The Set-Up: The Lost Classic by the Author of 'The Wild Party'

By Joseph Moncure March and Erik Kriek

Written in 1928, The Set-Up is a long narrative poem about the boxing underworld - a hard-boiled tragedy told in syncopated rhyming couplets. When the work was first published it made the bestseller list, and in 1949 it was turned into an award-winning film featuring Robert Ryan and Audrey Totter. This reprinting of the original, unchanged 1928 poem features dynamic, specially commissioned artwork by Erik Kriek that vividly conveys the story of Pansy, an up-and-coming black prize fighter who takes on all comers. When he was in the ring, "It was over before you knew it. He'd carve you up like a leg of mutton. And drop you flat with a sock on the button." Pansy's complicated love life leads to a spell in prison and his career subsequently takes a nosedive; but he continues to box until the fateful night his fight managers and opponent triple-cross him and he meets a grisly end at the hands of a vengeful gang.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Korero Press
• Release date: Apr 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781912740123

Joseph Moncure March

Joseph Moncure March (1899-1977) was the first managing editor of The New Yorker, and helped create the magazine's Talk of the Town front section. After leaving the magazine, March wrote the first of his two important Jazz Age narrative poems, The Wild Party. In 1928 he followed it up with The Set-up. Moving to Hollywood in 1929 he became the script writer who turned the silent version of Howard Hughes' classic Hell's Angels into a talkie.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

IN 1928, Joseph Moncure March viewed a painting by his friend, US artist James Ormsbee Chapin that stirred his imagination. In the foreground sits a black boxer, gloves resting on his knees, staring blindly into the ring before him. Behind him, a white fight manager leans languorously against the ropes, gesturing towards the invisible crowd, who sit in vulturous anticipation of blood.

The Set-Up is a verse narrative conceived by March in New York to the rhythmic thump and clank of a machine shop, and finished on a shabby kitchen table in Rhode Island in the summer of 1928. Set to a tightly syncopated beat and dripping with atmosphere, it paints a vivid and exhilarating picture of prize-fighting in early 20th century America. In this brutal world, populated by greedy, scheming fight managers and the boxers they control, dupe and misuse, corruption lurks beneath the surface, compromising the morality of all. The New York-set story pivots on the inextricable link between boxing and organised crime during this period of US history, and on the prevailing racial politics: almost every character — black, Jewish, German, or Italian — is tied to, and characterised by, his ethnicity.

Pansy Jones, the book’s protagonist, is an ageing African-American boxer who is used as fodder to advance the career of an up-and-coming young Italian-American boxer. Against the grim viciousness of his sport and the casual inhumanity of his associates, Pansy stands firm, refusing to blindly accept his ill treatment. According to March, The Set-Up is the "story of a Negro fighter who had already been defeated by race prejudice but didn’t know how to stop fighting’’, and the book can at times feel morally and stylistically claustrophobic; March’s style has a distinct mnemonic tenacity that can be attributed in part to his relationship with the American poet Robert Frost. Nevertheless, he had the ability to convey drama and action powerfully and quickly, and his ear for the rhythms of everyday speech confer a strong sense of reality on the book’s dialogue.

Joseph Moncure March was born into a prominent American family in 1899, and raised in New York on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, whose citizens, according to March, had an intense and scientific preoccupation in the art of bouncing their knuckles off somebody’s jaw. From an early age he took it for granted that being an expert with fists was important, yet his privilege ensured that such violence existed only on the periphery of his life. In his youth he explored the poverty and misery of New York’s slums vicariously by reading Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; and in later life he would write that his preference had always been for the disreputable. However, although he undoubtedly felt an affinity with this world, he enjoyed enough of a separation from its reality to be idealistic about it. It was at Amherst College in Massachusetts that March first exercised this nascent idealism; here, he battled with sour-faced trigonometry professors over the value of poetry and co-published a satirical newsletter that was derisive about the college.

Enlisting in the US Army as a private in 1918 – even though his uncle was a senior general – and taking with him volumes of the works of Keats and Shelley, March spent the rest of World War I serving in an infantry unit. To the derision of the other men, he downplayed his family connections; he later lamented that his explanation of his family’s negative attitude towards nepotism was met with hostility: These men were realists, and had no patience with anyone who did not take advantage of his advantages. If the first half of March’s life was marked by privilege, the small fragment of war he experienced in France was enough to cause a marked disruption; on his return, he was allowed to graduate honoris causa.

In 1926, when the weekly magazine The New Yorker was founded, March became its first managing editor. However, he soon fell foul of its formidable editor-in-chief, Harold Ross. As March’s successor Ralph Ingersoll recalls, March and Moss quarrelled so badly on March’s last day, that he was actually removed from the office by little men in white coats. Ross, who had imposed a blanket ban on sexual content, perhaps foresaw March’s racier literary intentions.

In 1926, March published the narrative poem for which he is best known, The Wild Party, and after it was briefly banned in Boston for its risqué content, it became a succès de scandale. The US cartoonist Art Spiegelman called it a hard-boiled jazz-age tragedy. William Burroughs credited it as the text that made him want to became a writer. The book’s cult following has endured to the present day, and its sporadic resurgence can be seen in stage adaptations around the world. The Wild Party has a distinctive style that made the US critic Louis Untermeyer comment that he hadn’t the faintest idea whether it is good or bad poetry.

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