Charteris was prolific. In the first decade of his career he sometimes published two books a year. In 1934 there were three! A biographical note on the Pan editions says he was educated at Rossall School and Cambridge and worked as a sailor, rubber planter, tin miner, wood distiller, prospector and tramp before his invention of The Saint made him famous. The notion that a writer should be a jack of all trades was popular back then. The rest of the books say nothing about the author at all. Not one of them carries his photograph.
Was Joe curious about him? And if he was, where would he have gone to find out more? The reference section at the public library probably. Personal information was harder to find then and so it mattered less. Perhaps he was satisfied to know Simon Templar and to hell with Leslie Charteris.
I google him, of course. And now I see why they kept him in the shadows. Charteris was born in Singapore to a Chinese father, Dr SC Yin, and an English mother, Lydia Florence Bowyer. He went to school in England, where he was bullied for ‘being different’. After immigrating to the US in 1932, he was for years prevented from getting permanent residence by the Chinese Exclusion Act, finally becoming a naturalized citizen in 1946.
But I’m distracting myself with research, if I can call it that, when the facts are easy enough to access. I know why Joe gave me these books: he wanted me to read them. He wasn’t to know I’ve tried already – I still have the books here somewhere – and it helped very little. What did I learn? That Simon Templar had an alter ego called Sebastian Toombs. That he yearned to write poetry. That he was a subversive of a kind, a left-leaning Robin Hood, the scourge of the powerful and champion of the poor, who loved to humiliate the magnates and arms dealers and give the big shots their comeuppance.
What did I miss? The obvious. It wasn’t Templar my brother wanted to be. It was Charteris.
As I pick through the Big Jim crate I find myself thinking, despite myself, like his literary executor. What’s happened to the juvenilia, the exercise books full of bad poetry that he hid in the not-so-secret compartment, the notebooks and diaries, the files full of correspondence? He once told me he kept copies of his own letters to make life easier for the literary scholars of the future. Did he give all this stuff to Grahamstown? Em says she sent a load of boxes there on his instructions. Or did he take a leaf out of Mom’s book and use it to kindle a bonfire?
Finally I do what I should have done before I started our experiment in teamwork: I reread Joe’s books. ‘Reread’ is disingenuous. When he started publishing, I read the first few to see if I was in them, and the next few because people said they were good, but I’m opening the later ones for the first time. It isn’t compulsory, I used to say, just because he’s my brother. I pile up the books from my shelves, snoop around on his publishers’ websites, and order the missing titles off Kalahari. He’s no Charteris, thank God. The complete works fit on my bedside table.
Jordan carries off a couple he hasn’t seen before. I’ve always steered him away from his uncle’s books. You’re not ready, I would say. You’ll enjoy them more when you’re a year or two older. To the point where he lost interest. But now he wants to read them all. His new girlfriend is reading them too. Even Rita reads the first half of the one her book club recommended.
The well-known attributes are there, the eye for detail – too much of it, if you ask me – the magical flourishes, the social concern. There’s a bit of me in some of his characters, which is only to be expected, as is the fact that he passes a lot of bad attitudes off on me. But there’s nothing about boxing. Then again, he always insisted that he wasn’t interested in boxing but in Ali. And anyway the book’s not about Ali. Whatever you think it is, it’s something else. He’s working me over with the literary rope-a-dope.
13
Limits
In February last year when she was kidnapped from her apartment, Miss Hearst had seemed a normal, rather apolitical university student. According to Stephen Weed, her then fiancé, she had exclaimed “oh no, not me” when a White woman and two Black men started taking her away.
But soon, in recordings on tape cassettes forwarded to various people, she began supporting the SLA and denigrating her parents and American society in general.
– Pretoria News, May 1975
Joe
At university I discovered a view of America at odds with my own. In this view, the United States was not the bastion of freedom in the West but a meddling bully-boy state that undermined democratic governments and propped up corrupt and oppressive regimes in Central America and Africa, including our own. I liked this use of ‘regime’ and began to use it freely, but I wasn’t persuaded by every aspect of the radical argument. Was popular culture really no more than propaganda? I couldn’t see the music and films I loved as the stock-in-trade of cultural imperialism. Shortly after I heard the term for the first time, I understood that I was a philistine. Although I’d moved on from Charteris, I was still hanging out with the lightweights. When one of my teachers, a Montale specialist, saw me reading Kerouac, he sneered: ‘That’s not writing, that’s typing.’ I had no idea he was quoting Truman Capote.
