Strange Antics by Clement Knox

Author:Clement Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-12-13T17:00:00+00:00

Johnson defeated by Jess Willard, the Pottawatomie Giant, in scorching heat in Havana, Cuba, 1915.

On his stool at the end of the round, he told his cornermen to get Lucille out of the audience. He did not want his wife to witness his downfall. But the end came seconds later, and Lucille was still in the crowd to see it. After a final devastating flurry Johnson was on the canvas, counted out under the fierce Cuban sun before an ecstatic white crowd. He had reigned for six years, four years less than his French idol.[59]

The fact that he was no longer the champion did nothing to change Johnson’s legal status in the United States. He was still a wanted man. In May he returned via Spain and France to London, where he signed on with a theatre in Elephant and Castle. One night the performance was interrupted by a zeppelin raid. When the threat had apparently passed, Johnson fetched his white Benz and began to drive through the debris back home to Haverstock Hill.

But the trip was not to be made undisturbed, for suddenly there came roaring out the black sky more bombs. The raiders had returned. Between blasts of bombs which were falling all around us, we could hear the whir and swish of the Zeppelin overhead. I speeded the car up in an effort to get outside of its bombing radius, but was surprised to learn that no matter how fast I traveled or in what direction I turned, the bombs were close upon us. It was then that I learned with considerable alarm that the Zeppelin was following us.[60]

At length Johnson arrived home, having been bombed all the way, and scrambled into his shelter. In his fanciful account the airships continued to bombard his house through the night, levelling the whole neighbourhood. He emerged the next morning to a scene of total destruction, his home ringed by smoking ruins. It is a glorious account, worthy of some of the more apocalyptic episodes found in Waugh or Fitzgerald – and equally fictitious. But the choice of the fiction reveals something of the man: his egoism (naturally, the bombing of London had to be all about him), but also his weariness at his persecution. Real or not, his pursuit by that zeppelin was the perfect metaphor for his condition.

The Johnsons soon tired of the deprivations of wartime London, and in the spring of 1916 they moved to Spain. In Barcelona Johnson’s existence, which had always teetered on the edge of unreality, became surreal, both figuratively – he became involved in an advertising agency and did a few turns in La Monumental as a matador – and literally: in April 1916, he fought, and handily beat, Arthur Cravan, the nephew of Oscar Wilde and a Dadaist poet in his own right. He was still in Spain when the United States entered the war in 1917 and, ever the patriot, offered his services to the American embassy in Madrid as a spy.

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