Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  If I were wrestling, he must have thought, these clot-heeds and carles** would have paid bloody attention.

  Not possible – not any longer – he couldn’t toss off his coat and join in.

  Litt men, we suffer in the knees, our lower backs weaken. My father walks with a stick and has trouble making it off the sofa.

  If there’s any genetic carryover, from William to me, he too grimaced as his vertebrae popped and clicked.

  How he must have ached in soul, for an impossible return to his triumphs, and ached in body, as the price of their achievement.

  When Henry visits Mary, at the very end of the novel they share, we get – real or imagined – a sense of physical and psychic devastation.

  The pleasing visions of hope, and the presence of her whom he loved, – pleasures which could impart happiness even in anticipation – no longer animated a breast then in the arena of health, strength, and activity; but now – his prospects forever blasted by the final and lasting eclipse of that sun which gilded them, – emaciated in form, and altered external appearance, he seemed no longer the same [man] whose unrivalled prowess, and unshaken courage, made him the pride of his friends and the terror of his enemies.††

  This is a description of my father, after my mother’s death.

  He was defeated by it.

  For all of my family, the last two weeks were made worse by my mother’s strength. She had ovarian cancer, that’s what was killing her. She became a skeleton. But she was fit. She was a rambler, and said she wanted to be cremated in her hiking gear – boots, waterproof jacket.‡‡ She’d walked coast to coast, from St Bees to Whitby. She’d done the Pembrokeshire Coast path. Her heart was strong, and it refused to stop beating. She fought against dying until each breath was a great struggle.

  We were all exhausted, but especially my father.

  The facts must be repeated.

  They had been married for over forty-five years.

  She died on his birthday.

  13 February 2012.

  There’s a piece of advice I often give my creative writing students.

  ‘Write about what you don’t want to write about.’

  Because, chances are, if you start to confess something embarrassing or shameful or painful, it will be worth hearing, reading.

  Remember pub-conversations: how, when you decide to tell people your considered opinion, they tend to look elsewhere (the men) or look intensely at you in a way that shows it’s causing them effort (the women). But when you happen to say, ‘I did this really awful thing…’ or ‘I’m so embarrassed…’, they perk up and genuinely pay attention.

  I sometimes say to my students, ‘Picture yourself on a tube train. You’re overhearing the piece of writing you’ve just given me. Imagine it’s no longer words on a page but a woman whispering audibly to another woman. Would you stay on a stop beyond your stop, in order to hear the end of what she’s saying? If she’s giving her opinions on this or that, probably not; if she’s slyly owning up to having slept with a friend’s boyfriend, probably; if she’s being forced to confess something weird and appalling she did involving an octopus and a Porsche, you’ll be hoping you’re on the Circle Line.’

  It is hard to take your own advice, to become your own student.

  I know what I don’t want to write about. I don’t want to write about being a loser.

  Once, when the term was fashionable – that is, the years after Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction – I was often called a ‘cult writer’.

  I objected to this. A true cult writer, I said, was one whose books had – at some stage – all gone out of print, been ignored. My books, I used to say, hadn’t had such a tough time. Adventures in Capitalism was reviewed everywhere. Corpsing got into the bestseller lists. I’d got half a dozen foreign publishers and had sold the film rights. My books were in the shops, and so I couldn’t be a cult writer.

  Well, now, I’m a cult writer.

  I’ve been one since about 2011, which is when I was dropped by my publisher. My books no longer sold enough for my publisher – under great financial pressure – to continue to put them out. My editor said he wanted to keep supporting me, but couldn’t. The phrase bean-counters was not used, but it was around and about.

  After this, I wrote three novels. I thought they were some of my best writing. None of them got published. My other books went out of print. My mother died. My father’s health got worse. I left my old agent and then my new agent left me. I wrote a comic about two dead boys, and – after a year – the comic was cancelled.

  I began asking myself a very basic question: Why do I need to write? Why do I need to put myself through this?

