Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  Nowhere else in Wrestliana does the grown-up William seem less of his place and of his time. He separates himself from the bloodlusting Cumbrian crowd, for whom hunting would have been the epitome of sport. His argument is rational but his reaction was visceral. He could not control it. William’s language is that of horror at men and empathy with the hare.

  The first time I read this passage in Wrestliana, I thought I understood William’s attitude – that he was, in a twenty-first century way, against cruelty to animals. How could he write about the suffering of a hare and not feel the same way about the suffering of other creatures? If he was against one kind of bloodsport, why not all of them? But as I read on, I saw that it was not so simple. Later in Wrestliana, he makes his opinions clear.

  William opposed hare coursing not because of its dependence on agonized death, but because it just wasn’t sporting. He also disparaged angling (using, as he wrote, ‘artificial means to destroy or deceive… a fish’¶). However, because two cocks, put into the ring, faced only one other of their species, and it was a fair fight between them, he supported it.

  Surely no man in his senses, unless totally blinded by prejudice, can pretend to argue, that an equal combat between two birds which need no incitement but their mutual and natural animosity, can possibly be either cruel or barbarous, compared with league-ing, and combining with twenty, thirty, or forty ferocious animals to worry a defenceless one!||

  When I realized this, I found William’s values regarding animals confused and confusing. His logic was bracing. But what he said of the hare’s death went beyond the intellectual. I could see him, at a tender age, running up to the screaming creature. I could see him, white-faced, disillusioned, appalled. Hares are notorious for the anguish of their death-cries, and for the amount they bleed. I could see his father, mortified, pulling him away.

  Years later, when he wrote the first of his two books, William would show that he had forgotten nothing of what young Will saw, or what he thought and felt.**

  * Details from J.S. Gibbons, The Hare, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896; and Walter Scott, Guy Mannering, Penguin, 2003, pp. 134–135.

  † Caesar Caine, Cleator and Cleator Moor: Past and Present, Michael Moon, 1973, p. 392.

  ‡ Ibid., p. 393.

  § Wrestliana, 1st ed., pp. 60–63; 2nd ed., pp. 41–43.

  ¶ Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 66; 2nd ed., p. 46.

  || Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 66; 2nd ed., p. 46.

  ** Both William’s eldest son, William Litt, my great-great grandfather, and his son’s eldest son, also William, and his son’s third son, John, my great grandfather, were to have a lifelong concern with the welfare of animals. They were veterinary surgeons.

  4

  DADS VS. LADS

  In Brockwell Park, London, just inside the Rosendale Road gate, there is a patch of ground between two diverging paths shaped like an upside-down triangle. Tall trees stand at each corner. Every time I walked past it, during the year I spent researching William, I felt guilty and proud.

  Elsewhere in the park, the grass was thick and green and healthy. But at the centre of the triangle was a fuzzily oblong area of flattened mud. This is where, every Sunday afternoon, the Dads vs. Lads match took place. One or two of us fathers were there in January, when the boys lifted the ice off a nearby puddle and smashed it on the path. Many more, perhaps fifteen fathers, were around for the later, sunnier days.

  Henry, who was 10-years-old, and George, 8, never wanted to miss a Sunday. If we had to go to a family gathering, or they were invited to a birthday party, they would get extremely upset.

  With an intense year of tackles, passes, and running, running, up and down the triangle, we wore away the grass so completely I was worried it wouldn’t ever grow back.

  I became a father at the age of thirty-six. When we had the scan for my first child, and I was told it was a boy, I saw two clear images of his future. One was of him learning to ride a bicycle – me letting go, in slow motion; the other was of us kicking a football back and forth. If he lived, if I lived, I knew these things would happen.

  And they did. The bike riding was a big moment of potential father–son connection. From my own boyhood, I remembered learning how to keep going without stabilizers. This had become one of my mother’s stories about me. At 99 Dunstable Street, there was an apple tree in the garden, with a lawn around it, and I tried and failed, for a week or more, to ride around it once without putting my foot down. My mother, standing at the sink, watched me through the kitchen window. She had obviously said something to annoy me, and perhaps to provoke me, because, when I finally succeeded in keeping going, I ran back inside and defiantly said to her, ‘I have got a sense of balance!’

  Henry loved the way his bike looked – red and yellow like a fire engine – but he hated riding it. We’d made the mistake of buying a bicycle with inertia braking. Unfortunately, this meant that to get the bloody thing going from a standstill required an infant Hercules. Henry never got moving without a push. The stabilizers, too, slowed him down. He became dispirited. He hated the bike, and me for putting him on it.

  The big day, stabilizers removed, I tried to persuade Henry to the park. Inside, I was preparing myself for the slow-motion moment as he joyously and independently cycled away from me. He cried all the way down the street. As we approached the gates, he wailed, ‘No!’ In the end, it became obvious that I was being cruel, and we turned back home.

  Kicking the football back and forth went better. I didn’t force it, it just happened. I wasn’t trying to train a professional. If Henry wanted a kickabout, that was fine. I would have been just as happy throwing a Frisbee. In fact, I would have been overjoyed.

