MY MUHAMMAD ALI: BELLS AFTER FIFTEEN ROUNDS

1. When We Were Kings is the title of a superb documentary film about the Rumble In The Jungle, Muhammad Ali's classic battle with George Foreman in Zaire, where he regained the heavyweight crown. The title is fitting, because Ali's fame began in the ring, and it was a time of giants in boxing's most glamorous division. George Foreman said that he, Joe Frazier and Ali were like one person; they had been forged together in the public imagination, but there were also Sonny Liston, Floyd Patterson, Ken Norton, Henry Cooper, Ernie Terrell: men over whom Ali needed to triumph to establish himself, and men who now shine in his reflection. Watch the moment Foreman falls in the film: at ringside the writer George Plimpton is frozen in drop-jaw disbelief, Norman Mailer is already beginning to celebrate. Boxing has always drawn great writers; there is no more telling display of character, no more naked revealing of what is happening inside a man's heart, than that time in the ring, and writers and film-makers have always known that.

2. Muhammad Ali was the most important sportsman of the Twentieth Century, and would have been even had he not become the most transcendent, become a symbol for battles of conscience, for racial justice, for people far removed from power, for religious belief, for so much else. He was unquestionably the most-recognisable human being in the world; he could go virtually nowhere without being mobbed. But it started on a smaller scale. When he burst on the scene after winning his Olympic light-heavyweight gold in Rome, he brought something new to sport: showmanship and self-promotion. He carried the trash-talk of the playground and the braggadocio of the professional wrestling ring into the arenas of 'legitimate' sport.Ali's style coincided with the rise of sports television: it was the beginning of the time when sportsmen stopped being paid as competitors and began to realise TV turned them into entertainers, like movie stars. This did not mean Ali was embraced immediately or automatically. To many 'traditional' sports fans, mainly whites, he was a loud-mouth, he was uppity, he needed to be put into his place.

3. From 'I Am The Greatest', a poem by Cassius Clay: 'The fistic world was dull and weary/with a champ like Liston things had to be dreary'.

I once wrote about Sonny Liston, who before Clay might legitimately have been considered the baddest man on the planet, saying 'his only skill was hurting people'. The white audience faced severe problems trying to decide if they should root for Liston, a thug who'd learned his boxing in prison, to be the one to shut 'the Louisville Lip' up. Not that they doubted he would; he was a 7-1 favourite. Cassius Clay had irritated people calling Doug Jones 'an ugly little man' before their title eliminator in Madison Square Garden, which Clay won by decision. He spent the build-up to the fight entertaining celebrities like the Beatles (his win over Henry Cooper a few months earlier had already made him a star in Britain) who flocked to Miami; he called Liston a 'big ugly bear' and seemed so hyper at the weigh-in sportswriters claimed he was scared to near-death. Clay's victory in February 1964 shocked the world. Soon after, he announced his conversion to Islam and his name-change to Muhammad Ali. When he won the rematch with Liston in Lewiston, Maine, delayed and moved to its unlikely location because boxing politics had already stripped him of the WBA version of the title (for agreeing the rematch, rather than facing the WBA's top contender) the surprise was such that many still believe Liston took a dive, falling to the famous phantom punch.

4. Floyd Patterson may have been the first black 'white hope'. Ali beat Patterson, who had been destroyed twice in short-order by Liston, mercilessly; when the fight was stopped in the twelfth round, he had carried 'the rabbit', in order to inflict extra punishment on Floyd. It was partly for using his 'slave name' Cassius Clay, and partly because Patterson was promoted as the 'credit to his race' boxer the establishment wanted to see win. In a strange way, the beating Floyd took from Ali restored some of the respect he'd lost in his two losses to Liston, returned his place among champs. Patterson had first lost his own championship to the Swede Ingemar Johansson, then re-gained the title; my father, whose parents were Swedes, was a Floyd fan because of that. The generation gap was already apparent in our house in late 1965. Ali then beat four white fighters in a row within the space of six months in 1966: Canada's George Chuvalo, Cooper and fellow Brit Brian London, and Germany's Karl Mildenberger. By the time he'd finished, my dad was an Ali fan. Even when Ali fought the guy deemed the latest, perhaps last, Great White Hope, Jerry Quarry.

5. 'I was the onliest boxer in history people asked questions like a senator.' 

When Ali was called up for the draft in 1966, he had to be reclassified 1-A. He'd originally been judged 1-Y, fit to be called up only in times of 'national emergency' because his IQ was measured at 78, which put him in the bottom 16% of Americans; the army didn't take anyone from the bottom 30%. 'I said I was the greatest, not the smartest' he said at the time. He would belie that statement many times in the next few years. Clay was not a good student; he never was a reader. But he absorbed things he thought were necessary to learn, like a sponge, and his ability to separate what he needed to learn from what he didn't was superb. He had the charisma to make people, interviewers, great writers, all feel he was talking on their level, probably because they were more eager to be understood on his. And he could recycle old tropes, jokes, stories, and make people feel they were brand new.

     As anyone who went through the process knew at the time, draft boards are not elected bodies, nor civil service, they are made of up of local grandees who rarely sent their own sons off to war. Many people thought the timing of Ali's reclassification by the Louisville draft board, when he was already 24, was more than coincidence, because it happened just afer his contract expired with the ten influential Louisville millionaires who originally backed him, and they saw the Nation of Islam's Elijah Muhammad taking control of the fighter.

