The Bruiser Read online

  He possessed few other skills that would gain him admission to 9–5 life. Having little formal education and being the son of Irish immigrant parents didn’t afford him the option of working in daddy’s firm or marrying the banker’s daughter and being installed a vice president. Instead, he chose a path favored by immigrants and drifters. He would put on boxing gloves and enter the ring.

  Tully’s boxing training amounted to little more than sparring in a gym. As he later recalled in the third-person,

  Environment seemed bound to make him a pugilist. He fought so many brakemen, yeggs, and railroad detectives (he lumps them altogether) that he subconsciously became a trained fighter. Drinking rotgut whiskey, he battled galore in box cars and saloons. He learned the elemental lesson of the survival of the fittest. For in tramp life the struggle is primal and the weak are used as door mats while the strong are respected.

  It would be, if nothing else, (mostly) honest money.

  Tully had met other boxers, past, present, and future, in his travels. And as he embarked on his new profession, he recalled the advice he’d been given by one of them. The great lightweight champion, Joe Gans, advised Tully: “Don’t pay any attention to the fellow you fight—just act like he’s not in the world.” It proved difficult advice to follow for one without Gans’s skills, and Tully’s ring career never came close to that of the black legend. Still, for the next several years, Tully earned at least part of his living in the ring. His journeyman ring career ended in San Francisco in 1912.

  It was in the fourth round—I learned later.

  A right caught me. I was unconscious until the next afternoon.

  All events which preceded the fight, and everything which happened in the ring has been in eclipse all these years. I do not even remember dressing for the fight.

  My opponent, fearful that I had been killed, called upon me while I was still unconscious. A kindly note scrawled with pencil begged my forgiveness.

  Some minutes after I opened my eyes I vaguely grasped the situation. The note began, “You were knocked out last night—”

  Still shaky, I went to the lobby, and from there to the street.

  Years of struggle followed before Tully established himself as a successful writer with the publication of his first book in 1922. But by 1935, Tully’s last two books had tanked, and, in the view of many, Tully had peaked as a writer. Beset by personal problems and jaded by the tinniness of Hollywood, Tully was at a crossroads when he met Langston Hughes, a longtime admirer of Tully’s work, at a Beverly Hills party. The two writers hit it off, and Tully invited Hughes to come by some time for lunch.

  When Hughes called a couple days later, he asked if he might bring Harry Armstrong, a former boxer turned trainer who wanted to write. Tully quickly consented and a date was set. Hughes and Armstrong planned on taking the interurban from downtown Los Angeles to Tully’s home, an hour and a half ride. Harry’s protege, Henry Jackson, who had even taken his mentor’s name and boxed as Henry Armstrong, was free that morning and offered to drive the men and wait in the car. When they arrived, Hughes mentioned that the young boxer was waiting outside in the car and Tully immediately went out to invite Henry to join them.

  Like Langston Hughes and Jim Tully, so too does it seem that Henry Armstrong and Tully were destined to meet. In his autobiography, Gloves, Glory and God, Armstrong remembered laying awake one night in St. Louis when he felt the irresistible pull of California. It was the heart of the Depression, and neither Henry nor his trainer and running buddy, Harry, had anything like train fare to California. Writing in the third-person, Armstrong recalled,

  Well, if there wasn’t money for the trip, maybe it could be made without money. He had read somewhere of an author named Jim Tully, who had been a fighter and a hobo. If Tully could make it all over the country as a hobo, surely Henry could get to California that way.

  They caught a west-bound freight train in Carondelet, Missouri, and a few years later washed up at Tully’s Toluca Lake door. Tully liked Armstrong immediately. “When he entered the room,” Tully wrote, “I knew at once there was a man in the house.” Armstrong was mostly silent but listened intently as his trainer and Hughes described how tough it was for a boxer to make a living. Tully could only nod in recognition. Armstrong had lost fixed matches with the Mexican fighter, Baby Arizmendi, that he’d clearly won and was as broke in Los Angeles as he had been in St. Louis. “You might see a way out, Jim,” Hughes said. “Henry’s beaten him twice and lost two decisions—he’s innocent and honest, and it isn’t right.” To make matters worse, Wirt Ross, who bought Armstrong’s contract when the boxer was a minor, had scheduled him to again fight Arizmendi. Moved by the hobo-turned-boxer’s plight, one he knew firsthand, Tully impulsively raised the possibility of buying Armstrong’s contract from Ross. Armstrong was very enthusiastic, leaving Tully to mull it over. Watching his guests leave, Tully regretted not hearing more from the young boxer. “My God,” he later commented, “a great man has been here. Armstrong was the wisest of us all. He saved his breath for the pork chops.”

