Culture of Bruising by Gerald Early

First published: 1994

Type of work: Cultural criticism/essays

Form and Content

The Culture of Bruisingcollects essays in which noted cultural critic Gerald Early engages a diversity of topics, ranging from boxing, baseball, and jazz to magic, race, and life with daughters. Most of the essays were previously published in journals as various as The Hungry Mind Review, The Kenyon Review, The Antioch Review, and Harper’s Magazine. As the book’s subtitle announces, the themes that Early examines involve prizefighting, literature, and American culture, but the fourteen essays that compose the volume lack a unifying thesis and exist as separate essays on distinct and sometimes unrelated topics. The book is divided into three sections, each with its own focus, though the essays themselves can easily be read alone without any attempt to understand the relationship among them.

In his introduction, Early observes that this collection grew out of the final essay in his previous essay collection, Tuxedo Junction (1989), an essay by James Baldwin on the first fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Early goes to great lengths to convince readers that his essays should not be read simply as explorations of boxing. Rather, they should be read as the work of a literary critic who is interested in examining a set of propositions about a range of subjects with which he is deeply engaged.

The book’s first section, “Prizefighting and the Modern World,” contains four essays that deal specifically with boxing. The first and longest essay, “The Black Intellectual and the Sport of Prizefighting,” discusses the lack of black writing on the subject. Early observes that—apart from a few key texts including the opening scene of Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952) and Jeffrey Sammons’s nonfiction work Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society (1988)—no black academic writer has written about the sport. Paradoxically, Early points out, black boxers dominate the sport, and the great fights between white fighters and African American fighters—for example, Jerry Cooney versus Michael Spinks or Jerry Quarry versus Muhammad Ali—were elevated to mythic battles in which the boxing ring itself became the place where ideas of order were contested.

In Early’s view, black intellectuals examine boxing only when an African American fighter becomes a hero for the African American masses and fights a white fighter. As Early points out toward the end of his essay, the situation becomes more challenging when two African American fighters square off in the ring, as did Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston. What happens when two such radically different black men confront each other in the ring? Who becomes the model for the preservation of black dignity? Early points out that Patterson had become so trapped in patterns of life created for him by integration that he, unlike Ali or Liston, could do little but play the white nemesis of the African American trickster figure in the ring. The fight thereby perpetuated the notion that the ring was the arena for contesting the established social order.

Another essay in the text’s first section, “The Unquiet Kingdom of Providence,” brilliantly analyzes the political and social implications of the 1962 fight between reigning heavyweight champion Patterson and former prison inmate Liston. According to Early, this fight represented the finest hour of 1960’s liberalism. Patterson finally consented to fight Liston and remarked that Liston had paid for his crimes; if Liston were to defeat him and become champion, then Liston would be a changed man and all his good qualities, buried before the fight, would emerge.

Early points out the irony of a nation of white men watching two black men beat each other’s brains out. Liston’s defeat of Patterson, however, dashed the liberal notion that the fight might reform Liston. Instead, as Early observes, white Americans and bourgeois African Americans recognized the rage buried in the black underclass as well as the inadequacy of liberal rhetoric to deal with it. In the final essay in the first section, “The Romance of Toughness,” Early compares and contrasts the fighting styles and the machismo of Jake LaMotta and Rocky Graziano.

The book’s second section, “Habitations of the Mask,” comprises eight essays covering a wider range of topics, from multiculturalism, baseball, and jazz to magic, Malcolm X, and race and material culture. In “The American Mysticism of Remembrance,” Early questions the value of Black History Month to an American culture already segregated by the demands of race, gender, and class. With affecting grace, Early recalls his realization in the fifth grade—when he failed to complete his report on Phillis Wheatley for Negro History Week—that he hated Negro History Week, because, in his view, his people had no history worthy of Washington or Jefferson.

Early extends his reflections to his present disgust for Black History Month, during which he has become another speaker on a circuit touting the significance of black identity. He points out that the rhetoric surrounding Black History Month is chauvinistic and tyrannical, asserting that black people’s history not only has meaning but must be seen as the source or origin of all meaning in the world. Early challenges such an attitude as anti-intellectual and as one that traps African Americans in a prison of race that offers no more freedom than the prison of race in which whites have trapped them.

In “House of Ruth, House of Robinson: Some Observations on Baseball, Biography, and the American Myth,” Early examines the enduring appeal of baseball, as well as the significant differences between two of the first African American ballplayers in the white leagues, Willie Mays and Jackie Robinson. Whereas Mays was content to play ball, Robinson saw life as more than baseball. Robinson spent much of his time after his baseball career ended working on behalf of civil rights, while Mays was still gliding over the grass and robbing opposing players of home runs.

In “Collecting ’The Artificial Nigger’: Race and American Material Culture,” Early contends that, rather than opposing the little statues of black jockeys displayed in yards across the South, African Americans should collect them as material artifacts of their past. To do so would allow them to bridge the gap between being black and being American. The second section’s longest essay, “Pulp and Circumstance: The Story of Jazz in High Places,” is itself a virtuoso performance that covers the music of Shirley Caesar, Jelly Roll Morton, and Billie Holiday. Holiday’s comeback, according to Early, signified the acceptance of the black jazz artist in mainstream American culture.

In “Notes on the Invention of Malcolm X: Wrestling with the Dark Angel,” Early argues that African Americans must not only learn to value their African identity—as Malcolm X taught—but also accept and embrace the complex fate of being American. The two personal essays in the book’s final section, “Life With Daughters,” explore Early’s relationship with his daughters. They use the lenses of the Miss America Pageant and the movies of Shirley Temple to examine his daughters’ experiences growing up female and black in a white society.

Critical Context

In 1994, The Culture of Bruising won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, an indication that this select group of book reviewers and critics found Early’s work insightful and challenging. That same year, he released a memoir, Daughters: On Family and Fatherhood, that took up the concerns of his final two essays in The Culture of Bruising. His essay “Life with Daughters: Watching the Miss America Pageant” was selected by the prestigious Best American series for publication in Best American Essays of the Century (2000).

Gerald Early, the Merle King Professor of Modern Letters at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, has earned a national reputation as an essayist and cultural critic. His writings offer penetrating insights into music (notably jazz), sports, and African American culture and politics and their impact on American culture. His other books include This Is Where I Came In: Black America in the 1960’s (2003), The Sammy Davis, Jr., Reader (2001), Miles Davis and American Culture (2001), and The Muhammad Ali Reader (1998). Early served as a consultant on documentary filmmaker Ken Burns’s films Baseball (2003) and Jazz (2004). Early’s essays on race and American sports continue to cut against the grain, challenging opinions both inside and outside the academy.

Bibliography

Barthes, Roland. “The World of Wrestling.” In Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers. New York: Hill and Wang, 1972. A seminal piece of cultural criticism on sports, reading the significance of wrestling to modern society.

Crouch, Stanley. “An Introduction to Gerald Early.” In The All-American Skin Game: Or, The Decoy of Race. New York: Pantheon Books, 1995. Positive evaluation of Early’s work by another controversial African American essayist.

Journal of Sport and Social Issues. Review of The Culture of Bruising: Essays on Prizefighting, Literature, and Modern American Culture, by Gerald Early. 18, no. 3 (August, 1994): 293-294. Offers a brief but useful overview of Early’s essay collection.

Sammons, Jeffrey T. Beyond the Ring: The Role of Boxing in American Society. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. Another important consideration of boxing and culture by an African American scholar; one of the few precursors to Early’s collection.