6. 'No Viet Cong ever called me nigger'. 

I write the N word here because that's what Ali said, and because how can anyone who wasn't alive at the time understand fully the depth of anguish and honesty in what he was saying if they don't hear the lash of the word? Ali failed to step forward for induction into the army in April 1967 and almost immediately had his New York State boxing license withdrawn, and was stripped of his titles. In June, a jury took only 20 minutes to convict him, and the case went to appeal and eventually to the Supreme Court. Here's how he explained it: 'what should I shoot them for? They never called me nigger. They never lynched me, they didn't put no dog on me. They didn't rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father....How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.' This made my decision to be a conscientious objector, and face the consequences, so much easier.

7. In 2014 I wrote Ernie Terrell's obituary for The Guardian:

Ernie Terrell, who has died aged 75, lost his heavyweight championship to Muhammad Ali in the infamous 'What's My Name?' fight, one of the most brutally cruel displays in boxing history. In the build-up to their match Terrell insisted on calling Ali by his 'slave name', Cassius Clay. This tactic had backfired for Floyd Patterson in an earlier loss to Ali, but because Terrell also held the WBA belt Ali felt was his, Ali was infuriated. He called Terrell 'an Uncle Tom nigger' and said 'I'll make him eat those words, letter by letter'.

     The unification fight was held in February 1967 in the Houston Astrodome, where 37,000 spectators made it the biggest indoor boxing crowd ever. In his pre-match poem, Ali talked of knocking Terrell out of the stadium in the first round: 'The ref is frantic/Terrell's over the Atlantic/Who would've thought, when they came to the fight/They'd see the launch of a coloured satellite!' 

      For 15 rounds Ali taunted Terrell as he inflicted as much damage as he could. He thumbed Terrell's left eye, and later pushed it along the ring-ropes, leaving Terrell nearly blind. By the twelfth round, Terrell was simply covering his face, and in the thirteenth Ali landed a stream of unanswered punches, but referee Harry Kessler never stopped the fight. Terrell nearly lost the sight in his eye, and was never the same fighter again. Ironically, only two months after the fight, Clay was stripped of both his titles.

      (Terrell) remained philosophical about his beating...saying, in 2009, 'We were fighting...I bore no animosity. What he say, all that, don't count. That was his way of promoting the fight'.

8. The cover story of the April 1968 issue of Esquire Magazine was called 'The Passion of Muhammad Ali', and the magazine cover created by George Lois and shot by Carl Fischer, is often considered the greatest of all time: a homage to Mantegna's 'Martyrdom Of St Sebastian', Ali in his white trunks penetrated by arrows. The issue hit the stands just as President Lyndon Johnson announced that he 'would not seek, nor shall I accept' the nomination of his party for President. It was easy to think we, young people protesting the Vietnam Nam war and the ongoing problem of racial prejudice, had won. Easy, but as it turned out, delusional.

9. While banned from boxing, Ali toured college campuses giving lectures. Sometime I believe in the spring of 1970, before the Invasion of Cambodia, shootings at Kent and Jackson State, and the student strike, I was in a packed crowd at the brand-new rink at Wesleyan, listening to Ali, and hanging around afterwards to applaud as he left by car. I honestly believe that absent Ali's visit, the lacrosse team, of which I was a part, would not have been the first group on campus to vote to join the strike. There is a clip from around that time on You Tube where Ali faces down a young critic, telling him that white folks are the enemy, not the Viet Cong. 'If I die, I'm gonna die right here fighting you,' he says. We believed him, and we somehow believed that 'white folks' didn't include us.

10. From 'I Am The Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'This kid fights great, he's got speed and endurance/If you sign to fight him, increase your insurance.'

If Ali had never become a public figure outside boxing, never revolutionised the way we saw sport, never set sportsmen free to be entertainers, he would still be an iconic figure based on the major fights he fought after his return. The enforced absence from the ring cost him some of his speed: few opponents had been able to hurt him with solid punches before. The three fights against Joe Frazier, the Rumble in The Jungle against George Foreman, the two split decisions against Ken Norton, are all engrained in my memory. Some of them I only heard on the radio, but I've since watched them over and over again, and can see the relentless Frazier plowing forward, head down, left arm low and cocked to deliver the hook that caused so much damage. I now watch the Rope A Dope strategy against Foreman and think about the courage, the intelligence, the risk Ali took. And think mostly about the long-term damage those big fights inflicted on The Champ.

11. In 1976 I was a press liason at the Montreal Forum during the boxing finals, at which both Spinks brothers won gold medals. Leon Spinks' win over Cuban Sixto Soria was the greatest amateur bout I've ever seen. In 1978 I watched Ali retake his title from Spinks, on closed circuit at the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road. It was the result I wanted, but I took no joy from it. Ali would be nearly 40 when the fifth and final loss of his career, a difficult-to-watch unanimous decision against Trevor Berbick finally convinced him to retire. He refused to believe what he thought possible might not be.

12. From 'I Am The Greatest' a poem by Cassius Clay: 'Then someone with colour, someone with dash/brought the fight fans running with cash.' 

