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Emily Bullock's debut novel The Longest Fight is a story of boxing, obsession and sacrifice set in the East End of London in the 1950s. The plot follows Jack Munday, an aspiring boxing manager, who believes he has found his big break in the raw yet talented fighter Frank; but to make it in the big time, Jack needs to play the game with the gangsters who control the business. The Longest Fight contains vivid accounts of Frank's fights, but Bullock writes equally well about the complex family relationships which drive Jack, and creates an evocative depiction of the post-War East End.
Here, she talks about her inspirations, the difficulties of making boxing matches feel real on the page, and her writing habits.
The Longest Fight is inspired by your grandfather, a boxer. Can you tell us a little bit about him, and the influence he had on the novel?
The novel was inspired by my grandfather and his London
childhood. Jimmy Bullock, the Tooting Tiger, started boxing as a boy, fought on
air bases during the war, and after the war he became a builder by day, a
fighter by night. I remember his house being full of boxing World Record Books
and grainy VHS tapes of fights; sometimes we watched them together.
I began my research for the novel by studying the boxing
paraphernalia that he’d collected during his own boxing career. Congratulating
myself on the good luck of having access to these materials I quickly realised
that research alone wasn’t going to be enough. It was my desire to move away
from my actual family history that led me to foreground female characters in
the story and a protagonist who gains self-awareness.
The novel gives a
strong sense of the London underworld - how did you research the locations and
characters?
Living in South London myself I initially believed the
research into the area would be simple to pursue. But I realised that the bomb
damaged heart and slum terraces that shaped Jack's life had long since
disappeared: from maps, paintings and eye witness accounts I had to piece
together a vanished landscape.
I needed to take a step back from the idea of
the researcher as 'historian' and focus instead on the 'creative writing.'
Research was critical but I wanted to reclaim the language, and the images of
my sources, and feel they were mine before I could use them in the context of
my character’s voice. One strategy that
I found useful during this process was poetry. I could use it to change my
research into fiction whilst also knowing that none of the produced poetic
material committed me to using it in the novel. I gave myself the freedom to
play and create.
What drew you to set
The Longest Fight in the 1950s, in particular?
Some of the best boxing fiction to come out of America is
set in the 1930s depression era and for me post war London also had this sense
of austerity and deprivation. The war might have been over, but for the people
living in those slums and walking those bomb damaged streets it was a long way
from being won. Boxing was a way out for many of those men, a chance at a
better future – for many it still is. I was also struck by the parallels to
austerity Britain today; yet the early 1950s often get overlooked as an era in
historical fiction.
Making a fictional
sporting event appear authentic to readers seems like a huge challenge. What
were the key things for you, to make the fight scenes convincing?
I turned to boxing reportage to investigate the
level of realism that the boxing elements of the plot demanded; great boxing
writers like Norman Mailer, Budd Schulberg, and David Remnick. What I also
found in their writing was a range of creative techniques that I hadn’t
expected to encounter; uses of flashback, a mythic sense of scale. Boxing
reportage can’t just tell the reader it has to show them - that essential
balance of showing and telling.
I also acknowledge a debt to boxing films: Raging Bull; Rocky; Fat City. The fight scenes in the novel attempt to follow the
advice of Walter Murch’s In The Blink of an Eye (a perspective on film editing); he makes a
strong argument for cutting with the blink when he describes how
[i]f
you are in an actual fight, you will be blinking dozens of times a minute
because you are thinking dozens of conflicting thoughts a minute – and so when
you are watching a fight in a film, there should be dozens of cuts per minute.[1]
Syntactically I have tried to do this in prose
form by using short sentences, and grammatical markers to break up the rhythm
of sentences.
Following on, your PhD
research looked at the way novelists have written about boxing in the past -
which would be the classic novels or stories, for you?
The short stories of F.X. Toole are the first boxing
stories that I read and they’re still my favourite. Toole boxed himself and his
work is suffused with the characters and events he witnessed. The Professional by W.C. Heinz, a novel
as close to sports reportage as you can come in fiction. The monotony of the
training regime is realistic, not all punch and glory under the bright lights
of the ring. You find yourself longing for the fight and the big win, but as in
life the tragedy is that there’s no guarantee of a win.
Where do you go to
write? What's your routine like?
I prefer to write at home; I get too distracted in coffee
shops and libraries. I usually battle with the internet during the writing day,
coming up with all sorts of excuses as to why I need to turn it on – sometimes
I wrestle control and manage to limit it to coffee breaks. I try to work a 9 to
5 day; I find the routine helpful in lessening procrastination. Although all my
best ideas come just as I’m about to fall asleep; I’ve learned to keep a pen
and paper handy at all times.
Who are your favourite
modern writers?
Sarah Waters for great plots, and clever uses of time in
her novels.
Alice Munro for her ability to condense whole lives into a
few thousand words - something I’m always telling students not to do. She
breaks all those short story ‘rules’ magnificently and with such eloquence.
Graham Swift’s characters are filled with such emotion that
I’m always moved by their plights, and of course he chooses some great South
London settings.
I haven’t yet read a word by A.L. Kennedy that I didn’t
like.
What are you working on
next?
End Times,
a novel about a Victorian matriarchal crime family. I also like to write short
stories, and have various ones in different stages of editing at the moment.
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