GENERAL

C RISPIN J ACKSON Striking Blows For Freedom

T HE G REATEST F IGHTOF O UR G ENERATION : L OUIS VS S CHMELING

★By Lewis A Erenberg (Oxford University Press 320pp £16.99)

B EYOND G LORY : M AX S CHMELINGVS J OE L OUIS , ANDA W ORLDONTHE B RINK

★By David Margolick (Bloomsbury 432pp £18.99)

T HEDEFEATOF heavyweight boxer Joe Louis by Max Schmeling in 1936 was one of the greatest upsets in boxing history. It was also an unfortunate one. Louis was young, black, apparently clean-living and possessed of a God-given ability to knock out opponents with either hand. He was widely expected to win the world title and so end the racial segregation that still blighted the sport. Though affable and generally liked in the US, the much older Schmeling had one irredeemable fault: he was German, and his twelfth-round knockout of Louis was inevitably seized upon by the Nazis as proof of their racist theories. ‘The last round is quite wonderful,’ Goebbels noted in his diary after watching the film of the fight. ‘He really knocks out the nigger.’ Their second meeting in the ring in June 1938 – by which time Louis had taken the title from the game but pedestrian James J Braddock – was a contest of colossal symbolic importance as it forced white America to choose between a white boxer who, however inadvertently, represented a racist regime, and a black fighter who stood for tolerance and Uncle Sam. It is for this reason rather than the fight’s merits – it took Louis little more than two minutes to batter Schmeling into submission in what was one of the most one-sided championship fights in history – that the men’s rivalry is now commemorated in these two momentously titled studies. Erenberg’s is much the better book, analysing (there are over 400 numbered notes) where Margolick’s merely itemises. There is minimal contradiction between the two works, although Erenberg implies that Louis’s demise in the first fight began with his knockdown in the fourth round, whereas Margolick quotes Louis’s own testimony that he was effectively out of the fight after Schmeling caught him with a big right in the second.

However, Erenberg does provide the clue as to how Louis so comprehensively outfought the German in the rematch. Watching Louis defeat the tough Basque boxer Paolino Uzcudun in 1935, Schmeling noted a flaw in his technique: a tendency to drop his left hand after a jab. This made Louis particularly susceptible to his own speciality punch: the right cross. In turn, Louis’s canny trainer Jack Blackburn made a crucial observation of his own: that Schmeling needed time to line up his right. Consequently he told Louis to go for all-out attack from the opening bell of the second fight so that Schmeling would be unable to launch an effective counter. This Louis did, with devastating effect. Erenberg offers a much more detailed account of the subsequent careers of the two fighters, which contrasted as sharply as their boxing styles. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, Louis volunteered for the infantry as a private soldier. Although he never saw action, he fought tirelessly against segregation in the US armed forces. Schmeling was dragooned into the Parachute Corps and endured the horror of the bloody Battle of Crete. Thereafter his main activity seems to have been making goodwill visits to British and American POWs. Erenberg’s book includes a photograph of him peering nervously out of the side door of a Junkers 88; he looks more frightened than he ever did facing Louis. Louis died in 1981, his body wasted by drug and alcohol addiction; Schmeling died only this year, a few months short of his hundredth birthday, having eschewed fast living for regular sessions on his exercise bike. Both authors agonise over the extent of Schmeling’s complicity with the Nazis. It is perhaps reprehensible that he did not, like Dietrich, turn his back on Germany when the true complexion of Hitler’s regime became apparent, but it is absurd to suggest that he fought for the glorification of National Socialism. As one journalist so neatly put it, Schmeling had ‘a lyrical enthusiasm for the American dollar’. He fought for gold and personal glory: nothing else. Both authors have chosen to rely entirely on secondary sources, despite the fact that there must still be plenty of people alive who remember the two bouts and the men who fought them. Some years ago I met an elderly, silver-haired Polish aristocrat who recalled how his German governess had gloated over Schmeling’s victory but was resolutely silent the morning after the second bout. Eventually her young charge plucked up the courage to ask her who had won the fight. ‘Louis,’ she snorted, ‘but it does not count: Schmeling is a man, and Louis is just an animal.’ I prefer Jesse Jackson’s judgement, delivered at Louis’s memorial service, and quoted by Erenberg: ‘He was our Samson, our David who slew Goliath … a giant who saved us in time of trouble.’ To order these books, see order form on page 78

