8

Save Me, Jack Dempsey;
Save Me, Joe Louis

Boxing fans always like to imagine hypothetical contests: could John L. Sullivan have beaten Mike Tyson? How would Amir Khan have fared against Roberto Durán? In the 1930s imaginary contests between Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey were all the rage, and one forms the basis of Irwin Shaw’s 1939 story, ‘I Stand By Dempsey’. Two boxing fans leave a Madison Square Garden disgusted with the show. ‘Not a bloody nose,’ Flanagan said, ‘Not a single drop of blood. Heavyweights! Heavyweight pansies!’ The conversation switches to Joe Louis and whether Dempsey ‘in his prime’ would have beaten him. Gurske thinks he would, but Flanagan dismisses his fervour as the over-excitement of ‘a little guy’ – ‘a guy is under five foot six, every time he gets in a argument he gets excited’. Finally Gurske snaps and throws a bottle at Flanagan, who lifts his friend into the air by the collar and declares him a ‘hundred-and-thirty-pound Napoleon’. The story ends bizarrely with Flanagan laying Gurske over his knee and spanking him. It takes 32 strokes before Gurske will say ‘I stand by Louis’ and concedes that Louis would have beaten Dempsey in the second round.1

Louis and Dempsey were talismanic figures for many Americans during the Depression. In different ways, each man provided a focus for discussions of failure and success, endurance and survival, for a sense that one might be lucky or unlucky. The question of allegiance for one or other boxer was more complicated than simply white and black, although that discourse was often relevant. Dempsey was a figure from the past, the champion of the affluent twenties, struggling to adapt to new circumstance; Louis, meanwhile, emerged from the heart of the Depression and for many, seemed to suggest the promise of a new kind of future.

Jack Dempsey remained a popular figure long after he lost the title to Gene Tunney in 1927. This was partly due to the fact that, after Tunney’s retirement the following year, the heavyweight title changed hands rapidly (from Max Schmeling to Jack Sharkey to Primo Carnera to Max Baer to James J. Braddock) with no enduring champion emerging until Joe Louis in 1937. (A. J. Liebling dubbed this period ‘the Dark Age’ of boxing.² ) Dempsey, meanwhile, maintained and developed his public profile. After losing money in the 1929 crash and through an expensive divorce settlement in 1930, he began fighting exhibitions and refereeing, and in 1935 opened Jack Dempsey’s ‘gaudily meatish’ Restaurant, near Madison Square Garden, which, after moving to Broadway, stayed in business until 1974.3 During the economic boom of the twenties, Dempsey’s youthful experiences of poverty had made him seem exotic to many Americans. He represented a rough-hewn relic of the frontier days, and was all the more modern for his seeming primitivism. At the height of the Depression, however, Dempsey’s appeal shifted, as many more people felt that they were living in a world where conventional rules no longer applied; novelist Jo Sinclair, for example, described the Depression itself as ‘getting slugged below the belt’.⁴ No longer an intriguing anachronism, the Manassa Mauler became a representative man.

Dempsey’s final defeats form the basis of Horace Gregory’s poem, ‘Dempsey, Dempsey’, included in the influential 1935 anthology Proletarian Literature in the United States. The poem begins by addressing the ex-champion as the ‘failure king of the usa’, a model for all those who are down, but not yet out:

there’s a million boys that want to come back

with hell in their eyes and a terrible sock

that almost connects.

They’ve got to come back, out of the street,

out of some lowdown, lousy job

or take a count with Dempsey.

But Dempsey cannot stop the ‘big boss’ who cuts their pay checks, Gregory suggests; he cannot even earn his own. As the poem’s desperation intensifies, the final stanza recasts the enemy; the problem is not just ‘the big boss’ but those who ‘quit’ the fight.

I can’t get up, I’m dead, my legs

are dead, see, I’m no good,

they got me and I’m out,

down for the count.

I’ve quit, quit again,

only God save Dempsey, make him get up again,

Dempsey, Dempsey.⁵

Throughout the thirties and beyond, Dempsey served as an iconic figure both to those who identified with his losses and failures, and those who felt that they too could one day be champion of the world, if only they worked hard enough. Two photographs exemplify the conflicting aspects of his appeal. In the first, a touched-up studio print from 1937, he is pictured with an eight-year-old in Philadelphia supporting the United Studios campaign for boys’ clubs – inspiring hope for the future (illus. 100). In the second, from 1939, he appears at the State Penitentiary in North Carolina; the ropes on the ring separating the boxer from the prisoners, but also suggesting that the ring itself might be a kind of prison (illus. 101).

l00 Jack Dempsey meets eight-year-old John Panulla at the Germantown Boys Club, Philadelphia, 1937.

101 Jack Dempsey addresses prisoners at the State Penitentiary, Raleigh, North Carolina, 1939. The caption reads ‘Many of the men whom he talked to have been in prison since he won his title.’

‘I COULD’VE BEEN A CONTENDER. I COULD’VE BEEN SOMEBODY.’6

In a 1933 sociological study of ‘Americans at play’, Jesse Frederick Steiner noted a ‘growing interest in amateur boxing’; an interest, he argued, which had been stimulated by ‘the Golden Gloves Amateur boxing contest sponsored by the Chicago Daily Tribune and the New York Daily News’. Such events, he maintained, ‘demonstrated that the sport can draw large crowds when conducted as a boxing match and not as a prize fight’.⁷ Steiner’s comments suggest that the increased appeal of amateur boxing was due to a sudden revival in sporting spirit, but mass unemployment was probably a more significant factor. In 1933, 50 per cent of Americans between the age of fifteen and nineteen were unemployed. Otis L. Graham notes that, on average, young Americans waited two years to find work after finishing school and ‘about 25 percent never found employment until the war’.⁸ Considerable sums of public and charitable money were spent on creating sports facilities for a population that suddenly ‘had more leisure and less money’.⁹ Most contestants in boxing competitions did not view amateur success as an end in itself. At the very least, as Barney Ross recalled, amateurs won ‘medals and trophies and watches which they could pawn for a few bucks’:

Sometimes you’d get a box of shirts, sometimes, ties or socks, sometimes a pair of shoes. Whenever I won, I’d take my merchandise around to the ghetto neighbourhood and sell it as a bargain. I used to get a dollar for $2.95 shirts, a dollar for a box of ties and about two dollars for eight- or nine-dollar shoes.¹⁰

‘Pawnshop fighting’ was all very well, but the real goal was to turn professional and earn some serious money. Steven Riess notes that during the thirties, around 8,000 men boxed professionally, many more than ever before.¹¹ Only a handful made a living at the sport.

Neighbourhood gyms and small boxing clubs often had fierce ethnic affiliations. Beryl Rosofsky, who, renamed Barney Ross, won the world lightweight championship in 1932, and the welterweight title in 1934, began fighting amateur bouts at Kid Howard’s gym in Chicago’s West Side. As his reputation began to spread, Ross recalled, his ‘pals and neighbours from the old neighbourhood were all loyal to me and I was able to get a good crowd out for each fight’. When he became the first Golden Glover to win a professional title, the whole of Chicago seemed to adopt him. In his autobiography Ross presents his decision to take up boxing as a rational career choice: a steady job at Sears Roebuck would not satisfy his ‘feverish desire to make a lot of money in a hurry’, and Al Capone and the other ‘big gangsters’ had turned him down. Ross justified his choice of profession by saying that he needed to support his family after his orthodox Jewish father was murdered in his shop. ‘If Pa had lived,’ he wrote, ‘I think he would have killed me before he ever would have permitted me to put on a pair of gloves and climb into a ring.’12 According to legend, Ross’s mother came to accept his boxing, sewed the Star of David onto his trunks, and on Friday nights prayed for him at the synagogue before walking five miles to the stadium to watch him fight. Ross retired in 1938, and after Pearl Harbor volunteered for the Marine Corps. At Guadalcanal he was seriously wounded trying to help a trapped scout patrol, and was awarded a Silver Star and the Distinguished Service Cross. After the war he became a staunch Zionist, smuggling guns into Israel after 1948. Two films draw on part of Ross’s story – Body and Soul (1948) and Monkey on My Back (1957).

Thirties fiction and film is full of stories about dreams of individual success, stories of escaping poverty and rebuilding the family fortunes through sport or crime. Ross’s employment choice (boxing or Al Capone) became emblematic, as the sportsman and the gangster were presented as related figures, both advancing as best they could in a world that barred more conventional routes. Once again Dempsey epitomized the fighter who could just as easily have become a criminal. In 1937 Paul Gallico described him, rather floridly, as the product of a ‘hard rough world in which there was never any softness or any decency . . . I can see him as a surly, dangerous inhabitant of that spiteful nether world, just on the borderline of the criminal.’¹³ The ‘borderline’ professions of prize-fighter and criminal were seen as glamorous alternatives to the breadline, and, for some, they were interchangeable, not only with each other, but with a new kind of movie star.¹⁴ When Benny Lynch returned to Glasgow after winning the world flyweight title in 1937, he was hailed as both the ‘Jack Dempsey of the small men’ and the Gorbals Jimmy Cagney (illus. 102).¹⁵

Robert Sklar argues that through his portrayals of boxers and gangsters, James Cagney established a new ‘cultural type’: the urban tough guy – small, wiry and street-smart, the product of the ethnic neighbourhoods of Chicago and New York.¹⁶ Cagney, in other words, was the Jack Dempsey of the big screen, and Benny Lynch was not the only one to think of the two men as comparable idols (illus. 103). Cagney first played a gangster in The Public Enemy (1931) and a boxer in Winner Take All (1932). As gangster Tom Powers, he operates from an office whose walls display pictures of John L. Sullivan, and he shows affection to his mother and friends with repeated short-fisted jabs. The main difference between being a boxer and being a gangster seems simply to be where your weapon is concealed. When Powers goes to get fitted for a suit, the dresser feels his biceps. ‘Oh sir,’ he campily says, ‘here’s where you need the room – such a muscle!’ Powers, however, wants the extra room in his waistband – such a gun, is what he’s counting on.¹⁷

The press was quick to praise the ‘effortless authenticity’ of Cagney’s performances as both gangster and boxer. One review of Winner Take All concluded enthusiastically that he ‘carries with him a veritable smell of the shower room, of sweating body and sodden leather’.¹⁸ Nevertheless, a large part of the film is about his character’s misguided attempt to rid himself of the authenticating marks of boxing, when he falls in love with a heartless ‘society dame’ called Joan (Virginia Bruce). As soon as she tells him that he might be handsome (and hence kissable) without his broken nose and cauliflower ear, he rushes off to a plastic surgeon. Fixed up, he then rushes back to Joan, saying, ‘I want to be just like you want me, honey’. Joan, however, is not interested; as she later tells a friend, ‘he’s lost all the things that made him colourful and different; he’s just ordinary now, like any other man. And one thing I can’t stand is bad grammar spoken through a perfect Grecian nose.’19 Joan is not the only one to reject the beautified Jim. The boxing crowd don’t like the defensive style he adopts to protect his face and a newspaper headline accuses him of becoming a ‘“Powder Puff” Boxer’. All is put right at the end when Jim fights for the championship, damages his face and returns to the arms of his original working-class girlfriend. The film’s reference to plastic surgery and powder puff boxers brings to mind the era of smooth-faced silent screen lovers and in particular, Rudolph Valentino. In evoking, but rejecting, that model, Winner Take All announced the birth of a new kind of Hollywood leading man.²⁰

Cagney’s sex appeal may have been sadistic and anarchic, but after 1932, the films in which he appeared were often promotional vehicles for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration. Warner Brothers supported Roosevelt’s campaign and even laid on a special train to bring stars to his inauguration in 1933.²¹ The first of Warner’s overtly New Deal films was released later that year. Although rather an ideological muddle, Heroes for Sale is determinedly optimistic about the capacity of Americans to survive the Depression; as one character puts it, ‘it takes more than one sock on the jaw to lick a hundred and twenty million people’. As if to illustrate this point literally, many subsequent Warner’s films involved socks on the jaws. In Winner Take All, a typical boxing melodrama, Cagney plays a worn-out fighter called Jim Kane. While in New Mexico for a rest cure, he meets Peggy (Marian Nixon), a young widow who can’t pay her bills because the insurance company won’t honour her husband’s life insurance policy. Still in poor health, Kane offers to fight to pay her debt. Aaron Baker argues that this sequence of events embodies the ‘hybrid ideology’ of both the film and populism more generally: the community is to be redeemed by the efforts of a rugged individualist who labours not just for his own good, but for that of others.²² The movie’s emphasis on individualism is further bolstered by the terms under which the fight takes place. Initially, Jim is told that the loser’s fee is $600, exactly the amount of Peggy’s debt. But when the fight promoter learns this, he worries that Jim won’t fight seriously. ‘What guarantee do I have,’ he asks, ‘that you won’t fold in the first round, just to get the loser’s fee?’ Instead, he proposes that the fight be ‘winner take all’ – $2,000 or nothing. The initial terms of the agreement might be read as representing those of the New Deal itself, including a measure of social insurance – a safety net of $600 for the loser. This deal, however, introduces an element of risk for the promoter/state, the risk that the fighter/worker will rely on the safety net and abandon the competitive incentives of boxing/work. A ‘winner take all’ system shifts the risk from the promoter to the fighter and represents laissez-faire capitalism at its starkest. This part of Winner Take All is set on the Mexican border, where such frontier economics were thought to flourish naturally.

