as New York's Academy of Music ('the first film invasion of the fa- mous old Academy') and London's Imperial Theatre. A poster announcing its showing at the Imperial Theatre advertised 'a revolution in amusement enter- prise' and 'Brobdignagian attractions' (sic) in the form of the 'two greatest novel- ties of the present century' (illus. 67). Henry James attended a showing, and 'quite revelled' in it.117 Another writer who may have seen the film was James Joyce. In Ulysses (1922), young Patrick Dignam catches sight of a poster advertising a re- cent local boxing match, which sets him off reminiscing about other good 'puck- ers'. 'Fitzsimons', he thinks, is 'the best pucker going for strength', 'Jem Corbet' 'the best pucker for science'. Fitzsimmons, only a middleweight, as Patrick re- calls, 'knocked the stuffings out of him, dodging and all'.118 Ulysses is set in 1904, just seven years after the fight took place, and it is quite likely that Patrick's knowl- edge of it, and Joyce's, came from the Rector film. Corbett 's manager, William A. Brady, complained that while the film had made between $600,000 and $700,000, each fighter received only $80, 000. 119 It didn't take long, however, before fighters, and their managers, negotiated a fairer share of the profits. 'Poor scrapper,' Bernard Shaw noted in 1901, 'is hardly 153 the word for a modern fashionable pugilist', for the contests in which he engaged now took place 'in huge halls before enormous audiences, with cinematographs hard at work recording the scene for reproduction'.120 While the impact of film on the development of boxing was huge - open- ing up new and lucrative markets - it is fair to say that boxing also had an im- pact on the development of film. Claims for the relationship between the two vary from the circumspect - 'the evolution of the modern form of . . . [boxing] closely paralleled the development of the motion pictures' - to the bold - 'box- ing created cinema'.121 Early filmmakers were interested in filming boxing matches for a variety of reasons - personal, commercial and technical. Person- ally, it just happened that the Latham brothers and Enoch Rector (collectively the Kinetoscope Exhibition Company) were interested in boxing. Commercially, fight films were good business because they appealed to the male working-class audiences most likely to frequent kinetoscope parlours. Technically, although early cinema was obsessed with 'movement for movement's sake', early cam- eras were heavy and had a restricted viewpoint; it was, however, quite simple to set cameras to cover the relatively small space of the boxing ring within which lots of movement took place.122 'The cameraman could then grind away, secure in the certainty that the picture was not getting away from him, unless indeed the combatants jumped the ropes and ran away'.123 While boxing films were seen as a way of making boxing more palatable to middle-class tastes - spectators would be 'Without any of the Demoralizing Surroundings Unavoidable at the Actual Fight' - the association of film with the 'odium of pugilism' damaged attempts to gentrify the new art.124 In The Art of the Moving Picture (1915), Vachel Lindsay wrote of 'trying to convert a talented and noble friend to the films. The first time we went there was a prize-fight between a black and a white man, not advertised, used as a filler. I said it was queer, and would not happen again. The next time my noble friend was persuaded to go, there was a cock-fight . . . The convert was not made.'125 Lindsay's example is complicated by the fact that the film featured interracial boxing (something I'll consider in more detail in the next chapter), but there was also a broader sense among the middle-classes that a film show almost inevitably involved boxing. 'It is not very creditable to our civilization', complained the New York Times in 1897, 'that an achievement of what is now called the veriscope that has attracted and will attract the widest attention should be the representation of the prizefight'.126 By 1912, an English critic, Frederick Talbot, noted the 'consid- erable opposition' which prize-fight films met. This, he said, 'should be wel- comed as a healthy sign even by the film-producers themselves. The cinematograph can surely do more elevating, profitable and entertaining work than the recording of a prize-fight.'127 Before the first dedicated cinemas (the nickelodeons) opened in 1905, box- ing films were often shown as part of an evening's entertainment at a music hall or in a burlesque or vaudeville show, where they often drew upon the conven- tions of the acts that surrounded them.128 This generally meant matching tall, 154 thin men against short, stout ones.129 One of the great subjects for turn of the century British film-makers was the Boer War, and, although most films were topical, a few comic dramas were made. In 1900, for example, a film entitled 'Prize fight or Glove Contest between John Bull and President Kruger' was pro- moted as a comedy, while in the previous year, the Warwick Trade Co. (Ltd) produced a three-round, three-reel 'Comic Boxing Match' in which three foot six inches defeated six foot three inches on the deck of a ship bound for Africa.130 Charlie Chaplin's career began in the English music hall and several of his very early films feature similar slapstick pantomime. In Mack Sennett's The Knockout (1914), he has a bit -part as a referee who gets hit quite frequently and provides no help to cowardly heavyweight Fatty Arbuckle in his fight against a real boxer, Edgar Kennedy. When he loses the match, Fatty grabs a revolver from the attending sheriff, and the film ends with a spirited chase involving the Keystone Cops (illus. 68). A few days later Chaplin made another film with a pugilistic theme, Mabel's Married Life. There he plays a husband who is jealous of his wife's flirtation with a burly man.131 He retreats to a saloon and gets very drunk, while Mabel, angry because Charlie did not defend himself, goes out and buys a boxing dummy. He comes home and, thinking he is taking on his Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle in a poster advertising Counted Out (1914), also known as The Knockout. MACO COMEDIES Offer 155 rival, rights the dummy. The dummy wins.132 By the following year Chaplin had become both director and 'the tramp', and so in The Champion (1915), some pathos is injected to counter the comedy of balletic violence. With his faithful and hungry bulldog, the tramp find a lucky horseshoe just as he passes a training camp advertising for a sparring partner 'who can take a beating'. After watching several fighters being carried out on a stretcher, he puts the horseshoe into his glove. He wins. Suddenly favourite for the championship, Charlie, billed as the 'Jersey Mosquito', now has to fight without his horseshoe. His dog watches the fight, smiles when he lands a punch, and becomes fierce and then gloomy when he is knocked down. Finally the dog enters the ring and distracts Charlie's opponent so that he can land a knockout punch. Size, strength, and even Anglo- Saxon fair play emerge as no match for immigrant cleverness, cunning and luck. Chaplin revisited these vaudeville boxing balletics in City Lights (1931), a defiantly silent film at the start of the sound era. As in The Champion, the tramp only resorts to boxing because he needs to feed another. This time it is a blind flower girl. He happily agrees to take part in a fixed fight, but unfortunately his opponent disappears after finding out the police are after him. Instead he is faced with Hank Mann, who is not only much bigger but refuses to take part in the fix. As his anxiety rises, Charlie begins to mince and flirt with the giant. His opponent is so unnerved by this that he hides behind a curtain to change into his shorts. The tramp has once more gained a (temporary) advantage over a physically superior opponent, one who finds sitting next to a supposed homo- sexual more frightening than being hit.133 (Subsequently, however, Charlie is knocked out twice - once in the ring, and once by a falling glove in the dressing room.) Mark Winokur argues that these later films are not slapstick but what he calls transformative comedy. While 'slapstick insists on perpetuating into the realm of fantasy the insult to the body that occurs in the world', 'transforma- tive comedy', he argues, 'insists on the intelligence of the body in avoiding insult (successfully or otherwise)'.134 Although Chaplin was a fan of boxing and a friend of boxers, his films debunk much of the masculine and nativist posturing that sur- rounded it.135 Such debunking was not, of course, the ambition of D. W. Griffith in his 1915 film of the Civil War and its aftermath, The Birth of a Nation; the film most often credited with making movie-going respectable in America. Accompanied by an orchestral score, it was shown in large legitimate theatres at high prices and was an enormous (if hugely controversial) success. The Birth of a Nation aspired to the status of serious history as well as entertainment; Griffith's next film, Intolerance (1916), was a philosophical meditation on the development of a 'universal theme' through the ages. Only twenty years had passed since Corbett vs Fitzsimmons had first wowed audiences, but the aspirations of film- makers had changed enormously. It might seem odd then that in 1919 Griffith decided to film Thomas Burke's story of a London prize-fighter and his daugh- ter.136 Broken Blossoms is about the destruction of a young girl (Lillian Gish) who is trapped between two competing versions of masculinity - one passive, oriental 156 and threatening miscegenation (represented by her suitor, the Yellow Man, played by Richard Barthelmess), the other active, Anglo-Saxon and hyper- masculine (represented by her father, a prize-fighter called Battling Burrows, played by Donald Crisp and described in an inter-title as an 'abysmal brute, a gorilla of the jungles of East London').137 The Yellow Man leans languidly against walls and on couches; Burrows pummels both his opponent (the 'Limehouse Tiger', played by real boxer, Kid McCoy) and his daughter (his 'punching bag'). The dialectic between these modes of conduct can also be mapped onto the formal conflict between the stasis of painting and the constant motion of narrative film. Dudley Andrew notes that while the Yellow Man is seen 'in gently curved poses which concentrate the dramatic energy within the frame', Battling Burrows 's thrashing movements thrust 'our attention out of the frame and to the object of his aggression'.138 Brigitte Peucker suggests that Griffith's decision to represent Burrows as a boxer was a way of alluding to 'proto- and early cinematic films'; both boxers and boxing movies were crude and primitive.139 No one gets out of Broken Blossoms alive: Burrows kills Lucy, the Yellow Man shoots Burrows and then goes home to kill himself with a knife. A reference to the latest casualty figures from the Western Front suggests that the whole world might have battled itself to a halt. THE PRIZE-FIGHTER AND THE LADY While maintaining that it was natural for women to admire fighters, John L. Sullivan was adamant that fights themselves should be seen only by men. The next generation was not so fastidious. Women made up a substantial part of the audience at the premiere of Rector's movie in 1897. 14° Miriam Hansen argues that this film, 'the cinematic mediation' of the prize-fight, as she calls it, opened up a previously forbidden spectacle to a large number of women who relished the sight of a little male flesh.141 Indeed it seems that Corbett 'calculat- edly played on his awareness of his "ladies' man" image' by dressing for his fight films in trunks that prominently display his bottom, 'not often found on other fighters' and rather similar to those worn by Billy Smith in Eakins's Salutat. But 'the Adonis of the Fistic arena', who also had a huge following as a stage actor, was clearly an exception. Dan Streible notes that 'subsequent fight films, even those showing Jim Corbett, never again attracted female patrons in significant numbers'.142 Even before the cinematic mediation of 1897, it was not unheard of for women to attend fights and to be seen to express an interest in prize-fighters. And again novelty was largely the point. In 1889, Nellie Bly, feature writer for the New York World, interviewed John L. Sullivan as he prepared for his fight with Jake Kilrain. Bly begins by announcing that she 'was surprised' by her visit, and the article goes on to explain why. She arrives at the house, which is 'in the prettiest part of town' and 'one would never imagine from the surroundings that a prize-fighter was being trained there'. When Sullivan enters the room, she finds him 'half-bashful', 157 'very boyish' and 'not ungraceful'. Next she admires his 'straight and shapely' fingers, and finds 'the closely trimmed nails ... a lovely oval and pink'. Finally, they eat breakfast, and 'the daintiness of everything' from 'the white table linen and beautiful dishes, down to the large bunch of fragrant lilacs and another of beautifully shaped and coloured wild flowers, separated by a slipper filled with velvety pansies - was all entirely foreign to any idea I had ever conceived of prize- fighters and their surroundings'.143 But while some women may have been attracted to prize-fighting by reassurances of clean nails and dainty dishes, others, it seems, went because they wanted to see blood and half-naked men (or at least that is what male readers liked to think). Steible points out that 'the figure of the lone, disguised woman at ringside became a recurring one in tabloid stories of the 1890s'; the San Francisco Examiner, for example, sent Annie Laurie (touted as 'the first woman to report a prize fight') who watched 'from behind a curtained booth' and reported back that 'men have a world into which women cannot enter'.144 This was not strictly true. In Carson City in 1897, a special section was designated for women spectators, and Rose Fitzsimmons acted as one of her hus- band's seconds. 'As the battle went on,' reported the Chicago Tribune, 'she became more and more demonstrative, sometimes breaking out with exclamations which bordered on the profane.'145 From the ring itself, meanwhile, James Corbett not- iced in the crowd, 'a big, blonde, and very excited woman, her hair loose, hat jammed down over one ear, the blood from Fitz spattering her own face, and she, meanwhile, yelling at me things that were not at all flattering either to my skill as a fighter or my conduct as a gentleman'.146 In 1905 the San Francisco Examiner reported the attendance of 'a few misplaced women' at the Nelson-Britt fight. A few of them looked like decent women, but the most gave token of being jaded, jades in search of some new torment for the sagging nerves' (illus. 69). 147 These stories largely appealed to men who enjoying being a little shocked at the prospect of an occasional narrowing of the gap between manly boxing and their ideas of femininity. There is nothing like an exception to prove the rule. But some men - fight promoters and film-makers - actively encouraged the presence of women spectators, believing that their attendance would confer respectability on movie-going and provide a strong argument in favour of the legalization of prize-fighting. Streible notes that fight film advertisements often included 'such exaggerated inducements as "witnessed by hundreds of ladies'".148 In 1915, the Broadway Sporting Club advertised that women would be charged a reduced rate of 50 cents to attend the next fight. Over 1,000 men showed up, but only one woman. The club then offered triple trading stamps as an inducement to 'flee pink tea and sewing circles'.149 Two women came. It has become commonplace to suggest that when a male writer or artist depicts a woman looking at a man, the female point of view is really a mask for the male artist's own, usually erotic, interest. This is undoubtedly true in some cases, but there are other reasons (perhaps even conflicting reasons) why a man might explore a female point of view. We should not, for example, rule out the possibility of vanity. As the influence of Darwinian ideas spread, men (and later 158 69 George Bellows, Preliminaries to the Big Bout, 1916. 1 ^^v^^fedfl^^jnE jp ^ Tift VH ^ 1- V * • (V-i women) also became interested in boxing as a subject matter within which to ex- plore the mechanisms of sexual selection, the 'struggle between the males for possession of the females'.150 Cashel Byron's Profession tells the story of the eponymous hero's romance with an independent, aristocratic 'New Woman', Lydia Carew. At first the attraction is aesthetic. Lydia, who is described as having 'a taste for . . . the fine arts', first encounters the boxer while walking, appropriately with a copy of Faust, in the woods of her home: The trees seem never ending: she began to think she must possess a for- est as well as a park. At last she saw an opening. Hastening towards it, she came again into the sunlight, and stopped, dazzled by an appari- tion which she at first took to be a beautiful statue, but presently recog- nized, with a strange glow of delight, as a living man . . . the man was clad in a jersey and knee-breeches of white material, and his bare arms shone like those of a gladiator. His broad pectoral muscles, in their white covering, were like slabs of marble. Even his hair, short, crisp, and curly, seemed like burnished bronze in the evening light.151 When James Corbett played Cashel Byron in one of the early pirated stage ver- sions, Shaw noted that American ladies were seized with a desire to go on the stage and be Lydia Carew for two thrilling hours'.152 In the novel, too, it does not take Lydia long to recognize that Cashel's value is more than sculptural. Not that 159 anyone would 'dare to suspect her . . . of anything so vulgarly human as sexual in- terest in Cashel'. 'A utilitarian before everything', Lydia assesses his animal vital- ity as a necessary complement to her own intellectualism and 'fine breeding', and decides to marry him in order to produce healthy children. 'I believe in the doctrine of heredity; and as my body is frail and my mind morbidly active, I think my impulse towards a man strong in body and untroubled in mind a trust- worthy one.' He becomes, in other words, her stud. It is 'a plain proposition in eugenics', but it does not quite work. The boys turn out like her, and the girls like him, and she 'soon came to regard him as one of the children'.153 The female assessment of a potential mate was central to many of Jack Lon- don's fight scenes, and more often than not his emphasis is on male excitement in realizing that this is the case. While in Great Expectations, Pip had been app- alled at Estella's flushed checks, London's men like to see their women aroused by a good fight. Expecting 'to find a shocked and frightened maiden counte- nance', they are often pleasantly surprised by a 'flushed and deeply interested face'. In the midst of a fierce exchange of blows, Martin Eden finds time to watch Lizzie Connolly watching him. 'Usually the girls screamed when the fellows got to scrapping, but she was looking on with bated breath, leaning slightly for- ward, so keen was her interest, one hand pressed to her breast, her cheek flushed, and in her eyes a great and amazed admiration.' Martin was 'thrilling all over'.154 London's interest in the female perspective is most fully explored in The Game (1905), a novella which grew out of his local club fight reports for the Oak- land Herald; it remained one of his favourite works.155 Chapter One begins with the protagonists Joe and Genevieve choosing a carpet. They are to be married the next day, but first Joe will fight one last time and he wants her to watch - 'I'll fight as never before with you lookin' at me'. Genevieve's response to this is am- biguous. On the one hand, she responds with appropriate feminine revulsion; on the other, 'the masculinity of the fighting male . . . [made] its inevitable appeal to her, a female, moulded by all heredity to seek out the strong man for mate'. Joe too experiences a conflict of desires: He saw only the antagonism between the concrete, flesh-and-blood Genevieve and the great, abstract, living Game. Each resented the other, each claimed him; he was torn with the strife, and yet drifted helpless on the current of their contention.156 Before any boxing has taken place, then, we see that the central fight of the story is to be between the values of the 'abstract' and 'the concrete'. Contrary to what we might expect, abstraction is allied with 'the Game' while romantic love con- cerns the physical. Chapter Two goes back to consider Joe and Genevieve's courtship, and to em- phasize the importance of what they see of each other in forming their relationship. As they walk in the park the eyes of passers-by are 'continually drawn to them,' and each observes the admiring glances the other attracts.157 This emphasis on seeing 160 and being seen sets the tone for the fight scene itself. As women were not allowed into the arena Genevieve disguises herself as a boy and watches the fight through a peephole in the wall.158 As a boy, indeed wearing Joe's shoes, she is, for the first time in her life, unnoticed by the men in the hall, 'this haunt of men where women came not'. This, London suggests, is her first moment of liberation from what he calls 'the bounds laid down by that harshest of tyrants, the Mrs. Grundy of the working class'.159 The next such moment comes when she sees Joe's 'beautiful nakedness'. She feels guilty 'in beholding what she knew must be sinful to behold', but London informs us that 'the pagan in her, original sin, and all nature urged her on'. The terms in which Genevieve perceives Joe are, however, far from straight- forwardly erotic. Rather, her appreciation curiously shifts between the religious and the aesthetic, and much of it is feminizing. Joe is 'godlike', and she feels 'sac- rilege' in looking at him, but his face is also like a cameo', a thing of 'Dresden china', and London tells us that 'her chromo-trained aesthetic sense exceeded its education'. Joe's delicacy, fragility, smoothness and fairness are also continually emphasized. His opponent, on the other hand, is the classic 'beast with a streak for a forehead', 'a thing savage, primordial, ferocious'.160 Looking connects the concreteness of romantic love to the fight's abstraction. During the central fight scenes, London seems to forget that we are seeing the fight from Genevieve's perspective, and there are several pages of detailed blow-by-blow description. Moreover, when Genevieve's perspective does return it seems confused, as if London was not really sure what do with it. On the one hand, he describes her attraction to what he calls the pagan values of pain, sex and death: 'She, too, was out of herself; softness and tenderness had vanished; she exulted in each crushing blow her lover delivered'. Yet, only moments later, her responses seem quite distinct from those of the crowd; she feels sick, faint, both 'overwrought with horror at what she had seen and was seeing' and baffled at the whole process. The fight in the ring ends when Joe slips and is caught on the chin with a lucky punch. Chance seems initially to be working for Genevieve, for believing that 'the Game had played him false', she concludes that 'he was more surely hers'. When she realizes that he is dead, however, it is with the acknowledgment that she had already lost him to 'the awful facts of this Game she did not understand'.161 The Game is finally ambiguous about the status of both the boxer's body (it is a source not simply of violence, but of economic power, and self-expression) and the spectator's interpretation of the body (bio- logically, erotically, religiously and aesthetically). It is not only Joe's death that makes the conclusion bleak. He was also gambling on his ability to communi- cate the meaning of the Game to Genevieve, and that gamble failed as well. Women might look but they do not really understand men; London, however, understands that female lack of understanding.162 While Genevieve in The Game and Lydia in Cashel Byron 's Profession achieve a certain power simply by watching men fight, other works of the period (again usually by men) imagine female power more directly as the women themselves don gloves (illus. 