Grimmish by Michael Winkler

Author:Michael Winkler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Puncher and Wattmann
Published: 2022-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

23.

Well, I said, that is – whatever it is. Never good at character names. A mention of Bob Fitzsimmons all those years ago! The familiar juddering punctuation. ‘Curlicues’ was a word from a Robert Lowell poem I loved at seventeen. The strong man in the first paragraph was a version of a terrifying Vietnam vet who I worked with on a farm when I was fifteen; I saw him hold the kicking leg of an angry cow with one enormous arm in the herringbone milking shed one day, and he could carry four hay bales at once which some people don’t think is a great feat: to them I say, try carrying two bales at once and see how you go. McVitty was of course some of the unpleasant young men I feared when I was a young man.

Who was Saitchell?

I don’t know who Saitchell was. I don’t know why I wrote it at twenty-two. I don’t know why these peculiar obsessions endure.44

We are not always proud of the things that obsess us. I have always been interested in combat sports, cleaving to the moral justification that the combatants are willing and voluntary participants. The thought of children being forced to fight, such as boys shoved into special combat pits in mining areas of industrial England; or the Battle Royale for impoverished African-Americans in the USA; or men forced to kill or be killed in the Roman arena; or slaves pressed on pain of death to participate in head-butting contests – all of this shames humanity. I can hardly bear to think – quite literally – of those American brutes who grew their thumbnails long and hardened them over candles to gain a hideous advantage in gouging bouts: fights in which the win was secured by scraping out an opponent’s eyeball. It leaves me sickened. But I remain engrossed by the idea of powerful forbearance – Grim in the ring, or an unbreakable prisoner lugging bluestone from one corner of the punishment yard to another, as many times as required, breaking the system under the crushing weight of his stoicism. I think Grim’s philosophy in its entirety – or more than a philosophy, which implies a distance between self and thought, however small; his tao, his raison d’etre, his self – was simply this: I can take more punishment than they can deliver.45 That was who he was. Or most of it, anyway.

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