102 Fans watch as Benny Lynch trains.

103 Publicity still of James Cagney as a boxer.

The Mexican border was also the setting for King Vidor’s 1931 box office hit, The Champ, a film with a rather different ideological slant (illus. 106). If Cagney’s boxer is a model worker, Wallace Beery’s is a drunken layabout. Beery stars as Andy, an ex-heavyweight champion who lives a dissolute life in Tijuana with his young son Dink (Jackie Cooper). One day, Dink’s mother Linda (Irene Rich) reappears with her wealthy, hard-working second husband Tony (Hale Hamilton) and they offer to take the boy away to ‘a better life’. The film is very sentimental about Andy’s relationship with his son, and the separate all-male world that they create together. Nevertheless, the final outcome – in which Andy briefly pulls himself together and wins a fight, but dies shortly afterwards – was the one test audiences preferred. Dink, they knew, would be better off with a solid bourgeois life in the American heartland.

In both these early-thirties movies, boxing is portrayed as a business in which you can succeed with sufficient hard work. In films made just a few years later, however, hard work is hardly the issue as the business itself is shown to be corrupt to its core. The tragic consequences of that corruption were the subject of numerous noir films during the late 1940s – screenwriter Carl Foreman, for example, described Champion as drawing ‘a parallel between the prize fight business and western society or capitalism in 1948’.23 At the height of the Depression, a comic perspective was often more welcome. The Milky Way by Lynn Root and Harry Clork, a Federal Theater production that was filmed in 1936, is a comic fantasy about a Chaplinesque milkman who becomes middleweight champion.²⁴ The story is not one of talent rising to the top, but of financial dealings and deception. The milkman, Burleigh Sullivan (Harold Lloyd), is persuaded to become a boxer because he has embarrassed the current middleweight champion, whom the press, erroneously, believe he has knocked out. A scheme is hatched to build up the milkman’s value over the course of six set-ups, and then to stage a sell-out match with the champ. The milkman enters the contract because his employers, the profit-driven Sunflower Dairy, want to send his sick horse to the knackers’ yard. The film’s comic resolution comes with the introduction of charity into the world of business. Burleigh, with six ‘wins’ under his belt, thinks himself a big shot and walks around with a lion on a leash (à la Battling Siki). His girlfriend tells him he has become a ‘tiger’ when he used to be a horse-loving ‘humanitarian’. Burleigh gets to redeem himself in the fight with the champ because the proceeds will go to Mrs Winthrope Lemoyne’s Milk Fund Charity, an obvious allusion to Millicent Willson Hearst’s Free Milk Fund for Babies. Everyone wins in this scenario. Paramount Pictures also did well, promoting the film in conjunction with the Borden Milk Company. Cardboard cutouts featuring Harold Lloyd were placed over milk bottles.25

While boxing was a popular sport in local gyms throughout America, boxing films of this period firmly locate the business of boxing in the heart of the city (usually Manhattan) – the downtown urban centre provides the settings both of the boxer’s work (the changing room and the boxing ring) and that of his leisure (the hotel room and the nightclub). The gangster-managers are very much at home in this environment, but their fighters are brought in from elsewhere, from the countryside or the working-class neighbourhoods that surround the metropolitan centre. These two spaces – the country and the neighbourhood – are presented as roughly equivalent. Boys from the country are strong, wholesome, and easily, if only briefly, tempted. In Michael Curtiz’s Kid Galahad (1937), Ward Guisenberry (Wayne Morris) moves to New York, home of ‘fast-living spenders and punch-drunk gunmen’, in order to earn enough money to buy his own farm. After enduring a temporary ‘diet of cigar smoke and gymnasium fumes’, he becomes champion, only to retire and marry the farm-girl sister of his manager. Meanwhile, the rival gangsters (Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart) dispose of each other in a shoot-out.²⁶ In Palooka (1934), the protagonist is happily selling eggs on his farm when his strength is discovered by Knobby Walsh (Jimmy Durante), presumably en route from one metropolis to another. The scrawny Knobby tries to persuade Joe Palooka to come with him, saying, ‘It ain’t healthy living in the country. Why look at me – raised on gasoline fumes and carbon monoxide, the picture of vigorous vitality!’ After a series of unsuccessful urban adventures, Joe too ends up back on the farm with his rural sweetheart.²⁷

Other thirties films give cynical city boxers the chance to escape Babylon: in Winner Take All, Jim and Peggy meet in the countryside and form the kind of authentic relationship that neither found possible back in New York; in The Life of Jimmy Dolan (1933), a prize-fighter (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr) accidentally kills a man at a party and flees to a health farm for invalid children. Gradually, he begins to lose his cynicism under the influence of the children and another pretty girl called Peggy (Loretta Young).²⁸ Andrew Bergman argues that these films have little to do with reality but set one myth, ‘the shyster city’, against another, ‘the country as an idyll’; the real state of the economy, he points out, is ignored (‘why, in 1933, go to a farm?’).²⁹ But although these films are not interested in the realities of rural life, neither are they mere fantasies about cows and barns. The countryside itself is less important than the alternative, utopian communities that exist within it – Dr Betts’s Rosario Ranch for asthmatic children and rundown boxers in Winner Take All, or the reform school farms of The Life of Jimmy Dolan and Boys’ Town. These small, integrated communitarian ventures, like the co-operative farm in King Vidor’s 1934 film, Our Daily Bread or the migrant workers’ camp in John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, are presented as collective alternatives to the individualistic and pugnacious city.30 In another series of films, the urban hub is set in opposition to the romanticized working-class neighbourhood, where cultural and ethnic, rather than physical, health is the primary issue.³¹ Both the farm and the neighbourhood are clearly defined spaces and operate with clearly defined values centred around family bonds and local solidarity; in contrast, the city (and this term is used to apply solely to the urban centre) is an amorphous entity, represented either by limitless vistas or by tightly enclosed spaces. Its values are those of impersonal capitalism.

The spatial mapping of the city versus the neighbourhood is particularly clear in Golden Boy (1939), Rouben Mamoulian’s film adaptation of Clifford Odets’s 1937 play (illus. 107).³² Golden Boy was the most successful of Odets’s plays for the Group Theatre, itself an ‘oasis’ within a city that was dominated by commercial theatre.³³ The film opens with shots of downtown Manhattan’s skyscrapers before zeroing in on a sign advertising ‘Tom Moody, Boxing Enterprises’. Moody needs $5,000 in order to pay for a divorce and remarriage to Lorna Moon (Barbara Stanwyck); ‘I see a penthouse in your eyes’, he tells her. No sooner has Moody discovered that his latest contender has been injured in the gym than Joe Bonaparte (William Holden) appears, offering to take his place. Joe phones home to tell his father he will be late, and we see Papa Bonaparte (Lee J. Cobb) answering the phone. Papa’s place of work and home could not be more different. The Italian American Grocery is piled high both with goods and with communal values: it is a meeting-place as well as a selling-place, a bazaar as traditionally understood. More important, as the camera penetrates to the living-quarters behind the shop and then lingers admiringly, is the seamless fit of public and private life. The apartment is a shrine to traditional, bourgeois domestic comfort, stuffed full of chintz, doilies, velvet drapes, a painting of the Virgin and child, and a gilt-framed photograph of Joe playing the violin as a curly-haired child. Particular attention is given to this last image in contrast to representations of Joe as a close-cropped fighter (denuded of his Italian hair as well as culture) on numerous mass-produced posters in Moody’s office. Joe is tempted away from his heritage by a desire for ‘people to know who I am’, and also by Lorna, an ambitious ‘girl from Newark’. She takes him up on to the roof of a skyscraper to show him the open spaces of Manhattan. As he looks down, she tells him that ‘it’s a big city and little people don’t stand a chance’, but that he could make ‘all that your carpet to walk on’. The film tells us that by abandoning the neighbourhood – a place of cultured ethnicity – for the metropolitan promise of celebrity, Joe has abandoned his identity; ‘people’ now know his name, but he no longer knows ‘who he is’. Nevertheless, this process is easily reversed – in the film, if not the play. After a hearty dinner Lorna is converted and now tells him, ‘you shouldn’t be in the ring; you should be at home, with your violin’. There are a few complications involving gangsters to iron out first, but Joe takes her advice. The film ends with the couple held in the embrace of Papa, as the camera shifts slightly to bring the painting of the Holy Family into view behind them.34 Papa’s faded oriental rug is now all the carpet Joe and Lorna need to walk on.

The ethnic neighbourhoods of Chicago provide the setting for much of Nelson Algren’s fiction, and there too the ‘way out’ offered by boxing is questioned. In the Hemingway mould, Algren was also fond of the analogy between writers and fighters. In ‘Nonconformity’ (1951), Algren quoted Georges Carpentier on the fighter’s need for ‘viciousness’ in order to argue that a writer needed similar qualities: ‘the strong-armer isn’t out merely to turn a fast buck any more than the poet is solely out to see his name on the cover of a book, whatever satisfaction that event might afford him. What both need most deeply is to get even’.³⁵ ‘Getting even’ was an impulse that Algren particularly associated with Chicago, ‘the very toughest kind of town – it used to be a writer’s town and it’s always been a fighter’s town’.³⁶ Hemingway provided a blurb for Algren’s first novel, Somebody in Boots (1935), saying you shouldn’t read it ‘if you cannot take a punch’. Algren’s subsequent works offer many punches; most directly, his last, posthumously published novel, The Devil’s Stocking, was about the incarceration of middleweight contender Rubin ‘Hurricane’ Carter.

Never Come Morning (1942), is set in the thirties and draws on many of Warner Brothers’ stock naturalistic plots and characters – the fallen woman, the juvenile delinquent and the boxer.³⁷ It tells the story of Bruno Bicek and his dream of becoming a boxing champion, and of how, turning 21, he instead ends up in jail on a murder charge. ‘If they had stayed in the Old World,’ Mama Bicek thinks, ‘her son would have been a good son. There a boy had to behave himself or be put in the army.’³⁸ The local barber, and prime villain, Bonifacy, is reminiscent of the grandmother in Yekl in his incomprehension of ‘young Poles with a purely amateur enthusiasm for a wop outfielder or a Jew welterweight . . . Life in the old world had been too hard to permit young men to play games’. (What he can appreciate is the value of boxing, and gambling, as a way of making money.) The neighbourhood boys also follow Yekl in compulsively adding American nicknames to their Polish surnames – Bruno (a.k.a. ‘Lefty’; ‘Biceps’; ‘Powerhouse’; ‘Iron-Man’; ‘Killer’) more compulsively than anyone. When arrested on a murder charge, he proudly tells the police that he is ‘a citizen’, ‘a Polish-American citizen’ and distinguishes himself from greenhorns who don’t speak English properly. Nevertheless, all the enmities in the novel are expressed in terms of their Old World nationalities and loyalties – we don’t know names, just the Jew, the Mex, the Polack, the Litvak and the Greek. Only the idea of the Great White Hope overrides these affiliations. In the fight that closes the book, Bruno is aware that the crowd are applauding him simply for ‘being white’.³⁹ Algren originally called his book White Hope, perhaps with a nod to the unpublished novel that his friend Richard Wright was working on at the same time, Black Hope.⁴⁰

Unlike the films discussed above, Never Come Morning does not romanticize, or indeed ever leave, the confines of the neighbourhood. Algren does not allow any moral or cultural alternative to Chicago’s ‘Little Polonia’, an area bounded triangularly, and tightly, by three streets – Chicago, Ashland and Milwaukee Avenues. Within the triangle are further confined spaces – the brothel, the jail, the beer flat, the gang clubhouse, the poolroom, the barber shop (and the bird cage within it), the police station, the amusement park, and the boxing ring – each of which simply reinforces the enclosure of the others. The novel is framed by two fight scenes. In the opening sequence, Casey Benkowski dutifully takes a dive and returns to the barber’s shop. The final chapter rests on whether Bruno will do the same. He doesn’t, but his gesture of existentialist heroism proves futile. The police are waiting to take him to prison, just one more ‘ropeless ring’. Algren uses these different places to create an insistently interlocking network of symbols. ‘The Triangle’s my territory,’ boasts Bruno, and there is very little sense of the existence of a world, indeed of a city, beyond the boundaries of its three streets. Identities are so local that characters introduce each other by their street names (‘Catfoot N. from Fry St’, ‘Bruno B. from Potomac and Paulina’, ‘Steffi R. from by the poolroom’).41 The wider world, the wider city even, only really exists for Bruno and the fellow members of his gang, the Warriors, through the magazines and movies that they consume. One of Algren’s sources may have been a long-running series of films about a gang variously known as the Dead End Kids, the East End Kids and the Bowery Boys, films which emphasized the sociology behind the gangster myth and thus tried to undermine its glamour.⁴² These films were about saving street kids from a life of crime, and in the muscular Christian tradition, a combination of religion and sport often play a large part in the cure. In Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), gangster Jimmy Cagney, just out of prison, is enlisted on to the basketball court by Father Connelly (Pat O’Brien); in The Bells of St Mary’s (1945), Father O’Malley (Bing Crosby) and Sister Benedict (Ingrid Bergman) both don gloves in order to install discipline among their unruly charges. Spencer Tracy won an Oscar as Father Flanagan in Boys’ Town (1938), which was based on the true story of a rural reform school which used boxing to produce ‘sturdy young bodies and stout young hearts’ (illus. 104). The ‘boxer-and-the-priest’ movie is one of the many genres parodically referred to by Nabokov in Lolita (1952). The plot of one, told to Humbert by Charlotte Haze, is typical: ‘The boxer had fallen extremely low when he met the good old priest (who had been a boxer himself in his robust youth and could still slug a sinner).’⁴³

Unfortunately Bruno Bicek does not have a priest or a reformed gangster to help him. He is obviously a keen movie-goer, however, and compares himself and his friends to Cagney, John Barrymore and others. The only time in the story that Bruno sees a movie, however, it is a boxing picture in a kinetoscope arcade, ‘a scarred and faded film of the Dempsey–Willard fight’.

