Wrestliana

by Toby Litt

  It was wrestling, William says, that helped Greece extend from ‘a few petty states’ to ‘the most powerful Kingdom at that time in the world’. This fact, he magnificently proclaims, is ‘universally acknowledged by all historians and commentators who have ever treated of the subject’.||

  The first two falls seem to have gone to William.

  *

  Judging the books by their covers, Egan is the winner.

  Put a copy of Boxiana alongside one of Wrestliana and the latter seems a very scrappy, provincial production.

  Figure 20. The first edition.

  Egan’s hardbound three-volume work has illustrations, William’s none but the familiar wrestlers-with-disconnected-heads plate that had appeared for years in the Cumberland Pacquet, and that I’ve put as the frontispiece of my own Wrestliana.

  Yet, despite looking much shorter and more pamphlet-like, Wrestliana was – once it got going – by far the more ambitious work.

  After his brief dedication** and introduction, Egan was happy simply to compile a dictionary of famous boxers – a very long and, to me, quite boring list. William wanted his argument to run from first page to last, and with a strong narrative to boot.

  The middle chapters of Wrestliana take the form of a series of match ups, Wrestling vs. Boxing, Wrestling vs. Hunting, Wrestling vs. Football.

  As with William’s ten undefeated years on Arlecdon Moor, Wrestling is victorious each time – and emerges at the end as last sport standing.

  William has a particular hatred of the violence of boxing, and gives a wince-making description of the epic bout between Jack Carter and Tom Oliver, held at Gretna Green on October 4th 1816. This went to the thirty-second round, after which the defeated Oliver was hustled away in the company of surgeons who declared that ‘in consequence of the vast quantity of blood he had lost’ it was ‘highly dangerous that he should be bled’.††

  Figure 21. ‘The Fight Between Carter and Oliver at Gretna Green, October 4th, 1816’ by William Brown. An amazing painting. Half the sky is summer, half is apocalypse.

  Because we know William saw this, and because there is a painting in existence of the event, it’s possible he is one of the men standing around the ring. They are all dressed the same – top-boots, black jackets. If William’s there, he is anonymized.

  William’s writing, in describing the brutality of this boxing match, and throughout the rest of the book, was energetic, muscular, quick-witted and good-humoured.

  But the reviewers – and there were quite a few reviewers – did not agree.

  John Badcock, writing in the Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette, a publication advertised on the back cover of Wrestliana, questioned William’s scholarship. He also referred to Mr Litt very much in the same patronizing way as James Hogg, ‘the Ettrick Shepherd’, was commonly granted notice. Neither man had been to Oxford or Cambridge, or even Edinburgh or Glasgow, so – in Badcock’s view – they could hardly be called educated. Hogg’s self-education might be startling, in flashes, but could not give the clear, even light of consistent culture. William was also described as a naïve rustic who knew a bit but was fundamentally unsound.

  To William’s defence came Christopher North, the public person of John Wilson – whom we saw between William and William Wordsworth at the Windermere Regatta of 1824. And North’s review was in a far more significant publication than The Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette.

  In Haworth Parsonage, the four Brontë children read it side by side, in eager pairs. Coleridge considered suing it for libel. A bad review from it was thought to have killed Keats.

  Popular, notorious, ground-breaking, spirit-breaking – Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (known as ‘Maga’) was one of the most influential publications in British history.

  And so, for Wrestliana to receive a rave review from Maga’s star reviewer, running to over eighteen double-columned pages, was a very big deal.

  I’m glad it was a big deal because, apart from his victory against Harry Graham and the ovation he received at the 1824 Lonsdale dinner, this was the high point of William’s life.

  The same magazine, and the very same reviewer, that had written of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘A man who abandons his wife and children is undoubtedly both a wicked and pernicious member of society…’,‡‡ said of William that he was as honest, upright, and independent an Englishmen as ever floored or threw.

  Even more expansively, Christopher North’s review gave Wrestliana this opening-line puff: ‘Our literature is rich in British Sports, and this admirable little volume will be a valuable addition to the most bang-up library’.

