6

Fresh Hopes

‘We are all Anglo-Saxons enough to enjoy the sight of a fight,’ Frank Norris declared in 1903, before, unblushingly, going on to praise the talents of a New Zealander of Cornish descent, Bob Fitzsimmons.1 A rather loose approach to matters of race, ethnicity and nationality had long been a feature in boxing, even when those affiliations were supposedly the point. Such leniency allowed a former American slave, Tom Molineaux, to be co-opted into the English battle against Napoleon in 1812, the Irish-born and California-bred John Heenan to be fêted as a symbol of both American and Irish anti-British sentiment in 1860, and Joe Louis to become a symbol of Jim Crow America’s fight against foreign fascism in 1938.

The rapid development of sports in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was closely linked to questions of national identity – what it meant to be an American, and more critically for the new immigrants, what was needed to become one.² ‘To be an American, dress like an American, look like an American, and even, if only in fantasy, talk like an American’ was the goal of the young immigrant.³ Sports such as boxing provided a readily available subject-matter, and vocabulary, for recognizably American talk.

In Abraham Cahan’s 1896 novella, Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto, Yekl Podkovnik’s metamorphosis into Jake, ‘an American feller, a Yankee’, is represented by his enthusiasm for dance halls and boxing. The story opens with Jake giving his fellow Lower East Side sweatshop workers a detailed account of the exploits of Sullivan, Corbett and others, proudly displaying his grasp of the correct idiom:

‘Say, Dzake,’ the presser broke in, ‘John Sullivan is tzampion no longer, is he?

‘Oh no! Not always is it holiday!’ Jake responded, with what he considered a Yankee jerk of his head. ‘Why don’t you know? Jimmie Corbett leaked him, and Jimmie leaked Cholly Meetchel, too. You can betch you’ bootsh! Johnnie could not leak Chollie, becaush he is a big bluffer, Chollie is,’ he pursued, his clean-shaven florid face beaming with enthusiasm for his subject, and with pride in the diminutive proper nouns he flaunted. ‘But Jimmie pundished him. Oh, didn’t he knock him out off shight! He came near making a meat-ball of him’ – with a chuckle. ‘He tzettled him in three roynds. I knew a feller who had seen the fight.’

‘What is a rawnd, Dzake?’ the presser inquired.4

Reading this slang-laden fight description (which then goes on into ‘a minute exposition of “right-handers”, “left-handers”, “sending to sleep”, “first blood”, and other commodities of the fistic business’) we might almost be back in Regency England. But there are important differences. The first thing to notice is a footnote that tells us that ‘English words incorporated in the Yiddish of the characters of this narrative are given in italics’. Fluent standard English, in other words, represents fluent standard Yiddish. The English that appears in italics is the same kind of English that Pierce Egan italicized in the 1800s, and like Egan, Jake is putting on a costume when he uses ‘diminutive proper nouns’ and talks of ‘tzampions’ and ‘roynds’. Sabinne Haenni suggests that this speech could ‘qualify for the vaudeville stage’.⁵ But Jake’s language is further complicated by the fact that he has recently moved to New York from Boston, and so even his Yiddish is different from that of his co-workers and ‘his r’s could do credit to the thickest Irish brogue’. In Boston, Jake says, ‘every Jew speaks English like a stream’, but what kind of English is it that flows so freely? It is hardly standardized – one man says ‘roynd’; another ‘rawnd’. Cahan describes the English his characters speak as ‘mutilated’ and ‘gibberish’.⁶

When his friends dismiss boxing as mere fighting, Jake evokes its rules. One of the men, a scholar called Bernstein, makes a joke: ‘America is an educated country, so they won’t even break each other’s bones without grammar. They tear each other’s sides according to “right and left”, you know.’ Cahan explains that ‘this was a thrust at Jake’s right-handers and left-handers, which had interfered with Jake’s reading’, and adds, in a footnote, that ‘right and left’ is ‘a term relating to the Hebrew equivalent of the letter s, whose pronunciation depends on the right or left position of a mark over it’. The rules of Hebrew are thus juxtaposed with those of American boxing. Jake may ‘speak quicker’ than his friends, his American slang flowing ‘like a stream’, but he is illiterate; Bernstein has little standard English and less slang, but he is a Hebrew scholar.⁷

Cahan himself sat somewhere between his two characters.⁸ Before Yekl, Cahan had published several stories in Yiddish and had enthusiastically welcomed the American publication of stories by I. L. Peretz and Shalom Aleichem. But Yiddish was generally regarded by Jewish intellectuals as non-literary. The languages of the literature were Hebrew, Russian, Polish, German, and, if a broad American audience was to be reached, English.⁹ ‘A Tale of the Ghetto’ written specifically for those outside the ghetto, Yekl followed in the tradition of what was then known as ‘local color’ fiction and positioned its characters and their environment with anthropological exactness. The narrator is a key figure in this process, our tour guide around the ghetto, and our translator of its speech. His English is self-consciously literary and genteel. The opening paragraph, for example, tells us that the boss was on Broadway ‘where he had betaken himself two or three hours before’, and that ‘the little sweltering assemblage . . . beguiled their suspense variously’. Jules Chametzsky maintains that the extreme contrast between this language and that of Cahan’s characters entails ‘an arch and condescending attitude’ towards them. ‘Their fractured English is comic when it is not grotesque.’10 But something more interesting seems to be going on. While the English the characters speak is, in Cahan’s word, ‘mutilated’, as we have seen, their Yiddish (written as English) is fluent and in many ways, much more expressive than the narrator’s English. Yiddish, Cahan notes, is ‘omnivorous’. Several jokes in the text emerge from phrases or words that sound similar in Yiddish and English (‘left and right’ above; ‘dinner’ in Yiddish is ‘thinner’ in English). The language of the ghetto, like the ghetto itself, remains a complicated, and not wholly translatable, ‘hodgepodge’. English may be the official language of the story but within its embrace are found several varieties of Yiddish (one of which is spoken with an Irish lilt), Russian and Hebrew (when Jake takes a Hebrew letter to be translated, Cahan jokes that it ‘was Greek to Jake’).¹¹

For Jake, however, following boxing is not only about finding an excuse to show off his new mastery of American colloquialisms. It is also a ‘trying on of roles . . . [a] delight in assuming new identities’; in particular new versions of masculinity.¹² Becoming an American man was not a matter of simply gaining something additional (a style on top); it also meant giving something up. The shifting balance between gains and losses is what the story is all about, and at times the debate slips into verbal sparring. When one of Jake’s co-workers dismisses the fight talk, Jake is immediately ‘on the defensive’.

’Don’t you like it? I do,’ Jake declared tartly. ‘Once I live in America,’ he pursued, on the defensive, ‘I want to know that I live in America. Dot’sh a kin’ a man I am! One must not be a greenhorn. Here a Jew is as good as a Gentile. How, then, would you have it? The way it is in Russia, where a Jew is afraid to stand within four ells of a Christian?’¹³

In the 1890s Zionists in Germany, England and the Unites States had begun to speak of a modern muscular Judaism, and often evoked the name of the early nineteenth-century Jewish boxers, Daniel Mendoza and Dutch Sam.¹⁴ In the ‘Proem’ to The Children of the Ghetto (1914), Israel Zangwill told the story of an old peddler called Sleepy Sol who is defended from the brutality of a local hostler by his son-in-law, who turns out to be Dutch Sam. ‘The young Jew paralysed him by putting his left hand negligently into his pocket. With his remaining hand he closed the hostler’s right eye, and sent the flesh about it into mourning.’ Zangwill included the story to make the point that ‘Judæa has always a cosmos in little, and its prize-fighters and scientists, its philosophers and “fences” [etc] . . . have always been in the first rank.’¹⁵ When Yekl defends his interest in prize-fighting by evoking Russian persecution of Jews, he seems to be aligning himself with muscular Judaism. To his friends, and indeed to most Orthodox Russian and Polish immigrants at this time, however, the idea of the tough Jew (the muskeljuden) was not merely an anathema but a contradiction in terms, and its adoption signalled the beginning of the end of traditional values.16 In The Spirit of the Ghetto (1902), Hutchins Hapgood observed that many of those who talked of the ‘crimes of which they read in the newspapers, of prize-fights, of budding business propositions . . . gradually quit going to synagogue, give up heder promptly when they are thirteen years old, avoid the Yiddish theatres, seek the up-town places of amusement, dress in the latest American fashion, and have a keen eye for the right thing in neckties’.¹⁷

When Bernstein asks Yekl, ‘Are there no other Christians than fighters in America?’ he might have added, are no other Americans than Irish-Americans? But neither man seems aware that Yekl’s American icons were both first-generation Irish immigrants: Sullivan’s parents came from Tralee and Athlone, Corbett’s from Galway.¹⁸ If you wanted to become an American in late nineteenth-century Boston it made sense to adopt an Irish brogue and talk about Sullivan and Corbett. At the time, Irishness was almost synonymous with pugnacity, and pugnacity was almost synonymous with Americanness; ergo the Irish were the ‘real’ Americans, the immigrants who best performed the accepted version of national identity.¹⁹ Assimilation simply meant adopting the ways of the previous generation of immigrants.

The complexities of ethnic identification form the basis of O. Henry’s 1906 story, ‘The Coming-out of Maggie’, in which an Irish girl sneaks her Italian boyfriend Tony Spinelli into the Clover Leaf Social Club under the name of Terry O’Sullivan. ‘Terry’ falls out with the leader of the Give and Take Athletic Association, Dempsey Donovan, who challenges him to a fight. Faced with Donovan, ‘dancing, light-footed, with the wary grace of a modern pugilist’, Terry reverts to his essential Tony-ness and, with ‘a murderous look in his dark eyes’, pulls a stiletto from his jacket. Maggie apologizes for bringing a ‘Guinea’ into the club and Donovan walks her home.²⁰ Tony Spinelli was not the only immigrant to adopt an Irish name; many turn-of-the-century Italian and Jewish fighters followed suit. Mushy Callahan was Jewish; Hugo Kelly was Italian.²¹ In James T. Farrell’s 1932 novel Young Lonigan, set in 1916, Old Man O’Brien remembers the good old days, ‘when most of them [the boxers] were real Irish, lads who’d bless themselves before they fought: they weren’t fake Irish like most of the present-day dagoes and wops and sheenies who took Hibernian names’. Meanwhile Davey Cohen, a Jewish boy, sees ‘all the Irish race personified in the face of Studs Lonigan’ and imagines himself ‘punching that face, cutting it, bloodying the nose, blackening the eyes, mashing it’.²²

Soon Jews were participating in, as well as watching and imagining, such fights. Along with Sullivan and Corbett, Yekl might have celebrated the San Francisco Jewish boxer, Joe Choynski, who fought Corbett, Fitzsimmons, Sharkey and Jack Johnson and whose father published Public Opinion, a muckraking newspaper that exposed anti-Semitism.²³ Corbett recalls that their 1889 fight was partly promoted as ‘Jew versus Gentile’.24 In 1905, the Police Gazette noted that a generation of ‘peaceable and inoffensive’ Russian Jewish immigrants had been succeeded by ‘turbulent young men from whose ranks have been graduated a number of professional pugilists and boxers’.²⁵ The first Jewish-American champions were bantamweight Harry Harris, who won his crown in 1901, and featherweight Abe Attell, who held the title from 1904 to 1912. In New York’s Lower East Side, the first popular Jewish fighter was Leach Cross (Louis Wallach) who, from 1906 to 1915, fought as ‘The Fighting Dentist’, while London’s East End produced 1915 world welterweight champion Ted ‘Kid’ Lewis (Gershon Mendeloff ), and lightweight and junior welterweight champion Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg (Judah Bergman), the ‘Whitechapel Windmill’, who famously hung his tzitzis on the ringpost at the start of each fight.²⁶ In 1920 the Italian Samuel Mandella began fighting under the Jewish-sounding name of Sammy Mandell, and by the early 1930s, Jews dominated boxing on both sides of the Atlantic, not simply as fighters and fans, but as promoters, trainers, managers, referees, journalists and sporting goods manufacturers.

It wasn’t long before the story of the Jewish boy who broke his father’s heart by becoming a boxer became a bit of a cliché. His People, a 1925 film about Jewish life on the Lower East Side, tells the story of Sammy and Morris Cominsky, both of whom stray from the ways of their Orthodox parents. Morris becomes a lawyer and Sammy a prize-fighter. As the father expels Sammy from the house, his words are presented in an inter-title:

A box-fyteh!? So that’s what you’ve become? For this we came to America? So that you should become a box-fyteh? Better you should be a gangster or even a murderer. The shame of it. A box-fyteh!²⁷

In Nineteen Nineteen (1932), John Dos Passos introduced the character of Benny Compton: ‘The old people were Jews but at school Benny always said he no he wasn’t a Jew he was an American’. The Compton children assimilate in different ways. Ben becomes a political activist, his sister Gladys a secretary, and their brother, Izzy ‘palled around with an Irishman who was going to get him into the ring.’ Although it is Benny and Gladys who eventually come to bad ends, it is Izzy’s career choice that most upsets his parents. ‘Momma cried and Pop forbade any of the kids to mention his name’.²⁸

Boxing promoters capitalized on ethnic animosities and often matched a Jewish fighter against an Irishman or an Italian against either (illus. 74). Prompted by the gift of The Jewish Boxers’ Hall of Fame, Herman Roth recalled many of the early Jewish champions (and in particular those from New Jersey) in a 1988 conversation with his son Philip, whom he had taken as a child to the Thursday night fights at Newark’s Laurel Garden. ‘They fought two battles’, Herman said.

