5

‘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-1920s, boxing had become 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 businessmen 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 magazine 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 potent 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 deprivation, and fasting. The magazine awarded championship belts in all these ‘events’ and so challenges were regularly issued. But the Police Gazette was particularly interested in boxing. Gene Smith argues that, ‘almost alone’, Fox’s magazine ‘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, ‘he can do the walking.’ From then on, the Police Gazette devoted itself to slandering 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.

36 The 45th round of Sullivan vs. Kilrain, as illustrated in the Police Gazette (1889).>

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, José Martí, 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 material . . . 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 merchants, 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 Sullivan 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 different.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

Of Boston

Broke every single rib of Jake Kilrain.12

But only three years after his defeat of Kilrain, Sullivan’s great bare-knuckled 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 Francisco’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 country, 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 reputation 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 different 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

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 (popularly 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 “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 others. In his Life and Confessions, the psychologist G. Stanley Hall admitted a compulsive interest in the ‘raw side of human life’, so much so that he ‘never missed an opportunity to attend a prize fight 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 illegal 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 (Taking the Count and Between Rounds) and the moment when it is all over (Salutat). The professional activities surrounding the fight – involving the boxers’ attendants, the referee, 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 Salutat 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 highlighted 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 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 Cranmer’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 without 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 spectators and participants is less important than the links which connect them.

38 Thomas Eakins, Salutat, 1898.

Several of Eakins’s followers pursued his interest in boxing, finding in it a subject matter which would both challenge academic painting, and Americanize it in a properly ‘manly’ way. In the mid-1890s, Robert Henri, who had studied 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

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.

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 ‘Ashcan 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 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 backroom 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 downward, 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 spectator. 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 subject 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 suggesting 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. Both Hogarth and Bellows co-opted low-life activities such as boxing to epitomize ‘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

40 George Bellows, Stag at Sharkey’s, 1909.

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 literature 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 expressing vitality, virility or sincerity.

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, language 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 boxers 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 comparable 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 daring anticipation of coming social developments’.41 The book was a huge popular 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. Wodehouse 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 Championship 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 argumentative 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 business trying to make money at a certain weight and at certain risks, not of bodily 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 encouraged 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 Donnelly) 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 Victorian chivalry, ‘It’s no pleasure to me to fight chance men in the streets for nothing; 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 opportunity 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 Croxley 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 return to medical school.51

In ‘The Croxley Master’, Conan Doyle had come a long way from the Regency romance of Rodney Stone (published nine years earlier) to an almost Shavian 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 XII.’⁵²

As work of last resort, Shaw further maintained, boxing had much in common with prostitution. His 1893 play Mrs Warren’s Profession was originally subtitled ‘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 prostitution, 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 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

41 Jack Yeats, Not Pretty but Useful, 1897–9.

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 development 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 particle 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 nutritional needs. In the boxer’s case, this invariably meant lots of meat. Discussions 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 association with John Bull Englishness, and partly because many early boxers, including 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 ‘nourishment 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 relieved to hear he had ‘resumed the flesh of animals’.⁶⁴

Sporting nutritionists were not invented in the twentieth century. An obsession 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. Blackwood’s Magazine ran a satirical article on the subject:

In the morning, at four of the clock, a serving-man doth enter my chamber, 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 reflections 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 provide 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 stomach 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 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 romantic. 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’.70

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 mangles, 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 concluded, ‘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 describe 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 is ‘old’, and so he must fight with a ‘policy of economy’, in a manner that is ‘parsimonious 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.

42 Jack London in boxing pose in an undated photograph.

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 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: MUSAE 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 subtraction’ is exemplified in Sister Carrie:

A man’s fortune, or material progress, is very much the same as his bodily growth. Either he is growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood; or he is growing weaker, older, less incisive mentally, 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 considerably 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 of fortunes’.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 creature 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 calculate 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 another story.’⁸⁵

43 The Boxing Boys, wall-painting from Akrotiri, Thera, 17th to 16th century BC.

45 The Female Combatants, Or Who Shall, 1776, etching.

44 Humphreys vs Mendoza Jug, 1788.

46 The Prussian prize-fighter and his allies attempting to tame imperial Kate, or, the state of the European bruisers, Cartoon shows Catherine II and Frederick William II 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.

