F.
X. Toole's Pound for Pound: Requiem for a
Heavyweight Writer
Jul 29 '06
Author's Product Rating
Pros
Nobody but nobody writes
better fight scenes than
Toole
Cons
The novel, still in
first-draft form, needs one or two more
edits
The Bottom Line
F. X. Toole
died before he could finish his great boxing
novel, but despite its flaws the book reminds us
how great Toole was--he was more than just a
"contendah."
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Boxing and writing have one thing in
common: only a fool with hope in his heart would
climb into a ring to be repeatedly punched in the
face or send off a manuscript to publishers only
to get socked by rejection after rejection.
Pugilists and novelists quickly learn two truths:
you have to “go the distance” if you want to rise
to the top; and it’s the beatings you take along
the way that make you tougher.
F. X. Toole
was a fool for boxing and writing, coming to both
of them in mid-life when he was, admittedly, a
boozer and a ladies’ man. His life was the stuff
of hard-knuckled machismo, ripped from the pages
of Hemingway. Prior to turning pugilist and
scribe, he worked as a cabbie, cement truck
driver, bartender and bullfighter (he was gored
three times before he gave up his Sun Also
Rises adventure). He had a chunk of one
ear bitten off in a street fight (and, no, Mike
Tyson was nowhere around at the time).
Toole grew up listening to the fights on
the radio. Madison Square Garden was his Camelot,
sluggers like Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano and Jack
Dempsey were his knights in shining muscles. So,
it was only natural when, looking for something
new to try, he stepped into the ring. The lean,
gray-haired man earned wary respect from the other
gym rats, which soon turned to admiration when he
didn’t quit after the first day of sparring bouts.
“So there I was, didn’t know squat from
boxing,” he’d later write. “Was slapping rather
than punching, on my heels instead of toes, sticky
instead of slick. But I sparred with eighteen- and
twenty-year-old beginners anyhow. Had teeth
cracked and inlays fall out. I got hit more than I
should have, because without my glasses I couldn’t
see the shot coming, but I did okay for an old
man. The spell was cast.”
Eventually, he
was forced to quit sparring when he got braces to
correct a jaw condition. But, as he says, he was
already under the spell. He started working
ringside as a cut man (one who plugs the flow of
blood between rounds), a corner man and a trainer.
“About the only thing I haven’t done in
boxing is make money….But that hasn’t stopped me
any more than not making money in writing has.
Both are something you just do, and you feel
grateful for being able to do them, even if both
keep you broke, drive you crazy, and make you
sick. Rational people don’t think like that. But
they don’t have in their lives what I have in
mine. Magic.”
His real name was Jerry
Boyd, but to keep his writing career a secret from
his boxing buddies, he used a pen name, a mix of
the actor Peter O'Toole and the 16th-century
Jesuit saint Francis Xavier. Then finally it
happened. Toole sold a story, caught the eye of an
agent and soon had a six-figure book deal. His
collection of short stories, Rope
Burns, was published when he was 70 years
old, after 40 years of writing stories and
collecting rejection slips. Critics immediately
started comparing him to Hemingway, Mailer and
Faulkner. In the writing world, we call that a
TKO; at his age, it was nothing short of a miracle
full of sentiment and uplift. If anyone ever makes
a film of Toole’s life, there won’t be a dry eye
in the house.
Especially when we get to
the end.
F. X. Toole died on September 12,
2002, of complications resulting from heart
surgery. He didn’t live long enough to see two of
his stories turned into an Academy-Award-winning
movie, Million Dollar Baby. Toole
knew he had a bum ticker and that it was only a
matter of time. He’d been working on a novel and,
when he knew he’d have to go into the hospital for
surgery, he took his laptop with him, desperate to
make a final push to the end of the story. He fell
short of the finish line, but he bequeathed 900
pages of chapters and fragments to his children
and agent. Out of that stack of papers came
Pound for Pound, what he hoped would
be his magnum opus of boxing literature.
I never met F. X. Toole (though—full
disclosure—he and I share the same literary
agent). If I had, I’ve no doubt his handshake
would have been “as gentle as a nun’s,” as he once
wrote about a boxer’s hands. His prose had that
same kind of dichotomy—the sentences could smack
you with a hard uppercut, then in the next instant
make you cry at their tenderness. F. X. Toole knew
about the inner clockwork mechanism we call the
heart. His characters might be hard, stoic men
gambling on one last shot at a championship, but
their emotional centers were tenderized meat. As
James Ellroy writes in his introduction to
Pound for Pound, Rope
Burns was “savage and melancholy, and
somehow heartbreakingly sweet.”
Most of
the world still doesn’t know Toole’s name, but
many of them might recognize his words—the bulk of
Morgan Freeman’s narration in Million Dollar
Baby was lifted straight from the pages of
Rope Burns.
Toole wrote
about boxing like John Wayne rode a horse, knowing
precisely how to sit easy and go with the flow of
words about blood, broken bones and shattered
hearts. He didn’t waste time with fluffy, writerly
bullshit. He got right to the point. Take a look
at the first lines of two of his stories: “I stop
blood” (“The Monkey Look”) and “Boxing is an
unnatural act” (“Million $$$ Baby”). His
descriptions of people came at us in equally
tough, concise images—one shady character’s eyes
are “colder than a dead Eskimo dick.”
