Nabokov on the pleasure of being knocked out

 Play (Breitenstrater—Paolino) (Essay, 1925)

(...)
Nabokov—who had been taught boxing at home as a child and was ready to use it at school to defend victims from bullies, and was an occasional boxing coach in the mid-1920s—here exults in boxing, its traditions, its champions, its artistry, its courage. He exults even in the pleasure of being knocked out. Most surprisingly of all, this non-crowd-lover, this resolute individualist, exalts the crowds who come to watch boxing in a spirit very much like his.
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Everything in the world plays: the blood in a lover’s veins, the sun on water, and a musician on a violin.

Everything good in life—love, nature, the arts, and homespun puns—is play. And when we actually play—whether we’re knocking down a tin battalion with a pea or meeting over the barrier of a tennis net—what we feel in our very muscles is the essence of the play engaged in by the marvelous juggler who tosses from hand to hand, in an unbroken sparkling parabola, the planets of the universe.

People have played as long as they have existed. There are eras— humanity’s holidays—when people particularly take to games. So it was in bygone Greece, in bygone Rome, and so it is in the Europe of our own day.

A child well knows that in order to play to his heart’s content he must play with someone else or at least imagine somebody, he must become two. Or, to put it another way, there is no play without competition; which is why some kinds of play, such as those gymnastic festivals in which fifty-odd men or women, moving as one, form patterns across a parade ground, seem insipid, since they lack the main thing which gives play its ravishing, thrilling charm. That’s why the communist system is so ridiculous, since it condemns everyone to performing the same tedious drills, not allowing that anyone should be fitter than his neighbor.

Not for nothing did Nelson say that the Battle of Trafalgar was won on the football and tennis grounds of Eton.' And the Germans, too, have lately realized that the goose step won’t take you far, and that boxing, football, and hockey are more valuable than military or any other drills. Boxing is especially valuable, and there are few sights healthier or finer than a boxing match. A highly strung gent, who dislikes washing stark naked in the mornings and inclines to surprise that a poet working for two and a half connoisseurs earns less money than a boxer who works for a crowd of many thousands (a crowd which, by the way, has nothing in common with the so-called masses and is filled with a delight far more pure, sincere, and good-natured than that of the crowd welcoming home its civic heroes), this highly strung gent will feel indignation and disgust toward a fistfight, just as in Rome, probably, there were people who frowned at the sight of two huge gladiators demonstrating the very best in the gladiatorial arts, slugging each other with such iron blows that not even the pollice verso” was necessary, they’d finish each other off anyway.

What matters, of course, is not at all that a heavyweight boxer is a little bloodied after two or three rounds or that the white waistcoat of the referee looks as though red ink has leaked out of a fountain pen.

What matters is, first, the beauty of the very art of boxing, the perfect accuracy of the attacks, the side jumps, the dives, the range of blows— hooks, straights, haymakers—and, second, that fine manly excitement this art arouses. Many writers have depicted the beauty and the romance of boxing. Bernard Shaw has a whole novel about a professional boxer.’ Jack London, Conan Doyle, and Kuprin have all written on the subject. Byron, that darling of all Europe, except exacting England, eagerly befriended boxers and loved to watch their fights, just as Pushkin and Lermontov would have loved it, had they lived in England. Portraits have survived of the professional boxers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The famous Figg, Corbett, Cribb’ fought without gloves and fought skillfully, honorably, tenaciously, more often to utter exhaustion than to a knockout.

And it was not at all the commonplace of humaneness that led to the appearance of boxing gloves in the middle of last century, but, rather, a desire to protect the fist, which could otherwise be too easily broken in the course of a two-hour bout. They have all long since stepped down from the ring, those famous, champion pugilists, having won their supporters quite a few pounds sterling, and lived to a ripe old age, and in the evenings, in taverns, over a pint of beer, they would talk with pride of their former exploits. They were followed by others, the teachers of today’s boxers: the massive Sullivan, Burns, with his looks of a London dandy, and Jeffries, the son of a blacksmith, “the white hope,” as they called him, a hint that black boxers were already becoming unbeatable.

Those who had hoped that Jeffries would beat the black giant Johnson lost their money. The two races followed this fight closely. But despite the furious enmity between the white and black camps (the event took place in America twenty-five or more years ago), not a single boxing rule was broken, even though Jeffries, with every one of his blows, kept repeating, “Yellow dog ... yellow dog.” Finally, after a long, splendid fight, the enormous Negro struck his opponent so hard that Jeffries flew backward from the ring, over the surrounding ropes, and, as they say, “fell asleep.” Poor Johnson! He rested on his laurels, gained weight, married a beautiful white woman, began appearing as a living advertisement on the music-hall stage, and then, apparently, ended up in jail, and only briefly did his black face and white smile flash out from the illustrated magazines.

