In boxing, the previous stays an ever current obsession. We show a reverence for historical past and the written phrase that borders on compulsion, poring via previous newspapers, compiling lists of names and dates, catalogs of fights and fighters and clippings from previous magazines. Even after a century of technological innovation — movie, radio, tv, and streaming — we nonetheless look to the writers, our scribes of the candy science, for recent perception into this historical sport. We rejoice our bibliography from Homer and Virgil via to Byron and Whitman, from London and Hemingway to Mailer and Oates. There’s Nat Fleischer and Bert Sugar. There’s Egan and Liebling and Heinz, Talese, Plimpton, McIlvaney, and Hauser. On and on. However one title routinely goes lacking from these lists: Robert E. Howard. One of the vital widespread pulp journal writers of the Twenties and 30s, Howard’s accomplishments in boxing literature goes sadly unheralded. And we’re the more serious for the omission.
Born in Texas in 1906, Howard confirmed an early ardour for tales. As a baby he listened to older relations spin their Texas-sized yarns, instilling in him a love of storytelling. His world was broadened by the journey tales of Jack London and Rudyard Kipling and he knew early that he needed to be a author, publishing his first tales whereas nonetheless in highschool. Throughout his teenagers, Howard additionally took up bodybuilding and boxing. He competed as an beginner boxer and remained an avid fan of the game, persevering with to spar all through his grownup life.
In 1925, Howard started publishing tales in pulp magazines such because the then-fledgling Bizarre Tales. Early tales concerned werewolves and cavemen. Fueled by his curiosity in historical past and mythology, Howard started writing what would turn out to be generally known as the “sword and sorcery” subgenre of fiction. These tales spanned the globe and blended historical past with fantasy. He created heroes he might revisit and return to all through a number of tales, together with Kull the Conqueror, an Atlantean king; Solomon Kane, a Puritan swordsman; Bran Mok Morn, a Pict king, and Crimson Sonya of Rogatina.
In 1932, Robert E. Howard created his most enduring character: Conan the Barbarian, for whom Howard developed a whole fictional world, a land referred to as Cimmeria, and even a fictional time, the Hyborian Age. This allowed Howard to indulge his love of historical past and fantasy whereas liberating him from the laborious and time-consuming analysis wanted for historic fiction. He imbued the world of Conan with a way of scope and scale virtually extraordinary in pulp tales, writing essays outlining Conan’s world, drawing up maps and creating gods, equivalent to Crom. Conan has endured as a popular culture icon for nearly a century via graphic novels, comedian books, novelizations, and Hollywood variations. The character cemented sword and sorcery as a viable style and influenced generations of fantasy writers, from Tolkien to George R. R. Martins.
However whereas Conan would turn out to be Howard’s most enduring character, he wasn’t Howard’s most prolific. As a substitute, as struggle followers can be to know, that honor goes to a completely totally different Howard creation, a pugilist, Sailor Steve Costigan. Modeled partially on Howard, Costigan is a good-natured, Texas-born man with black Irish options who sails on the service provider ship The Sea Woman, “the fightenest ship on the seven seas.” Touchdown principally in Asian ports, Costigan inevitably will get into brawl after bloody brawl. The primary Sailor Steve Costigan story was printed in 1929 and was a smash hit, pun meant, and Howard would write almost forty Sailor Steve Costigan tales over the subsequent 5 years. The success of those tales earned Howard, then solely 23, sufficient revenue to stay to writing full time. Costigan’s episodic adventures would function a mannequin for the later Conan tales, and the monetary stability afforded by the Costigan yarns allowed Howard time to tackle the extra concerned Conan challenge. With out the recognition of Sailor Steve Costigan, there can be no Conan the Barbarian.
Given the precarious nature of the then-fledgling pulp markets, the publication historical past of Robert E. Howard’s Costigan tales can be considerably convoluted. They first appeared within the pulp journal Combat Tales, and shortly branched out to its sister journal, Motion Tales. Costigan additionally appeared within the short-lived publication Jack Dempsey’s Combat Journal. At one level, trying to develop the marketplace for Costigan tales, Howard modified the character’s title to keep away from battle between rival publications. A boxing story about “Dennis Dorgan” – a sailor who simply occurs to be precisely the identical in dimension, look, and temperament as Costigan – appeared in Magic Carpet Journal in 1934. Howard wrote almost a dozen Dennis Dorgan tales, however the journal shuttered their doorways earlier than they might publish any extra.
