Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  About halfway through my school career, I had my most glorious sporting moment. After doing lots of circuit training for a rugby tour of the Netherlands, I became very fit. The school steeplechase that year saw me finish seventh. I was recruited for the cross-country team, and joined the athletics team – I was assigned to the 800 metres, a wonderful, killing distance, neither sprint nor slog. But 800 metres was the event of my sporting hero, Sebastian Coe, and another English victor, Steve Ovett.

  Seb Coe running, one of the greatest sights I’ve ever seen on a television. Birdcage ribs above very British legs, superbly pale toward the upper thigh. Floating, as if a hundred birds inside his lungs were winging him forwards. By the time Steve Cram came to the fore, I was losing interest; Cram’s appalling flipper-footed style made me pray someone else would beat him – it didn’t matter what country they came from. I wanted that flailing embarrassment out of my sight. Earlier, though, I’d read Running Free, Sebastian Coe’s co-written autobiography. I’d also read about Sir Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile and, one year, took part in the four by 800 metres at the Public School’s Relays. This was held on a proper all-weather running track, on the Iffley Road, Oxford. The very place the four-minute mile had been broken.

  BMS were in the lead when I took the baton and still in the lead when I handed it over. Our anchor leg runner was our weakest, and we finished outside the top three. But I’d worn the vest and the spikes. I ran a time of two minutes nine seconds – as close as I’d ever come to the pace of a four-minute mile.

  I was sporty, or sporty enough to pass.

  But it wasn’t what I felt I was best at.

  * William’s published books, history and novel, contain quotations from Thomson’s The Seasons and Virgil’s Aeneid. But, at this time, it would have been unusual for a schoolboy not to have studied them – and to miss Gray’s ‘Elegy’ would have been unthinkable.

  6

  MY BEST DAYS

  The men I feel saddest for are those whose schooldays really were the best days of their lives.

  The washed-up high school sports star has become an American archetype. Rabbit Angstrom, hero of John Updike’s Rabbit novels, was once almost-great at basketball. Jack Kerouac turned to writing after a knee injury ended his American football career. In ‘Glory Days’, Bruce Springsteen sings of having a few drinks with a guy who used to be a great baseball pitcher – and they can’t talk about anything else, because there’s nothing else to talk about. Sport takes everything, leaves nothing – nothing except aches and jokes. Match of the Day banter.

  For my own sons, I hope they peak around the age of sixty-four and a half. Obviously, that means they’re going to be doing something mental rather than physical. But I don’t want them to spend their lives reminiscing about goals they once scored or saves they once made.

  William said of himself, in Wrestliana, ‘my best day was in 1806, 1807 and 1808’ – which makes it quite a long day. He meant his best wrestling day. He would have been 21-years-old when he began to peak. School would have been over for a while – and the two main sources on William’s life mostly agree about what he was up to, during that time, which wasn’t a great deal.

  The Memoirist says that he was leading ‘what may be called rather a loose, gentlemanly kind of life’. This involved living with his parents at Netherend and ‘taking just what portion of the duties of the farm he pleased, and at such times as best suited his inclination and convenience’.

  Wrestling and Wrestlers is more specific, and more critical. William’s parents, they say, saw that ‘young Litt had rendered himself in some measure unfit for the Church’. To try and give him an alternative they ‘placed him with a neighbouring farmer to get an insight into practical, as well as theoretical, agricultural pursuits’.* Elsewhere the authors give their gloss on the word ‘unfit’ by writing: ‘Attending wrestling and racing meetings unfits many persons for a steady and attentive devotion to business’.

  Their word ‘devotion’ was carefully chosen. William, around 18-years-old, had shown himself to be unfit for the business of devotion and incapable of devotion to business. This lack of application might have something to do with alcohol, and the easy money of gambling, and low company. If Henry & Mary is as autobiographical as I believe it is, and if its straying hero Henry is a stand-in for William, then these early years of manhood led him into temptation.