Clay understood from the first what he was doing, and in his poem he refers to himself as a new kind of fighter, to boxing's 'New Frontier'. He claimed to have based his style on the early TV wrestling star Gorgeous George, but it's more likely he was copying 'Classy' Freddie Blassie, the self-proclaimed 'King of Men', who was big in the Louisville when Clay was young. In 1976, Ali took part in a fight with the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, and brought Blassie in as his manager. Watch them on the Tonight Show, guest-hosted by MASH actor McLean Stevenson. Blassie says Ali has 'the fastest feet, the fastest punch and now he's proven he's got the fastest brain too...because he hired me.' Although Ali claimed it was going to be a real fight, that was never Inoki's idea, and when Ali got to Japan negotiations as to how the fight should be scripted broke down; neither guy would do a job for the other. So we saw Inoki lying on his back in the fight, using his feet to keep Ali away; easily the least edifying moment of Ali's career. He was born to be a boxer and a performer. He became the latter through the former.

13. In 1988, working for ABC Sports, I was in Pesaro, Italy, broadcasting a middleweight title fight between Sumbu Kalambay and Mike McCallum. The night before the fight I stayed up late with the promoter Bob Arum and with Angelo Dundee, Ali's legendary trainer. I don't think I've ever heard anyone describe someone in the way Angelo did; it was somewhere between respect and worship, like a follower who had been blessed in ancient times to fight alongside a demigod. And it was sincere. I learned a lot about boxing on that trip, but I never did discover whether Angelo actually sliced Clay's gloves to buy time in the first fight against Cooper.

14. At the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 I was in charge of host broadcast coverage of basketball at the Georgia Dome. The bane of my life was any game with the US Dream Team II, because my fellow broadcasters and journalists would desperately try to get into broadcast/press seats, not working but just to see the superstars. But before the game with Angola, Ali, who of course had lighted the Olympic torch to open the games, arrived courtside. The Angolans broke off their warmups to crowd around, followed by the Dream Teamers who rushed out of their locker room to join them. Here were the world's biggest superstars turned into fan boys just like the rest of us. I walked casually down to court side, fan boy myself, just to admire the admiration.

15. Today I woke to the news Ali was gone, and listened to tributes and watched my memories gather and soar. I rummaged through some boxes and found my copy of Cassius Clay's 45, 'I Am The Greatest', b/w 'Will The Real Sonny Liston Please Fall Down'. It's more than half a century since I first heard it. This is a DJ copy I won in a college competition; on the single as released the flip side is Ali singing 'Stand By Me'. The sleeve is a bit worn, and I don't have a record player anymore, so I couldn't play it. I just looked at the pictures on the sleeve and heard the voice in my head, clear as it was when I was 12. 'This is the legend of Cassius Clay/the most beautiful fighter in the world today. He talks a great deal and brags indeedy, 'bout a tremendous punch that's incredibly speedy....If Cassius says a mouse can beat a horse, don't ask how, put your money where your mouse is...if Cassius says a cow can lay an egg, don't ask how, grease that skillet.' The world that brought that character into the spotlight no longer exists, and a great part of the reason for that is Muhammad Ali. But the shadow of those things that drew Ali to the spotlight outside of the ring, those most American clouds of race, of war, of rich and poor, still lingers over the country. It's a different country, in part because of Ali, and he was The Greatest. Grease that skillet.

Saturday 4 June 2016

NOTE: I wrote this on Saturday, and it appeared Sunday at Newstalk.com in Ireland. You can link to that here. It was billed somewhat misleadingly as a 'list of some of the landmark moments' in Ali's career, which obviously it isn't, so I thought I'd repost it here, with my original subtitle. You can also find a version, deftly shortened by London Review of Books, at the LRB Blog here. Over the weekend, there were so many great obituaries and reminiscences, and so much great writing about him while he lived, it wasn't for me to follow those who knew him. But everybody had their own responses to Ali, and these were some of mine.

 

JAMES SALTER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of James Salter is up at the Guardian's web-site (you can link to it here); it should be in the paper paper Tuesday. The published version was edited somewhat for space, and some of what was lost I thought was important, so you can read my original copy below. What I thought was most telling was the last quote, from Light Years, discussing Viri's view of fame and greatness. It seemed so apt, if not prescient, even written 25 years before Salter would achieve a modicum of fame it laid out a bit of his writer's fate.

I also thought it important to define 'frotteur'; its sexual connotations give Salter's description of himself writing a certain piquancy. The French influence was strong in his work, and life; he had an important affair in France and told a story about seeing the woman again, 40 years later, at a party celebrating his success. And I wished I had room for the story about Anatole Broyard giving Light Years a bad review in the New York Times, complaining about the 'exoticism' of the characters' names. Salter wrote him a letter, saying, 'Come on. Anatole?'

You will also note I didn't write that Salter found Hemingway's 'womanising' character distasteful. In fact I didn't say 'womanising' and Salter didn't enumerate what parts of Hemingway's character he was talking about. I would assume it was the machismo and perhaps the guilt that required Hem to marry each woman he cheated with that Salter might have resented. That form of womanising, perhaps, but it is certainly not how I interpreted it. Salter was a womanizer too, after all, one who appeared to understand women, which is one of the keys to his writing. As Salter said in another interview, 'the major axis of life is a sexual one; the music changes but the dance is always the same.'

