In Harry Crews's the Knockout Artist

"Macho Time": Boxers and Boxing1 in Harry Crews's The Knockout Artist Allen Shepherd TA o a reader at all familiar with the Crews canon and possessed of the wisdom of hindsight it seems remarkable that only after twenty years, in his tenth novel, The Knockout Artist (1988), has Harry Crews come at last to boxing. To be sure, his heroes have earlier mastered almost every other sport2; as is said of one uncommonly talented and ferocious performer in A Feast of Snakes (1976), "Jesus, ain't it nothing that little sucker cain't do?"3 That Eugene Talmadge Biggs, glass-jawed hero of The Knockout Artist, becomes a solo player who knocks himselfout for delighted pa tronssuggests the inimitableCrewsian perspective on the "sweet science" and its devotees. And when another character says to him, "Understand, you are a metaphor for most of what 1 believe about the world,"* we may suspect that she articulates authorial intent. As the novel makes clear, boxing (with and without Crews's invention) is almost ideally suited to the dramatization of virtually all his end uring thematic concerns. It is also happily the case that The Knockout Artist represents a sub stantial recovery from its immediate predecessor, All We bleed of Hell (1987).5 The Knockout Artist, like most of Crews's fiction, is fast, mean, violent, and sometimes horrifyingly funny, altogether an unsettling combination. Things relentlessly go wrong, appearances are generally deceiving, yet self discipline does not wholly fail. The body, however well trained and powerful, will give out, and the spirit, bereft of wholeness, hungers. Many are called, very few chosen. It is "the sports figure," as Donald Johnson remarks, who "more than any other character in our culture, epitomizes the duality of mind and body which is at the heart of the human condition."6 A year after Crews's boxing novel there appeared a highly acclaimed non fiction volume, Joyce Carol Oates's On Boxing, itself a result of research which 70 Aethlon VI 1:1 / Fall 1989 Oates did in preparation for the writing of her own novel, You Must Remember This (1987), in which a boxer is a principal character. It does not seem at all surprising that Crews's imagination should be engaged by what Norman Mailer in King of the Hill terms the "last exercise of will, (the) iron fundament of the ego"7; it is perhaps surprising but quite clear nonetheless, as Victor Strandberg points out, that "violence, that male preserve of power so purely rendered in the boxing ring, exerts a subversive appeal upon (Oates's) feminist sensibility."8 The present essay, then, will examine issues of characterization and theme in The Knockout Artist, considered within the context of the canon and illumina ted by reference to Oates's fine essay. Crews and Oates may seem an odd couple, but, as will become apparent, they complement one another admirably. In Crews's novel we observe a young man from Bacon County, Georgia, learning the values in an often bizarre progress through the New Orleans underworld. It has to be said that Crews does not know or show New Orleans the way in earlier novels he did rural Georgia and northern Florida. He doesn't offer the insider's view that John Kennedy Toole provides in A Confederacy of Dunces, certainly not as his characters tell each other that in New Orleans C.B.D. stands for Central Business District. Yet even this kind of guidebook sketchiness sometimes proves functional, for Biggs is the young man from the country, learning his way around, brave and (by urban standards) innocent, brought up in humble circumstances, seeking his fortune in a life much more complex than any he had imagined, in which intrigue and danger await him, and unable for a variety of reasons to go home again. We read to discover whether his courage and ingenuity will suffice, whether he will make the appropriate intellectual and moral choices. One of the locals, an attractive (to Biggs) lesbian prostitute named Jake, tells him, "You're one of us" (127), a possibility which gives the hero serious pause. Yet by novel's end Biggs is on the road again, chastened, educated, unsure of his prospects, but clear at least as to what he cannot and will not any longer do, to himself and others. He has encountered what Crews terms "the very face of horror," metaphorically his own in others', has felt "forever burned clean of feeling" (266), but is last seen, having traded his BMW motorcycle for an old pickup truck, about to leave town with a young man, promising boxer, friend, much resembling his original self. In the circumstances of Biggs's departure Crews has constructed a mean between the resolutely happy ending of his ninth novel, All We Need of Hell, and the self-destructive violence of his eighth, A Feast of Snakes. The values by which