48 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).

49 Charles Turner after T. Blake, The Interior of the Fives Court, with Randall and Turner Sparring, 1825.

50 The Zoopraxiscope, Athletes Boxing, by Eadweard Muybridge, c. 1893.

51 ‘Gown! Gown! Town! Town! or, The Battle of Peas Hill’, illustration from Gradus ad Cantabrigiam (1824).

52 Thomas Eakins, Between Rounds, 1898–9.

53 ‘If I Wuz the Man I Wuz, They Wouldn’t Need Him’, postcard, New York, 1912.

54 Cover of The Coming Champion, 1910, Blackface Minstrel Show, script for a sketch.

55 Archibald J. Motley Jr, The Plotters, 1933.

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.

59 Karl Arnold, Women Boxers, Berlin, from Simplicissimus, August 1923.

60 Poster advertising Panama Al Brown at the Palais des Sports, Brussels, 1938.

61 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.

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 rigorous work habits, and a watchful eye on market demand. Writing, like boxing, 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 described the effort of writing and publishing as physical, especially when dealing 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 ‘brainpower’ 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 both of them), and was followed by an interval of half a minute for recuperation’. 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 predetermined, as was their duration (usually three or four minutes) and ‘a combatant 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 discovered 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, producing 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 marketable as a spectator sport; particularly so when film entered into the equation. 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 entertainment 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 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

64 George Belcher, Time & Judgement at the National Sporting Club (J. H. Douglas and E. Zerega), 1898.

Once the precise measurement of time became paramount, and before automatic 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 Canvey 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

The conjunction between calls of time in boxing and in life is further developed 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 listening 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).⁹⁹ 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 lifetime. A huge work, it depicts, almost lifesize, the boxer Charlie McKeever standing waiting while the referee, a portrait of sportswriter Henry Walter Schlichter, counts to ten. McKeever’s opponent, Joe Mack, crouches in the right-hand corner, 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 outstretched 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 timekeeper, the seconds, and the boxer are the central protagonists, but the policeman 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

BROBDINGNAGIAN ATTRACTIONS: PHOTOGRAPHY AND FILM

In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge produced his first sequential photographs of moving horses. In the 1880s his experiments (with Thomas Eakins) at the University of Pennsylvania resulted in over 100,000 negatives of animal and human bodies 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 movement, and refused to discriminate between methods of viewing humans and traditionally ‘lower’ forms of life, and so were regarded as evidence for evolutionary 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 university, 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 Students 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 invertebrate 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 classicism and Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe (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 corner 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 modern nudity (like that of classical Greece on which it modelled itself) was communal 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 methodology. In his classic 1880 exposition of naturalist technique, Emile Zola compared 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 naturalist 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 performed 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 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 terrible 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 shipwrecked men unable to land their boat, and McTeague (1899) where Frank Norris ends his antagonists’ struggle for gold in an inescapable Death Valley.

65 Circle of Thomas Eakins, Two Male Students Posing as Boxers, c. 1886.

66 Thomas Eakins, Seven Males, Nude, Two Boxing at Centre, c. 1883.

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 destroy. All the painful, thousand years’ gains of man in his upward climb through creation were lost. Only the electric light remained, a milestone 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, recoiling and colliding again and eternally again.