  Some of the reasons for Christopher North’s high praise are political, and some personal.

  Blackwood’s was a Tory magazine, set up in direct opposition to the Edinburgh Review. If William’s politics had been radical, he could have expected a slating, however good his book was.

  It also helped that John Wilson himself liked William personally, and had wrestled against him. But most important was that he was the right sort of chap saying the right sort of thing.

  The default setting of Christopher North in Blackwood’s was murder–death–kill.§§ He could also mercilessly ignore what he didn’t like.

  To confirm this – there was no equivalent outflow of praise for William’s novel of the following year. As far as I can tell, Blackwood’s didn’t once mention it. And this effectively ended William as a writer.

  But Wrestliana was a different matter. It gave Christopher North the chance to do what he liked best of all, opine. And North’s favourite subject, the core of his public persona, was sport – particularly, fighting.¶¶

  So, let’s have a fight.

  *

  Mr North vs. Mr Fancy, the rave review vs. the stinker.

  Seconds out!

  Mr North tries to assert himself early on, but seems then to back away. He speaks well of wrestling, declaring himself a ‘Littite’ in believing that it is superior ‘as a British field-sport, to pugilism, cock-fighting, horse-racing, foot-ball, running, leaping, and single-stick’, yet flinches by saying ‘our opinion remains wavering between the comparative merits of the science of the Fist, of the Back-Hold, and of the Quarter-staff’.||||

  Mr Fancy wades in; he has no such doubts. Boxing is ‘the primest and, indisputably, most manly exercise in which man can possibly engage’.

  Mr North staggers back, and Mr Fancy follows in with the hard blow that ‘instead of wrestling being distinct or superior to’ boxing, it is secondary to it, wrestling forms part of the match but only ‘after science is exhausted’; wrestling ‘terminates the rounds as the pell-mell fag-ends of a grand procession put the finish to a state raree-show’.

  The referee intervenes, and Mr North takes a standing count. He insists, though, that he’s still up for the fight – and returns with an unexpected uppercut. ‘There is,’ he asserts, ‘none of that bluster about William Litt which there certainly was about Napoleon Buonaparte’. A slightly strange comparison, but the point is that, had William come second at the Carlisle meeting, ‘he would have entertained towards his conqueror none of those petty feelings of spite and envy with which the exile of Helena regarded the victor of Waterloo’.

  Mr Fancy counters with an accusation of rank cowardice. William is a ‘shocking stick’ – ooh! – who has handled the subject of boxing ‘currishly’. Ow! ‘For, after flooring the whole system… he turns about upon his heel, like a fellow who floors another in the street, and runs away to some well-known haunt’.

  Back comes Mr North, ‘Mr Litt is a person in a respectable rank of life, and his character has, we know, been always consonant with his condition. He is, in the best sense of the word, a gentleman…’

  But Mr Fancy is having none of that. Litt ‘returns again and again to the subject of boxing or pugilism, mixing and confounding these and the terms of art in the manner common to novices, flats and yokels’.

  Mr North will not allow this. At the ‘last
grand northern meeting’ (Carlisle, 1823), William – to the gratification of the thousands collected round the ring – was ‘honoured by the especial notice of the most powerful noble family in England’, the Lowthers, of course. Take that, Fancy boy.

  Mr Fancy’s response to this attempted knockout is a sly kidney punch, William ‘showeth forth his non-knowledge in every fresh recurrence to the thing’. The thing being, boxing.

  Mr North – a bit stunned that this is where the fight is going – shifts back a bit, and tries to regain control. William, he says, ‘possesses a clearer head and style’ than Macvey Napier, author of ‘Dissertation on the Scope and Tendency of Lord Bacon’.

  The ‘mode of execution’ of Wrestliana, Mr Fancy jabs away, ‘does not rise above mediocrity’ and ‘is full of localisms and obscurities’.

  The two fighters now move onto the ground of Boxiana. Mr North lands this one-two combo. ‘We love pugilism and Pierce Egan, but in some respects they must yield the palm to wrestling and William Litt’.

