Thom Jones, boxing, and The Pugilist at Rest
The Illinois author, the war in Vietnam, and ancient Greece
Thom Jones appeared on the literary scene in 1993 with a short-story collection called The Pugilist at Rest. That is also the name of the first story in the book, its title taken from an ancient Greek statue of a seated boxer. Jones’s father was a boxer and Jones, born in Aurora, Illinois, in 1945, took boxing lessons at his father’s urging. He boxed in the Marine Corps during the Vietnam War, and sustained a serious head injury. Elements of his boxing background form part of the history of the narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest.”
Excited reviewers outdid themselves when The Pugilist at Rest appeared. The stories had “profound and devastating impact,” gave “tense, edgy pleasure,” seemed “like a three-car collision in the Indy 500,” and produced a “blend of knowledge and skill, terror and release.” The Pugilist at Rest was a finalist for the National Book Award. Jones followed it with two more collections, Cold Snap (1995) and Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999). Jones died in 2016 at 71. A posthumous collection called Night Train, with some new stories and reprints of others, was published in 2018 by his wife Sally and daughter Jenny.
Jones published “The Pugilist at Rest” in The New Yorker in 1991. His work appeared in other A-list journals, including Esquire, Atlantic Monthly, and Playboy. He won an O. Henry Award in 1992, but he never broke through to best-seller level. Even so, his death was noticed. He was eulogized just days after he died by Joyce Carol Oates in The New Yorker (“Postscript: Thom Jones,” Oct. 20, 2016; to go https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/postscript-thom-jones). Chris Power’s account of Jones’s life, with attention to his boxing background, appeared the same day (“Thom Jones: the writer who explored madness, art and violence,” The Guardian, Oct. 20, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/20/thom-jones-dies-the-pugilist-at-rest-vietnam-war). In 2018, Amy Bloom, herself a finalist for the National Book Award the same year as Jones, published her memorial as the introduction to Night Train (also published as “In Praise of Razor-edged, Moving Fiction,” Literary Hub, Oct. 18, 2018; go to https://lithub.com/amy-bloom-on-the-legacy-of-thom-jones/).
Power claims that “The Pugilist at Rest” was “too good to be rejected,” but the story was rejected by Raymond Smith, editor of the Ontario Review and Oates’s husband, at the same time it was accepted by The New Yorker, that being, Oates wrote in her eulogy, one of the best things that ever happened to Thom Jones. Few writers would disagree.
Smith found the story overly long and digressive. Jones’s works sometimes have both faults. I attribute the digressiveness to a search for patterns and to associations that imitate the narrator’s wandering attention. These defects must be set against Jones’s startling originality and the hard-nosed confessional tone taken by his narrators, male and female. Some of his most memorable narrators are women who are down on their luck. His principal characters undergo hardships, understanding that they are victims but, usually, refusing to embrace that identity. Their resignation opens the door to acceptance, which is something greater. Do I find Jones’s literary word “unfailingly buoyant, uplifting,” as Oates did? I do not. Indeed, “buoyant” and “uplifting” would be the last words I’d use to describe his depressing and often bitter work, which nonetheless I admire.
After Jones enlisted in the Marine Corps, he was seriously injured in a boxing match. Later he suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a condition shared by the narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” (pp. 21-23). Because of his injury, Jones could not be sent to Vietnam with his platoon, “all but one of whom would be killed in action,” Power writes (no sources given). Jones uses this twist of fate to fuel the themes of guilt and shame in “The Pugilist at Rest.” But in the story, the narrator goes to Vietnam and wins many medals. He incurs a head injury after he returns. Others, including his friends, die in the war, but the narrator lives. Jones himself was understandably dismayed to be confused with him and to be referred to as a Vietnam veteran. That said, Jones and his narrator are unnervingly similar.
After his time in the Marines, Jones attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and edited advertising copy. He also worked as a janitor before, in his mid-40s, finding success as a writer. Power reports that Jones claimed to have read some 10,000 books in his 11 years as a janitor. If so, Jones was poorly supervised on the job. Reading that many books in just 11 years would require reading two and one-half books every day, not something many people could manage even if reading were their full-time occupation, and certainly not if Fyodor Dostoyevsky were among their favorite authors, as he was for Jones.