70). William H. Bishop's 1895 novel, The Garden of Eden, usa, 161 70 Women boxers, c. 1911. for example, presents a Utopia of sexual and economic equality in which cook- ing and housework are done by centralized machinery. This was perhaps the first novel to discuss rape as a social problem and certainly the first to suggest, as a possible form of resistance, boxing.163 In the world outside Utopia, Bishop argues, 'the power of self-defense or of indignant protest is more necessary to women than to men'. In the Garden of Eden, however, women box 'more in bravado of conventional prejudices than anything else'.164 Although Bishop's is not the only work in which a feminist agenda is pres- ent, many references to women boxing in this period seem to involve little more than a return to the scantily clad heroines of Fielding's day. In 1880 the Police Gazette announced that a Miss Libbie Ross was 'champion female boxer of America', and in 1884, Hattie Stewart was declared world female champion, but no one seemed to take these titles very seriously. More popular were stories in which women (ignoring Darwin) fought over men and against 'mashers', usu- ally 'according to pugilistic rules' (illus. 71). l65 Athletic new women also featured in the new visual technologies, where great attention was paid to their costumes and what they revealed. A form of photography that was very popular between the 1850s and 1930s was stereoscopy. When two almost identical photographs, placed side by side, were seen though a stereoscope, a sense of depth and solid- ity was created. The technique was most often used to view images of land- scape and women in their underwear. No. 95 in a late nineteenth-century 'Beauty Series' featured a Hallowe'en party boxing match entitled 'England's Advantage' (illus. 72). We cannot see either of the girl's faces, but that is hardly the point. The American 'beauty' has her opponent's glove in her face, and we 162 71 'The Girls Biffed Each Other', from Police Gazette (1890). 72 Stereoscopic photo of a Hallowe'en party boxing match, 'England's Advantage'. THE GIRLS BIFFED EACH OTHER. MA II IE HERBETT AND MABEL BROWN FIGHT **}» GEOfiGE WOODWARD IN PLEASANTVILLE, N.J. E i 3 s i get a fine view (especially through a stereoscope) of the English girl's bloomers. Thomas Edison's 1898 film, Comedy Set-To was one of many early films in which women box for laughs. Starring the Police Gazette 'Champion Lady Bag Puncher', Belle Gordon, against Billy Curtis, it was, according to one magazine, 'refined, scientific, and a genuine comedy'. 'Belle Gordon is as frisky a little lady as ever donned a boxing outfit, and her abbreviated skirt, short sleeves and low necked waist make a very jaunty costume.'166 Women's arm muscles had suddenly become a new erogenous zone. The ethereal hero of Joris-Karl Huysmans's A Rebours (1884) falls briefly in love with a female acrobat, 'an American girl', largely because of her 'muscles of steel and arms of iron', while Everard in George Gissing's The Odd Women (1893) is very impressed by Rhoda Nunn's 'strong wrists, with exquisite vein-tracings on the pure white'.167 In 1897 Frank Norris interviewed Alcide Capitaine, hailed as 'the female Sandow'. The resulting essay begins with sound feminist intentions. Norris addresses male readers who might be tempted to call her 'a "little woman" . . . and . . . might even . . . assume the certain condescension of man- ner that men - some men - display when talking to the "weaker" sex.' Such condescension would immediately vanish, however, when attempting to grasp her upper arm 'at first with one hand, then, failing in this, with two ... A man must have large hands to do the thing, for the bicep measurement is fifteen and a half inches.' Norris, we now realize, is not primarily interested in Capitaine as a living refutation of sexism or a feminist role model. It is the fact that her body is so different when 'at ease' and when 'muscled up' that excites him so much. Muscles relaxed, she is a 'quiet, retiring sort of little body'; a little flexing, however, and 'Tom Sharkey himself would be proud of that arm.' 'Really it took one's breath away.' While many New Women cultivated athleticism as an alter- native to Victorian restrictions on their bodies and behaviour, the fantasies of their often rather prurient supporters rested on the conjunction, or rather disjunction, of the new and the old, the 'frame of a pugilist in the person of a girl not yet out of her teens'. Although descriptions such as this carry more than a touch of the freak show, they also represent a broader cultural tendency to define both male and female sexuality (often referred to as biological health or fitness) in masculine terms. Biceps, rather than breasts or hips, were considered indicators of fitness for both men and women. When Norris compares Capitaine to Tom Sharkey he is not saying that he would prefer to sleep with Sharkey (even vicariously). In social and psychological terms, Capitaine remains womanly, but (by being a little bit manly around the arms) she also reveals herself to be sexually active and biologically fit. Early on in Jack London's first novel, A Daughter of the Snows (1902), Frona Welse offers her arm to an old family friend. ""Tis muscle," he admitted, passing his hand admiringly over the swelling bunch; "just as though ye'd een workin' hard for yer livin"". 164 73 Jack and Charmian London boxing together. 'Oh, I can swing clubs, and box, and fence,' she cried, successively strik- ing the typical postures; 'and swim, and make high dives, chin a bar twenty times, and - walk on my hands. There!'169 Like Genevieve, Frona is engaged in the task of sexual selection, but unlike Genevieve, she is highly educated in Social Darwinian terminology and so can recognize quite precisely what she is feeling. The novel is structured around Frona's choice between two suitors, the rather brutish Gregory St Vincent, and Vance Corliss, whose 'muscular development was more qualitative than quanti- tative', and whom she eventually picks. Fortunately, Vance likes her too, and for very similar reasons - 'the strength of her slenderness' and 'the joy of life', which 'romped through her blood, abstemiously filling out and rounding off each shapely muscle .. . Especially he liked the swell of her forearm, which rose firm and strong and tantalizing'.170 Genevieve could only look at Joe uncomprehendingly; Frona and Vance look at each other and rationally assess what they see. Theirs is to be a marriage of biological equals, 'mate man' and 'mate woman' boxing to- gether, just as London did with his second wife, Charmian (illus. 73). As the nineteenth century drew to a close, writers lost interest in the distinc- tive sub-culture and language of boxing; instead, the sport became a focus for many competing, and often oddly intermingling, discourses. In their rhetorical battles, often with each other, eugenics, professionalism, strenuousness, realism and feminism all drew upon pugilism to make their points. Missing from this list, and this chapter, however, are two fiercely debated topics in early twentieth- century America: nation, and race. It is these that the next chapter will consider. 165 43 The Boxing Boys, wall-painting from Akrotiri, Thera, 17th to 16th century bc. Female Combatants OR WHO 8IIALL - a:, The Female Combatants, Or Who Shall, 1776, etching. 44 Humphreys vs Mendozajug, 1788. The Prussian prize-fighter and his allies attempting to tame imperial Kate, or, the state of the European bruisers, Cartoon shows Catherine 11 and Frederick William 11 as pugilists, stripped to the waist with fists raised. Published by William Dent, 14 February 1791. 47 The Close of the Battle or the Champion Triumphant, 1811. Robert and George Cruikshank, 'Cribb's Parlour: Tom introducing Jerry and Logic to the Champion of England', coloured aquatint illustration from Pierce Egan, Life in London (1821). -I" Charles Turner after T. Blake, The Interior of the Fives Court, with Randall and Turner Sparring, 1825. The Zoopraxiscope, Athletes Boxing, by Eadweard Muybridge, c. 1893. 'Gown! Gown! Town! Town! or, The Battle of Peas Hill', illustra- tion from Gradus ad Cantahrigiam (1824). 52 Thomas Eakins, Between Rounds, 1898-9. \ttiz. tn£ mtt i wu?. t Twey "ctitMA/r ftcen mm. i£n .. * it *i . 54 Cover of T/?f Coming Champion, 1910, Blackface Minstrel Show, script for a sketch. 53 'If I Wuz the Man I Wuz, They Wouldn't Need Him', postcard, New York, 1912. I'rn'r IS C«TJ DE N I SON S BLACKFACE Rl The Coming Champion 1 WALTER K BAKER CO. WLUIffiLft. - IWllMfti I ^1 -wlMTCR St UdSTCitiuSi 55 Archibald J. Motley Jr, The Plotters, 1933. OltOih IS. ittL PUNCH, OH THK rXA'DON CHARIVARI, tr. THE SYMPATHETIC SPECTATOR. 56 William Low, 'The Sympathetic Spectator', Punch, 15 October 1924. 57 Cover of The Champion annual, 1953. 58 Cover of The Fight magazine, 13 February 1931. r>'"' Karl Arnold, Women Boxers, Berlin, from Simplicissimus, August 1923. A 20 ham A 20heures CHAMPION DU MONDE QUI V1INT □ ■ HITTDI PUDtl£R K O AU 1 ROUND ^ PLACES K)-75\v HiH'Ht ihirnDin COflTRE ' ^B COffTRE HOPERt COffTRE 60 Poster advertising Panama Al Brown at the Palais des Sports, Brussels, 1938. 6l Aligi Sassu, Pugilatori, 1929. 62 Max Pechstein, Boxer in the Ring, postcard to Erich Heckel, 4 November 1910. 63 The Stenberg Brothers, poster for The Boxer's Bride, 1926. 6 Fresh Hopes 'We are all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of a fight,' Frank Norris declared in 1903, before, unblushingly, going on to praise the talents of a New Zealander of Cornish descent, Bob Fitzsimmons.1 A rather loose approach to matters of race, ethnicity and nationality had long been a feature in boxing, even when those affiliations were supposedly the point. Such leniency allowed a former American slave, Tom Molineaux, to be co-opted into the English battle against Napoleon in 1812, the Irish-born and California-bred John Heenan to be feted as a symbol of both American and Irish anti-British sentiment in i860, and Joe Louis to become a symbol of Jim Crow America's fight against foreign fascism in 1938. The rapid development of sports in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to questions of national identity - what it meant to be an American, and more critically for the new immigrants, what was needed to become one.2 'To be an American, dress like an American, look like an American, and even, if only in fantasy, talk like an American' was the goal of the young immigrant.3 Sports such as boxing provided a readily avail- able subject-matter, and vocabulary, for recognizably American talk. In Abraham Cahan's 1896 novella, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Yekl Podkovnik's metamorphosis into Jake, 'an American feller, a Yankee', is repre- sented by his enthusiasm for dance halls and boxing. The story opens with Jake giving his fellow Lower East Side sweatshop workers a detailed account of the exploits of Sullivan, Corbett and others, proudly displaying his grasp of the cor- rect idiom: 'Say, Dzake,' the presser broke in, 'John Sullivan is tzampion no longer, is he? 'Oh no! Not always is it holiday!' Jake responded, with what he con- sidered a Yankee jerk of his head. 'Why don't you know? Jimmie Cor- bett leaked him, and Jimmie leaked Cholly Meetchel, too. You can betch you' bootsh! Johnnie could not leak Chollie, becaush he is a big bluffer, Chollie is,' he pursued, his clean-shaven florid face beaming with enthu- 166 siasm for his subject, and with pride in the diminutive proper nouns he flaunted. 'But Jimmie pundished him. Oh, didn't he knock him out off shightl He came near making a meat-ball of him' -with a chuckle. 'He tzettled him in three roynds. I knew a feller who had seen the fight.' 'What is a rawnd, Dzake?' the presser inquired.4 Reading this slang-laden fight description (which then goes on into 'a minute ex- position of "right-handers", "left-handers", "sending to sleep", "first blood", and other commodities of the fistic business') we might almost be back in Regency England. But there are important differences. The first thing to notice is a foot- note that tells us that 'English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the charac- ters of this narrative are given in italics'. Fluent standard English, in other words, represents fluent standard Yiddish. The English that appears in italics is the same kind of English that Pierce Egan italicized in the 1800s, and like Egan, Jake is putting on a costume when he uses 'diminutive proper nouns' and talks of 'tzampions' and 'roynds'. Sabinne Haenni suggests that this speech could 'qual- ify for the vaudeville stage'.5 But Jake's language is further complicated by the fact that he has recently moved to New York from Boston, and so even his Yid- dish is different from that of his co-workers and 'his r's could do credit to the thickest Irish brogue'. In Boston, Jake says, 'every Jew speaks English like a stream', but what kind of English is it that flows so freely? It is hardly standard- ized - one man says 'roynd'; another 'rawnd '. Cahan describes the English his characters speak as 'mutilated' and 'gibberish'.6 When his friends dismiss boxing as mere fighting, Jake evokes its rules. One of the men, a scholar called Bernstein, makes a joke: 'America is an educated country, so they won't even break each other's bones without grammar. They tear each other's sides according to "right and left", you know.' Cahan explains that 'this was a thrust at Jake's right-handers and left-handers, which had inter- fered with Jake's reading', and adds, in a footnote, that 'right and left' is 'a term relating to the Hebrew equivalent of the letter s, whose pronunciation depends on the right or left position of a mark over it'. The rules of Hebrew are thus jux- taposed with those of American boxing. Jake may 'speak quicker' than his friends, his American slang flowing like a stream', but he is illiterate; Bernstein has little standard English and less slang, but he is a Hebrew scholar.7 Cahan himself sat somewhere between his two characters.8 Before Yekl, Cahan had published several stories in Yiddish and had enthusiastically wel- comed the American publication of stories by I. L. Peretz and Shalom Aleichem. But Yiddish was generally regarded by Jewish intellectuals as non-literary. The languages of the literature were Hebrew, Russian, Polish, German, and, if a broad American audience was to be reached, English.9 A Tale of the Ghetto' written specifically for those outside the ghetto, Yekl followed in the tradition of what was then known as local color' fiction and positioned its characters and their environment with anthropological exactness. The narrator is a key figure in this process, our tour guide around the ghetto, and our translator of its speech. His 167 English is self-consciously literary and genteel. The opening paragraph, for exam- ple, tells us that the boss was on Broadway 'where he had betaken himself two or three hours before', and that 'the little sweltering assemblage . . . beguiled their suspense variously'. Jules Chametzsky maintains that the extreme contrast between this language and that of Cahan's characters entails 'an arch and conde- scending attitude' towards them. 'Their fractured English is comic when it is not grotesque.'10 But something more interesting seems to be going on. While the English the characters speak is, in Cahan's word, 'mutilated', as we have seen, their Yiddish (written as English) is fluent and in many ways, much more expres- sive than the narrator's English. Yiddish, Cahan notes, is 'omnivorous'. Several jokes in the text emerge from phrases or words that sound similar in Yiddish and English (left and right' above; 'dinner' in Yiddish is 'thinner' in English). The language of the ghetto, like the ghetto itself, remains a complicated, and not wholly translatable, 'hodgepodge'. English may be the official language of the story but within its embrace are found several varieties of Yiddish (one of which is spoken with an Irish lilt), Russian and Hebrew (when Jake takes a Hebrew letter to be translated, Cahan jokes that it 'was Greek to Jake').11 For Jake, however, following boxing is not only about finding an excuse to show off his new mastery of American colloquialisms. It is also a 'trying on of roles ... [a] delight in assuming new identities'; in particular new versions of masculinity.12 Becoming an American man was not a matter of simply gaining something additional (a style on top); it also meant giving something up. The shifting balance between gains and losses is what the story is all about, and at times the debate slips into verbal sparring. When one of Jake's co-workers dis- misses the fight talk, Jake is immediately 'on the defensive'. 'Don't you like it? I do,' Jake declared tartly. 'Once I live in America,' he pursued, on the defensive, 'I want to know that I live in America. Dot'sh a kin' a man I ami One must notbe a greenhorn. Here a Jew is as good as a Gentile. How, then, would you have it? The way it is in Russia, where a Jew is afraid to stand within four ells of a Christian?'13 In the 1890s Zionists in Germany, England and the Unites States had begun to speak of a modern muscular Judaism, and often evoked the name of the early nineteenth-century Jewish boxers, Daniel Mendoza and Dutch Sam.14 In the 'Proem' to The Children of the Ghetto (1914), Israel Zangwill told the story of an old peddler called Sleepy Sol who is defended from the brutality of a local hostler by his son-in-law, who turns out to be Dutch Sam. 'The young Jew paralysed him by putting his left hand negligently into his pocket. With his remaining hand he closed the hostler's right eye, and sent the flesh about it into mourning.' Zangwill included the story to make the point that 'Judaea has always a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and "fences" [etc] . . . have always been in the first rank.'15 When Yekl defends his interest in prize-fighting by evoking Russian persecution of Jews, he seems to be 168 aligning himself with muscular Judaism. To his friends, and indeed to most Orthodox Russian and Polish immigrants at this time, however, the idea of the tough Jew (the muskeljuden) was not merely an anathema but a contradiction in terms, and its adoption signalled the beginning of the end of traditional values.16 In The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Hutchins Hapgood observed that many of those who talked of the 'crimes of which they read in the newspapers, of prize-fights, of budding business propositions . . . gradually quit going to synagogue, give up heder promptly when they are thirteen years old, avoid the Yiddish theatres, seek the up-town places of amusement, dress in the latest American fashion, and have a keen eye for the right thing in neckties'.17 When Bernstein asks Yekl, 'Are there no other Christians than fighters in America?' he might have added, are no other Americans than Irish-Americans? But neither man seems aware that Yekl's American icons were both first-genera- tion Irish immigrants: Sullivan's parents came from Tralee and Athlone, Corbett's from Galway.18 If you wanted to become an American in late nineteenth-century Boston it made sense to adopt an Irish brogue and talk about Sullivan and Corbett. At the time, Irishness was almost synonymous with pugnacity, and pug- nacity was almost synonymous with Americanness; ergo the Irish were the 'real' Americans, the immigrants who best performed the accepted version of national identity.19 Assimilation simply meant adopting the ways of the previous genera- tion of immigrants. The complexities of ethnic identification form the basis of 0. Henry's 1906 story, 'The Coming-out of Maggie', in which an Irish girl sneaks her Italian boyfriend Tony Spinelli into the Clover Leaf Social Club under the name of Terry O'Sullivan. 'Terry' falls out with the leader of the Give and Take Athletic Asso- ciation, Dempsey Donovan, who challenges him to a fight. Faced with Donovan, 'dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of a modern pugilist', Terry reverts to his essential Tony-ness and, with 'a murderous look in his dark eyes', pulls a stiletto from his jacket. Maggie apologizes for bringing a 'Guinea' into the club and Donovan walks her home.20 Tony Spinelli was not the only immigrant to adopt an Irish name; many turn-of-the-century Italian and Jewish fighters fol- lowed suit. Mushy Callahan was Jewish; Hugo Kelly was Italian.21 In James T. Farrell's 1932 novel Young Lonigan, set in 1916, Old Man O'Brien remembers the good old days, 'when most of them [the boxers] were real Irish, lads who'd bless themselves before they fought: they weren't fake Irish like most of the present-day dagoes and wops and sheenies who took Hibernian names'. Meanwhile Davey Cohen, a Jewish boy, sees 'all the Irish race personified in the face of Studs Lonigan' and imagines himself 'punching that face, cutting it, bloodying the nose, blackening the eyes, mashing it'.22 Soon Jews were participating in, as well as watching and imagining, such fights. Along with Sullivan and Corbett, Yekl might have celebrated the San Francisco Jewish boxer, Joe Choynski, who fought Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Sharkey and Jack Johnson and whose father published Public Opinion, a muck- raking newspaper that exposed anti-Semitism.23 Corbett recalls that their 1889 169 fight was partly promoted as 'Jew versus Gentile'.24 In 1905, the Police Gazette noted that a generation of 'peaceable and inoffensive' Russian Jewish immi- grants had been succeeded by 'turbulent young men from whose ranks have been graduated a number of professional pugilists and boxers'.25 The first Jew- ish-American champions were bantamweight Harry Harris, who won his crown in 1901, and featherweight Abe Attell, who held the title from 1904 to 1912. In New York's Lower East Side, the first popular Jewish fighter was Leach Cross (Louis Wallach) who, from 1906 to 1915, fought as 'The Fighting Dentist', while London's East End produced 1915 world welterweight champion Ted 'Kid' Lewis (Gershon Mendeloff ), and lightweight and junior welterweight champion Jackie 'Kid' Berg (Judah Bergman), the 'Whitechapel Windmill', who famously hung his tzitzis on the ringpost at the start of each fight.26 In 1920 the Italian Samuel Mandella began fighting under the Jewish-sounding name of Sammy Mandell, and by the early 1930s, Jews dominated boxing on both sides of the Atlantic, not simply as fighters and fans, but as promoters, trainers, managers, referees, journalists and sporting goods manufacturers. It wasn't long before the story of the Jewish boy who broke his father's heart by becoming a boxer became a bit of a cliche. His People, a 1925 film about Jewish life on the Lower East Side, tells the story of Sammy and Morris Cominsky, both of whom stray from the ways of their Orthodox parents. Morris becomes a lawyer and Sammy a prize-fighter. As the father expels Sammy from the house, his words are presented in an inter-title: A box-fyteh!? So that's what you've become? For this we came to Amer- ica? So that you should become a box-fyteh? Better you should be a gangster or even a murderer. The shame of it. A box-fyteh!27 In Nineteen Nineteen (1932), John Dos Passos introduced the character of Benny Compton: 'The old people were Jews but at school Benny always said he no he wasn't a Jew he was an American'. The Compton children assimilate in differ- ent ways. Ben becomes a political activist, his sister Gladys a secretary, and their brother, Izzy 'palled around with an Irishman who was going to get him into the ring.' Although it is Benny and Gladys who eventually come to bad ends, it is Izzy's career choice that most upsets his parents. 