The Bruiser

Jim Tully, 1886–1947

 

by

JIM TULLY

Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak

Foreword by Gerald Early

Black Squirrel Books

KENT, OHIO

 

© 2010 by The Kent State University Press, Kent, Ohio 44242

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2010008636

ISBN 978-1-60635-056-0

Manufactured in the United States of America

First published by Greenberg, New York, 1936.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Tully, Jim.

The bruiser / by Jim Tully;foreword by Gerald Early.

p. cm.

“Edited by Paul J. Bauer and Mark Dawidziak.”

ISBN
978-1-60635-056-0 (pbk.: alk. paper) ∞

I. Early, Gerald Lyn.

II. Title.

PS
3539.
U
44
B
78 2010

813′.52—dc22

2010008636

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication data are available.

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TO

MY FELLOW

ROAD-KID

JACK DEMPSEY

Foreword

Introduction

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by Gerald Early

It's a rough world, Shane—as warm as the very devil when the referee's raisin' your hand, and cold as a hang-man's heart when he ain't.

—Silent Tim speaking to his fighter,

Shane Rory, in Jim Tully's
The Bruiser

Baseball may have captured America's heart, but boxing is America's body and its soul.

American authors have written a number of noted, even outstanding, baseball novels including Mark Harris's quartet,
The Southpaw, Bang the Drum Slowly, A Ticket for Seamstitch
, and
It Looked like For Ever
, Robert Coover's
The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop
, Bernard Malamud's
The Natural
, W. P. Kinsella's
Shoeless Joe
, Ring Lardner's
You Know Me, Al
, and Philip Roth's
The Great American Novel
. Comparatively speaking, there have been far fewer great American boxing novels: Budd Schulberg's
The Harder They Fall
, W. C. Heinz's
The Professional
, Leonard Gardner's
Fat City
, and F. X. Toole's
Rope Burns
, which is actually a collection of stories, come immediately to mind. On this short list should be placed the book you hold in your hands, Jim Tully's neglected novel,
The Bruiser
, published in 1936. I shall say more about Tully's work momentarily.

The fact that more impressive baseball novels than boxing novels have been written cannot be accounted for by the fact that baseball is the more popular sport, so it would be expected to have produced a greater number of novels. That is certainly true today that baseball is more popular, but throughout most of the twentieth century, in the United States, prizefighting, as professional boxing was often called, had a huge and passionate following, million-dollar gates, and huge television contracts. (Indeed, boxing was the first sport to hit television, when the device became available for mass use in the late 1940s, and was televised much more than baseball.) Many heavyweight champions were among not only the most famous athletes of their era but among the most famous celebrities or public figures anywhere. John L. Sullivan, Jack Johnson, Jack Dempsey, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Muhammad Ali, Joe Frazier, and Mike Tyson were among the most famous people on the planet during their heyday, the princes of popular culture. And some fighters in lighter weight divisions were also world-famous: Sugar Ray Robinson, Willie Pep, Henry Armstrong, Emile Griffith, Benny Leonard, Rocky Graziano, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Sugar Ray Leonard, Alexis Arguello, Roberto Duran, Tommy Hearns, Carlos Monzon, Nino Benvenuti, and Oscar De La Hoya to name only a few. Nearly all of these men made fabulous amounts of money during their careers—whether they were capable of keeping what they earned is another story and some, most famously Louis, Duran, Tyson, and Armstrong wound up broke—and their fights generated enormous publicity, front page in the sports section, sometimes front page news stories.

Highly gifted boxers, regardless of whether they are especially articulate men, are charismatic by virtue of the
unsettling but striking combination of naked brutality and muscular yet lissome grace that characterizes their sport. Boxing is the only sport where the object is to break your opponent's will by physically beating him into submission: either to knock him unconscious or to make him quit or make the referee or your opponent's corner make him quit by stopping the fight. The risk the prizefighter takes seems by turns heroic, curious, thrilling, decadent, primitive, or simply absurd. So what if you win? But the same can be said for any sport. Perhaps that is the point of sports, the irrationality of its imbalance: so much is harnessed and expended to prove so little. Its aim is pointless, which is why, perhaps, it is so fascinating, especially to the bourgeoisie who often seem obsessed completely by the need for safety and comfort, the avoidance of risk or any sort of danger. Sometimes absurd risk can be honorable. For no matter how much money a successful boxer makes, no fighter fights only for money. And most fighters do not make much money, in the end, because most never become champion or anything close to it. There is a certain code that drives these men (and now the women who box as well). This point may seem counterintuitive for a sport that is often accused of being faked, fixed, and corrupted by organized crime. Yet boxing has been able to transcend its shoddy origins and debased tendencies, and some boxers have become authentic national heroes. Prizefighting is both the height of inhumanity—to beat another human being senseless if you can—and the essence of what it means to be an exemplary human being—to stand up alone to a fearsome adversary and not be afraid.

