The Bruiser

by Jim Tully, Gerald Early (Foreword), Paul J. Bauer (Introduction)

A picture of life in the boxing ring “Few novelists captured the contradictions of his country so simply or so honestly in the metaphor of the pure, fatalistic, and merciless community of bruising.”―from the Foreword When The Bruiser was first published in 1936, almost every reviewer praised Jim Tully’s gritty boxing novel for its authenticity―a hard-earned attribute. Twenty-eight years before the appearance of The Bruiser, Tully began a career in the ring, fighting regularly on the Ohio circuit. He knew what it felt like to step inside the ropes, hoping to beat another man senseless for the amusement of the crowd. Having won acclaim in the 1920s for such hard-boiled autobiographical novels as Beggars of Life and Circus Parade, Tully thus became both fighter and writer. “It’s a pip of a story because it is written by a man who knows what he is writing about,” said sportswriter and Guys and Dolls author Damon Runyon. “He has some descriptions of ring fighting in it that literally smell of whizzing leather. He has put bone and sinew into it, and atmosphere and feeling.” The Bruiser is the story of Shane Rory, a drifter who turns to boxing and works his way up the heavyweight ranks. Like Tully, Shane starts out as a road kid who takes up prizefighting. While The Bruiser is not an autobiographical work, it does draw heavily on Tully’s experiences of the road and ring. Rory is part Tully, but the boxers populating these briskly paced chapters are drawn from the many ring legends the writer counted among his Jack Dempsey, Joe Gans, Stanley Ketchel, Gene Tunney, Frank Moran, and Johnny Kilbane, to name a few. The book is dedicated to Dempsey, the Roaring Twenties heavyweight champion, who said, “If I still had the punch in the ring that Jim Tully packs in The Bruiser, I’d still be the heavyweight champion of the world today.” More than just a riveting picture of life in the ring, The Bruiser is a portrait of an America that Jim Tully knew from the bottom up.

Genres: Fiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1936

About the author

Jim Tully was an American vagabond, pugilist, and writer. He enjoyed critical and commercial success as a writer in the 1920s and 1930s.

Reviews

[Peter Corrigan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well this book was written in 1936 so I doubt whatever I write is gonna influence too many people. I enjoyed it however, from the dedication to Jack Dempsey ('my fellow road kid') to the style of writing and story itself. Sort of a Hemingway feel to it--short sentences, crisp dialog and a lack of flowery writing. This may not be my favorite writing style but it fit the subject perfectly. It is set in the height of the Great Depression and the desperation among people was real. The fight game itself is exposed in all of its corruption, seediness, tragedy and glory. I got the feeling that Shane Rory, the protagonist was partly modeled after Jack Dempsey (aka Kid Blackie) who fought in dozens of small towns and bars as he drifted across the U.S. in his youth. Jim Tully really knew the sport of boxing and there is ample evidence of that knowledge througout and while the main characters are fictional there are many references to actual fighters. I learned about some real greats just looking up the names that are mentioned at various points along the way. Among them Stanley Ketchel (the 'Michigan Assasin') who is ranked in the top 10 (or 5) of every list of greatest Middleweight fighters of all time but was somewhat ironically murdered (not in the ring) at age 24. Also some of the the bare-knucklers such as William (Bendigo) Thompson British Heavyweight Champion in 1839 who won a 93-round fight against Ben Caunt in 1835. The toughness of those guys sort of defies belief. But back to Tully's book, it might even please a modern progressive (despite the liberal use of the forbidden 'n' word--that is the way people talked in 1936 America) as his portrayal of the upright black character Torpedo Jones has to reflect his own respect for black fighters who were often denied their rightful place in the fight world of the time. And he does not fail to mention several great historical black fighters including Sam Lankford (the Boston Tar Baby) and of course Jack Johnson.

[Rex Hurst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jim Tully, along with Dashiell Hammet, was the creator of the hard-boiled style of American writing. This style was later picked up and refined by Ernest Hemingway, H. L. Mencken, and Raymond Chandler, but Tully stands out from all these others. They simply wrote in the style. He lived it. The introduction describes him as the biggest longshot in American literature. Growing up poor, abandoned by his family to an orphanage, Tully spent much time tramping about as a bum, a circus hand, and -for a short time - a boxer.