With his fighter’s heart and his fighter’s mind, Bruno sensed the mind and heart of the other. He watched Willard on his knees, swinging his head like a blinded ox, and no spark of pity came to the watcher . . . His fingers spread, resisting the urge to get in there for the kill himself. He watched the referee standing Dempsey off, and that bothered both Dempsey and Bicek. He turned the film as slowly as possible . . . Dempsey was circling, circling, trying to get the beaten man on the other side of the referee’s arm. A warmth rose in Bruno: Jack was in on the bum – one – two – left to the heart – right to the jaw – to the heart – to the jaw – and his hand stopped cold on the film. There was nothing before him but a cracked square of yellow cardboard and he was sweating on his hands. ‘We killed the bum fer life,’ he assured himself, ‘I’m a killer too.’

Algren employs several layers of irony in this passage. In the novel’s closing boxing match, Bruno does become like his hero, Dempsey, when he metaphorically ‘kills’ his opponent, but the night after seeing the movie, he had already literally killed someone, and it is for this that he is arrested as the final bell of his own fight sounds. Identifying with Dempsey is a complicated business. Bruno is not primarily interested in the boxer’s David-versus-Goliath-like success; rather it is his anger, his ruthlessness and his urge to ‘prove himself’ at whatever cost that appeal. ‘No spark of pity came to the watcher’, Algren comments. Identification means experiencing another man’s battles (indeed, another man’s sadism) as your own and in order to do this Bruno turns the fairground kinetoscope ‘as slowly as possible’, adapting it to suit his own needs. Dempsey’s slow circling becomes the medium through which he experiences the self that he would like to be (later, in jail, he is ‘swamped by an image of himself: as though he had been abruptly transplanted before a technicolor movie being reeled a little too fast’).44

By the late thirties, the language of movie gangsters had become well-worn cliché. Damon Runyon’s 1937 palooka of a gangster Tobias Tweeney complains that his wife wants to know why he cannot be a ‘big gunman’ like Edward G. Robinson or James Cagney.⁴⁵ But while Runyon viewed such behaviour as rather comical, others were less sanguine. James T. Farrell’s trilogy Studs Lonigan (1932–5) recounts the short, delusional life of a Chicago-Irish boy who is constantly involved in a ‘dream of himself’. This culminates in his death at the age of 29, and a fevered death fantasy, in which hard-as-nails Studs imagines himself walking ‘along a strange city with a gun’, as Al Capone Lonigan’ and then ‘entering a ring with two million people looking on’, as ‘Jack Dempsey Lonigan’.⁴⁶

104 ‘Sturdy Young Bodies and Stout Young Hearts’, postcard of Father Flanagan’s Boys’ Home, Nebraska.

For Marxist critics of popular culture, identification such as this was pernicious, not only because it distracted the masses from the realities of their own lives, but because, by doing so, it made authentic choices and action impossible. In numerous naturalist novels of this period, those who succumb to the allure of popular culture end badly. The tragedy of John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), for example, begins in mass-produced fantasies of movie and boxing glory. The son of a ranch boss in the Salinas valley, Curley is a Cagney-esque ‘lightweight’ who has ‘done quite a bit in the ring’; we hear that he ‘got in the finals for the Golden Gloves’ and that ‘he got newspaper clippings about it’. He walks about the ranch with his fists clenched and slips into ‘a slight crouch’ at the slightest provocation. His glance is ‘at once calculating and pugnacious’ and he fights dirty with a ‘glove fulla Vaseline’. His unnamed wife of two weeks, meanwhile, is convinced she ‘coulda been in the movies’; stuck on the ranch she contents herself by ‘giving the eye’ to every man around. The dangerous consequence of these fantasies is revealed when the couple encounters Lennie Small, a simple-minded gentle giant who comes to work on the ranch with his friend George Milton. The novella’s tragedy lies less in Lennie’s inability to control his immense strength than in his lack of understanding of mass media conventions. Lennie ‘don’t know no rules’.47 He destroys, by failing to acknowledge them, both Curley’s pretensions to be a Hollywood boxer and his wife’s pretensions to be a Hollywood femme fatale. Readers in the thirties may have associated the mentally slow but ‘strong as a bull’ Lennie with Primo Carnera, who beat Jack Sharkey for the heavyweight title in 1933. Gangsters Owney Madden and Dutch Schultz stole much of Camera’s money and it has been speculated that most of his fights were fixed.⁴⁸ Unlike Carnera, however, Lennie relies on a man whose interest in his welfare is genuine. The ranch boss cannot understand this: ‘what stake you got in this guy?’ he asks George. The antithesis of a fight manager trying to make a buck, George, it seems, has ‘no stake’ in Lennie. The novella ends bleakly with his acknowledgment that Lennie cannot live in ‘society’. In a gesture of love, George shoots his friend.⁴⁹

THE SET-UP

‘I just got through triple-crossing a double-crosser’, Knobby Walsh (Jimmy Durante) cheerfully admits in Palooka (1934). Apparently, he was not alone. In 1931, J. F. Steiner complained that professional boxing had ‘failed to free itself entirely of the undesirable associations that have so long clung to it’. While it had been hoped that legalisation would end boxing’s links to crime, the connection flourished. ‘More than any other sport’, Steiner notes, boxing ‘has been exploited for purposes of excessive financial gain by both its promoters and participants’.50 This was partly because it is relatively easy to fix a boxing match – certainly much easier than fixing a baseball game which requires the co-operation of a whole team – and boxing, especially outside of New York, was virtually unregulated until the 1950s.⁵¹ For a large part of the twentieth century, the plot twists of boxing fiction and film relied heavily on the many ways there were to fix a fight.⁵²

Before legalization, boxing had largely been controlled by local politicians; afterwards, Prohibition bootleggers and gangsters took over. Notable figures in the twenties and thirties include Dutch Schultz and Owney Madden in New York, Boo Hoo Hoff in Philadelphia, and Al Capone in Chicago. ‘By the Depression,’ Riess notes, ‘the sport’s connection with organized crime was an open secret.’⁵³ In the middleweight division, Frankie Carbo (‘Mr Big’) held a virtual monopoly from the mid-thirties until the late fifties, exploiting his close ties with managers, matchmakers and promoters to fix fights at every level. One of his most useful contacts was Billy Brown, matchmaker at Madison Square Garden. Any fighter who refused to play along suffered greatly; a prime example was Jake La Motta, the top middleweight contender from 1943 to 1947. After years of being refused a shot at the title, La Motta accepted an offer to fight light heavyweight, Billy Fox, managed by one of Carbo’s men, Blinky Palermo.⁵⁴ For $100,000 and the promise of a title shot, La Motta took part. But his naiveté proved his undoing. He refused to attack and protected himself so well that when a technical knockout was awarded to Fox in the fourth round, the crowd was convinced it was a set-up. An investigation cleared La Motta; he was fined $1,000 and suspended for seven months for ‘concealing an injury’, which was his excuse for a poor performance. He did not receive his title fight until 1949 (after paying $20,000 to champion Marcel Cerdan).

One of the first stories to explore the relationship between boxing and organized crime was Ernest Hemingway’s ‘The Killers’ (1927).⁵⁵ Two men show up in a small-town café and hold the staff hostage as they wait for the man they want to kill, Ole Andreson, a former heavyweight boxer. When Nick Adams, who has been in the café, tells Andreson about the men, the boxer says that nothing can be done to save him and turns his face to the wall. Little more than a page of this eleven-page story is devoted to Nick’s encounter with Andreson, but it changes everything. The gangsters dub Nick ‘bright boy’, but the story reveals how little he knows about power and powerlessness. In an attempt to escape his revelation – that the heavyweight, the epitome of masculinity, is not prepared to fight back – Nick decides to move on. ‘I can’t stand to think about him waiting in the room and knowing he’s going to get it.’ As in the case of ‘The Battler’ and ‘The Light of the World’, the story ends with Nick preparing to ‘get out of this town’.⁵⁶

If the dominant boxing setting of the 1920s was Madison Square Garden, during the thirties, forties and fifties, crime writers such as Hammett and Chandler, and so-called proletarian writers such as Algren and Farrell, focused on low-level professional boxing as a setting within which to examine delusion and corruption. If the dominant boxing motif of the twenties was the knockout, that of the following decades was the set-up. Damon Runyon even created a whole new vocabulary to describe fighters who accepted bribes: ‘tank-fighter’, ‘ostrich’ and the ultimate shady character who ‘folds up’ easily, a ‘parasol’. ‘Of course all the customers know very well that Chester is only fighting some parasol, for in Philadelphia, Pa., the customers are smartened up to the prize-fight game and they know they are not going to see a world war for three dollars tops’.57

While Hemingway’s fighter in ‘Fifty Grand’ gambled on a $25,000 profit, James T. Farrell’s Kid Tucker is willing to settle for $25. ‘Twenty-five Bucks’ (1930) revisits the territory of Jack London’s ‘A Piece of Steak’ by matching a ‘never-was of a palooka’ with a young contender, but Farrell’s naturalism, rejecting the consolations of sentimental animalism, is much harsher than London’s. Kid Tucker’s life comes to an end one evening after fifteen years of living ‘in grease’. Psychologically damaged by his experiences in the trenches of the First World War and with a face ‘punched to a hash’, Tucker is usually paid simply to get beaten. ‘He earned his living by taking smashes on the jaw.’ In a metaphor that London would have approved of, Farrell says of Tucker’s manager that he prepared his fighters ‘as cattle were fed for the Chicago stockyards’. On one particular occasion, however, in order to make the bout look more authentic, he is instructed to put up the pretence of a fight, ‘or no dough’. But ‘the war and the prize ring had taken all the fight out of him’, and Tucker cannot comply. At the end of the bout, as he lies unconscious on the floor, the manager, determined to prove the fight was ‘on the level’, makes a speech saying that he will not pay Tucker. Instead the purse will go to ‘the boy who puts up the best fight here this evening’ and the crowd can choose. But it does not matter. Tucker dies of a cerebral haemorrhage without regaining consciousness. For the Marxist Farrell, as for London, the manager and the members of the crowd (the manufacturer and the consumers) are ready partners in an economic system in which the individual boxer is mere labour, and as such expendable.⁵⁸

This is certainly the way things work in Personville, Montana – better known as Poisonville – the setting of Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929), often described as the first ‘hard-boiled’ detective novel. An operative from San Francisco’s Continental Detective Agency is sent to Poisonville to investigate a murder and clean up the town. Among the many poisons of the ‘lousy burg’ that he encounters is its crooked prize-fighting.

We talked about the fights. Nothing more was said about me versus Poisonville . . . [The gambler] even gave me what seemed to be a straight tip on the fights – telling me any bet on the main event would be good if its maker remembered that Kid Cooper would probably knock Ike Bush out in the sixth round. He seemed to know what he was talking about, and it didn’t seem to be news to the others.59

The Continental Op tries to persuade Bush not to go ahead with the fix, and after much prevarication, Bush knocks out Cooper, an obvious ‘palooka’. There is a ‘short silvery streak’ from the balcony, followed by a thud. ‘Ike Bush took his arm out of the referee’s hand and pitched down on top of Kid Cooper. A black knife-handle stuck out of the nape of Bush’s neck.’⁶⁰

This is a particularly dramatic ending, but the scenario that Hammett presents – in which the boxer defies the gangsters by refusing to throw the fight, and then immediately pays for it with his health or his life – soon became a staple in popular fiction and film. The plot often turned on the moment in which the boxer realizes that he has been duped by the mob, his crooked manager or the nightclub singer who has been stringing him along. In more socially conscious films, such Golden Boy and Body and Soul (1947), the death of a black man provides the prompt. In Golden Boy, Joe Bonaparte’s conscience revives when he kills the Chocolate Drop Kid (James ‘Cannonball’ Green) in the ring. He leaves boxing behind, telling the gangsters, ‘you used me like a gun’. In Body and Soul, Charley Davis (John Garfield) wakes up to the reality of his life when he finds out that his black sparring partner, Ben Chapman (Canada Lee) has died – neither man was told that Chapman had a blood clot. As Gerald Early notes in a different context, there is ‘a very simple and very old idea here, namely, that the black male is metaphorically the white man’s unconscious personified’.⁶¹

Charley’s story is told in flashback, following an opening sequence in which he has agreed to throw a fight for $60,000. Although his mother has told him to ‘fight for something, not for money’, Charley is seduced by the prospect of ‘lots of clothes, lots of money, lots of everything’. But after Ben’s death, Charley fights to win. When the gangsters complain, he is scornful. ‘What can you do?’ he asks, ‘Kill me? Everybody dies.’⁶² Although Body and Soul was based on Golden Boy (as well as the biography of Barney Ross), scriptwriter Abraham Polonsky did not want to recreate Odets’s original tragic ending or the film version’s saccharine family reunion. Director Robert Rossen had wanted to close with Davis being shot by the mob, and falling into a barrel of garbage. Polonsky talked him out of this ‘heroic’ conclusion, arguing that it would be ‘totally against the meaning of the picture, which is nothing more than a fable of the streets’.⁶³ Body and Soul ends with Garfield walking away with his girlfriend into the sunset, seemingly unharmed by his insubordination.

Stories such as these celebrate individual rebellion against collective tyranny, but where that tyranny lies is not always made clear. In the late forties, most audiences concentrated on the corruption of the criminally connected prize-fight world itself; just before Body and Soul’s release, the New York district Attorney’s office launched an investigation of the La Motta-Fox fight. Today, however, the film is more often considered as a parable of defiance against the House Un-American Activities Committee, which only months later subpoenaed many of those involved in its making. Rossen, who had been an active member of the Communist Party, eventually offered other names to clear his own. Polonsky, also a communist, refused to name names and was blacklisted, as was Garfield.

