Wrestliana by Toby Litt
A S H Smyth
In autumn 2014, feeling somewhat down about his writing career, uncertain in his role as model for his two sons, and with one eye on the health of his own father, Toby Litt decided to take on the oftpostponed biography of his great-greatgreat-grandfather William.
William Litt (1785-1850) was something of a Renaissance man: an undefeated prizefighter and winner of 200 belts in the popular 19th-century pursuit of Cumberland and Westmorland wrestling (hereafter: wrestling).
He wrote ‘the first [English?] history of wrestling’ ( Wrestliana, 1823) as well as a ‘densely worded’ autobiographical novel, contributed poetry and correspondence to the Cumberland news-sheets, became a trainee priest, a non-committal farmer, a bankrupt brewer and a schoolteacher, and even dabbled in a spot of smuggling. He wore his top boots in the ring, and was, in his day, a big noise in the North-west, ‘the Champion of the Green’, as much written about as writing – a sort of Gentleman Jim.
But, crucially, he was not a gentleman. After his sporting retirement, perhaps lacking focus for his talents, he went quite fundamentally off the boil. He made no money, abandoned his family (Toby is at pains to stress that he plays football with his kids, a lot) and retired to the ultimate obscurity of Canada, like an old, heroic Greek who cannot come to
terms with his mortality. Or perhaps, more prosaically, he’d had a run-in with his Cumberlandlords.
There was one final burst of letters to the local paper, the Cumberland Pacquet, and then... nothing. Two centuries later, his biographer stands awkwardly beside an intersection where his grave should be.
With its local customs, terms of art (did you know that ‘buttock’ is a verb in wrestling?), Wordsworth sidebars, and notes on the cosmopolitan elite vs the (real) countryside, this new Wrestliana is at once family history, rural psycho-geography, and a breezy, open window on the writing life, with all its disappointments, dead ends and half-conclusions.
But this is not what the book is really about. What it is about is: why is Toby
Litt not more like William Litt? What makes a man in 2018? And how is that different from a man in 1818? Are there physical and intellectual forms of manliness?
Toby, ‘a puny, Southern desk-worker’, checks Dads vs Lads, school bullying (by his own admission, the reason he became a writer), Norman Mailer’s dog, and other quotidian ‘tests’ of one’s machismo, and concludes, ‘Even when they’re not wrestling, men are always wrestling.’
Worse, in the present-day echo of this conflict, he sees no chance of a reconciliation between what he calls the ‘two tribes of masculinity’ – the professional sportsmen and the poets: ‘If you’re well-balanced, then you must be a well-balanced no-hoper.’
In an effort to narrow the gap, Toby (of course) decides to give wrestling a try – and comes up even more impressed than previously.
‘What “all-rounder” means, in cricket, is just that a man can bowl and bat and field, not that they can write a decent essay on the causes of the French Revolution and cook beef Wellington and play the flute... William was a genuine all-round man, a real oddity.’
Twentieth-century Toby can’t squeeze out a tear at William’s graveside, and feels bad about it. Some might find Toby’s wrestling-as-life construct a smidge predictable. But at least he’s sceptical of football as the vehicle for any of life’s (or even sport’s) essential lessons.