Fight the bad fight
Patrick Skene Catling
THE PUGILIST AT REST by Thom Jones Faber, £14.99, pp. 230 Testosterone gushes abundantly through these short stories about death in war, deep-sea diving and disease. Thom Jones has inherited the gung-ho tradition of Hemingway and Mailer — and improved on it. They posed as heavyweights. Jones is a light-heavyweight. Occasional flashes of ribald humour illuminate the machismo. He demonstrates that Rambo has feet of clay.
A Marine Corps veteran of Nam, Jones himself is a pugilist at rest. He survived more than 150 fights in the boxing ring and graduated from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop with his originality intact. He gave this autobiographically reminiscent fiction, his first, the title of the statue of Theogenes, 'the greatest of gladi- ators,' who fought at the time of Homer, 'the greatest poet who ever lived'. Like his literary he-men predecessors, Jones evidently regards fighting and writing as comparable competitive sports. To the death? So be it, man.
In the time of Theogenes and Homer, Jones writes, 'as now, violence, suffering and the cheapness of life were the rule'. He depicts recent violence, suffering and the cheapness of life in gruesome detail in the title story and in another story, 'Break on Through,' about the devastation inflicted and suffered by an American platoon on 'a routine reconnaissance patrol' in the Vietnamese jungle.
Television newsreels and films have made the experience seem familiar to those who weren't there; Jones, with skilfully restrained passion, refreshes even the most jaded, second-hand awareness of horror.
In the boot-camp barracks of San Diego, teenage Marine recruits make a virile ritual of smoking: Pall Malls ... were much longer, packed a pretty good jolt, and when we snapped open our brushed-chrome Zippos, torched up, and inhaled the first few drags. . .
In training they joke about the 'steaming-hot panties' of Rosie Rotten- crotch. In Vietnam the Marine narrator, apparently someone very much like Jones, is concerned with the relative merits of the M-16 and the AK-47, the M-60 machine- gun and the M-79 launcher. But the techni- calities of warfare fail to dehumanise his reaction to discovering that a comrade, 'fried to a crisp by the napalm . . . had been mutilated while alive'.
Back in the United States, the veteran is still violent until he meets his match in the ring. 'There's always someone bigger and badder than you,' he observes. After his brutal last fight, he suffers from 'a form of left-temporal-lobe seizure which is some- times called Dostoevski's epilepsy'. Com- mitted to a 'bleak, austere nuthouse,' he learns the high-tech language of state-of- the-art medical treatment — Depakene, phenobarbital, Tegretol, Dilantin, Thorazine and cingulotomy, a brain operation that is not quite a lobotomy.
No, this is not a happy book. Bullets, fists, nervous breakdown and cancer inexorably take their toll. But Thom Jones, with masterful expertise, offers the modern catharsis of Primal Scream Therapy.
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