'Momma cried and Pop for- bade any of the kids to mention his name'.28 Boxing promoters capitalized on ethnic animosities and often matched a Jew- ish fighter against an Irishman or an Italian against either (illus. 74). Prompted by the gift of The Jewish Boxers' Hall of Fame, Herman Roth recalled many of the early Jewish champions (and in particular those from New Jersey) in a 1988 conversa- tion with his son Philip, whom he had taken as a child to the Thursday night fights at Newark's Laurel Garden. 'They fought two battles', Herman said. They fought because they were fighters, and they fought because they were Jews. They'd put two guys in the ring, an Italian and a Jew, and 170 •THE RING- Bt&tr&friarji Road — SJE. Sunday- Oct. Z 7™ 1^30 Kliniiii.iting CHdlHplnhsHp Contest /■jfttmti 'imlnvi- Rounds MANCINI V HARRY Mason «NI?lfiiA1L - 4 ALF MAMCINI Reserved Seals.... S'9li)El'+'0 Unreserved.... I'lO to 4'6 HAHRY MA5QN 74 Poster advertising AlfMancini vs. Harry Mason, Southwark, London, 1930. Irishman and a Jew, and they fought like they meant it, they fought to hurt. There was always a certain amount of hatred in it. Trying to show who was superior.29 As a teenager, Philip Roth 'could recite the names and weights of all the cham- pions and contenders', and was particularly keen on Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, light heavyweight champion from 1932 to 1934. 'Jewish boxers and boxing aficionados,' he later noted, were a 'strange deviation from the norm' of Jewish culture and 'interesting largely for that reason'. In the world whose values first formed me, unrestrained physical violence was considered contemptible everywhere else. I could no more smash a nose with a fist than fire a pistol into someone's heart. And what imposed this restraint, if not on Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, then on me, was my being Jewish. In my scheme of things, Slapsie Maxie was a more miraculous Jewish phenomena by far than Dr. Albert Einstein.30 Although less strikingly named than Slapsie Maxie, the most famous Jewish boxer of the early twentieth century was undoubtedly Benny Leonard; Farrell's Davey Cohen describes him as 'one smart hebe that could beat the Irish at their own game' (illus. 75). 31 Benny's real surname was Leiner, but he fought under the name of Leonard, supposedly in case his mother read about his fights in the 171 Jewish Daily Forward. One day, returning home with a black eye, he was unable to conceal the truth from parents: My mother looked at my black eye and wept. My father, who had to work all week for $20, said, 'All right Benny, keep on fighting. It's worth getting a black eye for $20; I am getting verschwartzt [black- ened] for $20 a week.32 Leonard became world lightweight champion in 1917 and retired undefeated in 1925. 33 Like many boxers, he then dabbled in vaudeville, including a 1921 appearance in one of the Marx Brothers' most successful stage shows, a fast-paced revue called On the Mezzanine Floor. The brothers were keen fight fans, and Harpo had known Leonard for some time (illus. 76). 34 Leonard was in love with Hattie Darling, the dancing violinist star of the show, and, as Groucho recalled, 'she was able to talk him into putting money into our act'. 'A few times he joined the act and would come on stage, and the four of us would try to box with him. The audience loved that. They loved to see a world champion kidding around on stage.'35 After the Wall Street crash of 1929, Leonard briefly returned to boxing; 'The Great Bennah' died, while refereeing a fight, in 1947. In 1980, Budd Schulberg recalled Leonard's importance to the children of Jewish immigrants; children who had 'tasted the fists and felt the shoe-leather of righteous Irish and Italian Christian children'. Benny Leonard was their 'superhero'. Schulberg, who was born in 1914, was luckier than most because his father, a Hollywood mogul, knew Leonard personally. 75 Benny Leonard, cigarette card given away with The Champion, 3 June 1922. To see him climb in the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighbourhood gauntlet.36 'More than any other group of athletes', Jewish boxers provided a 'vivid coun- terpoint to popular anti-Semitic stereotypes'.37 But the stereotypes were remarkably persistent. 'No Business' (1915), by Charles E. Van Loan, is the story of a boxer called Isidore Mandelbaum. Two Irish fight fans discuss his career, and while conceding that he can 'hit with both hands - hit hard too', they lament his lack of 'the heart and the stomach'. 172 Mandelbaum, they conclude, is 'a gladiator for revenue only'. 'The only part of the fight game that he likes is the split-up in the box office . . . He'll never fight for the pure love of fightin', understand me? Put an Irish heart in him ... an' you'd have a champion - no less'. The men construct an elaborate set-up to encourage Mandelbaum to be a little more 'game' in the ring. It works and they're happy, but we never learn what Mandelbaum thought.38 Perhaps the most famous portrait from this period of a Jew who boxes is Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926).39 Cohn is not just any Jew, fresh off the boat, but 'a member, through his father, of one of the rich- est Jewish families in New York, and through his mother, one of the oldest'. He has many privileges that the novel's narrator, Jake Barnes, lacks. The first, a Prince- ton education, is mentioned in the novel's opening sentence: 'Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.' 'Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title', Jake quickly adds, 'but it meant a lot to Cohn.' The paragraph continues as a virtuoso exercise in deflation. We next learn that Cohn 'cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it', and then that 'he never fought except in the gym'. In other words, Cohn is no sportsman. Princeton may have given him a 'flattened nose', but after he left, no one remembered him or his title.40 The insinuation is that Cohn boxed in order to remove the obvious mark of his Jewishness, hoping to assume in its place the flat-nosed pugilistic style that Jake feels is his own birthright. Throughout the novel, Jake goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it takes more than a little outmoded Ivy League undergradu- ate 'spirit' to turn a Jew into a proper sporting strenuous American.41 The problem with Cohn, as Jake sees it, is that his responses to life, literature and sport are not genuine - they are, like Yekl's speech, merely a costume that he 76 The Marx Brothers with their fists raised. 173 dons. Cohn likes the idea of a mistress more than any actual mistress; the idea of 'a lady of title' more than Lady Brett Ashley; the idea of chivalrous battle more than a real fight. He thinks boxing is something that takes place in gyms, and worries that he'll be 'bored' at the corrida. His 'undergraduate quality' is constantly noted. At 34 he still wears polo shirts and reads novels full of fights and handshakes, novels like W. H. Hudson's romantic potboiler, The Purple Land (1885), which Jake claims he took literally'. When he stands up 'ready to do battle for his lady love', Jake mocks the 'childish, drunken heroic of it'. In his first fight outside the gym, Cohn ends up taking on everybody he can, all in the same spirit and in his polo shirt. He first knocks down Mike, who is 'not a fighter', and Jake, 'the human punching-bag', who then obliges him by shaking hands. But things are different with the toreador, Romero, who 'kept getting up and getting knocked down again'. When Cohn tries to shake hands with him, Romero punches him in the face. Mike dismisses both 'Jews and bullfighters' as 'those sorts of people'; Jake, however, knows that Brett's substitution of Romero for Robert, and himself, is a definite upgrade.42 Walter Benn Michaels remarks that 'Hemingway's obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable.'43 For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both 'taken in hand' by Brett, 'manipulated' in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capucines. There, a 'girl assistant' lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance on stands, while she stands with 'folded hands', looking away'.44 'the peculiar gift of the white man' The narrator of Herman Melville's 1846 novel, Typee, is surprised to find that the inhabitants of the South Sea island on which he is marooned don't under- stand boxing: 'not one of the natives', he complains, 'had soul enough in him to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him': The noble art of self-defence appeared to be regarded by them as the pe- culiar gift of the white man; and I make little doubt but that they sup- posed armies of Europeans were drawn up provided with nothing else but bony fists and stout hearts, with which they set to in column, and pummelled one another at the word of command.45 Despite the success of early nineteenth-century black boxers such as Tom Mo- lineaux and Bill Richmond, by Melville's time it had become a commonplace that 'the noble art of self-defence' - an art no less - was 'the peculiar gift of the white man'. In 1908, this confidence would be shattered when a black American became heavyweight champion of the world and the country plunged into a feverish, and futile, search for a 'great white hope' with a sufficiently stout heart and bony fists to defeat him. After 1908, many whites played down 'art' and began to talk of nature. 174 Although black Americans had boxed before the Civil War, it was really only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that they began to make any headway in the sport. This was partly to do with the development and profes- sionalization of sport in general, and partly to do with the growth of a significant black urban population. James Weldon Johnson's Black Manhattan (1930) tells the story of the origins of black urban culture, and of the ways in which 'the Negro . . . effectively impressed himself upon the city and the country'. 'Within this period,' he noted, 'roughly speaking, the Negro in the North emerged and gained national notice in three great professional sports: horse-racing, baseball, and prize-fighting.' Johnson devotes most of his attention to boxing, the sport which, he maintained, had the advantage of depending (at least more than the others) on 'individual skill and stamina'.46 The growth of an urban black sporting and theatrical community was accompanied by the development of what Johnson calls a 'black Bohemia' of sporting and gambling clubs. The walls of a typical club 'were literally covered with photographs or lithographs of every colored man in America who had ever "done anything"'. There were pictures of Frederick Douglass and of Peter Jackson, of all the lesser lights of the prize-ring, of all the famous jockeys and the stage celebrities, down to the newest song and dance team ... It was, in short, a centre of coloured Bohemians and sports.47 From the myriad of photographs and lithographs that cover the club walls, John- son picks out two portraits - those of Frederick Douglass and Peter Jackson. Jackson was a great late nineteenth-century heavyweight (and I'll consider his career in a moment), but it is worth remembering that Frederick Douglass also had a reputation as a pugilist. A SLAVE BECOMES A MAN': DOUGLASS VS. COVEY Before the Civil War, slaves in Southern states were often set to fight for the entertainment of their masters, who made money gambling on the outcome. Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave who became a prominent anti-slavery orator and author of the best-selling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an Amer- ican Slave (1845), noted with horror the way in which slave owners encouraged slaves to participate in boxing and wrestling matches, designed also to serve as 'safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity'. As an alternative Sabbath activity, Douglass set up a school to teach his fellow slaves to read, but this had to be kept secret, 'for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings'.48 For Douglass, reading, writing and speaking offered the ultimate resistance to slavery's dehumanization. Nevertheless, verbal self- expression is directly connected to violent, physical self-expression in the 175 Narrative. A 'turning-point' in the book, and in Douglass's 'career as a slave', is a fight, in which, as a sixteen-year-old boy, he takes on the brutal 'nigger-breaker' Edward Covey. Covey has broken Douglass's spirit - 'the disposition to read de- parted . . . behold a man transformed into a brute' - and it is only by fighting that he can again become a man who reads. In some ways the shape of the book follows the form of a conversion narra- tive, and the depiction of the fight, which is dense in biblical allusion, refigures religious conversion. Covey is a 'professor of religion' - 'a pious soul', the Narrative ironically notes - but it is Douglass who is preaching a sermon.49 In fighting Covey, Douglass becomes a combination of Daniel escaped from the Lions' Den, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and the suffering Christ; the outcome of the fight is likened to 'a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery'.50 Usually such a rebellion would have been rewarded with further whipping, but for reasons that Douglass does not fully convey, he remains unpunished. Neither man is really a loser here: Covey's 'unbounded reputation' as an overseer remained intact; Dou- glass gained the 'self-confidence' necessary to take the next steps in his progression towards freedom, and leadership. The conversion from bondage to freedom enacted here is not, therefore, actual - he would remain a slave for four more years - but psychological. Douglass's formulation, 'You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man', indicates that 'slave' and 'man' are to be understood as opposing and contradictory concepts (as indeed, Dou- glass believed, were 'slave' and 'American'). The events leading up to the fight show Covey whipping Douglass, and by this stage of the Narrative, we realize that to accept such whippings is to be in some way feminine.51 In resisting (and in turn feminizing) Covey - a fierce tiger before, a trembling leaf afterwards - Douglass says he has 'revived within me a sense of my own manhood'. Only when this psy- chological transformation has taken place can the truly liberating activities - read- ing, writing and running away- develop a proper momentum. It might be argued that this fight is very different from a boxing match. It did not have an audience, it was not undertaken for money or show; it was an authentic struggle. Yet in the context of the Narrative, as in all literary, or auto- biographical descriptions of fights, the scene takes on some characteristics of a performance. In addition, it is important to remember that the Narrative was written primarily for an abolitionist readership, and that Douglass was con- sciously fashioning an acceptable image of the male slave. This put him in a difficult position. On the one hand, as Richard Yarborough observes, blacks were viewed as 'unmanly and otherwise inferior because they were enslaved'; on the other hand, they were seen as 'beasts and otherwise inferior if they rebelled violently'.52 In presenting his fight with Covey, Douglass treads a fine line between appropriate manliness and frightening bestiality. Douglass wants to present himself to his readers as manly and assertive, yet not as too manly or too assertive. 'I held him uneasy causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers,' he wrote; an awkward description that seems to reflect his own uneasiness about what he had done.53 176 The problematic nature of this encounter is made evident if the later revi- sions of the Narrative are considered. In 1855, by now famous, Douglass expanded and revised his account as My Bondage and My Freedom; in 1881, a final version, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published. In these two later versions, he is not merely relating his escape from slavery; he is recount- ing the exemplary story of his life as a self-made man, Benjamin Franklin style. The fight remains central to the story, but its depiction is very different. Covey is transformed into the stock villain of the melodramatic novel, the 'scoundrel' and 'cowardly tormentor' against whom he must reluctantly defend himself. Douglass ends by apologizing to readers who might find his narration of the 'skirmish' as 'undignified' as the event itself.54 This seems to be a move toward what David Leverentz calls 'genteel chumminess': 'at any rate,' wrote Douglass, 7 was resolved to fight, and, what was better still, I was actually hard at it'.55 Yet the very expansion of a single long paragraph to several pages of detailed description might be read as itself an act of politically motivated aggression. Douglass's political views had changed significantly since 1845. Then, he opposed the idea of violent slave resistance, which he believed would delay aboli- tion; instead he called for the peaceful conversion of slaveholders. After the in- troduction of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he became frustrated with the ineffectiveness of non-violent persuasion and began to speak out in favour of ac- tive, violent, slave resistance as both morally defensible and more likely to end slavery.56 Douglass may also have thought it necessary to develop the fight scene as counter-propaganda to Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-selling 1852 novel, Uncle Tom 's Cabin, a work which certainly did not advocate slave rebellion. In a piv- otal scene, Uncle Tom capitulates, with Christian stoicism, to the whip of Simon Legree.57 Dramatizations of the novel were popular well into the twentieth cen- tury, and, in one of the ironies of segregated America, many black boxers, some of whom, like Peter Jackson and Jack Johnson, had recently defeated white op- ponents, found ready employment playing the mild, emasculated Tom.58 My Bondage uses every means possible, including italics and capitals, to emphasize both Douglass's manliness - 'I was nothing before; I was a man now' - and the role that the fight played in developing it - A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity.'59 As a free man, Douglass retained his faith in pugilistic metaphor and ex- ample. In 1862 he made a speech to a largely black audience in which he com- plained that 'we are striking the guilty rebels with our soft white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man'.60 The following year, he intensified his call of 'Men of Color, To Arms', arguing that the 'imper- iled nation' must 'unchain against her foes her powerful black hand . . . Words are useful only as they stimulate blows . . . "Who would be free, must them- selves strike the blow."'61 At the height of the war, in 1864, Douglass declared that the conflict had 'swept away' many 'delusions' about black men. 'One was . . . that the Negro would not fight; that he . . . was a perfect lamb, or an "Uncle Tom"; disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be 177 whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him'. The war, Douglass noted, 'has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the Negro, and that he will fight, as Mr. Quincy, our President, said, in earlier days than these, "when there is a reasonable probability of his whipping anybody"'.62 I have discussed Douglass vs. Covey in some detail partly because of its own interest as a fight story, but also because of its continued importance for black American writers, artists and political leaders throughout the twentieth cen- tury.63 After his death in 1897, Douglass was frequently presented as a model of 'the New Negro Man', exemplary to some in his 'manly courage', and, to others, in his self-restraint and patience.64 Paul Lawrence Dunbar's elegy, for example, celebrates him as 'no soft-tongued apologist' but a warrior: 'He died in action, with his armor on.'65 A rather less forceful figure emerges in Booker T. Washing- ton's 1906 biography, in which he both sought to establish himself as Douglass's rightful heir and to distance himself from his defiant tone. That Washington had some trouble with the Covey fight is indicated by the brevity of his account of it, and by his frequent use of words such as 'reckless' and 'rash'. The fight over, both men behave suspiciously well. Covey admits himself 'fairly outdone', while, Washington concludes, 'it speaks well for the natural dignity and good sense of young Douglass that he neither boasted of his triumph nor did any- thing rash as a consequence of it'.66 A few years later, Washington would ex- press concern at both the rash behaviour and boastfulness of the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. Throughout the twentieth century, explorations of the nature of black lead- ership often allude to Douglass and his portrait crops up in many places, often aligned, or contrasted with, that of a prize-fighter. Douglass himself kept a pic- ture of Peter Jackson in his study and, according to James Weldon Johnson, 'used to point to it and say, "Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question"'.67 For many, Frederick Douglass's battle with Covey remained the model of what an authentic black vs. white fight should be (illus. 