As noted in my previous post, I met Norman Mailer at a conference at Harvard three years ago. At the time, I’d read almost none of his work and was completely nonplussed by the experience. Being of a generation for whom practically everything is held up as larger than life, and thus for whom almost no one is larger than life, I had no appreciation for why, e.g., Ken Finkleman would go off his rocker when he learned I’d met the man.1 However, when I picked up King of the World, David Remnick’s extended snapshot of Muhammad Ali, in the course of researching a story on fighting, the force and utter strangeness of Mailer’s personality at the height of his fame became impossible to overlook.
Mailer got interested in the fight game shortly after the post-war success of The Naked and the Dead. He wrote a succession of articles over the years, many of them for Esquire, in which he blended astute analysis of the sport with highly charged assessments of the sport’s racial politics, and with his trademark self-promotion. This self-promotion occurred off the page, as well. Remnick describes Mailer’s centre-ring performance in the circus that was the aftermath of the 1962 Floyd Patterson-Sonny Liston bout:
Norman Mailer arrived after the press conference had started. He had been up all night drinking at the Playboy Mansion, and the more he had drunk, the more he had buttonholed people there about how to promote a rematch and make it a multimillion-dollar score. He himself would help promote the fight. He even insisted that he could prove Liston had not really won the fight in Chicago, that Patterson had gotten up off the floor and “existentially” beaten Liston in the ninth round. Mailer had had a great deal to drink.
Mailer showed up without credentials at the morning-after press conference, and as he was being kicked out, told a New York Times reporter that he was there to handle media relations for the fight and make a great deal of money for everyone. He was, Remnick writes, “carried out of the ballroom on a chair looking like the Hebrew emperor of ice cream.” Mailer made his way back in, and, when allowed to speak, exchanged trash talk with Liston. And so it was that Mailer, not Liston or Patterson, ended up dominating the pre-fight media coverage. Mailer later recounted these events in his Esquire article on the fight, concluding (wrongly) that he’d earned Liston’s respect.
I haven’t read any of Mailer’s shorter boxing work, but The Fight, his book on the 1975 Rumble in the Jungle between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, is plagued by the wild inconsistency identified by his many eulogizers as the hallmark of his oeuvre. Lauded as a classic in many quarters, the account is an often-dated and occasionally painful read, thanks to Mailer’s extensive, self-reflexive use of the third person, which he sometimes interweaves with off-the-cuff racial analysis. For example:
How his [Mailer's] prejudices were loose. So much resentment had developed for black style, black snobbery, black rhetoric, black pimps, superfly, and all that virtuoso handling of the ho. The pride Blacks took in their skill as pimps! A wrath at the mismanagement of his own sensual existence now sat on him, a sorrow at how the generosity of his mind seemed determined to contract as he grew older. He could not really bring himself to applaud the emergence of a powerful people into the center of American life—he was envious. They had the good fortune to be born Black.
This post–Jazz-age riffing reads, now as then, as more than a little embarrassing.2 Essayist and critic Gerald Early took Mailer to task for it in his essay “I Only Like It Better When the Pain Comes,” writing, “For Mailer, the black is always the id-dominated beast, the heart of the white man’s darkness; and always, in Mailer’s tone, there is that juvenile penis envy that might as well be hate because it amounts to such an insulting kind of love.”3
Early also dissed Mailer’s forty-page description of the Ali-Foreman fight itself, deploying Hemingway to deliver a low blow: “All bad writers are in love with the epic.” But here, Early erred. The fight account is where Mailer’s strengths come out. His understanding of ring psychology is superb, and the Beaty rhythms of his prosody blend perfectly with his subject, making for a spectacular read.
On ring psychology: “Before fatigue brings boxers to the boiler rooms of the damned,4 they live at a height of consciousness and with a sense of detail they encounter nowhere else.”
On the to-and-fro (or rather the to-and-to) of the fight:
With Ali braced on the ropes, as far back on the ropes as a deep-sea fisherman is braced back in his chair when setting the hook on a big strike, so Ali got ready and Foreman came on to blast him out. A shelling reminiscent of artillery battles in World War I began. Neither man moved more than a few feet in the next minute and a half. Across that embattled short space Foreman threw punches in barrages of four and six and eight and nine, heavy maniacal slamming punches, heavy as the boom of oaken doors, bombs to the body, bolts to the head, punching until he could not breathe, backing off to breathe again and come in again, bomb again, blast again, drive and steam and slam the torso in front of him, wreck him in the arms, break through those arms, get to his ribs, dig him out, dig him out, put the dynamite in the earth, lift him, punch him, punch him up to heaven, take him out, stagger him—great earthmover he must have sobbed to himself, kill this mad and bouncing goat.
This passage also served to communicate Ali’s strategy—the famous rope-a-dope, which saw Foreman punch himself out so that Ali could later move in for the kill. The strategy worked, as Mailer writes, because Foreman became “a total demonstration of the power of one idea even when the idea no longer works.”
Mailer’s great flaw as a boxing writer, by contrast, might be summarized as a total demonstration of the strain caused by too many ideas that don’t work. But when his ideas did work, they worked spectacularly.
Next, on the Bironist: I recount the awkward moment when Gerald Early and Norman Mailer called “Bingo” at the same time at a PTA fundraiser.
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