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 BAD SEX

T OM F LEMING Oooh-la-jolly well-la

T HIS IS THE thirteenth anniversary of the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Its purpose is to gently dissuade writers from filling their novels with redundant, badly written or embarrassing passages of sex for the purposes of selling more books. Just as importantly, it aims to dissuade their publishers from insisting they do so. Fittingly, then, one of the first nominations for this year’s prize was The Olive Readers (Macmillan) by Christine Aziz, which earlier this year won Richard and Judy’s ‘How To Get Published’ competition. This is the scene in which hero and heroine collide: We made our way to the summerhouse and hid in its shadows. We lay on the cool floor and I twined my legs around Homer’s body, gripping him like a hunter hanging on to its prey. He made love to me with his fingers and I came in the palm of his hand. He stroked my breasts and neck. ‘Don’t wash it away,’ he said. ‘I want to be able to smell you tonight.’ What kind of hunter twines its legs round its prey? Bad sex is often recognisable by such misguided attempts to emphasise protagonists’ animal instincts. But in terms of abusing the natural world, Lobster by Guillaume Lescable (Dedalus) is in a league of its own. The surrealist tale of a lobster on board the Titanic which finds itself helplessly attracted to a human female, the book hinges on the ‘life-changing orgasm’ the fishy amorist gives Angelina as the boat sinks into the icy water: Lobster swam to her purple feet ... and climbed up the inside of the leg as far as the clenched knees. He was amazed at the pleasure he felt in being held in this way. His pincers slipped between the thighs, prising them gently apart. His feelers were just able to reach the satin of the panties. They fluttered, made the labia quiver. Under the shimmering material a hint of life was returning. Angelina’s thighs relaxed. Lobster pulled back his feelers. Tensed and retensed his tail. His strokes were fast and powerful. He was making headway. He sank himself into her warming muscles; his tail did not falter. Lescable’s book, however, is an extreme example, and will perhaps fail to win owing to its consistent – rather than occasional or egregious – outlandishness. More culpable with respect to unsuspecting wildlife is John Updike. Here is Owen, the hero of his latest novel

Villages(Hamish Hamilton), exposing himself to local birdlife: A flock of crows, six or eight, raucously rasping at one another, thrashed into the top of an oak on the edge of the square of sky. The heavenly invasion made his heart race; he looked down at his prick, silently begging it not to be distracted; his mind fought skidding into crows and woods, babies and Phyllis, and his prick stared back at him with its one eye clouded by a single drop of pure seminal yearning. He felt suspended at the top of an arc. Faye leaned back on the blanket, arranging her legs in an M of receptivity, and he knelt between them like the most abject and craven supplicant who ever exposed his bare ass to the eagle eyes of a bunch of crows. A multitude of dodgy wildlife similes can also be found in Tarun J Tejpal’s The Alchemy of Desire (Picador). Phrases such as ‘I sucked the eagle wings into my mouth and began to fly’, and ‘she saw him begin to surge and flare like a provoked cobra’ come thick and fast in this, the debut novel from the editor of the hard-hitting Indian news website Tehelka. Tejpal’s interest in anatomy pervades his entertaining novel: We began to climb peaks and fall off them. We did old things in new ways. And new things in old ways. At times like these we were the work of surrealist masters. Any body part could be joined to any body part. And it would result in a masterpiece. Toe and tongue. Nipple and penis. Finger and the bud. Armpit and mouth. Nose and clitoris. Clavicle and gluteus maximus. Mons venera and phallus indica. The Last Tango of Labia Minora. Circa 1987. The Last Tango brings us to Marlon Brando’s Fan-Tan (William Heinemann), co-written with Donald Cammell, which received several nominations. Annie, it must be noted, is in fact a man, Captain Anatole Doultry, a South Seas pirate: In a moment Annie was on his side, Madame Lai was like a plant growing over him, and her little fist (holding the biggest black pearl) was up his asshole planting the pearl in the most appreciated place. ‘Oh, Lord,’ he cried out. ‘I’m a-comin’!’ She could not answer. It is the one drawback of fellatio as conscientious as hers that it eliminates the

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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