77). Following Emancipation and Reconstruction, increasing anxiety about polic- ing the boundaries between blacks and whites led to the introduction of wide- spread segregation (institutionalized with the infamous Supreme Court Pessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896 which guaranteed 'separate but equal' status for blacks). In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois declared that 'the problem of the twentieth cen- tury' would be 'the problem of the color line', and the colour line was firmly asserted in most competitive sports.68 Initially, boxing was less segregated than team sports such as baseball and football. George Dixon held the American ban- tamweight title from 1890 to 1892, and the featherweight title from 1892 to 1900; Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1906, and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908. Although many white fans, particu- larly in the South, 'winced' every time a black boxer hit a white boxer, these fights continued.69 But the heavyweight title carried heavier symbolism. Today Peter Jackson is often described as the finest boxer never to have fought for a world title. He wanted to, but no champion would take him on. 178 77 Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Douglass series, no. 10, 1938-9, tempera on hardboard. Having won Australia's heavyweight championship in 1886, Jackson travelled to the United States looking for a match with John L. Sullivan. While he received an ecstatic reception from black Americans - 'in every city the local black community went wild with excitement over his presence and would honor him with a testimonial dinner' - Sullivan refused to meet him.70 In 1891, in the face of a great deal of adverse publicity, Jim Corbett agreed to a contest. Corbett presented his decision to fight Jackson as a kind of experiment: 'There may be something in a dark opponent that is not found in a light one and, if so, it behooves me to find out.'71 An unprecedented purse of $10,000 may also have helped. A classic of endurance, Jackson vs. Corbett was finally stopped in the 61st round, by which time the fighters were struggling to keep upright, and many spectators had fallen asleep.72 As the fight had been declared a draw either man could justifiably have challenged Sullivan's title. Both did, but Sullivan ignored Jackson. A few months later Corbett won the title and imme- diately capitalized on his sex-symbol reputation by taking to the stage. He was 179 not frightened of Jackson, he said, just too busy for a rematch. With no alter- natives, Jackson also resorted to the theatre, where he toured as Uncle Tom. When he tried to introduce a little sparring into the role (and thus maintain his credibility as a championship contender) the press complained that he had 'degraded the character'.73 Peter Jackson's rather limited moment of glory came in 1892 at London's National Sporting Club. The Club had opened just six months earlier, and of- fered as the climax to its inaugural season a keenly fought contest between Jack- son and Frank Slavin. The fight lived up to its billing. Soon everyone who was anyone claimed to have been there. Young Winston Churchill bunked off from Harrow to attend. He drew a rather ugly caricature of Jackson and reputedly used it to settle his tuckshop bill.74 The fight may have inspired another artist, too: in his 1898 volume of woodcuts, Almanac of Sports, Sir William Nicholson chose to represent boxing with an image of a white and a black fighter, poised for action (illus. 78). The night itself was a study in contrasts. Jackson, celebrated as the Black Prince, dressed in white; Slavin, who was white, wore dark blue. Jackson was slim and 'beautifully proportioned'. But it was Slavin, 'with his beetle brows and smouldering, deep-sunken eyes, leonine mane, fierce mous- tache, hairy chest and arms', who was London's idol. He was also an unabashed 78 Sir William Nicholson, 'November' from An Almanac of Twelve Sports, 180 racist, and had loudly declared that 'to be beaten by a black fellow, however good a fellow, is a pill I shall never swallow'. Slavin had to swallow the pill, but it was administered with care. Jackson steadily demolished his outclassed opponent for nine rounds, then looked to the referee to stop the fight. Urged to box on, he brought Slavin to his knees with 'five mercifully gentle blows'. Someone heard him say, 'Sorry, Frank.'75 Born in the Virgin Islands and raised in Australia, Jack- son knew the gestures that were required of the Empire's subjects.7 In 1930 James Weldon Johnson described Jackson as the first prize-fighter who was also a 'cultured gentleman'. 'His chivalry in the ring was so great that sports-writers down to today apply to him the doubtful compliment "a white colored man".'77 The next black contender, Jack Johnson, would not be so chivalrous. THE GOLDEN GRIN Writing in 1936 on the 'ethics of living Jim Crow', novelist Richard Wright noted many subjects that were 'taboo from the white man's point of view': American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro sol- diers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slav- ery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amend- ments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.78 Among a range of general topics such as 'slavery' and 'social equality', only four individuals are named: three are the liberators of the Civil War - General Sher- man, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln; the fourth, an early twentieth- century black boxer, Jack Johnson. How did Johnson endup in such illustrious company, and why his name was still taboo to whites in 1936? Born in the port of Galveston, Texas in 1878, Arthur John Johnson was of the first generation of free black Americans. At thirteen he began working on the docks where he soon developed a reputation as a fighter, and, at seventeen, he took up boxing professionally. After beating all the other good black heavy- weights, including Joe Jeanette and Sam Langford, he secured a title fight in Australia, then one of the world's boxing centres. The promoter's guarantee of $30,000 supposedly overcame the reluctance of then champion Tommy Burns (whose real name was Noah Brusso) to fight a black man. 'Shame on the money- mad Champion!' John L. Sullivan is said to have exclaimed, 'Shame on the man who upsets good American precedents because there are Dollars, Dollars, Dol- lars in it.'79 On 26 December 1908, after fourteen rounds, during which Johnson casually taunted the out-matched Burns, the referee stopped the match.80 Jack London was there, and his fight report established the terms in which Johnson would most often be subsequently described: 181 A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson's . . . At times . . . Johnson would deliberately assume the fierce, vicious, in- tent expression, only apparently for the purpose of suddenly relaxing and letting his teeth flash forth like the rise of a harvest moon, while his face beamed with all the happy care-free innocence of a little child . . . [Johnson's] part was the clown.81 London's view of Johnson as a clown or a minstrel drew upon the myth of black shiftless gaiety peddled by 'coon songs' popular since before the Civil War (char- acteristic numbers included A Nigger's Life is Always Gay' and 'Happy Are We, Darkies So Gay'). When Johnson entered the ring to fight Jim Jeffries in Reno in 1910, the band played All Coons Look Alike to Me'.82 The popular press repre- sented Johnson's victory with a flurry of Sambo cartoons, all emphasizing his smile.83 Johnson's 'golden grin' (he had several gold teeth) quickly became his trademark, a symbol of laughing defiance that infuriated and obsessed white America. But what many critics described as Johnson's laziness' was in fact a carefully thought out defensive style. He fought with his hands low, at only chest height, and looked like an artist leaning back from a canvas to evaluate the pic- ture from a distance'. This defensive style, Randy Roberts points out, was culti- vated by all the great black heavyweights of the time; in order to secure fights they needed 'to just barely defeat' their white opponents.84 Within moments of Johnson's gaining the title, the search for an Anglo- Saxon challenger began. Former champion Jim Jeffries was the popular choice to come out of retirement and 'remove the golden smile from Jack Johnson's face'.85 Jeffries was 'the great white hope'. Now ubiquitous, the phrase seems to have been coined by London, perhaps trying to evoke Roosevelt's reputation as the 'Great White Father' or Rudyard Kipling's 'White Man's Burden'. Written in response to the Roosevelt-led American takeover of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1899, Kipling's poem instructs readers to 'Take up the White Man's Burden - / Send forth the best ye breed'.86 The expectations of white America were a heavy burden indeed. In the run-up to the Johnson-Jeffries fight, the Social Darwinian 'scientific' racist rhetoric of the day intensified. Promoter Tex Rickard foolishly advertised the fight as the 'ultimate test of racial superiority', and newspapers published articles predicting that Jeffries, who 'had Runnymede and Agincourt behind him', was bound to beat Johnson who 'had nothing but the jungle'.87 The same result was also predicted, in song, by Groucho Marx, as an inadvisable part of his act at the Pekin, an all-black theatre in Chicago. Unfortunately for Groucho, 'Johnson was in the audience'; he 'barely survived the evening'.88 'Heart', the quality that Jews also seemed to lack, and a possible 'yellow streak' were much discussed. Is Johnson a typical example of his race in the lack of that intangible "something" that we call "heart"?' asked a typical newspaper columnist.89 In the weird world of racial attribution, blacks did, it seemed, have some advan- tages. Would Johnson benefit from what some saw as an 'insensibility to pain 182 which distinguishes the African and gives him a peculiar advantage in the sports of the ring'? Would Jeffries, 'a thinker' who 'undoubtedly possesses the worry- ing qualities of the white race' lose out to the 'care free and cool' Johnson? 'The art of relaxing', London claimed, was 'one of Johnson's great assets' since the 'tensing of muscle consumes energy'.90 What was announced as the 'fight of the century' finally took place in Reno, Nevada, on 4 July 1910, and ended in the fifteenth round when Jeffries's seconds threw in the towel. Assertions of white supremacy suddenly seemed a lot less certain. News of the result spread quickly by telegraph; crowds gathered in front of the 'automatic bulletin' at the New York Times building, and the paper later reported Johnson's mother and sisters listening to its click on the stage of the Pekin Theatre in Chicago and sharing 'in the big crowd's happiness'.91 But for blacks in less congenial surroundings, the result was not such good news. Louis Armstrong recalled being told to hurry home from his paper round in New Orleans, while Henry Crowder remembered thousands of whites gath- ering in Washington's Pennsylvania Avenue: 'no Negro dared show his face on that street'.92 As the news spread by telegraph across America, lynchings, fights and full-scale riots were reported. Allen Guttman summarizes: In Houston, Charles Williams openly celebrated Johnson's triumph and a white man 'slashed his throat from ear to ear'; in Little Rock, two blacks were killed by a group of whites after an argument about the fight in a streetcar; in Roanoke, Virginia, a gang of white sailors injured several blacks; in Wilmington, Delaware, a group of blacks attacked a white and whites retaliated with a lynching bee'; in Atlanta a black ran amok with a knife; in Washington . . . two whites were fatally stabbed by blacks; in New York, one black was beaten to death and scores were injured; in Pueblo, Colorado, thirty people were injured in a race riot; in Shreveport, Louisiana, three blacks were killed by white assailants. Other murders or injuries were reported in New Orleans, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St Joseph, Los Angeles, Chattanooga, and many other small cities and towns.93 For some, the dead became martyrs in the struggle for equality. William Pickens, later field secretary of the naacp, wrote in the Chicago Defender that 'it was a good deal better for Johnson to win, and a few Negroes to be killed in body for it, than for Johnson to have lost and all Negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press'.94 A 1910 postcard presented Johnson alongside Abraham Lincolm as 'Our Champions' (illus. 79). In the months and years that followed, the search for a suitable white chal- lenger continued. Johnson had refused to fight any black contenders, recogniz- ing that in such contests he had nothing to gain and everything to lose. 'I am 183 IfVH rli.iu.p : kp ( .-.|.:T-.< 1910— CliMnliJiM. 1 [r.lf HT.xdl K,.rl" Cdm, »F(J*W»ikJ. OUR CHAMPIONS • ■ H x^^^B^. JP \f *7"v / Abiiki ii fin (■ . / v... . ABRAHAM LINCOLN __ 79 0«r Champions: Abraham Lincoln andjackjohnson, postcard, 1910. champion of the world', he reputedly said, 'I have had a hard time to get a chance and I really think I am the only colored fellow who ever was given a chance to win the title . . . I'll retire the only colored heavyweight champion.'95 Soon, as John Lardner put it, 'well-muscled white boys more than six feet two inches tall were not safe out of their mother's sight', but nothing seemed to work.96 Seeing Johnson humble successive white hopes, many whites lost hope about the best that they could breed. Some took comfort in the belief that it was merely generational problem . 'Honestly', asked William A. Phelon, 'is there one single, genuine, solitary Hope, now rampant and challenging, that you be- lieve could have gone five rounds with Bob Fitzsimmons?' Fitzsimmons, Sulli- van, or Corbett 'could have plowed though the present staff of hopes like an axe through cheese'.97 In a 1912 cartoon, a red-faced reveller looks at a poster adver- tising the latest challenger and reflects, 'If I wuz the man I wuz, they wouldn't need him' (illus. 53). Some decided simply to ignore Johnson and staged all-white champion- -ships. Georges Carpentier's London fight against Gunboat Smith in 1914, for instance, was billed the 'White World Heavy-Weight Championship'; Carpentier noted that this was 'certainly good publicity if perhaps a trifle unorthodox'.98 Others relied on fiction for consolatory stories of white triumph. Just a few months after Jeffries's defeat, Jack London began work on The Absymal Brute, the story of a white boy, Pat Glendon, who only fights other white boys. Nevertheless, Johnson's existence as the real champion was hard for London to forget. Glendon is described as 'the hope of the white race' and there is a passing reference to Jeffries who could have 'worried' him 'a bit, but only a bit'.99 Jeffries and the Reno fight are also mentioned in Edgar Rice Burroughs's 1914 serial The Mucker and W.R.H. Trowbridge's The White Hope (1913), but there too, fictional compensation is provided. After defeating a series of 'white hopes', Burroughs's Chicago-Irish 'mucker', Billy Byrne, emerges as 'the most likely heavy since 184 Jeffries'. The story ends with a deal to fight 'the black champion', although Byrne's manager complains that the terms are 'as usual, rather one-sided'.100 More ambitious in its fantasy, the finale of The White Hope sees the middle- weight crown wrested away from a 'grinning' black champion. The negro's knees sagged and he lurched forward . . . Sam Crowfoot, face down on the boards, with the sand of the ring showing in patches on his black skin, was out to the world.101 80 Advertisement for Jeffries-Johnson Fight Pictures, 1910. Jeffries-Johnson Fight Pictures BHUi uncii ; Much of the public agitation about Johnson's continuing success centred around its representation, and circulation, on film. In 1910, many states acted quickly to ban showings of the Reno film, arguing that riots would necessarily follow. The film was not shown in the South or in most American cities. When news spread that Johnson was due to defend his title against Jim Flynn on 4 July 1912, the '"white hopes" of Congress' got to work.102 Just weeks after Johnson's knockout of Flynn, the Sims Act was passed, forbidding the interstate trans- portation of any film showing 'any prize fight or encounter of pugilists' for 'purposes of public exhibition' (illus. 80). In 1915, when D. W. Griffith's Klan- celebrating The Birth of a Nation was released, James Weldon Johnson won- dered if 'some of the moral fervour' expended against prize-fight films might be extended to Griffith's movie.103 Whites who had previously cele- brated boxing as the sport of manly self-assertion, now remarked brutality. Theodore Roosevelt, longtime champion of the strenuous art, announced that he was forsaking boxing after Jeffries 's defeat. T sincerely trust,' Roosevelt declared piously, 'that public sentiment will be so aroused, and will make itself felt so effec- tively, as to guarantee that this is the last prize fight to take place in the United States.'104 How curious, W.E.B. Du Bois pointed, that it was only when the world champion was black that commentators felt the urge to object to boxing per se. 'Neither he nor his race invented prize fighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black.'105 In the years that followed Johnson's 1915 defeat, Du Bois remained unsure about the significance of boxers as cultural heroes. On the one hand, he worried that an interest in sport Tfei U Hm Hkc-ttt, Hm, Htrtfc, Jut? 4, I9t0. Dj 1h» NEW YORK HERALD *--■!- ni(i'nl«il ■■■!«■*• Every Vital Mttment of the World's Crealesl Kitvv-wiiglil Ohanpiwisliip Battle S50.00-HDYJILH FDR EACH WEEK'S USE--S50.00 Tbii u Ih Cnlriin (Hmrlmilj !**• Lin, llp-te-Nii-Mnril Shownun ma m wsnimr the bki hctujes m the umn — Ti~t—-^i^' >_- *+— -i. *** J ***■ ^ 1 ii h--*HiHLp»^B»pp Mf¥rrm wif mitM-r* mi ma mothiii u ^n.n*"ir> H airbittCnn m IB These are Ihe ffnlf Csiilmb Jeffrie Jolran field Piclures LOUIS J. BERG.ER, Secretary. TSflft BroBdw«v- l-.m~- -~ -™,-*«i« HEW YORK CUT M^['i-:f "«1 1*1 1"*" *■■■ "ii'ii hfiiiL Hiu 11 r mi urn ™»- BLM* _* '*■ — "*f5V^^T* "YTV"" rfj *"*" ' *^_W^ 185 might distract black Americans from the importance of education, noting, for example, that the receipts from Harry Willis's fight with Luis Firpo were 'enough to endow a Negro University'.106 On the other hand, the continuing success of black boxers in the 1920s was a repeated blow to white supremacy, and their continuing bad treatment a reminder that whites were 'afraid to meet black boxers in competition wherever equality and fairness in the contest are necessary'.107 As a folk hero Jack Johnson's reputation rested on much more than simply his boxing skill. In and out of the ring, he flamboyantly broke taboos. Urged by civil rights activist Ida B. Wells to invest in a gymnasium for black boys in Chicago's South Side, Johnson instead opened the Cafe de Champion, serving black and white customers together. Wells complained that he was catering to the 'worst passions of both races'.108 By his own admission, Johnson was 'a dandy'; shaving his head and sporting everything Booker T. Washington had promised whites that accommodating blacks would refrain from wearing: 'a high hat, imitation gold eye-glasses, a showy walking-stick, kid gloves, fancy boots, and what not'.109 In 1909 Washington's personal secretary argued that Johnson needed to 'refrain from anything resembling boastfulness'.110 He also liked fast cars and famously hired a white chauffeur to drive him around.111 Worse of all, Johnson spent his money on white prostitutes and had three wives, all white.112 Just months after legislating against the interstate transportation of Johnson's films, the American legal system took another shot at the champion. In 1912 Johnson was charged with having violated the 1910 'White Slave Traffic Act', also known by the name of its sponsor, Mann. The Act was designed to target commercial vice rings and it was rare that individuals were taken to court. But, 'for Jack Johnson the government was willing to make an exception'. When charges concerning Lucille Cameron (a 'sporting woman' whom he later mar- ried) fell through, the government latched onto Belle Schreiber. Resentful at having been rejected by Johnson, she testified to receiving money and crossing state lines with the boxer.113 Booker T. Washington issued a statement deplor- ing Johnson's behaviour and claiming that it would injure the 'whole race'. 'I do not believe it is necessary for me to say that the honest, sober element of the Negro people of the United States is as severe in condemnation of this kind of immorality ... as any other portion of the community.'114 The whole case was, as Johnson later said, 'a rank frame-up.'115 But that made no odds. Convicted by a white jury and sentenced to a year and a day in prison and a $1000 fine, he jumped bail and fled the country with Lucille in 1913. He spent the next two years in giving exhibition fights and performing as the 'agreeable gentleman with the settled smile and the shining white teeth' in vaudeville in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.116 In 1915 Johnson agreed to defend his title against the white American Jess Willard in Havana. Willard knocked Johnson out in the 26th round according, Johnson later claimed, to a deal he had made with the fbi in order to be allowed to return to the States. Most boxing historians, having studied the film footage, believe that it was a fair fight.117 On becoming cham- 186 pion, Willard immediately reinstated the colour line. It was upheld until 1937 when Joe Louis finally broke it for good. In the years that followed his defeat, Johnson's star showed no signs of wan- ing. When he arrived in Harlem in 1921, after finally serving his jail sentence in Kansas, he was welcomed by thousands as a returning hero. The explosion of 1920s black urban culture, now known as the Harlem Renaissance, established him as an iconic figure. Claude McKay's 1928 novel Home to Harlem is full of ref- erences to Johnson; every time someone gets hit his name is evoked. As well as pugnacity, the boxer represented the possibility of black celebrity. One little boy shows off to another that he 'done met mos'n all our big niggers', including Johnson, but both are upstaged by a Miss Curdy who claims to know 'all that up- stage race gang that wouldn't touch Jack Johnson with a ten-foot pole'. The greatest compliment the protagonist Jake receives is when someone tells him, 'If I was as famous as Jack Johnson and rich as Madame Walker I'd prefer to have you as my friend than - President Wilson.'118 The eventful, and inspirational, life of Johnson appealed to writers, and even more to publishers. In 1930, following the success of the reissued The Autobiog- raphy of an Ex-Colored Man, publisher Blanche Knopf urged James Weldon John- son to write a novel based on Johnson. When he refused, she turned to Walter White. Although he contemplated including Johnson in a planned series of bi- ographical essays and wrote 152 pages of a novel about a boxer, neither project was completed.119 Instead Johnson's story was told in minstrel show sketches such as The Coming Champion (illus. 54) and in a Broadway play by two white writers, Jim Tully and Frank Dazey, called Black Boy.1,10 Black Boy opened in 1926, with Paul Robeson taking the lead (illus. 