They fought because they were fighters, and they fought because they were Jews. They’d put two guys in the ring, an Italian and a Jew, and

74 Poster advertising Alf Mancini vs. Harry Mason, Southwark, London, 1930.

Irishman and a Jew, and they fought like they meant it, they fought to hurt. There was always a certain amount of hatred in it. Trying to show who was superior.29

As a teenager, Philip Roth ‘could recite the names and weights of all the champions and contenders’, and was particularly keen on Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, light heavyweight champion from 1932 to 1934. ‘Jewish boxers and boxing aficionados,’ he later noted, were a ‘strange deviation from the norm’ of Jewish culture and ‘interesting largely for that reason’.

In the world whose values first formed me, unrestrained physical violence was considered contemptible everywhere else. I could no more smash a nose with a fist than fire a pistol into someone’s heart. And what imposed this restraint, if not on Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom, then on me, was my being Jewish. In my scheme of things, Slapsie Maxie was a more miraculous Jewish phenomena by far than Dr. Albert Einstein.³⁰

Although less strikingly named than Slapsie Maxie, the most famous Jewish boxer of the early twentieth century was undoubtedly Benny Leonard; Farrell’s Davey Cohen describes him as ‘one smart hebe that could beat the Irish at their own game’ (illus. 75).³¹ Benny’s real surname was Leiner, but he fought under the name of Leonard, supposedly in case his mother read about his fights in the Jewish Daily Forward. One day, returning home with a black eye, he was unable to conceal the truth from parents:

My mother looked at my black eye and wept. My father, who had to work all week for $20, said, ‘All right Benny, keep on fighting. It’s worth getting a black eye for $20; I am getting verschwartzt [blackened] for $20 a week.32

Leonard became world lightweight champion in 1917 and retired undefeated in 1925.³³ Like many boxers, he then dabbled in vaudeville, including a 1921 appearance in one of the Marx Brothers’ most successful stage shows, a fast-paced revue called On the Mezzanine Floor. The brothers were keen fight fans, and Harpo had known Leonard for some time (illus. 76).³⁴ Leonard was in love with Hattie Darling, the dancing violinist star of the show, and, as Groucho recalled, ‘she was able to talk him into putting money into our act’. ‘A few times he joined the act and would come on stage, and the four of us would try to box with him. The audience loved that. They loved to see a world champion kidding around on stage.’³⁵ After the Wall Street crash of 1929, Leonard briefly returned to boxing; ‘The Great Bennah’ died, while refereeing a fight, in 1947.

75 Benny Leonard, cigarette card given away with The Champion, 3 June 1922.

In 1980, Budd Schulberg recalled Leonard’s importance to the children of Jewish immigrants; children who had ‘tasted the fists and felt the shoe-leather of righteous Irish and Italian Christian children’. Benny Leonard was their ‘superhero’. Schulberg, who was born in 1914, was luckier than most because his father, a Hollywood mogul, knew Leonard personally.

To see him climb in the ring sporting the six-pointed Jewish star on his fighting trunks was to anticipate sweet revenge for all the bloody noses, split lips, and mocking laughter at pale little Jewish boys who had run the neighbourhood gauntlet.³⁶

‘More than any other group of athletes’, Jewish boxers provided a ‘vivid counterpoint to popular anti-Semitic stereotypes’.³⁷

But the stereotypes were remarkably persistent. ‘No Business’ (1915), by Charles E. Van Loan, is the story of a boxer called Isidore Mandelbaum. Two Irish fight fans discuss his career, and while conceding that he can ‘hit with both hands – hit hard too’, they lament his lack of ‘the heart and the stomach’. Mandelbaum, they conclude, is ‘a gladiator for revenue only’. ‘The only part of the fight game that he likes is the split-up in the box office . . . He’ll never fight for the pure love of fightin’, understand me? Put an Irish heart in him . . . an’ you’d have a champion – no less’. The men construct an elaborate set-up to encourage Mandelbaum to be a little more ‘game’ in the ring. It works and they’re happy, but we never learn what Mandelbaum thought.38

Perhaps the most famous portrait from this period of a Jew who boxes is Robert Cohn in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926).³⁹ Cohn is not just any Jew, fresh off the boat, but ‘a member, through his father, of one of the richest Jewish families in New York, and through his mother, one of the oldest’. He has many privileges that the novel’s narrator, Jake Barnes, lacks. The first, a Princeton education, is mentioned in the novel’s opening sentence: ‘Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.’ ‘Do not think that I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title’, Jake quickly adds, ‘but it meant a lot to Cohn.’ The paragraph continues as a virtuoso exercise in deflation. We next learn that Cohn ‘cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it’, and then that ‘he never fought except in the gym’. In other words, Cohn is no sportsman. Princeton may have given him a ‘flattened nose’, but after he left, no one remembered him or his title.⁴⁰ The insinuation is that Cohn boxed in order to remove the obvious mark of his Jewishness, hoping to assume in its place the flat-nosed pugilistic style that Jake feels is his own birthright. Throughout the novel, Jake goes to great lengths to demonstrate that it takes more than a little outmoded Ivy League undergraduate ‘spirit’ to turn a Jew into a proper sporting strenuous American.⁴¹

The problem with Cohn, as Jake sees it, is that his responses to life, literature and sport are not genuine – they are, like Yekl’s speech, merely a costume that he dons. Cohn likes the idea of a mistress more than any actual mistress; the idea of ‘a lady of title’ more than Lady Brett Ashley; the idea of chivalrous battle more than a real fight. He thinks boxing is something that takes place in gyms, and worries that he’ll be ‘bored’ at the corrida. His ‘undergraduate quality’ is constantly noted. At 34 he still wears polo shirts and reads novels full of fights and handshakes, novels like W. H. Hudson’s romantic potboiler, The Purple Land (1885), which Jake claims he took ‘literally’. When he stands up ‘ready to do battle for his lady love’, Jake mocks the ‘childish, drunken heroic of it’. In his first fight outside the gym, Cohn ends up taking on everybody he can, all in the same spirit and in his polo shirt. He first knocks down Mike, who is ‘not a fighter’, and Jake, ‘the human punching-bag’, who then obliges him by shaking hands. But things are different with the toreador, Romero, who ‘kept getting up and getting knocked down again’. When Cohn tries to shake hands with him, Romero punches him in the face. Mike dismisses both ‘Jews and bullfighters’ as ‘those sorts of people’; Jake, however, knows that Brett’s substitution of Romero for Robert, and himself, is a definite upgrade.⁴²

76 The Marx Brothers with their fists raised.

Walter Benn Michaels remarks that ‘Hemingway’s obsessive commitment to distinguishing between Cohn and Jake only makes sense in the light of their being in some sense indistinguishable.’43 For all their differences, Robert Cohn and Jake Barnes are both ‘taken in hand’ by Brett, ‘manipulated’ in a way that recalls the boxer dolls that Jake nearly trips over on the Boulevard des Capucines. There, a ‘girl assistant’ lackadaisically pulls the threads that make the dolls dance on stands, while she stands with ‘folded hands’, ‘looking away’.⁴⁴

‘THE PECULIAR GIFT OF THE WHITE MAN’

The narrator of Herman Melville’s 1846 novel, Typee, is surprised to find that the inhabitants of the South Sea island on which he is marooned don’t understand boxing: ‘not one of the natives’, he complains, ‘had soul enough in him to stand up like a man, and allow me to hammer away at him’:

The noble art of self-defence appeared to be regarded by them as the peculiar gift of the white man; and I make little doubt but that they supposed armies of Europeans were drawn up provided with nothing else but bony fists and stout hearts, with which they set to in column, and pummelled one another at the word of command.⁴⁵

Despite the success of early nineteenth-century black boxers such as Tom Molineaux and Bill Richmond, by Melville’s time it had become a commonplace that ‘the noble art of self-defence’ – an art no less – was ‘the peculiar gift of the white man’. In 1908, this confidence would be shattered when a black American became heavyweight champion of the world and the country plunged into a feverish, and futile, search for a ‘great white hope’ with a sufficiently stout heart and bony fists to defeat him. After 1908, many whites played down ‘art’ and began to talk of nature.

Although black Americans had boxed before the Civil War, it was really only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century that they began to make any headway in the sport. This was partly to do with the development and professionalization of sport in general, and partly to do with the growth of a significant black urban population. James Weldon Johnson’s Black Manhattan (1930) tells the story of the origins of black urban culture, and of the ways in which ‘the Negro . . . effectively impressed himself upon the city and the country’. ‘Within this period,’ he noted, ‘roughly speaking, the Negro in the North emerged and gained national notice in three great professional sports: horse-racing, baseball, and prize-fighting.’ Johnson devotes most of his attention to boxing, the sport which, he maintained, had the advantage of depending (at least more than the others) on ‘individual skill and stamina’.46

The growth of an urban black sporting and theatrical community was accompanied by the development of what Johnson calls a ‘black Bohemia’ of sporting and gambling clubs. The walls of a typical club ‘were literally covered with photographs or lithographs of every colored man in America who had ever “done anything”’.

There were pictures of Frederick Douglass and of Peter Jackson, of all the lesser lights of the prize-ring, of all the famous jockeys and the stage celebrities, down to the newest song and dance team . . . It was, in short, a centre of coloured Bohemians and sports.⁴⁷

From the myriad of photographs and lithographs that cover the club walls, Johnson picks out two portraits – those of Frederick Douglass and Peter Jackson. Jackson was a great late nineteenth-century heavyweight (and I’ll consider his career in a moment), but it is worth remembering that Frederick Douglass also had a reputation as a pugilist.

‘A SLAVE BECOMES A MAN’: DOUGLASS VS. COVEY

Before the Civil War, slaves in Southern states were often set to fight for the entertainment of their masters, who made money gambling on the outcome. Frederick Douglass, a runaway slave who became a prominent anti-slavery orator and author of the best-selling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), noted with horror the way in which slave owners encouraged slaves to participate in boxing and wrestling matches, designed also to serve as ‘safety-valves, to carry off the rebellious spirit of enslaved humanity’. As an alternative Sabbath activity, Douglass set up a school to teach his fellow slaves to read, but this had to be kept secret, ‘for they had much rather see us engaged in those degrading sports, than to see us behaving like intellectual, moral, and accountable beings’.⁴⁸ For Douglass, reading, writing and speaking offered the ultimate resistance to slavery’s dehumanization. Nevertheless, verbal self-expression is directly connected to violent, physical self-expression in the Narrative. A ‘turning-point’ in the book, and in Douglass’s ‘career as a slave’, is a fight, in which, as a sixteen-year-old boy, he takes on the brutal ‘nigger-breaker’ Edward Covey. Covey has broken Douglass’s spirit – ‘the disposition to read departed . . . behold a man transformed into a brute’ – and it is only by fighting that he can again become a man who reads.

In some ways the shape of the book follows the form of a conversion narrative, and the depiction of the fight, which is dense in biblical allusion, refigures religious conversion. Covey is a ‘professor of religion’ – ‘a pious soul’, the Narrative ironically notes – but it is Douglass who is preaching a sermon.49 In fighting Covey, Douglass becomes a combination of Daniel escaped from the Lions’ Den, Jacob wrestling with the Angel, and the suffering Christ; the outcome of the fight is likened to ‘a glorious resurrection from the tomb of slavery’.⁵⁰ Usually such a rebellion would have been rewarded with further whipping, but for reasons that Douglass does not fully convey, he remains unpunished. Neither man is really a loser here: Covey’s ‘unbounded reputation’ as an overseer remained intact; Douglass gained the ‘self-confidence’ necessary to take the next steps in his progression towards freedom, and leadership. The conversion from bondage to freedom enacted here is not, therefore, actual – he would remain a slave for four more years – but psychological. Douglass’s formulation, ‘You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man’, indicates that ‘slave’ and ‘man’ are to be understood as opposing and contradictory concepts (as indeed, Douglass believed, were ‘slave’ and ‘American’). The events leading up to the fight show Covey whipping Douglass, and by this stage of the Narrative, we realize that to accept such whippings is to be in some way feminine.⁵¹ In resisting (and in turn feminizing) Covey – a fierce tiger before, a trembling leaf afterwards – Douglass says he has ‘revived within me a sense of my own manhood’. Only when this psychological transformation has taken place can the truly liberating activities – reading, writing and running away – develop a proper momentum.