The redemptive power of resistance is depoliticized and mythologized in Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949). A third-rate boxer and his wife go to the ironically named Paradise City for one last fight. (Paradise City Athletic Club is next to a dance hall called Dreamland, and across the street from the Hotel Cozy.) Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan) is fighting a much younger, stronger man, and everyone but him is aware that the fight is fixed. Everyone, including himself, will gain if he loses. In the classic noir gesture of integrity and futile defiance, when Stoker finds out about the set-up, he fights so hard that he wins. But his victory is limited to the confines of the square circle. After he leaves the gym, the gangsters work him over in the grim alley-way.64 However Christ-like he is (and we are not allowed to forget it), Paradise City is really just another name for Poisonville after all.

The symbolism of the set-up was not confined to stories directly about the fight game. When, in James M. Cain’s 1936 novel, Double Indemnity, insurance salesman Walter Huff conspires with Phyllis Nirdlinger to insure and then kill her husband, he talks of their plan as a ‘set-up’. Huff maintains that insurance is itself a form of gambling. Billy Wilder’s 1944 film adaptation, with the conspirators renamed Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson, further highlights the sportor game-like nature of the plan.⁶⁵ Dietrichson had been a college football player and is now a keen devotee of baseball on the radio; his daughter Lola, meanwhile, plays checkers with her stepmother and talks of going roller-skating. When she quarrels with her father, he describes Lola as ‘a good fighter for her weight’ (and this is something she will prove to be after the murder has been committed). Walter himself talks of the murder plan as something that should be followed ‘move by move’, and later, believes that his immediate boss, Keyes, is ‘playing on our team’ (the big boss, Norton, meanwhile, ‘fumbled with the ball’). Most relevantly, the living room of Walter’s apartment is decorated with four framed prints of nineteenth-century bareknuckle fighters. In the crucial scene in which Phyllis arrives to secure and plan the set-up, the camera makes sure that these prints are clearly visible. They are not images of fights, but of solitary men in fighting pose, much as Walter had seen himself up to this point. At the start Walter believes that by killing her husband, he is fighting for Phyllis and the money. By the end of the film, aware that he has won neither, he realizes that she is his real opponent, and in an embrace that is both sexual and a boxers’ clinch, they shoot each other. Of his life before Phyllis, Walter says there were ‘no visible scars’. The point of the film is not that he dies at the end, but that he dies with the ‘visible scars’ of a man who has chosen the wrong fight.⁶⁶

The screenplay of Double Indemnity was written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and it may have been Chandler’s idea to compare the insurance investigator to a boxer. Certainly Chandler had made frequent use of boxing metaphors in his 1939 novel The Big Sleep. Dressed in a ‘powder-blue suit’, Philip Marlowe describes himself as the start of the novel as ‘neat, clean, shaved and sober’; in other words, ‘everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be’. At this stage, there is still a possibility of ‘me versus Poisonville’. But things start to fall apart only a page later when Marlowe meets his client’s daughter, Carmen Sternwood, and she fails to recognize his carefully constructed and signalled identity. Instead she notices that he is ‘awfully tall’ and when he jokes that his name is Doghouse Reilly, she asks if he is a prize-fighter. ‘Not exactly, I’m a sleuth,’ he replies. Being a sleuth, Marlowe suggests, is not exactly the same as being a prize-fighter, but there is a similarity between the two professions. The prize-fighter analogy works against the novel’s earlier suggestion that the detective is a kind of knight.67 While Sherlock Holmes could equate the chivalric and meticulous codes of boxing to detective work, Marlowe does not really do much detection. ‘I’m not Sherlock Holmes’, he tells Sternwood.⁶⁸ ‘Little methods of thought’ are not what being a modern sleuth, or a modern prize-fighter, is all about. All Marlowe can do is take part in a series of dirty fights, double-crosses and set-ups.

If medieval codes of chivalry, and the English Queensberry rules, are obsolete in ‘this rotten crime-ridden country’, Marlowe still holds onto one rule, that opponents should be equally matched. He makes frequent references to the relative sizes and weights of the men and women he encounters, but most of the contests that he witnesses or participates in are mismatches. We assume Marlowe is a heavyweight; at any rate, he is, as Carmen points out, ‘awfully tall’. (Chandler later described Marlowe as ‘slightly over six feet and weigh[ing] about thirteen stone eight’.⁶⁹ ) Most of his opponents are either smaller than him or homosexual, which seems to amount to the same thing. The only time Marlowe doesn’t fight at all is when he encounters a real boxer, Eddie Mars’s bodyguard, ‘an obvious pug, a good-looking pale-faced boy with a bad nose and one ear like a club steak’. Compared to the boxer, Marlowe feels himself feminine: ‘I turned around for him like a bored beauty modeling an evening gown’. Shortly afterwards, however, he is able to re-establish his masculinity when he takes on Carol Lundgren, ‘a very handsome boy indeed’, and the lover of the dead ‘queen’, Geiger. When Lundgren punches Marlowe on the chin, he backsteps and manages to avoid being knocked down. ‘It was meant to be a hard one, but a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like.’ Marlowe tells Lundgren that he won’t fight with him – ‘You’re giving away too much weight’ – but Lundgren ‘wants to fight’. Each man has a different strategy: Marlowe takes Lungren’s neck ‘in chancery’; Lundgren uses his hands ‘where it hurt’; but there is a moment in which ‘it was a balance of weights’. ‘We seemed to hang there in the misty moonlight, two grotesque creatures’. On the threshold of what he describes as the ‘poisonous room’ in which homosexual sex and murder have taken place, Marlowe feels himself momentarily a ‘grotesque’ creature too. Then he finishes his opponent off, and starts to call him ‘son’.⁷⁰

In the novel’s final pages Marlowe is finally matched with two opponents who equal him in size. The first is Eddie Mars’s wife, Silver-Wig, who is ‘tall rather than short, but no bean-pole’, and whose hair, under her wig, is short and clipped, ‘like a boy’s’; the second is the confusingly purring but dog-like Canino (Marlowe’s nom de guerre is, of course, Doghouse).71 The fight begins with a warning scream from Silver-Wig, ‘a beautiful thin tearing scream that rocked me like a left hook’. When Canino fires his gun, Marlowe contemplates allowing him to continue, ‘just like a gentleman of the old school’. But he is no knight, no Sherlock Holmes, and so he shoots ‘four times, the Colt straining against my ribs’.⁷² (Walter Huff, in the novel Double Indemnity, experiences being shot as ‘something hit[ting] me in the chest like Jack Dempsey had hauled off and given me all he had’.⁷³ ) At the end Marlowe admits, over a couple of double scotches, that he is ‘part of the nastiness now’.

MEN ‘TAKING IT’ AND WOMEN WATCHING

In most Hollywood comedies of the thirties, it did not really matter if the boxer won or lost as long as he got paid. In Cain and Mabel (1936), for example, Larry Cain (Clark Gable) is about to clinch the match when he hears Mabel (Marion Davis) calling out to him. He turns to look and is knocked out. ‘Gee, Mabel, I lost every penny I had in the world’, he complains. ‘Never mind,’ she replies, ‘I bet on the other guy and I’ve enough for both of us.’ In Nothing Sacred (1937), Wally (Fredric March) and Hazel (Carole Lombard) decide to box so that Hazel will seem tired enough to convince a doctor she has radium poisoning and therefore deserve her free trip to New York (illus. 108). By the late 1940s, however, when economic conditions were much better, such cheerful pragmatism no longer seemed possible.⁷⁴

In her 1949 study of gender differences, Male and Female, the anthropologist Margaret Mead commented on the importance for American boys of a willingness to fight. ‘Both sexes are told not to fight, and then boys are watched very anxiously, girls almost as anxiously, to see if they show signs of being quitters, of not being able to take it.’⁷⁵ Boxing stories, in some way or another, are always about the anxieties of boys and the ways in which they test and define their masculinity. But at different times, different aspects of masculinity are foregrounded. In the thirties, Clifford Odets’s Joe Bonaparte clenched his fists and explained that he became a fighter because ‘I’d rather give it than take it’.⁷⁶ His aggression was clearly motivated and comprehensible. By the late forties, however, the test of manliness was not aggression – how much pain the boxer’s body could inflict – but endurance – how much it could withstand. Being able to ‘take it’ was now all that one could expect of men.⁷⁷ In 1932, Kirstein had described Cagney’s appeal as lying in his portrayal of ‘the delights of violence’; in 1947, John Houseman concluded an article on ‘today’s hero’, saying that, ‘in all history I doubt there has been a hero whose life was so unenviable and whose aspirations had so low a ceiling’.⁷⁸ The ‘semi-conscious sadism’ of the thirties gangster film had, in other words, given way to the masochism of the forties film noir.⁷⁹

Sports films tend to be optimistic about individual or team efforts to succeed, even against extreme odds, and film noir generally stayed clear of sporting stories. Boxing was an exception, since, as Andrew Dickos points out, ‘the fight game encompasses many key noir features – its urban roots, the corruption of power and money and of the criminal element so often controlling it, and the violence and near-narcotic dynamism intrinsic in its exercise’.80 The three most notable boxing noirs were Body and Soul, Champion and The Set-Up, although many movies, from The Killers (1946) to The Big Combo (1955), effectively used boxing settings to create an atmosphere of barely contained violence.⁸¹

Although these films often presented themselves as ‘socially conscious’, aiming to expose the brutality of boxing, they often seemed to relish the suffering that individual boxers endured.⁸² In a 1949 essay attacking both the ‘compulsion to grind away at a message’ and the exaggerated degradation of most fight films, Manny Farber argued that their real impetus often seemed to be ‘a pure imaginative delight in the mangling of the human body’.⁸³ This is apparent if we consider the endings of Champion, Body and Soul and The Set-Up. Each concludes, in seemingly traditional style, with the protagonist winning his big fight, but in each case, this physical sporting victory is shown as hollow rather than glorious. As I suggested earlier, the ostensible ‘message’ of these films is that some kind of spiritual or moral transcendence of the body is not only possible but absolutely necessary. It might be argued that in their rejection of the cult of the body these films, like Raging Bull some 30 years later, are the antithesis of the typical sports movie. However, the camera’s lingering attention to the endurance as well as the ‘mangling’ of the human body, like the attention given by Renaissance artists to the crucified Christ, inevitably undermines the intentions of the artists: an asserted rejection or transcendence of the physical is always going to be less memorable than an all-too-present physicality. Body and Soul’s final image is of Charley and his girl walking respectably down the street together; after a final fight, he has left boxing and crime behind. The images that we remember, however, are those from the fight itself – Charley’s spirited refusal to stop fighting and his bloodied, battered face, which cinematographer James Wong Howe shot with a handheld camera. Even more memorable is the final scene of Champion, in which Midge Kelly (Kirk Douglas) dies alone in his dressing room after a severe beating in the ring.⁸⁴ The scene parallels an earlier one in which a well-oiled Douglas, a ‘quartzlike, malevolent show-off’ according to Farber, preened as he trained. While generally disapproving of the film’s sentimentality, Farber found the death scene ‘unbearably moving’.

While scenes such as this put late-forties boxing films firmly into the category of the male weepie, it is worth remembering that the most important spectators within the films are always women. ‘Boxing movies may describe the world of men and male values,’ noted Ronald Bergan, ‘but it is the women in the background that give them meaning.’⁸⁵ From the male point of view, the meaning of women is relatively straightforward and, in these films, largely negative: life would be simpler without them. Nevertheless, as the title of a 1939 Kenneth Patchen poem puts it, ‘Boxers Hit Harder When Women Are Around’.⁸⁶ In the early twentieth century, representations of women spectators at men’s boxing matches signalled a fascination with unabashed male display and active female choice in matters of sex. By mid-century, women were still seen as choosing, but the men seemed more anxious about being judged. Much of this anxiety is manifest in misogynist portrayals of women as sexual predators, femme fatales – lustful, cruel, bloodthirsty and, most of all, only really interested in hard cash. ‘They’re all alike’, complained Midge in Ring Lardner’s story ‘Champion’, ‘Money, money, money’; a view supported by Bruno, in Never Come Morning: ‘Dames don’t care if a guy’s puss is pushed in, so long as they ain’t no dent in his wallet’. According to Jim Tulley’s bruiser, ‘the women who marry fighters, God save my ragged soul, are often crueler than the managers’.87

Women did not fare much better in the movies. In Golden Boy, Lorna (Barbara Stanwyck) tells the naïve Joe (William Holden) that she only likes men ‘who reach for a slice of fame’: ‘do it’, she urges, ‘bang your way to the middleweight crown. Buy that car, give some girl the things she wants.’ Lorna, as we have seen, is reformed by her exposure to Italian family life, but most femmes fatales, and most boxers, are not so lucky. Perhaps the most relentless exploration of what happens to a boxer when he hooks up with a bad girl is Robert Siodmak’s The Killers (1947). The film begins with a fairly faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s short story of the same title: the Swede (Burt Lancaster) is seen lying on his bed, passively awaiting his killers despite having muscles that actively strain his vest. While Nick Adams never learns why the Swede has given up, the film introduces an insurance investigator to delve into his past and solve the puzzle of his downfall.⁸⁸ The solution lies with torch-song singer Kitty (Ava Gardner); in Frank Krutnik’s words, ‘a lustrous incarnation of 1940s Hollywood eroticism’.⁸⁹ It is Kitty, we gradually learn, who has unmanned the Swede, who has transformed him from a prizefighter, the epitome of active masculinity, into a prone and passive figure lying on a bed.