  Perhaps because it was an addiction. I’d sat at the desk so long, for so many words, that I didn’t feel comfortable, didn’t really feel I existed, anywhere else. Perhaps because my creative writing teaching job depended upon continuing to produce at least two books every five years – and upon my job depended my ability to pay my way. Perhaps because I was deluded enough to believe a comeback was always possible.

  Boxers, not wrestlers, are the sportsmen famous for misguided comebacks. Like Mohammed Ali’s last-but-one fight in 1980. And Joe Frazier’s, aged 38-years-old. But I have always thought there was a deep misunderstanding here, by the sneerers. What motivates an ageing boxer’s hopeless comeback is exactly what, when they were young, enabled their greatest victory. Without the one, there would never have been the other. To understand it properly, you have to reverse time and make what happens later the cause: The true sign of a future champion is that, one day, they will make a hopeless comeback.

  I was not going to stop writing. I was foolish enough to believe – perhaps because I’m like a boxer – that I could go beyond where I’d already gone.

  After the ‘Athleticus’ controversy, William seems gradually to have retired from umpiring.

  And it was when William lost his place at the centre of the action that he began to get into trouble. Perhaps he was too easy to provoke into a foolish assertion, and an unconsidered wager to prove it. Local pride would always have made him back a Cumbrian contestant against one from Westmorland – even when his lad was clearly the weaker of the two.

  Yet in Wrestliana, William had made a great distinction between wrestling and boxing. ‘Professed pugilism is gambling,’ he wrote.§§ The interest of boxing to many attendees is ‘the sum they are to gain or lose by the event’.¶¶ More awful still, each boxer was ‘the hireling of the gambling opinion’ and ‘degrades himself to the condition of the game-cock, the race-horse’.||||

  By contrast, ‘Wrestling has never yet (at least in this county) become a subject of gambling speculation. The trifles sported by the spectators are never an object of much consideration’.***

  This distinction holds true today. It’s no accident that the biggest boxing matches take place in Las Vegas whereas the most important wrestling occurs at the Olympics.

  Boxing matches, as William presented them, originated in a bet. ‘I will back my man against yours,’ says the owner, just as the previous week he’d backed his ratter and the week before that, his grey mare. Wrestling matches, as part of county fairs, were completely different. They were a tournament, not just a contest. The contestants entered freely, weren’t professionals, and could walk away uninjured even should they lose.

  But, it seems, that William as a spectator was losing more than he ever did as a participant. This isn’t the way it usually goes.

  During the 2014 Brazil World Cup, a lot of which I watched on TV with Henry and George, I became very aware that most of the ads, when not for lager and junk food, were for in-game betting. The disembodied mockney head of a digital Ray Winstone incessantly manifested itself, cajoling us the viewers – as if we were his mates – oi!!! – to g’wan and gert more involved in the game, to gain from it, by putting a couple of quid on which player would be next to score.

  Can we do that, Dad? No. But can we do that? No. But why can’t we do that?


  A more recent ad features a good-looking chauffeur, who often ferries sportsmen from hotel to venue, telling the viewer that this driving bit isn’t when he gets closest to sport, no, that’s when he’s down his local greasy spoon, checking odds on his mobile (like you can do).

  To gamble on the result of any sport is to tie your own fate, in a minor way, to that of the team or person you’re betting on. If you don’t bet, and your guy or your side loses, you are disappointed but that’s it; if you backed them, then when they lose you, too, become a loser.

  This might seem so obvious as not to need stating – but the intimacy of sportsman and sport’s fan, through gambling, which the betting companies spend such vast amounts of money establishing, is false.††† There’s an absolute difference in kind between what a boxer loses by losing a fight and what someone who’s had a punt on that fight loses. This is true even if both the boxer and the punter lose their house and then their family. The punter, whatever happens, has only lost money – and the loss of the money has caused his other losses; the boxer, though, as well as losing whatever money he laid on himself, has lost his ability to pursue his vocation, and had lost all or part of his livelihood, has lost his status within the world he inhabits, his backers, his motor functions.