With this author, however, you can never be sure. “I Love You, Sophie Western” (she is a character is Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones and in the 1963 film by Tony Richardson) is a story about Frankie, a high school student who was in a mental hospital for a while and who was, I would say, released prematurely. His English class is studying Great Expectations—a sign of the good old days, surely. Inept in many of his classes, Frankie does well in English. “When he was in the nuthouse, in spite of the Haldol and lithium, Frankie could burn through thick books, a couple a day—they were like excursions to different worlds” (Sonny Liston, p. 224). The proximity of this estimate to the one I derived from Power’s essay is too close to be coincidental. Reading “thick books” at that clip is not something everybody could do. Jones seems to have done it.
As this reference to speed-reading suggests, Jones’s work is a house of mirrors, absorbing but disorienting. Each story has its own focus but also incorporates, in piecemeal fashion, ideas, episodes, and images found in others. This cross-referential method operates in the tee shirt Jones wears in the photograph published with Oates’s New Yorker essay. The shirt features Sugar Ray Leonard (on the left) and Roberto Duran, who was one of Jones’s boxing heroes. Both boxers appear in the first story Jones published in The New Yorker.
The narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest” speaks after his career in the Marine Corps, which included three tours in Vietnam as well as stateside duty, has ended. He begins, as one must, with his experience in basic training. He recalls a sergeant who talked to the recruits about Marines who would do whatever it took to save the lives of other Marines. Many recruits teared up. One who did not was Jorgesen, described as “small and unassuming” (7), who scorned sentiment and described himself as “Earth’s greatest hero” (p. 8).
During a run, a Marine bigger than Jorgesen shoves him with his rifle. Jorgesen falls. The narrator chases the bigger man and pounds his temple with his rifle butt. “I was a skilled boxer,” he says, “and I knew the temple was a vulnerable spot” (p. 8). No one reported the deed, even when the men grilled by the Marine’s Criminal Investigation Unit. The injured man, soon discharged because of his skull fracture, was not popular; the narrator was (p. 9). He went on to receive the Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, and many other medals. Jorgesen would have the opportunity to repay this good deed.
The narrator recalls a Memorial Day during which he dug out his old dress-blue uniform, which is the color of Jorgensen’s eyes. The uniform has sergeant’s chevrons; the left breast is covered with combat citations. He takes out a bag full of medals and finds his Airborne wings, a sign of the “crème de la crème” of the Corps, the recon Marine (p. 10). It was Jorgesen who urged him to earn this status, which Jorgesen earned also.
The narrator now turns to Vietnam, where, shortly after he arrived, he was part of a reconnaissance mission. Dropped near the DMZ, his squad walks into an ambush. Several Marines are killed. The narrator tries to fire but finds that dirt from mortar blasts has jammed his weapon. Jorgesen grabs a machine gun held by another man who has been killed; he mows down several NVA soldiers before being hit by a rocket grenade. When he screams, a North Vietnamese fighter who was pursuing the narrator turns back to kill Jorgesen. The narrator escapes and believes that Jorgesen shouted to draw fire to himself, so that, with his last breath, he could have saved the narrator’s life (pp. 12-17).
After this extended episode, the narrator turns without explanation to Theogenes, a gladiator and boxer who fought in numerous bloody contests to please the “cruel nobleman” whom he served. Theogenes lived “several hundred years” before Plato and Aristotle and was “the greatest of gladiators.” “Then, as now, violence, suffering, and the cheapness of life were the rule,” the narrator says (p. 17). Life was violent, painful, and cheap in Vietnam as well, but that is hardly a compelling connection to the Greek world. What are we doing there?
Theogenes was an Olympic champion in 480 BC. He had a long string of victories, over 4,100 fights, some believe (see K. U. Leuven, http://ancientolympics.arts.kuleuven.be/eng/tp007en.html [2012]). Matches between Greek boxers were settled when one of the combatants died (pp. 17-18). Theogenes is thought to have killed most of his opponents. His name leads the narrator to meditate on a bronze Greek statue of perhaps the late fourth century BC called “The Pugilist at Rest.”
