WHERE DID ARTHUR CRAVAN GO?: NOTES ON DEATH, BOXING, AND HAMLET

Shahriar Shaams

As far as poets and writers go, Arthur Cravan might’ve possibly been a worse boxer than Ernest Hemingway. While the latter was resolute and sincere, claiming, “My writing is nothing. My boxing is everything,” (and considering his writing, I tend to agree), the former sauntered around as a parody, a proto-Dadaist (in the words of some), someone who couldn’t care less how badly he came out from a bout. Indeed, Cravan was rumored to have staged a “boxing” show which would have ended with his purported suicide. Thankfully, it hadn’t, as he had been merely trolling.

Cravan showed typical eccentricism. He traveled through Europe with forged passports, delivered anarchistic lectures, and made sure to make a spectacle of himself in any way possible. Arthur Cravan wasn’t even his real name. He was born Fabian Avenarius Lloyd in Switzerland in the 1880s and unlike Hemingway, who did kill himself in 1961, Cravan’s entire personality defied an ending, a full-stop from where people can move on. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why Cravan’s disappearance off the Mexican coast around 1918 so dominates my mind.

I came to boxing tired of my novel. I wanted to find in the sweet science an intensity that I was unable to fashion in my writing at the time. There was an added thrill of competition, the simple perversity of triumphing over someone. Boxing, though only a sport in name, also provided me with an avenue to be athletic, something a lanky, bookish cityboy like me, uninterested in much of sport, never had an opportunity to be. Though I am hesitant to air my admiration of Norman Mailer (mostly because of the wife-stabbing), his 1975 nonfiction book The Fight, an account of the “Rumble in the Jungle” in Zaire, had much to do with my wonder for the fight-game.

But the novel was still my only love. Writing was the only thing I ever wished to do. I treated my boxing, then, novelistically: infinitely more interested in the stories, the motions, and the personalities than the scoreboards and necessarily dull maneuvers (and endurance!) to hold a fight.

Boxers tend to fall into two camps. On one end are brawlers. Aggressive punchers who march forward and favor duking it out close-up, phone booth style. On the other end are the out-boxers, or as I prefer to call them, dancers. Gliders and technical masters who land their blows like a matador taking control from a distance. A simple example of each, for those uninitiated, would be Mike Tyson and Muhammad Ali. Tyson reveled in monstrous power while Muhammad Ali sped his way through ingenious ring-generalship. It was often these charismatic brushes with danger that held my attention. I, too, hated in-fighting and preferred the dance.

My fascination with boxers such as the American Willie Pep (rumored to have once won a round without even throwing a single punch) was baked in this seeming invincibility. Willie Pep’s the pep step, a set of beautiful escapes, was a masterstroke of misdirection that in Cravan’s hands (or feet, if we’re talking literally) would definitely end up akin to a banana-peel routine. Make no mistake, boxing at its core is a jazz with death. After you take away the jabs and the hooks—the “trading of energy” as the grappling artist Ryan Hall calls combat—you are left with a performance that snakes in and out of a conversation on mortality. When you are knocked out and bereft of any energy to dole out, you might as well be dead in the ensuing shame.

It might be opportune now to call on “our ambassador of death”—Hamlet. If Arthur Cravan was my patron saint, looking down with ridicule at a writer attempting to seriously box, Hamlet was my true prophet, whom I worshiped as much as I feared. The zealous turn of my bardolatry toward the more extreme sect of Hamlet-worship was indeed explainable. I would claim that to truly understand the beauty of boxing one must first give in to Hamlet’s preoccupations.

No one controls the temperature of death as much as the Prince of Denmark. To even suggest that he was a ditherer, as is the case for every High School teacher I am aware of, is to undercut and severely deny the intelligence of literature’s greatest character. Hamlet is aware of everything, especially how far he risks his play in matters of death. He never strays too far, knowing all too well that death is no laughing matter. It is no joke. Not something one can troll about. Especially through the very medium of art.

Arthur Cravan is a buffoon. His poetry is at best mediocre. The journal he founded, Maintenant, is not much to write home about either. There is some merit in his play, Art Was Here: A Technical Knockout in Ten Rounds, but it does not go beyond light-entertainment. His antics, which included fighting the Heavyweight Champion Jack Johnson in Spain, was essentially a scheme to make some money, striking only in how the bout was a 100 years before influencer boxing, which sees the likes of YouTubers fighting boxers for more or less the same ends.

What has kept him alive is his disappearance. His death. Stories of him being on the same ship as Trotsky on their way to America, or of him being the nephew of Oscar Wilde (through his aunt’s marriage) have contributed to the allure of the man without pointing to any genuine spark. Cravan was all frivolity. Only in this death has he achieved a sense of gravity. A life spent trolling and joking only to vanish forever suddenly. One can and should (I must, for the sake of my inner peace) take it as a tragedy, a drowning perhaps that has swept his life away. As Hamlet had taught me, death can never be a provocation.

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