Читать книгу Sporting Blood. Tales from the Dark Side of Boxing онлайн

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As a pro in America during the last lawless era in boxing, Johnson understood the lucrative kinship between prizefighting and carny sideshows. With that in mind, he hooked up with one of the unlikeliest figures ever to step into a boxing ring. Born in Switzerland in 1887 to British parents, Arthur Cravan, whose real name was Fabian Lloyd, was one of the first personalities to kick-start the Dada movement in art. Cravan was a one-man modernist-wrecking crew who published an irreverent literary journal called Maintenant filled with pre-surrealist verse and diatribes against his contemporaries. For years, Cravan had idolized Johnson, and he included “Lil’ Arthur” on his list of cultural heroes alongside Rimbaud and Wilde. “After Poe, Whitman, Emerson, he is the most glorious American,” Cravan rhapsodized. “If there is a revolution here, I shall fight to have him enthroned king of the United States.”

Inspired by seeing Johnson perform his vaudeville routine in France a few years earlier, Cravan transformed poetry readings and lectures—where he often held forth wearing only a jockstrap—into free-for-alls, sometimes firing a pistol into the air and, more often than not, hurling objects as well as insults at the startled crowd.