  The prospect of a return to boxing, albeit outside the ropes, was tempting.

  For days the idea burned in my head. I would again enter the wild world of the bruiser. The thought made the bubbles burst in my blood. It would be a return to the care-free days I’d loved. I had fought hard for freedom and found it another jail.

  It is a measure of how miserable Tully had become that he considered boxing as way out of writing, rather than the reverse. In the end, he came to the conclusion he’d reached more than two decades before and chose writing over boxing. Tully instead promised to speak to Al Jolson, who had both the interest and means to promote a young boxer. Tully’s decision not to buy Armstrong’s contract seems not to have hurt Armstrong in the least. Armstrong fought another ten years and for a few months in late 1938 simultaneously held the World’s Featherweight, Welterweight, and Lightweight Championships. Armstrong was elected to the Boxing Hall of Fame in 1954.

  Boxing was one thing; writing about boxing was another. In his 1934 Esquire essay “The Manly Art,” Tully wrote, “The great book of the prize ring is yet to be written. The man who will write it will be one who has been smeared with its blood.” While litterateurs as diverse as George Bernard Shaw and Ernest Hemingway had tried, none had boxed and could hope to really convey what it was like inside the ropes. Two years later, tired of waiting for an honest novel of the ring, Tully decided to write it himself.

  By early September he had a first draft and had built up a head of steam in the writing of a novel about a young boxer named Shane Rory. He could feel it in his bones, the boxing novel was going to be good, very good. This one would restore his good name and get him the respect that he felt was his due. The past year had been one of survival, but now there was hope and he could finally feel his long depression beginning to lift. Two weeks later he was knocked off the tracks.

  Tully’s son, Alton, had been arrested for assaulting a 16-year-old girl. It was not the first such incident and the news made headlines across the country. Concerned friends tried to lift Tully’s spirits, and it is worth noting that another former drifter-turned-boxer, Jack Dempsey, phoned with the offer of $10,000 to help with legal expenses. Tully was devastated, and work on the boxing novel came to a halt. Instead, he returned to the question he’d faced most of his adult life: What to do about Alton? In the past, he’d come to the boy’s defense, but this time, against all paternal instinct and the advice of Alton’s attorneys, he insisted Alton plead guilty. This Alton did and was sentenced to San Quentin for one to fifty years.

  Tully looked to crawl from the wreckage with a new book. He sounded out Maxwell Perkins, who had become renowned as the editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, on a boxing book but was torn between the novel about Shane Rory or a history of the ring. He felt it necessary to convince the legendary editor that he was not a has-been. “I’ve played in bad luck the past few years, and have done considerable m
ovie work, but I’m by no means out of the running as a writer.”

  Tully was far from a has-been, but his year-end royalty statement punctuated a bad year. Ladies in the Parlor, his previous book, had earned him just $200 in the past six months of 1935. Perkins declined a boxing history but asked to see the novel. Tully returned to the Shane Rory manuscript, now titled The Bruiser, he’d been working on before the tribulations of autumn. Perkins was not enthusiastic about the draft he received of The Bruiser, and, for the time being, the two went their separate ways.

  With a solid draft of The Bruiser in hand, Tully began shopping the book around. Having immersed himself in boxing, he flew to New York in April to work with Jack Dempsey on a play based on the legendary champion’s life. Waiting for him on his return was a letter with the happy news that his 1934 federal tax return was going to be audited.

  Tully first sent The Bruiser to Boni, the publisher of two of his earlier novels, who wanted the manuscript so badly that he signed away the film rights. By late June, Tully had misgivings about signing with Boni and his request to be released from his contract was granted. Frustrated with what he saw as Jim’s fussiness over publishers, Tully’s agent, Sydney Sanders, quit, leaving Jim free to strike his own deal for The Bruiser.