In this scene, Barthes’s story of the ‘rise and fall of fortunes’ seems to be straightforwardly reduced to the colliding of atoms and star-dust, but reading on, the issues are complicated considerably, as London introduces Martin’s own perspective 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 kinetoscope. . . 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 naturalist ideas can be tested and observed, it is one of the few in which the act of observation 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 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, Ramsaye 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 reengages 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 peephole, 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 contract 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 Stuart’s words, the ‘fistic carnival’) finally took place in Carson City, Nevada on 17 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

67 Poster advertising film of the Corbett–Fitzsimmons Record Prize Fight, London, 1897.

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 ‘copyright the veriscope company’ so that spectators would know they were watching the real thing and not a re-enactment. (Rector was right to worry, for fake fight films were common, and Sigmund Lubin’s ‘Reproduction of the Corbett and Fitzsimmons 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 upmarket venues as New York’s Academy of Music (‘the first film invasion of the famous old Academy’) and London’s Imperial Theatre. A poster announcing its showing at the Imperial Theatre advertised ‘a revolution in amusement enterprise’ and ‘Brobdignagian attractions’ (sic) in the form of the ‘two greatest novelties 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 recent local boxing match, which sets him off reminiscing about other good ‘puckers’. ‘Fitzsimons’, he thinks, is ‘the best pucker going for strength’, ‘Jem Corbet’ ‘the best pucker for science’. Fitzsimmons, only a middleweight, as Patrick recalls, ‘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 knowledge 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 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 – opening up new and lucrative markets – it is fair to say that boxing also had an impact 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 – ‘boxing created cinema’.¹²¹ Early filmmakers were interested in filming boxing matches for a variety of reasons – personal, commercial and technical. Personally, 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 cameras 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 prize-fight’.¹²⁶ By 1912, an English critic, Frederick Talbot, noted the ‘considerable opposition’ which prize-fight films met. This, he said, ‘should be welcomed 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, boxing 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 conventions of the acts that surrounded them.¹²⁸ This generally meant matching tall, 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 promoted 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 rival, fights 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.

68 Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle in a poster advertising Counted Out (1914), also known as The Knockout.

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 homosexual 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’, ‘transformative 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 surrounded 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 filmmakers 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 daughter.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 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 1897.¹⁴⁰ 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 ‘calculatedly 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’, ‘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 husband’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 noticed 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 women) also became interested in boxing as a subject matter within which to explore the mechanisms of sexual selection, the ‘struggle between the males for possession of the females’.¹⁵⁰

69 George Bellows, Preliminaries to the Big Bout, 1916.

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 forest 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 apparition which she at first took to be a beautiful statue, but presently recognized, 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 versions, 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 anyone would ‘dare to suspect her . . . of anything so vulgarly human as sexual interest in Cashel’. ‘A utilitarian before everything’, Lydia assesses his animal vitality 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 trustworthy 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 London’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 appalled 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 countenance’, 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 forward, 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 Oakland 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 ambiguous. 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 concerns the physical.

Chapter Two goes back to consider Joe and Genevieve’s courtship, and to emphasize 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 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 straightforwardly erotic. Rather, her appreciation curiously shifts between the religious and the aesthetic, and much of it is feminizing. Joe is ‘godlike’, and she feels ‘sacrilege’ 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 (biologically, erotically, religiously and aesthetically). It is not only Joe’s death that makes the conclusion bleak. He was also gambling on his ability to communicate 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, for example, presents a utopia of sexual and economic equality in which cooking 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

70 Women boxers, c. 1911.

Although Bishop’s is not the only work in which a feminist agenda is present, 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’, usually ‘according to pugilistic rules’ (illus. 71).¹⁶⁵ 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 solidity was created. The technique was most often used to view images of landscape 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 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

71 ‘The Girls Biffed Each Other’, from Police Gazette (1890).

72 Stereoscopic photo of a Hallowe’en party boxing match, ‘England’s Advantage’.

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 manner 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 alternative 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’.¹⁶⁸

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””.

73 Jack and Chairman London boxing together.

‘Oh, I can swing clubs, and box, and fence,’ she cried, successively striking 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 quantitative’, 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 together, just as London did with his second wife, Charmian (illus. 73).

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, writers lost interest in the distinctive 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.