The Fight Racket

THE HARDER THEY FALL (343 pp.)--Budd Schulberg--Random House ($3).

The manly art of modified murder, as the late ringsider W. O. McGeehan called it, has supplied Budd Schulberg, 33, with a subject even seamier than the gaudy and greedy Hollywood of his first novel, What Makes Sammy Run? In The Harder They Fall, professional prize fighting is presented as a thoroughly crooked and brutal business. This point of view is entirely tenable, but as the theme of a full-length novel it gets tiresome. All the shocking details that Schulberg desperately dishes up cannot disguise the sophomoric quality of his storytelling, and readers will end up feeling that his book is almost as coarse and phony a performance as the show it satirizes.

Talent with a Taint. Eddie Lewis, the narrator, is a pressagent, prey to the pressagent's stock neurosis: Shall I go on prostituting my talent for dough or shall I bravely become a Serious Writer? A nice girl, Beth, thinks Eddie should be brave, but his boss, Nick Latka, has a big thing for him to build up--a giant Argentine with a glass jaw who can be babied and ballyhooed into a heavyweight contender. This game appeals to Eddie and so does his promised cut of the proceeds, so he takes leave of Beth and swings off to the West Coast with the traveling menagerie for which he has been appointed barker. El Toro Molina, the chief exhibit, is a youthful monster who barely knows how to put up his hands and has the fighting spirit of a titmouse. Eddie throws a cocktail party in Los Angeles to sell the Giant of the Andes to the press.

Says Schulberg: "The cocktail party is America's favorite form of seduction.... The plot is always the same. Come up to my room and have a drink. And whether the object is physical passion or getting your client's name into the headlines, the method is standard: to weaken their resistance with let-me-pour-you-another-one, until they open their arms or their columns to you in an alcoholic daze. Of course there will always be some ladies, and members of the working press, who bounce back regularly after each seduction, holding out their empty glasses, eager to sacrifice themselves again. . . ." The press goes for "the story," with one exception--"the sort of fellow who comes to your cocktail party, drinks up all your liquor and then goes away and writes as he pleases. No loyalty. No principles."

El Toro, the bewildered victim, is nominally "owned" by a lewd fat man, Vince Vanneman, who fixes every one of his fights on a coast-to-coast tour that Eddie promotes into a triumphal march. Nick, the powerful and deadly racketeer who actually owns El Toro as he owns Eddie, also owns the aging heavyweight champion, Gus Lennert. Gus is soon to retire, after drawing one big purse for getting massacred by the challenger, Buddy Stein, and another for doing a nose dive before El Toro. Nick has all the elements nicely calculated except his wife, Ruby, a ladylike tramp who seduces El Toro. Eddie finally gets fed up with the whole business; he realizes at last that he can't have Beth, that he has been a criminal among criminals. The novel has a wildly contrived and sentimental ending.

Jargon with a Trowel. The Harder They Fall shows a certain verve in the writing; the Eighth Avenue, Manhattan atmosphere and guttersnipe jargon are accurate, though laid on with a trowel; some of the minor characters--trainers, punch-drunk fighters, hangers-on--are human, pathetic and partly credible. Schulberg has hung around the sidelines of boxing for years, but only as a spectator. It is poor luck for him that Eddie Lewis' relationship with his boss is reminiscent of Jack Burden's with his (a fictional Huey Long) in last year's Pulitzer Prize novel, All the King's Men.

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