It might be argued that this fight is very different from a boxing match. It did not have an audience, it was not undertaken for money or show; it was an authentic struggle. Yet in the context of the Narrative, as in all literary, or autobiographical descriptions of fights, the scene takes on some characteristics of a performance. In addition, it is important to remember that the Narrative was written primarily for an abolitionist readership, and that Douglass was consciously fashioning an acceptable image of the male slave. This put him in a difficult position. On the one hand, as Richard Yarborough observes, blacks were viewed as ‘unmanly and otherwise inferior because they were enslaved’; on the other hand, they were seen as ‘beasts and otherwise inferior if they rebelled violently’.⁵² In presenting his fight with Covey, Douglass treads a fine line between appropriate manliness and frightening bestiality. Douglass wants to present himself to his readers as manly and assertive, yet not as too manly or too assertive. ‘I held him uneasy causing the blood to run where I touched him with the ends of my fingers,’ he wrote; an awkward description that seems to reflect his own uneasiness about what he had done.⁵³

The problematic nature of this encounter is made evident if the later revisions of the Narrative are considered. In 1855, by now famous, Douglass expanded and revised his account as My Bondage and My Freedom; in 1881, a final version, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, was published. In these two later versions, he is not merely relating his escape from slavery; he is recounting the exemplary story of his life as a self-made man, Benjamin Franklin style. The fight remains central to the story, but its depiction is very different. Covey is transformed into the stock villain of the melodramatic novel, the ‘scoundrel’ and ‘cowardly tormentor’ against whom he must reluctantly defend himself. Douglass ends by apologizing to readers who might find his narration of the ‘skirmish’ as ‘undignified’ as the event itself.54 This seems to be a move toward what David Leverentz calls ‘genteel chumminess’: ‘at any rate,’ wrote Douglass, ‘I was resolved to fight, and, what was better still, I was actually hard at it’.⁵⁵ Yet the very expansion of a single long paragraph to several pages of detailed description might be read as itself an act of politically motivated aggression.

Douglass’s political views had changed significantly since 1845. Then, he opposed the idea of violent slave resistance, which he believed would delay abolition; instead he called for the peaceful conversion of slaveholders. After the introduction of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, he became frustrated with the ineffectiveness of non-violent persuasion and began to speak out in favour of active, violent, slave resistance as both morally defensible and more likely to end slavery.⁵⁶ Douglass may also have thought it necessary to develop the fight scene as counter-propaganda to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s best-selling 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work which certainly did not advocate slave rebellion. In a pivotal scene, Uncle Tom capitulates, with Christian stoicism, to the whip of Simon Legree.⁵⁷ Dramatizations of the novel were popular well into the twentieth century, and, in one of the ironies of segregated America, many black boxers, some of whom, like Peter Jackson and Jack Johnson, had recently defeated white opponents, found ready employment playing the mild, emasculated Tom.⁵⁸ My Bondage uses every means possible, including italics and capitals, to emphasize both Douglass’s manliness – ‘I was nothing before; I was a man now’ – and the role that the fight played in developing it – ‘A man, without force, is without the essential dignity of humanity.’⁵⁹

As a free man, Douglass retained his faith in pugilistic metaphor and example. In 1862 he made a speech to a largely black audience in which he complained that ‘we are striking the guilty rebels with our soft white hand, when we should be striking with the iron hand of the black man’.⁶⁰ The following year, he intensified his call of ‘Men of Color, To Arms’, arguing that the ‘imperiled nation’ must ‘unchain against her foes her powerful black hand . . . Words are useful only as they stimulate blows . . . “Who would be free, must themselves strike the blow.”’⁶¹ At the height of the war, in 1864, Douglass declared that the conflict had ‘swept away’ many ‘delusions’ about black men. ‘One was . . . that the Negro would not fight; that he . . . was a perfect lamb, or an “Uncle Tom”; disposed to take off his coat whenever required, fold his hands, and be whipped by anybody who wanted to whip him’. The war, Douglass noted, ‘has proved that there is a great deal of human nature in the Negro, and that he will fight, as Mr. Quincy, our President, said, in earlier days than these, “when there is a reasonable probability of his whipping anybody”’.62

I have discussed Douglass vs. Covey in some detail partly because of its own interest as a fight story, but also because of its continued importance for black American writers, artists and political leaders throughout the twentieth century.⁶³ After his death in 1897, Douglass was frequently presented as a model of ‘the New Negro Man’, exemplary to some in his ‘manly courage’, and, to others, in his self-restraint and patience.⁶⁴ Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s elegy, for example, celebrates him as ‘no soft-tongued apologist’ but a warrior: ‘He died in action, with his armor on.’⁶⁵ A rather less forceful figure emerges in Booker T. Washington’s 1906 biography, in which he both sought to establish himself as Douglass’s rightful heir and to distance himself from his defiant tone. That Washington had some trouble with the Covey fight is indicated by the brevity of his account of it, and by his frequent use of words such as ‘reckless’ and ‘rash’. The fight over, both men behave suspiciously well. Covey admits himself ‘fairly outdone’, while, Washington concludes, ‘it speaks well for the natural dignity and good sense of young Douglass that he neither boasted of his triumph nor did anything rash as a consequence of it’.⁶⁶ A few years later, Washington would express concern at both the rash behaviour and boastfulness of the first black heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson.

Throughout the twentieth century, explorations of the nature of black leadership often allude to Douglass and his portrait crops up in many places, often aligned, or contrasted with, that of a prize-fighter. Douglass himself kept a picture of Peter Jackson in his study and, according to James Weldon Johnson, ‘used to point to it and say, “Peter is doing a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question”’.⁶⁷ For many, Frederick Douglass’s battle with Covey remained the model of what an authentic black vs. white fight should be (illus. 77).

Following Emancipation and Reconstruction, increasing anxiety about policing the boundaries between blacks and whites led to the introduction of widespread segregation (institutionalized with the infamous Supreme Court Pessy vs. Ferguson decision of 1896 which guaranteed ‘separate but equal’ status for blacks). In 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois declared that ‘the problem of the twentieth century’ would be ‘the problem of the color line’, and the colour line was firmly asserted in most competitive sports.⁶⁸ Initially, boxing was less segregated than team sports such as baseball and football. George Dixon held the American bantamweight title from 1890 to 1892, and the featherweight title from 1892 to 1900; Joe Walcott was welterweight champion from 1901 to 1906, and Joe Gans was lightweight champion from 1902 to 1908. Although many white fans, particularly in the South, ‘winced’ every time a black boxer hit a white boxer, these fights continued.⁶⁹ But the heavyweight title carried heavier symbolism.

Today Peter Jackson is often described as the finest boxer never to have fought for a world title. He wanted to, but no champion would take him on. Having won Australia’s heavyweight championship in 1886, Jackson travelled to the United States looking for a match with John L. Sullivan. While he received an ecstatic reception from black Americans – ‘in every city the local black community went wild with excitement over his presence and would honor him with a testimonial dinner’ – Sullivan refused to meet him.⁷⁰ In 1891, in the face of a great deal of adverse publicity, Jim Corbett agreed to a contest. Corbett presented his decision to fight Jackson as a kind of experiment: ‘There may be something in a dark opponent that is not found in a light one and, if so, it behooves me to find out.’⁷¹ An unprecedented purse of $10,000 may also have helped. A classic of endurance, Jackson vs. Corbett was finally stopped in the 61st round, by which time the fighters were struggling to keep upright, and many spectators had fallen asleep.⁷² As the fight had been declared a draw either man could justifiably have challenged Sullivan’s title. Both did, but Sullivan ignored Jackson. A few months later Corbett won the title and immediately capitalized on his sex-symbol reputation by taking to the stage. He was not frightened of Jackson, he said, just too busy for a rematch. With no alternatives, Jackson also resorted to the theatre, where he toured as Uncle Tom. When he tried to introduce a little sparring into the role (and thus maintain his credibility as a championship contender) the press complained that he had ‘degraded the character’.⁷³

77 Jacob Lawrence, Frederick Douglass series, no. 10, 1938–9, tempera on hardboard.

Peter Jackson’s rather limited moment of glory came in 1892 at London’s National Sporting Club. The Club had opened just six months earlier, and offered as the climax to its inaugural season a keenly fought contest between Jackson and Frank Slavin. The fight lived up to its billing. Soon everyone who was anyone claimed to have been there. Young Winston Churchill bunked off from Harrow to attend. He drew a rather ugly caricature of Jackson and reputedly used it to settle his tuckshop bill.74 The fight may have inspired another artist, too: in his 1898 volume of woodcuts, Almanac of Sports, Sir William Nicholson chose to represent boxing with an image of a white and a black fighter, poised for action (illus. 78). The night itself was a study in contrasts. Jackson, celebrated as the Black Prince, dressed in white; Slavin, who was white, wore dark blue. Jackson was slim and ‘beautifully proportioned’. But it was Slavin, ‘with his beetle brows and smouldering, deep-sunken eyes, leonine mane, fierce moustache, hairy chest and arms’, who was London’s idol. He was also an unabashed racist, and had loudly declared that ‘to be beaten by a black fellow, however good a fellow, is a pill I shall never swallow’. Slavin had to swallow the pill, but it was administered with care. Jackson steadily demolished his outclassed opponent for nine rounds, then looked to the referee to stop the fight. Urged to box on, he brought Slavin to his knees with ‘five mercifully gentle blows’. Someone heard him say, ‘Sorry, Frank.’⁷⁵ Born in the Virgin Islands and raised in Australia, Jackson knew the gestures that were required of the Empire’s subjects.⁷⁶ In 1930 James Weldon Johnson described Jackson as the first prize-fighter who was also a ‘cultured gentleman’. ‘His chivalry in the ring was so great that sports-writers down to today apply to him the doubtful compliment “a white colored man”.’⁷⁷ The next black contender, Jack Johnson, would not be so chivalrous.

78 Sir William Nicholson, ‘November’ from An Almanac of Twelve Sports, 1898.

THE GOLDEN GRIN

Writing in 1936 on the ‘ethics of living Jim Crow’, novelist Richard Wright noted many subjects that were ‘taboo from the white man’s point of view’:

American white women; the Ku Klux Klan; France, and how Negro soldiers fared while there; French women; Jack Johnson; the entire northern part of the United States; the Civil War; Abraham Lincoln; U. S. Grant; General Sherman; Catholics; the Pope; Jews; the Republican Party; slavery; social equality; Communism; Socialism; the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution; or any topic calling for positive knowledge or manly self-assertion on the part of the Negro.78

Among a range of general topics such as ‘slavery’ and ‘social equality’, only four individuals are named: three are the liberators of the Civil War – General Sherman, Ulysses S. Grant, and Abraham Lincoln; the fourth, an early twentieth-century black boxer, Jack Johnson. How did Johnson end up in such illustrious company, and why his name was still taboo to whites in 1936?

Born in the port of Galveston, Texas in 1878, Arthur John Johnson was of the first generation of free black Americans. At thirteen he began working on the docks where he soon developed a reputation as a fighter, and, at seventeen, he took up boxing professionally. After beating all the other good black heavyweights, including Joe Jeanette and Sam Langford, he secured a title fight in Australia, then one of the world’s boxing centres. The promoter’s guarantee of $30,000 supposedly overcame the reluctance of then champion Tommy Burns (whose real name was Noah Brusso) to fight a black man. ‘Shame on the money-mad Champion!’ John L. Sullivan is said to have exclaimed, ‘Shame on the man who upsets good American precedents because there are Dollars, Dollars, Dollars in it.’⁷⁹ On 26 December 1908, after fourteen rounds, during which Johnson casually taunted the out-matched Burns, the referee stopped the match.⁸⁰ Jack London was there, and his fight report established the terms in which Johnson would most often be subsequently described:

A golden smile tells the story, and that golden smile was Johnson’s . . . At times . . . Johnson would deliberately assume the fierce, vicious, intent expression, only apparently for the purpose of suddenly relaxing and letting his teeth flash forth like the rise of a harvest moon, while his face beamed with all the happy care-free innocence of a little child . . . [Johnson’s] part was the clown.81

London’s view of Johnson as a clown or a minstrel drew upon the myth of black shiftless gaiety peddled by ‘coon songs’ popular since before the Civil War (characteristic numbers included ‘A Nigger’s Life is Always Gay’ and ‘Happy Are We, Darkies So Gay’). When Johnson entered the ring to fight Jim Jeffries in Reno in 1910, the band played ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’.⁸² The popular press represented Johnson’s victory with a flurry of Sambo cartoons, all emphasizing his smile.⁸³ Johnson’s ‘golden grin’ (he had several gold teeth) quickly became his trademark, a symbol of laughing defiance that infuriated and obsessed white America. But what many critics described as Johnson’s ‘laziness’ was in fact a carefully thought out defensive style. He fought with his hands low, at only chest height, and ‘looked like an artist leaning back from a canvas to evaluate the picture from a distance’. This defensive style, Randy Roberts points out, was cultivated by all the great black heavyweights of the time; in order to secure fights they needed ‘to just barely defeat’ their white opponents.⁸⁴

Within moments of Johnson’s gaining the title, the search for an Anglo-Saxon challenger began. Former champion Jim Jeffries was the popular choice to come out of retirement and ‘remove the golden smile from Jack Johnson’s face’.⁸⁵ Jeffries was ‘the great white hope’. Now ubiquitous, the phrase seems to have been coined by London, perhaps trying to evoke Roosevelt’s reputation as the ‘Great White Father’ or Rudyard Kipling’s ‘White Man’s Burden’. Written in response to the Roosevelt-led American takeover of the Philippines after the Spanish-American War in 1899, Kipling’s poem instructs readers to ‘Take up the White Man’s Burden – / Send forth the best ye breed’.⁸⁶ The expectations of white America were a heavy burden indeed.