I was lucky enough to see Smith, and Bombardier Wells, and Goddard, and Wilde, and Beckett, and the wonderful Carpentier, who beat Beckett. That fight, which paid the winner five thousand, and the runner-up three thousand pounds, lasted exactly fifty-six seconds, so that someone who had paid twenty pounds for his seat had only enough time to light a cigarette, and when he looked up at the ring, Beckett was already lying on the boards in the touching pose of a sleeping baby.

I hasten to add that in such a blow, which brings on an instantaneous blackout, there is nothing terrible. On the contrary. I have experienced it myself, and can attest that such a sleep is rather pleasant. At the very tip of the chin there is a bone, like the one in the elbow which in English is called “the funny bone,” and in German “the musical bone.” As everyone knows, if you hit the corner of your elbow hard, you immediately feel a faint ringing in the hand and a momentary numbing of the muscles. The same thing happens if you are hit very hard on the end of the chin.

There is no pain. Only the peal of a faint ringing and then pleasant instantaneous sleep (the so-called knockout), lasting from ten seconds to half an hour. A blow to the solar plexus is less pleasant, but a good boxer knows just how to tense his abdomen so that he won’t flinch even if a horse kicks him in the pit of the stomach.

I saw Carpentier this week, on Tuesday evening. He was there as trainer to the heavyweight Paolino, and the spectators seemed not to recognize immediately, in that modest, fair-haired young man, a recent world champion. His fame has faded now. They say that after his fearsome fight with Dempsey he sobbed like a woman.

Paolino appeared in the ring first and sat down, as is customary, on a stool in the corner. Huge, with a square dark head, and wearing a magnificent robe down to his heels, this Basque resembled an Oriental idol.

Only the ring itself was lit, and in the white cone of light falling on him from above, the platform looked like silver. This silvered cube, amid a gigantic dark oval, where the dense rows of countless human faces called to mind kernels of ripe corn strewn against a black background— this silvered cube seemed lit up not by electricity, but by the concen- trated force of all the gazes fixed on it out of the darkness. And when the Basque’s opponent, the German champion Breitenstriter,  stepped onto the bright platform, fair-haired, in a mouse-colored robe (and for some reason in gray trousers, which he immediately began to pull off), the enormous darkness trembled with a joyful roar. The roar did not die down when the photographers, jumping onto the edge of the platform, pointed their “monkey-boxes” (as my German neighbor called them) at the fighters, at the referee, at the seconds, nor when the champions “pulled on their boxing gloves” (which reminds me of “the young oprichnik and the valiant merchant”). And when both opponents threw off their robes (and not “velvety furs”) from their mighty shoulders and rushed toward each other in the white gleam of the ring, a slight moan went through the dark abyss, through the rows of corn kernels and the misty upper tiers, for everyone saw how much bigger and stockier the Basque was than their favorite.

Breitenstrater attacked first, and the moan turned into a rumble of delight. But Paolino, hunching his head into his shoulders, answered him with short uppercuts, and from almost the first minute the German’s face glistened with blood.

With every blow that Breitenstrater took, my neighbor took in air with a whistle, as if he himself were taking the blows, and all the darkness, all the tiers croaked a kind of enormous supernatural croak. By the third round it became noticeable that the German had weakened, that his punches could not push off the hunched orange hill moving toward him. But he fought with extraordinary courage, trying to make up with his speed for the fifteen pounds by which the Basque outweighed him.

Around the luminous cube, across which the boxers danced with the referee twisting between them, the black darkness froze, and in the silence the glove, shiny with sweat, smacked juicily on the live naked body. At the start of the seventh round Breitenstriter fell, but after five or six seconds, jerking forward like a horse on black ice, he stood up.

The Basque fell upon him immediately, knowing that in such situations you must act decisively and swiftly, put all your strength into your punches, for sometimes a blow that is stinging but not firm will, instead of finishing off your weakened opponent, enliven him, wake him up.

The German bent away, clinging to the Basque, trying to win time, to make it to the end of the round. And when once more he went down, the gong did in fact save him: on the eighth count, he got up with great difficulty, and dragged himself to his stool. By some sort of miracle he had survived the eighth round, to mounting peals of applause. But at the start of the ninth round Paolino, striking him beneath the jaw, hit him just the way he wanted. Breitenstriter collapsed. The darkness roared furiously, chaotically. Breitenstrater lay twisted like a pretzel.

The referee counted down the fateful seconds. He kept lying there." So the match ended, and when we had all emptied out onto the street, into the frosty biueness of a snowy night, I was certain that in the flabbiest family man, in the humblest youth, in the souls and muscles of all this crowd, which tomorrow, early in the morning, would disperse to offices, shops, factories, there would be one and the same grand feeling, for the sake of which it was worth bringing together two excellent boxers, a feeling of dauntless, flaring strength, vitality, courage, inspired by the play in boxing. And this playful feeling is, perhaps, more valuable and purer than many so-called higher pleasures.