In
Toole’s world of boxing, second-rate fighters have
to eat in third-rate hotel buffets with “hot dogs
and dried-out fish and chicken fried near to
black. Cold pork chops all bone and fat. Food be
dead." If the fighters and trainers in Toole’s
stories get breaks, it’s less through luck than
through hard work, determination and downright
deception. His are the people who’ve been kicked
and pushed aside, yet still have a scrappy spirit.
As Ellroy puts it, Toole wrote “from the
inside out”—not just from inside the boxing ring,
but from within the hearts of men battered by
tragedy and disappointment.
So it is in
the pages of Pound for Pound, the
tale of Dan Cooley, former lightweight
champion-turned garage owner-turned boxing trainer
living in L.A. Like the majority of Toole’s
characters, Cooley is a tough son of a bitch, but
he’s also got a sentimental streak, especially
when it comes to his grandson, a lad he takes
under his wing and teaches the science of the
punch—not unlike Maggie Fitzgerald in
Million Dollar Baby. Just when the
novel is getting as cheery as the end of a Rocky
Balboa movie, a tragic accident snaps the mood and
Cooley turns hard and bitter.
In Cooley’s
darkest hour, when grief stabs him in the heart
then twists the knife, Toole describes how the
scarred, ex-fighter reels from the blow: “Dan
gagged, nausea rising, pain flooding his chest.
His hand went to his battered eye. He tried to
die, but couldn’t.”
Meanwhile, we’ve been
introduced to another character, Eduardo “Chicky”
Garza, a young contender from Texas who is being
cheated by promoters and trainers in the amateur
circuit. Chicky knows he needs a better trainer,
someone to show him footwork and the timing of
punches, but he’s tied down by responsibility to
his drug-addicted grandfather, himself a former
boxing legend named The Wolf.
Toole
alternates chapters between Cooley and Chicky,
bringing them closer together all the time, until
eventually they meet and Pound for
Pound turns into an inevitable story of
hope and redemption.
Throughout, Toole
follows that old author’s axiom: “Write what you
know.” Here’s a typical passage from a
welterweight tournament that shows not only
Toole’s encyclopedic knowledge of boxing, but also
his skill at explaining the sport with an economy
of words:
The bell rang, and he charged
from the corner like a mini Mike Tyson, but
Farrell pivoted out of the way. When Sykes came
around, Farrell hit him with a quick
right-left-right combination that knocked Sykes
down, his first trip to the canvas ever. He tasted
blood from a cut lip and began to shake. Mortified
that a white boy had knocked him down, he let
loose a high, keening wail that bounced off the
hard walls. The crowd keened back. He took the
mandatory eight count on his feet, and roared back
at Farrell, who continued to pepper him with jabs.
Sykes tried to wrestle him down at one point, and
the ref was there to step in and penalize Sykes
with a one-point deduction. The crowd hooted at
Sykes and went into a frenzy of whistles and
spit.
I haven’t been this awe-struck
by fight scenes since the time in 1980 when I sat
in a darkened theater and recoiled as Robert
DeNiro punched the camera and blew sweat on the
lens.
Like most novels interrupted by
their author’s death (The Mystery of Edwin
Drood by Charles Dickens, The Garden
of Eden by Ernest Hemingway, etc.),
Pound for Pound has a fog of
melancholy hanging over it even before you finish
reading the first page. Just knowing the story was
left unfinished and unsettled in the author’s
mind, you find yourself full of what ifs
and could have beens. What we hold in our
hands is, from the get-go, less than perfect, a
gem still waiting for the author to polish it or
discard it as a flawed work.
There are
certainly flaws and problems with Pound for
Pound. Toole can be tediously scientific
with the fight scenes, some of the dialogue is
unabashedly corny, and there is still some flab
from the 900 pages that needs to be trimmed. I
often found myself tearing up while reading the
book, not so much at the tale’s sad turn of
events, but over the fact that I wished God had
given Toole another year, or even just six months,
to live and finish the book properly.
But
everyone dies—most of us in mid-sentence—and we
readers can only go with what we’ve got in front
of us. Pound for Pound is an
unfinished symphony but it’s still worth our
while. You can see the heart of F. X. Toole on
every page—his earnest, urgent writing that is so
full of raw honesty. It’s an ambitious work
spanning three generations of males who persevere
through personal tragedy, corruption, deceit,
self-doubt and thoughts of suicide—all of it
played out against the arid landscape of the
Southwest. Toole’s reach here is deeper and
broader than in his short stories. It’s easy to
see how the story and characters ballooned to 900
pages.
Even though it falls short in the
long run, there are many moments when Toole is
right on the mark. In the parlance of boxing, this
is a writer who knew how to throw his shoulders
forward with the punch, rocking and rotating his
weight from his left foot to his right foot in a
light shuffle dance. Toole made the hard grind of
writing look easy on the page. He wrote like a
butterfly and stung like a bee.
Recommended:
Yes
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