In the run-up to the Johnson-Jeffries fight, the Social Darwinian ‘scientific’ racist rhetoric of the day intensified. Promoter Tex Rickard foolishly advertised the fight as the ‘ultimate test of racial superiority’, and newspapers published articles predicting that Jeffries, who ‘had Runnymede and Agincourt behind him’, was bound to beat Johnson who ‘had nothing but the jungle’.⁸⁷ The same result was also predicted, in song, by Groucho Marx, as an inadvisable part of his act at the Pekin, an all-black theatre in Chicago. Unfortunately for Groucho, ‘Johnson was in the audience’; he ‘barely survived the evening’.⁸⁸ ‘Heart’, the quality that Jews also seemed to lack, and a possible ‘yellow streak’ were much discussed. ‘Is Johnson a typical example of his race in the lack of that intangible “something” that we call “heart”?’ asked a typical newspaper columnist.⁸⁹ In the weird world of racial attribution, blacks did, it seemed, have some advantages. Would Johnson benefit from what some saw as an ‘insensibility to pain which distinguishes the African and gives him a peculiar advantage in the sports of the ring’? Would Jeffries, ‘a thinker’ who ‘undoubtedly possesses the worrying qualities of the white race’ lose out to the ‘care free and cool’ Johnson? ‘The art of relaxing’, London claimed, was ‘one of Johnson’s great assets’ since the ‘tensing of muscle consumes energy’.90

What was announced as the ‘fight of the century’ finally took place in Reno, Nevada, on 4 July 1910, and ended in the fifteenth round when Jeffries’s seconds threw in the towel. Assertions of white supremacy suddenly seemed a lot less certain.

News of the result spread quickly by telegraph; crowds gathered in front of the ‘automatic bulletin’ at the New York Times building, and the paper later reported Johnson’s mother and sisters listening to its click on the stage of the Pekin Theatre in Chicago and sharing ‘in the big crowd’s happiness’.⁹¹ But for blacks in less congenial surroundings, the result was not such good news. Louis Armstrong recalled being told to hurry home from his paper round in New Orleans, while Henry Crowder remembered thousands of whites gathering in Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue: ‘no Negro dared show his face on that street’.⁹² As the news spread by telegraph across America, lynchings, fights and full-scale riots were reported. Allen Guttman summarizes:

In Houston, Charles Williams openly celebrated Johnson’s triumph and a white man ‘slashed his throat from ear to ear’; in Little Rock, two blacks were killed by a group of whites after an argument about the fight in a streetcar; in Roanoke, Virginia, a gang of white sailors injured several blacks; in Wilmington, Delaware, a group of blacks attacked a white and whites retaliated with a ‘lynching bee’; in Atlanta a black ran amok with a knife; in Washington . . . two whites were fatally stabbed by blacks; in New York, one black was beaten to death and scores were injured; in Pueblo, Colorado, thirty people were injured in a race riot; in Shreveport, Louisiana, three blacks were killed by white assailants. Other murders or injuries were reported in New Orleans, Baltimore, Cincinnati, St Joseph, Los Angeles, Chattanooga, and many other small cities and towns.⁹³

For some, the dead became martyrs in the struggle for equality. William Pickens, later field secretary of the NAACP, wrote in the Chicago Defender that ‘it was a good deal better for Johnson to win, and a few Negroes to be killed in body for it, than for Johnson to have lost and all Negroes to have been killed in spirit by the preachments of inferiority from the combined white press’.⁹⁴ A 1910 postcard presented Johnson alongside Abraham Lincolm as ‘Our Champions’ (illus. 79).

In the months and years that followed, the search for a suitable white challenger continued. Johnson had refused to fight any black contenders, recognizing that in such contests he had nothing to gain and everything to lose. ‘I am champion of the world’, he reputedly said, ‘I have had a hard time to get a chance and I really think I am the only colored fellow who ever was given a chance to win the title . . . I’ll retire the only colored heavyweight champion.’95 Soon, as John Lardner put it, ‘well-muscled white boys more than six feet two inches tall were not safe out of their mother’s sight’, but nothing seemed to work.⁹⁶ Seeing Johnson humble successive white hopes, many whites lost hope about the best that they could breed. Some took comfort in the belief that it was merely generational problem. ‘Honestly’, asked William A. Phelon, ‘is there one single, genuine, solitary Hope, now rampant and challenging, that you believe could have gone five rounds with Bob Fitzsimmons?’ Fitzsimmons, Sullivan, or Corbett ‘could have plowed though the present staff of hopes like an axe through cheese’.⁹⁷ In a 1912 cartoon, a red-faced reveller looks at a poster advertising the latest challenger and reflects, ‘If I wuz the man I wuz, they wouldn’t need him’ (illus. 53).

79 Our Champions: Abraham Lincoln and Jack Johnson, postcard, 1910.

Some decided simply to ignore Johnson and staged all-white champion-ships. Georges Carpentier’s London fight against Gunboat Smith in 1914, for instance, was billed the ‘White World Heavy-Weight Championship’; Carpentier noted that this was ‘certainly good publicity if perhaps a trifle unorthodox’.⁹⁸ Others relied on fiction for consolatory stories of white triumph. Just a few months after Jeffries’s defeat, Jack London began work on The Absymal Brute, the story of a white boy, Pat Glendon, who only fights other white boys. Nevertheless, Johnson’s existence as the real champion was hard for London to forget. Glendon is described as ‘the hope of the white race’ and there is a passing reference to Jeffries who could have ‘worried’ him ‘a bit, but only a bit’.⁹⁹ Jeffries and the Reno fight are also mentioned in Edgar Rice Burroughs’s 1914 serial The Mucker and W.R.H. Trowbridge’s The White Hope (1913), but there too, fictional compensation is provided. After defeating a series of ‘white hopes’, Burroughs’s Chicago-Irish ‘mucker’, Billy Byrne, emerges as ‘the most likely heavy since Jeffries’. The story ends with a deal to fight ‘the black champion’, although Byrne’s manager complains that the terms are ‘as usual, rather one-sided’.100 More ambitious in its fantasy, the finale of The White Hope sees the middleweight crown wrested away from a ‘grinning’ black champion.

The negro’s knees sagged and he lurched forward . . . Sam Crowfoot, face down on the boards, with the sand of the ring showing in patches on his black skin, was out to the world.¹⁰¹

Much of the public agitation about Johnson’s continuing success centred around its representation, and circulation, on film. In 1910, many states acted quickly to ban showings of the Reno film, arguing that riots would necessarily follow. The film was not shown in the South or in most American cities. When news spread that Johnson was due to defend his title against Jim Flynn on 4 July 1912, the ‘“white hopes” of Congress’ got to work.¹⁰² Just weeks after Johnson’s knockout of Flynn, the Sims Act was passed, forbidding the interstate transportation of any film showing ‘any prize fight or encounter of pugilists’ for ‘purposes of public exhibition’ (illus. 80). In 1915, when D. W. Griffith’s Klan-celebrating The Birth of a Nation was released, James Weldon Johnson wondered if ‘some of the moral fervour’ expended against prize-fight films might be extended to Griffith’s movie.¹⁰³

80 Advertisement for Jeffries–Johnson Fight Pictures, 1910.

Whites who had previously celebrated boxing as the sport of manly self-assertion, now remarked brutality. Theodore Roosevelt, longtime champion of the strenuous art, announced that he was forsaking boxing after Jeffries’s defeat. ‘I sincerely trust,’ Roosevelt declared piously, ‘that public sentiment will be so aroused, and will make itself felt so effectively, as to guarantee that this is the last prize fight to take place in the United States.’¹⁰⁴ How curious, W.E.B. Du Bois pointed, that it was only when the world champion was black that commentators felt the urge to object to boxing per se. ‘Neither he nor his race invented prize fighting or particularly like it. Why then this thrill of national disgust? Because Johnson is black.’¹⁰⁵ In the years that followed Johnson’s 1915 defeat, Du Bois remained unsure about the significance of boxers as cultural heroes. On the one hand, he worried that an interest in sport might distract black Americans from the importance of education, noting, for example, that the receipts from Harry Willis’s fight with Luis Firpo were ‘enough to endow a Negro University’.106 On the other hand, the continuing success of black boxers in the 1920s was a repeated blow to white supremacy, and their continuing bad treatment a reminder that whites were ‘afraid to meet black boxers in competition wherever equality and fairness in the contest are necessary’.¹⁰⁷

As a folk hero Jack Johnson’s reputation rested on much more than simply his boxing skill. In and out of the ring, he flamboyantly broke taboos. Urged by civil rights activist Ida B. Wells to invest in a gymnasium for black boys in Chicago’s South Side, Johnson instead opened the Café de Champion, serving black and white customers together. Wells complained that he was catering to the ‘worst passions of both races’.¹⁰⁸ By his own admission, Johnson was ‘a dandy’; shaving his head and sporting everything Booker T. Washington had promised whites that accommodating blacks would refrain from wearing: ‘a high hat, imitation gold eye-glasses, a showy walking-stick, kid gloves, fancy boots, and what not’.¹⁰⁹ In 1909 Washington’s personal secretary argued that Johnson needed to ‘refrain from anything resembling boastfulness’.¹¹⁰ He also liked fast cars and famously hired a white chauffeur to drive him around.¹¹¹ Worse of all, Johnson spent his money on white prostitutes and had three wives, all white.¹¹² Just months after legislating against the interstate transportation of Johnson’s films, the American legal system took another shot at the champion. In 1912 Johnson was charged with having violated the 1910 ‘White Slave Traffic Act’, also known by the name of its sponsor, Mann. The Act was designed to target commercial vice rings and it was rare that individuals were taken to court. But, ‘for Jack Johnson the government was willing to make an exception’. When charges concerning Lucille Cameron (a ‘sporting woman’ whom he later married) fell through, the government latched onto Belle Schreiber. Resentful at having been rejected by Johnson, she testified to receiving money and crossing state lines with the boxer.¹¹³ Booker T. Washington issued a statement deploring Johnson’s behaviour and claiming that it would injure the ‘whole race’. ‘I do not believe it is necessary for me to say that the honest, sober element of the Negro people of the United States is as severe in condemnation of this kind of immorality . . . as any other portion of the community.’¹¹⁴ The whole case was, as Johnson later said, ‘a rank frame-up.’¹¹⁵ But that made no odds. Convicted by a white jury and sentenced to a year and a day in prison and a $1000 fine, he jumped bail and fled the country with Lucille in 1913. He spent the next two years in giving exhibition fights and performing as the ‘agreeable gentleman with the settled smile and the shining white teeth’ in vaudeville in Europe, Canada, and Mexico.¹¹⁶ In 1915 Johnson agreed to defend his title against the white American Jess Willard in Havana. Willard knocked Johnson out in the 26th round according, Johnson later claimed, to a deal he had made with the fbi in order to be allowed to return to the States. Most boxing historians, having studied the film footage, believe that it was a fair fight.¹¹⁷ On becoming champion, Willard immediately reinstated the colour line. It was upheld until 1937 when Joe Louis finally broke it for good.