  Hoping that the The Bruiser would make a bigger splash with Simon & Schuster, who had rejected Ladies in the Parlor, Tully mailed the manuscript in July to editor and friend H. L. Mencken, who hand-delivered it to Max Schuster. With Tully now years away from having anything like a successful book, the rejection a few weeks later from Simon & Schuster rattled his confidence. He wrote Mencken, “I am not hurt much, as I have such contempt for the novel, that I know I’m not much good at the writing of one.”

  In the end he returned to his old publisher, Greenberg, mailing a draft of The Bruiser in late July and signed a contract shortly after. However, Greenberg’s insistence that The Bruiser have a happy ending gave Tully pause. Greenberg was not alone in finding problems with the book’s conclusion. Mencken found the ending “abrupt.”

  Whatever the problems with the book’s conclusion, Tully was determined that the boxing scenes would be the best ever written. Many writers had written about boxing but none had Tully’s experience inside the ropes. Tully even recruited his pal, former heavyweight contender Frank Moran, to shadowbox the final fight and then had Dempsey read the manuscript.

  Greenberg got right to work soliciting blurbs from Gene Fowler, Walter Winchell, Mencken, and Frank Scully. He also contacted George Bellows’s estate for permission to use his masterpiece, Stag at Sharkey’s, for the dust jacket. The executor declined but wrote Greenberg, “If I could say yes to anyone it would be you for Mr. Tully’s novel.”

  By early August, Tully had rewritten the conclusion. As one reporter described it,

  It was to end with the girl sending the discouraged fighter back to the ring with lusty admonitions about the old gutseroo and courage and try-try-again and I’ll-be-waiting. So the guy goes back to the ring and finally he becomes champ but in the process he gets lobbed around until he’s slug-nutty. Punch drunk. So he goes back to the Girl and marries her and she’s got a slap-happy, drooling champ on her hands for the rest of her life.

  This was not the happy ending Greenberg wanted, and, with yet another ending, Tully delivered the completed manuscript that September. The Bruiser was set for release later in the fall. Mencken wrote, “If I were still editor of The American Mercury, your description of that prize fight would already be in type.” Returning to the bout in another letter, he concluded, “it is one of the best things anybody has ever done.” Greenberg was equally optimistic and asked for a proposal for Tully’s next book. A month later, Greenberg’s mood darkened. He complained that advanced sales for The Bruiser were poor, citing resistance from booksellers and women to boxing novels. Tully, never known for patience with his publishers, could hardly be blamed for being irritated. Greenberg was well aware that he was publishing a boxing novel and pronouncing a book a failure before a single review appeared was premature at best.

  With his mood still soured by Greenberg’s dire forecast about The Bruiser, Tully’s career hit bottom when a letter from Bennett Cerf, the publisher of The Modern Library, landed on his desk with a thud. Cerf declined to reprint any of Tully’s earlier books, noting that “I have done some quiet checking up on the sale of these books in the last few years, however, and am sorry to say that I find the demand, in New York at least, is practically nil.” All hope rested with The Bruiser.

  Novelists who choose sports as a central theme face a common pitfall. If, at the novel’s conclusion, the protagonist proves the odds surmountable and knocks out his opponent or hits a home run with two outs in the ninth, most readers will leave thinking they’ve just finished a boilerplate boy’s book. If the hero lands on the canvas or strikes out at the book’s conclusion, readers will understandably feel let down. The best sports novels and films wisely avoid this trap, from the baseball books Blue Ruin by Brendan Boyd and Shoeless Shoe by W. P. Kinsella to such films as John Sayles’s Eight Men Out and Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull. Each succeeds by not aligning its story with a particular contest.

  The Bruiser follows Shane Rory from his days as a road kid, through his unsteady ascent up the boxing ranks, and culminates in his title fight for the heavyweight championship. With the book so structured, Tully’s problems with the ending were inevitable. His solution was to have Shane Rory win the title fight and hand over the crown to a black boxer and fellow road kid whose route to the top would have otherwise been blocked by a color line. It was a happy ending to be sure but with a twist. If the conclusion of The Bruiser seems a bit pat, the thirty-one chapters which precede it are not. Shane Rory, like Jim Tully was an accidental fighter. He tried boxing, won his fight, and, “The course of his life changed. He was a combination road kid and wandering fighter.”