Originally published in 1936, The Bruiser may have been one of Tully’s more successful novels - at least successful enough to be reprinted several times over the next few decades. Though his true success seems to come from his autobiographical works, The Bruiser was the exception to the rule. If there is one flaw, which many modern readers have pointed out, is the uneven flow of the narrative. It is choppy, like a rough cut piece of ice, and sometimes jolting as the action jerks the reader into an area, brings up a plot point, and then resolves it behind the scenes.

Tully wanted this to be as realistic a picture of boxing life as is possible, hence the irregular action. And I must admit he succeeded. It is a very knowledgeable look at boxing, complete with punchy old boxers, sleazy rip-off managers, and the general corruption which has been always associated with the sport. This is all wrapped around the traditional story of a young man going up the ranks of his chosen sport, and wondering if it is with all the trouble.

[Richard Wolff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Terribly disappointing. This reads like an outline for a bad film more than a novel, with little detail, color or character portraiture - just lots of one and two sentence paragraphs (then occasionally an excessively long one), interspersed with one sentence bits of B-movie caliber dialogue. Even descriptions of the fights were disappointingly juvenile. What's worse, I didn't anywhere get a real feel for the main character, from start to finish. Having been given no reason to care about the hero and what happened to him, I didn't. In the end, reading this was simply a chore.

[Joseph Hirsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

For years now, I’ve been searching for the great boxing novel. I’ve even tried my hand at writing one (and most likely failed.) I read W.C. Heinz’s The Professional, and while I found it an authentic enough document, I don’t think it rose quite to the level of its reputation. Ditto for Fat City, which, while photographic in some of its details, and well-drawn in terms of characterization, was a bit too episodic to really cohere. That might be a minority opinion, though, as no less a light than Denis “Jesus’ Son” Johnson regarded the book as something like his Bible in his youth, and Leonard Gardner as his Christ.

Now here we have The Bruiser by legendary road-kid-turned-unlikely-Hollywood-scribe, Jim Tully. Like Heinz and Gardner, Tully knows the milieu, which is no surprise, as most men of his generation were members of the cauliflower cognoscenti. He understands the fight game’s myths and realities, and that the moments where the two intersect—while rare—are what keep us coming back to this dirty game.

Shane Rory is an obvious stand-in for Sully, a former hobo and chain-maker who’s led a hard, peripatetic life. Initially he takes up the fight game to earn a few bucks, but when he proves to have a natural talent and to be a fast study, a smooth-talking promoter takes him under his wing. Shane begins his ascent up the rankings, but after seeing a punch-drunk fighter shadowboxing in a psyche ward, he gets cold feet.

Tully deserves massive credit for bringing attention to the plight of boxers suffering from dementia pugilistica, well before the condition was diagnosed as such. He also deserves credit for recognizing the humanity of the black fighters of this era, and the injustice of the “color bar” that kept them from getting their fair shot at the title.

But these details—impressive as they are—are ultimately of sociological interest. As far as the narrative goes, Tully is a bit of a ham and a melodramatic, who’ll go after the easy resolution and tear wherever he can jerk it. Moments of the story have power, and some of the characters—especially newsman Hot and Cold Daly—rise above cipherhood to take on real dimension. But the ultimate picture that emerges is of solid anecdotes and authentic voices mustered in the service of a dime store novel with a foregone conclusion.

Tully is regarded by some interwar literary historians as the longest longshot in the history of American letters. He was born into dire poverty and was an autodidact all the way, living the kind of hard life that would’ve made Steinbeck weep bitter tears. Eventually, through sheer determination and indomitable self-belief, he rose to become a figure of some national prominence, and a legend among road kids and hoboes who unfortunately never made it out of the jungles or off the rails.

But writers, like boxers, can only get so far on raw, native talent. It needs to be coupled with something else, something Tully (or at least The Bruiser) lacks. As for my effort to find a great novel about a boxer, the search continues. By which I mean, I’ll keep reading. I’m done, however, writing about pugs, at least for the foreseeable future.

[Chris Stephens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mike Tyson really should have read this it would have made a world of difference, maybe.