In Praise Of Unlikely Writers

John Julius Reel on Brilliant Writers With No Literary Pedigree

Dear Republic,

The great lesson of The Republic of Letters so far is how many outstanding writers there are who aren’t represented by some major agent, haven’t done a fancy MFA, who may have worked as butchers, housecleaners, delivery couriers, or whatever else. I don’t think we’ve had any boxing managers or pimps, but… it’s early days for the publication. John Julius Reel writes on some excellent writers who are truly outsiders.

-ROL

IN PRAISE OF UNLIKELY WRITERS

When some unlikely writer with outsized talent breaks out of obscurity into the ranks, s/he never quite makes it into the club.

A teenage fireballer, for example, from a working-class family gets the equivalent of a half-million dollars out of high school to go pro. Two years later, his career washes up, a total bust. Ten years after that, in between getting a college degree, starting and raising a family, and teaching school, he finishes a memoir about his disappointingly short-lived baseball career. As far as standard writing credentials, he’s only got a few newspaper bylines to his name.

And yet the cult classic, A False Spring, by former “bonus baby” Pat Jordan, gives a no less gut-wrenching account of curtailed glory than any novel by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and is far more illuminating on the pro athlete’s predicament than baseball classics by established journalists like David Halberstam, Roger Kahn, or Roger Angell.

Or let’s imagine a hardscrabble kid, abandoned early by an abusive, profligate father, and eluding his overstretched mother to get “street-poisoned” on the stoops and back alleys of various depressed Midwestern cities. He gets expelled from school, falls in with petty hustlers and con artists, and ends up in jail. He finally finds his feet as a pimp, spends almost twenty-five years “scheming to out-think his whores,” then, after a harrowing ten months in solitary confinement, “squares up,” takes a job as a janitor, and writes a book with the grandiose subtitle The Story of My Life.

And yet Pimp, by Robert Beck, aka Iceberg Slim, leaves a more brutal, revealing, and resonant impression than anything written by consecrated chroniclers of urban grit and grifter life, like Richard Price, George V. Higgins, and Elmore Leonard.

Pimp and A False Spring are thrilling reads. The stories pulse rather than flow. Beck and Jordan’s singular lives electrify their sentences. Unlikely writers should be sought out and treasured.

***

Probably no one on the current American scene with competent, much less impressive writing ability, has lived to the extent that Charles Farrell has, on the margins, but with his finger on the pulse. In his recently published second book, The Legend of Mitch “Blood” Green and Other Boxing Essays, Farrell writes about his “conscious and unconscious choice” to become “involved in businesses that encouraged and rewarded various forms of paternalism and exploitation,” like managing fighters and wannabe pop stars, colluding with the mob to fix fights, or various other underworld businesses that “flatter and victimize” and are “predatory.” He adds, “I was always willing—often foolishly willing—to pay whatever the cost was to live an unreal life.”

Charles Farrell

In June of 2021, shortly after the publication of his literary debut, (Low)life: A Memoir of Jazz, Fight-Fixing, and the Mob, Farrell did an episode of Patrick Bet-David’s Valuetainment podcast, titled “Mafia’s Most Wanted Fight Fixer.” Although Farrell was once wanted by the mob, “Sought-after Fight Fixer” would be more accurate. He started advising the mob on fights at fourteen years old, and before his extraordinary career ended, he had managed five world champions, although not necessarily in their prime. In the fight world, he’s got his share—if not fair share—of recognition, and in jazz circles too, for his virtuosity on the piano, having collaborated and held his own with improvisational jazz legends like Ornette Coleman and Evan Parker. Farrell’s varied, accomplished, and exciting life would make his books interesting even if he couldn’t write, but amazingly he can.