Many noir films and novels rely on a clear distinction between bad girls and good girls, the ones who reject blood-soaked money and tell their men to stay at home. Good women shield their eyes at ringside, and really good women listen, wincing, to the radio at the hearth. Occasionally, in extremis, they appear at ringside to steer their men back to the true path. In Spirit of Youth (1938), Joe ( Joe Louis) deserts his hometown sweetheart, Mary (Edna Mae Harris) for a cabaret singer called Flora (Mae Turner); finally awarded a shot at the title, Joe fights listlessly until Mary appears at ringside to urge him on. Body and Soul presents the competing influence of three women on Charley Davis: the film was advertised as ‘The story of a guy that women go for!’ (illus. 109). The bad girl, Alice (Hazel Brooks), who snuggles up in her fur coat and yells for him to kill his opponent, has no chance against the combined strength of Charley’s Jewish mama (Anne Revere) and his neighbourhood girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer). Peg leaves Charley when she sees him being corrupted, but returns when he defies the gangsters and shows that he’s really a mensch after all.

Men may do the fighting, but stories like this suggest that without the guiding moral influence of a woman, they have no idea what is worth fighting for. The male desire for glory is frequently declared to be rather pathetic. When, in The Set-Up, Stoker Thomson tells his wife that he’s just a punch away from success, Julie counters mercilessly, ‘Don’t you see, Bill, you’ll always be one punch away’. She refuses to use the ticket that he has bought her and in a dramatic scene rips it up and throws it over a bridge (we are encouraged to think that she is contemplating suicide, but that is hardly believable – unlike her husband, she is not prone to self-destruction). Throughout his fight, Stoker looks towards Julie’s seat – in section C, row four – but it remains empty. From the other seats, stereotypically bad women shout out ‘kill him’, ‘let him have it’. While Stoker is boxing, and afterwards, while he is being beaten up by the gangsters whose set-up he has refused to honour, Julie has been warming soup on the hot plate at the Hotel Cozy. Finally she sees him staggering out of the alley and rushes to his side. The religious symbolism of the film continues when she holds him in a classic pietà shot – he has become the fallen Christ.90 But what is she? Stoker, hardly able to speak, gasps out that he had won that night. Looking at his broken hand, Julie smiles beatifically and says ‘we’ve both won.’ He has won his integrity, but lost his career, physical prowess and, it might be argued, his masculinity; certainly she has won control of their future.⁹¹

A rather more complex take on women as boxing spectators can be found in John Steinbeck’s 1937 story, ‘The Chrysanthemums’, which, like Of Mice and Men, is set in the Salinas Valley. Steinbeck once described Salinas as a town dominated by a ‘blackness – the feeling of violence just below the surface’. Although there were many forms of entertainment in town, he recalled, ‘easily the most popular’ was evangelist ‘Billy Sunday in boxing gloves fighting the devil in the squared ring’.⁹² ‘The Chrysanthemums’ is the first in a collection of stories which explore the dark enclosure of the town and its valley. The first sentence announces entrapment – ‘The high grey-flannel fog of winter closed off the Salinas Valley from the sky and from all the rest of the world. On every side it sat like a lid on the mountains and made of the valley a closed pot’ – and the story proceeds, in good naturalist fashion, to explore the forces contained within that closed pot. Most tightly constrained is Elisa Allen, the wife of a rancher, who tends her chrysanthemums, although their stems ‘seemed too small and easy for her energy’. A chicken-wire fence divides her flower garden from the rest of the farm, and her conversations with her husband tend to take place with this fence between them. Critics have tended to read Elisa’s flower garden as a symbol of repressed sexuality. Some argue that her husband is keeping her fenced in; more convincingly, Stanley Renner suggests that she represses her own physicality: she will not even garden without gloves.⁹³ The story then introduces a tinker, a ‘big’ man with ‘calloused hands’, whom she invites into the garden and to whom she gives a chrysanthemum in a different kind of pot (‘the gloves were forgotten now’). When her husband comes home, he tells her that she looks ‘different’, ‘strong and happy’. They decide to go to town for dinner; on the way, she sees the plant abandoned on the road – despite his talk, the travelling man was only interested in the pot. The story is rather insistent on the sexual meaning of gardens and flower pots. More relevant here is the way that Steinbeck links these to boxing. (‘Sex is a kind of war’, he later claimed.94 ) At the start of the story, Elisa’s husband had joked about going to the fights. ‘Oh no’, she said breathlessly. ‘No, I wouldn’t like fights.’ Later, after seeing the tinker’s cart and her rejected flower, she asks her husband, ‘Henry, at those prize fights, do the men hurt each other very much? . . . I’ve read how they break noses, and blood runs down their chests. I’ve read how the fighting gloves get heavy and soggy with blood.’ Several words used here link back to moments earlier in the story – the reference to ‘gloves’ recalls Elisa’s own pair, and ‘heavy’ resonates with Henry’s comment, just a few lines earlier, that ‘we get so heavy out on the ranch’. The prize-fights, of course, take place in a fenced-off square that echoes Elisa’s garden, the flower beds within it and the Salinas Valley itself. So what is Steinbeck suggesting? Elisa, it seems, has the sexual energy and potential violence of a boxer, but, until that day, she has not allowed a real opponent into the ring with her. Having finally done so, and having even gone bareknuckled, she herself has now been badly bloodied. Bemused, Henry offers to take his wife to watch the fights, but all her own fight has gone. ‘She relaxed limply in the seat . . . She turned up her coat collar so he could not see that she was crying weakly – like an old woman.’⁹⁵

JOE LOUIS IS THE MAN’

Chapter Two of The Autobiography of Malcolm X begins with ‘the greatest celebration of race pride our generation had ever known’: ‘On June twenty-seventh of that year, nineteen thirty-seven, Joe Louis knocked out James J. Braddock to become the heavyweight champion of the world.’ More than two decades had passed since a black American had held the title.

In the wake of this victory the thirteen-year-old Malcolm Little followed his brother to the gym. But while Philbert was ‘a natural boxer’, Malcolm was not. Pretending he was older he signed up for a bout with another novice, a white boy called Bill Peterson; ‘I’ll never forget him.’

I knew I was scared, but I didn’t know, as Bill Peterson told me later on, that he was scared of me, too. He was so scared I was going to hurt him that he knocked me down fifty times if he did once.

He did such a job on my reputation in the Negro neighbourhood that I practically went into hiding. A Negro can’t just be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up to the neighbourhood, especially in those days . . . When I did show my face again, the Negroes I knew rode me so badly I knew I had to do something.

. . . So I went back to the gym, and I trained – hard. I beat bags and skipped rope and grunted and sweated all over the place. And finally I signed up to fight Bill Peterson again.

The rematch was no better:

The moment the bell rang, I saw a fist, then the canvas coming up, and ten seconds later the referee was saying ‘Ten!’ over me. It was probably the shortest ‘fight’ in history . . . That white boy was the beginning and the end of my fight career.96

It is interesting to consider why Malcolm X included this story in his Autobiography. Most straightforwardly, it seems that he was illustrating the impact of Louis in the late thirties – ‘Every Negro boy old enough to walk wanted to be the next Brown Bomber’ – and demonstrating his own tenacity. More importantly, however, the story allows him to compare the roles of black men, and black leaders, in the 1960s and in the 1930s, where ‘sports and, to a lesser extent, show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.’ Malcolm X’s autobiography is all about the unexpected places in which he has been able to ‘whip a white man’, and the suggestion is that if he had been good at boxing he would not have become an exceptional leader. ‘A lot of times in these later years since I became a Muslim, I’ve thought back to that fight and reflected that it was Allah’s work to stop me: I might have wound up punchy.’⁹⁷ Nevertheless, the qualities that made him train ‘hard’ and go back for a second shot at Peterson are also, it is suggested, the qualities which made him the man he became.⁹⁸

Born in 1914 in Lafayette, Alabama, Joe Louis Barrow moved with his family to Detroit’s Black Bottom when he was twelve.⁹⁹ According to legend, his first boxing lessons were paid for with money his mother had given him for violin classes, and, when he began to fight, he dropped his surname to deceive her.¹⁰⁰ Louis trained at the Brewster gym, where he met local businessmen John Roxborough and Julian Black (both men dealt in real estate and Roxborough also ran Detroit’s numbers racket, while Black ran a casino). While keen to manage Louis, neither man had any experience in boxing, so they enlisted the help of veteran trainer Jack Blackburn.

After winning the light heavyweight championship at the (unsegregated) Detroit Golden Gloves competition in 1933 and 1934, Louis turned professional. By the time he was twenty he had a record of twelve wins and no losses, and was starting to get noticed. Eventually Roxborough, Black and Blackburn decided that he would have a better chance at securing high-profile fights with white fighters if he also had a white manager, and in particular, one with the right connections. Mike Jacobs was employed by the Hearst organization and was therefore the most powerful promoter in the States; the ‘pugilist-infested stretch’ of 49th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue was dubbed ‘Jacobs’ Beach’.¹⁰¹ Jacobs joined the three-man management team in 1935, and subsequently had a major influence on the direction of Louis’s career. Jacobs collected half the profits from Louis’s fights and reduced Roxborough and Black to figureheads.¹⁰² Because of this, Jacobs has been demonized. Louis’s biographer, Chris Mead, for example, described Louis as ‘getting into bed with a rattlesnake’, while Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1982 painting St Joe Louis Surrounded By Snakes depicts the boxer in the pose of the Renaissance sacra conversazione, with Blackburn on his right, laying a supportive arm on his leg, and a hooked-nosed Jacobs, as a money-grubbing Judas on the left.103 Louis recalled Jacobs more generously:

If it wasn’t for Mike Jacobs I would never have got to be champion. He fixed it for me to get a crack at the title, and he never once asked me to do anything wrong or phony in the ring . . . He made a lot of money through me, but he figured to lose, too.¹⁰⁴

The key to success in 1930s America, Roxburgh and Jacobs realized, was for their fighter to behave in a manner as unlike Jack Johnson as possible. Roxborough laid down seven rules for Louis to follow. White America had been offended by Johnson’s marriages to white women, so Louis agreed only to be photographed with black women. White America had been offended by Johnson’s flamboyance, so Louis was to appear low key and unexpressive. He was never to gloat over a fallen opponent. He was never to get a speeding ticket. In short, he was to be, at all times, ‘a credit to his race’, blameless and bland.¹⁰⁵ As Langston Hughes put it,

’They say’ . . . ‘They say’ . . . ‘They say’ . . .

But the gossips had no

‘They say’

to latch onto

for Joe.¹⁰⁶

Years later Louis admitted, ‘I was just as vain as Muhammad Ali; I just had to be more discreet about it.’¹⁰⁷

Louis’s professional career was notable not simply for its brilliance – he retained his title for nearly twelve years – but because of what else was going on during those particular twelve years, 1937–49. Louis fought a lot of white men during that time, and each fight represented something slightly different. For Richard Bak, he is ‘unquestionably the greatest metaphor the American prize ring has ever produced’.¹⁰⁸

Louis’s first metaphorical contest took place at Madison Square Garden in 1935, just a few months after the Harlem riots. His opponent was Primo Carnera, the Italian former heavyweight champion who had famously been photographed by Edward Steichen giving the Fascist salute. Carnera was a huge man and the press portrayed him as symbolic of the quarter of a million Italian troops poised to invade Ethiopia. The Washington Post printed a cartoon of the fighters with enormous shadows (representing Haile Selassie and Mussolini) behind them, and the New York Sun featured Louis kicking a boot called Carnera, while a similarly small figure named Ethiopia stood next to a giant map of Italy. The Sun’s caption asked, ‘can the king of Abyssinia, descendant of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, do on a big scale in Africa what Joe Louis did on a small scale in Yankee Stadium?’¹⁰⁹

Louis was not well known before the fight, but overnight he became famous. While Jack Johnson’s celebrity was tied up with the development of film, and Muhammad Ali would later been seen as the saviour of television boxing, Louis’s status as a national hero was associated with the spread of radio during the thirties.110 Autobiographies of the period (by blacks and whites) almost invariably contain an account of listening to one of his fights. ‘We’d be all crowded around the radio waiting to hear the announcer describe Joe knocking some motherfucker out,’ recalled Miles Davis. ‘And when he did, the whole goddamn black community of East St Louis would go crazy’.¹¹¹ Maya Angelou describes a crowd gathering in an Arkansas store to listen to radio coverage of the Louis–Carnera contest. Every piece of commentary brings forth a reaction from the listeners, as they imagine what is happening in the ring. When it seems Louis might be going down, Angelou reports:

My race groaned. It was our people falling. It was another lynching, yet another Black man hanging on a tree. One more woman ambushed and raped. A Black boy whipped and maimed . . . This might be the end of the world.

105 Louis on the cover of The Crisis, June 1935.

The wider meanings of the fight are clear to everyone there. When the commentator reports, ‘They’re in a clench, Louis is trying to fight his way out’, Angelou notes, ‘some bitter comedian on the porch said, “That white man don’t mind hugging that niggah now, I betcha.”’ And she herself ‘wondered if the announcer gave any thought to the fact that he was addressing as “ladies and gentlemen” all the Negroes around the world who sat sweating and praying, glued to their “master’s voice”. Louis’s eventual victory proved glorious: ‘people drank Coca-Colas like ambrosia and ate candy bars like Christmas’. But Angelou, writing in 1969, was also conscious of the limitations of this moment. As the crowd dispersed, she notes that ‘those who lived too far had made arrangements to stay in town’. ‘It wouldn’t do for a Black man and his family to be caught on a lonely country road on a night when Joe Louis had proved that we were the strongest people in the world.’112

In the months that followed his defeat of Carnera, Louis-mania flourished in diverse quarters. In June, the journal of the respectable NAACP, The Crisis, gave its seal of approval by putting him on the cover (illus. 105).¹¹³ In September, Richard Wright (who had listened to Louis’s defeat of Baer on the radio in a South Side tavern) wrote in the communist New Masses of Chicago’s black population filling the streets as ‘a fluid mass of joy’:

Four centuries of oppression, of frustrated hopes, of black bitterness, felt even in the bones of the bewildered young rose to the surface. Yes unconsciously they had imputed to the brawny image of Joe Louis all the balked dreams of revenge, all the secretly visualized images of retaliation AND HE HAD WON! . . . From the symbol of Joe’s strength they took strength.114

Although he came from Detroit, Harlemites quickly claimed Louis as one of their own. Badly hit by the Depression, Harlem was still the symbolic centre of black American life, and as Ralph Ellison later recalled, ‘a place of glamour’.