In the years that followed his defeat, Johnson’s star showed no signs of waning. When he arrived in Harlem in 1921, after finally serving his jail sentence in Kansas, he was welcomed by thousands as a returning hero. The explosion of 1920s black urban culture, now known as the Harlem Renaissance, established him as an iconic figure. Claude McKay’s 1928 novel Home to Harlem is full of references to Johnson; every time someone gets hit his name is evoked. As well as pugnacity, the boxer represented the possibility of black celebrity. One little boy shows off to another that he ‘done met mos’n all our big niggers’, including Johnson, but both are upstaged by a Miss Curdy who claims to know ‘all that upstage race gang that wouldn’t touch Jack Johnson with a ten-foot pole’. The greatest compliment the protagonist Jake receives is when someone tells him, ‘If I was as famous as Jack Johnson and rich as Madame Walker I’d prefer to have you as my friend than – President Wilson.’118

The eventful, and inspirational, life of Johnson appealed to writers, and even more to publishers. In 1930, following the success of the reissued The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, publisher Blanche Knopf urged James Weldon Johnson to write a novel based on Johnson. When he refused, she turned to Walter White. Although he contemplated including Johnson in a planned series of biographical essays and wrote 152 pages of a novel about a boxer, neither project was completed.¹¹⁹ Instead Johnson’s story was told in minstrel show sketches such as The Coming Champion (illus. 54) and in a Broadway play by two white writers, Jim Tully and Frank Dazey, called Black Boy.¹²⁰ Black Boy opened in 1926, with Paul Robeson taking the lead (illus. 81). The fact that ‘Black Boy’ became involved with a white woman on stage prompted great controversy. Robert Coleman wrote in the New York Daily Mirror that ‘the authors have cheapened their portrait of the pugilist by introducing the problem of race antagonism. In our opinion it is always in bad taste to introduce this unpleasant element.’¹²¹

‘ASCERTAINING THE PROGRESS OF THE AMERICAN NEGRO’

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was not simply a flowering of black art, but part of a much larger process of political and social change. Postwar political radicalism was largely diverted into a cultural patriotism which asked what ‘gift’ blacks could contribute to the American melting pot.¹²² Works such as Alain Locke’s The New Negro (1925) and V. F. Calverton’s An Anthology of American Negro Literature (1929) sought to demonstrate ‘the existence of the black tradition as a political defense of the racial self against racism’.¹²³ In a 1916 essay called ‘Inside Measurement’, James Weldon Johnson considered what he thought were the ‘various methods of measurement for ascertaining the progress of the American Negro’. What he termed ‘outside measurements’ recorded growth in population and increase in wealth. An ‘inner measurement’ could be made by keeping ‘a record of the number of intelligently written books bought and read each year by the colored people’.124 Johnson developed this idea further in The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), where he argued that the artistic achievement of black Americans could go a long way in improving their social status in the United States.¹²⁵ In 1903 Du Bois had argued that an overemphasis on industrial education would not produce black leaders: instead a ‘talented tenth’ must be encouraged to achieve as cultured individuals in order to ‘inspire the masses’.¹²⁶

81 Paul Robeson on stage in Black Boy, 1926.

Johnson was a problematic figure for the Harlem intellectuals. On the one hand, it was widely believed that art and literature were the correct ways to demonstrate ‘intellectual parity’. On the other, in 1915, Weldon Johnson conceded that ‘there is not, perhaps, a spot on the globe where Jack Johnson’s name is not familiar’.

Johnson’s bad personal breaks deprived him of the sympathy and approval of most of his own race; yet it must be admitted that with these breaks left out of the question, his record as a pugilist has been something of a racial asset. The white race, in spite of its vaunted civilization, pays more attention to the argument of force than any other race in the world.127

Some years later, Weldon Johnson wrote of his meeting with Jack Johnson, and, alluding to Douglass’s comment that Peter Jackson had done ‘a great deal with his fists to solve the Negro question’, concluded that ‘after the reckoning of his big and little failings has been made, [Johnson] may be said to have done his share’.¹²⁸ If the celebration of a sports hero was difficult to square with a belief in artistic and intellectual achievement, one way to reconcile them was to consider boxing itself as an art or as analogous to art. In his 1916 essay, ‘The Negro in American Art’, Weldon Johnson had argued that ‘there is nothing of artistic value belonging to America which has not been originated by the Negro’. As ‘partial corroboration’ he quoted the white avant-garde artist and editor Robert Coady, describing Jack Johnson’s ‘shadow dancing’, as ‘the most beautiful dancing of modern times’. ‘When he strikes a fighting pose’, Coady rhapsodized, ‘we are carried back to the days of Greek bronzes.’¹²⁹ Perhaps it was not so farfetched then to imagine Johnson as a member of the Talented Tenth.¹³⁰

But not everyone agreed with such analogies. In 1926 George Schuyler denounced what he called ‘The Negro-Art Hokum’. There was, he claimed, no unique ‘Aframerican art’: ‘the literature, painting and sculpture of Aframericans – such as there is – is identical in kind with the literature, painting and sculpture of white Americans’. To say otherwise, he implied, was just another form of racist thinking:

The mere mention of the word ‘Negro’ conjures up in the average white American’s mind a composite stereotype of Bert Williams, Aunt Jemima, Uncle Tom, Jack Johnson, Florian Slappy, and the various monstrosities scrawled by cartoonists. Your average Aframerican no more resembles this stereotype than the average American resembles a composite of Andy Gump, Jim Jeffries, and a cartoon by Rube Goldberg.¹³¹

For Schuyler, Johnson’s influence was of no more use than that of Uncle Tom; indeed, in some ways, it might be seen as worse. ‘It must be tragic for a sensitive Negro to be a poet’, George Bernard Shaw remarked to Claude McKay in 1920. ‘Why didn’t you choose pugilism instead of poetry for a profession?’¹³²

‘THE NEW NEGRO. WHEN HE’S HIT, HE HITS BACK!’

For the most part, Jack Johnson was celebrated less for his statuesque appearance than for his defiant qualities – however stereotypal those might be. During the First World War, for example, heavy black shells were nicknamed ‘Jack Johnsons’.¹³³ Numerous songs celebrated his victory over Jeffries. One blues reworked ‘Amazing Grace’ so that the ‘sweet’ and saving sound was no longer God’s word, but the thud of Jeffries hitting the canvas.

Amaze an’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,

Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down.

Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin,

An’ then Jack knocked him down agin.

The Yankees hold the play,

The white man pulls the trigger;

But it makes no difference what the white man say,

The world champion’s still a nigger.134

However assertive the ‘but’ might be, it only serves highlight the limits of Johnson’s victory in a world in which the white man ‘holds the play’ and ‘pulls the trigger’. Other popular songs were less equivocal. ‘The Black Gladiator: Veni, Vidi, Vici – Jack Johnson’ celebrated his victory over Burns as ‘proof that all men are the same / in muscle, sinew, and in brain / No blood flows through our veins / but that of Negro Ham’s own strain / Master of all the world – your claim.’¹³⁵ ‘Titanic’, a 1912 song by Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly), is equally forthright. The flooring of Jeffries is matched as a blow to white supremacists only by the sinking of the Titanic (which wouldn’t allow blacks as passengers).

It was midnight on the sea,

The band was playin’ ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee.’

Cryin’, ‘Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!’

…

Jack Johnson wanted to get on boa’d;

Captain Smith hollered, ‘I ain’t haulin’ no coal.’

Crying ‘Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!’

…

Black man oughta shout for joy,

Never lost a girl or either a boy.

Crying, ‘Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well!’¹³⁶

At the end of the First World War, the black soldiers who returned to America were unwilling to put up with escalating white racism. The summer of 1919 saw unprecedented race riots, and in their wake, the Liberator published Claude McKay’s sonnet, ‘If We Must Die’, now often considered the ‘inaugural address’ of the Harlem Renaissance.¹³⁷ The poem depicted blacks as ‘hogs’, ‘hunted and penned in an inglorious spot’, and whites as ‘mad and hungry dogs / Making their mock at our accursed lot’. It ends with the plea that ‘though far outnumbered let us show brave, / And for their thousand blows deal one death-blow!’

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,

Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!138

What was supposedly ‘new’ about the much discussed New Negro was not aggression but retaliation; not a desire to fight, but a renewed willingness to fight back.¹³⁹ In 1921, Rollin Lynde Hartt, a white Congregational minister and journalist, described ‘a negro magazine’ bearing the legend (an adaptation of Frederick Douglass’s Childe Harold allusion), ‘They who would be free must themselves strike the blow.’ When hit, Hartt concluded, the New Negro, unlike ‘the timorous, docile negro of the past’, does not hesitate to ‘hit back’.¹⁴⁰ The political radicalism of the New Negro was often linked to his ‘dauntless manhood’. ‘The Old Negro,’ wrote J. A. Rogers in 1927, ‘protests that he does not want social equality; the New . . . demands it.’ While ‘the Old . . . acts as if he were always in the way’, ‘the New is erect, manly, bold; if necessary, defiant’.¹⁴¹

For many, the New Negro was epitomized in the figure of Jack Johnson, and his name became a shorthand for many different kinds of ‘erect, manly; if necessary, defiant’ behaviour. Zora Neale Hurston noted that in the folk tales she grew up with, the trickster who ‘outsmarted the devil’ was always called ‘Jack’ or ‘High John de Conquer’; he was ‘our hope-bringer’.¹⁴² After 1910, black men who challenged, and beat, white authority were commonly dubbed, or dubbed themselves, ‘Jack Johnson’.¹⁴³ In 1934 Henry Crowder published a series of eight autobiographical vignettes about segregation, racial abuse, and ‘hitting back’ in Negro, an anthology edited by Nancy Cunard. In the first, he walks away after being refused service in a Georgia café, but by the second, he is not afraid to ‘wade in’. The final vignette tells of Johnson’s defeat of Jeffries and the fights that broke out in its wake in Washington. While the police search for ‘a giant Negro armed with brass knuckles’, ‘we Negroes remained where we were, drinking and laughing’.¹⁴⁴

One of the books reviewed in Negro was Sterling Brown’s Southern Road (1932); Alain Locke designated Brown ‘the New Negro Folk-Poet’.¹⁴⁵ In one of the strongest poems in the collection, ‘Strange Legacies’, Brown places Johnson alongside John Henry and ‘a nameless couple’ of sharecroppers as symbols of folk resilience; all endured their troubles, ‘taking punishment’. The poem ends, ‘guess we’ll give it one mo’ try’.

One thing you left with us, Jack Johnson.

One thing before they got you.

You used to stand there like a man,

Taking punishment

With a golden, spacious grin;

Confident.

Inviting big Jim Jeffries, who was boring in:

“Heah ah is, big boy; yuh sees whah Ise at.

Come on in . . .”

Thanks, Jack, for that.146

Some linked Johnson’s ‘hitting back’ to Frederick Douglass’s resistance to Covey, and Johnson himself lined up with Douglass against Booker T. Washington, who had condemned his behaviour on several occasions. Washington, Johnson wrote in 1927, ‘ has to my mind not been altogether frank in the statement of the problem or courageous in his solutions’. Douglass’s ‘honest and straightforward program has had more of an appeal to me, because he faced issues without compromising.’¹⁴⁷ In 1919, Johnson had taken out an advertisement in an Industrial Workers of the World magazine, Gale’s, urging ‘colored people’ to leave ‘the “boasted” land of the liberty’ and move to Mexico where they would no longer be ‘lynched, tortured, mobbed, persecuted and discriminated against’.¹⁴⁸

In 1922 Claude McKay travelled to the Soviet Union, one of the first black Americans to be invited by the Bolshevik government. While in Moscow he was commissioned to write a short book to inform the Soviets about the condition of Negry v Amerike (The Negroes in America). Although McKay was keen to argue that race should be considered primarily ‘from a class point of view’, his analysis focuses as much on culture as on economics.¹⁴⁹ In a chapter titled ‘Negroes in Sports’, McKay provides a complex and astute reading of Jack Johnson and the ideological status of black boxers more generally.¹⁵⁰ The prize-fighter only has limited value as a symbol for defiance. Although the boxing ring can seem to be a site of struggle against white dominance (one where African-American workers ‘exert all their efforts to gain the victory’ and one where victory is possible), it nevertheless remains a ‘large business . . . managed by corporations’, white corporations that set the terms of black entrance and success. For McKay, it was foolish to believe that ‘racial differences’ could be resolved by ‘fist fights arranged for a commercial purpose’.¹⁵¹ Langston Hughes made a similar point in ‘Prize Fighter’ (1927):

Only dumb guys fight

If I wasn’t dumb

I wouldn’t be fightin’.

I could make six dollars a day.

On the docks

And I’d save more than I do now.

Only dumb guys fight.¹⁵²

But while Marxists such as Hughes and McKay pointed out the economic reality, the symbolism of Johnson’s career, and interracial fighting more generally, continued to have resonance for many artists and writers. In Archibald J. Motley’s 1933 painting, The Plotters, a fight between a black and a white boxer is used to represent not simply defiance and resilience, but conspiracy (illus. 55). The painting depicts a group of black men sitting at a table, and the title tells us what they are doing. Two men at the table look intently at one another while a partially obscured standing figure points at a piece of paper. On the wall behind the table we see part of a painting, featuring a black and a white boxer. The men at the table, like the boxers in the painting, seem too large for the confines of the framed space. A boxing match may be nothing more than a degrading, commercially motivated performance, nevertheless, as Motley suggests, it can symbolically represent a real fight.

A similar thought seems to lie behind ‘Box Seat’, a story in Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), in which a boxing match between dwarfs is performed as a grotesque spectacle. Dan Moore, angry and frustrated with the ‘sick’ world, has followed the respectable Muriel into the theatre. At first he is appalled by the freak show and thinks Muriel, who is trying to pass as white, a ‘she-slave’ for watching. But all of a sudden, play-acting breaks out into something else when one of the men ‘lands a stiff blow’. ‘This makes the other sore. He commences slugging. A real scrap is on.’

