By Stuart Mitchner

Never lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him. Crowd a boxer, and take everything he has, to get inside. Duck a swing. Block a hook. And counter a jab with everything you own.

—Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

The winner got to wear a three-ply rope fashioned after the style of Hemingway…

—John Lennon (1940-1980)

John Lennon’s reference to Hemingway’s style is from his posthumous collection, Skywriting By Word of Mouth (1986). Today would have been his 84th birthday.

Ernest Hemingway’s tips on boxing come from a May 6, 1950 New Yorker profile by Lillian Ross (“How Do You Like It Now, Gentlemen?”). Hemingway and his wife Mary had just checked into Manhattan’s Sherry-Netherland Hotel, where he was drinking champagne and playfully riffing about boxing and writing: “I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I’ve fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody’s going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I’m crazy or I keep getting better.”

A Manhattan Mixture

I reread what Hemingway said about writers as boxers while warming up for a fantasia on the vice-presidential debate as a boxing match between Mr. Vance (JDV), a former venture capitalist from Ohio, and Mr. Walz (TW), a retired football coach from Minnesota. These two out-of-towners squared off a week ago at the CBS Center on West 57th, an easy walk west from the Sherry-Netherland, 15 blocks south of the scene of John Lennon’s murder and just around the corner from Mount Sinai West’s surgical center, where he died on December 8, 1980.

JDV vs. TW

As for how Hemingway’s tips on boxing might relate to either opponent in this imaginary match, his warning not to “lead against a hitter unless you can outhit him” might explain what Mr. Walz is up to as Mr. Vance shows off some fancy footwork attempting to repair his image while doing his best to keep things collegial. Truth be told, TW looks unhappy when he comes out of his corner. Nobody’s attack dog, he generally likes people, even (maybe especially) weird people with hillbilly roots. In the split-screen shots when he’s not talking, the coach looks fuddled, wary, and worried, like a deflated Don Rickles, a tragic clown facing off against a conflicted hack who also basically likes people and is making nice even as he delivers carefully rehearsed zingers about Kamala Harris before falling into occasional we’re-all-in-this-together-bro clinches, hoping TW will self-destruct the way the president did in June.

If the fight were being scored, JDV would be ahead on points as he defends the indefensible DT, dodging and ducking, bobbing and weaving around questions on the climate change “hoax,” evil migrants, the economy, still without ever landing a serious blow as the coach glumly stands his ground, impassively “taking everything” and showing as yet no sign of fire or righteous indignation.

“A Damning Non-Answer”

TW finds his opening in round 10. When the subject is January 6 and DT’s attempt to overthrow a free and fair election, JDV has to deal with a high school football coach standing up for the primary law of sports: when you lose, you take it and shake hands. As JDV stalls about focusing on the future rather than the past while feebly diverting attention with the fake news about Harris censoring social media, TW executes a nifty collegial feint. After thanking “Senator Vance” and agreeing that “there’s a lot of agreement” — except for the fact that DT’s continuing threat to democracy is “one we’re miles apart on” — the coach looks his opponent squarely in the eye and asks him flat out, yes or no, did Trump lose the election? And when JDV wards off the question with another feeble stall, collapsing into the rhetorical equivalent of a clinch, he’s hit with a line that in the lingo of the ring, you could call an uppercut, but with a twist made to fly on social media: “That’s a damning non-answer.”

Listening to Lennon

After watching Vance dance around the awful truth during the match at the CBS Center, I naturally thought of John Lennon’s “Gimme Some Truth,” a searing, multi-syllabic blast about “hearing things from uptight, short-sighted, narrow-minded hypocritics,” along with the plea that even when he was alive had the eerie effect of a voice singing “All I want is some truth, just give me some truth” from beyond the grave. Lennon’s greatest songs, however, are very much alive in the here and now, like two on Side 1 of the White Album: “Dear Prudence,” a simple, childlike come-out-and-play ballad addressed to a single person that becomes a soaring anthem, and “Happiness is a Warm Gun,” a novel’s worth of excitement and attitude delivered in under three minutes. Taking his title from an article in American Rifleman magazine, Lennon shows the same talent for making the most of everyday slice-of-life material revealed decades later in Skywriting By Word of Mouth.

Of all the Lennon songs that have followed me around and kept me company for more than half a century, the most haunting, harrowing, and ultimately uplifting is “Instant Karma.” Besides seeing me through writer’s block in January 2020, it’s another example of Lennon’s ability to make art from the mundane details of everyday life. Who else could turn instant coffee into a song that tells you “pretty soon you’re gonna be dead” while asking “what in the world you’re thinking of laughing in the face of love?”

“Instant Karma” is the first song I’ll listen to on Lennon’s birthday. The man who sings “We all shine on” with life or death intensity in 1970 sang to the world with the Beatles in the summer of 1967: “Nothing you can make that can’t be made; no one you can save that can’t be saved; nothing you can know that isn’t known; nothing you can see that isn’t shown; and nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be.”

The New York Story

John Lennon’s place in the New York story is reinforced every Times Square New Year’s Eve by the singing of his song “Imagine.” In fact, the line “Imagine all the people living for today” resonates with the way everything comes together in Manhattan, where Ernest Hemingway’s holding forth on writing and boxing while waiting for Marlene Dietrich to stop by his Sherry-Netherlands suite, just around a Central Park corner from her suite at the Plaza, where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald cavorted in the 1920s and from whose windows John Lennon and the Beatles waved to crowds of fans and New York cops 60 years ago, February 7, 1964.

A Birthday Playlist

Here’s a playlist by singer songwriters who came into the world on this date, starting with “Boris the Spider” by The Who’s John Entwhistle, who was born October 9, 1944, in Hammersmith, London, and died June 27, 2002, in Paradise, Nevada. You can be sure that this black-comedy ditty got plenty of plays during the Boris Johnson Brexit fiasco.

Although Jackson Browne, born October 9, 1948, may be best known for “These Days,” composed at 16, I’ve always admired “Lawyers in Love,” a song (and video) that should be played from now until Election Day, with lines like “I can’t keep up with what’s been going down” and “Am I the only one who hears the screams and the strangled cries of lawyers in love.” Except they won’t have time for love after November 5; they’ll be to their necks in litigation.

The one album worthy of a place on the playlist is Let England Shake by PJ Harvey, who was born Polly Jean Harvey in Bridport, Dorset, on October 9, 1969. “The world we live in” was Harvey’s answer when she was asked by an interviewer what inspired the album, which ultimately celebrates life, music, nature, love, poetry, and the creative spirit. At the same time, considering that war and waste, greed and madness, sickness and death, are all worthy, challenging subjects for an artist with Harvey’s gifts, she embraces them, takes them on, makes a mission of them.

Finally, a song by the youngest musician in the group, the son of John Winston Lennon, who was born in Liverpool Maternity Hospital on October 9, 1940. Sean Ono Lennon arrived on October 9, 1975, in Manhattan’s Cornell Medical Center. I didn’t know his song “Parachute,” nor had I seen the video where he looks so chillingly like his father. I kept my distance, as I always have since listening to John sing “Beautiful Boy” on December 8, 1980. Try watching the video with dry eyes when Sean sings lines like “if I have to die tonight, I’d rather be with you.”