  Why did William not take to farming? It may be, simply, because – as my father would say – it was ‘a bit too much like hard work’.†

  To get an idea of the yearly round of farming in Cumberland, I searched the British Library for contemporary documents. I lucked out, and found a diary kept between 1811 and 1859 by William Fisher of Barrow. His notes are extremely laconic, perhaps simply those of an exhausted man, but record how much sheer grind was involved in growing crops and tending sheep and cows. One sentence for January 20th reads, ‘Begun to plow’ and then adds ‘March 23 had done plowing’. (Two months trudging behind the blade! – enough to break any plough boy.) Sewing the corn takes from the 2nd to the 20th of April, after which the barley takes another ten days. The milch-cows are laid out in early June. July is mowing hay in the meadows. August 10th to September 12th is sheep-shearing. In late October, the milch-cows are laid in. The diary has nothing to say about winter.

  William did not become a farmer. This, for him, is the moment of great regret – both main sources agree.

  ‘On arriving at manhood, with a vacillation much regretted in after life, farming was neglected and abandoned’,‡ says Wrestling and Wrestlers.

  ‘Memoir of the Author’ gives a more elaborate explanation:

  In after years he looked back on this period of his career with feelings of great pain, and attributed his subsequent misfortunes and want of success in life to the fact that the golden time of youth had been allowed to pass over so unprofitably, and to the circumstance that he had not been brought up to look forward to any particular occupation as a means of living.

  From our point of view, two hundred years later, William seems to have been a definite success in two areas – as a wrestler and as a writer. And as, for us, these are both acceptable ways of making a living, and of defining oneself as a man, he seems hardly to have been a failure at all. But William was a gentleman, and the son of a gentleman. It was only in the years after he retired from the ring that professional sportsmen began to gain recognition.

  Paul Johnson says in his book Birth of the Modern, ‘In no respect did the modern age proclaim its arrival more significantly than in the rise of competitive, organized, regulated and mass-directed sports. In the past, sports usually had been regarded as the resort of the idle, frivolous, dissolute and even the disaffected – “sporting meetings” were often a pretext for treasonable gatherings of the discontented gentry and their followers. Suddenly, at the beginning of the [nineteenth] century, it became identified with healthy outdoor exercise and, equally important, with moral cleanliness: mens sana in corpore sano’.

  Later in life, William regretted his youth as feckless, undirected. He hadn’t laid the foundations of prosperity, or learned a useful trade. But it’s clear he did devote himself to something, wrestling. I take this brief paragraph from Wrestliana§ as disguised autobiography:

  To arrive at the top of the tree in either wrestling or boxing, a complete knowledge of the science, and varied and effective action are indispensably necessary; and neither of these requisites can possibly be acquired without practice of every description. What we mean by practice of every description is, practice with superiors, equals, and inferiors, both in respect of science and weight; and to form a complete master, such practice is absolutely necessary.

  Despite being the son of the Commissioner for the Enclosure of Waste Lands, William must have been liked by other wrestlers. If he had not been, he would not have gained the opportunity to train. There is no way he could have forced or bought his way in. Natural talent wasn’t enough. He had to be one of t
he lads. In Wrestliana, it’s clear that whilst none of the wrestlers were full-time professionals, many of them had occupations that gave them a kind of daily preparation for the hard lifting and muscular strain of the ring. Millers, for example, such as the famed William Richardson, of Caldbeck.

  From frequent practice in lifting and removing loads with his arms, in which the knee and foot are sometimes used as auxiliaries, he might have acquired more strength in the leg when striking out, and felt less incommoded when balancing and turning his man, than if he had been brought up to almost any other trade.

  To compete with, and sometimes to defeat, men whose daily business was hard physical labour, William must have been anything but idle in his youth.

  This was the time when, in the words of the poem ‘The Enthusiast’ – handwritten in the back of the family copy of Henry & Mary – William ‘had been / In very youth, the Champion of the green…’

  He must have put in the hours.

  Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers popularized the idea of the 10,000 hours rule – that in order to become an expert in any given discipline (playing the violin, writing short stories, bricklaying) a person needs to have spent 10,000 hours doing that thing.¶ Former table-tennis champion Matthew Syed, in Bounce, refines Gladwell’s definition. Achieving excellence doesn’t just demand putting in the hours, it requires ten years of directed practise.||

  I found this an incredibly persuasive idea, when I first read it. And when I applied it to myself, it seemed to fit. I began writing fiction seriously in about 1986; my first book was published in 1996. But I also had my doubts. It’s not that I believed in innate gifts that took a sportsperson all the way or in inevitably triumphant artistic genius; more that I thought – before the hours – the basic physiology or neurology also needed to be in place. I was relieved to find this argument put far better than I could put it in David Epstein’s The Sports Gene. This is a point-by-point takedown of Malcolm Gladwell’s argument, for which Gladwell was gracious enough, or self-publicizing enough, to give a cover quote saying that it’s ‘A wonderful book’. David Epstein finds a way to explain what makes champions. For example, some of them may have a talent not for a particular sport but for being trainable.

  What all of these accounts of sporting achievement leave out is what I see as central: a certain degree of fuckedupness. No one starts wanting and needing to be the world’s greatest X without some kind of very sad prompt. Occasionally, but not always, this is abuse they’ve suffered. Often, what gets a person to put in 10,000 hours is a simple desire for revenge.

  Out of my own past, I came raging against bullies – I wanted to make sure my voice was the one that was listened to, not theirs.

  If it takes ten years of dedicated practise to achieve the highest level, that would place William’s serious dedication of himself to wrestling in 1795, when he was 10-years-old. Seems about right. And, if so, this would have required a lot of hanging about on the green, throwing and – more often – being thrown.

  Perhaps the village green really was as idyllic as the place Susanna Blamire, the self-styled ‘Muse of Cumberland’, lays out in ‘Stoklewath; or, the Cumbrian Village’.**

  Now on the green the youth their gambols keep,

  Stretching their sinews in the bounding leap;

  Others the wrestler’s glory would maintain,

  Twist the strong nerve and fill the swelling vein;

  One youth his pip blows from the rocky hill,

  Seated like Pan above the clacking mill;

  Another strikes the violin’s cheerful string,

  Light to the dance the bounding virgins spring;

  ’Tis most part nature, yet some art is found

  When one—two—three lies heavy on the ground…

  This vision is like something off the side of a Greek vase, or the painting by Edgar Degas, ‘Young Spartans Exercising’ (without the nudity, I guess).

  The idyllic greens were later to be enclosed, by William’s father.

  How good was William, as a wrestler?

  Well, when a copy of Wrestliana came into his hands, he would add beneath his name the words ‘Winner of 200 belts’. That means he won two hundred competitions, small and large. Each competition would have had a number of rounds, sometimes three and sometimes as many as six or seven. This suggests William won well over 1,000 competitive wrestling bouts.

  His most impressive statistic is that for ten consecutive years, on Arlecdon Moor, William went undefeated. The place was his fortress. He was perfect there.

  Elsewhere, he didn’t do so well. His record at the Carlisle races wasn’t good. The further from home he went, the less well he did.

  In this, William was like Antaeus – the wrestler from Greek myth who couldn’t be defeated on his home turf. It took wily Hercules to figure out Antaeus’ weakness. To beat Antaeus you needed to lift him off the ground. By holding him in the air, breaking the link between man and land, Hercules took away Antaeus’ strength. After figuring this out, Hercules was easily able to bear-hug the previously unbeatable wrestler into submission.

  William was good enough at wrestling to seem mythic.

  And what was I doing, when I was twenty-one, twenty-two and twenty-three?

  I was reading – reading and writing.

  When I finished reading a book, I noted it down in my diary. In 1990, I read 101 books; the next year, 109; and 1992, it was 104.