American novelist, journalist, socialist reformer, and boxing fan Jack London published what is, by all accounts, the first fictional American boxing story,
The Abysmal Brute
, in
book form in 1913 (it had been serialized in 1911); its similarities to Edgar Rice Burroughs'
Tarzan of the Apes
(serialized in 1912), published in book form in 1914, is startling. Both are essentially pulp novels about physically imposing white heroes—Young Pat Glendon and Lord Greystoke, who seem uncivilized—one reared in the woods and mountains and the other reared by apes in the jungle—but in fact are cultured but also more than a match for any man or beast. The love interests in the book, the rich heiress and enterprising journalist Maud Sangster and the intrepid Jane Porter—innocent, young, beautiful but assertive white women (the New Woman of the twentieth century that pundits and arbiters talked about)—are basically the same woman, seeking an extraordinary man to whom they can submit sexually. What both fantasies reflect are the racial phobias about masculinity that troubled the imagination of white America during the reign of the first black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson (1908–1915). The books were serialized during the height of Johnson-mania, right after his much-publicized fight with Jim Jeffries in July 1910, which Johnson won by knockout and which produced racial violence throughout the country, and during his closely followed trial for violation of the White Slavery Act.

The heavyweight champion, at this time, was not only the most famous, toughest
man
in the United States, usually, but he was the most famous, most mythical
male
. The fact that a man from a so-called inferior race beat white men in the ring and became the champion (until the rise of Johnson, white heavyweight champions drew the color line and refused to fight black challengers) was a cause of considerable cultural and social unrest in the United States. Johnson
made headlines not only because of his fights against white champions but also because of his affairs and marriages to white women at a time when miscegenation, at least between a black man and a white woman, was outlawed in virtually the entire south, and was a rigidly observed taboo nearly everywhere. Johnson was prosecuted and convicted under the new federal antiprostitution legislation called the Mann Act and sentenced to prison for one year. He fled the country in 1912 to avoid imprisonment and did not serve the sentence until his return to the United States after World War I, at which time he was no longer the heavyweight champion.

But the novels by London and Burroughs also reflect the concern that white men were becoming too civilized, too softened by civilization. The books depicted their white heroes as idealized children of nature, Adamic, Wordsworthian, and rigidly Victorian in their morals; they are, in most respects, prelapsarian man, a form of cultural innocence. The heroes are also strikingly well read, extraordinarily literate. (Amazingly, London's hero prefigures Gene Tunney, who was to defeat Jack Dempsey twice, in 1926 and 1927, marry an heiress, and lecture about Shakespeare in an English class at Yale. Life does on occasion imitate fiction.) Both novels display distrust of civilization; London's novel, for instance, condemns the business of boxing but not the actual performance of the sport, which, ideally, is pure and manly. Cities are seductive, deceptive fleshpots; journalism is a racket.

I mention both Burroughs and particularly London at length because Tully's
The Bruiser
makes use of many of the elements to be found in the earlier novels but tends to turn them on their head or to recast them in a more nuanced,
complex way. The rising young fighter of 1936, the year
The Bruiser
was published, was Joe Louis of Detroit, the first black heavyweight to contest seriously for the title since Jack Johnson's defeat at the hands of Jess Willard in Havana in 1915. Louis was not to win the title until 1937 when he defeated Jim Braddock, the Cinderella Man, in eight rounds. But in 1936 Louis lost for the first time in his career when he was pummeled for twelve rounds by Max Schmeling. This defeat set up the rematch in 1938 that became one of the biggest, most anticipated fights of the twentieth century. In the novel, the character Tiger Jones does not quite represent Louis but rather a composite of black fighters (a bit of Louis, a bit of Tiger Flowers, a bit of Joe Walcott, a bit of Henry Armstrong) but certainly the racist but oddly admiring way that the journalist Hot and Cold Daily describes Jones in print is exactly the way Louis was described in the pre-1938 portion of his career, when the white sporting public was more unsure of him and had not taken him to its heart the way it would especially during World War II. In short, the entire atmosphere of both boxing and the United States was different in 1936 from 1911. The 1930s was the era of the Great Depression. Americans saw their country differently; politically, there was a far less pronounced jingoism, less brawny white Anglo-Saxonism.
The Bruiser
is less pulp fiction, although of course pulp fiction has largely an urban working-class audience, than something like a proletarian or working-class novel. In a word, Tully was a hard-boiled fictionist.
The Abysmal Brute
was not quite a novel of the underground, in much the way that a novel by Horatio Alger, despite its aspects of social realism, is not, as the moral sentimentalism makes its less a protest book than an aspiration
narrative.
The Bruiser
is a novel of the underground. The characters we are supposed to like are not too good to be true or too superior to their surroundings.