  The retired sportsman who opens a pub and loses all his money – it’s a cliché. William, in his defence, was there towards this cliché’s very start. And he did it on a grander scale – it wasn’t just a pub, it was a brewery; it wasn’t just a few pounds, he blew £3,000 in around a year on his bad investment.

  To realize the size of this achievement, you probably need to know something of the drinking scene in Whitehaven, circa 1824.

  Just when I needed to find out about this, I was – completely by chance – introduced to an expert. His name is Dr James Kneale, and he works in the Department of Geography at UCL. He’s a psychogeographer of pubs. I met him because a friend of mine invited us both to be part of a public event at Stanford’s Bookshop, on Longacre, near Covent Garden. Afterwards, we all shared a pint and a pizza in the nearby Nags Head.

  When I heard what James did, I began to ask him questions about density of pubs. Whitehaven, it seemed, at one hundred people per pub (1 ppp) was a stupendously boozy place. Ports usually are. James said he had some figures he could let me see.

  He did.

  Whitehaven didn’t have the highest ever recorded people per pub, but it was – James said – ‘still looking pretty sozzled’. The whole of London, in 1856, had 156 ppp, and the City of London had 72 ppp. But these figures, unlike the one for Whitehaven, only counted people over 15-years-old. James concluded by saying, ‘Whitehaven may not have the record, but it’s pretty close’.‡‡‡

  William does seem to have been able to organize a piss up in a brewery, but it was a piss up he lost money on.

  It is hard to work out the exact chronology of William’s business failures. All the accounts agree: He invested his money in a large brewery. ‘A collapse, and loss of nearly all the capital employed, followed in little more than twelve months.’ (Remember the word collapse.)

  More intimate with the events, and more sympathetically perceptive, the Memoirist says,

  He received a fair share of patronage; but, as he refused nobody who thought proper to favor him with an order, it was not always of the most profitable kind. Suffice it to say, that his book debts soon became very heavy; and he discovered that it was certainly not as a manufacturer of ale and porter he was destined to make a fortune. He therefore abandoned the business altogether, having lost nearly the whole of his investment in little more than a twelvemonth, and returned once again to the more congenial occupations of the plough and the pen, with an occasional bout in the wrestling ring.§§§

  I believe William had a mania to be liked. If he had a fatal flaw, this was it. He couldn’t, not for one moment, stand to see a man think the less of him. And this is a terrible basis upon which to do business.¶¶¶

  William the brewer suffered from being the same man as William the ex-wrestler. Propping up the bar is a very different thing to standing behind it, serving and taking money.

  His business failing, William had no purpose. A quieter life beckoned. One, it seems, of waiting in vain for Lord Lonsdale to reward his loyalty – to notice the fawning and flattering.

  The Memoirist describes William’s life at this time, and also explains why William – unlike Wordsworth – was passed over. It is a sad paragraph, that covers years of wasted hours:

  He lived for the most part at Hensingham, holding some parochial offices, and expecting some long-promised consideration at the hands of the party always paramount in Whitehaven [i.e., Lonsdale], and to which he had rendered important services.||||||

  In 20 June 1826, William is to be found on a list now among the Lowther Papers of ‘them as constables’. (The list notes his authorship of Wrestliana, further down another constable is parsed as ‘a large man’.) By 1831, as well as being ‘victualler of the King’s Arms, Hensingham’, he was ‘acting overseer and collector of king’s taxes’.****

  The Memoirist speaks up for William, but at the same time dooming him:

  He was not, however, of the stuff that sycophants and successful place-hunters are made, and certainly should not have hoped, if he did hope, anything from their gratitude. Do we not all know that it is on what Thackeray calls the genus “muff,”†††† as witness not only Whitehaven but everywhere else, that noblemen mostly shower their favors and their honours? And nobody will venture to say that William Litt was of this class. It is, however, too long a story to enter upon here, and there can come little good of raking up the ashes of things long forgotten. Pass on to the end.‡‡‡‡

  To Canada.