After the Rumble, my fascination with Ali began to wane. He had reached the pinnacle of his career; the long, painful descent still lay ahead. All through my first year at varsity I went on collecting cuttings about him without bothering to paste them into books. In retrospect, this was good for the archive, as none of the cuttings was ruined by sticky-tape glue. These tatty hoards of newsprint stuffed into cardboard folders are the index of a fading enthusiasm.
In 1975, Ali defended his title four times, against Chuck Wepner in March; Ron Lyle in May; Joe Bugner in June, their second meeting; and Joe Frazier in October, their third, the so-called Thriller in Manila.
Chuck Wepner was a scrapper from Bayonne, New Jersey, a veteran of one hundred amateur and pro fights who still worked in a liquor store. Alan Hubbard called him the man from the back of Bayonne and joked that his face had launched a thousand snips of the surgeon’s scissors.
Richard Walker made this vivid sketch of the Bayonne Bleeder, as Wepner was known in the boxing world: Wepner comes from the grim, unglamorous side of American boxing. He has spilt buckets of blood, most of it his own, in a decade of picking up 500 dollar purses in dirty steeltowns. He has never been able to afford to give up a daily job, and his wife, Phyllis, works too…Wepner looks like one of these old pictures of 19th century prizefighters – a hunk of ham with whiskers, pulverized face stitched up like an old sock. It took 120 stitches to put him together again after one fight with Sonny Liston, back in 1970.
If it’s true that Wepner needed this many stitches after a single bout, then the career estimate made by Hubbard in the Pretoria News was conservative: Wepner only gets angry when you refer to the 200 stitches he has had in his face. ‘So I bleed a little – what was all that stuff around Rocky Marciano? Tomato ketchup?’
The scribes had made the connection with a more famous bleeder: Henry Cooper. A month before Ali met Wepner, The Star carried a piece by Alan Hoby on the first Ali vs Cooper fight headlined ‘The night that ‘Enry’s ’Ammer crashed in’. Hoby was no fan of Ali. He made much of the claim that Angelo Dundee had deliberately torn one of Ali’s gloves during this fight to give him time to recover from a knock-down. The article was accompanied by photographs of Cooper’s bloodied head.
The Wepner folder, which I think of as ALI V although it’s not a scrapbook, contains a dozen cuttings on the buildup to the fight and half that number on the fight itself. Foreman was always going to be a hard act to follow, but Wepner was a no-hoper who had barely made it onto the contenders’ list. According to Ali’s manager Herbert Muhammad, Wepner’s race played a big part in the decision to give him a fight. Ali has beaten all the other White heavyweights, he said.
This was not Ali’s finest moment. He did nothing to hide the fact that he was overweight, inviting reporters to count the rolls
of fat on his stomach. In the photographs Wepner himself looks like a chubby ducktail. Billed as one of the biggest underdogs in heavyweight boxing history, he looks pleased as Punch to be in the same frame as The Greatest, whom he professed to admire as a boxer and a man, clowning around for the press and smiling genially. He introduced some theatrical flimflam of his own into proceedings by donning a pair of ‘magic boots’ inscribed with curse signs pointing at Ali. There is even a mock-blow photo in which Wepner lands a straight left on Ali’s jaw.
This good humour evaporated in the ring, where Ali gave Wepner a terrible hiding. The referee let this savage, almost sadistic torture go on until the fifteenth round before stopping the fight. Afterwards Ali justified his viciousness on the grounds that Wepner had been allowed to foul him. The post-match photo of Wepner is nearly as shocking as the one of Henry Cooper. He is bruised everywhere – eyes, nose, cheeks, ears. He can hardly see out of his eyes. His eyelids and brows bulge out and over like two overripe, split plums.