  Surprisingly, Mr Fancy seems to concede this equality, but returns with a dangerous swipe, ‘and as to “eloquence,” and all that sort of thing, both these gentlemen seem much upon a par’. But wrestling, William’s ‘favourite sport of “tumble down Dick”’ is no match for the glory of pugilism.

  Mr North attempts to conclude matters with ‘we thank Mr Litt for his well-written, candid, manly, and scientific’ volume.

  As he backs towards his corner, the bell for the round having gone, Mr Fancy counsels Mr Litt to ‘avoid controversy, and round off his flowing style’.

  Not likely.

  Mr Fancy! – God, don’t you really just want to clobber him? – to smack the lah-di-dah little tosser right in the gob?

  Which is, I’m pretty sure – though in slightly less demobbed 1950s language – exactly what a lot of men feel when they hear me speak. Not because I’m necessarily going to be super-articulate. A lot of the time I’m a shoe-inspecting mumbler who, Leigh complains, always messes up any story he tries to tell. But I did go to public school and then to Oxford, and they’re still there in my voice. I sound clivver.

  In 1997, the actor and television presenter Stephen Fry was interviewed by Anthony Clare on the radio programme In the Psychiatrist’s Chair. His point was this: the British public associate eloquence with insincerity.***

  Clare asked, ‘And you can intellectualize almost anything?’ And Fry, in a magnificent statement worth quoting in full, said:

  Yeah, but also it’s a problem of being in this culture now where, you know, feelings seem to be presented as an antithesis of logic and reason and to me part of the real beauty of humanity and the world is reason and is thought. It is one of the most beautiful things we have and one of the most moving and most profound. Yet we live in a culture in which people generally think that if something is well expressed it’s less likely to be true than if it’s badly expressed. That a fumbling for words is an index of sincerity and truth and a mastery linguistically of expression of feelings, however complex, must be regarded as an example of precisely that. That I’m describing something that means a lot to me emotionally but doing it in language that is not chaotic. And people distrust that, and perhaps rightly and perhaps I distrust it myself.’ (Italics mine.)

  The fact that Fry had been able to speak about his depression with coherence, and the occasional sub-clause, made people believe it wasn’t that serious. The full force of an emotional point is only ever made by inarticulacy. What he’d really needed to do, to convince them, was cry like a baby.

  True feeling, supposedly, drives out language – only tears, screams, gestures (hugs, fist-pumps) and flying fists will do.

  Mr Fancy’s parting advice is foolish – if you take away William’s flow and his controversial opinions, you leave him very little.

  Judged by Mr Fancy’s metropolitan standards, William’s prose is poor; judged by our contemporary standards, his liveliness and vulnerability are far preferable to the strut and sneer and quote and carp of 1823 Oxford-educated prose.

  William is not at all concerned about being correct, he just wants to be right.

  Fine abstract sentiments, William would have argued, are all very well for fine abstract subjects – what I’m about is the practical. You’re not in the library, man, you’re in the ring – and this man’s there, against you. He wants to put you down. How do you take hold? What do you feel, his chest pressed against your chest? When he tries a chip, what then? What use are words now?

  *

  In reading the bad reviews of Wrestliana, I hated to hear William put down. I found myself skimming ahead through each new paragraph, willing the writer to say something positive about him. And if they didn’t, I got angry.

  He’s a better man than you, I’d think. You great Georgian ponce.

  Clearly, even apart from Christopher North, William got many more of his contemporaries on his side. James Hogg wrote to the magazine’s editor, William Blackwood, after reading that number of Blackwood’s:

  My dear Sir… The maga is excellent. No dross…Wrestliana is the very thing for me. Wilson must come to the Yarrow games this year…†††

  Wilson may have gone to wrestle, William didn’t.

  I needed to.

  When I read Wrestliana once again, in the Spring of 2016, I wasn’t looking at it abstractly, or as a literary critic.

  It was my training manual.

  * A first edition of Wrestliana is so sought after that you would have trouble getting one for less than £1,000.