His voice infuses the page, shot through with the sensibility that comes with breaking the membrane of conventional decency. In both (Low)life and The Legend of Mitch “Blood” Green, the reader doesn’t have to rely on a fiction writer’s imagination, or a hired pen’s second-hand account, to understand what it means to improvise music with the greats, live on the edge, or in hiding, or under the threat of death. In Farrell’s world, the stakes are high and reveal with striking clarity human nature and the human condition. Like Jordan and Beck, Farrell incorporates the more charged conflicts of fictional drama into nonfiction, without tryhard craft and tricks, without the whiff of the literary.

In the memorable title essay of Farrell’s collection, he writes about managing the boxer Mitch Green for a few years after Green’s legendary beef with Mike Tyson. The two fighters met in the ring in 1986. Tyson outfought him, but Green looked sharp, stayed on his feet, and even showboated a bit. Seven months and seven fights later, Tyson won the heavyweight title in spectacular fashion against Trevor Berbick. Green re-emerged on the scene in 1988, when he picked a street fight with Tyson, got his left eye shut and his nose busted open, and Tyson broke his hand. Mitch “Blood” Green never lost his celebrity after that, remaining potentially bankable, even after his impressive boxing skills and his already questionable drive had declined.

With deft, unadorned, and heartfelt prose, Farrell writes about his failed attempt to resuscitate Green’s career. Green, full of himself, hilarious without trying to be, oddly loyal, completely lacking in self-awareness, talented, charismatic, game and fearless when young, and lazy and skittish later, is tragically unable to take advantage of his situation and fame to make big, easy money, despite Farrell’s advice, which he ignored.

Charles Farrell with Floyd Patterson

Farrell writes best about what he calls “talented losers,” like the late “Smokin” Bert Cooper, whose electrifying left hook left more than one foolhardy fighter on the canvas, rueing his overconfidence. Farrell includes Green and himself in this Gatsbyesque category of those whose misguided pursuit of greatness, and inability to play the game, ultimately tripped them up.

Farrell, who is seventy-four, grew up early in blue-collar Boston, precocious in every way. He was betting on horses at seven years old, stopped going to school in eighth grade, and once spent five days in jail for statutory rape until his parents could arrive and verify his age: fifteen. A child prodigy at the piano, he started making “adult money” playing jazz in mob clubs at sixteen. In (Low)life, he thanks his maternal grandfather, Ruby—a musician, too—for passing on “birthright” to him.

Birthright was the ironclad inborn knowledge that, finding yourself anyplace on earth, you could walk into a hotel or nightclub and walk out with money in your pocket and a place to stay the night. Birthright was something that would always bail you out of trouble. It would keep you free.

Pat Jordan and Robert Beck—two other talented losers—lived and breathed birthright. Their talent bailed them out of trouble and kept them as free as anyone can be. Perhaps their early losses attuned them to their talent. Perhaps their talent got formed and refined in the crucible of loss. After setbacks, and lacking literary pedigree, they pounded out their life stories, like other brash upstarts have done: former shoe-shine boy and heroin addict, Piri Thomas, dashing off Down These Mean Streets, after spending seven years locked up in Comstock; John Fante, the self-hating son of a carousing immigrant bricklayer, writing Ask the Dust, the American equivalent of Notes from Underground; or Zora Neale Hurston, at forty-four, after three failed marriages and hopelessly in love yet again, this time with a 23-year-old, starting and finishing Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven exhilarating weeks, at night, while doing anthropological research abroad.

Charles Farrell lived for many years outside the law, exploiting and being exploited, deceiving behind the scenes, and yet the frankness of his books kept me enthralled. Zero artifice. Effortless prose. No exaggerated effect, contrivances, or wasted words. He never tries to impress, or be sublime, but manages to do both. He writes, “For something as fundamentally true as boxing, there’s a tremendous amount of bullshit involved.” The same could be said of writing, but not Farrell’s writing. The fundamental truths jump off his pages.

John Julius Reel’s memoir My Half Orange: A Story of Love and Language in Seville was published by Tortoise Books in 2023. On Substack, he writes in English and Spanish at Rants from a Foreign Land. He reviews books on his YouTube channel Book Rants.