  * Cleator Moor, Notes, News and Views [by “Denton”], ‘Henry and Mary Again’, Cumberland Pacquet, 21 March 1929.

  † Westmorland Gazette, 7 August 1824. See also the Carlisle Patriot, 24 November 1824, ‘I challenge him for a bottle of port, or porter, that Mr. R himself corroborates my assertion’.

  ‡ William Dickinson, Cumbriana, or Fragments of Cumbrian Life By the Compiler of the Glossary of Cumberland Words and Phrases, Whittaker and Co, 1875. This is a rough translation: ‘And there would have been a big old ding-dong if Will Litt hadn’t waded in amongst them and told them not to fight, on top of this he whanged them around by their necks like a bunch of goslings: but he wasn’t able to pull them apart before he’d bloodied up some of their ugly mushes. Most of them were more than willing to clear out of his way, because they knew you couldn’t take him on solo, and so everyone simmered down again’.

  § Cumberland Pacquet, 4 January 1831.

  ¶ The Carlisle Patriot, 20 November 1824.

  || The Carlisle Patriot, 16 October 1824.

  ** A clot-heed is a ‘blockhead’ and a carle is a ‘vulgar man’. Alexander Craig Gibson, The Folk-Speech of Cumberland, J.R. Smith, 1869.

  †† Henry & Mary, 1st ed., p. 368; 2nd ed., pp. 206–207.

  ‡‡ She was.

  §§ Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 39; 2nd ed., p. 24.

  ¶¶ Ibid., p. 22.

  |||| Ibid., p. 23.

  *** Ibid., p. 28.

  ††† Similarly, sport has nothing whatsoever to do with sweet fizzy drinks, despite the fact that sport has everything to do with sweet fizzy drinks.

  ‡‡‡ James Kneale, private communication, 30 April 2015.

  §§§ Ibid., pp. viii–ix.

  ¶¶¶ The very definition of ‘it’s just business’ being – I may like you, but I’m still going to screw you and, conversely, I may hate your guts, but I’m still going to make you rich.

  |||||| ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. x.

  **** For his loyalty, Wordsworth had by this time been made very comfortably off by Lonsdale’s rewards. He had been put in charge of distributing stamps for both Cumberland and Westmorland.

  †††† Webster’s Dictionary gives, ‘A stupid fell
ow; a poor-spirited person. [Colloq.] “A muff of a curate.” Thackeray.’

  ‡‡‡‡ ‘Memoir of the Author’, Henry & Mary, 2nd ed., p. x.

  18

  IMMIGRANT

  I boarded a flight to Montréal on April the 22nd, 2016.

  I had been reading and writing about William for eighteen months – and all that time, I’d known I would have to go and see where he lived the final eighteen years of his life.

  Setting off, I still didn’t have any idea why William chose Canada, rather than America or South America, as his new home. My best guess was that he knew people there, or thought it was the place he’d make most money.

  Even though I’d written a whole book of short stories about a made-up Canadian band called okay, I’d never been to Canada before.

  The most important part of my trip would be paying a visit to where William was buried. I hoped to find his grave, to pay my respects.

  But for months and months, I had completely failed to locate the churchyard where William lay – dozens of times I had looked in records online; nothing. I knew the name of the church. It was called Saint-Stephen’s. And there were several Saint-Stephen’s churches in Montréal, but none of them near to where William died, in the Parish of Saint-Anne, on Isle Jesus.

  With the date of my flight only a couple of days away, I became manic. The whole trip could be pointless. I sent out twenty emails to archivists, realtors, local history groups – and one of the people I contacted put me in touch with Vicki Onufriu.

  Vicki, who grew up and went to High School in Laval (‘Happy memories?’ ‘No.’) is a young historian who has been studying the Protestant families who attended the churches of that region. She says she had been stuck in history as a spreadsheet – births, marriages, deaths in long columns. When I emailed her copies of William’s ‘Letters on Canada’, it was – for her – a voice from a whole scattered cemetery of previously silent graves.