The gong rings. No fooling this time. The dwarfs set to. They clinch. The referee parts them. One swings a cruel upper-cut and knocks the other down. A huge head hits the floor. Pop! The house roars. The fighter, groggy, scrambles up. The referee whispers to the contenders not to fight so hard. They ignore him. They charge. Their heads jab like boxing gloves. They kick and spit and bite. They pound each other furiously. Muriel pounds. The house pounds. Cut lips. Bloody noses. The referee asks for the gong. Time! The house roars. The dwarfs bow, are made to bow. The house wants more. The dwarfs are led from the stage.153

But the crowd is not satisfied until the violence of the contest is defused by the winner of the fight, Mr. Barry, singing ‘a sentimental love song’ to various girls in the audience. Finally Mr. Barry turns to Muriel, and offers her a white rose, which he has kissed with his blood-stained lips. She ‘shrinks away’, ‘flinches back’, ‘tight in revulsion’, but this only provokes him further. Dan reads the dwarf’s eyes as a reproach and an acknowledgment of their shared identity as Christ-like freaks. He leaps up, shouts, ‘JESUS WAS ONCE A LEPER!’, and ‘hooks’ the jaw of the complaining man sitting next to him. The story ends with the man taking off his jacket to fight in earnest in an alley behind the theatre, but Dan, ‘having forgotten him’, walks away.¹⁵⁴

MATTERS OF COLOUR

Jack Johnson’s career had a significant resonance for white, as well as black, artists and writers. While black artists saw Johnson as an inspirational figure (whether representing the possibility of celebrity, progress or defiance) and paid no attention either to his white opponents or to his white wives, whites were almost obsessively drawn to representations of a black and a white man fighting together. The only time that Johnson (or a Johnson-like figure) is mentioned without reference to a white opponent, or girlfriend, he functions as a minstrel figure.155 In Conan Doyle’s 1926 story, ‘The Adventure of the Three Gables’, a black boxer bursts into Sherlock Holmes’s rooms at Baker Street and offends Dr Watson and the detective with his ‘hideous mouth’ and ‘smell’. Watson’s first impression is that ‘he would have been a comic figure if he had not been terrific, for he was dressed in a very loud gray check suit with a flowing salmoncoloured tie. His broad face and flattened nose were thrust forward, as his sullen dark eyes, with a smouldering gleam of malice in them, turned from one of us to the other.’ After he has left Holmes tells Watson that he is ‘glad you were not forced to break his woolly head’: ‘he is really rather a harmless fellow, a great muscular, foolish, blustering baby, and easily cowed, as you have seen.’¹⁵⁶ Johnson is also ‘easily cowed’ in a story that William Carlos Williams included in his Autobiography. One day there was ‘a near riot’ in a café in Paris. ‘They began tearing the chairs apart for clubs. When it was all over and the lights went on again they found the World’s Champion under a table scared stiff. “That’s not the kind of fight I’m interested in,” he said frankly.’¹⁵⁷

The image which perhaps best encapsulates the white response to Johnson is George Bellows’s Both Members of this Club (1909), originally entitled A Nigger and A White Man (illus. 82). Bellows began work on the painting in October 1909, the month in which the terms for Johnson’s fight against Jeffries were finally agreed. The setting is dark and the figures are elongated smears of white, brown and red paint; the faces in the crowd are grotesques. The painting reworks the geometrical design and impasto of earlier works such as Stag at Sharkey’s, but is considerably larger and more claustrophobically ‘dreamlike’ in its atmosphere.¹⁵⁸ The title refers to the fact that, because of the legal restrictions on prize-fights, boxers as well as spectators needed to take out a nominal club ‘membership’. This practice meant that Jim Crow America found itself sanctioning organizations in which blacks and whites could both be members. In his choice of title, Bellows seems to be making a joke about the fact that a law designed to stop one undesirable practice (boxing) should lead to another (what Claude McKay described as the ‘strange un-American’ coming together of blacks and whites under equal terms).¹⁵⁹ The painting’s perspective suggests that the viewer too has joined the club. After finishing Both Members, Bellows abandoned boxing as a subject for paintings until the mid-1920s. His lithographs, however, continue to explore America’s obsession with interracial boxing.¹⁶⁰ The White Hope did not appear until 1921, by which time the colour line had been firmly re-established (illus. 83). It was now safe to imagine white defeat and black compassion.

82 George Bellows, Both Members of This Club, 1909.

83 George Bellows, The White Hope, 1921.

‘A Matter of Color’ was the title of the first boxing story written by Ernest Hemingway, as a high school student in 1916. A Ring Lardner-style vernacular yarn with an O. Henry twist at the end, it presents a retired trainer telling the story of how he had once fixed a fight by hiring a ‘big Swede’ to clobber the black opponent, the young Joe Gans no less, with a baseball bat through a curtain. But the Swede hit the white boxer by mistake. Back in the dressing room, the trainer asks him, ‘Why in the name of the Prophet did you hit the white man instead of the black man?’ The Swede replies, ‘I bane color blind.’161 The story ends there. (Joe Gans went on to become world lightweight champion.)

It is not surprising that in 1916 a young boxing fan such as Hemingway would have thought to write of a set-up against a black boxer. The previous year, Jack Johnson had finally been defeated by Willard, and soon afterwards he began to claim it was a set-up. Hemingway never commented directly on this fight, or indeed on Johnson’s career, but his subsequent fiction repeatedly drew on interracial boxing for more than simply a snappy punch line. In The Sun Also Rises (1925), Bill Gorton returns to Paris after a trip to Vienna where he witnesses a fixed fight between a bribed black American and an unskilled local.

Wonderful nigger. Looked like Tiger Flowers, only four times as big. All of a sudden everybody started to throw things. Not me. Nigger’d just knocked local boy down. Nigger put up his glove. Wanted to make a speech. Awful noble-looking nigger. Started to make a speech. Then local white boy hit him. Then he knocked white boy cold. Then everybody commenced to throw chairs . . . Big sporting evening.

For all his casually racist speech, Gorton is the good guy in the story, and he helps the fighter, who never gets the money owed to him, flee the enraged crowd. ‘Injustice everywhere’, he concludes.¹⁶² Later in the same chapter, the two friends go off to have dinner with Jake’s ex-lover, Brett (whom he notices is not wearing stockings), and her new fiancé, the ‘very fit’ Mike Campbell. When Mike asks, ‘Isn’t she a lovely piece? Don’t you think so, Jake?’, Bill replies, ‘There’s a fight tonight . . . Like to go?’ The implication is that Jake, who has ‘a rotten habit of picturing the bedroom scenes of my friends’, wants to fight Mike.¹⁶³ Bill understands this impossible-to-realize ambition and provides an alternative outlet for his friend. Although he has to change the date to suit the novel’s chronology, Hemingway makes a particular point of mentioning the names of the fighters they see in action, Charles Ledoux and Kid Francis. Once a great fighter, Ledoux was past his prime in 1925, and that night he lost ‘a twelve-round decision in a furious brawl with his younger opponent’. Michael Reynolds notes that the evening confirmed Hemingway’s view that ‘champions never come back’; a view, which it seems, Jake was also entertaining.¹⁶⁴ Injustice (whether racial, economic or romantic) is indeed everywhere.

The White Hope era also informs Hemingway’s ‘The Light of the World’ (1933), in which the teenage narrator and his friend, Tom, encounter a motley crew of late-night travellers at a railway station: ‘five whores . . ., and six white men and four Indians’.¹⁶⁵ Among the prostitutes are two ‘big’ women, Alice and Peroxide, who argue about who really knew ‘Steve’ or ‘Stanley’ Ketchel (they also can’t agree on the first name).¹⁶⁶ The cook remembers Stanley Ketchel’s 1909 fight with Jack Johnson, in particular how Ketchel had floored Johnson in the twelfth round just before Johnson knocked him out.167 Peroxide attributes Ketchel’s defeat to a punch by Johnson (‘the big black bastard’) when Ketchel, ‘the only man she ever loved’, smiled at her in the audience. Alice remembers Steve Ketchel telling her she was ‘a lovely piece’. They both refer continuously to Ketchel’s ‘whiteness’ – ‘I never saw a man as clean and as white and as beautiful’, says Peroxide. ‘White’, as Walter Benn Michaels notes, ‘becomes an adjective describing character instead of skin’ and so Ketchel is figured as a kind of Christ-like figure, while Johnson, ‘that black son of a bitch from hell’, is the devil.¹⁶⁸ Ketchel’s pseudo-divinity is suggested by such statements as ‘I loved him like you love God’; ‘His own father shot and killed him. Yes, by Christ, his own father’; and, of course, the title. Philip Young points out that Hemingway placed this story after ‘the most pessimistic of all his stories’, ‘A Clean, Well-Lighted Place’, in Winner Take Nothing ‘as if the point of the story is really that the light of the world has gone out.’¹⁶⁹

But there seems to be more going on under the surface of this particular iceberg. First of all, the confusion of names and facts is important, and once again, some knowledge of boxing history helps. Stanley Ketchel was not killed by his father – that was Steve Ketchel, a lightweight boxer, who never got near Johnson. Stanley was shot in 1910, by the husband of a woman with whom he was having an affair. Secondly, of all boxers, Stanley Ketchel was perhaps the most unlikely possible candidate for Redeemer. His nickname was the ‘Michigan Assassin’, and, according to one reporter, ‘he couldn’t get enough blood.’¹⁷⁰ While the prostitutes may be seeking salvation, the story that they tell is absurd. So what is going on? Howard Hannum argues that much of the dialogue between the two women ‘has the quality of counterpunching’, as if they are restaging Ketchel’s contest against Johnson: here, the (bleached) blonde versus the heavyweight.¹⁷¹ But the cook’s role also needs to be considered. The discussion of whiteness begins when the narrator notices a ‘white man’ speaking; ‘his face was white and his hands were white and thin’. The other men tease the cook about the whiteness of his hands (‘he puts lemon juice on his hands’) and hint that he is gay. Are these two things connected? And, if they are, what does that suggest about clean, white, beautiful Ketchel? When asked his age, Tom joins in the sexual bantering with hints at ‘inversion’ – ‘I’m ninety-six and he’s sixty-nine’ – but throughout the boys remain uneasy and confused. By the end of the story, the narrator seems quite smitten with Alice (‘she had the prettiest face I ever saw’). Tom notices this and says it is time to leave. The supposedly natural order of whites beating blacks, men having sex with women, and ‘huge whores’ being unappealing has been unsettled. When the cook asks where the boys are going, Tom replies, ‘the other way from you’.

Racial and sexual ambiguities also trouble ‘The Battler’, one of the Nick Adams initiation stories in In Our Time (1922).¹⁷² The story begins with Nick himself having just survived a battle with a brakeman on a freight train. He has been thrown off the train and lands with a scuffed knee and bruise on the face, of which he is rather proud – ‘He wished he could see it’ – but he is still standing. ‘He was all right.’ Nick then ventures into another battling arena – a firelit camp which seems to be a refuge but which also turns out to be a kind of boxing ring.173 There he encounters Ad Francis, an ex-champion prize-fighter whose bruises are more impressive, and much more disgusting, than his own.

In the firelight Nick saw that his face was misshapen. His nose was sunken, his eyes were like slits, he had queer-shaped lips. Nick did not perceive all this at once, he only saw the man’s face was queerly formed and mutilated. It was like putty in color. Dead looking in the firelight.¹⁷⁴

That ‘Nick did not perceive all this at once’ suggests that he kept looking away. ‘Don’t you like my pan?’ the fighter asks, revealing even worse: ‘He had only one ear. It was thickened and tight against the side of his head. Where the other one should have been there was a stump.’ Although Nick is ‘a little sick’, he counters Ad’s pugnacious assertions with gusto:

’It must have made him [the brakeman] feel good to bust you,’ the man said seriously.

‘I’ll bust him.’ . . .

All you kids are tough.’

‘You got to be tough,’ Nick said.

‘That’s what I said.’

Nick’s pleasure at establishing a rapport with a fellow battler is short-lived, however. Ad, he discovers, is unstable (‘crazy’), and depends on his companion Bugs to stop him battling. When Ad tries to start a fight with Nick, in ‘an ugly parody of a boxing match’, Bugs intervenes by knocking him out with a stick from behind in a manner that recalls ‘A Matter of Color’.¹⁷⁵ Colour is also important here as Nick is obviously startled by the fact that Bugs is black, and makes a great deal of his ‘negro’s voice’, the ‘negro way’ he walks, and his ‘long nigger’s legs’. Although it has been argued that the story reveals Hemingway’s racism, these almost compulsively repeated epithets (like those describing whiteness in ‘The Light of the World’) seem to be Nick’s as he struggles to understand the relationship between the two men. White prize-fighters, after all, were not supposed to have black friends. Bugs tells Nick a story about Ad which adds to his confusion. Ad had a woman manager, and it was always being ‘written up in the papers all about brothers and sisters and how she loved her brother and how he loved his sister, and then they got married in New York and that made a lot of unpleasantness’. Nick vaguely remembers this, but then Bugs adds, ‘of course they wasn’t really brother and sister no more than a rabbit, but there was a lot of people didn’t like it either way’. Bugs repeatedly stresses how ‘awful good looking’ the woman was, and how she ‘looked enough like him to be twins’. Some have read this admiring comment (along with the description of Ad’s face as ‘queerly formed’ and his lips as ‘queer shaped’) as a suggestion that the two men may be lovers.¹⁷⁶ Less directly, like ‘The Light of the World’, the story slides anxiously between taboos – incest becomes homosexuality becomes miscegenation.