One thing I found fascinating was how many influences Salter would acknowledge, handfuls of them, all different, in separate interviews. I don't doubt this was sincere. I would have particularly liked to have mentioned Henry Miller, with whom he bears a lot of similarities despite the seeming differences in style and tone. I found an interesting comparison with John Singer Sargent: 'direct observation and an economical use of paint', which may have been as good an influence as any. Most importantly, Salter said he considered himself 'completely American...but I admire European ways.' That resonated with me.

It would have been nice to go into more depth about with his film career, or repeat his reaction to Charlotte Rampling, chewing gum and smelling awful, on the set of Three (with a young Sam Waterston) And the way Jack Shoemaker and North Point Press came to re-establish Salter's work was wonderful; that esteemed publishing house deserved its own obit when it folded. You'll also note the unnecessary difficulty the paper has with the Military Academy at West Point, as well as its weird policy of capitalization (or not) of words.

There have been few novels about the Korean War; The Hunters followed James Michener's The Bridges At Toko-Ri, and preceded MASH and may well be the best of the bunch. It might have been nice too to detail the dawn of jet fighter combat, the F-86 Sabre jets against the Soviet-made MiGs; there was a new kind of glamour to jet fighter pilots. I would have liked to have noted his envy when some of his former colleagues in MiG Alley wound up walking on the moon, or his joy when he was offered the chance to fly an F-16 many years later. That quote about pilots being royalty was heartfelt.

Finally, Salter's charm was legendary; I know women on whom it was not lost even when he was in his late 80s. He was almost the epitome of the cultured New York WASP establishment, like his friends George Plimpton or Peter Mathiessen, despite his Jewish roots. Apparently he kept careful track of their summer touch football games out in Long Island, the statistician inside him. There's a whole deep story in that change of identity from Horowitz to Salter to which I wish I could have done more justice. His is the writing of a gentleman, which brings us back to Hemingway and grace under pressure, to being able to stand apart from the chaos, the desire, and the sadness behind our fleeting pleasures, and write so meaningfully about them. RIP...

JAMES SALTER

For six decades, in which he published only five novels and a collection of stories, James Salter, who has died aged 90, was a cult writer, whose cult was headed by his fellow writers. 'James Salter writes American sentences better than anyone writing today,' said novelist Richard Ford, but Salter's work generated mixed reviews and small sales. Only in the new century, following his memoir Burning The Days (1997) and his second collection of stories, Last Night (2005), did the mainstream catch up. When his sixth novel, All That Is, appeared in 2013, Salter quipped, at an Oxford Street bookshop, that he'd signed more copies of All That Is than he'd sold of all his previous books.

Salter wrote painstakingly, once calling himself a 'frotteur', French for someone who draws pleasure from rubbing; he liked to 'rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that's really the best word possible.'

His precise prose saw him compared to Hemingway, whose writing he admired, but whose character he 'found distasteful'. Courage, Hemingway's 'grace under pressure', is tested in his work, first by war and later by the conflict between the comfort of relationships and thrill of erotic adventure. Salter said 'you can live both. Can you live them simultaneously? That's difficult'. He once wrote that 'man's dream and ambition is to have women, as a cat's is to catch birds, but this something that must be restrained.' In that restraint lies a very French sense of sadness, intensified by Salter's skill with his female characters, whom he saw as those who face 'the harder task'.

Salter was already in his thirties when his first novel, The Hunters (1956) was published. A war story based on his experience of more than 100 sorties as a jet fighter pilot in the Korean War, it's focussed on the conflict between a squadron leader in search of his first kill and his reckless wingman, who wants to become an ace. Salter did shoot down one Korean jet, but that kill was registered under his real name.

James Arnold Horowitz was born 10 June 1925 in Passaic, New Jersey, but grew up in Manhattan, where his father was successful in real estate. At the elite Horace Mann school he edited the literary magazine, whose contributors included a post-graduate football star named Jack Kerouac. His father had graduated first in his class from the United States Military Academy, at West Point, New York; James allowed himself to be persuaded to follow in his footsteps in 1942. He qualified for an accelerated flight programme, but a month before graduation, on VE day, in May 1945, he got lost on a training flight and crashed into a house in Massachusetts. The war ended before he saw combat, but after completing a graduate degree at Georgetown he was assigned to the tactical air command in Virginia, which he left to volunteer for Korea.

He was a major, stationed in Germany in charge of an aerial demonstration team, when The Hunters appeared, credited to 'James Salter', a pen-name he'd chosen both to hide his identity from his comrades and to avoid being type-cast as 'another Jewish writer from New York'. His close contemporaries Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal made their names with first novels set during World War II; Salter's remains the best of the few novels set in Korea. With a $60,000 payment for the movie rights (the 1958 film starred Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner) he found himself able to pursue his dream of writing, but the choice was difficult. 'As a writer you aren't anybody until you become somebody. As a pilot you're nobility from the very beginning. It was worse than divorce, emotionally.'

