Punchy prose
F X Toole talks like he writes. Rapidly and saltily. He is 70 years old, is just off the plane and his hearing aid is playing up. But he is unstoppable – on bullfighting, boxing and writing, the Hemingway-esque trinity which has shaped his life and seen a heart-warming late literary flowering. We meet at a gym in east London and, after a couple of hours in his ebullient company, I feel I have gone 10 rounds with a champ, light on his feet but punching heavy, like the prose in Toole’s debut book, Rope Burns.
Rope Burns is a collection of short stories that draws on Toole’s experiences in boxing. James Ellroy has called the book “a hymn to ferocious longing and loss” and described it as “the best boxing short fiction ever written”. It is visceral and violent; written in a rhythmic street language that, in the great American tradition, manages to be both uncompromising and elegiac. It is, on all counts, a pretty good first round for a 70-year-old, worth his 50-year-wait to get published.
Where to start with Toole? He seems to encapsulate America. Irish father and “brought up Irish” – the FX stands for Francis Xavier; Californian country-girl mother; child of the Depression; brief stint in the navy; trained to be an actor (his brother became an opera singer) but wanted to write too and read avidly. One day he read Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon and had a vision of his future life.
“I was fed up with theatre people. I came upon Death in the Afternoon and said ‘here it is, here’s the real thing, here’s the true drama’. I gave up acting and became a bullfighter, and I got the living shit kicked out of me.”
Toole moved to Mexico and became fluent in Spanish. But he soon realised that it was already too late; though only in his mid-20s, he was too old. “I was a pretty good bullfighter, but I didn’t have the skills to get out of the way. A good writer – it’s not only what he puts in, it’s what he leaves out, right? with a good fighter, it’s not only what he takes to it, it’s how he gets away. I had to take chances that someone 16 would not be expected to take.” He got gored three times, ran out of money, and after two years, headed back to the US- with a new wife and daughter.
Maybe age imposes a seamlessness on life, but Toole’s struggles have barely made a mark on his spirit. His body is in pretty good shape, too, considering the goring, the boxing, and open-heart surgery 10 years ago. There is clearly something to be said for avoiding publishers’ lunches until your 70s.
Toole is vague about the 20 years following his return to California. Two more marriages (“three strikes and now I’m out”); construction work; lots of bar tending, a good place to hone both survival skills and story-telling instincts; and writing, writing, writing: an “LSD novel”, a play in which a pair of Doberman pinschers play key roles, but nothing that came even remotely close to being published.
Lesser men would have despaired. In fact, it sounds like even Toole despaired. “I didn’t have the heart for it. The reason I didn’t have the heart for it is that I didn’t have my soul. It took open-heart surgery to give me my soul back; it gave me the heart to put up with rejection.” In Missouri in 1996, a boxing story, The Monkey Look, “popped” into Toole’s head. He wrote it, a magazine accepted it, Secker and Warburg editor Geoff Mulligan read it and commissioned Rope Burns, which is being published simultaneously in the UK and US. There has even been Hollywood interest, though Toole already seems to have latched on to the fact that film optioners fight dirtier than ageing heavyweights.
Though Toole has always loved boxing, he came late to the professional game. “I was 45, living in California; I’m watching the fights every week and all of a sudden the skies part and I think I’m going to learn how to do this. I had no illusions about being a fighter; I wanted to understand how they did it, mechanically, psychically and mentally. That was the great adventure.”
He found a trainer called Dub Huntley, who was so sure that Toole would give up he trained him for nothing. Toole didn’t go away. He was way too old to fight, but not too old to work as a cornerman. Huntley was tied up one evening and asked Toole to work the corner for one of his fighters in an amateur contest in LA. Toole reluctantly agreed and it was love at first fight. “I fell in love right there, from the inside out. It was from the outside in before; now it’s the inside out.”
He became a fight junkie. “There’s nothing like it in the world. It’s like bullfighting: you’re living right on the edge. I’ll fly anywhere. Where’s the fight? I’ll go.” He became an expert in treating cuts and travelled all over the US, and to Europe and South Africa, working corners.
In the introduction to Rope Burns, Toole reflects on this love affair: “I began to learn and to understand what had drawn me to boxing as a boy. It was the science of fighting, and the heart it takes to be a fighter. Boxing was an exercise of the mind. I also began to realise that, despite my age, I was someone who could play the game. I was spellbound. I still am. God has blessed me with the sweet science.”
Rope Burns depicts the brutality and crookedness of fighting, the viciousness of LA street life, the desperate circumstances of many boxers. Toole wants to distance himself from writers such as Norman Mailer, who, Toole says, have written about boxing from the outside and in the process romanticised it.
“What happens so often is, ‘look at me, look how much I know about boxing’, as opposed to ‘what’s the subject that we’re dealing with?’ I have this tremendous insight into this hermetically sealed world, which they don’t; they don’t know their ass. Mailer trained and for a while he was trying to get into fights with people. The writer as tough guy. Fuck that. You fight for money or you fight because someone comes through the window of your house. Some writer comes up and says ‘let’s go fight’; get lost.”
But for all the desperation, the fact that Toole portrays a Fat City-style world of bruisers and losers, there is a kind of innocent beauty in the book too: the love of the trainer for his charge; the common search for identity, for – key word in boxing – respect; the way two men who have brutalised each other will hug at the end; the realisation that the higher you go, the further you can fall.
Toole mentions, in passing, a fighter called Frankie “Too Sweet” Jennings, a handsome man in his youth (hence Too Sweet), now so busted up he can hardly make himself understood. A good argument against boxing, I suggest. Toole doesn’t get the full freight of the question. Jennings was talented, he says, but he didn’t train properly, was out of condition, got hit too often. Now you just want to hug him, hold him.
But boxing wrecks lives, I say loudly, to make sure the hearing aid is working, and he gets the counter-punch. He throws a combination. “There is more barbarity in corporate America than there is in boxing. More lives are destroyed in business than in boxing. They kill more jockeys in America than fighters. The physical part of boxing is incidental to the mental part. I hope I’ve portrayed that in the book. You have to be tough to be a boxer, but it’s not about being tough, it’s about being smart. In bullfighting, one of the worst things they can say to a young bullfighter is ‘you’re brave, you’ve got balls’. Bullfighters want to be artists. The greatest of all was Pedro Romero. He was in 7,000 bullfights and he never shed a drop of blood. That’s a good bullfighter.”
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