  I read Graham Greene and Jane Austen, Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bishop and more Graham Greene. I read on the metro and in trams. I read for whole anxious, blissful afternoons.

  I also wrote and rewrote three novels (never published), and either wrote or co-translated 265 poems.†† I kept a daily diary. I wrote a weekly letter to my parents. For my employers, a private English school, I created dialogues for English courses.

  This was me, taking a large chunk out of the necessary 10,000 hours of directed practise. Much of what I wrote was an attempt to drag myself away from the sludge of adolescent self-pity and self-hatred.

  Forgive me, but I sometimes used to ask myself if I would prefer to be happy or that vague thing I thought of as ‘great’ – as in ‘a great poet’, ‘a great writer’. It wasn’t a real question, this, because I knew the answer already. I was just pushing myself onwards. Of course, I would do anything, write any number of words, trash any number of years, to become ‘great’.

  If I looked up from my book, from my desk, which I must have done sometimes, outside the window was post-revolutionary Prague.

  I arrived there on Easter Sunday 1990 and stayed for exactly one hundred and twenty weeks.

  In retrospect, I am partly amazed how much work I got done, but mostly I am sorry how little I allowed myself to enjoy myself – and I am even more sorry how negligently I treated Magdalena and Virginia, my first and second girlfriends.

  Magdalena had fled Prague in 1968, as a little girl, with her mother. She grew up in Sweden, and spoke English and Swedish better than she did Czech. Magdalena was dark haired, pale skinned. She worked in the National Theatre. I loved her. I couldn’t believe she was going out with me, and I treated her so badly she soon wasn’t.

  Virginia was English. She had come to Prague to learn Czech, Early New High German and to start a PhD about a Protestant from the start of the fifteenth century known as Peter the Englishman. Gini was auburn haired, freckled. She ended up working for an educational foundation funded by the billionaire George Soros. I loved her. I couldn’t believe she was going out with me, but she stuck with me for several obsessive years.

  I was so boring.

  I never wanted to do anything except read and write. The most exercise I took was a walk up to Prague Castle.

  Whenever I missed a day at the desk, I became convinced I was worthless. If I wasn’t writing, I might as well be dead.

  1990, 1991 and 1992 were a high point for Europe.

  I could have seen much more of them than I did.

  If 1806,
1807 and 1808 were William’s best day, then these years were a high point for Great Britain, too – or, at least, the beginning of the glory days. Political historians love the pungency of this era – very posh men in stinky wigs trying to top one another’s eloquence, or undermine one another’s parliamentary oomph.

  Walk in through the side door of Westminster Abbey, and you find yourself dwarfed by pale marble versions of these democratic giants. They stand, refreshingly noble, secular but god-fearing, voluble even in their silence – Charles Fox, George Canning, William Pitt the Younger.

  1805 had brought victory at Trafalgar, the sea-battle against the French and Spanish Navies that set up a hundred years of ‘Britannia Rules the Waves!’ But this is more to do with the Winston Churchill school of history, those who believe that Britain’s finest hour always comes when the nation is on the back foot. Thus, 1940, after the evacuation of Dunkirk, when Hitler could go sightseeing in Paris, and on through the heroics of the Battle of Britain; thus, 1805 – after Napoleon had defeated both the Austrian and French armies, at the battle of Austerlitz, and had Europe at his mercy.

  What was my father – young David H.B. Litt – doing, at the age when William was having his best days?

  The answer is simple: National Service. Stationed in West Germany, he dated German blondes and translated love letters to German blondes for his fellow Tommies. He polished his boots to a bright shine, and hated it. If he misbehaved, the Sergeant Major had him peeling potatoes all day long. Mainly, he drove a tiny armoured Daimler Dingo Scout Car with five gears forwards and five in reverse. He was in the cavalry, the Royal 17th/21st Lancers. Their cap badge was a skull and crossbones that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Jolly Roger. Their motto was ‘Death or Glory’.