84 Woodcut from Joseph Moncure March, The Set-Up (1931 edition).

Interracial fighting provided a dramatic subject for many popular novels during this period, including Louis Hémon’s Battling Malone, Pugiliste (1925), Alin Laubreaux’s Mulatto Johnny (1931), and Joseph Moncure March’s The Set-Up (1928). Starkly contrasting woodcuts depicting white and black fighters – whether expressionist in style (The Set-Up) or vaguely cubist (Battling Malone) – provided vivid illustrations (illus. 84 and illus. 85).177 Joseph Moncure March’s novels translated the exciting underbelly of twenties America into verse: The Wild Party deals with prohibition and The Set-Up with prize-fighting and the Jack Johnson story. The Set-Up’s protagonist Pansy is a middleweight who ‘had the stuff, but his skin was brown; / And he never got a chance at the middleweight crown.’ Finally, it seems, he will get a shot at the title, but then ‘the brass-knuckled hand of the law / Hung a hot one on Pansy’s jaw.’ Pansy is charged with bigamy and serves five years in prison. When he gets out he gradually rebuilds his career and finally gets a fight with a white boxer called Sailor. It is a set-up (Pansy’s meant to take a fall) but no one has told him, thinking he’ll lose anyway.

85 Clément Serveau, woodcut from Louis Hémon, Battling Malone, Pugiliste (1931).

His face was blank;

Grim in repose:

And what he was thinking

God only knows.

Those lynx-like eyes,

That skull without hair

Gave him a savage,

Menacing air.

He made you think

Of the missing link.

He looked like something

To catch and cage:

Like something that belonged

In a Jungle Age.178

After winning the fight, Pansy learns about the set-up. He tries to escape the gangsters but running away finds himself in the subway where he is hit by a train. In 1949 March’s book was, loosely, to form the basis of a powerful film noir of the same title. The film changes many things, including the race of its protagonist. In 1928, however, stories of the Jungle Age were still popular.

Another popular work which drew on the Johnson myth was Mae West’s 1930 novel, The Constant Sinner. It tells the story of a ruthless (yet not unappealing) ‘lady of pleasure’, Babe Gordon, and her adventures in the New York of the 1920s. One of the first things we learn about Babe is that, ‘Every man she looked at she sized up as a fighter would an opponent.’¹⁷⁹ Her opponents are, first a white prizefighter, the Bearcat, then a black gangster, Money Johnson, and finally, an upper class white businessman, Baldwin. Babe’s fighting talk seems to come easily to West, whose father was a boxer and who herself had affairs with numerous white and black fighters.¹⁸⁰

What makes The Constant Sinner revealing of its time is not simply its boxing figuration of the battle between the sexes but, more specifically, the way it uses boxing to talk about interracial sexual relations. Bearcat, dubbed ‘the salvation of our race’ by one female admirer, does not hold the colour line and is described fighting Harlem Joe who ‘moved like a panther and endeared himself to coloured worship by a famous watermelon grin’.

The two contrasting bodies came to the ring centre, clasped gloves and received final instructions. The human throng pulled up taut and tense, to feast upon this supreme battle of black and white. The gong rang!

The two bodies rushed at each other and became a whirlpool of stabbing, slashing arms, swirling like angry foam in boiling rapids, now white, now muddy black – a gush of red blood in the foam – the white form of Bearcat sank to the canvas.

Babe, who has already ‘ruined more than one promising white hope’, eventually leaves Bearcat for Money Johnson and a Harlem which West describes as ‘the pool of sex, where all colours are blended, all bloods mingled’. Johnson, whose ‘magnificent body, lynx-eyes, and pearly-white grin had brought the women of Harlem crawling to him’, has eyes only for white Babe. Like his namesake Jack, ‘he craved white women. He wanted the whitest and most beautiful, and so he fell for Babe Gordon’. The novel ends with Johnson being shot by the jealous Baldwin and a gullible Bearcat agreeing to take the blame. He of course gets off (in what some have seen as a parody of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation) as the prosecutor argues that he was a hero for defending his wife against ‘the low, lustful, black beast’. Baldwin’s attraction to Babe is presented as entirely dependent on her association with Johnson. At the novel’s end, when he finally has Babe (at least temporarily) he ‘cannot avoid thinking of Babe’s white body and Johnson’s black body, darkness mating with dawn . . . He has Babe now to himself. He is happy. But the black and white pattern is indelibly woven into the tapestry of his memory.’181

The sex appeal of Jack Johnson, and black men like him, is just one of many targets in Wallace Thurman’s bitterly funny satire of the Harlem Renaissance, Infants of the Spring (1932). Lucille tells the protagonist, Ray, ‘one of the black hopes of Negro literature’, that she will ‘never go to bed with any white man . . . because I’d never be sure that I wasn’t doing it just because he was white’. In fact Lucille feels almost white herself, as she justifies her infatuation for a painter called Bull, ‘the personification of what the newspaper headlines are pleased to call a burly Negro’. The women in his paintings have ‘pugilistic biceps’. ‘I suppose I find the same thing in Bull that white women claim to find in a man like Jack Johnson,’ concedes Lucille, ‘That’s the price I pay, evidently, for becoming civilized.’¹⁸² Ray is in love with Lucille and later ‘snaps’ that Bull ‘is so afraid of the white man that his only recourse is to floor one at every opportunity and on any pretext’. Indeed when Bull finds out that Lucille is pregnant, his response is to ‘sock her in the jaw, and stalk away’. Ray helps her to get an abortion and she promises to lay off ‘virile men . . . at least . . . for the purpose of procreation’. Bull, she concedes, was simply ‘an experiment I had to make’.¹⁸³

Interracial fighting is again linked to interracial sex in William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), which explores the history and legacy of American slavery from 1807 until 1910, the year in which Johnson defeated Jeffries. The novel opens with the narrative of a survivor of the Civil War, Rosa Coldfield. Rosa’s sister Ellen married Thomas Sutpen, a man of poor origins and great social ambition, who has built a house in the woods with a group of ‘wild Negroes’. Another of the novel’s narrators, Mr. Compson, compares Sutpen’s social awkwardness to that of John L. Sullivan ‘having taught himself painfully and tediously to do the schottische, having drilled himself and drilled himself in secret until he now believed it no longer necessary to count the music’s beat, say’. But having gone to great lengths to become the perfect Mississippi gentleman, ensconced in ‘baronial splendor’, Sutpen tends to slip back into his old ways, ‘some opposite of respectability’ in which strict racial segregation does not play a part. Rosa tells the story of Ellen watching a fight in Sutpen’s stables:

Yes, Ellen and those two children alone in that house twelve miles from town, and down there in the stable a hollow square of faces in the lantern light, the white faces on three sides, the black ones on the fourth, and in the centre two of the wild Negroes fighting, naked, not as white men fight, with rules and weapons, but as Negroes fight to hurt one another quick bad . . .

Ellen, Rosa says, ‘accepted’ this – ‘this’, she thinks, ‘is all’. But it is not all. One night she enters and sees ‘not the two black beasts she had expected to see but instead a white one and a black one’ – the ‘grande finale’. What frightens her is not the fight but the fact that men are indistinguishable. ‘Her husband and father of her children’, a slave owner, cannot be told apart from the slaves, the ‘wild negroes’ who ‘belonged to him body and soul’. Rosa uses a kind of demonic Darwinian imagery to describe the fight scene that she has not witnessed. It becomes a primeval scene, as Rosa imagines Ellen witnessing the men with their ‘teeth showing’: ‘both naked to the waist and gouging at one another’s eyes as of they should not only have been the same color, but should have been covered in fur too’. And still that is not all. First, Ellen sees that her son Henry is watching, and then, what’s much worse, that her daughter, Judith is also there. A final horror comes in the observation that the pattern of ‘nigger and white’ is repeated in ‘Judith and . . . the negro girl beside her’, Clytie (Sutpen’s other daughter, by a slave mother) – ‘two Sutpen faces’. Ellen’s terror (certainly Rosa’s) – that one cannot tell black from white, or sister from brother – becomes the novel’s. The doubling of Sutpen and ‘the wild niggers’ (‘his face exactly like the Negro’s’) is repeated in the doubling of Judith in Clytie; the intermingling of white and black bodies in a fight once again prefigures their sexual intermingling. ‘There is something in the touch of flesh with flesh which abrogates, cuts sharp and straight across the devious intricate channels of decorous ordering, which enemies, as well as lovers know because it makes them both... let flesh touch with flesh, and watch the fall of all the eggshell shibboleth of caste and color too.’184

JAMES JOYCE AND ‘THAT EPOCK-MARKING EVENT’

If Jack Johnson’s victories over white opponents exercised white America in various ways, they also provoked those further afield. James Joyce, it is frequently asserted, didn’t like sports, and especially not violent ones. Nevertheless, in 1910, according to his brother, Stanislaus, he read the plethora of newspaper articles building up to the Johnson-Jeffries fight. Stanislaus suggests that Joyce’s ‘ironical comments’ on nationalism in ‘that epock-marking event’ formed ‘a rough draft’ of the Keogh-Bennett fight described in the ‘Cyclops’ section of Ulysses (1922).¹⁸⁵ Another source was a fight between a British soldier and a Dubliner that he saw advertised in the Freeman’s Journal.186 American racist ideology is thus echoed and refigured in British and Irish nationalist terms. The debts of the Harlem Renaissance to the Irish Renaissance are well documented; this incident reveals that Irish literature also owes something to black America.¹⁸⁷

The Keogh-Bennett fight is first alluded to in ‘Lestrygonians’, when Blazes Boylan is mentioned as the trainer of Keogh and a fight promoter.¹⁸⁸ It gets a proper airing, however, in ‘Cyclops’, when, at Barney Kiernan’s pub in Little Britain Street, we learn that Boylan has made a hundred pounds by spreading the rumour that Keogh was ‘on the beer’. ‘Cyclops’ is narrated by a nameless barfly, whose opinionated commentary is interrupted periodically by a series of extravagant parodies. One of the most exuberant parodies adopts the inflated language of early nineteenth-century fight reports, and from it we learn that the ‘redcoat’ has had his ‘right eye nearly closed’ by ‘Dublin’s pet lamb’. We immediately think of Ulysses and Polyphemus, and indeed, Heenan and Sayers, whose commemorative print Stephen Dedalus had seen earlier in the novel. Ignoring the attempts of Leopold Bloom to change the subject, another barfly, Alf Bergan notes, in a more up-to-date pugilistic jargon, that ‘Myler dusted the floor with him . . . Heenan and Sayers was only a bloody fool to it. Handed him the mother and father of a beating.’¹⁸⁹

Bloom’s voice in ‘Cyclops’ is usually heard as one at war with the ‘blindness’ and aggressive masculine violence of racism and nationalism. Later in the scene, he famously rejects ‘force, hatred, history, all that’ in favour of ‘love’, ‘the opposite of hatred’. This is generally taken to be Joyce’s view as well. According to his brother, he wrote the scene ‘not to express personal bias but to associate violence and brutality with patriotism’. While I do not wish to claim that Joyce is advocating violence, I suggest that the novel’s repeated allusions to boxing do more than simply update Homer. A certain latent aggression is also expressed. Just before he speaks out against force, Bloom tells the pub denizens that he too belongs to a race, ‘that is hated and persecuted. Also now. This very moment. This very instant’, and while he speaks he nearly burns his fingers on his cigar. Unlike Ulysses, armed with his fiery club, Bloom does not get near the eye of his Cyclops. Nevertheless, he ‘put[s] up his fist’. ‘Talking about injustice’ like this, the force of Bloom’s feeling is expressed in staccato (punchy?) phrases and even single words, quite unlike his usual eloquent and loquacious speech:

Robbed, says he. Plundered. Insulted. Persecuted. Taking what belongs to us by right. At this very moment, says he, putting up his fist, sold by auction off in Morocco like slaves or cattle.

Before talking about the ‘opposite of hatred’, the narrator tells us that Bloom ‘collapses all of a sudden, twisting around all the opposite, as limp as a wet rag’. But this second Bloom does not completely displace the first. Bloom may be finally seem a ‘wet rag’, advocating love as he runs away from a flying biscuittin, but something remains of the man who raises his fist in angry defiance.190 How does one choose between two rather absurd clichés?

