Ultimate Fighting

Extreme Cage Fight War (photo: Ticketmaster)

Prize fighting is a metaphor for life. At least it’s one of the metaphors and it’s probably the metaphoric quality that accounts for its popularity. The same can be said about mixed martial arts, a sport which takes place in cages (the Ultimate Fighting Championship is significantly the name of the company that promotes many of these events) and jiu jitsu. Of  course other sports like football offer the same possibility for enticement through their potential to create empathy. How may times have you heard someone who is going to undertake a challenge refer to “carrying the ball?” But fighting requires an especially high level of preparedness and the combat is the most individual (outside tennis or mountain climbing) and brutal. You fight to the finish with a win sometimes rendering the opponent senseless. A prize fight is not like a cockfight since it’s ultimate goal is not the death of the loser, but annihilation is certainly on the table. The victory exhausts the defeated party and breaks his or her will. But if there is an animal quality to fighting it also exhibits some of highest elements of the human spirit to the extent that it represents an aspiration of the consciousness to overcome bodily limitations. It’s no accident that writers like Hemingway, A. J. Liebling, Mailer and most recently Joyce Carol Oates have all exhibited a fascination with boxing since those who are prone to articulate the lot of the creative artist frequently equate it with over the top challenges, which sometimes involve the sacrifice of life. Whether it’s the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea or the great white whale in Moby Dick, the person who attempts to emblazon his inner life on reality faces a Herculean and sometimes Sisyphean task. The only difference between the fighter and the artist is that the battle the artist is waging is more solitary. His or her opponent is the self. But the whole fascination with fighting as a metaphor poses still other questions. Is all of life a battle? Should people fight for the things they want the way some patients fight against cancer. And is full-fledged combat the best way to fight cancer--or depression for that matter? Leni Riefenstahl’s film was Triumph of the Will and it was a consummate piece of Nazi propaganda.

Philip Roth: Unmasked

Remember the scene in It’s a Wonderful Life in which the Jimmy Stewart character is shown what Bedford Falls would be like if he weren’t part of the world. Imagine what your Jewish doctor, dentist or lawyer would be like had he never decided on the profession and had become a famous writer instead. You’ll have more of an appreciation of William Karel and Livia Manera's Philip Roth: Unmasked, the documentary currently playing at Film Forum (the showings are all free by the way). It might sound like a prejudicial statement, but Roth is by his own admission is Homo Hebrais. In fact, during the film he describes how when he was in college he wrote pathetic short stories about sensitive characters, invoking Salinger’s name with a note of wistful disparagement. Then he read Joyce who left Dublin and never stopped writing about it. Bellow’s Chicago, Malamud’s Brooklyn, Hemingway’s Michigan and Faulkner’s Mississippi are all invoked in the same breath. By the way, Roth reveals that he writes standing up which is something that Hemingway also did. So what is your dentist like in this alternate universe where he is filling your mind rather than your cavities? The film is more about Roth’s work than his personal life, though Roth does describe his first marriage as being “lurid” and “derailing” him. He quotes I.B Singer who was also accused of giving defamatory portraits of Jews, in talking about the reaction to Portnoy’s Complaint, “What should I write about, Portuguese pimps?” And he describes the effect of the psychoanalytic treatment he underwent after his disastrous first marriage and what it did for his imagination realizing that, as a writer, he had all the “permission a psychoanalytic patient has” to say anything. There is a wonderful vignette about how he prepares his parents for the reception of Portnoy’s Complaint, finding out later that on the way home to New Jersey his mother was crying “he has delusions of grandeur” and how after the book came out people would call out to him on the street “hey Portnoy leave it alone.” Later in life Roth shows himself struggling more with death than sex in both his life and work. He gets to know a gravedigger and tours a cemetery in order to pick out his own gravesite. “I don’t think that one’s for you,” he’s told after selecting a plot near his parents’ graves. “There no leg room.” “Well that important,” he quotes himself as responding. “I’m going to be there for a long time.” Roth is as great extemporizing as he is working in the more premeditative mode of actual writing and the film is filled with wonderful nuggets. Roth does say in the very beginning of the film in answer to a question about being a Jewish American writer, “I don’t write in Jewish. I write in American,” but countervailingly everything began for him when he realized he could triage his own condition writing about Newark and Jews, pathology and anatomy. Come to think of it, despite the curmudgeonly soul described by the actress Claire Bloom (Roth’s second wife), in Leaving a Doll’s House: A Memoir the portrait of the writer that emerges partakes
 of the family doctor, dentist and divorce lawyer all rolled into one.

“For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn"

Frank Kermode the British critic once wrote a book called The Sense of An Ending. Hollywood has always had script doctors—writers who producers go to in an emergency to deal with their ailing screenplays. And novelists have always engaged editors. For instance Hemingway and Fitzgerald both had Maxwell Perkins, though there are many novelists who might want to see a specialist who just deals with the problem of endings, a problem which has reached epidemic proportions in certain periods of literary history. Speaking of Hemingway, Times writer Julie Bosman points out that Hemingway told George Plimpton in a l958 Paris Review interview that he’d written 39 different endings to A Farewell to Arms “To Use and Use Not,” NYT, 7/4/12). Bosman’s piece appears on the occasion of the publication of a new edition of A Farewell to Arms which contains an appendix with all the endings. Bosman quotes Sean Hemingway, the writer’s grandson, who happens to be “a curator of Greek and Roman art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art” as pointing out, there are 47. These endings are all to be found in the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston. In a piece on a new collection of Steven Millhauser short stories in The New York Review of Books (“A Master of the In-Between World,” The New York Review of Books, 7/12/12), Charles Simic writes “Hemingway once said that the best story he ever wrote contained just six words: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.'” Sometimes non-sequiturs make great endings and considering some of the examples that Bosman’s article unearths one wonders why Hemingway didn’t include the precious words above instead of for instance No. 7, the truly prosaic “Live-Baby Ending" which reads, “There is no end except death and birth is the only beginning.” What if Hemingway had gone to see an ending specialist or consulted with a critic like Frank Kermode? Perhaps “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” might have ended up being the ending of A Farewell to Arms. “After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain,” was what Hemingway finally decided on.