--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, DJ-Anonyme@w... wrote:
> Jonathan Yardley writes an occasional "Second
Reading" column for
the
> Washington Post. Today's was on Willeford's
Cockfighter. It turns
out
> that Yardley knew Willeford.
>
>
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38004-2004Dec30.html
>
> Mark
Since there are those who hate to register, I will paste in
the article, which is quite a good appreciation with
Yardley's personal association with Willeford. By the way, I
am quite weary of the requirement that all publications are
now assuming--register even if you will never likely pass
their way again.
Richard Moore
Here is the article:
'Cockfighter': Writer Wins His Spurs By JONATHAN
YARDLEY
Friday, December 31, 2004; Page C01 An occasional series in
which The Post's book critic reconsiders notable and/or
neglected books from the past. The ancient blood sport of
cockfighting is on its last legs in these United States. In
only Louisiana and New Mexico is it still legal, and in the
latter it is under heavy attack. Its opponents argue that
cockfighting "is wrong, morally wrong, legally wrong, and
every other kind of wrong," while its defenders insist that
it is "a legitimate, honorable business," the "only sport
that can't be fixed, perhaps the only fair contest left in
America." Those quotations are drawn not from a debate in the
New Mexico legislature but from a novel, "Cockfighter," by
Charles Willeford. Published as a paperback original in 1962,
reissued in a revised hardcover edition in 1972, adapted a
couple of years later for the movies, the novel has had a
cult following for four decades, not just among aficionados
of cockfighting but among the lamentably small number of
readers who know and appreciate the work of one of our most
skilled, interesting, accomplished and productive writers of
what the literary establishment insists on pigeonholing as
"genre" fiction. I first read "Cockfighter" in 1974. That
year I assumed the book editorship of the Miami Herald. I was
the first full-time staffer to hold that job, and I had to
start pretty much from scratch. My only asset showed up one
day in the form of a portly, amiable, soft-spoken man of
about 50, richly mustachioed, who presented himself at my
desk and introduced himself as Charles Willeford, the
Herald's reviewer of mysteries and crime novels. I liked him
immediately and told him I wanted him to stick with that
assignment. We talked for a while, in the course of which he
said he'd published a number of novels himself, one of which
was called "Cockfighter." I got a copy and read it straight
through. I was astonished: This guy was good. He wasn't just
another hack book reviewer and small-time college professor
but a real writer who had, it turned out, already published
about a dozen other novels. I'd come to Miami with the usual
stereotypical preconception that it was a cultural wasteland,
yet here was a writer right in the heart of the city who
deserved comparison with the competition on the state's Gulf
Coast -- John D. MacDonald -- and who, as I learned during my
five years in Miami, was a man of culture, wit and
conviviality. Chas., as he signed himself, had lived a life
as amazing as anything in his fiction. Born in 1919, he was
orphaned while a boy and struck out on his own when his
grandmother fell on hard times, a story he tells in "I Was
Looking for a Street" (1988). Faking his age, he enlisted in
the Air Corps at 16, was posted to the Philippines -- see
"Something About a Soldier" (1986) -- quit that and got
himself into the Army's 11th Cavalry. In World War II he was
a tank commander with the 3rd Army, where he served with
courage and distinction, winning a chestful of medals. He
stayed in the service until he reached the 20-year mark,
retiring as a master sergeant, and then struck out in any
direction that appealed to him. He studied art in France and
Peru, painted, trained horses, worked as a radio announcer,
boxed . . . and pursued the interest in writing he'd
developed as a boy. He wrote a lot of poetry
(it wasn't his strong suit) and began to turn the violence,
cruelty and psychopathic behavior he'd witnessed on the
battlefield and elsewhere into fiction. His first novel,
"High Priest of California," was published as a Royal Giant
paperback in 1953, and "Pick-Up" appeared the next year. In
time he found his way to Miami (he said, with characteristic
wry understatement, that "the crime rate -- the highest in
the nation -- provides a writer with an exciting
environment") and started teaching English at Miami-Dade
Community College and the University of Miami. Charlie was a
heavy smoker, and eventually that did him in. He died in
1988, by which time a measure of success had come to him.
He'd published at least a dozen more books (several
posthumous volumes have appeared as well), one of which,
"Miami Blues" (1984), began a four-book series featuring the
Miami cop Hoke Moseley. A movie adaptation of "Miami Blues"
appeared in 1990, and various compilations of Charlie's
fiction and nonfiction have been published. About eight of
his books remain in print, but they're hard to find. All of
which is to say that he's still around, but on the periphery
of our literary consciousness. Since that had been the case
just about all his life, and since his inclination was toward
self- deprecation rather than self-pity, he no doubt would
take it in stride, probably with a laugh at his own expense,
but it's a real pity that more readers don't know him and his
work. This is especially true at a time when the line between
"literary" and "popular" fiction is beginning to blur, in the
minds of serious readers if not those of most literary
critics. Willeford was a skilled storyteller and had a
decidedly tongue-in-cheek attitude toward the violence,
treachery and just plain craziness he so often described, but
he was also a man of wisdom and depth who regarded the human
comedy with a clinical yet appreciative and sympathetic eye.