He had married Ann Altemus in 1951 and begun a family. Living up the Hudson River from New York, Salter sold swimming pools while working on his second novel, The Arm Of The Flesh (1961) based on his experiences in Germany. He rewrote it completely and retitled it Cassada when it was reissued forty years later. With a neighbour he began making documentary films; Team Team Team, the story of the Army cadets gridiron team preparing to play against the Naval Academy, won a prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. He wrote film scripts while finishing his best-known novel, A Sport And A Pastime (1967). The story of an affair between a Yale drop-out and a girl he meets in France, its frank sexual content saw it turned down by his publisher. Eventually, George Plimpton got Doubleday to publish it under his Paris Review imprint, in a small edition which failed to sell. It was perhaps too salacious for the high-minded, too subtly crafted for the prurient.

He then turned to screenwriting, and saw three films released in 1969. An early screenplay eventually became The Appointment, a disappointment. More successful was the documentary-style skiing film, Downhill Racer, starring Robert Redford. And with help from his friend, the novelist Irwin Shaw, he wrote and directed Three, which fused elements of A Sport And A Pastime with Jules et Jim, and starred Charlotte Rampling and Sam Waterston.

His 1975 novel Light Years, arguably his best, chronicled the coming apart of a loving marriage, the sadness of unfilled expectations, which both reflected his own and anticipated that of his closest friends, on whom he modeled his characters. In their case it became a self-fulfilling prophecy based on his observation of things they has not seen in themselves. He and Ann divorced in 1975; by now he was living between Brideghampton, Long Island, and Aspen, Colorado, where he met Kay Eldredge who became his second wife. He wrote travel articles (collected in Then And There, 2005) and interviews for People Magazine of writers like Vladimir Nabokov. A mountain climbing film script turned down by Redford became his fifth novel, Solo Faces (1979).

His short stories appeared in Esquire, the Paris Review, and Grand Street, and in 1978 a new small press in San Francisco, North Point, offered to publish a collection, and brought some of his fiction back into print. Salter took ten years to write the two stories he wanted to fill out the collection, Dusk and Other Stories, which won the Pen/Faulkner award in 1988. He'd been struck by tragedy when, in 1980, his eldest daughter, Allan died in an electrical accident the day she moved into an outbuilding at Salter's Aspen house. It was one part of his life he could not write about, saying in his memoir, 'the death of kings can be recited, but not of one's child.'

In Light Years the husband, Viri, reflects on whether fame equates with greatness. 'He was sensitive to lives that had, beneath their surface, like a huge rock or shadow, a glory that would be discovered, and one day rise into the light'. It wasn't until his ninth decade that James Salter rose into the light, and finally achieved both.

His rediscovery following his memoir saw him publish six books in his last decade, and finally have a story accepted by The New Yorker. All That Is led to his receiving one of the first Windham-Campbell awards from Yale in 2013; the $150,000 prize gave him a measure of financial security. He died in Sag Harbor, New York 19 June 2015, while doing physical therapy. He is survived by Kay, two daughters and a son by his first marriage, and a son by his second

PETER MATTHIESSEN REDUX: THE CIA ,PARIS REVIEW, MODERN ART AND LOBSTER

My discussion of Peter Matthiessen, following my obit of him for the Guardian (see the preceding post and follow the link to catch up) have generated quite a bit of comment (sadly, not on the blog itself). Most of it had two strands. One came from a few people who felt Matthiessen was not a great fiction writer, that travel and the natural world in non-fiction was his strength. I'm inclined to agree with them--I've always found his fiction a bit studied, perhaps too much influenced by the kind of awareness of American literary roots espoused by his second cousin (once removed) F.O. Matthiessen. It's tempting to see the Shadow Country trilogy as marking a change in that.

The other point, made by many on the Guardian's comments page, as well as in emails to me, was about the CIA link. They ranged from the paranoid to an excellent comparison by my friend Michael Goldfarb to Norman Mailer's much underrated Harlot's Ghost. But Mailer's novel is less about the politics of the CIA than the old boy network, centered on Yale, that formed the early CIA. I have no doubt the CIA funded the Paris Review, as I implied in the obit, but I don't know what kind of spying Matthiessen did for the agency. Keeping an eye on lefties in Paris seems innocuous enough, but of course that's the way Matthiessen would have wanted it to seem.

Robin Ramsey, the editor of Lobster, for whom I have written a number of pieces, forwarded me an article from Lobster 50, 'The Fiction Of The State' (you can find it at Lobster, here) which I either missed or don't recall. It's by Richard Cummings, who was a part of that circle in some ways, and is best known for a controversial biography of Allard Lowenstein, Pied Piper, which alleged that the anti-war Democratic congressman, head of Americans for Democratic Action and an early critic of the official verdict in the Robert Kennedy assassination, had been a CIA agent (and a closeted gay). Lowenstein was murdered in 1980 by a student he had befriended in the 60s. Cummings was accused of relying on guilt by association to make his case--he has apparently confirmed his thesis with CIA files--but you'll see guilt by association makes up a part of the basis of 'The Fiction Of The State' as well. Which is to be expected, because the whole business is about associations.

It's a fascinating, if  impressionistic, article (a lot of the names would mean nothing to most of you reading it, but they encapsulate the New York literary world of the 50s and 60s). It's interesting because anyone involved in that world remains captivated by it yet somehow able to see themselves apart from it...which applies to Cummings every bit as much as to Matthiessen. The influence of this group resembles that of the British upper classes via Oxbridge. For example, Cummings' editor at Brazilier was Ned Chase. Ned's son is Chevy (like Wallace Shawn or Carly Simon, the entertainment world is littered with the children of  New York editors!). More importantly, people in big New York law firms, often Yalies themselves, were the core of the CIA.