Biggs tries to live his life are traditional and familiar to readers of Crews's earlier work, fiction and non-fiction alike: integrity, fidelity, self-possession, and pride. The ills and temptations to be overcome include guilt, despair, self-disgust, alcohol, drugs, betrayal, large amounts of illicit money, several varieties of protean human sexuality, and endemic Shepherd / Macho Time 71 violence. Although all of the items in the foregoing catalogue are related and although it is difficult at times to be sure which is cause, which effect, Crews's emphasis falls upon guilt, betrayal, sexuality and violence. For Biggs and perhaps for the reader, there are two particularly dangerous kinds of hindrances to understanding. One is to be found in the overtly sophisticated analysis of Charity Beechum, resident intellectual and Ph.D. candidate in psychology; the other is located in the monstrous yet apparently well founded cynicism of J. Alfred Blasingame, a.k.a. Oyster Boy, local busi nessman and malefactor of great wealth. Neither one, that is, is to be trusted, although they can sometimes make what seems to be a good case. Charity, who has set up the hero in an apartment the better to study him, concludes that he "is the quintessential hero. Here in the twentieth century is a living example of Man's recurrent, archetypal pattern for working out the Role of the Hero and at the same time denying the inevitability and finality of death" (138). She also asks her quintessential hero, the knockout artist, "What are your career goals?" (94), a question accurately indicative of her limitations in tact and insight. In Crews's fiction, any academic is suspect; that way likely lies out-of-touch, pointy-headed liberalism. When the would-be professor is a young woman who expresses herself in such glib, capitalized concepts, she stands self-convicted. Charity is filthy rich, manipulative, deranged, coldly analytical and bisexual, though this is only a partial list of her imperfections. The novel opens with an elaborate and expensively mounted theme party at which Biggs performs for 350 guests costumed as boxers, managers, trainers and hangers-on and at which the host degrades himself and others for pleasure. Oyster Boy, the host, sports Everlast boxing trunks and a spiked dog collar by which he is led about on all fours. Although the hero alleges that he is not surprised by anything any longer. Crews certainly means for the reader to be. For pertinent comment, we may turn to Joyce Carol Oates. Writing of more conventional bouts in On Boxing Oates observes that it is plausible that emotionally effete men and women may require ever more extreme experiences to arouse them, [and] it is perhaps the case too that the desire is not merely to mimic but, magically, to be brute, primitive, instinctive, and therefore, innocent.’ How to be innocent while on all fours wearing boxer trunks and a spiked dog collar isaninterestingquestion,butBiggs, "still a notch-solid middleweight" and still "startlingly handsome" (3), arouses a variety of longings in the partygoers, not least in Oyster Boy himself, described as "the most unhealthy- looking human being (Biggs) had ever seen" (13). Oates on the use and significance of antebellum fighting slave collars will further illuminate Crews's initial display. Oates writes that 72 Aethlon VII:1 / Fall 1989 white slave owners commonly pitted their Negro slaves against one another in combat, and made bets on the results. To prevent the slaves' escape, or, perhaps to make poetically graphic the circumstances of the black man's degradation, iron collars re sembling dog collars were fixed about their necks and attached to ropes or chains. (65) Oyster Boy's party, exemplary as it is of hothouse degeneracy among the very rich, calls to mind the sort of anecdote that Gibbon would leave untranslated in his Decline and Fall. But whetherit is southern history or perhaps scenes from Absalom, Absalom! that Crews is recalling, it is an angry down-home blue collar moral that it pointed: the poor, in whom virtue would flourish if it only had the chance, have to do all manner of degrading things just to survive, while the undeserving rich, who buy sex and power and who own things and people, turn out to be physically insignificant, carrot juice-drinking lechers, probably Republicans. Crews, be it noted, is not interested either to attack or defend boxing as sport or business. From his memorable autobiography, A Childhood (1978), it's clear that Crews came from very poor tenant farmers, whose lives were a compound of hard work and equally hard drinking and fighting. In that world "survival depended on raw courage, a courage born out of desperation and sustained by a lack of alternatives."10 So it is with E.

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