  *

  My memories of playing Frisbee with my father all take place in 1970s California light – light as soft as a Fender Rhodes piano recorded on analogue tape: Paul Simon’s “Still Crazy After All These Years”.

  We would play on Cornish and French beaches. And I was never closer to my father than when twenty or thirty metres away, zinging our Frisbee up into an onshore breeze, slinging it off on an arc so lopsided that it seemed the Frisbee would splash down way out to sea – then watching (with my father watching, too) as the beautifully weighted plastic saucer zoomed back in towards him; so accurately that he didn’t even have to move his feet to catch it. Then he would do the same, even more outlandishly, back to me – and it was a wonder the few people left on the sundown beach didn’t all stand up to applaud.

  We were as good at Frisbee as The Carpenters were at harmonizing.

  Surely, I believed, we would win the Father–Son Frisbee gold medal, if the Olympics were sensible enough to start holding that event.

  And if the Frisbee wasn’t thrown with perfect aim, because the wind lifted and took it further off, I would try to impress my dad by making desperate diving catches that had me sprawling in the sand. Then I would stand up and put an extra load of spin on the next throw, so the Frisbee would seem to stop for a minute, directly above Dad’s head, just out of reach, until it fell like an apple out of a tree, straight into his hand.

  Yes, for a couple of summers, we were the champions.

  Together.

  I knew I couldn’t compete with my father. I had never beaten him at any sport he took seriously.

  The closest I ever came was at squash. We were not in one of the recently built glass boxes but in one of the older, white-walled courts at the Flitwick club. It was a Sunday morning. (I know this because if it had been any other morning, I would have been at school.) For some reason, I had gone out to an eight–one lead. I was serving really well, and needed only one more point for victory.

  My father had promised me £10 if I beat him.

  Just as I was about to serve, my mother appeared in the widescreen-shaped gap in the brickwork, high up at the back of the court.

  She asked my father when we’d be finished, and he told her the score.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and stayed to watch.

/>   We resumed the game.

  I served, lost the point.

  Perhaps beating my father whilst my mother watched was a much harder thing. Or perhaps, with my mother watching, my father decided to start trying his best. Probably a combination of both, but my father won every remaining point in the game.

  I lost eight–nine.

  I became angry. To cover this, I jokingly blamed my mother for interrupting my flow. ‘If you hadn’t come along, I’d’ve won.’ Secretly, though, I was glad that my father remained undefeated. Beating him was something I would achieve one day, when I was worthy – but I never did.

  We never played squash again seriously.

  I don’t know why not.

  When I ask my father, he can’t remember.

  Both William’s father, John, and my father’s father, John Percy, were in their mid-forties when their sons would have been of an age to want to muck around, to play physical games.

  I doubt that John Litt ever wrestled seriously with William, and he seems too staid a character for horseplay.

  John Percy was worn out from the war. He liked a round of golf, far from children.

  I am glad, however unserious it is, that I’ve been able to join in with Henry and George at Dads vs. Lads. They’ve seen me score some goals. They don’t associate me entirely with a desk and a computer. And George will still, now and again, ask me if I could score five out of five penalties against the England goalkeeper, or if Usain Bolt would really beat me from here to that tree over there?

  Figure 6. George’s drawing of ‘Daddy at the Desk’. (Daddy doesn’t look very happy.)

  I enjoy being a hero to them. I am delighted by their ludicrous belief that I’d stand a chance against a professional sportsman of any sort. I know this will end very soon, and they’ll think I’m ‘dead’. (As Everton’s star midfielder in a football magazine on their bedroom floor is ‘dead’.) Maybe, when they’re older, they’ll realize that where I’m at my best is at the desk, on the computer.

  I remember believing my own father was invincible. But, with him being as big as he was, I had more reason. I didn’t imagine him winning sporting events. Instead, I had a repeated fantasy that took place at a particular location.

  Behind the Spar minimarket, directly opposite my bedroom window at 99 Dunstable Street, was a car park. This is where we’d always park the Peugeot 504 – and then, to get home, we’d walk up a side alley, over a little paving-stoned hillock, and through an arcade of concrete pillars.

  Here, in my imagination, was where a gang of four local dossers would stop Dad and me. And here, an event I seriously yearned for, my father would send all of them flying over brick walls and through glass windows. Just once, and with me there to witness it, he would be able to unleash his full, fearsome, dog-snapping strength.

  Sadly, we were never mugged – and part of me still mourns this scene that never took place.

  I wonder if my sons have similar fantasies about me, kicking arse.

  Fights with winners and losers, someone being beaten, someone doing the beating – there are far more nuanced ways of looking at male identity, masculinity.

  My partner, Leigh, is an academic. She teaches English literature at the University of Westminster. Her specialist areas are early twentieth century writing and contemporary fiction. Recently, she has been writing about novelists who (like me with this book) have temporarily or permanently abandoned writing novels and turned instead to non-fiction – because made up stuff has started to make them feel nauseous, self-disgusted.

  Leigh is tall, strong, and can jog further and faster than I can. School games lessons, however, were some of the worst hours of her life. She loves watching Wimbledon, but if all other sport disappeared from our house for the rest of the year I know she’d be delighted. (With Henry and George around, that’s not going to happen.)