Howard got here to boxing at an attention-grabbing level in historical past. The game had been legalized in the US however its outlaw previous was nonetheless a current reminiscence. Boxing literature from round that point was Naturalist in type, practical and somewhat grim. Jack London’s “A Piece of Steak” (1909), Ring Lardner’s “Champion” (1916), and Hemingway’s “Fifty Grand” (1927) portrayed the newly-established sport as corrupt and isolating. In contrast, Howard’s tales are full of life and unconstrained, filled with bravado and masculine vigor. They recall boxing’s outlaw zeal. It’s no shock Howard discovered such success writing for the pulps. Society was changing into mechanized with a newly-formed “center class” which now not labored with their palms and masculinity was adopting disaster and nervousness as the brand new norm. Pulp magazines, with their unique and scandalous tales of males relieved of that middle-class morality – sailors, cowboys, detectives, and pagan warriors – supplied simply sufficient sugar to coat that bitter capsule.
The Costigan tales are enjoyable and quick, lurid and absorbing tales of crime and violence. The motion typically veers into slapstick, with wild battles that get much less and fewer possible, with Costigan as more likely to get right into a barroom brawl as he was to enter the ring. Regardless of all of the damaged knuckles and cauliflowered ears, the tone stays gentle and breezy, with nearly as a lot humor as there’s motion. One can simply think about Despair-era readers basking within the fellow-feeling of those tall tales. Right here’s how Howard begins “The Pit of the Serpent,” by which Cositgan fights a sailor named Bat Slade:
The minute I stepped ashore from the Sea Woman, I had a hunch that there can be hassle. This hunch was brought on by seeing a few of the crew of the Dauntless. The lads on the Dauntless have disliked the Sea Woman’s crew ever since our skipper took their captain to a cleansing on the wharfs of Zanzibar—them being narrow-minded that manner. They claimed that the previous man had a knuckle-duster on his proper, which is ridiculous and a grimy lie. He had it on his left.
Informed from Costigan’s perspective, the tales are dripping with slang and vernacular and suffused with Costigan’s good-natured and down-home values, giving them a high quality distinct from the unapologetically “hard-boiled” crime tales that stuffed the pulps. Degeneracy and corruption surrounds Costigan on the wharfs and waterfront dives he frequents, but it surely by no means appears to stain him. At the least, not as he tells the story. However we perceive that Sailor Steve Costigan is an unreliable narrator; he brags about his successes in hyperbolic phrases whereas downplaying his indiscretions, like how a lot he’d needed to drink or how a lot accountability he bears for the fights he begins. With straightforward attraction and likable humor, Costigan embodies that particular pressure of human nature that permits us to miss our personal faults, our guilt, and our culpability within the failures we ascribe to others.
After some time I discovered myself in a dance corridor, and whereas it’s form of hazy simply how I obtained there, I guarantee you I had not no large amount of liquor below my belt—some beer, a couple of whiskeys, somewhat brandy, and possibly a slug of wine for a chaser like. No, I used to be the proper chevalier in all my actions, as was confirmed when I discovered myself dancing with the prettiest lady I’ve but to see in Manila or elsewhere. She had crimson lips and black hair, and oh, what a face!
The seaports visited by Steve Costigan are various and Howard peppers his tales with accents and dialects and crisp dialogue. Not often is a line of speech merely “mentioned.” It will get whimpered or muttered or snarled or bellowed. He additionally relied on adjectives to convey tone and emotion. A fighter would possibly grin savagely between punches whereas ringside a dame coos gently and her husband glares disapprovingly. If one is searching for a fault within the writing, the dialogue is typically a tad expositional, like a Bond villain needlessly explaining his schemes. Howard additionally leaned on dialogue to explain motion, present background info, and clarify a personality’s intentions. For Sailor Steve Costigan, there’s virtually no such factor as interior monologue; he’s a person of motion who tends to assume out loud. Or, as is extra typically the case, he thinks along with his fists.
