Grim

On my flight over to Greece, I read Michael Winkler’s Grimmish (2021) on Richard Rothaus’s recommendation. It was good and weird.

Essentially, it was a 200+ page reflection on pain through the story of Joe Grim an obscure, but not unremarkable early 20th century boxer. Grim’s claim to fame was not his victories in the ring, but his relentless resistance to being knocked out. Apparently, he was capable of surviving extraordinary levels of punishment over the course of 15 and even 20 round fights. In fact, he fought some of the leading boxers of his era including Jack Johnson at heavyweight, Joe Walcott (I) at welterweight, and Joe Gans at lightweight. Grim appears to have mostly been a welterweight or middleweight. Over his career he accrued a record of 24(10)-104-22.

The boxing, however, is a minor part of the novel which is set (albeit somewhat loosely) during Grim’s time touring Australia. Instead, the novel reflects on Grim’s ability and willingness to endure pain to make a living. In some, perhaps simplistic, ways, the novel might be a reflection on capitalism where we’re often called upon not so much to win or even to advance, but to endure in the name of making a living. 

Joe Grim was also an Italian immigrant and he honed his tremendous tolerance for pain in the streets of South Italy. His travels to Australia to advance his career as a boxer further contribute to a sense of displacement. In one of the more obscure (but also humorous) sections of the novel, Grim finds himself stranded in the Australian outback with a talking goat and a guy who has agreed to man Grim’s corner. Running short of water and with little help of being saved, they discuss various matters as they resolve to pass gently. Somehow they are saved only to find themselves in a small town where a head butting contest is taking place at the local pub. Displacement is pain and leads, it seems, to more pain. For Grim, this pain is both physical and mental as he soon finds himself in a mental hospital in Perth.

The kind of physical and mental pain created by displacement, capitalism, and, in the most limited way, boxing, offers the author a bit of a metaphor for the kind of pain associated with writing. As someone who struggles constantly with words, it is easy to recognize in Grim’s struggles the struggle of the author. Winkler goes a step further though and comments not just on task of writing but also on the pain that an author endures in efforts to get their work to an audience.

Despite its unusual topic and even more unusual execution, Winkler’s book offers a meditation on topics of significant relevance in the “contemporary discourse”: capitalism, displacement, resilience, and work. We live in a world suffused with pain and suffering. Winkler makes clear that Grim felt the pain. His massive determination and resilience (to invoke another favorite term in our Neoliberal age) did not represent an immunity to hurt or reveal that capitalism, displacement, and work did not take their toll. In fact, Winkler tells us that Grim spends his later years in a hospital for the mentally infirm in Philadelphia. Instead, the heroism Grim displayed in the ring and allowed him to make a living left him a devastated man. Boxing as a sport, but more importantly, as a metaphor for our current situation where pain is the cost of capitalism, displacement, resilience, and work, has its consequences. Whether we, or Grim, could have done better is hard to know.