81). The fact that 'Black Boy' became in- volved with a white woman on stage prompted great controversy. Robert Cole- man wrote in the New York Daily Mirror that 'the authors have cheapened their portrait of the pugilist by introducing the problem of race antagonism. In our opinion it is always in bad taste to introduce this unpleasant element.'121 ASCERTAINING THE PROGRESS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO' The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was not simply a flowering of black art, but part of a much larger process of political and social change. Postwar politi- cal radicalism was largely diverted into a cultural patriotism which asked what 'gift' blacks could contribute to the American melting pot.122 Works such as Alain Locke's The New Negro (1925) and V. F. Calverton's An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) sought to demonstrate 'the existence of the black tradition as a political defense of the racial self against racism'.123 In a 1916 essay called 'Inside Measurement', James Weldon Johnson considered what he thought were the 'various methods of measurement for ascertaining the progress of the American Negro'. What he termed 'outside measurements' recorded growth in population and increase in wealth. An 'inner measurement' could be made by keeping 'a record of the number of intelligently written books bought and read each year by 187 81 Paul Robeson on stage in Black Boy, 1926. the colored people'.124 Johnson developed this idea further in The Book of Amer- ican Negro Poetry (1922), where he argued that the artistic achievement of black Americans could go a long way in improving their social status in the United States.125 In 1903 Du Bois had argued that an overemphasis on industrial educa- tion would not produce black leaders: instead a 'talented tenth' must be encour- aged to achieve as cultured individuals in order to 'inspire the masses'.126 Johnson was a problematic figure for the Harlem intellectuals. On the one hand, it was widely believed that art and literature were the correct ways to demonstrate 'intellectual parity'. On the other, in 1915, Weldon Johnson con- ceded that 'there is not, perhaps, a spot on the globe where Jack Johnson's name is not familiar'. Johnson's bad personal breaks deprived him of the sympathy and ap- proval of most of his own race; yet it must be admitted that with these 188 breaks left out of the question, his record as a pugilist has been some- thing of a racial asset. The white race, in spite of its vaunted civiliza- tion, pays more attention to the argument of force than any other race in the world.127 Some years later, Weldon Johnson wrote of his meeting with Jack Johnson, and, alluding to Douglass's comment that Peter Jackson had done 'a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question', concluded that 'after the reckoning of his big and little failings has been made, [Johnson] may be said to have done his share'.128 If the celebration of a sports hero was difficult to square with a belief in artistic and intellectual achievement, one way to reconcile them was to con- sider boxing itself as an art or as analogous to art. In his 1916 essay, 'The Negro in American Art', Weldon Johnson had argued that 'there is nothing of artistic value belonging to America which has not been originated by the Negro'. As 'partial corroboration' he quoted the white avant-garde artist and editor Robert Coady, describing Jack Johnson's 'shadow dancing', as 'the most beautiful danc- ing of modern times'. 'When he strikes a fighting pose', Coady rhapsodized, 'we are carried back to the days of Greek bronzes.'129 Perhaps it was not so far- fetched then to imagine Johnson as a member of the Talented Tenth.130 But not everyone agreed with such analogies. In 1926 George Schuyler de- nounced what he called 'The Negro-Art Hokum'. There was, he claimed, no unique Aframerican art': 'the literature, painting and sculpture of Aframeri- cans - such as there is - is identical in kind with the literature, painting and sculpture of white Americans'. To say otherwise, he implied, was just another form of racist thinking: The mere mention of the word 'Negro' conjures up in the average white American's mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappy, and the various mon- strosities scrawled by cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a com- posite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.131 For Schuyler, Johnson's influence was of no more use than that of Uncle Tom; indeed, in some ways, it might be seen as worse. 'It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet', George Bernard Shaw remarked to Claude McKay in 1920. 'Why didn't you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?'132 'THE NEW NEGRO. WHEN HE'S HIT, HE HITS BACK!' For the most part, Jack Johnson was celebrated less for his statuesque appearance than for his defiant qualities - however stereotypal those might be. During the First World War, for example, heavy black shells were nicknamed 'Jack John- sons'.133 Numerous songs celebrated his victory over Jeffries. One blues reworked 189 'Amazing Grace' so that the 'sweet' and saving sound was no longer God's word, but the thud of Jeffries hitting the canvas. Amaze an' Grace, how sweet it sounds, Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down. Jim Jeffries jumped up an' hit Jack on the chin, An' then Jack knocked him down agin. The Yankees hold the play, The white man pulls the trigger; But it makes no difference what the white man say, The world champion's still a nigger.134 However assertive the 'but' might be, it only serves highlight the limits of John- son's victory in a world in which the white man 'holds the play' and 'pulls the trigger'. Other popular songs were less equivocal. 'The Black Gladiator: Veni, Vidi, Vici- Jack Johnson' celebrated his victory over Burns as 'proof that all men are the same / in muscle, sinew, and in brain / No blood flows through our veins / but that of Negro Ham's own strain / Master of all the world -your claim.'135 'Titanic', a 1912 song by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), is equally forth- right. The flooring of Jeffries is matched as a blow to white supremacists only by the sinking of the Titanic (which wouldn't allow blacks as passengers). It was midnight on the sea, The band was playin' 'Nearer, My God, to Thee.' Cryin', 'Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!' Jack Johnson wanted to get on boa'd; Captain Smith hollered, 'I ain't haulin' no coal.' Crying 'Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!' Black man oughta shout for joy, Never lost a girl or either a boy. Crying, 'Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!'1313 At the end of the First World War, the black soldiers who returned to Amer- ica were unwilling to put up with escalating white racism. The summer of 1919 saw unprecedented race riots, and in their wake, the Liberator published Claude McKay's sonnet, 'If We Must Die', now often considered the 'inaugural address' of the Harlem Renaissance.137 The poem depicted blacks as 'hogs', 'hunted and penned in an inglorious spot', and whites as 'mad and hungry dogs / Making their mock at our accursed lot'. It ends with the plea that 'though far outnum- bered let us show brave, / And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!' 190 Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!138 What was supposedly 'new' about the much discussed New Negro was not aggression but retaliation; not a desire to fight, but a renewed willingness to fight back.139 In 1921, Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, described 'a negro magazine' bearing the legend (an adaptation of Frederick Douglass's Childe Harold allusion), 'They who would be free must themselves strike the blow.' When hit, Hartt concluded, the New Negro, unlike 'the timorous, docile negro of the past', does not hesitate to 'hit back'.140 The political radicalism of the New Negro was often linked to his 'dauntless man- hood'. 'The Old Negro,' wrote J. A. Rogers in 1927, 'protests that he does not want social equality; the New . . . demands it.' While 'the Old . . . acts as if he were always in the way', 'the New is erect, manly, bold; if necessary, defiant'.141 For many, the New Negro was epitomized in the figure of Jack Johnson, and his name became a shorthand for many different kinds of 'erect, manly; if necessary, defiant' behaviour. Zora Neale Hurston noted that in the folktales she grew up with, the trickster who 'outsmarted the devil' was always called 'Jack' or 'High John de Conquer'; he was 'our hope-bringer'.142 After 1910, black men who challenged, and beat, white authority were commonly dubbed, or dubbed themselves, 'Jack Johnson'.143 In 1934 Henry Crowder published a series of eight autobiographical vignettes about segregation, racial abuse, and 'hitting back' in Negro, an anthology edited by Nancy Cunard. In the first, he walks away after being refused service in a Georgia cafe, but by the second, he is not afraid to 'wade in'. The final vignette tells of Johnson's defeat of Jeffries and the fights that broke out in its wake in Washington. While the police search for 'a giant Negro armed with brass knuckles', 'we Negroes remained where we were, drinking and laughing'.144 One of the books reviewed in Negro was Sterling Brown's Southern Road (1932); Alain Locke designated Brown 'the New Negro Folk-Poet'.145 In one of the strongest poems in the collection, 'Strange Legacies', Brown places Johnson alongside John Henry and 'a nameless couple' of sharecroppers as symbols of folk resilience; all endured their troubles, 'taking punishment'. The poem ends, 'guess we'll give it one mo' try'. One thing you left with us, Jack Johnson. One thing before they got you. You used to stand there like a man, Taking punishment With a golden, spacious grin; Confident. Inviting big Jim Jeffries, who was boring in: "Heah ah is, big boy; yuh sees whah Ise at. 191 Come on in . . ." Thanks, Jack, for that.146 Some linked Johnson's 'hitting back' to Frederick Douglass's resistance to Covey, and Johnson himself lined up with Douglass against Booker T. Wash- ington, who had condemned his behaviour on several occasions. Washington, Johnson wrote in 1927, ' has to my mind not been altogether frank in the state- ment of the problem or courageous in his solutions'. Douglass's 'honest and straightforward program has had more of an appeal to me, because he faced is- sues without compromising.'147 In 1919, Johnson had taken out an adver- tisement in an Industrial Workers of the World magazine, Gale's, urging 'colored people' to leave 'the "boasted" land of the liberty' and move to Mexico where they would no longer be lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discrim- inated against'.148 In 1922 Claude McKay travelled to the Soviet Union, one of the first black Americans to be invited by the Bolshevik government. While in Moscow he was commissioned to write a short book to inform the Soviets about the condition of Negry v Amerike {The Negroes in America). Although McKay was keen to argue that race should be considered primarily 'from a class point of view', his analysis focuses as much on culture as on economics.149 In a chapter titled 'Negroes in Sports', McKay provides a complex and astute reading of Jack Johnson and the ideological status of black boxers more generally.150 The prize-fighter only has limited value as a symbol for defiance. Although the boxing ring can seem to be a site of struggle against white dominance (one where African-American workers 'exert all their efforts to gain the victory' and one where victory is possible), it nevertheless remains a 'large business . . . managed by corporations', white corporations that set the terms of black entrance and success. For McKay, it was foolish to believe that 'racial differences' could be resolved by 'fist fights arranged for a commercial purpose'.151 Langston Hughes made a similar point in 'Prize Fighter' (1927): Only dumb guys fight If I wasn't dumb I wouldn't be fightin'. I could make six dollars a day. On the docks And I'd save more than I do now. Only dumb guys fight.152 But while Marxists such as Hughes and McKay pointed out the economic reality, the symbolism of Johnson's career, and interracial fighting more gener- ally, continued to have resonance for many artists and writers. In Archibald J. Motley's 1933 painting, The Plotters, a fight between a black and a white boxer 192 is used to represent not simply defiance and resilience, but conspiracy (illus. 55). The painting depicts a group of black men sitting at a table, and the title tells us what they are doing. Two men at the table look intently at one another while a partially obscured standing figure points at a piece of paper. On the wall be- hind the table we see part of a painting, featuring a black and a white boxer. The men at the table, like the boxers in the painting, seem too large for the confines of the framed space. A boxing match may be nothing more than a de- grading, commercially motivated performance, nevertheless, as Motley sug- gests, it can symbolically represent a real fight. A similar thought seems to lie behind 'Box Seat', a story in Jean Toomer's Cane (1923), in which a boxing match between dwarfs is performed as a grotesque spectacle. Dan Moore, angry and frustrated with the 'sick' world, has followed the respectable Muriel into the theatre. At first he is appalled by the freak show and thinks Muriel, who is trying to pass as white, a 'she-slave' for watching. But all of a sudden, play-acting breaks out into something else when one of the men lands a stiff blow'. 'This makes the other sore. He commences slugging. A real scrap is on.' The gong rings. No fooling this time. The dwarfs set to. They clinch. The referee parts them. One swings a cruel upper-cut and knocks the other down. A huge head hits the floor. Pop! The house roars. The fighter, groggy, scrambles up. The referee whispers to the contenders not to fight so hard. They ignore him. They charge. Their heads jab like boxing gloves. They kick and spit and bite. They pound each other furiously. Muriel pounds. The house pounds. Cut lips. Bloody noses. The referee asks for the gong. Time! The house roars. The dwarfs bow, are made to bow. The house wants more. The dwarfs are led from the stage.153 But the crowd is not satisfied until the violence of the contest is defused by the winner of the fight, Mr. Barry, singing 'a sentimental love song' to various girls in the audience. Finally Mr. Barry turns to Muriel, and offers her a white rose, which he has kissed with his blood-stained lips. She 'shrinks away', 'flinches back', 'tight in revulsion', but this only provokes him further. Dan reads the dwarf's eyes as a reproach and an acknowledgment of their shared identity as Christ-like freaks. He leaps up, shouts, 'jesus was once a leper!', and 'hooks' the jaw of the complaining man sitting next to him. The story ends with the man taking off his jacket to fight in earnest in an alley behind the theatre, but Dan, 'having forgotten him', walks away.154 MATTERS OF COLOUR Jack Johnson's career had a significant resonance for white, as well as black, artists and writers. While black artists saw Johnson as an inspirational figure (whether representing the possibility of celebrity, progress or defiance) and paid 193 no attention either to his white opponents or to his white wives, whites were almost obsessively drawn to representations of a black and a white man fight- ing together. The only time that Johnson (or a Johnson-like figure) is mentioned without reference to a white opponent, or girlfriend, he functions as a minstrel figure.155 In Conan Doyle's 1926 story, 'The Adventure of the Three Gables', a black boxer bursts into Sherlock Holmes's rooms at Baker Street and offends Dr Watson and the detective with his 'hideous mouth' and 'smell'. Watson's first impression is that 'he would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmon- coloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.' After he has left Holmes tells Watson that he is 'glad you were not forced to break his woolly head': 'he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby, and easily cowed, as you have seen.'156 John- son is also 'easily cowed' in a story that William Carlos Williams included in his Autobiography. One day there was 'a near riot' in a cafe in Paris. 'They began tear- ing the chairs apart for clubs. When it was all over and the lights went on again they found the World's Champion under a table scared stiff. "That's not the kind of fight I'm interested in," he said frankly.'157 The image which perhaps best encapsulates the white response to Johnson is George Bellows 's Both Members of this Club (1909), originally entitled A Nig- ger and A White Man (illus. 82). Bellows began work on the painting in October 82 George Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909. 194 83 George Bellows, The White Hope, 1921. 1909, the month in which the terms for Johnson's fight against Jeffries were finally agreed. The setting is dark and the figures are elongated smears of white, brown and red paint; the faces in the crowd are grotesques. The painting re- works the geometrical design and impasto of earlier works such as Stag at Sharkey's, but is considerably larger and more claustrophobically 'dreamlike' in its atmosphere.158 The title refers to the fact that, because of the legal restric- tions on prize-fights, boxers as well as spectators needed to take out a nominal club 'membership'. This practice meant that Jim Crow America found itself sanctioning organizations in which blacks and whites could both be members. In his choice of title, Bellows seems to be making a joke about the fact that a law designed to stop one undesirable practice (boxing) should lead to another (what Claude McKay described as the 'strange un-American' coming together of blacks and whites under equal terms).159 The painting's perspective suggests that the viewer too has joined the club. After finishing Both Members, Bellows abandoned boxing as a subject for paintings until the mid-±920s. His litho- graphs, however, continue to explore America's obsession with interracial boxing.160 The White Hope did not appear until 1921, by which time the colour line had been firmly re-established (illus. 83). It was now safe to imagine white defeat and black compassion. A Matter of Color' was the title of the first boxing story written by Ernest Hemingway, as a high school student in 1916. A Ring Lardner-style vernacular yarn with an 0. Henry twist at the end, it presents a retired trainer telling the story of how he had once fixed a fight by hiring a 'big Swede' to clobber the black opponent, the young Joe Gans no less, with a baseball bat through a curtain. 195 But the Swede hit the white boxer by mistake. Back in the dressing room, the trainer asks him, 'Why in the name of the Prophet did you hit the white man in- stead of the black man?' The Swede replies, 'I bane color blind.'161 The story ends there. (Joe Gans went on to become world lightweight champion.) It is not surprising that in 1916 a young boxing fan such as Hemingway would have thought to write of a set-up against a black boxer. The previous year, Jack Johnson had finally been defeated by Willard, and soon afterwards he began to claim it was a set-up. Hemingway never commented directly on this fight, or indeed on Johnson's career, but his subsequent fiction repeatedly drew on interracial boxing for more than simply a snappy punch line. In The Sun Also Rises (1925), Bill Gorton returns to Paris after a trip to Vienna where he wit- nesses a fixed fight between a bribed black American and an unskilled local. Wonderful nigger. Looked like Tiger Flowers, only four times as big. All of a sudden everybody started to throw things. Not me. Nigger'd just knocked local boy down. Nigger put up his glove. Wanted to make a speech. Awful noble-looking nigger. Started to make a speech. Then local white boy hit him. Then he knocked white boy cold. Then every- body commenced to throw chairs . . . Big sporting evening. For all his casually racist speech, Gorton is the good guy in the story, and he helps the fighter, who never gets the money owed to him, flee the enraged crowd. 'Injustice everywhere', he concludes.162 Later in the same chapter, the two friends go off to have dinner with Jake's ex-lover, Brett (whom he notices is not wearing stockings), and her new fiance, the 'very fit' Mike Campbell. When Mike asks, 'Isn't she a lovely piece? Don't you think so, Jake?', Bill replies, 'There's a fight tonight . . . Like to go?' The implication is that Jake, who has 'a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends', wants to fight Mike.163 Bill understands this impossible-to-realize ambition and provides an alternative outlet for his friend. Although he has to change the date to suit the novel's chronology, Hemingway makes a particular point of mentioning the names of the fighters they see in action, Charles Ledoux and Kid Francis. Once a great fighter, Ledoux was past his prime in 1925, and that night he lost 'a twelve-round decision in a furious brawl with his younger opponent'. Michael Reynolds notes that the evening confirmed Hemingway's view that 'champions never come back'; a view, which it seems, Jake was also entertaining.164 Injustice (whether racial, economic or romantic) is indeed everywhere. The White Hope era also informs Hemingway's 'The Light of the World' (i933), in which the teenage narrator and his friend, Tom, encounter a motley crew of late-night travellers at a railway station: 'five whores . . ., and six white men and four Indians'.165 Among the prostitutes are two 'big' women, Alice and Peroxide, who argue about who really knew 'Steve' or 'Stanley' Ketchel (they also can't agree on the first name).166 The cook remembers Stanley Ketchel's 1909 fight with Jack Johnson, in particular how Ketchel had floored Johnson in 196 the twelfth round just before Johnson knocked him out. 7 Peroxide attributes Ketchel's defeat to a punch by Johnson ('the big black bastard') when Ketchel, 'the only man she ever loved', smiled at her in the audience. Alice remembers Steve Ketchel telling her she was 'a lovely piece'. They both refer continuously to Ketchel's 'whiteness' - 'I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beau- tiful', says Peroxide. 'White', as Walter Benn Michaels notes, 'becomes an adjec- tive describing character instead of skin' and so Ketchel is figured as a kind of Christ-like figure, while Johnson, 'that black son of a bitch from hell', is the devil.168 Ketchel's pseudo-divinity is suggested by such statements as 'I loved him like you love God'; 'His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father'; and, of course, the title. Philip Young points out that Hemingway placed this story after 'the most pessimistic of all his stories', 'A Clean, Well- Lighted Place', in Winner Take Nothing 'as if the point of the story is really that the light of the world has gone out.'169 But there seems to be more going on under the surface of this particular iceberg. First of all, the confusion of names and facts is important, and once again, some knowledge of boxing history helps. Stanley Ketchel was not killed by his father - that was Steve Ketchel, a lightweight boxer, who never got near Johnson. Stanley was shot in 1910, by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Secondly, of all boxers, Stanley Ketchel was perhaps the most unlikely possible candidate for Redeemer. His nickname was the 'Michi- gan Assassin', and, according to one reporter, 'he couldn't get enough blood.'170 While the prostitutes may be seeking salvation, the story that they tell is ab- surd. So what is going on? Howard Hannum argues that much of the dialogue between the two women 'has the quality of counterpunching', as if they are restaging Ketchel's contest against Johnson: here, the (bleached) blonde versus the heavyweight.171 But the cook's role also needs to be considered. The discus- sion of whiteness begins when the narrator notices a 'white man' speaking; 'his face was white and his hands were white and thin'. The other men tease the cook about the whiteness of his hands ('he puts lemon juice on his hands') and hint that he is gay. Are these two things connected? And, if they are, what does that suggest about clean, white, beautiful Ketchel? When asked his age, Tom joins in the sexual bantering with hints at 'inversion' - 'I'm ninety-six and he's sixty-nine' - but throughout the boys remain uneasy and confused. By the end of the story, the narrator seems quite smitten with Alice ('she had the prettiest face I ever saw'). Tom notices this and says it is time to leave. The supposedly natural order of whites beating blacks, men having sex with women, and 'huge whores' being unappealing has been unsettled. When the cook asks where the boys are going, Tom replies, 'the other way from you'. Racial and sexual ambiguities also trouble 'The Battler', one of the Nick Adams initiation stories in In Our Time (1922). 