The narrator thinks that the bronze of the seated boxer, which is just over four feet high, represents Theogenes, a boxer with “the body of a small heavyweight.” The narrator, also a light heavyweight, likens him to “a Jack Johnson or a Dempsey,” both heavyweights (p. 18). The narrator keeps a photograph of the Greek boxer in his room, an image of “weariness and philosophical resignation,” a description that might be applied to the narrator himself (p. 19). Jones provides a fine discussion of the statue (which he thought was Roman).
If the narrator had a picture of the Greek boxer in his room, it would most likely have been one with a frontal view that made the most of the boxer’s striking expression. As is the case with many seasoned boxers, his body is his history. Commentators note his cauliflower ear, his flattened nose, and his scars. His fight was recent; copper inlays represent trickles of blood. He has a magnificent head of hair and a full beard; his hands are gloved. His gloves (cestus) are also marked with blood. His fingers and toes, according to some accounts, have been rubbed by passersby. The statue perhaps served as a talisman.
“The Pugilist at Rest” is far removed from the period we think of as classical Greek art, with heroic, idealized figures who rise above individualized associations. The bronze was given an experimental color reconstruction in 2021 that imparts personality and immediacy. Its most subjective feature, the expression held in the eyes, is also the most powerful., and from some angles they communicate anxiety, if not fear.
In the mind of the narrator, the statue expresses resignation, not fear. There is no shame in fear; he insists that fear is not incapacitating. He thinks of Dempsey fighting Jess Willard in 1919 and Louis Firpo in 1923. He notes that Dempsey felt fear before his fights but won dramatic victories. The Dempsey-Willard fight is one you have to see on YouTube, a battle from the old days, when a boxer could hit an opponent who had been knocked down as that man was getting up. Willard was 6’6”, 235 lbs., Dempsey, the “little man,” was 6’1”, 187 lbs. Willard looms over him, but Dempsey broke Willard’s jaw in the first round and knocked him down seven times. The fight lasted four rounds. Willard left the ring with a broken cheekbone, broken ribs, several teeth gone, and permanent hearing loss; he never boxed in competition again. This is still regarded as the most brutal championship fight of all time, fought in blazing heat on July 4, in front of some 50,000 fans.
The Dempsey-Firpo fight was also spectacular. Firpo knocked Dempsey out of the ring but not before Dempsey had knocked Firpo down seven times (see my Boxing and Masculinity, pp. 238-63, for a discussion of the fight and the famous painting of the fight by George Bellows).
For the narrator, the most important boxer is Duran. “What is courage?”, the narrator asks. “What is cowardice? The magnificent Roberto Duran gave us ‘No mas,’ but who had a greater fighting heart than Duran?” (p. 19; No mas means “no more”). The story of Duran and No mas is well known. A tough, dangerous boxer of epic standing, Duran won 103 matches, 70 by knockout, and lost 16. The comment quoted by the narrator is wrongly attributed to him. It was supposedly made at the end of Duran’s second fight with Leonard (they fought three times; Duran lost the second and third).
In their second fight, Duran was out of condition and out of practice and was badly outperformed by the flashy Leonard. Duran is said to have ended the fight by saying “No mas” (no more). Nobody heard Duran say these words, however, and he denies having said them. But he did quit the fight, the cardinal sin of boxing. Yet the narrator believes that he had a great “fighting heart.” He might have been weary, but he was not afraid. Did Duran have “a greater fighting heart” than Dempsey? Boxing fans who have seen the Dempsey-Willard fight might have their doubts that Duran had more heart than either of these men.
The narrator’s fighting heart is the one in question. He went to Vietnam not once, when he “cut and ran,” but three times. He claims that he “got over that first scare,” but it is not clear that he did. His second and third tours were fueled by “a reservoir of malice, poison, and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam.” This was payback for the violent deaths of his friends (p. 20) but also more. He waged war out of rage, anger, shame, and survivor’s guilt. He wanted to replace the cowardice of “that first scare” with ferocious bravery.
He was not wounded in Vietnam but was seriously hurt at Camp Pendleton, where he was a garrison Marine and boxer. Well known for his exploits in Vietnam, he was 27, a heavy smoker and “a borderline alcoholic” who was “in no kind of shape” to box. Yet he took a fight with a light heavyweight. One thinks of the out-of-shape Duran facing Leonard.