Those were the days of the swinging big bands, days when the streets of Harlem were filled with celebration every time Joe Louis knocked somebody out in the ring, days when we danced the Lindy at the Savoy Ballroom, and nights when new stars were initiated on the stage of the Apollo Theater.¹¹⁵

When Louis beat Max Baer, the São Tomense poet Francisco José Tenreiro wrote that ‘Harlem opened up in a wide smile’, while little girls skipped and sang of Louis’s ‘socking’ and Baer’s ‘rocking’ as the ‘dream of a viper’.¹¹⁶

While waiting for his title chance against Jim Braddock, Louis took on a number of ex-world champions, the most prominent of whom was Max Schmeling. Schmeling had come touted by Goebbels and Hitler as an exemplar of Aryan racial superiority (although Hitler was supposedly pleased to point out that Schmeling’s manager, Joe Jacobs, was an American Jew, and hence ‘Germany is not anti-Jewish’¹¹⁷ ). Boxing was important to Hitler, and in Mein Kampf, he had emphasized its role in training the youth of Germany:

It is regarded as natural and honourable that a young man should learn to fence and proceed to fight duels right and left, but if he boxes, it is supposed to be vulgar! Why? There is no sport that so much as this one promotes the spirit of attack, demands lightning decisions, and trains the body in steel dexterity . . . If our entire intellectual upper crust had not been brought up so exclusively on upper-crust etiquette; if instead they had learned boxing thoroughly, a German revolution of pimps, deserters, and such-like rabble would never have been possible.¹¹⁸

In the years leading up to the war, Max Schmeling’s every fight became a test case not only for Hitler’s racial theories (German Jews had not been allowed to box professionally for some time) but also for the potential might of the German army.¹¹⁹ In 1933 Schmeling had been defeated by Max Baer (whose Jewishness was questionable, but who often fought with a Star of David on his shorts), and the American Hebrew described the defeat as ‘a huge joke at the expense of “Herr Hitler”’ whose ‘Nazi theory of Nordic superiority’ had been made ‘ridiculous’.120 On 19 June 1936, however, Schmeling fought and beat Louis in twelve rounds. He had picked up Louis’s only weakness as a fighter – a tendency to hold his left hand too low. Any fighter who circled to his left could defeat him, a jealous Jack Johnson had predicted, and he proved right. The American had been the 10–1 favourite. Johnson, however, had bet heavily on Schmeling and, after the contest, walked down 125th Street, waving his wad around.¹²¹ (Johnson was also involved in the search for a white hope to defeat Louis: ‘it’s a commercial affair with me’, he explained.¹²² )

The Nazi journal Das Schwarze Korps declared that ‘Schmeling’s victory was not only sport. It was a question of prestige for our race’, and Goebbels used the fight footage in one of his most successful propaganda films, Max Schmelings Sieg – Ein Deutscher (‘Schmeling’s Victory, A Germany victory’). More than three million Germans saw the film in its first month.¹²³ (The Berlin Olympics began just six weeks later.) Meanwhile, Der Weltkampf wrote that France, England and ‘white North America’ should also celebrate the victory which had ‘checked the arrogance of the Negroes and clearly demonstrated to them the superiority of white intelligence’.¹²⁴ At least one American paper, the New Orleans Picayune, agreed. A columnist cheerfully wrote of Louis’s defeat, ‘I guess this proves who really is the master race.’¹²⁵

For blacks, Louis’s defeat was made worse by the fact that it had taken place on Juneteenth, Emancipation Day.¹²⁶ Hundreds wept in the streets of Harlem, and Francisco José Tenreiro declared that ‘The gong of the bell / Hangs in the air, screaming / The negro’s defeat.’¹²⁷ Marcus Garvey, meanwhile, blamed Louis, accusing him of laziness, selfishness, and lack of racial pride. ‘Schmeling knew that he had the responsibility of satisfying a watching and waiting Germanic world’, but Louis, ‘as is customary to us’, ‘thought only of himself’: ‘We hope Mrs Louis will not think hard of us, but we think Joe got married too early before securing his world championship.’¹²⁸ ‘Don’t be a Joe Louis’ was a popular expression that summer and John Dos Passos wrote to his friend Ernest Hemingway, asking him what had happened to his ‘little chocolate friend Joey Louis? Matrimony? Dope? Disease? Or is Hitler right?’¹²⁹

On 22 June 1937 Louis’s redemption began. Twenty-two years after Jess Willard had defeated Jack Johnson, Joe Louis broke the colour line in the heavyweight championship for good by defeating Jim Braddock, the ‘Cinderella Man’.¹³⁰ The fight had been difficult to secure and Louis’s manager, Mike Jacobs, finally agreed to pay Braddock, and his manager Joe Gould, 10 per cent of Louis’s earnings for a decade. The Baltimore celebration was witnessed by British journalist Alistair Cooke. Cooke and a friend were attending a Fats Waller show in ‘darktown’, when ‘far off from somewhere came a high roar like a tidal wave’. ‘It was like Christmas Eve in darkest Africa . . . for one night, in all the lurid darktowns of America, the black man was king. The memory of that night has terrified and exhilarated me ever since.’¹³¹ The Daily Worker was less Conradian: ‘The Negro people,’ it declared, ‘are going to smack Jim Crow right on the button like Louis hit Braddock.’132

But the real championship fight, and the fight that turned Louis into a potent symbol for white as well as black America, was the 1938 Schmeling rematch (illus. 110).¹³³ In the lead up to the contest, Franklin D. Roosevelt reputedly invited the boxer to the White House, felt his muscles, and said, ‘Joe, we’re depending on those muscles for America.’¹³⁴ Louis did not disappoint. After only 124 seconds he knocked out the ‘sagging Teuton’, the ‘Nazi Nailer’; ‘people who had paid as much as $100 for their chairs didn’t use them’ and many radio listeners who had not quite settled down for the fight said they missed it altogether.¹³⁵ ‘It was a shocking thing, that knockout,’ reported Bob Considine, ‘short, sharp, merciless, complete’.¹³⁶ ‘Hitler’s pet,’ wrote Richard Wright, ‘looked like a soft piece of molasses candy left out in the sun.’¹³⁷ Nevertheless, Louis and Schmeling embraced. ‘They both smiled,’ noted Considine, ‘and could afford to – for Louis had made around $200,000 a minute and Schmeling $100,000.’ (Later, to salve opinion back in Germany, Schmeling claimed he had been fouled.)

In Harlem, 500,000 blacks took to the streets, saluting each other with Nazi salutes and shouting ‘Heil Louis!’ ‘One joyous Negro passed it on to another and finally Seventh Avenue looked like a weird burlesque of Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin – staggering, yelling, singing, jumping, dancing, hugging, men and women jutting out their hands to one another in mock Nazi salute.’¹³⁸ In Georgia, things were slightly different. Jimmy Carter recalled hearing the fight on the family radio which had been propped up on the window sill so that their black neighbours could listen to it without entering the house. At the end of the fight, ‘there was no sound from anyone in the yard, except a polite “Thank you, Mister Earl”’, offered to Carter’s ‘deeply disappointed’ father.

Then, our several dozen visitors filed across the dirt road, across the railroad track, and quietly entered a house about a hundred yards away out in the field. At that point, pandemonium broke loose inside that house, as our black neighbours shouted and yelled in celebration of the Louis victory. But all the curious, accepted proprieties of a racially-segregated society had been carefully observed.¹³⁹

Like the victory of the black American runner Jesse Owens at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, Louis’s triumph had a powerful political impact.¹⁴⁰ For whites, American democracy had straightforwardly defeated German fascism. For blacks, however, Louis was primarily a ‘race hero’, fighting in (as well as for) Jim Crow America. Marcus Garvey now argued that Louis’s punches were ‘typical of our race in true action’: Joe had ‘had time for reflection and for the appreciation of the responsibility our race has placed on his shoulders’.¹⁴¹ Richard Wright noted the political potential of the ‘High Tide in Harlem’ that Louis’s victory inspired and tried to balance the claims of democracy vs. fascism with those of black

Carry the dream on for yourself; lift it out of the trifling guise of a prizefight celebration and supply the social and economic details and you have the secret dynamics of proletarian aspiration. The eyes of these people were bold that night. Their fear of property, of the armed police fell away. There was in their chant a hunger deeper than that for bread as they marched along.

For the communist Wright, this was a moment of potentially revolutionary significance. With Louis as a rallying point, the black proletariat might break out of the confines of their own square circle and recognize ‘that the earth was theirs . . . that they did not have to live by proscription in one corner of it’.142

When Jack Johnson entered the ring in Reno in 1910 the band played ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me’; in 1938, ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ introduced Louis. After 1938, white newspaper cartoonists finally abandoned Sambo stereotypes to portray Louis in a flattering light.¹⁴³ Louis’s nicknames proliferated as fast as his product endorsements. As Eugene McCartney noted in a 1938 scholarly article, ‘Alliteration on the Sports Page’:

Brown Bomber has finally emerged as his most popular name, but only after knocking out a score of others: Alabam’ Assassin, Black Beauty, Brown Behemoth, Brown Bludgeon, Brown Embalmer, Dark Destroyer, Dark Dynamiter, Detroit Demon, Detroit Devastator, Detroit’s Dun Demon, Jarring Joe, Jolting Joe, Licorice Lasher, Michigan Mauler, Ring Robot, Sable Sphinx, Sepia Slasher, Sepia Sniper, Tan Thunderbolt, Tan Thunderer, Tan Tornado, Wildcat Warrior.¹⁴⁴

Louis’s reputation as an all-American hero was consolidated in 1942 when he risked his title against Max Baer and donated his winnings (approximately $70,000) to the Naval Relief Fund to help the families of those who had died at Pearl Harbor.¹⁴⁵ Paul Gallico declared that Louis (‘Citizen Barrow’) represented nothing less than ‘simple good American integrity’, perhaps forgetting that in 1935 he had dubbed him a ‘calmly savage Ethiopian.’ Many blacks were less happy about Louis’s support of the discriminatory and oppressive Navy policies. After Walter White, Secretary of the NAACP, expressed the hope that Louis’s patriotic actions would stir the American Navy toward desegregation, the Office of War Information and the War Department made statements insisting that it was necessary to the war effort to ‘de-emphasize our many long standing internal dissensions’.¹⁴⁶ But the war simply highlighted those dissensions. In the May 1941 issue of The Crisis, labour leader A. Philip Randolph had called for a mass march on Washington to protest against employment inequalities in the National Defense industries, arguing that the present situation was ‘a blow below the belt’. Six days before the scheduled march, Roosevelt issued an order barring racial discrimination in the defense industries, and Randolph cancelled the march. The effectiveness of the threat of nonviolent direct action had been demonstrated.147

After the fight, Louis enlisted and became a spokesman and recruiting agent for the army. In May 1942, he made a speech saying, ‘We gon do our part, and we will win, because we’re on God’s side.’ This immediately became a popular propaganda slogan, featuring on a recruitment poster with Louis and his gun.¹⁴⁸ Claudia Jones of the Young Communist League used the same image for the cover of a 1942 pamphlet, Lift Every Voice for Victory! (illus. 133). ‘All victories won on the “home front” against discrimination today,’ she argued, ‘are inseparable from the struggle to defeat Hitler.’¹⁴⁹ Louis also appeared in a couple of propaganda films, including This is The Army (1943) – featuring an Irving Berlin song that urged the fashionable to ‘take a look at Brown Bomber Joe’ to find out what ‘the well-dressed man in Harlem will wear’ – and the groundbreaking The Negro Soldier (1944).¹⁵⁰ The film begins in a church where the black congregation listens to a young preacher, who departs from his prepared text to consider the contribution of blacks in the military. The preacher (played by Carlton Moss, who also wrote the script) begins by evoking Joe Louis’s 1938 defeat of Schmeling. A news-reel clip of the fight is then shown with the preacher’s words as a voiceover:

In one minute and 49 seconds an American fist won a victory. But it wasn’t a final victory. No, that victory’s going to take a little longer and a whole lot more American fists. Now those two men that were matched in the ring that night are matched again, this time in a far greater arena and for much greater stakes.

The scene then shifts to Louis and Schmeling in training – Louis in uniform running through the countryside with his comrades, and Schmeling jumping out of a plane, learning to be a parachutist. In Germany, men are ‘turned into machines’, the preacher says; in America, he implies, even black men are at one with nature. The sermon continues:

This time it’s a fight not between man and man but between nation and nation, a fight for the real championship of the world, to determine which way of life shall survive – their way or our way. And this time we must see to it that there is no return engagement for the stakes this time are the greatest men have ever fought for.¹⁵¹

The film goes on to tell the story of black involvement in the American army since the Revolution. Although the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln are briefly mentioned, slavery is not.¹⁵² In 1945, Louis was awarded a medal by the Legion of Merit. ‘White America found it easier to give Joe Louis a medal than to integrate the army,’ notes Chris Mead, ‘easier to write an editorial praising Joe Louis than to hire a black reporter.’¹⁵³ Louis was not unaware of the political hypocrisies at play. Of his fights with Schmeling, he said, ‘White Americans – even while some of them still were lynching black people in the South – were depending on me to k.o. Germany.’¹⁵⁴

106 Poster advertising The Champ (1931).

107 Poster advertising Golden Boy (1939).

108 Poster advertising Nothing Sacred (1937).

109 poster advertising Body and Soul (1947).