But if Cummings be correct, and the CIA was seriously fighting communism by trying to control what writers wrote, or ensure that certain ideas got spread through magazines like The Paris Review or Encounter, it makes you wonder what they were thinking, who they thought the real enemy was. Of course James Jesus Angleton edited a poetry magazine at Yale, and it's tempting to think he and the agency thought they could save the world from communism by simply improving on their undergraduate publications. But it's more realistic to think that they feared uppity intellectuals outside their waspy sphere more then they did the threat of godless communism in Russia.

Cummings is believable on the way Matthiessen forced out Harold Humes, (pictured right) and quotes two of Matthiessen's wives as confirming the wider extent of Matthiessen's CIA work--Cummings believes his own book about the CIA's covert war against Ethiopa, and his Lowenstein book, were both victims of CIA plots initiated by Matthiesen. It's easy to accept, because it reinforces the idea that all this energy might have been better directed elsewhere, and it speaks to the essential banality of the authoritarian mindset which is behind intelligence, working as an arm protective of corporate interest.

There's so much gossip about who married whom or had affairs with whom or got their money from whom that Cummings becomes very hard to follow. You can't help but think there's an element of jealousy that he himself wasn't ever fully admitted to the club. But what I find most interesting isn't Matthiessen or Plimpton as much as the idea the CIA considered Clement Greenberg to be in the front line against communism, which basically validates the thesis of Serge Guibault's book How New York Stole The Idea Of Modern Art. I'd always thought Guibault over stated his case, and certainly failed to give enough credit to the art, because to do so would weaken his argument, but if Cummings be right, Guibault if anything understates his case.

Basically the CIA seems to have wasted a lot of money in terms of political gain. On the other hand, their artistic judgement seems better than, say, that of the National Endowment for the Arts, or the Arts Council. So maybe their mission statement and budget ought simply to be adjusted?

PETER MATTHIESSEN: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer Peter Matthiessen is up at the Guardian's website now. You can link to it here, and it should be in the paper paper soon. I wrote it quickly, to a flexible word length. A few things were cut out, and some explanations added it, but mostly it is as I wrote it.

The most extensive loss was my second graf:

No less than his work, Matthiessen's life embodied the nature of opposites beloved in the Zen Buddhist philosophy he practised. Beyond the dichotomy of fiction and fiction, Matthiessen was able to found the pre-eminent literary journal, The Paris Review, while working for the CIA. And his journey to radical politics and alternative life-style never saw him abandon the elite New York society from which he came, right down to living in the smart east end of Long Island.

  

I felt the point about the Zen nature of his life was an important one to make, particularly because his final novel seemed so strongly to encompass opposites. And though some of the specifics are covered later in the obit (hence the cut) I actually would have liked to take a little more time to explore the contradictions in his atrician New York life style and his earthy proto-hippie explorer quality. It was something that is very American upper-class--another small item cut was my mention that while at Hotchkiss he withdrew his name from the family's listing in the Social Register; yet proceeded on to Yale, and continued to live the life-style of the elite. I also mentioned that he'd been at school with George Plimpton, a fellow founder of the Paris Review, and a close copy of Matthiessen, right down to writing for Sports Illustrated--Plimpton explored professional sports the way Matthiessen explored the natural world. They were both elegant in that strong patrician way, the kind of men who wear seersucker that never wrinkles. Perhaps my interest reflects all the time I have spent in this country!You can seen the connection when people compare those Americans to the same sort of English, more prevalent in the pre-Thatcher years than now, a sort of transcontinental Oxbridge centered on America's prep (ie: British 'public') schools and our Oxbridge of Yale and Harvard. Of course, if America were Britain, Matthiessen would have probably been presenting wildlife programmes, a la David Attenborough.

These were the men recruited for the CIA in its early days, and although the taint of having spied on his fellow expats never seemed to stick to Matthiessen, it was interesting the way he always moved to distance his magazine from his own work. Yet anyone following the funding dispersed by the CIA in that period could hardly doubt that some of it must have made its way to the Paris Review. The question inflames some people, like Elia Kazan informing on fellow-travelers, yet here it doesn't quite makes its way into Philby territory, perhaps another difference between the American faux-aristocracy and the British.

That life style is interesting too because Matthiessen's house on Long Island was a meeting place for New York's literary world, which was a potent mixture of WASPy upper crust and urban immigrant-types, mostly Jews. Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, if you please. From this mix emerged the bright world of post-war American fiction. I seem to recall reading an Esquire piece about a highly competitive softball game organised out there, but I couldn't dig up the reference.

Mathiessen was quite funny about the way Timothy Leary ruined the world of LSD for everyone, by making such a fuss the government was almost forced to make it illegal. I wanted to include Matthiessen's take on Leary, but didn't; in the end, the single mention of him went too. His trip to New Guinea in 1961, which became Under The Mountain Wall, was made with Michael Rockefeller, who later would disappear, and appears to have been killed and eaten by cannibals.