  † Almost two hundred years after its publication, Wrestliana is a much sought after volume – not just by specialists in wrestling and martial arts, but among general collectors of sports books. The copy I and my father bought, in 2009 from an antiquarian bookseller in Suffolk, so there would be one in the family, cost us £500. The original price was ‘Two Shillings and Sixpence’.

  ‡ Pierce Egan, Boxiana, 1813, pp. 1–2. But whom could Adam have sparred with, apart from Eve? Even with all his wiles, the armless Serpent wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.

  § Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 8; 2nd ed., p. 2.

  ¶ Pierce Egan, Boxiana, 1813, p. 3.

  || Wrestliana, 1st ed., p. 10; 2nd ed., p. 4.

  ** One of the most startling things about Wrestliana is its dedication, or rather its lack of dedication. Here was an easy way for William to ingratiate himself to the Earl of Lowther, yet he didn’t take it. Instead, he replaces a conventional dedication with something very much like the studio chat skits that begin hip-hop albums. William first gives a cameo of himself at work on the proofs for his book. ‘But our old acquaintance, Tim Twistwell, a knowing kind of chap, and something of a wrestler, looking in upon us and observing we were busy writing over the first sheet for the press, desired to look at the Preface’.

  There follows a bluff argument.

  ‘Preface!’ says William, ‘truly I mean to write none.’

  Tim Twistwell makes various attempts to persuade William to be more backward in putting himself forward. ‘Thou has not taken sufficient pains to acquire information.’

  ‘“Too much pudding will choak a dog,”’ William says, ‘Tim, I know enough without it to illustrate my own opinion of the subject; and except in the historical department, where quotations are both amusing and instructive, my own knowledge will be sufficient.’

  William concludes his victory by asking, ‘Thinkest thou there is one man in the kingdom who has won as many prizes as I have and can write better?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Then be content, good Tim, and in lieu of a Preface, I will publish our conversation.’

  †† Ibid., p. 40.

  ‡‡ ‘Some Observations on the “Biographia Literaria” of S.T. Coleridge’, John Wilson, Blackwood’s Magazine, October 1817.

  §§ In the 1980s, there was a fashion for American newspapers to headhunt British tabloid journalists. Why? Because they could do the Blackwood’s style better than anyone else.
They wrote to a purpose and with a vengeance. Facts were merely the opinions of the unimaginative. All of this attitude could be seen to start with John Wilson, John Gibson Lockhart and James Hogg in 1820s Edinburgh.

  ¶¶ John Wilson had written a very long article on boxing, in ‘Maga’, in 1819.

  |||| The Annals of Sporting and Fancy Gazette, March 1824, p. 268. Other quotes that follow are nearby.

  *** Anthony Clare, In the Psychiatrist’s Chair III, Chatto & Windus, 1998, p. 140. It’s interesting that, for no particular reason (apart from what this whole book is about), Fry spends a lot of time discussing his attitude to sport – as non-participant and as fan.

  ††† Hogg letter to Blackwood, 18 January 1824, quoted in The Collected Letters of James Hogg 1820–1831, edited by Gillian Hughes, Edinburgh University Press, 2006, p. 196.

  16

  ACTUALLY WRESTLING

  23 March 2016

  All the way up, on the train, I read and reread the practical bits of Wrestliana and thought about how – in five hours, then four hours, then three – I could be riding in an ambulance.

  I knew fairly certainly which injuries I feared most. I’d constructed a sliding scale.

  At the very top, there was quadriplegia – a broken neck and me in a wheelchair, unable to hug my children, scanning websites for advances in robot exoskeletons. Then there was the fractured lower vertebra, keeping me away from my desk, perhaps forever. There was the ruptured knee ligament. In the days before, I had started to notice how many of the men I saw were limping as they walked. I started to walk with an imaginary limp myself, because I thought a knee injury the likeliest. I flashed forward to the serious painkiller addiction that would follow. Next, there was the broken collarbone and the dislocated shoulder. By the time I got this far down the list, I was staring to bargain. ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘I’d settle for that.’ Badly strained wrist, yes, that would be fine – as long as it was the non-writing hand. Can we make it the left wrist?