Express to Hollywood

Victor McLaglen. EXPRESS TO HOLLYWOOD. Jarrolds, London, 1934.

Current Selling Prices
$600-$800 /£350-£450

MOVIES / BOXING / AUTOBIOGRAPHY
This is a return visit to a resolutely unfindable book. Actually, Peter M a reader of these postings found a copy and mailed me these images. Many thanks. There are no copies on the web and I have only heard of one going through Ebay; there is also the copy mentioned by Prize Fighter in the old comments field. Family members, boxing fans, Brits in Hollywood scholars and movie fans want it.

It is the autobiography of a Hollywood hard man and ex boxer, recalling his wildly adventurous career prior to entering the movies. McLaglen was born in turbulent Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England. His father, a bishop, moved the family to South Africa when McLaglen was a child. He left home at fourteen to join the army with the intention of fighting in the Second Boer War. However much to his chagrin, he was stationed at Windsor Castle and was later forced to leave the army when his true age was discovered. From 1904 - 1920 he was a boxer and in 1918 McLaglen won the Heavyweight Championship of the British Army. The Wikiman says of this elusive book:

"His tale of the road, his odyssey from his native England through Canada and the western United States, details his long-held desire to be a professional prizefighter, climaxing in a no-decision fight with world heavyweight champion Jack Johnson. McLaglen supplements his story with vignettes of life as a farmer, gold and silver prospector, wrestler, policeman, soldier, vaudeville performer, miner, pearl fisher, big-game hunter, and sign-painter. In all likelihood the only Academy Award-winning actor ever, past or future, also to be Assistant Provost Marshal of the city of Baghdad, McLaglen writes a story that reads as though Jack London had written it. He writes with candor and humility, and with style. It is am immensely enjoyable book, and the fact that McLaglen was at the time of its writing only beginning to achieve the fame and popularity that would maintain his career nearly another three decades is both astonishing and a bit disappointing: it would have been wonderful to read his accounts of the next quarter century...."

Of course he went on to make "The Informer," "The Quiet Man," and "What Price Glory?". I have trod on his name on Hollywood Boulevard where, as Ray Davies has it, his name "is written in concrete."



VALUE? 20 years ago someone paid $120 for a signed photo at Darvick , there was a BIN for an insubstantial clipped note at ebay for $250. Sanders Autograph Guide (2000) rate his signature at $165 and a signed photo at $335 and spell his name McLaglin. He wasn't John Wayne, who can go very high indeed, but for some reason hard guy's signatures are often pricy. Jarrolds, an East Anglian publisher, tended to have funky colourful jackets so it would look good and modestly priced in the low to mid hundreds it would probably sell to the fastest finger in less than an hour on ABE--there are over 40 buyers waiting. It is a boxing book which, as far as I am aware is still a lively collecting area; there are even boxing book specialists - I used to ask them in vain for Arthur Cravan posters. Do they join the ring? Sans jacket the book still very good, people want to read it. There are no Kessinger reprints. Ugly though they usually are, new printings would lower the price.

Arthur Cravan. Maintenant 1912 - 1915.

Arthur Cravan. MAINTENANT. Revue Littéraire. 5 issues. Self Published. Paris, April 1912 - April 1915.

Current Selling Prices
$10000+ /£5000+

PERIODICAL / DADA/ BOXING / ODDITY
Arthur Cravan--poet, traveller, boxer, charlatan and possible forger published the proto-Dadaist magazine 'Maintenant' in Paris beteween 1912 and 1915. The 5 issues are now very scarce and can command over a thousand dollars each. The market for them is probably slim and collectors of this material tend not to have deep purses but the mystery of his life and death is still pretty potent...He was in the news this year when someone turned up at the New York ABAA book fair with a bunch of Oscar Wilde manuscripts of intense value (if they had been right.) They were pronounced forgeries, and Cravan (or Fabian Lloyd as he was born) was mentioned as the possible source and maker of the fakes. The story was well covered at The Times Online. Cravan was actually the son of Wilde's brother in law and was born in Lausanne in 1887. He grew to 6 foot 6 inches and weighed 18 stone. At one point he became the boxing champion of Europe and even fought the World Champion Jack Johnson (poster above) in a rigged fight in Barcelona to get enough money to travel to New York to avoid the military call-up. A relentless world traveller, he wrote "I have twenty countries in my memory and trail in my soul the colors of one hundred cities." He also wrote in Maintenant that "Every great artist has the sense of provocation" --the key to his style.