“Hey you,” I accosted him politely, “the place is that awful first mate of yours?”
“Try to discover out, you boneheaded mick,” he answered rudely. “What d’ya assume uh that?”
“Chew on this awhile,” I growled, clouting him heartily within the mush, and for a couple of seconds a merry time was had by all. However fairly fast I smashed a proper hook below his coronary heart that took all of the struggle out of him, alongside along with his wind.
Throughout those self same years, in additional “literary” circles, the younger Ernest Hemingway was advancing his “iceberg” concept of literature, {that a} story may very well be strengthened by what it omits. Like an iceberg, seven-eighths of a narrative might stay unstated, submerged under the floor. However with Howard, these figures are reversed. These aren’t delicate character research filled with subtlety and nuance and omission, however rough-and-tumble, no holds barred struggle fiction. All the things’s on the floor: a brand new port, a brand new lady, a brand new struggle. Decision arrives with the daybreak, when it’s time for Costigan to ship off but once more.
We met within the middle of the ring like a thunder-clap, and his first lick break up my left cauliflower, and my first clout laid his jaw open to the bone. After that it was slaughter and bloodbath.
Howard did write a couple of boxing tales with out Sailor Steve Costigan, and they’re pretty normal however with wild titles applicable for the pulps, equivalent to “Crowd Horror,” truly a love story involving a fighter named Slade Costigan, and “The Apparition within the Prize Ring,” a surprisingly smart yarn a couple of Black fighter, Ace Jessel, who idolizes the bare-knuckle fighter Tom Molyneaux. One other non-Costigan story, “The Iron Man,” reveals Howard flexing his literary muscle with an extended “novelet” about “Iron” Mike Brennon.
A cannon-ball for a left and a thunderbolt for a proper! A granite jaw, and chilled metal physique! The ferocity of a tiger, and the best combating coronary heart that ever beat in an iron-ribbed breast! That was Mike Brennon, heavyweight contender.
As he did along with his sword and sorcery tales, Howard blends truth and fiction, invoking actual fighters and actual fights. Joe Grim, Tom Sharkey, Joe Goddard, Battling Nelson, and Joe Choynski – “males who relied on their ruggedness to hold them via” – are talked about alongside fictional fighters from Howard’s earlier tales, equivalent to Sailor Slade and Steve Costigan. Curiously, Costigan will get described as a fighter “who by no means rated higher than a second-class man, however who gave some first-raters terrific battles.”
Many of the boxing tales printed throughout Howard’s lifetime appeared between 1929 and 1931, although a couple of would proceed to be printed within the years following. Howard was a person bursting with tales and after Costigan he moved on to Conan and later he tried his hand at different genres. He struggled with mysteries, tried writing racy tales for a publication referred to as Spicy-Journey Journal, and located success writing westerns, the place he created a likable hero, Breckinridge Elkins, who was robust, humorous, and never significantly vibrant, not not like Sailor Steve Costigan.
Howard’s life got here to a tragic finish when he was solely thirty years previous. In 1936, apparently distraught over his mom’s failing well being, Howard walked to his automobile, sat down, and shot himself within the head. He left a quick suicide be aware in his typewriter, two traces from English poet Viola Garvin:
All fled, all performed, so elevate me on the pyre;The feast is over and the lamps expire.
Robert E. Howard carved out a residing as a full-time author for seven years, a formidable feat at any time, and he managed it in the course of the Nice Despair no much less. He packed extra writing into that transient span than many authors handle over the course of a long time. Broadly learn in his lifetime, Howard’s prominence has waxed and waned within the a long time since, as devotees acquire uncommon editions and students debate the deserves of his work. However whereas Robert E. Howard could also be ceaselessly remembered for Conan the Barbarian, boxing followers would do properly to additionally bear in mind Conan’s precursor, the heavyweight champion of The Sea Woman, Sailor Steve Costigan, that fictional fighter “well-known in all ports as a tricky man with the gloves, and the phobia of all first mates and buckos afloat.” –Andrew Rihn