  When I showed Leigh an early draft of this book, she said, ‘I know what you should call it – Bein’ a Man.’

  It was a family joke. When he was 2-years-old, still bumbling around in nappies, Henry came up with a little thing he’d do – tensing his arms so that the tiny muscles bulged and his head wobbled from side to side with the strain. He was like a small bodybuilder, displaying his pecs to the judges. (The pose exists and is called the ‘Most Muscular’.) This performance, he said, was bein’ a man – and, because it was so funny, we filmed it, making the usual joke about eighteenth birthday montages.

  In our house, bein’ a man was something innately ridiculous, and to be laughed at. But as the boys have grown up, I’ve become aware that they will be encountering people, especially men, for whom bein’ a man is the most serious business of all. How should I advise the boys to cope with them? Men’s men. Should they just try to avoid them? That’s not really an option. The world is dominated by men frantically, and often violently, demonstrating just how manly their manliness is.

  Men tend to endure what they are, rather than examine or explore it. (And they make others endure it, too – especially women.) They are often oblique. Don’t just tell your best mate you love him. Go out together, get drunk, get more drunk, start a fight, get beaten up, get chucked out of the bar, then tell your best mate you love him. That’s the furthest extreme. Lots of men would just do the getting more drunk bit.

  Men are not simple creatures. But many men like to make a very simple impression. They like it to be known that the argument about them personally is over – and they won.

  It’s hard to resist this. I realize, I’m making a lot of very general generalizations. But I find it hard to say anything specific about manhood because the subject resists that. It wants to be described in action. Words are for liars. The truth is a well taken penalty kick.

  In the west – and probably to a degree, the rest of the world – manhood is partly a rage for simplification – not just a simplification of itself as a subject, but the repeated assertion that there isn’t a subject, because that’s just how things are, because it’s all obvious, alright?

  (As I wrote these words, the woman sitting next to me on the train said into her phone, ‘Philip’s at home, watching TV in his pants.’)

  Perhaps my picture of all of this is stereotypical, but a lot of men live and die by these stereotypes.

  Some of the more nuanced ways of examining manhood and masculinity look at how it is performed. These are the ways Leigh would respect. They don’t take machismo’s surface explanations for it’s deep reasons.

  I once had a creative writing student, a lesbian air-stewardess, who had done a fascinating piece of research for her PhD. She had become a drag queen, and had developed quite a successful act in gay men’s clubs. But the thing was, she had done this as a man. Before she dragged up as a drag queen, in the dressing room, she had secretly to drag up as the man who was about to drag up as a woman.

  She told me how she’d applied make-up to her neck, to fake an Adam’s apple. She would put on her male voice, and then her male-mimicking-female voice. She was very funny about how she’d managed to pass not just once but twice. To pass as what she was but wasn’t.

  I asked her what she’d learned. What was the conclusion of her PhD?

  She gave a grimace. It was too sexually head-spinning to explain. But then her face lightened, and she found the best way of putting it.

  ‘Darling,’ she said, ‘it’s all drag.’

  A punch in the face is not drag.

  *

  I am aware that this is a very male book, and that it seems to take masculinity very much on its own terms. It’s about wrestling, for God’s sake.

  There is a big subject here, but it presents itself flickeringly. If you are a man, you are faced – moment by moment – with thousands of micro-conflicts. Unless you stay indoors, in bed, under the covers, you can’t avoid them.

  Who will win the Battle of the Zebra Crossing? Who will triumph in the Getting Off the Train First Sweepstake? Who will win the Eternal Factoid Smackdown down the pub?

&nbs
p; There’s a simpler, less nuanced explanation, too – simpler than sport. The entire world is about penis size, or compensation for lack thereof.

  The more nuanced approaches to masculinity may be more accurate, but they aren’t much help in Brockwell Park on a Sunday afternoon when a 10-year-old is attempting to nutmeg you for the third time.

  The match is called Dads vs. Lads because Mums hardly ever take part, and Lasses (with one exception) never.

  When I’m playing, I have to make a split second choice: Do I let the Lad nutmeg me? Do I let the Lads win?

  My father, clearly, believed that it did a boy no good to think he could beat a grown man at squash, at anything, until he himself was a man, and won fair and square.

  I belong to a less macho school of fatherhood. Perhaps it’s generational. New man; househusband – keywords of the 1980s, when my view of the world was being formed.

  If I become tempted to let loose, on the football field, I remember the Competitive Dad sketches on the Fast Show. In these, a similar knockabout in the park always degenerates as the embarrassed children witness the unleashing of their father’s rampant will to triumph.

  What did boys learn from that kind of behaviour? It’s Dad dancing to the power of a thousand.

  Once a year, there’s a proper, formal Dads vs. Lads match, with plastic goalposts and medals given out to the winners. The result isn’t definite until the final, last second goal. (We always let the Lads win.) But there are lots of little moments where an individual Dad has to make a decision. How fast do I run here? How much muscle shall I put into this tackle? Do I let that cheeky little git nutmeg me again?