I was reminded of Cravan recently on hearing of the death of another poet and boxer Vernon Scannell. How many other boxers wrote poetry? Muhammad Ali made a pretty good fist of it (as it were) Roy Campbell was something of a bruiser, T.E. Hulme fought Wyndham Lewis in Soho Square, Marlowe died in a pub brawl - possibly there are more. With Cravan all you can collect are the five issues of Maintenant and two or three boxing posters, the one to the left can be bought in 'limited edition' facsimile for £200. The originals have got to be into four figures sterling.

Cravan paraded himself as "the poet with the shortest haircut in the world." One is reminded of the book dealer and writer Driffield, an almost daily visitor to Trumpers and himself a larger than life character and a bit of a bruiser to boot. The most memorable thing about Cravan was his total disappearance in 1918. Cravan had established a boxing school in Mexico City and married the highly rated poet Mina Loy. He and Loy planned a short sojourn in Buenos Aires, but only had enough money for her passage, Cravan decided to navigate himself with a friend in a small fishing boat; he and Loy would rendezvous later in Valparaíso. Nobody ever saw Cravan again. Loy bore their daughter, Fabienne, in April 1919. Two issues of Maintenant are archived on the web at Iowa (see below.) Interestingly they show all the original ads including a creamery, a bonbonniere, a Mercedes dealer and an evening with Cravan himself (see below.) The contents are best described by a great Cravan enthusiast Andy Merryfield of The Brooklyn Rail site:

'Still, Cravan’s spirit is best evoked by Cravan himself, in the pages of Maintenant, his pesky journal, the centerpiece of the publisher Champ Libre’s handsome Arthur Cravan Oeuvres: Poèmes, Articles, Lettres. (The now-defunct Champ Libre was the brainchild of millionaire French producer and agent, Gérard Lébovici, who, in 1984, was gunned down in an avenue Foch parking lot in a murder never solved.) Only five issues of Maintenant appeared between 1912 and 1915; Cravan was editor-in-chief and sole contributor, often penning diatribes under pseudonyms like W. Cooper, Robert Miradique and Edouard Archinard. Soirées of poetry and boxing instruction were advertised on its cover; inside, we find not only Cravan’s manic poetry, which sizzles on the page, but also hilarious frontals against establishment figures–like André Gide—and hallucinogenic dialogues between Cravan and his late "uncle" Oscar Wilde. "I looked at him in his entirety," said Cravan in "Oscar Wilde is living!" "He was fine. In his armchair he had the air of an elephant; his backside crushed the seat where it was narrowest; in front of those enormous arms and legs I tried, with admiration, to imagine the divine sentiments that inhabited these same limbs… ‘Come on! Have a bloody drink!’ I exclaimed with an American boxer’s accent." "You are a terrible boy," quips an indignant Wilde to Cravan, "my God, have you lost all your dignity!"

Cravan’s stanzas are similarly exuberant and raving: "I would like to be in Vienna and in Calcutta," he wrote in "Hie!" "catching every train and every ship,/ fornicating with every woman and devouring every dish./ Socialite, chemist, whore, drunk, musician, worker, painter, acrobat, actor;/ Old, young, swindler, hoodlum, angel and reveler;/ millionaire, bourgeois, cactus, giraffe or crow;/ Coward, hero, negro, monkey, Don Juan, pimp, lord,/ peasant, hunter, industrialist,/ Fauna and flora:/ I am all things, all men and all animals!" And in "Words," he warned that "You need to dream your life with great care,/ Instead of living it merely as a party." Then, "Weary of searching for the day, you will taste the night." "I have lived in an epoch," Cravan said in "Arthur," "where I could have the drunkenness to think that nobody else was my equal./ An idea!"

Other Cravan enthusiasts include Andre Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Greil Marcus and Guy Debord.



VALUE? With ads for cafes and car dealers one suspects that the run of Maintenant was not tiny and it is likely that the always broke Cravan hawked them about forcing sales by his sheer physical bulk. However I have never seen one, and Martin Stone in 20 years of patrolling the boulevards and quais of Paris has only seen two issues. A run turned up a few years ago at Benjamin's auctions in the Netherlands and made circa $10000 but that result might have been site specific. From the look of the copies held at Iowa University they were printed on cheap paper and won't have survived in limpid state. Kind of thing one might find with a bunch of dull, yellowing French journals--and what a find!

TRIVIA. A biographical graphic novel on the life of Arthur Cravan has been published by Dark Horse Comics. Written by the publisher, Mike Richardson, and illustrated by Rick Geary, "Cravan" puts forth the idea that Cravan and the enigmatic author of 'The Treasure of the Sierra Madre' B. Traven might be one and the same. Haven't read it but reckon that it would be easier to prove that the Duke of Earl was Shakespeare.