In the ring at Pendleton, the narrator took hard shots but he won. But he also lost. Almost immediately his head problems began and his personality changed. A fan of Schopenhauer, he transformed his suffering “into an object of understanding,” which is to say that he began to write. He feels “sympathetic to the cares and sufferings of all living creatures” and is no longer a swaggering drunken former Marine. He believes that he has found “peace and self-renewal” in Schopenhauer (p. 22).
Years later, he started to have seizures. He continues to suffer from “left-temporal-lobe seizure which is sometimes called Dostoyevsky’s epilepsy.” Freud thought Dostoyesky was a “hysterical epileptic.” The narrator find himself in good company, claiming that St. Paul, Joan of Arc, and others are thought to have been affected by this form of epilepsy and the occasional ecstasy it bring (p. 24).
He pays a price for his ecstasy. The narrator rarely leaves his house. He still he wears his boxing headgear and mouthpiece but uses them to protect himself from falling and biting his tongue during seizures. His physical vulnerability is his new opponent. His coaches and caregivers are two dogs sent by the Veterans Administration to watch over him as he sleeps (p. 24). He claims that the dogs pull him away from soft objects when he has seizures and even that they turn him over on his back. Both of these moves are meant to keep him from suffocating.
But this is not the end of the story. On the second-last page we learn that the narrator falsely claimed to have performed an act of heroism in Vietnam. He performed many brave acts there, for he describes his many medals and citations. He also let himself be put forward for the Medal of Honor, an honor that he “almost” was given (p. 26) but apparently could not receive because there were no witnesses to the heroic action that the award would have recognized.
“I had saved no one’s life,” the narrator admits. But we do not learn about the episode or how the possibility of the award came about. If he had won it, he says, he would not have fought well in his post-war match at Camp Pendleton. Instead, he would have let “the light-heavyweight from artillery fucking kill me” (p. 27). He’s going to have neurosurgery but hopes, no matter the outcome, that he will get to keep his dogs. That is the end of story.
“What is courage?”, he asked earlier. “What is cowardice?” To ask the question is, in most cases, to imply that courage and cowardice are indistinguishable. He seems not to realize it, and I am not sure Jones realized it, but the answers are clear. Courage is fighting for what you believe in. Cowardice is failing to fight for your beliefs. Courage is not rage or anger, which motivated the narrator’s second and third tours in Vietnam.
These questions about God, reality, and illusion are sophomoric doodles that are beneath a reader of Schopenhauer. Perhaps they underpin the narrator’s inability to accept credit for his heroic behavior—for his medals. We mark the contrast between his success in Vietnam and his insistence on his cowardice and unworthiness. The narrator disowns recognition of his own bravery and focuses on his failure, on his decision to “cut and run.” Except for the bravery of men like Jorgesen, who died so that others could live, no good comes out of the war. But Jorgesen’s bravery counts for something, but perhaps not enough to offset the anger and cynicism that flavor “The Pugilist at Rest” with anti-war sentiment. At least the VA and its guardian-angel dogs come off looking good.
Jones himself had no experience in Vietnam, perhaps we should extrapolate from the narrator’s single-minded insistence on his failure to Jones’s own state of mind. Perhaps his success as an author, not a boxer, is at stake. It seems to have been less important to him than his failures. He did not win the National Book Award; he did not make it to the best-seller list of the New York Times. He did well, but perhaps not well enough.
For an author whose narrative trademark seems to have been low self-esteem, Jones himself seems to have believed that he deserved more than he was given. I don’t know what life with temporal lobe epilepsy is like, but it is a pity that Jones seems to have been unable, despite the evidence of The New Yorker photograph, to be happy with his success and, as a pugilist, to find acceptance and rest.
"Courage is fighting for what you believe in. Cowardice is failing to fight for your beliefs." Brilliantly stated. I also like the discussion on fear. I keep turning over this idea of how fear is the opposite of love and therefore the enemy in so many ways, and yet fear is the first glimmer of intelligence. Not knowing what to fear will get you killed. I've observed this with the outdoor cats I've had over the years. Never heard of Thom Jones. Thanks for the introduction.