Top Ten Nick Paumgarten Pieces: #7 "The Ring and the Bar"

Bob Bozic (Photo by Steve Pyke for Nick Paumgarten's "The Ring and the Bar")

Nick Paumgarten is an excellent profile-writer. He’s written memorable pieces on Billy Joel (“Thirty-Three Hit Wonder”), Elvis Costello (“Brilliant Mistakes”), Mickey Drexler (“The Merchant”), St. Vincent (“Singer of Secrets”), and Yvon Chouinard (“Wild Man”), to name five that come quickly to mind. My favorite is “The Ring and the Bar” (January 30, 2012), a profile of bartender and former heavyweight boxer Bob Bozic. Here’s Paumgarten’s description of Bozic:

Bozic, who is sixty-one, is a stocky six feet two, with bearish arms and shoulders and the belly of a man who likes a beer at lunch. He shaves clean what hair there’d still be over his ears; he’s got a melon. His features manage to seem both doughy and sharp—with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating. He speaks in the sinusy muffle of an old prizefighter and has a bulldog laugh, all grunts and snorts. He often taps your arm or shoulder when he’s telling a story, to make sure you’re listening. He tears up easily, thinking about all that he has been through and the people who have put up with him.

That passage makes me smile every time I read it, especially the part about “with his arched eyebrows and his piercing eyes, he looks a little like Lenin after a back-alley beating.”

Bozic is a great talker. Paumgarten says,

Bozic isn’t the first boxer or barkeep to talk a lot; everyone’s got a story, pal. But his, hopping from Belgrade to Afghanistan, from memories of a vagrant stretch on the streets of Toronto to a bout against Larry Holmes at Madison Square Garden and a possible claim on a Serbian spa and a coal mine in Kosovo, tests the confines of the form. He tells his tales without bravado or bombast. He often punctuates them with a shrug, as if they were nothing to him.

Note that “everyone’s got a story, pal.” It’s Paumgarten momentarily shifting into indirect free style, talking like a bartender. It’s nothing major; just a neat bit of technique that Paumgarten uses to roughen the texture of his prose. 

Another of his techniques is use of the first-person perspective. “The Ring and the Bar” contains several examples of it, including this beauty:  

Bozic at sixty-one, shadowboxing in front of a floor-to-ceiling mirror at the Church Street Boxing Gym, in lower Manhattan, on a recent weekday morning. He jabbed at his reflection, exhaling sharply, like an air brake. He had me hold the heavy bag for a while as he pounded it. I pressed my head into the bag, to absorb the blows. “This is when you feel who you are,” he said.

I think that is one of my all-time favorite New Yorker passages. The use of a sentence fragment to set the scene; the vivid figuration (“exhaling sharply, like an air brake”); the indelible image of Paumgarten pressing his head into the punching bag as Bozic pounds it; the meaning that Bozic extracts from the experience (“ ‘This is when you feel who you are’ ”) – the whole thing is total perfection!

“The Ring and the Bar” tells the story of Bozic’s life: his family’s roots in Serbia; their emigration to Canada; Bozic’s birth in Windsor, Ontario; the family splitting up; his mother giving Bozic up to a foster family; “Bozic, at sixteen, living hand-to-mouth on the streets of Toronto”; Bozic training as a boxer at the Lansdowne Training Club, meeting, among others, Canadian heavyweight champion George Chuvalo; Bozic winning the Canadian national amateur heavyweight championship in 1969; Bozic fighting Larry Holmes at Madison Square Gardens in 1973. Paumgarten writes,

No one gave Bozic much of a chance; at the weigh-in, he overheard Duke Stefano, the matchmaker, assure Don King, the promoter, that Bozic wouldn’t give Holmes any trouble. Holmes was already known for his jab. Bozic, at the outset, thought he’d test it: “You know how a batter takes the first pitch? Well, I took the first punch. Eight seconds in. It broke my nose. I thought, This is another level. This is gonna be quite an evening.” Two rounds later, a right knocked out several of Bozic’s teeth. Holmes beat him badly, but Bozic stayed upright and went the distance: “There is something almost cleansing about getting a whooping in front of a big crowd and yet not giving in. Just give in to your master, walk right into that buzz saw.”