He wasn't quite as much a social and cultural critic as those
two other Grade-A Florida novelists, MacDonald and Carl
Hiaasen, but his eye for fraud, sham, venality and hypocrisy
was every bit as keen as theirs. The three books I'd
recommend as introduction to his work are "Cockfighter," "The
Burnt Orange Heresy" (1971) and "Miami Blues." The last
revolves around Freddy Frenger, "a blithe psychopath from
California" who finds his way to Miami and manages to get
himself, not to mention a lot of other people, into a whole
lot of trouble; the novel is at once horrifying and
hilarious, and shows Willeford at the prime of his maturity.
"The Burnt Orange Heresy" is a tour de force in which he
employs his deep knowledge of art to tell the story of an
ambitious young critic whose single-minded careerism leads
him to fraud, theft and murder; the understanding of human
psychology revealed herein is remarkable, worthy of many
other writers whose literary reputations are far greater. But
"Cockfighter" is what's on the table today. Between 1974 and
2004, it's lost none of its pop, its sizzle, its humor or its
intelligence. It is the story of a smart guy in his early
thirties named Frank Mansfield whose one great passion is
cockfighting. It takes place in Florida (where Frank has a
lease on a farm at Ocala) and Georgia (where the climactic
cockfight tournament is held). More than 2 1/2 years before,
Frank came within a whisker of winning the "little silver
coin, not quite as large as a Kennedy half-dollar" that is
awarded to the Southern Conference Tournament's Cockfighter
of the Year, the "ultimate achievement in one of the toughest
sports in the world," but his "personal vanity and big mouth"
did him in. Then and there he "made my self-imposed vow of
silence," which he determined to keep "until I was awarded
that little silver medal." Everyone else thinks there's
something physically or emotionally wrong with him. He
becomes known as "silent Frank," responding to others with
gestures, writing out questions or instructions in longhand,
making such a good show of it that everyone assumes he simply
cannot speak. To his surprise and irritation, he finds
himself "on the receiving end of personal confidences and
long sad stories." He says:
"The man who is unable to talk back is at the mercy of these
people. He is like an inexperienced priest who listens
tolerantly to the first simple confessions of impure
thoughts, and then listens with increasing horror as the sins
mount, one outdoing the other until he is shocked into
dumbness. And, of course, the sinner takes advantage of a
man's credulousness, loading ever greater sins upon him to
see how far he can really go now that he has found a trapped
listener who is unable to stop him. My ears had been battered
by the outpourings of troubles, tribulations, aspirations and
the affairs of broken hearts for two years and seven months.
Only by being rude enough to leave the scene had I evaded
some of my confessors." A few of these are women but most are
men, the tough men of the cockfighting circuit. As the
anthropologist Clifford Geertz wrote in his well-known essay
"Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," in the cock
ring "it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there.
Actually, it is men." The double-entendre is
self-explanatory, and "the fact that they are masculine
symbols par excellence is about as indubitable . . . as the
fact that water runs downhill." Geertz's "The Interpretation
of Cultures," in which that essay appears, was published in
1973, long after Willeford had finished the first version of
"Cockfighter," but the novelist underscores the
anthropologist's point: These are men at war. It is war with
its own rules and code of honor. "A handshake by two
cockfighters is as binding as a sworn statement witnessed by
a notary public," Frank says. Over and over in the course of
the novel, cockfighters are rewarded for honorable behavior
and punished for cheating or otherwise fudging the rules. The
long history of the sport is repeatedly invoked, as are the
masculine virtues associated with it. To say that Willeford
portrays his cockfighters as medieval knights gallant is no
exaggeration. Which is also to say that he is sympathetic to
the sport in which they are engaged as well as to them. This
isn't the place, and I haven't the space, to debate the
morality of cockfighting. Suffice it to say that Willeford
describes its elaborate rituals with care and affection, in
the process revealing a knowledge of cockfighting that can
only have come from experience. The best way to read
"Cockfighter" is the same as the best way to read Tom Lea's
fine novel about bullfighting, "The Brave Bulls": Set aside
your objections to blood sport (which I share) and savor the
novelist's artistry and acuity. The movie version of
"Cockfighter," it must be added, is a lovely piece of work.
With a screenplay by Willeford, directed by Monte Hellman
with Warren Oates as Frank Mansfield, it evokes
cockfighting's back-country universe with sensitivity and
clarity. Oates gives what is possibly the best performance of
his interesting career, and Richard B. Shull is terrific as
his partner Omar Baradinsky, but to my eyes the real star is
the man who plays Ed Middleton, the elderly referee. That
actor is Charles Ray Willeford, just as he was when first I
met him. As his friend and fellow novelist Barry Gifford
wrote in The Post's Book World a dozen years ago, this is
Charlie "the way he really was . . . his big red face
gleaming, humor and meaning in every line, full of soul." A
wonderful writer, a great man.
"Cockfighter" is available in "Charles Willeford Omnibus"
(Oldcastle Books paperback, $18.27) and in used bookstores.
Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is
yardleyj@washpost.com.
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