Tully's novel tells the story of Shane Rory, an itinerant fighter, who rides the rods and fights smokers, and his rise to a heavyweight championship fight (the climax of the novel). We learn from the novel, as Shane's manager Silent Tim informs us, “that guiding a man to a heavyweight championship was more delicate than assembling a watch.” All the clichés of the boxing novel are here: the hero is an innocent but unlike London's hero, Shane is no intellectual, although one fighter, Bangor Lang, tells him to take up reading to relax. Shane takes up reading for a time while his broken jaw mends, but he does not become an autodidact like Tully, his creator. He suffers something like a failure of nerve in the ring after he sees a punch-drunk fighter, Jerry Wayne, in an asylum and indeed, for a time quits the profession. His mother dies after being pushed from a streetcar by a drunken conductor; his father dies while returning from Panama; his sister dies from consumption. “I had to take it,” Shane tells his girlfriend, Lyndal Lund, “It's funny—I don't know why—nobody ever thinks a boy has any troubles—but he has—plenty.” He becomes a fighter while hanging around a gym running errands for the boxers. He gets drunk, loses his money more than once, and hangs around with prostitutes like Dilly Dally who take advantage of him; he knowingly and unknowingly participates in fixed fights. But he possesses a moral character: he is the only white man in the entire book who isn't racist; he believes in his ability despite his doubts about his profession; he does not really care about money or taking advantage of people.

In the novel, there is the “good”girl, Lyndal, who lives on a farm and gives up a professor for Shane, and there is the “bad” girl, Berniece Burue, an entertainer who thinks she might be good for Shane. Silent Tim, Shane's manager, is the typical teacher and cynic that one finds in novels of this sort. (Boxing novels, like sports novels generally, are basically “student/teacher”books, usually about the relationship between a younger and an older, more experienced man.) And there is an assorted lot of pugilists whose lives straddle being highly trained craftsmen (there is much about the technique of boxing in this book) and aimless hoboes.

While one can see elements of the life of heavyweight Jack Dempsey in the character of Shane Rory,
The Bruiser
is largely based on Tully's own experiences. Tully was born in Ohio in 1886, the son of a “drunken ditch digger,” as Tully describes his father, and his wife. After his mother died, he was placed in an orphanage. By fourteen, he was on his own, tramping from town to town, riding the rods or sneaking in boxcars with other hoboes. He worked in a circus, as a dishwasher, a newspaper boy, a common laborer. He also spent time in jail. In his early twenties, he became a professional featherweight boxer. When he was knocked unconscious, he quit, despite the fact that he showed much promise. Clearly, his depictions of boxing were drawn from his time in the ring, which may be why they have such a ring of authenticity to them, particularly his descriptions of being knocked out or hurt in the ring. So were his descriptions in
The Bruiser
of riding the rails as a hobo.

Tully eventually wound up in Hollywood, working for Charlie Chaplin, and then entering journalism as a magazine writer, revealing the secrets of the movie stars. He also
wrote dialogue for movies. At the same time Tully became a novelist and memoirist, unschooled though he was in the craft of novel writing or even in the mechanics of writing English, as he had not finished the equivalent of middle school. He had learned about life with hoboes, life in jail, life in the circus, life on the road. (His descriptions of journalism in
The Bruiser
, indeed, his characterization of the crusty sportswriter Hot and Cold Daily, are worth the price of the book.) He was the precursor of Kerouac, and the America Tully conjured up was a cross between the sensibilities of Walt Whitman and his generative America and Dashiell Hammett and his corrupt America, light and darkness, expansiveness and confinement. Few novelists captured the contradictions of his country so simply or so honestly in the metaphor of the pure, fatalistic, and merciless community of bruising. His work deserves to be rediscovered.