Branko
On the anniversary of Joe’s death, Em sends me an SMS: I miss him. I reply: Me too. I should say more, I want to, but I can’t find the words. Ageing is full of surprises and one of them is that the birthdays make way for the deathdays. I’ve started adding them to my calendar with a little cross to show that it’s the anniversary of a passing.
Now that my brother is dead, I must do the remembering for both of us. The responsibility sharpens my recall. Scenes from our childhood flicker to life and I write them down as they come. That’s something he taught me: thinking about writing is not the same as actually doing it. I’m on to my second manuscript book.
My side of the book is under control. The problem is his side. I keep going through the blue file, trying to order his drafts, but the plan eludes me. How can I knock these fragments into shape when I know so little about Ali? I have the scrapbooks, but he’s sucked the juice out of those already. And even if he hadn’t, their limitations are too obvious to overlook. His archive is hopelessly inadequate and incomplete. If Dad had read the Rand Daily Mail rather than the Pretoria News the whole thing would be different.
There’s the Internet. When he first started pestering me to collaborate with him, I spent a night or two online, clicking through the warmly lit pavilions of the Muhammad Ali Center in Louisville and the Boxing Hall of Fame in Canastota – they have the ring in which the Fight of the Century took place – and then wandering deeper and deeper into the backstreets where the fight fans hang out. There are boxing sites as dingy as old clubs where one-eyed sloggers trade opinions like blows. I’ll go back there only if I have to.
I should read a good biography. Google presents the options. The one that catches my eye is Superman vs. Muhammad Ali, but that can’t be a good place to start. Amazon suggests Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times by Thomas Hauser. Apparently customers who bought this item also bought King of the World by David Remnick and The Fight by Norman Mailer. This reminds me that Joe’s copies of Mailer and Torres are on my shelf.
José Torres’s Sting Like a Bee cost Joe R1.25 in 1974. Torres was a boxer himself and he knows what happens in the dressing room and the ring. Reading him, I finally get Ali’s boxing style, how he dropped his hands and moved his feet, how he traded power for speed and timing, and put his faith in the element of surprise. It’s not the hardest punch that hurts you, Torres tells us, it’s the one you don’t see coming. Torres loves Ali. He thinks of him as a mystery he has to unravel, an enigma he has to understand, but it’s impossible. He cannot explain the magic. And he loves that too.
Torres switches on a light in my brother’s gloomy archive and reveals how often he misreads things. Take Jerry Perenchio. Joe calls him a ‘theatrical agent’ – that’s what it says in the cuttings – but he’s a major showbiz player who represented celebrities like Liz Taylor, Jane Fonda and The Beatles. His idea of selling off the boxers’ gear was no spur-of-the-moment pitch to make a buck, it was part of a merchandising strategy that extended to the advertising and broadcasting rights, in which his stated intention (Torres says) was to ‘cut up and sell every part of the carcass, just like whaling’.
Norman Mailer wrote a preface for Torres’s book, having taken a ‘fatherly hand’ in its writing. Torres was living nearby at the time, and Mailer read his drafts for him and ‘functioned as a sort of editor’. In his preface, he sings the praises of the parts he edited and finds fault with those he didn’t. These deficient passages, he says, have ‘that air of the quaint (at a comfortably low literary level) which people expect when they read a feature story on a sports page’.
The book also has an epilogue by Budd Schulberg. He says writers and fighters have a special affinity, they understand one another and easily find common ground. Both have to stand or fall on their own, conquer their fears and absorb punishment, and draw on inner resources and personal experience to create something ‘not only entertaining but meaningful and winning in the deepest sense’. At their best, he goes on, both mediums, writing and boxing, ‘demand the same concentration, self-discipline and the aspiration of art’.
Presumably Joe shares this view. Somewhere he calls Ali an ‘artist’. But is writing really like boxing? The text doesn’t hit you back. The critics hit you, Schulberg says, with their ‘left jabs’ and ‘hard right hands’. Another bit of macho nonsense: the judges can score you unfairly and make you lose, but they can’t get in the ring and pummel you. Perhaps it’s the reader who’s in the other corner? But then the book stands between the two adversaries like a punchbag. It cannot defend itself.