I found it interesting too that his father was awarded an OBE for his camouflage designs for merchant convoys during the war (that was cut) and that his father's cousin was F.O. Matthiessen, the legendary professor of American Studies at Harvard, whose book, American Renaissance, was one of the first and still one of the classic looks at the great writers who seem to have in part inspired Matthiessen's fiction (I didn't have space for that rumination!). The Watson trilogy might be compared to Melville or Twain, you could also mention Faulkner, Harry Crews, Cormac McCarthy, or James Carlos Blake.

But the important thing was Matthiessen's writing, and trying to explain the nature of its appeal, both to the most intense literary types and to casual readers of travel, exploration, and nature. A few British comparisons occur to me now, but although many are elegant, they are more concerned with the phenomenology of travel, not the dissection of the spirit of the natural world. In this, Peter Matthiessen was one of a kind.

ALEX KARRAS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Alex Karras is up on the Guardian's website; you can link to it here, There was a lot I had to leave out, for the usual reasons of space and of the audience's assumed unfamiliarity with American football --a couple of very basic explanations were added in for fear they wouldn't understand. I had to leave out one of my favourite quotes--the story he made famous on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, about 'battling for 59 minutes and then some little guy in a clean uniform comes on and says 'I keek touchdown!'.  Garo Yepremian had indeed said that to Karras, but it came after the extra point on a meaningless touchdown--and might well have been apocryphal anyway, as Yepremian had already been playing in the Continental Football League.

For people who do know football, Karras' career is fascinating. He appears to have been a four-year all-state selection, which I found hard to believe--Bobby Valentine first achieved fame in my home state of Connecticut by being the first-ever three-timer-- and Karras suffered badly at Iowa, from both home-sickness and an unwillingness to adapt to the hard-edged approach of the legendary Hawkeyes' coach Forest Evashevski. Legend says he threw a shoe at the coach when he quit the team in 1955, and it was true he missed playing against his brother when Evashevski benched him for the 1956 season opener against Indiana. That year Iowa went 9-1 (losing to Michigan) and ended the season with a huge win over Notre Dame, whose star, ironically, was 'The Golden Boy' Paul Hornung, who went on to win the Heisman Trophy as best college player, and would later be suspended for gambling along with Karras. Iowa won the Rose Bowl over Oregon State, and finished ranked third in the nation.

The next year, Karras won the Outland Trophy, but almost more impressively finished second in the Heisman voting to halfback John David Crow of Texas A&M. But it would have taken too much space to explain both the Heisman and the fact it nearly always goes to a quarterback or running back. That Karras isn't in the Pro Football Hall of Fame is probably due to his gambling suspension--but Jerry Kramer is another lineman from the all-decade team in the Sixties who isn't in the Hall, and Kramer wrote books. In Instant Replay he paid Karras a supreme compliment as an opponent: 'I'm thinking about him every minute'. Speaking of books, it's also hard to understate the kind of impact that Paper Lion had. George Plimpton was an elegant, upper-class, American aristocrat kind of writer--editor of the Paris Review--and his endorsement of the NFL was as crucial as the Kennedys' games of touch football for elevating the game in the minds of mainstream America. You can see from reading the book just how taken he was with Karras--and as the epitome of the 'old style' game of football, he was essential to Plimpton's selling of what became a very different kind of sport as it conquered America.

The Lions had a formidable defense, especially in the middle, with Karras, the quick guy who'd now be called an 'under' tackle and big Roger Brown, with the excellent Joe Schmidt behind them at middle linebacker. I saw a couple of references to their line being called 'The Fearsome Foursome' before the Rams' claimed that name--but I tend to doubt it extended beyond Detroit, if at all, because I recall the Chargers' early AFL line being called that, also before the Rams, and the Lions' ends weren't that fearsome anyway. Ironically, Brown would be traded to the Rams, and join the Foursome as a replacement. Perhaps not so ironically, Karras feuded with his pro coaches too, except for Schmidt when he became coach after he retired, but by 1970 he'd lost too much quickness and was cut before the 1971 season.

I thought the Rugby League comparison was an apt one, and I would have liked to compare Karras and Hornung's suspension to Joe Namath's a few years later--Namath similarly had to divest himself of a share in a bar where underworld characters hung out. There was a good piece in the New York Times about the Lindell AC, where among the items framed on the walls was a jockstrap worn by Karras' teammate Wayne Walker. In the era of modern 'sports bars' this kind of joint just doesn't exist anymore, as much an anachronism as the players of the era and the kind of game football was.

Karras and Dick the Bruiser really did tear the Lindell AC to pieces in their staged brawl to promote the match staged while Karras was suspended. He didn't wrestle all that often, but he played a wrestler at least twice in movies, once in Babe, as I mentioned in the obit, and with actual ring action in Mad Bull (1977) where he plays the eponymous aging wrestler coming to the ring wearing a Mongo-style cowboy hat. Obviously wrestling helped him play the comic roles he so often got.

I'll have to dig up a copy of Babe; the more I think about it, the more convinced I am the Babe Didrikson may have been the greatest American athlete of the first half of the 20th century, certainly up there with Jim Thorpe, Babe Ruth, and Jesse Owens. I'm also curious to see how Susan Clark, who is an underrated actress, played her. Of course she wound up repeating the film role and marrying Karras for real.