110 Louis vs. Schmeling on the cover of Liberty magazine, 25 June 1938.

111 Benny Andrews, The Champion, 1968.

ll2
‘Look out – he’s back’, cover of Life, 9 November 1970.

113 Cover of Sports Illustrated, 28 October 1974: ‘The Fight in Africa’.

114 Andy Warhol, Muhammad Ali: Hand on Chin, 1977.

115 Cover of Ntozake Shange, Float Like a Butterfly, with illustrations by Edel Rodriguez (New York, 2002).

116 Poster advertising When We Were Kings (1996).

117 Poster advertising a.k.a. Cassius Clay (1970).

118 Elliott Pinkney (with the assistance of Sam Barrow and Lloyd Goodney), detail of Visions and Motions, 1993.

119 Harold King, cover of W. J. Weatherby, Squaring Off: Mailer v. Baldwin (1977).

120 Sylvester Stallone in Rocky (1976).

121 Cover of Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, dc Comics (1978).

l22
Eduardo Arroyo, Direct Panama, 1984.

123 Keith Haring, Boxer, 1988.

124 David Hammons, Champ, 1989.

125 Godfried Donkor, Financial Times Boxers, No. 2, 2001, collage on paper.

126 The Great White Hype poster, 1996.

127 Christy Martin on the cover of Sports Illustrated, 1996.

128 Annie Leibovitz, poster advertising Women exhibition, Washington, DC, 1999–2000.

129 Battle of the Blues, vol. 4, album cover, 1959.

130 Emma Amos, Muhammad Ali, 1998.

131 Peter Howson, Boxer 1, 2002, pastel on paper.

132 Paul-Felix Montez, The Gloves, 2006, model for a 70-foot sculpture of steel and bronze gloves above granite, shown at the 21st Century Las Vegas Monuments exhibition, Las Vegas.

In 1946, Louis returned to boxing but he was not as strong or as fast as he had been. He knocked out Billy Conn again – coining the slogan, ‘He can run, but he can’t hide’ – and won three other fights, including two with Jersey Joe Walcott, before abdicating his title in 1949. However, because he needed money to pay taxes – the IRS demanded a reported $1.2 million in back taxes, interest and penalties – he returned to the ring. In 1950 he lost a one-sided decision to Ezzard Charles and retired for good the following year when Rocky Marciano knocked him out in front of a national television audience. Broke, Louis turned to wrestling and refereeing and, following several stays in hospitals for cocaine addiction and paranoia, he became an ‘official greeter’ at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. He died in 1981 at the age of 66 and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery; Max Schmeling, who had become a good friend, was one of the pallbearers. Between 1937 and 1949 Louis defended his title 25 times, setting records for any division in the number of defences and longevity as a continuous world champion. Both records still stand.

For all that white America eventually embraced him, it was as a ‘race hero’ that Louis flourished.155 For some, he was simply the best-known black man in America. In November 1938 Frank Byrd described trying to write an article on a Harlem prostitute called Big Bess for the Amsterdam News, but being told by the night deskman that his job was simply ‘to tell me when Joe Louis gets some, and if the Brown Bomber likes it . . . Sidney said an Amsterdam reader could not care less whether Lenox Avenue Bess really had a heart; they’d read about her if Joe Louis said so’.¹⁵⁶ For others, the Louis phenomenon merited proper academic analysis. In their seminal sociological study Black Metropolis (1945), Clair Drake and Horace R. Cayton noted that from 1933 to 1938 Louis had more frontpage mentions (80) in the Chicago Defender than anyone else; Haile Selassie came a poor second with 24 mentions.¹⁵⁷ In Negro Youth at the Crossways (1940), E. Franklin Frazier reported Louis’s popularity with high school students: ‘Joe Louis’, Frazier wrote, ‘enables . . . many Negro youths and adults in all classes to inflict vicariously the aggressions which they would like to carry out against whites for the discriminations and insults which they have suffered.’¹⁵⁸

Louis soon became a quasi-religious figure, and in 1941 even Time magazine dubbed him ‘a black Moses, leading the children of Ham out of bondage’.¹⁵⁹ There are many examples of Louis being evoked in these terms, but none more poignant than a story told by Martin Luther King in Why We Can’t Wait:

More than 25 years ago, on one of the southern states adopted a new method of capital punishment. Poison gas supplanted the gallows. In its earliest stages a microphone was placed inside the sealed death chamber so that scientific observers might hear the words of the dying prisoner to judge how the victim reacted in this novel situation. The first victim was a young Negro. As the pellet dropped into the container, and the gas curled upward, through the microphone came these words. ‘Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis. Save me Joe Louis’.¹⁶⁰

133 Cover of Lift Every Voice for Victory! by Claudia Jones (1942).

Two Champions. Postcard based on a photograph of Joe Louis and Martin Luther King taken at a benefit for the March on Washington, 1963.

Writing in 1963, King described this cry as ‘bizarre and naïve’, and claimed that it had now been replaced by ‘a mighty shout of challenge’: the ‘loneliness and profound despair of Negroes in that period’, a despair manifest in the belief that ‘not God, not government, not charitably minded white men, but a Negro who was the world’s most expert fighter, in this last extremity, was the last hope’ had finally been ‘replaced by confidence’ in the possibility of real political change (illus. 134).161 During the sixties, another ‘expert boxer’ would come to represent political change, but at the height of the Depression, the dying prisoner was not the only American to believe that Louis was a Christ-like figure, the ‘New Black Hope’, the ‘one Negro white men respect’.¹⁶² After Louis beat Baer (in the first million-dollar gate since Dempsey), Richard Wright wrote that the feeling on the streets of Chicago ‘was like a revival’: ‘After one fight really, there was a religious feeling in the air. Well, it wasn’t exactly a religious feeling, but it was something, and you could feel it. It was a feeling of unity, of oneness.’¹⁶³

The religious aura surrounding Louis meant that he was highly flexible as a political symbol.¹⁶⁴ Ironically, Louis’s success in a sport that epitomized personal struggle and achievement was often used to harness support for political struggles that rejected individualist aspiration in favour of collective action. In 1942, Louis appeared in propaganda for the US Army; in 1946 he agreed to act as the honorary national chairman of the communist-linked United Negro Veterans of America, and was honoured (along with Duke Ellington and Frank Sinatra) by New Masses, the journal in which Richard Wright had dubbed him political ‘dynamite’.¹⁶⁵ Along with movie stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Rita Hayworth, and performers such as Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman, Louis could be found ‘supporting Spanish Loyalists, raising money for anti-fascist refugees, playing benefits for Popular Front politicians, and promoting themselves in the Daily Worker’.¹⁶⁶ In July 1947 The Worker reported the presence of Louis and Sinatra, along with Edward G. Robinson and Harpo Marx, at a benefit for an inter-racial hospital.¹⁶⁷

Novels of, and about, the 1930s and ’40s abound with references to Louis and his capacity for political inspiration. V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men (1967) is set partly on the British-governed Caribbean island of Isabella. Ralph Singh, writing his memoirs in London, recalls a visit to the home of a black school-friend, Bertie Browne, in the early forties. ‘On one wall, ochre-colored with white facings, there were framed pictures of Joe Louis, Jesse Owens, Haile Selassie, and Jesus.’ Only a few years later, Browne becomes a ‘black folk-leader’, active in the island’s struggle for independence.¹⁶⁸ A radio broadcast of Louis’s 1941 fight against ‘new White Hope’, Billy Conn, is the stimulus for a prison rebellion in Lloyd L. Brown’s 1951 novel, Iron City. For protagonist, Lonnie James, whose initials reverse those of the champion, each of Louis’s victories has been ‘a good sign’. On the night of the Conn fight, however, Louis seems to be struggling and the prison resounds with the sound of ‘kill that nigger!’ The guards turn the radio off, but the prisoners protest:

TURN ON THE RADIO! TURN ON THE RADIO! It was savage now, not pleading, and it seemed as though the granite walls would shatter from the pounding beat of the chant . . . Everything was in that outcry – the beatings, the Hole, the graft, the senseless rules, crooked cops, crooked judges – everything.

The guards give in and switch the radio back on. The fight is over, ‘but the inmates would still hear the solemn announcement. the winnah and still heavyweight champion of the world – jo-o-oe louis! The prisoners fight back against the guards, just as Louis had fought against Conn, but there is an important difference in the two battles. Louis’s victory had been an individual achievement, but that of the prisoners was a collective act. In the following chapter those same prisoners gather together to support Lonnie James’s appeal against the death penalty. Louis’s individual victory sparks collective action, and Brown links the fight to the German invasion of the Soviet Union (which took place just a few days later).169

But not everyone agreed that race heroes such as Louis could be effective as political models. Langston Hughes’s poem ‘To be Somebody’ (1950) describes a little boy ‘dreaming of the boxing gloves / Joe Louis wore’ but for him there is no ‘knockout’ merely ‘Bam! Bop! Mop!’ ‘There’s always room,’ the poem concludes, ‘They say, / At the top.’¹⁷⁰ A similar irony informs Chester Himes’s first novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), written in the wake of Louis’s support of the segregated American Navy. Robert Jones, who works in a California shipyard, has been raised up – ‘We made you a leader of your people, such as Joe Louis, the prize fighter, Marian Anderson, the singer, and others. We had confidence in you.’ – only to be brought down, by a false accusation of rape. Jones says he doesn’t want to fight, but he dreams constantly of killing. The novel ends when he joins the army.¹⁷¹

135 ‘Joe Louis is the Man’: Advertisement for Decca records, 1935.

While Joe Louis, or his reputation, crop up in a wide variety of novels, the form of expression most often associated with him was undoubtedly the blues (illus. 135).172 Within weeks of his 1935 defeat of Carnera, songs about the fighter were being released all over the country. The first was Texan Joe Pullum’s ‘Joe Louis is the Man’, which praised him less as a fighter than as a devoted son, while nine days later Memphis Minnie McCoy recorded the ‘Joe Louis Strut’ and ‘He’s In the Ring (Doin’ the Same Old Thing)’, a wonderful evocation of Joe’s promise amid Depression hardship.

I wouldn’t even pay my house rent

I wouldn’t buy me nothing to eat

Joe Louis said ‘Come take a chance with me

I’ll bet I put you on your feet.’

Soon every victory was being celebrated, and even Louis’s 1936 defeat by Schmeling was debated, most notably in a calypso by The Lion and Atilla: ‘I wouldn’t say it was dope or conspiracy, / but the whole thing look extremely funny to me.’173 By the end of the thirties Louis was established as the greatest blues hero since John Henry, and literary figures such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright joined in. In 1940 the NAACP Hollywood Theatre Alliance Negro Revue included a skit about Louis, which had as its climax Hughes’s song ‘America’s Young Black Joe’, a parody of Stephen Foster’s ‘Old Black Joe’ (1861). Old Black Joe was a slave dreaming of leaving the cotton fields for heaven:

I’m coming, I’m coming

For my head is bending low

I hear their gentle voices calling

Old Black Joe.

Young Black Joe is also ‘comin’,

But my head ain’t bending low!

I’m walking proud! I’m speaking loud!

I’m America’s Young Black Joe!¹⁷⁴

In 1941 Richard Wright’s attempt, ‘King Joe’ (with music by Count Basie), was recorded by Basie’s Orchestra, with Paul Robeson ‘singing the blues for the first time in his life’ (Jimmy Rushing stood by his side to beat time).¹⁷⁵ ‘Wonder what Joe Louis thinks when he’s fighting a white man,’ Wright asked, ‘Bet he thinks what I’m thinking, cause he wears a deadpan.’¹⁷⁶

JOE LOUIS VS. JACK JOHNSON

Joe Louis’s enormous popularity did not mean that Jack Johnson was entirely forgotten.¹⁷⁷ If white fight fans liked to compare Joe Louis and Jack Dempsey, blacks pitted Louis against Johnson. The comparative experience of the two black heavyweight champions was also evoked as a barometer of the changing position of black Americans more generally. Richard Wright’s first novel, Lawd Today, presents a Joycean day in the life of a Chicago South Side post office worker called Jake Jackson.178 The day is 12 February 1937, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, and the novel draws parallels between the Civil War, boxing, and Jackson’s daily struggles. At one point, Jake overhears part of a radio broadcast: ‘In the latter part of 1862 Meade and Lee sparred and feinted cautiously for an opening to deal a telling blow.’ It is also some months before Louis won the title, but the men at the post office think Louis will never be allowed to become champion.¹⁷⁹ After discussing Louis’s 1936 defeat by Schmeling, they reminisce about Johnson’s acts of defiance and the riots that took place in the wake of his victory over Jeffries. The Civil War is not over; the battling continues. Wright’s choice of name for his protagonist seems deliberately ironic. Jackson is no hero, but a gullible and pathetic drunk whose only blows are directed at his wife. The novel ends with a knockout of sorts: she smashes a glass over his head and he falls into a drunken sleep.