Joe’s copy of The Fight is a new edition published in the nineties. He disliked Mailer with a passion. What a jock, he used to say, always banging his dick on the table. I’m ready to dislike Mailer too, but his account of the Rumble in the Jungle disarms me. Get past the manly bluster, the occasional line that’s purple around the eyes, and he’s pretty good, if you ask me. He makes you feel like you’re there, ringside. Or in the ring with him, throwing a punch or taking it on the chin. He has an interest in boxing, which goes a long way. And the prose is, well, punchy.
Joe
Early in 1975, Ali announced that a White group of newspapers had invited him to South Africa for a series of exhibition bouts, with the proceeds going to black schools. The papers were The Star and The World, which was then under the editorship of legendary newsman Percy Qoboza, and the money was to be administered by the paper’s educational charity TEACH. In earlier years, Ali and his management had defended planned trips on the grounds that they had nothing to do with politics. Now they argued that the visit would benefit local people. Ali said he would be launching various schemes, from school buses to restaurants where Black people could eat in the sophisticated atmosphere that the Whites do. He’d called up the Jackson Five and they were willing to give free shows to help needy Blacks.
As it happened, the students around me were debating the nature and purpose of charitable work. One of the rites of passage for first years was the university rag, a street procession that raised money for charity. Radical students had begun to argue that liberal initiatives to uplift and support the poor did more harm than good. There was no point in trying to improve the conditions under which ‘needy Blacks’ lived in South Africa. The political system could not be reformed: it had to be overthrown.
I followed the arguments for Ali’s proposed visit with mixed feelings. As always the plans came to nothing. The same paper that carried the reports of Ali’s TKO victory over Wepner revealed that he had cancelled his trip. A similar visit by George Foreman, announced as a fait accompli just a few days earlier, soon fell through as well. The political pressure to boycott South Africa was growing.
Branko
‘Blow by blow’ suggests that everything is captured, but the words obviously don’t do justice to the performance. The written account is the bare knuckles of the thing, it summarizes the routine exchanges – a short opening flurry,
the fighters traded punches – and magnifies the big moments, the scoring blows and knock-downs. The scribe might mention the crowd, if they’re unhappy, or the referee, if he steps in to stop proceedings, but generally he ignores everything that isn’t a punch. The point is to abstract the fight and lift it clear of the visual and aural clutter. In the process, details that might have seemed crucial to another observer are edited out.
It’s not just the blow-by-blow accounts that fail me: it’s all the reports. There are things I’ve read about and would like to see for myself: the moment Ali stood over a fallen Liston. The old Irish timekeeper at the Blue Lewis fight with his mainspring wound down. The looks on the faces of Ali’s corner after the Norton defeat. Frazier knocking Ali down in the last round of the Fight of the Century. Hubbard describes Ali as a ship running aground on Frazier’s fists. My brother thought this was wonderful – but isn’t it ridiculous? It does nothing but obscure what actually happened.
The Fight is on YouTube. My plan is to fast-forward to the last round for the knock-down, but the action starts and I can’t stop watching. I’m in my element. Halfway through, a warning sounds in my head: I cannot go checking one archive against another. It will never be done. When the bell goes for the eighth and the seconds clamber through the ropes with their buckets and towels, I close the video and go to bed.
The very next day, like an addict falling off the wagon, I fall into the Net. I can’t help myself. Nearly every one of Muhammad Ali’s fights can be found online. Also half the fights of his opponents. And half the fights of theirs. I spiral out into the superabundance. Boxing was never my sport, but the fights look better in the past tense, the distance has given them charm, if not glamour. I drift from one ringside to another like a junior reporter with a press card in his hatband. If a contest bores me, as they often do, I click out halfway through and find the fight that went before or after. YouTube offers suggestions. Here’s Norton vs Reno. Sometimes I arrive by broken paths at the obscure fights and they interest me most of all. I become a fan – for the moment – of the boxers who got short-changed in Joe’s archive like Rudi Lubbers and Jürgen Blin. And then of those whose names he wouldn’t even have recognized like Karl Mildenberger and Willi Besmanoff.
The Distance Page 19