172 The story begins with Nick himself having just survived a battle with a brakeman on a freight train. He has been thrown off the train and lands with a scuffed knee and bruise on the face, of which he is rather proud - 'He wished he could see it' - but he is still stand- 197 ing. 'He was all right.' Nick then ventures into another battling arena - a firelit camp which seems to be a refuge but which also turns out to be a kind of box- ing ring.173 There he encounters Ad Francis, an ex-champion prize-fighter whose bruises are more impressive, and much more disgusting, than his own. In the firelight Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were like slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man's face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight.174 That 'Nick did not perceive all this at once' suggests that he kept looking away. 'Don't you like my pan?' the fighter asks, revealing even worse: 'He had only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other one should have been there was a stump.' Although Nick is 'a little sick', he coun- ters Ad's pugnacious assertions with gusto: 'It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,' the man said seriously. 'I'll bust him.' . . . All you kids are tough.' 'You got to be tough,' Nick said. 'That's what I said.' Nick's pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable ('crazy'), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him battling. When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in 'an ugly parody of a boxing match', Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls A Matter of Color'.175 Colour is also impor- tant here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his 'negro's voice', the 'negro way' he walks, and his 'long nigger's legs'. Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway's racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in 'The Light of the World') seem to be Nick's as he struggles to understand the relationship between the two men. White prize-fighters, after all, were not sup- posed to have black friends. Bugs tells Nick a story about Ad which adds to his confusion. Ad had a woman manager, and it was always being 'written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness'. Nick vaguely remembers this, but then Bugs adds, 'of course they wasn't really brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn't like it either way'. Bugs repeatedly stresses how 'awful good looking' the woman was, and how she looked enough like him to be twins'. Some have read this admiring comment (along with the description of Ad's face as 'queerly formed' and his lips as 'queer shaped') as a suggestion that 198 84 Woodcut from Joseph Moncure March, TheSet-Up (1931 edition). the two men may be lovers.17 Less directly, like 'The Light of the World', the story slides anx- iously between taboos - incest becomes homo- sexuality becomes miscegenation. Interracial fighting provided a dramatic sub- ject for many popular novels during this period, including Louis Hemon's Battling Malone, Pugiliste (1925), Alin Laubreaux's Mulatto Johnny (1931), and Joseph Moncure March's The Set-Up (1928). Starkly contrasting woodcuts depicting white and black fighters - whether expression- ist in style (The Set-Up) or vaguely cubist {Battling Malone) - provided vivid illustrations (illus. 84 and illus. 85).177 Joseph Moncure March's novels translated the exciting underbelly of twenties America into verse: The Wild Party deals with prohibition and The Set-Up with prize-fighting and the Jack Johnson story. The Set-Up's protag- onist Pansy is a middleweight who 'had the stuff, but his skin was brown; / And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown.' Finally, it seems, he will get a shot at the title, but then 'the brass-knuckled hand of the law / Hung a hot one on Pansy's jaw.' Pansy is charged with bigamy and serves five years in prison. When he gets out he gradually rebuilds his career and finally gets a fight with a white boxer called Sailor. It is a set-up (Pansy's meant to take a fall) but no one has told him, thinking he'll lose anyway. M ^3 M&wA 85 Clement Serveau, woodcut from Louis Hemon, Battling Malone, Pugiliste (i93i). 199 His face was blank; Grim in repose: And what he was thinking God only knows. Those lynx-like eyes, That skull without hair Gave him a savage, Menacing air. He made you think Of the missing link. He looked like something To catch and cage: Like something that belonged In a Jungle Age.178 After winning the fight, Pansy learns about the set-up. He tries to escape the gangsters but running away finds himself in the subway where he is hit by a train. In 1949 March's book was, loosely, to form the basis of a powerful film noir of the same title. The film changes many things, including the race of its protagonist. In 1928, however, stories of the Jungle Age were still popular. Another popular work which drew on the Johnson myth was Mae West's 1930 novel, The Constant Sinner. It tells the story of a ruthless (yet not unappeal- ing) lady of pleasure', Babe Gordon, and her adventures in the New York of the 1920s. One of the first things we learn about Babe is that, 'Every man she looked at she sized up as a fighter would an opponent.'179 Her opponents are, first a white prizefighter, the Bearcat, then a black gangster, Money Johnson, and finally, an upper class white businessman, Baldwin. Babe's fighting talk seems to come easily to West, whose father was a boxer and who herself had affairs with numerous white and black fighters.180 What makes The Constant Sinner revealing of its time is not simply its box- ing figuration of the battle between the sexes but, more specifically, the way it uses boxing to talk about interracial sexual relations. Bearcat, dubbed 'the sal- vation of our race' by one female admirer, does not hold the colour line and is described fighting Harlem Joe who 'moved like a panther and endeared him- self to coloured worship by a famous watermelon grin'. The two contrasting bodies came to the ring centre, clasped gloves and received final instructions. The human throng pulled up taut and tense, to feast upon this supreme battle of black and white. The gong rang! The two bodies rushed at each other and became a whirlpool of stabbing, slashing arms, swirling like angry foam in boiling rapids, now white, now muddy black -a gush of red blood in the foam -the white form of Bearcat sank to the canvas. Babe, who has already 'ruined more than one promising white hope', eventually leaves Bearcat for Money Johnson and a Harlem which West describes as 'the pool of sex, where all colours are blended, all bloods mingled'. Johnson, whose 'magnificent body, lynx-eyes, and pearly-white grin had brought the women of Harlem crawling to him', has eyes only for white Babe. Like his namesake Jack, 'he craved white women. He wanted the whitest and most beautiful, and so he fell for Babe Gordon'. The novel ends with Johnson being shot by the jealous Baldwin and a gullible Bearcat agreeing to take the blame. He of course gets off (in what some have seen as a parody of D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation) as the prosecutor argues that he was a hero for defending his wife against 'the low, lustful, black beast'. Baldwin's attraction to Babe is presented as entirely de- pendent on her association with Johnson. At the novel's end, when he finally has Babe (at least temporarily) he 'cannot avoid thinking of Babe's white body and Johnson's black body, darkness mating with dawn ... He has Babe now to himself. He is happy. But the black and white pattern is indelibly woven into the tapestry of his memory.'181 The sex appeal of Jack Johnson, and black men like him, is just one of many targets in Wallace Thurman's bitterly funny satire of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring (1932). Lucille tells the protagonist, Ray, 'one of the black hopes of Negro literature', that she will 'never go to bed with any white man . . . because I'd never be sure that I wasn't doing it just because he was white'. In fact Lucille feels almost white herself, as she justifies her infatuation for a painter called Bull, 'the personification of what the newspaper headlines are pleased to call a burly Negro'. The women in his paintings have 'pugilistic biceps'. 'I sup- pose I find the same thing in Bull that white women claim to find in a man like Jack Johnson,' concedes Lucille, 'That's the price I pay, evidently, for becoming civilized.'182 Ray is in love with Lucille and later 'snaps' that Bull 'is so afraid of the white man that his only recourse is to floor one at every opportunity and on any pretext'. Indeed when Bull finds out that Lucille is pregnant, his response is to 'sock her in the jaw, and stalk away'. Ray helps her to get an abortion and she promises to lay off 'virile men . . .at least . . .for the purpose of procreation'. Bull, she concedes, was simply 'an experiment I had to make'.183 Interracial fighting is again linked to interracial sex in William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which explores the history and legacy of American slavery from 1807 until 1910, the year in which Johnson defeated Jeffries. The novel opens with the narrative of a survivor of the Civil War, Rosa Coldfield. Rosa's sister Ellen married Thomas Sutpen, a man of poor origins and great so- cial ambition, who has built a house in the woods with a group of 'wild Negroes'. Another of the novel's narrators, Mr. Compson, compares Sutpen's social awkwardness to that of John L. Sullivan 'having taught himself painfully and tediously to do the schottische, having drilled himself and drilled himself in secret until he now believed it no longer necessary to count the music's beat, say'. But having gone to great lengths to become the perfect Mississippi gentle- man, ensconced in 'baronial splendor', Sutpen tends to slip back into his old ways, 'some opposite of respectability' in which strict racial segregation does not play a part. Rosa tells the story of Ellen watching a fight in Sutpen's stables: Yes, Ellen and those two children alone in that house twelve miles from town, and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the centre two of the wild Negroes fighting, naked, not as white men fight, with rules and weapons, but as Negroes fight to hurt one another quick bad . . . Ellen, Rosa says, 'accepted' this - 'this', she thinks, 'is all'. But it is not all. One night she enters and sees 'not the two black beasts she had expected to see but instead a white one and a black one' - the 'grande finale'. What frightens her is not the fight but the fact that men are indistinguishable. 'Her husband and father of her children', a slave owner, cannot be told apart from the slaves, the 'wild negroes' who 'belonged to him body and soul'. Rosa uses a kind of demonic Darwinian imagery to describe the fight scene that she has not wit- nessed. It becomes a primeval scene, as Rosa imagines Ellen witnessing the men with their 'teeth showing': 'both naked to the waist and gouging at one another's eyes as of they should not only have been the same color, but should have been covered in fur too'. And still that is not all. First, Ellen sees that her son Henry is watching, and then, what's much worse, that her daughter, Judith is also there. A final horror comes in the observation that the pattern of 'nigger and white' is repeated in 'Judith and . . . the negro girl beside her', Clytie (Sutpen's other daughter, by a slave mother) - 'two Sutpen faces'. Ellen's terror (certainly Rosa's) - that one cannot tell black from white, or sister from brother - becomes the novel's. The doubling of Sutpen and 'the wild niggers' ('his face exactly like the Negro's') is repeated in the doubling of Judith in Clytie; the intermingling of white and black bodies in a fight once again prefigures their sexual intermin- gling. 'There is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which en- emies, as well as lovers know because it makes them both . . . let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.'184 JAMES JOYCE AND 'THAT EPOCK-MARKING EVENT' If Jack Johnson's victories over white opponents exercised white America in var- ious ways, they also provoked those further afield. James Joyce, it is frequently asserted, didn't like sports, and especially not violent ones. Nevertheless, in 1910, according to his brother, Stanislaus, he read the plethora of newspaper articles building up to the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Stanislaus suggests that Joyce's 'ironical comments' on nationalism in 'that epock-marking event' formed 'a rough draft' of the Keogh-Bennett fight described in the 'Cyclops' section of Ulysses (1922). l8s Another source was a fight between a British soldier and a Dubliner that he saw advertised in the Freeman's Journal.1^6 American racist ideology is thus echoed and refigured in British and Irish nationalist terms. The debts of the Harlem Renaissance to the Irish Renaissance are well docu- mented; this incident reveals that Irish literature also owes something to black America.187 The Keogh-Bennett fight is first alluded to in 'Lestrygonians', when Blazes Boylan is mentioned as the trainer of Keogh and a fight promoter.188 It gets a proper airing, however, in 'Cyclops', when, at Barney Kiernan's pub in Little Britain Street, we learn that Boylan has made a hundred pounds by spreading the rumour that Keogh was 'on the beer'. 'Cyclops' is narrated by a nameless barfly, whose opinionated commentary is interrupted periodically by a series of extravagant parodies. One of the most exuberant parodies adopts the inflated language of early nineteenth-century fight reports, and from it we learn that the 'redcoat' has had his 'right eye nearly closed' by 'Dublin's pet lamb'. We im- mediately think of Ulysses and Polyphemus, and indeed, Heenan and Sayers, whose commemorative print Stephen Dedalus had seen earlier in the novel. Ignoring the attempts of Leopold Bloom to change the subject, another barfly, Alf Bergan notes, in a more up-to-date pugilistic jargon, that 'Myler dusted the floor with him . . . Heenan and Sayers was only a bloody fool to it. Handed him the mother and father of a beating.'189 Bloom's voice in 'Cyclops' is usually heard as one at war with the 'blindness' and aggressive masculine violence of racism and nationalism. Later in the scene, he famously rejects 'force, hatred, history, all that' in favour of love', 'the oppo- site of hatred'. This is generally taken to be Joyce's view as well. According to his brother, he wrote the scene 'not to express personal bias but to associate violence and brutality with patriotism'. While I do not wish to claim that Joyce is advocating violence, I suggest that the novel's repeated allusions to boxing do more than simply update Homer. A certain latent aggression is also ex- pressed. Just before he speaks out against force, Bloom tells the pub denizens that he too belongs to a race, 'that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant', and while he speaks he nearly burns his fingers on his cigar. Unlike Ulysses, armed with his fiery club, Bloom does not get near the eye of his Cyclops. Nevertheless, he put[s] up his fist'. 'Talking about injustice' like this, the force of Bloom's feeling is expressed in staccato (punchy?) phrases and even single words, quite unlike his usual eloquent and loquacious speech: Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction off in Morocco like slaves or cattle. Before talking about the 'opposite of hatred', the narrator tells us that Bloom 'collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag'. But this second Bloom does not completely displace the first. Bloom may be finally seem a 'wet rag', advocating love as he runs away from a flying biscuit 203 tin, but something remains of the man who raises his fist in angry defiance.190 How does one choose between two rather absurd cliches? As the day goes on, Bloom himself seems uncertain about what role in which to cast himself.191 On the beach, at little later, he ponders the incident: 'Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves . . . Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.' In his conversations with Stephen in the cabshelter that night, Bloom continues to vacillate between self-congratulation on his cool and rational response, and anxiety about his lack of physicality. He tells the story of his encounter with the Citizen twice. In his first version he presents himself as 'much injured but on the whole eventempered' and assures Stephen that 'A soft answer turns away wrath'. I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form . . . It's a patent ab- surdity to hate people because they live around the corner and speak an- other vernacular, so to speak ... All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood - bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of ho- nour and a flag - were very largely a question of the money question . . . This is partly said to reassure Stephen who has just survived a fight in 'Circe', but it is also serves as self-reassurance. Twenty pages later, the narrator returns to the subject, and gives it a rather different gloss: He, though often considerably misunderstood and the least pug- nacious of mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties inevitably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as a fore- gone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.192 At the start of this retelling at least, Bloom is associated with linguistic pugnac- ity and the hard 'vernacular' of his enemy. As the sentence proceeds, the narra- tive voice reconnects Bloom to his customary pacifism and its accompanying verbosity. If the cliches of pugnacity give readers (metaphorically) 'one in the giz- zard', the cliches of pacifism put them (metaphorically) to sleep.193 Bloom's equivocal interpretation of the events in the pub is revealed again in 'Ithaca'. As tension mounted in the pub that afternoon, Bloom had started listing Jews: 'Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spin- oza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.' In his third list of 'anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or 204 rejected race' in 'Ithaca', Bloom again includes Mendelssohn and Spinoza, in- forming us of their professions (composer and philosopher respectively), but now he adds to their company Daniel Mendoza, the London pugilist credited with having introduced boxing into Ireland, and Ferdinand Lassalle, who, we are told, managed to combine the professions of 'reformer' and 'duellist'.194 Fight- ers, it now seems, can be good Jews too. But this is not the last word on the sub- ject. At the end of the chapter, when Bloom relates his day to Molly in bed, he does not mention the 'altercation' in the pub at all. He has not, despite all these rehearsals, been able to settle on a version of events that pleases him, or, more to the point, that he thinks will please Molly.195 Bloom's aspirations to get bigger and stronger are largely informed by Eugen Sandow's Strength and How to Obtain It (1897). 196 Sandow was a music hall muscleman rather than a sports hero, and his books were aimed at commer- cial travellers and other city workers like Bloom.197 They offered a modern met- ropolitan kind of manliness distinct from the archaic nationalist version touted by the Citizen. Yet Sandow's presence is not unrelated to themes of injustice, revenge, or, indeed, the Cyclops. While the first part of Sandow's book is a con- ventional manual of exercises and measurement charts, part two - 'Incidents of My Professional Career' - reads at times like a Horatio Alger novel, for each 'in- cident' is most importantly a step onward and upward. One step involves the 'defeat' of two bodybuilding rivals, Samson and Cyclops. Sandow is at pains to stress that he is a small man and that 'in evening dress there was nothing . . . specially remarkable about my appearance. But when I took off my coat [to fight Cyclops] and the people could see my muscular development, the tone of indif- ference changed immediately to surprise and curiosity.' Sandow lets it be known that instead of exhibiting himself, he could have been a boxer. But although it would have been the 'shorter road to wealth', he was not tempted. 'No man', he concludes, 'can be a prize fighter and remain a gentleman'.198 Boxing, or at least street-fighting with pretensions to boxing, finally con- nects Stephen and Bloom in 'Circe', where Homer's underworld is refigured as a phantasmagoric vaudeville show. 'Nighttown' is a grotesque place where sex and violence come together, where a bawd sells 'maidenhead' for ten shillings and armless loiterers' in 'paintspeckled hats' can be found 'flop [ped] wrestling, growling in maimed sodden playfight.'1" Earlier in the day, the romantic Stephen had briefly identified with Heenan and Sayers performing before a star- ing audience in a print he saw in a shop window. In 'Nighttown', when a drunken British soldier hits him square in the face, he is suddenly forced to become a participant rather than a spectator. Could there be a more definite victory for what Joyce, elsewhere, praised as the solid materialism of 'sudden reality' over 'romanticism'?200 An important difference between the two encounters is that the heroic and popular mid-nineteenth century pugilism that the Heenan vs. Sayers fight represented has been replaced by Queensberry-rules sparring, associated par- ticularly with the army and with public schools - English violence disguised as 205 English honour. According to Stanislaus Joyce, his brother 'detested rugby, box- ing and wrestling,' which he had to take part in at school, and 'which he consid- ered a training not in self-control, as the English pretend, but in violence and brutality.'201 In Stephen Hero, Joyce had described the 'system of hardy brutal- ity' with which 'Anglo-Saxon educators' tried to 'cure' the 'fantastic ideal[ism]' of youth and had bemoaned the ugly 'Saxon slang' that accompanied such cures.202 In 'Circe', the Saxon slang of 'biffing' and 'blighters', the basis of what Bernard Shaw had described as 'the vast propaganda of pugnacity in modern fiction', is as much the subject of mockery as the brutality itself.203 Like a good Homeric hero, Stephen drunkenly extends his hospitality to Privates Compton and Carr, the two red-coated British soldiers that he runs into on the street, stating that, although 'uninvited', they are his 'guests'. Nev- ertheless, that's not their fault. 