Salvage Heart

Budd Schulberg is one of those authors that you might know of, but chances are have not read. Recently at a Powell's at the Portland International Airport, I saw two separate, aged paperback copies of What Makes Sammy Run? for a dollar each (I helped my self, for a few dollars more, to a remaindered edition of Barry Gifford's Port Tropique, not reviewed here but recommended nonetheless). Sammy is likely Schulberg's best known work; it continues at the fringes of contemporary awareness for having spawned the character Sammy Glick, now shorthand for a bootstrapping, throat-coating self-serving mercenary or agent type. At least, that's what I remember from my reading, a few years ago, tipped off by B.R. Myers' mention in his "A Reader's Manifesto," Atlantic Monthly version (and after Gogol's Dead Souls). (Schulberg, it should be noted, is still alive, and is also author of screenplays for On the Waterfront and A Face in the Crowd.)

"I may on occasion, for dramatic emphasis, fib. But I never lie. A lie is a thief, sir, and will steal from anybody. A fib just borrows a little from people who can afford it and forgets to pay them back." --Charles the Bartender, The Harder They Fall

The Harder They Fall (1947) is not, as the cover blurb brays, equal to Hemingway's "The Killers." Maybe nothing is. But it does involve boxers. It casts boxing in a miserable, shady milieu, crooked and miserable, and entertainment of the lowest lifeform. You can almost here Bob Dylan thumbing through it while working out the chord progressions on "Who Killed Davey Moore?"

The novel reads like pulp, or at least high-class pulp. It's hard-boiled, and features doomed characters living out the burnt ends of broken dreams, and it's dandy for culling great one-liners and passages from.

The Harder They Fall is grimier than What Makes Sammy Run?, but features men struggling to make right, or make themselves something out of nothing. Protagonist Eddie Lewis, a writer on hiatus from the draft of a play, works as a press agent for a shady boxing promoter when he isn't in the bottle. It's hard to tell who comes out looking worse--the p.r. types or the hacks at the typewriters, as Eddie begins to inflate a man-child Argentine fighter with no fight in him into a heavyweight contender.

"In America, a knock is just a plug that lets itself in the backdoor." --Eddie Lewis

The film came out nearly ten years later, and was (according to IMDB) Bogart's last picture. I haven't seen it.

"One ponch and he goes boom." -- El Toro

The Harder They Fall serves well as a puglist period piece and a crime drama. You can draw a line from Hemingway to Runyon to Thom Jones, and nick The Harder They Fall along the way. Does it stand up well today? Sure, as well as boxing, anyway.

"...[A]lthough I had the natural curiosity of anybody working in an atmosphere of big, quick, hushed money, I didn't let myself get too anxious to nose into subterranean affairs of the syndicate....First you get curious, then you try to find out, then you know too much, then you get paid off, then you get knocked off. It happens." --Eddie Lewis