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A. Znosko-Borovsky, Capablanca and Alekhine (Review, 1927) Lovers of the art of chess will find this small book a most entertaining novel, or, rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only now really clashed, and the future holds no shortage of entrancing tussles. Znosko-Borovsky, a talented player himself, writes about chess in a masterly way. The book begins with the story of how the bright, intoxicating combination play of former years (Anderssen, Pillsbury, et al.) turned into positional play under the influence of Steinitz, Schlechter, Rubinstein, Lasker, cold masters, admirers of rigor and dryness in chess.

“Capablanca,” the author writes, “brought chess back from the province of severe science to the sphere of jolly and joyful art,” and goes on to describe his wonderful career, his defeat of Lasker, triumphs, triumphs, an unexpected period of weakness, and again triumphs.

There’s “play in space,” characterized by a concern for the safety and strength of every position, and “play in time”—1.e., a play of motion, of development. And this is Capablanca, a dynamic player, the “knight of fast-flowing time.” Znosko-Borovsky is just as accurate in describing Alekhine’s game. Comparing him with Capablanca, he refers to the latter as classical and technical, and Alekhine as romantic and tactical.

Capablanca is calm, and in his play there’s the harmony of genius; Alekhine is fiery, his imagination knows no limits, his combinations are fantastical. “His game spreads out like a fan, which will snap shut only at the moment of the final blow.”

The text comes furnished with some interesting diagrams, and at the end of the book there are fourteen selected chess Capablanca-Alekhine games with splendid brief commentaries.

I would like to mention the unusual vividness of some of the author’s expressions, and the brisk, heady pace of the whole narrative. Znosko-Borovsky writes about chess with gusto, juicily and aptly, just as a mas- ter should write about his art. The undersigned, a humble but ardent admirer of Caissa,' welcomes the appearance of this thrilling book.

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Although Nabokov’s reviews of other émigré writers in the mid- 1920s are sporadic and mostly negative, in the late 1920s he began to review frequently and mostly enthusiastically. He reported with glee on another sport or game with which we associate him much more than we do boxing, in his review of a chess book on Alekhine and Capablanca. Two weeks before Alekhine became world champion, Sirin recommended this “thrilling” book as “a most entertaining novel, or rather, the novel’s first volume, since its main characters have only ” He particularly relished the characterization of now really clashed, the contrasting styles of the two grandmasters. About fifteen months later, he would conceive of and rapidly compose his own chess novel, The Luzhin Defense, named perhaps with a nod to the famously bold Alekhine Defense, just as the beginning and end of Aleksandr Ivanovich Luzhin’s name, if not his chess style, also seem a nod to Alekhine.

Like the nonfiction chess reporting that Nabokov extols as a “novel,” his own novel would reach a high point in the description of the final tussle between the styles of a Russian master and his Latin opponent (the fictional Turati replacing the real-life Capablanca).

Think, Write, Speak

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor VLADIMIR NABOKOV

What connection do you see between chess and the work of art?

There’s no connection between literature and the game of chess. But there’s certainly a connection between the art of literature and the art of chess problems. Problems and games are two different things. It’s not easy to speak of these two things, because not everybody, not even all chess players, can appreciate the difference between the game of chess, which is journalism, and the chess problem, which is poetry.

The link between the composition of a chess problem and that of a novel lies in the originality of the combinations and the economy of their realization.

It’s a magnificent, complex, and sterile art, akin to the ordinary form of the game only to the extent, for example, that a juggler, in inventing the interlacings of a new sleight-of-hand trick, draws on something in the properties of a sphere. In fact, most chess players, masters and amateurs, take only a moderate interest in these refined enigmas, purely invented and requiring great specialization, and although they appreci- ate a problem with a trap inside, they would be absolutely disconcerted if they were asked to compose one.

In common there are themes, stratagems, ambushes, sacrifices, pinning and unpinning, and all sorts of maneuvers, but combined in a certain way. Because it’s the combination of the different themes that makes a problem. Deceit pushed to the point of diabolism. In this sense, I think one can find a certain parallelism between the chess problem and the problem of literary compositions.

And on the level of characters’ strategies?

No, that’s something else. This is becoming allegory. One thinks of those chess figurines.

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When a chess problem comes into my mind I don’t see the chessboard, I don’t see squares as they are, I see perhaps little abysses, not holes, but different tensions, positive, negative. It’s not a question of form. It seems to me that in literary art there’s no privileged form, at the com- positional level. One could speak of a spiral, of a certain structure, but these are metaphors.

In terms of form, it would be, rather, “anything goes,” everything works, doesn’t it, all is allowed. I always have an interesting combination, complicated and with a certain form, but not each part of the combination.

Vladimir Nabokov

SPEAK, MEMORY

An Autobiography Revisited