'History is to blame'. Thinking that Stephen is insulting both Carr's girl, Cissy Caffrey ('faithful . . . although only a shilling whore') and Edward vn, Private Compton tells his friend to 'biff him one' - 'Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye ... he doesn't half want a thick ear, the blighter.'204 Stephen, meanwhile, 'a bit sprung' and so especially facetious, mocks 'the noble art of self-pretence', misquotes Swift, and rather effetely com- plains about his hand, which 'hurts me slightly'. 'Personally,' he says, 'I detest action.' That may be so, but, as his friend Lynch points out, 'he likes dialectic'. In the sequence that follows, Edward vn appears as the referee - 'We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck.' As the fight begins, Stephen imaginatively transforms it, using the traditional imagery of both cataclysm and crucifixion, into a grand and heroic battle. But Private Carr brings the battle to a swift and bathetic end. Carr 'rushes Stephen, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloomfollows and picks it up.' As in the Heenan-Sayers and the Keogh-Bennett fights, the crowd breaks through, and chaos descends, but there are no firm allegiances. The 'hag' and 'bawd' switch sides repeatedly; the 'quarrelling knot' of the Irish, it seems, are too busy fighting among themselves to be concerned with the slapstick main event.205 By the time we reach this scene in 'Circe', it becomes clear that a pattern is being presented. All things pass and, 'being humus the same returns', wrote Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939). 2o6 In 'Wandering Rocks', Stephen sees an image of Heenan vs. Sayers in Farnborough in i860; a few pages later, Patrick Dignam sees a poster advertising Bennett vs. Keogh, and thinks about the 1897 Carson City contest between Corbett and Fitzsimmons. In 'Cyclops', the connection be- tween Farnborough in i860 and Dublin in 1904 is reinforced (and, if we read Stanislaus Joyce, we can also make a connection to Reno in 1910). These discrete boxing matches all feature a small man taking on a big man, and an Irishman (broadly defined) taking on a British man.207 They also recall the battles faced re- peatedly by Ulysses on his journey home to Ithaca. Joyce's critics have, I would suggest, rather overplayed his rejection of such battles. Stanislaus Joyce recalled 206 that his brother first encountered Homer through Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses and when 'asked to say which of the heroes they admired most', chose Ulysses 'in reaction against the general admiration of the heftier, muscle-bound dealers of Homeric blows'. Richard Ellmann, meanwhile, rather romantically maintained that 'Joyce makes his Ulysses a man who is not physically a fighter, but whose mind is unsubduable.' Ulysses, while certainly peace-loving, and neither 'hefty' nor 'muscle-bound', hardly avoided adept and well-placed 'Homeric blows'.208 Bloom, and indeed Stephen, are certainly less willing or able fighters, but this is not to say that thoughts of fighting do not preoccupy them and that their fists are never clenched or raised. While parodying its posturing and patois, Joyce rel- ished the dramatic possibilities of boxing. In all the many ways it unfolds, Ulysses is also, some of the time, a boxing novel. Boxing images come less directly in Finnegans Wake (as does everything else), yet one of Joyce's many allusive patterns there links back to Johnson. The opening chapter of the novel introduces the comic strip characters of Mutt and Jute, representing the battle of 1014 between the Irish and Danes on the field of Clontarf. Mutt is the Irishman; Jute, the invader. Communication between the two is impossible - Mutt is 'jeffmute', Jute is 'haudibble'. The duo reappear in many guises throughout the novel - Butt and Taff; Bett and Tipp; Muta and Juva - as variants on the quarrelling brothers, Shem and Shaun, whose endless battles and reconciliations propel it forward. As Muta puts it, 'when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct to combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement'.209 Mutt and Jeff originate in a cartoon strip by H. C. (Bud) Fisher which first appeared under the title 'A. Mutt' on the racing page of the San Francisco Chron- icle'm 1907. Mutt first encountered Jeff on 27 March 1908, a 'sacred moment in our cultural development' remarked Gilbert Seldes. The encounter took place 'during the days before one of Jim Jeffries' fights'. It was as Mr Mutt passed the asylum walls that a strange creature confided to the air the notable remark that he himself was Jeffries . Mutt rescued the little gentleman and named him Jeff. In gratitude Jeff daily submits to indignities which might otherwise seem intolerable.210 Jeff's allegiance to Jeffries reached fruition in 1910 when he and Mutt resolve to see him fight Jack Johnson. Fisher devoted weeks of the strip to stories of the friends' mishaps as they travel to Reno, try to get seats, and then, with difficulty, try to get home again (illus. 86). Dan Schiff suggests that the pair may have appealed to James Augustine Joyce because their names, Augustus Mutt and James Jeffries, represent a strug- gle within his own name and between two sides of his personality.211 But Joyce may also have enjoyed the comical contrast the couple made - beanpole Mutt 207 1 l-i la Ft - 3 *«> Bud Fisher, 'A. Mutt', lgio: ' Mutt secures a ticket to the Jeffries-Johnson fight'. and stocky little Jeff- and the physical violence of their encounters. The last panel was often reserved for a knockout. Jeff, having driven Mutt to distraction, is usually the recipient; he is depicted conked or punched in the head, sometimes accompanied by the word 'Powf A similar resolution can be found in the 'Night- lessons' chapter of Finnegans Wake. In this 'drame' of 'caricatures', Shaun (the Mutt of the two) becomes fed up with the boastful Shem, and 'floors' him.212 The 'countinghands' of a referee suggest that a knockout has been accomplished, and then go on to conduct Wagner. Shem forgives his 'bloater', and the chapter ends with a catalogue of topics for the brothers' lessons, which range from 'When is a Pun not a Pun?' to 'Do you approve of our Existing Parliamentary System?' to 'Compare the fistic styles of Jimmy Wilde and Jack Sharkey.'213 The chapter takes the form of a central text, with marginal comments (from the two brothers) on either side, and footnotes (from their sister, Izzy).214 In the final section, Shem (on the Right) is silent, but Shaun provides classical and biblical parallels to the lesson themes. Flyweight Jimmy Wilde and heavyweight Jack Sharkey are matched with Castor and Pollux, the brothers who encounter Amycus in Theocritus' Idylls.215 The names of the fighters may change, but the schoolboy sport of light vs. large, and the philosophical sport of thesis vs. antithesis, continue. 'Is a game over? The game goes on.'216 208 7 Sport of the Future Although he had fulfilled the stated brief by defeating Jack Johnson, Jess Willard was not the Great White Hope that so many had longed for.1 Willard was large, slow and uncharismatic, and the public did not warm to their new white champion. It would be another four years before the White Hope of fantasy would emerge, realized in the tanned wiry body of Jack Dempsey. The Golden Grin would be laid to rest by a scowl. Born into a poor Irish-American family in Manassa, Colorado, Dempsey was initially a fairly mediocre boxer, fighting for $100 a time in Western bars and living sporadically as a hobo. He struck lucky when he met up with manager Jack Kearns, who carefully groomed him for a shot at the championship. Kearns ensured that Dempsey only encountered opponents whom he could easily knock out, and that 'he spent nearly as much time making the rounds of newspaper offices as he did fighting'. Between them Kearns and promoter Tex Rickard carefully cultivated the image of the 'Manassa Mauler' as America's perfect fighting man'.2 They knew that in the post-Johnson era (and even more so in the Klan-dominated twenties), there would be no money to be made in matching Dempsey against black opponents such as Harry Wills who might actually beat him. It made financial sense to maintain the colour line.3 By 1918 Damon Runyon, a syndicated columnist for the Hearst newspapers, was urging Willard to meet the new challenger. On 4 July 1919 (nine years after Johnson beat Jeffries), Dempsey fought Willard before 'a shirt-sleeved frontier mob' in Toledo, Ohio.4 Willard was 6 foot 7 inches tall and weighed 245 pounds. Dempsey, 6 inches shorter and 55 pounds lighter, was definitely the underdog, and many thought the fight likely to be a poor affair. A sceptical Ring Lardner quipped: 'I guess I got those there Toledo Blues, / About this fight I simply can't enthuse.'5 Nevertheless, Dempsey defeated Willard in three rounds, with what boxing historians agree was an extraordinary excess of violence. Peter Heller describes the fight as 'one of the most savage in boxing history', and Joyce Carol Oates ar- gues that Dempsey 's ring style, 'swift, pitiless, always direct and percussive . . . changed American boxing forever'.6 According to Paul Gallico, Dempsey was 'never a good boxer and had little or no defense. His protection was aggression.'7 209 That aggression was feted and fetishized from the start.8 This is Damon Run- yon's gory account of the fallen Willard: At the feet of the gargantuan pugilist was a dark spot which was slowly widening on the brown canvas as it was replaced by the drip-drip-drip- drip of blood from the man's wounds. He was flecked with red from head to foot. The flesh on his enormous limbs shook like custard. He was like a man who had just been pulled from the wreck of an automo- bile, or railroad train.9 In his 1950 teach-yourself guide to 'explosive punching and aggressive defence', Championship Fighting, Dempsey himself recalled the fight, preferring to de- scribe Willard as the victim of 'a premature mine blast' rather than of a car or rail accident: I won the ring's most coveted title by stopping a man much larger and stronger than I was ... I blasted him into helplessness by exploding my body-weight against him . . . My body-weight was moving like light- ning, and I was exploding that weight terrifically against the giant.10 Dempsey 's persona was complicated. First of all, he was Jack the Giant Killer, an image that Kearns and Rickard were keen to exploit, matching him with an- other sluggish giant, Luis Angel Firpo, 'the Wild Bull of the Pampas', in 1923. But it was not merely success against all odds that Dempsey represented; it was the instant success of the knockout blow. The step-by-step rise of a Horatio Alger was old-fashioned; the impatient Twenties favoured the 'cocainizing punch'.11 And there was still more to the Dempsey image. In the passage above, he litters his description with metaphors drawn from his days working in the Colorado mines, and he was often promoted as a rugged Westerner. Kearns ensured he tanned his face and upper body before the Willard fight, to give him the appear- ance, according to Runyon, of a 'saddle-colored demon'.12 In the years that followed this ruggedness was carefully cultivated. Runyon coined the name 'Manassa Mauler', and ghost-wrote Dempsey 's biography, A Tale of Two Fists', for serialization in the Hearst papers in 1919. Runyon, who had also grown up in Colorado, made much of Dempsey 's early days free-riding the railroads.13 When, in 1921, Dempsey knocked out the European light heavyweight champion, Georges Carpentier, the press described the victory as one for the frontier spirit (and old bare-knuckle days) against decadent European modernity (Carpentier, who liked to talk of the 'psychology of boxing', was dubbed the 'Orchid Man'14). Gallico's characterization of Dempsey as someone who had been schooled in 'the hobo jungles, bar-rooms, and mining camps of the West' was typical: Where Dempsey learned to fight, there were no rounds, rest intervals, gloves, referees, or attending seconds. There are no draws and no decisions in rough and tough fighting. You had to win. If you lost you went to the hospital or to the undertaking parlor.15 Dempsey's supposed affinities with the spirit of the old frontier appealed to 1920s urban America precisely because, as Roderick Nash puts it, at that time 'the self-reliant rugged individual . . . seemed on the verge of becoming as irrel- evant as the covered wagon'. The major difference between American boxing before 1920 and after- wards, was that it was now legal, and once legal it became big business. At the heart of that business was Madison Square Garden, which in 1925 assumed its third incarnation on the corner of 49th and 50th Street on Eighth Avenue.17 When Max Schmeling arrived in the United States in 1929, he noted that 'the Garden and the Hearst Corporation took turns calling the shots'.18 The Garden, as it quickly became known, was huge and intimidating. According to Jerry Doyle, the narrator of Hemingway's 1927 'Fifty Grand', the walk from the entrance to the ring looked like a half a mile'.19 This difference between small club illegal boxing and the new legal sport is strikingly apparent if we compare George Bellows 's Stag at Sharkey's (1909) and his 1920s paintings of legitimate, high-profile boxing, Ringside Seats (1924) and Dempsey and Fiq>o (1924). Gone is the grotesque male intimacy of spectators and fighters, and with it, a dark, expressionist claustrophobia. In their place, Bellows depicts a brightly lit space, vibrant with colour but rather flat. The paintings have more in common with contemporary magazine illustrations of well-dressed men and women than with his earlier paintings. Dempsey andtirpo presents the famous moment in their 1923 fight when Firpo sent Dempsey flying into the ringside typewriters (illus. 87). 2° The 1920s are often recalled as a golden age of sport, but it was an age of mass consumption rather than mass participation. Some thought that this was a very bad thing. In their 1929 sociological case study of Middletown, the Lynds noted that modern leisure was now 'mainly spent sitting down'.21 A few play,' elaborated Stuart Chase, 'while the rest of us shout, clap hands . . . crush in our neighbours' hats, and get what thrill we may from passive rather than active participation.' For Chase, this was sport 'at one remove'.22 Worse still was listening to the radio ('sport at two removes'). While Jack Johnson's fights had been available to national audiences only by way of reports telegraphed to the newspapers, and illegal films, radio brought sport to all. Radio broadcasts of fights began in 1920 and the first title fight to be broadcast live on the radio was the 1921 Dempsey-Carpentier match. In Buenos Aires in 1923 crowds gathered in the home of nine-year-old Julio Cortazar to listen to the radio describe Firpo's defeat in New York (afterwards, he later wrote, 'there was weep- ing and brutal indignation, followed by humiliated melancholy that was almost colonial'.) In anticipation of Dempsey's 1926 fight against Tunney, Halperin's Department Store acquired the first radio in Fitzgerald, Georgia; Lois Garrison recalls that 'the whole town' gathered to listen to speakers rigged up in the neighbouring streets.23 Joe Louis grew up listening to Dempsey's fights on the radio, and the radio would bring Louis's fights to many more during the 1930s.24 The sports pages of national newspapers (first introduced by Hearst in 1895) also played an important part in promoting and popularizing sport. Research by the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1929 revealed that one out of four readers bought a paper primarily because of its sports page. The editors voted Jack Dempsey the 'greatest stimulation to circulation in 20 years'.25 The press, and in particular the Hearst newspapers, saw to it that 'you knew Dempsey better than a member of your own family'.26 During his seven-year reign as champion, Dempsey entertained readers with a divorce and remarriage to a Hollywood starlet, and a trial for draft evasion (he was acquitted on the grounds that he needed to provide financial support to his mother and wife). Boxing itself played a relatively small part in the story; in seven years, Dempsey only defended his title six times.27 The flourishing of the sports pages is also associated with a golden age of American sports writing. In 1922, Nat Fleischer founded The Ring, still regarded as the leading boxing magazine, while the sports pages of the daily papers fea- tured writers such as Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner and Paul Gallico, all of whom eventually moved successfully from (rather literary) sports reporting to 87 George Bellows, Dempsey and Firpo, 1924. (rather sporty) fiction. Although they detailed the minutiae of contemporary sports events, these writers never took sport entirely seriously, and certainly not solemnly. This is Heywood Broun, on Dempsey vs. Carpentier: [Carpentier's] head was back and his eyes and his smile flamed as he crawled through the ropes. And he gave some curious flick to his bathrobe as he turned to meet the applause. Until that very moment we had been for Dempsey, but suddenly we found ourselves up on our feet making silly noises. We shouted 'Carpentier! Carpentier! Carpentier!' and forgot even to be ashamed of our pronunciation.28 Broun's report exemplifies what sociologist Leo Lowenthal identified as a dis- tinctive 1920s language of directness'. At the very moment when 'modern insti- tutions of mass communication' were promising 'total coverage', he argued, journalists increased their use of 'you' or 'we' to create a compensatory sense of intimacy between writer and reader.29 Boxing, perhaps, lent itself more readily then most sports to the language of directness. In 1924, Punch cartoonist William Low suggested a comparable intimacy between fighter and spectator (illus. 56). Low's spectator takes 'sympathy' to absurd lengths and eventually knocks him- self out. Broun's article, more of which is quoted below, goes on to compare the Dempsey-Carpentier fight to Greek tragedy. Lowenthal claimed that such allu- sions were designed to confer 'pseudo-sanctity and pseudo-safety on the futile affairs of mass culture', and complained that they were mixed up with 'slang and colloquial speech'.30 But this seems to miss the tone and the point. There is no 'linguistic confusion'. Like flash language in the 1820s, prose such as Broun's (and Lardner's, Galileo's and Runyon's) confidently celebrates its ability to embrace both high and low and to make a joke of either or both. Knowing cheerfulness was the tone of the 'boxing scribes'.31 It was also, largely, the tone of the cinema. 'Suddenly the mid-1920's movie theater became a very happy place', notes William Everson. 'Comedy was every- where, and in all forms.'32 Boxing movies were no exception and numerous come- dies debunked the masculine posturing of the ring. Hal Roach wrote and produced many of them, including The Champeen (1923), Laurel and Hardy's The Battle of the Century (1927), and Joe and Chubby's Boxing Gloves (1929); others include Mack Sennett's Scarum Much (1924). One of the most successful boxing comedies was an independently made series The Leather Pushers (1922-4), starring Reginald Denny, a former Royal Flying Corps heavyweight champion. Now largely forgotten, in the mid-twenties Denny was 'Universal's most important star, and next to Chap- lin, the highest-paid Englishman in pictures'. Denny was also responsible for in- troducing 'some comedy ideas' into what he called 'the hokum' of an adaptation of Jack London's boxing story, The Abysmal Brute (1923).33 For Paul Gallico, sports editor and columnist for the Daily News, the 1920s were a time of 'great, innocent ballyhoo', but for many others, particularly those on the left, the cocktail of sport, movies and the tabloid press made for a dangerous 213 mass opiate.34 Newspapers in the twenties, Robert K. Murray argued, moved away from the Progressive agenda of the pre-war years and 'began to view Amer- ican life not so much as a political and economic struggle but as a hilarious merry-go-round of sport, crime, and sex'. A growing obsession with 'the antics . . . of Dempsey and Babe Ruth' may, he suggested, have 'helped take the nation's mind off bolshevism', both at home and abroad.35 'It was characteristic of the Jazz Age that it had no interest in politics at all', declared Scott Fitzgerald in 1931. That same year (one of the worst of the Depression) Frederick Allen Lewis published a history of 'the Coolidge Prosperity' and argued that one of its most 'striking characteristics . . . was the unparalleled rapidity and unanimity with which millions of men and women turned their attention, their talk, and their emotional interest upon a series of tremendous trifles - a heavyweight boxing- match, a murder trial, a new automobile, a transatlantic flight'. Lewis dubbed this era 'the Ballyhoo Years'.36 The changing nature of American newspapers and the celebrity cult of sportsmen and movie stars are recurring preoccupations in John Dos Passos's trilogy of novels, usa (1930-36). Each novel breaks up its narrative with a series of 'Newsreel' sections, collages of undated newspaper headlines, juxtaposed for connection and contrast. One such juxtaposition, in Nineteen Nineteen, involves Dempsey. There is something appalling, Dos Passos suggests, about the ease with which readers can slip from 'earthquake in italy devestates like war' to 'dempsey knocks out willard in third round'.37 Dempsey himself, as we have already seen, was only too willing to compare the effects of his pugnac- ity to catastrophe on a grand scale. If the media attention given to Dempsey 's 1919 fight against Willard was lavish, it was nothing compared to that generated two years later, when he took on 'gorgeous' Georges Carpentier. The 4 July Jersey City fight attracted 80,000 spectators and is remembered as the first million-dollar gate. The stark contrast between the two protagonists, arranged with great care once again by Rickard, succeeded in creating a journalistic frenzy. Carpentier agreed to the mis-match (he was considerably lighter than Dempsey) knowing that he could earn a lot in America - in Hollywood as well as in the ring.38 Carpentier 's fan base included European intellectuals such as George Bernard Shaw, Arnold Bennett and Francois Mauriac. Shaw and Bennett had fulsomely described his 1919 victory over Englishman Joe Beckett, while Mauriac thought Carpentier both as 'one of those graceful Apollos slightly grazed by the pick in the process of their ex- humation' and 'the type of honest man dear to Pascal'.39 Sophisticated New Yorkers were also enchanted by the Frenchman. Heywood Broun described the fight as 'the finest tragic performance in the lives of ninety thousand persons'. It was, he joshed, 'sport for art's sake', comparable even to the work of Eugene O'Neill, 'the white hope of the American drama'. 