A comparative reading of the careers of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis is also important to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952). The novel enacts a debate between the two great black heavyweight champions of the first half of the twentieth century, and considers each in turn as a model for the black writer in America. Ralph Ellison was born in the year before Johnson lost his title, in 1914, the same year as Joe Louis Barrow. If by the 1940s the colour line in heavyweight boxing had gone for good, it remained firm in what might be called heavyweight writing. When, in 1963, Ellison wanted to complain that Irving Howe’s essay, ‘Black Boys and Native Sons’, was a ‘Northern white liberal version of the white Southern myth of absolute separation of the races’, he did so in the language of the boxing commentator: ‘[Howe] implies that Negroes can only aspire to contest other Negroes (this at a time when Baldwin has been taking on just about everyone, including Hemingway, Faulkner, and the United States Attorney General!), and must wait for the appearance of a Black Hope before they have the courage to move.’¹⁸⁰ Ellison repeatedly rejected the idea of a black-only tradition, asserting strongly the influence of writers such as Eliot, Joyce, Hemingway and Twain upon his work. ‘While one can do nothing about choosing one’s relatives,’ he maintained, ‘one can as an artist, choose one’s “ancestors”.’ Richard Wright was, in this sense, a ‘relative’; Hemingway an ‘ancestor’.¹⁸¹ This is an interesting and much-discussed distinction, but within both words, ‘relative’ and ‘ancestor’, I would suggest, another nestles – ‘opponent’. Ellison goes even further in his determination to throw off the influence of Wright, when he maintains in the same essay: ‘I did not need Wright to tell me how to be a Negro or to be angry or to express anger – Joe Louis was doing that very well.’¹⁸²

Ellison’s metaphor of the writer as fighter recalls his ‘ancestor’/ opponent Hemingway’s famous 1949 letter to Charles Scribner in which he claimed to be ‘a man without any ambition, except to be champion of the world’.¹⁸³ As Hemingway took on all-comers, living or dead, Ellison wanted to be seen as taking on allcomers, black or white. Ellison wanted to be considered ‘a real contender’ and part of that involved demonstrating the ambition necessary to be thought so. But while Hemingway’s only ambition was ‘to be champion of the world’, Ellison extends the fighterly metaphor, and makes it more precise and, in a way, more problematic. Wright may have given him faith ‘in his ability to compete’, but Joe Louis had taught him how ‘to be a Negro . . . to be angry . . . to express anger’.184

Invisible Man is a book full of ‘bouts with circumstance’, in and out of the boxing ring, bouts which are repeatedly presented as commentaries on questions of verbal expression and communication.¹⁸⁵ How much is writing, or boxing, Ellison asks, about ‘expressing anger’ or indeed any other form of self-expression or self-assertion? How much are both simply about performing? The best-known fight in the novel comes in its opening chapter, in the battle royal scene, which was first published as a short story.¹⁸⁶ The battle royal (which only featured blacks) was a popular form of boxing event in the early twentieth-century south, and was often the opening event on a boxing card. Most often, battle royals involved adolescent boys, who, often blindfolded and sometimes with one arm tied behind their backs, would compete to be the last one standing. ‘Manufactured disunity among blacks was the barely concealed plot,’ Andrew Kaye argues, ‘redolent of the old days on the plantation.’¹⁸⁷ In Ellison’s novel, the protagonist has been invited to speak before ‘a gathering of the town’s leading white citizens’ – the crowd will ‘judge truly [his] ability’ and it will be a ‘triumph for [the whole black] community’. In fact what happens is that several black boys his age are forced to watch a dance performed by a naked white woman with ‘a small American flag tattooed upon her belly’, and then are blindfolded and made to fight each other before scrambling for the coins that are their ‘reward’.¹⁸⁸ Initially ten boys are involved, but soon the number is reduced to two: Invisible Man and Tatlock.¹⁸⁹ When Invisible Man suggests, ‘Fake it like I knocked you out, you can have the prize,’ Tatlock replies, ‘I’ll break your behind’. ‘For them?’ the narrator asks. ‘For me, sonofabitch!’¹⁹⁰ Unlike his opponent, Invisible Man is convinced that a fight between black men in front of a white audience cannot be a genuine competition, and certainly not ‘sport’. Budd Schulberg’s description of boxing as ‘show business with blood’ is reinforced here, and throughout the novel, by references to the circus (the white woman, the unattainable prize, is described as a circus kewpie doll).¹⁹¹ But Invisible Man’s awareness that his expected role is as an entertainer does not extend to the speech he is about to give. Indeed, during the fight, he can only think of his speech, and despite the humiliation he is suffering, of impressing the white audience. The fight is thus a commentary on that imminent verbal performance.¹⁹²

In numerous interviews Ellison spoke of the battle royal episode as a type of initiation rite involving acceptance of white supremacy, a version of the initiation fights that he would have read about in Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy (1945).¹⁹³ Like Invisible Man, Black Boy is structured around a series of flights and fights. The most striking fight comes in Chapter Twelve in which Wright describes working in an optical factory in Memphis, a city he had hoped would be more enlightened than his native Jackson, Mississippi. Two incidents disabuse him of this belief. First, he witnesses the transformation, for a mere 25c, of one of his most intelligent co-workers, the ‘hardheaded, sensible’ Shorty, into ‘a clown of the most debased and degraded type’. This is merely the prelude to his own degradation. Worn down by insistence, Wright is goaded to fight Harrison, who works for a rival company, for $5 apiece. When Wright objects, arguing that ‘those white men will be looking at us, laughing at us’, Harrison is dismissive: ‘What have we got to lose?’ Wright’s acknowledgment of having nothing to lose is what makes him both willing to take part in a performance designed to ‘fool them white men’, and so physically angry that he cannot help going beyond the performance and hurting Harrison.

The shame and anger we felt for having allowed ourselves to be duped crept into our blows and blood ran into our eyes, half blinding us. The hate we felt for the men whom we had tried to cheat went into the blows we threw at each other.

Afterwards, Harrison and Wright avoid each other. ‘I felt that I had done something unclean, something for which I could never properly atone.’ The symbolism of this fight is the antithesis of the glorious defeat of Covey, or Carnera, or Schmeling. Wright and Harrison fight in the spotlight (‘a bright electric bulb glowed above our heads’) but it is not that of Madison Square Garden. If the ‘white folks formed a kind of superworld’, black folks operate in the underworld. The performance takes place ‘in the basement of a Main Street building’ before an all-male, all-white audience.194

Perhaps the most obvious point to note about Ralph Ellison’s version of the rite is the gap between the narrator’s retrospective understanding of its significance and the understanding of his adolescent self. Invisible Man (as a young man) does not realize what is going on, and so the novel repeats the rite of initiation, again and again, through a series of real and metaphorical fights. The repetition is so insistent that the chapters of the novel begin to seem less like episodes in a picaresque adventure than rounds in a boxing match. I want to concentrate on two particular episodes and consider how attention to the boxing allusions can aid in their interpretation.¹⁹⁵

In Chapter Three, Invisible Man takes the college benefactor Norton, upset and in need of whisky after his encounter with Trueblood, to a bar called The Golden Day. Many have noted the allusion to the title of Lewis Mumford’s 1924 pioneering study of the American Renaissance, and argued that Ellison is taking issue with Mumford’s lack of attention to slavery.¹⁹⁶ But there is another allusion at the beginning of the chapter. When the narrator approaches the bar, he overhears a man describing the 1910 Johnson–Jeffries fight in a virtuoso blend of anatomical detail, invective and graveyard humour. The description ends with the phrase, ‘Naturally, there was no other therapy possible.’¹⁹⁷ The allusion to the ‘Golden Day’ of American literature is thus complicated by an allusion to the day (4 July no less) when the Man with the Golden Smile challenged assumptions of white supremacy. The fight the men recall is one which was not simply, as in the case of the battle royal, a performance, but a genuine victory – an effective form of ‘therapy’.198 Here, however, black power manifests itself as stylistic barroom bravado in what seems to be an imitation of the pub scene in Joyce’s ‘Cyclops’, where Alf Bergan and Joe Hynes discuss the recent Keogh-Bennett bout.¹⁹⁹

At this stage, the narrator is unable to grasp the possibility of any kind of bravado, as becomes clear in the remainder of the chapter. This scene is followed almost immediately by a real fight when the veterans turn on their attendant, and give him some ‘therapy’. The narrator says of the men in the bar that they ‘hooted and yelled as at a football game’, or, we might add, a boxing match. He describes feeling ‘such an excitement that I wanted to join them’ and his chance to get involved comes soon after, when he goes looking for Norton, hiding under the stairs. His response, when confronted close-up with a white man, is, however, far from that of Jack Johnson:

some of the milling men pushed me up against him and suddenly a mass of whiteness was looming up two inches from my eyes; it was only his face but I felt a shudder of nameless horror. I had never been so close to a white person before. In a panic I struggled to get away.²⁰⁰

The competing rhetoric of fighting and the circus (both structured performances) and running (a refusal of structure or a recognition of its absence) are here, and throughout the novel, set up as alternatives.²⁰¹ They come together again in one of the final scenes in the book. Shortly before the riots which end the novel, the narrator comes across a huge woman with a beer barrel, sitting on a milk wagon and singing:

If it hadn’t been for the referee,

Joe Louis woulda killed

Jim Jeffrie

Free beer!!

In the song she confuses Joe Louis (a credit to the race) with bad Jack Johnson.²⁰² By substituting the names, Ellison seems to be suggesting that despite the ‘deadpan’, Louis is carrying on Johnson’s work, work that the heavyweight woman also participates in as, with her ‘enormous hand[s]’, she ‘sends quart after quart of milk crashing into the street’. But although this action, and the riots that follow, are intended to be a form of ‘therapy’, the reference to the circus (she is ‘like a tipsy fat lady in a circus parade’), reminds us again that therapy is also a performance.²⁰³

Invisible Man proper concludes with the narrator ‘plung[ing] down’ a manhole as once again, he runs away, this time from two white men with baseball bats. ‘I was just fixing to slug the bastard,’ one says. Underground, he finds himself ‘beyond the point of exhaustion, too tired to close my eyes.’ The fight, though, is not over. He has not been knocked out. He is in ‘a state neither of dreaming nor of waking, but somewhere in between’. And it is in this state, and under the influence of marijuana and Louis Armstrong’s ‘What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue’, that he tells the story of the yokel and the prize-fighter:

Once I saw a prize fighter boxing a yokel. The fighting was swift and amazingly scientific . . . He hit the yokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed, and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior. The smart money hit the canvas . . . The yokel had stepped inside of his opponent’s sense of time.204

Invisible Man is here ‘outside of time’ but what I suggest he (and Ellison) learn through his ‘hibernation’ is how to step ‘inside’: how to fight differently, how to become the yokel inside of modernism.

A possible way of reading the epilogue then is that Invisible Man decides to get up and go back to the fight, before he is counted out. In the final pages, the narrator acknowledges, with an ironic nod to Hemingway, that ‘it’s “winner take nothing” that is the great truth of our country or any country’, and recognizes that although ‘there’s still a conflict within me’, now ‘I am invisible, not blind’. What he calls the ‘victory of conscious perception’ has been won.²⁰⁵ If we read the novel as a künstlerroman, we can see that the progress ‘from ranter to writer’ is also one from bodily inarticulacy and blindness – represented by the blindfolded boys in the battle royal – to a disembodied articulacy.²⁰⁶ Yet this very disembodiment is still imagined in terms of bodies. Invisible Man’s version of Stephan Dedalus’s dedication to ‘silence, exile and cunning’ is yet again to talk about boxers.

With these questions in mind, I want to return to Ellison’s comparison of writing and fighting and how it might enable a consideration of style and form. Asserting frequently that ‘technique’ was what was needed ‘to free ourselves’, Ellison asked where that ‘technique’ could be learned.²⁰⁷ His customary answer was that it lay in ‘vernacular idiom in the arts’; indeed there, ‘lessons are to be learned in everything from power to elegance’. When challenged in an interview with the claim that ‘the black masses are uninterested in elegance’, he responded (in terms that recall Weldon Johnson on Jack Johnson 50 years earlier):

Elegance turns up in every aspect of Afro-American culture, from sermons to struts . . . Aesthetically speaking, when form is blended successfully with function, elegance results. Black Americans expect elegance even from their prizefighters and basketball players and much of the appeal of Jack Johnson and Joe Louis sprang from the fact that each was as elegant as the finest of ballet dancers.²⁰⁸

Connecting the world of sport and that of art for Ellison is not simply the bringing together of ‘power’ and ‘elegance’, although this combination is important. Sport and art could also be seen as related forms of ‘symbolic action’, to use Kenneth Burke’s term.209 Ellison was a close friend of Burke and was very interested in his anthropological understanding of literary works as forms of ritual.²¹⁰ Burke’s critical method, which drew on psychoanalysis, Marxism and linguistics, as well as anthropology, repeatedly stressed the importance of understanding the effect the work of art has on the reader.²¹¹ What the work is in itself is less important than what it allows its author to express and its audience to experience.²¹² ‘All action’, Burke proclaimed, ‘is poetic’; the only difference being that ‘some people write their poems on paper, and others carve theirs out of jugular veins.’²¹³ Or, as Ellison reworked these ideas, some ‘act’ ‘poetically’ by boxing, others by writing novels. It was high praise indeed, therefore, for Ellison to recall Wright as ‘a Negro American writer as randy, as courageous, and irrepressible as Jack Johnson’. ‘We literary people’, he went on, should always keep a sharp eye on what’s happening in the unintellectualized areas of our experience.’²¹⁴ Bringing together novels and boxing, or Keats and the carving of jugular veins, does more, however, than simply initiate a form of cultural studies based on performativity. Boxing is ‘show business with blood’; in acknowledging the show business in Burke’s theory, and in the fiction of Wright and Ellison, we should not forget the aggression, the desire for therapeutic blood-letting, which both enact.

In recent years, the tendency has been to regard Ellison as a quintessential fifties liberal – and thus a figure of deadpan complicity.²¹⁵ But a fuller understanding of what boxing meant to him would suggest that there was more of the Johnsonian golden grin in Ralph Ellison than the Louis deadpan.²¹⁶ Ellison himself said as much in a 1956 letter to Albert Murray:

with writing I learned from Joe and Sugar Ray (though that old dancing master, wit, and bull-balled stud, Jack Johnson is really my mentor, because he knew that if you operated with skill and style you could rise above all that being-a-credit-to-your-race-crap because he was a credit to the human race and because he could make that much body and bone move with such precision to his command all other men had a chance to beat the laws of probability and anything else that stuck up its head and if he liked a woman he took her and told those who didn’t like it to lump it and that is the way true studs have always acted).²¹⁷