I can't remember Karras on Monday Night Football, but that was the time I was leaving Montreal and moving to London. I was also surprised to see he'd done CFL commentary, for a station in Windsor, just across the river from Detroit. I remembered he'd had a big offer from Winnipeg when he left college--the CFL could actually compete with the NFL for some players, and they may have thought the undersized Karras might do better on the bigger Canadian fields.

I was indebted to Robert Collins for the Karras quote I used at the end. It sums up the man, and life, perfectly. I'll repeat it here:

"It takes more courage to reveal insecurities than to hide them, more strength to relate to people than to dominate them, more 'manhood' to abide by thought-out principles rather than blind reflex. Toughness is in the soul and spirit, not in muscles and an immature mind." 

RIP, Alex Karras.

JOHN GRISHAM'S CALICO JOE

NOTE: I read Calico Joe as part of my essay on baseball fiction for BBC Radio 4's Open Book last Sunday, you can link to my post about that here, and it may still be available on IPlayer if you live in Britain. I thought I'd give it its own space here, and I may look back and dig out my review of Bleachers and post it on this site later.

In Calico Joe, John Grisham effortlessly combines two of the main strains of baseball literature: the update of the classic, mythic hero tale (The Natural, The Year The Yankees Lost The Pennant) and the metaphor of baseball as the key to the relationship between father and sons (the poet Donald Hall's Fathers Playing Catch With Sons). It's 1973, and a powerhouse rookie from Calico, Arkansas, Joe Castle (note the Arthurian overtones) is tearing up the National League. He becomes every kid's favourite player, even young Paul Tracey, whose father Warren is a pitcher for the New York Mets. Warren is not much of a pitcher, by big league standards, and even less of a husband and father, and it when the on-field confrontation between hero and father takes place that Paul's relationship to both his parent and the game of baseball is changed forever. Or almost forever.

It is when Paul discovers that his father is dying that the story begins, with the childhood element told in his flashbacks, and those of Clarence Rock, a local newspaperman from Calico, whom Paul visits. Which take place in the present, as Paul tries to sort out his own relationship with his father while putting the story together.

I've reviewed Grisham's crime fiction many times, and he is a story-teller who has the uncanny ability to keep the reader engrossed even as characters or situations become cliched. He skirts that here—much of what we read we've read before, and at times Rock's cracker-barrel personality and Grisham's own paeans to baseball can seem very familiar indeed. Part of that is also because baseball was part of his (and my) childhood when it still was the 'national pastime', and thus it resonates with echoes of an America we now feel is lost—that has been a theme of many writers over the past few decades—but it also reflects Paul's own life, and the loss of both baseball and his father reflect a deeper loss for him.

And overall, the effect rings more true than not, and the emotions real, and this is in part because the characters are framed by their own reticence; part of the story is the tale of getting men to admit their feelings, and in that sense Grisham's limitations work to make it more believeable. He also manages to keep the tone pitched perfectly—there is an element of suspense which becomes obvious early on if you understand baseball, and will be more of a shock the less you do, but it is rarely saccharine as some of his other writing with sports themes (Bleachers, Playing For Pizza) has been.

In fact, the British publishers were so worried that they asked Grisham to write a 15pp preface introducing baseball to their audience. This was a mistake, because the deeper you get into his explanation, the more confused you will be. It would probably have been better to let the story speak for itself, which I think it can do (even though there are people, as I pointed out on Open Book last week, when I discussed baseball novels, who will always affect an inability to comprehend sports). If they were worried he could have added a brief afterword explaining the baseball issues relevant to the book. Or they could have tried a shorter explanation to the game, written by someone who understands the British perspective as well as the game (hint?).

As someone who also has worked in baseball and knows more about it than he needs to, I was impressed by the way Grisham worked his fictional characters into the real 1973 baseball season. Joe Castle's performance is probably a bit too spectacular (see George Plimpton's Sidd Finch) to convince purists, but I think he's playing the Roy Hobbs/Natural card there. Personally, I doubt you would have seen many people wearing replica jerseys to a game in 1973, certainly no adults; that is a practice which started during the baseball revival of the mid to late 1980s (and helped spark the similar soccer revival in this country a few years later). And I was very surprised by something Grisham flat-out missed. Walt Dropo, a rookie sensation for the Red Sox in the early 1950s, was indeed called Moose, not just because he was big, but more importantly because he came from Moosup, Connecticut. His nickname reflected his smalltown origins, just like Calico Joe's.

Calico Joe by John Grisham
Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99, ISBN 9781444744644

NORRIS CHURCH MAILER: SCOTT, ERNEST, AND ZELDA

My apreciation of Norris Church Mailer is in today's Guardian, a few days after the paper printed her obituary, you can link to it here. I just felt some recognition ought to be given to her performance (with Mailer and George Plimpton) in a reading of Plimpton's play 'Scott Ernest and Zelda', written with Terry Quinn, the fourth figure in the photo left. The Hemingway-Fitzgerald Paris thing was something I studied a lot in the 1970s, and I still recall how familiar many of the lines were, from letters and from A Moveable Feast, when I saw them perform in London (they also took it to Europe, including, of course, Paris. I enjoyed the night enormously, and obviously, remembered it fondly...