'None of the crowds in Greece who went to somewhat more beautiful stadia in search of Euripides ever saw the spirit of tragedy more truly presented.'40 Ring Lardner was less sentimen- tal. He believed that the fight should never have taken place and satirized it 214 ruthlessly in a short story called 'The Battle of the Century'. The Dempsey char- acter, Jim Dugan, complains about his training: 'I've got to show the boys I'm working so they won't think it's a farce. Like it wasn't a farce already!' The real winner, the narrator notes, was Dugan's manager Charley Riggs (based on Tex Rickard), who not only 'came out with a profit for himself and his backer of something like half a million . . . but the way he handled it put him in a class by himself as a promoter. The big fights to come will be staged by Charley or they won't be big fights.'41 After the 1923 Firpo contest, Dempsey did not fight for three years. Instead he went to Hollywood, travelled in Europe, and retained a high profile through the gossip columns and product endorsements. By 1926, however, it was time to make some more money, and Rickard's next 'big fight' matched Dempsey against Gene Tunney as part of Philadelphia's sesquicentennial celebration. Marketing was again a crucial factor, and in choosing Dempsey 's opponent, Rickard repeated the formula that had proved so profitable in the Carpentier fight. Dempsey was once again portrayed as the Western 'brute' and 'a slacker', while Tunney, a former us marine and aspiring Greenwich Village intellectual, was clean-living patriotism personified. The Associated Press made a great deal of the fact that Samuel But- ler's The Way of All Flesh had been spotted on Tunney 's bedside table.42 The pub- lic personae of the two men were reinforced in their ring styles. Dempsey was an aggressive slugger, famous for his knockout blows; Tunney, a defensive counter- puncher, who gradually wore his opponents down. Dempsey was instinctual, a 'natural', a born 'killer'; Tunney a 'synthetic' boxer, a student of 'ring science'.43 While this was a perennial opposition, its extraordinary success in 1926 suggests that it tapped into particular contemporary anxieties. While Tunney represented the middle-class ideal of self-improving and self-controlling masculinity (like Scott Fitzgerald's 'advertisement of the man'), Dempsey appealed to a persistent fantasy of untameable virility and independence.44 Dempsey was unfit and unprepared, but Rickard and his associates con- cealed this well from the public, who 'bet on the champion at preposterous odds'.45 Tunney won the ten-round fight clearly on points, his defensive skills keeping Dempsey safely at a distance. Afterwards, Grantland Rice argued that the fight had not been a sporting contest but a 'Golden Fleece', and indeed the largest fight crowd in history (a crowd that included Chaplin, Hearst and vari- ous Astors, Mellons and Rockefellers) paid a record-breaking $1,895,733 for the privilege.46 A rematch was inevitable, and in 1927, 145,000 spectators gathered at Soldier Fields, Chicago, in what would prove to be the culmination of Tex Rickard's career.47 When Dempsey fought Firpo in 1923, commentators were appalled by the way in which he stood over his prone opponent, ready to strike again as soon as Firpo rose to his feet. Although this was not allowed, the referee failed to intervene. New York boxing authorities then introduced a rule requiring the boxer who delivered the knockdown blow to go to a neutral corner prior to the referee beginning his ten-count. Many think this rule cost Dempsey his chance 215 Joseph Webster Golinkin, The Long Count, 1927, lithograph on paper. at regaining the championship in his 1927 fight with Tunney, a fight which became known as the 'Long Count' (illus. 88). In the seventh round, Dempsey knocked Tunney down and stood over him ready to do the same again. The referee refused to begin the count until Dempsey retired to the farthest neutral corner, and by the time he reached nine, Tunney had recovered. 'Enough running. Come on and fight,' the frustrated Dempsey shouted, but Tunney managed to hold him off and win again, by a clear decision.48 Tunney was not a popular champion, partly because his defensive style was rather dull and partly because he was represented by the press as a snob who de- spised the average boxing fan. According to Sherwood Anderson, 'he was always a bit too patronizing about his trade'.49 Tunney married a Connecticut socialite, delivered a course of lectures on Shakespeare at Yale, became a personal friend of Bernard Shaw and Thornton Wilder and, worst of all, dropped into conversation 216 words such as 'ineffectual', 'hitherto' and 'cosmeticize'.50 'His fastidious and abstracted air suggested that he had won the world championship on his way to acquiring a good library.'51 In 1928, after suffering from amnesia following a blow to the head, he decided to retire from boxing. His decision was praised by the Journal of the American Medical Association in an influential article on the effects of repeated cerebral injury, or 'punch drunkenness'.52 Tunney famously took a trip to the Alps with Shaw, and Sherwood Anderson (a Dempsey fan) imagined them walking 'along the road together': One was thinking, 'Here am I, a man of the mind. I have a close friend who is a prize fighter. How wonderful! ' And there was the other think- ing, 'I am a prize fighter, but I am no brute. I am a man of the mind. My being with this writer proves it.' Anderson was eager to mock the mutual attraction of author and prize-fighter because he believed it originated in a false dichotomy. For Anderson, 'real' fighters, such as Dempsey and Jack Johnson, have 'better minds' than Tunney, and 'real' artists and writers are themselves men 'of action'. I have watched painters at work who were like fighters about to enter the prize ring . . . Thoughts and feelings elude like a fast opponent in the ring. You rush at your opponent - the mood. 'Oh, if I could only hit it squarely, send it sprawling!' If Anderson's account of painting recalls Hazlitt, his model of writing, or rather the more energetic activity of manual typing, develops that proposed by Jack London. Anderson recalls visiting 'a writer friend' for dinner. When he arrives, the man is lying on his bed, exhausted. 'He was as a prize fighter might have been after a marvelous fight.' Anderson reports that this 'bout' had taken place after the man 'had been working for two years trying to get just the feeling he wanted in a certain piece of work.' That morning, he had sat down at his type- writer and produced 12,000 words. While London had focused merely on the production of quantities of writing, Anderson wants to relate the nature of pro- duction ('hitting and hitting' at the typewriter) to the flawless quality of the product, the 'timing' of the sentences and the 'feeling' expressed in them. In ap- pearance, very different activities, fighting and writing end up looking exactly the same. 'Marvelous' writers don't need to hang out with 'marvelous' fighters; they are 'marvelous' fighters.53 Ernest Hemingway draws a similar conclusion in his 1926 'Banal Story' (al- though, unlike Anderson, he did not like Dempsey and believed Tunney, whose nose he once bloodied, to be 'one of the greatest of heavyweight champions'.54) Hemingway's satire is directed against popular 'intellectual' magazines such as the Forum and the story parodies many articles that actually appeared in the mag- azine. 'Do we want big men - or do we want them cultured?' is one of the many 217 'banal' questions that the writer-protagonist encounters in its pages. 'What star must our college students aim at? There is Jack Britton [a welterweight]. There is Doctor Henry Van Dyke [the clergyman author of inspirational stories]. Can we reconcile the two? Take the case of Young Stribling [a heavyweight].' The story ends with an account of the death and funeral of a bullfighter. In its attention to detail, and its lack of abstraction and posturing, this embedded story is not banal; in fact, it is a vignette that could easily have appeared in In Our Time. It is also a story that could only have been written by a man for whom there is no gulf be- tween sophistication and size, a man like the protagonist (and the author) who is as confident in his knowledge of boxing as he is in his ability to write collo- quial, immediate prose. 'Far away in Paris,' the narrator thinks, as he spits seeds from an orange, 'Mascart had knocked Danny Frush cuckoo in the second round . . . There was Romance.'55 NOW THAT LADIES GO TO THE FIGHTS After 1920, it became increasingly fashionable for women to attend boxing matches; Rickard actively encouraged their presence in his efforts to make box- ing mainstream entertainment. In 1889 Nellie Bly had reassured women read- ers about the 'daintiness' of John L. Sullivan's table linen and the cleanliness of his nails. But twenties readers were more interested in the boxer's face and figure. Cartoons depicted fighters receiving flowers and advertising hair cream (illus. 58, 92). Boxers were sex symbols and women were no longer coy about ad- mitting it. 'How women love - / The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier,' noted Mina Loy in a poem, 'Perlun', published the month after 2,000 women were estimated to have attended the 1921 New Jersey fight. (H. L. Mencken com- plained that he had missed the preliminary bouts because he had been dis- tracted by a woman in a low-cut pink dress.56) Gosta Adrian-Nilsson's 1926 collage Bloo dy Boxing Debut juxtaposes images of Dempsey and Tunney with the words, 'Bloody', 'boxing debut', 'body' and 'a happy woman'.57 Women also began to write about boxers (if not boxing) for the daily papers. In 1914 Djuna Barnes reported on the phenomenon of women prize- fight spectators for the New York World magazine. At that time, she said that the main difference between male and female audiences was that when men looked at a boxer they noticed 'the muscles of his back', while women 'softly' praise his 'fine eyes': 'the woman's interest lies not in strength but in beauty'.58 Five years later, she interviewed Jess Willard and described him with a suitably aesthetic vocabulary: 'His head, having been overlooked by Sargent, is reproduced in every forest that cutters have been - that gravely solemn thing, the stump of some huge tree staring in blunt Rodinesque mutilation from the ground.'59 By 1921, when Barnes interviewed Jack Dempsey, it was no longer quite such a nov- elty to see women at boxing matches (illus. 89). She quotes Dempsey as saying, 'It's no longer enough to have speed and a good right arm to be the favorite. You have to be good-looking, too, now that ladies go to the fights.'60 Katharine 218 Djuna Barnes, Dempsey, 1921 Jack Fullerton Gerould came to the same con- clusion. Her reactions to Dempsey 's 1926 fight with Tunney, she admitted, were 'only aesthetic and psychological'. 'I do not know what "happened"; or why Gene Tunney was able to beat Jack Dempsey. I keep unperturbed, my own deep sense of the spectacle'. Aesthetically Tunney did not appeal at all. His 'tall ugliness (as Henry James would have put it)' reminded her of a 'gasoline salesman'; fortunately, the 'ferocious face and beautiful body' of Dempsey 'suggested nothing but the great gladiator'.61 Aesthetic contemplation of the statuesque male boxer often tipped over into (not always acknowledged) erotic excitement. Magazine illustrator Neysa McMein, for example, swooningly wrote of Carpentier that 'Michel Angelo would have fainted for joy with the beauty of his profile.'62 All this emphasis on the boxer's head, profile, and 'fine eyes' conceals the fact that the men these women were looking at were standing before them bare-chested in shorts. Only Mae West was candid enough to write of the de- sire of 'soft' female bodies for the 'touch' of 'raw, irritated flesh which had been scraped on the ring ropes'.63 Colette's 1920 novel, Cheri, is the story of a pre-war love affair between a mid- dle-aged woman and a boy half her age. After observing Cheri's hand while he's asleep - 'a hand not strictly feminine, yet a trifle prettier than one could have wished' - and noticing how pale and exhausted he seems, Lea resolves to feed him up (on strawberries, cream, and corn-fed chicken), and to hire him a boxing coach, Patron. Patron, she tells the jealous Cheri, has 'nothing of the dissipated schoolboy' about him: 'He has other attractions, and a good deal more to rec- ommend him than a perky little face and two black rings round his eyes.'64 Shortly afterwards, Lea watches Patron instructing Cheri in a little woodland al- cove (a pastoral setting that recalls Cashel Byron's Profession): Lea smiled, and revelled in the warm sun, sitting still and watching the bouts between these two men, both young and both stripped. In her mind she kept comparing them. 'How handsome Patron is - as solid as a house! And the boy's shaping well. You don't find knees like his running about the streets every day of the week, or I'm no judge. His back, too, is . . . will be . . . marvellous . . . And the set of his head! quite a statue!' 219 Later in the day, Lea discusses Cheri's progress with Patron. Patron praises the boy's physique: 'There's muscles on him now such as you don't see on our French lads; his are more like a coloured boy's - though he couldn't look any whiter, I must say. Nice little muscles they are, and not too showy. He'll never have mus- cles like melons.' She then embarrasses him by replying, 'I should hope not, Pa- tron! But then, you know, I didn't take him on for his boxing!'65 Pugilistic sexual potency - often, as here, analogous to 'coloured' sexual potency - crops up in a variety of women's writing of the period. In Paris in 1930, the writer and pub- lisher Nancy Cunard saw off (or possibly exacerbated) rumours about her close friendship with the black fighter Bob Scanlon by claiming he was giving her boxing lessons.66 Boxers crop up as sex objects in the work of writers as diverse as Rosamund Lehmann, Jane Bowles and Zelda Fitzgerald. Lehmann's heroine in The Weather in the Streets (1936), recovering from a failed love affair, takes up with a 'very hand- some' boxer, Ed, whose powerful hands suggest 'magnetism' rather than 'comrade- ship' (and remind her of her ex).67 In Jane Bowles's story, 'Going to Massachusetts', Janet tries to woo the feisty Sis, but Sis, 'full of fighting spirit', likes 'men who are champions. Like champion boxers' (especially when they're not in training). 'Whiskey,' she demanded. 'The world loves drunks, but it despises perverts. Athletes and boxers drink when they're not in training. All the time.'68 In Save Me the Waltz (1936), Zelda Fitzgerald detailed 'the post-war extravagance which sent . . . some sixty thousand . . . Americans wandering over the face of Europe'. When her protagonists, David and Alabama, arrive at the Hotel George-v in Paris, the bartender points out a Miss Dickie Axton, telling them, 'She'd been drinking in this bar the night she shot her lover in the Gare de l'Est.' We don't learn much more about Miss Axton, merely that 'her long legs struck forcefully forward as if she pressed her toes watchfully on the accelerator of the universe' and that 'peo- ple said she had slept with a Negro.' The bartender doesn't believe this. 'He didn't see where Miss Axton would have found the time between white gentlemen - pugilists, too, sometimes.'69 In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams recalled a 1924 visit with his wife Floss to see the Hemingways' new baby. After supper, they go to a prize-fight. In the row in front of us . . . was Ogden Nash, upon whose back, when one of the fighters got bloodiest, Floss pounded as she screamed, "Kill him! Kill him!" to my horror and astonishment. Home by taxi early. Only a few pages earlier, Williams had distinguished men, 'the technical morons of the tribe', from women who 'remain sound even in debauchery'. No wonder the taxi came early.70 Numerous films from the 1920s and '30s draw on the sexual lure of the champion boxer for respectable girls. Most, however, rather moralistically demonstrate how pugilistic sex drive, as well as sex appeal, could break careers as well as hearts. Usually there is a clear distinction between good and bad women. In Love in the Ring (1930), Max Schmeling stars as a boxer who falls under the influence of a society woman and nearly loses an important fight. His childhood sweetheart sets him right.71 In The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933), Steve Morgan (Max Baer) wins the heart of Belle Mercer (Myrna Loy), a hard- working, sensible woman who is good for his career. She has 'a lot of mother' in her, but, she adds, 'a lot of woman too'. Belle and Steve marry but his roving eye and legions of fans soon lead to trouble. While Belle stays at home and lis- tens to his fights on the radio, brassy blondes ogle the 'Adonis of the Ring' from the front row. 'I wouldn't mind having him on a pedestal in my front yard', one whispers. 'I bet you're a good dancer,' she says later when she manages to get closer. Corrupted by such women, Steve seems destined to lose an important fight - until Belle intervenes in his corner. He says he wants to quit ('I'm tired of being a big shot. I just want you') but she forbids it. She's doing her 'job' as his wife; he must finish his and become champion.72 The prevalence of prize-fighters as sex symbols put pressure on men to act the part, and many comedies of the period exploit the gap between the boxer and the average guy. The bobbed heroine of the 1926 German film The Boxer's Bride becomes so obsessed with boxers that her fiance decides to pose as a fighter to win her affections.73 A similar performance is undertaken by Alfred Butler, the hero of Buster Keaton's most successful silent film, Battling Butler (1926). 74 (Martin Scorsese later claimed that Keaton was 'the only person who had the right attitude about boxing in movies'.75) Battling Butler is about a wealthy fop whose father sends him to the mountains to 'rough it' and 'be a man'. Accompa- nied by his valet, Martin, Alfred Butler has no intention of roughing it. His camp- ing equipment consists of a brass bed, full silver service dinnerware, and three changes of clothes a day. Masculinity, we realize early on, is an elaborate mas- querade. Alfred falls in love with a local Mountain Girl (Sally O'Neil), but her brother and father reject his proposal of marriage until Martin tells them that Al- fred is actually 'Battling Butler', a champion boxer. Unfortunately the real Battling hears of this fraud and decides to humiliate the impostor by having him fight the Alabama Murderer'. Alfred is taken for training, and locks up his wife to keep her from seeing his disgrace. After much nervous pacing in the changing room, however, he finds that the real Battling Butler has already fought and won the bout. The play on which the film was based ended here, but Keaton realized that a movie audience would not put up with this: 'we couldn't promise 'em for seven reels that I was goin' to fight in the ring and then not fight. So we staged a fight in the dressing room with the guy ... and myself. And it worked out swell.'76 While the early sparring sessions consisted of familiar choreographed slapstick, in the final fight, Walter Kerr notes, Keaton 'suddenly seems no comedian at all': Without warning, he can take no more. He turns on his assailant . . . pounding him bloody against the walls of the small room, picking him up off the floor to batter him senseless again.77 90 Measuring Rudolph Valentino's biceps. If Keaton provided an unexpected Dempsey, an even less likely contender was Hollywood idol and 'catnip to women', Rudolph Valentino (illus. 90). 78 In 1921 Valentino became friendly with Dempsey who was living in Hollywood, promoting the career of his actress wife, Estelle Taylor, and acting in a few films himself. Although Valentino was a keen sportsman and often sparred with Dempsey and other Hollywood friends, his image, forged by films such as The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921) and The Sheik (1921), was that of dancer and lover, roles, it seemed, that were neither properly manly nor properly Amer- ican. 'While we try to assure ourselves in this country', wrote Vera Caspary in 1926, 'that dancing is as masculine as boxing and the dancer the physical peer of the fighter, we don't honestly believe it.'79 91 'Many a "Powder Puff'", advertise- ment for training bags, Everlast Boxing Record, 1926. c- p-ouibitititB nf JJ7S fk-«rrJ Valentino's later films are often more concerned with exploring and exploiting his star persona than in creating parts for him to act. For example, in Cobra (1925) he played an Italian count who had gone to America to escape women-trouble, but found himself accused of being an 'indoor sheik'. Dempsey helped him prepare for the knockdown punch with which he deci- sively answered the charge. The scene was to prove tragically prescient. The following year Valentino was deeply offended when a Chicago Tribune journal- ist dubbed him a 'pink powder puff' and claimed he represented a threat to 'Homo Americanus'. 'Hollywood', the editorial stated, 'is a national school of masculinity. Rudy, the beautiful gardener's boy, is the prototype of the Amer- ican male. Hell's bells. Oh, sugar.' Valentino responded with an open letter in a rival paper, challenging the journalist 'to meet me in the boxing . . . arena to prove in typical American fashion . . . which of us is more a man. I do not know how big you are but this challenge stands if you are as big as Jack Dempsey.'80 The journalist never responded, but Valentino would not let the matter drop. With Dempsey 's help, he staged a 'fight' with the sportswriter on the roof of a New York hotel. Valentino's opponent duly went down and the Evening] ournal ran a headline, 'powder puff? whami' The following month, Valentino was rushed to hospital with acute appendicitis and perforated gastric ulcers, the result, some claim, of all the boxing. Waking after surgery, his first words were reputedly, 'Did I behave like a pink pow- der puff or like a man?' After two weeks Valentino died, at the age of 31. Later that year, the annual Everlast Record Book pub- lished an advertisement for training bags with the text, 'Many a "Powder Puff" boxer developed a "kick like a mule's" that changed him to a "knockout artist"' (illus. 91). According to John Dos Passos, Valentino's tragedy resulted from trying 'to make good in he-man, two-fisted, bronco-busting, poker-playing, stock-jug- gling America'. After the actor's death, he noted, 'the champion himself [Dempsey] allowed himself to be quoted that the boy was fond of boxing and a great admirer of the champion.'81 The gap between movie star and pugilist was not, in fact, so big. While Valentino struggled to present himself a properly masculine American boxer - 'the Dempsey of the Nile', as Dorothy Parker quipped - the Manassa Mauler was told to get a Hollywood nose job.82 After all, as MANY A "POWDER PUFF' hour daVtlop*/) ■ "Irhk lill* ■ inutcV ikkl dLhnfftA bin ta a "kn*c)lfiWt ■Ulu"; m»Bjf m. Infiu] fjoeilc*Ld#r HBkraed ■ "loclt"