  The description of road kid and fighter could only have been written by one who knew both road and ring intimately. The action inside the ropes bristles with jabs, hooks, crosses, and uppercuts. And when Tully has a veteran boxer tell Shane, “I like you, that’s all—you take it and lash it out—and you don’t whimper,” he is repeating almost word for word Jim’s own code, stated to Langston Hughes months earlier. While Tully paints Shane in heroic colors, The Bruiser avoids sentimentality. It takes an unflinching look at all the types who encrust boxing, including broken-down punch-drunks, gamblers, cheats, hangers-on, promoters, reporters, and fans screaming for blood.

  Recalling Jim’s experiences, Shane’s life is transformed by books, or, in Shane’s case, one book in particular: Helen Keller’s Story of My Life. Reading the book in one sitting, Shane closes Keller’s memoir and realizes that despite Keller’s blindness and deafness, “She’s seen more than I have.” Shane “had never been aware of bees and flowers. The blind girl had. The world was a place he had never known.” It is one of Tully’s favorite themes: a damaged life transformed by a book.

  Reviews of The Bruiser were the best Tully had received in years and among the best he’d ever had. New York Times critic E. C. Beckwith acknowledged the novel followed the standard formula for boxing books, but recognized that Tully had “manipulated them with so skillful an artistry that the resultant work acquires a freshness and vitality which one had long ago thought extinct in pugilistic fiction.” There is a “touch of heart interest,” Beckwith continued,

  But it is in discourses expressed through his characters on ring science, in his descriptions of fistic events, in his first-hand knowledge of the game in every department, that Mr. Tully comes very close to writing, in The Bruiser, the best novel of its type this reviewer has read in late years.

  David Tilden, critic at Books, noted that The Bruiser was not “literary in any sense of the word, but the story is swiftly moving and, with just enough of disorder and emotion to make it a thoroughly human document.”

  Frank Scully picked up on Tully’s description of a punch-drunk boxe
r in his review of the The Bruiser. The subject had received scant attention before The Bruiser and Scully was taken with Tully’s accurate portrayal. Tully’s punch-drunk reminded Scully of Ad Wolgast, “a once prominent bruiser who ended his ring career throwing punches at shuffling phantoms in the cell of an insane asylum.”

  Wolgast was indeed the basis for Tully’s punch-drunk boxer. Jim had kept tabs on his former sparring partner, who had been sent to the Camarillo State Hospital in 1927 and where he remained for the rest of his life. In addition to basing The Bruisers Adam Walsh on Wolgast, Tully used Joe Gans as the basis for Joe Crane, Jack Tierney for Chicago Jed Williams, and Battling Schultz for Battling Ryan.

  Jim was buoyed by the good reviews, writing Nathan, “The novel, ‘Bruiser’ is starting well—400 copies sold yesterday…. It’s the starting of my second wind.” And to Mencken, Tully could crow that The Bruiser was proving to be his best book “critically and financially” since 1929.

  Praise for The Bruiser arrived from other quarters as well. Former heavyweight champion Gene Tunney, who had defeated Jack Dempsey twice, wrote to thank Jim for his inscribed copy, “It has great dramatic quality and from the pugilistic point of view is technically perfect.” Damon Runyon called it the greatest story of the ring ever told. W. C. Fields thanked Jim for his copy, adding in typically Fieldsian fashion, “Not a spoonful of the vile stuff has passed underneath my ruby nose these five months.” Nella Braddy, biographer of Anne Sullivan Macy, wrote on behalf of Helen Keller to say that “The Bruiser reached Miss Helen Keller’s home in the midst of the greatest sorrow of her life—the death on Oct. 20 of the great Irishwoman, Anne Sullivan Macy, who had been her teacher and constant companion for forty-nine years.” Braddy told Miss Keller about the book on the train returning from the funeral. “She was very much touched to know that you had thought of using her in the way you did and asked me to thank you.” Not all notices were so sublime. Alton wrote his stepmother from San Quentin,