Making the past bearable

The relationship of the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World, a Modernist woman poet and a swashbuckling Dadaist might…

The relationship of the first black Heavyweight Champion of the World, a Modernist woman poet and a swashbuckling Dadaist might be the stuff of romantic fiction; yet all three main characters in this ambitious first novel have been drawn from life. And through the correspondence of the American boxer, Jack Johnson, with the enigmatic Englishwoman Mina Loy, we can look back at the revolutionary early years of this century, and survey the influence of their long-lost friend and mentor, a Franco-European aesthete called Arthur Cravan.

As World Champion, Johnson suffered terrible racism in his own country. His letters recall how Cravan supported him through those years. Mina Loy has her own stories to tell, and together they try to complete the jigsaw of their hero: fearless critic, editor of his own literary magazine in Paris, maker of fights and art performances and great lover of women. (As if that isn't enough, just as you are thinking "Ezra Pound!", it turns out that Cravan's real name was Lloyd, his aunt was Constance Wilde, and at one time this highly principled fellow ran a lucrative sideline in faking manuscripts by his deceased uncle, Oscar). Loy has changed her name, too, and is his match for artistic daring and solopsism. After a number of disastrous relationships, some abandoned children and the sort of sexually explicit poetry which rouses the moral guardians of New York to call for her deportation, she tells how she meets Cravan and falls in love. Their 1918 marriage is witnessed by Johnson in Mexico, after which Cravan is lost at sea in his homemade boat, the pregnant poet wraps herself up in perpetual mourning and the boxer goes home to prison and a life of semi-retirement.

Romance, indeed - yet the question of how many large pinches of salt should be added nags through the book. Antonia Logue's knowledge of the period is impressive. But why has she arranged for Johnson and Loy's densely rambling correspondence to be written in 1946, so that their past comes filtered through hindsight?

FOR the reader, unravelling so many juxtapositions of time and place can be tedious. Where are the new politics which inspired the avant-garde in the first two decades of the century? And why does everyone write in the same high-flown style, which makes it difficult to differentiate a macho American from an English poet? Even Cravan's daughter, who takes up the search for him after her mother's death, catches their mood, spinning stories more fantastical than anything the three old friends might have invented.

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What rings true is how memory can gloss the past and make it bearable. Johnson's memory shows no signs of brain damage. He toughs out the years of psychotic racism: "I had trained myself to take abuse like it was a jammed car horn, loud but easily ignored if you didn't listen for it", and dismisses the European cities which welcomed him in with the same easy dislike with which he remembers his women. Nor are Loy's letters written to endear.

The life she describes summons figures like Harriet Monroe, HD and Nancy Cunard, but she writes without quoting any of her own work, only specific in complaints about the great artists and writers who helped her career. Her children continue to disappoint: "They tell me they came by and shouted through the door and knocked, and it is accusation, why do I not make the same time for them as I do for him." Probably because veneration has become a way of life.

Exactly what Mina loves about Craven is never very clear: we are not offered a single word of his legendary brilliance. When we finally get the chance to read something of his which turns up out of the blue, it booms with the aggressive self-centredness which echoes through all the voices here, but with a lust for adventure for which he would sacrifice everything else. And this is certainly an adventurous novel. Logue has plunged into an era almost obscured by two world wars and decades of political correctness. If in the end she fails to explain the mentality of those who dared take on convention, or make them sympathetic, she has raised some interesting questions about the balance between great art and life, and the price always mercilessly extracted.

Aisling Foster is a novelist and critic.