As the day goes on, Bloom himself seems uncertain about what role in which to cast himself.¹⁹¹ On the beach, at little later, he ponders the incident: ‘Got my own back there. Drunken ranters what I said about his God made him wince. Mistake to hit back. Or? No. Ought to go home and laugh at themselves . . . Suppose he hit me. Look at it other way round. Not so bad then. Perhaps not to hurt he meant.’ In his conversations with Stephen in the cabshelter that night, Bloom continues to vacillate between self-congratulation on his cool and rational response, and anxiety about his lack of physicality. He tells the story of his encounter with the Citizen twice. In his first version he presents himself as ‘much injured but on the whole eventempered’ and assures Stephen that ‘A soft answer turns away wrath’.

I resent violence or intolerance in any shape or form . . . It’s a patent absurdity to hate people because they live around the corner and speak another vernacular, so to speak . . . All those wretched quarrels, in his humble opinion, stirring up bad blood – bump of combativeness or gland of some kind, erroneously supposed to be about a punctilio of honour and a flag – were very largely a question of the money question . . .

This is partly said to reassure Stephen who has just survived a fight in ‘Circe’, but it is also serves as self-reassurance. Twenty pages later, the narrator returns to the subject, and gives it a rather different gloss:

He, though often considerably misunderstood and the least pugnacious of mortals, be it repeated, departed from his customary habit to give him (metaphorically) one in the gizzard though so far as politics themselves were concerned, he was only too conscious of the casualties inevitably resulting from propaganda and displays of mutual animosity and the misery and suffering it entailed as a foregone conclusion on fine young fellows, chiefly, destruction of the fittest, in a word.¹⁹²

At the start of this retelling at least, Bloom is associated with linguistic pugnacity and the hard ‘vernacular’ of his enemy. As the sentence proceeds, the narrative voice reconnects Bloom to his customary pacifism and its accompanying verbosity. If the clichés of pugnacity give readers (metaphorically) ‘one in the gizzard’, the clichés of pacifism put them (metaphorically) to sleep.¹⁹³

Bloom’s equivocal interpretation of the events in the pub is revealed again in ‘Ithaca’. As tension mounted in the pub that afternoon, Bloom had started listing Jews: ‘Mendelssohn was a jew and Karl Marx and Mercadante and Spinoza. And the Saviour was a jew and his father was a jew. Your God.’ In his third list of ‘anapocryphal illustrious sons of the law and children of a selected or rejected race’ in ‘Ithaca’, Bloom again includes Mendelssohn and Spinoza, informing us of their professions (composer and philosopher respectively), but now he adds to their company Daniel Mendoza, the London pugilist credited with having introduced boxing into Ireland, and Ferdinand Lassalle, who, we are told, managed to combine the professions of ‘reformer’ and ‘duellist’.194 Fighters, it now seems, can be good Jews too. But this is not the last word on the subject. At the end of the chapter, when Bloom relates his day to Molly in bed, he does not mention the ‘altercation’ in the pub at all. He has not, despite all these rehearsals, been able to settle on a version of events that pleases him, or, more to the point, that he thinks will please Molly.¹⁹⁵

Bloom’s aspirations to get bigger and stronger are largely informed by Eugen Sandow’s Strength and How to Obtain It (1897).¹⁹⁶ Sandow was a music hall muscleman rather than a sports hero, and his books were aimed at commercial travellers and other city workers like Bloom.¹⁹⁷ They offered a modern metropolitan kind of manliness distinct from the archaic nationalist version touted by the Citizen. Yet Sandow’s presence is not unrelated to themes of injustice, revenge, or, indeed, the Cyclops. While the first part of Sandow’s book is a conventional manual of exercises and measurement charts, part two – ‘Incidents of My Professional Career’ – reads at times like a Horatio Alger novel, for each ‘incident’ is most importantly a step onward and upward. One step involves the ‘defeat’ of two bodybuilding rivals, Samson and Cyclops. Sandow is at pains to stress that he is a small man and that ‘in evening dress there was nothing . . . specially remarkable about my appearance. But when I took off my coat [to fight Cyclops] and the people could see my muscular development, the tone of indifference changed immediately to surprise and curiosity.’ Sandow lets it be known that instead of exhibiting himself, he could have been a boxer. But although it would have been the ‘shorter road to wealth’, he was not tempted. ‘No man’, he concludes, ‘can be a prize fighter and remain a gentleman’.¹⁹⁸

Boxing, or at least street-fighting with pretensions to boxing, finally connects Stephen and Bloom in ‘Circe’, where Homer’s underworld is refigured as a phantasmagoric vaudeville show. ‘Nighttown’ is a grotesque place where sex and violence come together, where a bawd sells ‘maidenhead’ for ten shillings and armless ‘loiterers’ in ‘paintspeckled hats’ can be found ‘flop[ped] wrestling, growling in maimed sodden playfight.’¹⁹⁹ Earlier in the day, the romantic Stephen had briefly identified with Heenan and Sayers performing before a staring audience in a print he saw in a shop window. In ‘Nighttown’, when a drunken British soldier hits him square in the face, he is suddenly forced to become a participant rather than a spectator. Could there be a more definite victory for what Joyce, elsewhere, praised as the solid materialism of ‘sudden reality’ over ‘romanticism’?²⁰⁰

An important difference between the two encounters is that the heroic and popular mid-nineteenth century pugilism that the Heenan vs. Sayers fight represented has been replaced by Queensberry-rules sparring, associated particularly with the army and with public schools – English violence disguised as English honour. According to Stanislaus Joyce, his brother ‘detested rugby, boxing and wrestling,’ which he had to take part in at school, and ‘which he considered a training not in self-control, as the English pretend, but in violence and brutality.’201 In Stephen Hero, Joyce had described the ‘system of hardy brutality’ with which ‘Anglo-Saxon educators’ tried to ‘cure’ the ‘fantastic ideal[ism]’ of youth and had bemoaned the ugly ‘Saxon slang’ that accompanied such cures.²⁰² In ‘Circe’, the Saxon slang of ‘biffing’ and ‘blighters’, the basis of what Bernard Shaw had described as ‘the vast propaganda of pugnacity in modern fiction’, is as much the subject of mockery as the brutality itself.²⁰³

Like a good Homeric hero, Stephen drunkenly extends his hospitality to Privates Compton and Carr, the two red-coated British soldiers that he runs into on the street, stating that, although ‘uninvited’, they are his ‘guests’. Nevertheless, that’s not their fault. ‘History is to blame’. Thinking that Stephen is insulting both Carr’s girl, Cissy Caffrey (‘faithful . . . although only a shilling whore’) and Edward VII, Private Compton tells his friend to ‘biff him one’ – ‘Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye . . . he doesn’t half want a thick ear, the blighter.’²⁰⁴ Stephen, meanwhile, ‘a bit sprung’ and so especially facetious, mocks ‘the noble art of self-pretence’, misquotes Swift, and rather effetely complains about his hand, which ‘hurts me slightly’. ‘Personally,’ he says, ‘I detest action.’ That may be so, but, as his friend Lynch points out, ‘he likes dialectic’. In the sequence that follows, Edward VII appears as the referee – ‘We have come here to witness a clean straight fight and we heartily wish both men the best of good luck.’ As the fight begins, Stephen imaginatively transforms it, using the traditional imagery of both cataclysm and crucifixion, into a grand and heroic battle. But Private Carr brings the battle to a swift and bathetic end. Carr ‘rushes Stephen, fists outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls stunned. He lies prone, his face to the sky, his hat rolling to the wall. Bloom follows and picks it up.’ As in the Heenan-Sayers and the Keogh-Bennett fights, the crowd breaks through, and chaos descends, but there are no firm allegiances. The ‘hag’ and ‘bawd’ switch sides repeatedly; the ‘quarrelling knot’ of the Irish, it seems, are too busy fighting among themselves to be concerned with the slapstick main event.²⁰⁵

By the time we reach this scene in ‘Circe’, it becomes clear that a pattern is being presented. All things pass and, ‘being humus the same roturns’, wrote Joyce in Finnegans Wake (1939).²⁰⁶ In ‘Wandering Rocks’, Stephen sees an image of Heenan vs. Sayers in Farnborough in 1860; a few pages later, Patrick Dignam sees a poster advertising Bennett vs. Keogh, and thinks about the 1897 Carson City contest between Corbett and Fitzsimmons. In ‘Cyclops’, the connection between Farnborough in 1860 and Dublin in 1904 is reinforced (and, if we read Stanislaus Joyce, we can also make a connection to Reno in 1910). These discrete boxing matches all feature a small man taking on a big man, and an Irishman (broadly defined) taking on a British man.²⁰⁷ They also recall the battles faced repeatedly by Ulysses on his journey home to Ithaca. Joyce’s critics have, I would suggest, rather overplayed his rejection of such battles. Stanislaus Joyce recalled that his brother first encountered Homer through Lamb’s Adventures of Ulysses and when ‘asked to say which of the heroes they admired most’, chose Ulysses ‘in reaction against the general admiration of the heftier, muscle-bound dealers of Homeric blows’. Richard Ellmann, meanwhile, rather romantically maintained that ‘Joyce makes his Ulysses a man who is not physically a fighter, but whose mind is unsubduable.’ Ulysses, while certainly peace-loving, and neither ‘hefty’ nor ‘muscle-bound’, hardly avoided adept and well-placed ‘Homeric blows’.208 Bloom, and indeed Stephen, are certainly less willing or able fighters, but this is not to say that thoughts of fighting do not preoccupy them and that their fists are never clenched or raised. While parodying its posturing and patois, Joyce relished the dramatic possibilities of boxing. In all the many ways it unfolds, Ulysses is also, some of the time, a boxing novel.

Boxing images come less directly in Finnegans Wake (as does everything else), yet one of Joyce’s many allusive patterns there links back to Johnson. The opening chapter of the novel introduces the comic strip characters of Mutt and Jute, representing the battle of 1014 between the Irish and Danes on the field of Clontarf. Mutt is the Irishman; Jute, the invader. Communication between the two is impossible – Mutt is ‘jeffmute’, Jute is ‘haudibble’. The duo reappear in many guises throughout the novel – Butt and Taff; Bett and Tipp; Muta and Juva -as variants on the quarrelling brothers, Shem and Shaun, whose endless battles and reconciliations propel it forward. As Muta puts it, ‘when we shall have acquired unification we shall pass on to diversity and when we shall have passed on to diversity we shall have acquired the instinct to combat and when we shall have acquired the instinct of combat we shall pass back to the spirit of appeasement’.²⁰⁹

Mutt and Jeff originate in a cartoon strip by H. C. (Bud) Fisher which first appeared under the title ‘A. Mutt’ on the racing page of the San Francisco Chronicle in 1907. Mutt first encountered Jeff on 27 March 1908, a ‘sacred moment in our cultural development’ remarked Gilbert Seldes. The encounter took place ‘during the days before one of Jim Jeffries’ fights’.

It was as Mr Mutt passed the asylum walls that a strange creature confided to the air the notable remark that he himself was Jeffries. Mutt rescued the little gentleman and named him Jeff. In gratitude Jeff daily submits to indignities which might otherwise seem intolerable.²¹⁰

Jeff’s allegiance to Jeffries reached fruition in 1910 when he and Mutt resolve to see him fight Jack Johnson. Fisher devoted weeks of the strip to stories of the friends’ mishaps as they travel to Reno, try to get seats, and then, with difficulty, try to get home again (illus. 86).

Dan Schiff suggests that the pair may have appealed to James Augustine Joyce because their names, Augustus Mutt and James Jeffries, represent a struggle within his own name and between two sides of his personality.²¹¹ But Joyce may also have enjoyed the comical contrast the couple made – beanpole Mutt and stocky little Jeff – and the physical violence of their encounters. The last panel was often reserved for a knockout. Jeff, having driven Mutt to distraction, is usually the recipient; he is depicted conked or punched in the head, sometimes accompanied by the word ‘Pow!’ A similar resolution can be found in the ‘Night-lessons’ chapter of Finnegans Wake. In this ‘drame’ of ‘caricatures’, Shaun (the Mutt of the two) becomes fed up with the boastful Shem, and ‘floors’ him.²¹² The ‘countinghands’ of a referee suggest that a knockout has been accomplished, and then go on to conduct Wagner. Shem forgives his ‘bloater’, and the chapter ends with a catalogue of topics for the brothers’ lessons, which range from ‘When is a Pun not a Pun?’ to ‘Do you approve of our Existing Parliamentary System?’ to ‘Compare the fistic styles of Jimmy Wilde and Jack Sharkey.’²¹³

86 Bud Fisher, ‘A. Mutt’, 1910: ‘ Mutt secures a ticket to the Jeffries–Johnson fight’.

The chapter takes the form of a central text, with marginal comments (from the two brothers) on either side, and footnotes (from their sister, Izzy).²¹⁴ In the final section, Shem (on the Right) is silent, but Shaun provides classical and biblical parallels to the lesson themes. Flyweight Jimmy Wilde and heavyweight Jack Sharkey are matched with Castor and Pollux, the brothers who encounter Amycus in Theocritus’ Idylls.²¹⁵ The names of the fighters may change, but the schoolboy sport of light vs. large, and the philosophical sport of thesis vs. antithesis, continue. ‘Is a game over? The game goes on.’²¹⁶