“The Ring and the Bar” begins in the Fanelli Café, where Bozic works, and ends in the Pembroke Room, at the Lowell Hotel, where Paumgarten joins Bozic and his twenty-year-old daughter, Vesna, for tea. The ending subtly hints that Vesna may have inherited her father’s gift for storytelling.

What a pleasure to revisit this great piece!

"Beyond Words: Photography In The New Yorker"

Looking at the photos on display in the exhibition “Beyond Words: Photography in the New Yorker,” at the Howard Greenberg Gallery website (www.howardgreenberg.com), I found myself lingering over only two of them: Steve Pyke’s 2005 portrait of John Ashbery and Snowdon’s 1957 portrait of Iris Murdoch. Pyke’s photo was used to illustrate Larissa MacFarquhar’s wonderful profile of Ashbery (“Present Waking Life,” The New Yorker, November 7, 2005). It’s a fascinating photo. I remember seeing it when it appeared in the magazine. At first, I thought it was a bit flawed. Ashbery’s forehead and eyes reflect the white light of the camera flash, about ten percent of his face is outside the picture frame, and the right side of the photo is dominated by a large, incoherent expanse of black. In terms of composition, the photo is odd. But it’s also memorable, an extreme close-up of a face containing large eyes that look back at us as if they’re seeing our future. As I flicked through the exhibition’s pictures, I was looking for it. And I was delighted when I found it. I was looking for other favorites, too: Pyke’s shimmery black-and-white shot of Rem Koolhass (or is it his reflection?) that appears in the March 14, 2005, issue of The New Yorker, as an illustration for Daniel Zalewski’s “Intelligent Design”; Han Gissinger’s blurred action shot of kitchen reality at the Flamingo coffee shop (see Burkhard Bilger’s “The Egg Men,” The New Yorker, September 5, 2005), Sylvia Plachy’s gritty, off-kilter picture of the up-raised right arm of a statue of Jesus (see Ian Frazier’s “Route 3,” The New Yorker, February 16 & 23, 2004), Robert Polidori’s semi-abstract scrap metal photo illustrating John Seabrook’s “American Scrap” (The New Yorker, January 14, 2008), Martin Schoeller’s gleaming shot of Don Ainsworth driving his “sapphire-drawn convexing elongate stainless mirror” (see John McPhee’s “A Fleet Of One,” The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2003), Josef Astor’s gorgeous rooftop beehive-keeper pic that illustrates Adam Gopnik’s “New York Local” (The New Yorker, September 3 & 10, 2007). I regret to report that none of them are in the show. But what is in the show, in addition to Pyke’s extraordinary Ashbery shot, is one of the most intensely literary photos I’ve ever seen. I’m referring to Snowdon’s 1957 black-and-white photo of Iris Murdoch, showing her seated at a table in front of an open book that’s propped up against a lamp, reading intently through a cloud of smoke billowing from the cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. There’s a pile of books on the table, and a fountain pen; behind her, there’s a bookcase full of books. Light pours in from a window on her right. The picture has a painterly look, almost as if it was a photo of an oil painting by a great portrait painter. I love this photograph. It was used to illustrate John Updike’s review of Peter J. Conradi’s Iris Murdoch: A Life (“Young Iris,” The New Yorker, October 1, 2001; included in Updike’s 2007 essay collection Due Considerations). In his review, Updike calls Murdoch “the pre-eminent English novelist of the second half of the twentieth century.” But, in 1957, when Snowdon took her picture, her career was just getting started. Snowdon somehow conjured a photograph that predicted her greatness.

Credit: The above photograph of Iris Murdoch is by Snowdon; it appears in the October 1, 2001 issue of The New Yorker as an illustration for John Updike's "Young Iris."