From: hhenderson@vax.clarku.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books
Subject: RE: literary lions
Date: 12 Nov 92 23:31:02 GMT
Organization: Clark University

The story that follows is taken from George Plimpton's book SHADOW
BOX, which is full of fun anecdotes, some of them concerning the
endearingly testosterone-crazed Norman Mailer.  This one is about
an experience Stormin' Norman had while running with Muhammad Ali
in Zaire while Ali was preparing for his championship fight with
George Foreman.  It came to mind when the "literary lions" thread
came up...

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That night Mailer and I had dinner and he told me what had
happened.  He had kept up with Ali for a couple of miles into the
country upriver from the compound at N'Sele, but then he had begun
to tire, and finally he stopped, his chest heaving, and he watched
Ali disappear into the night with his sparring partners.  In the
east, over the hills, the African night was beginning to give way
to the first streaks of dawn, but it was still very dark. 
Suddenly, and seemingly so close that it made him start, came the
reverberating roar of a lion, an unmistakable coughing, grunting
sound that seemed to come from all sides -- just as one had read it
did in Hemingway or Ruark -- and Norman turned and set out for the
distant lights of N'Sele at a hasty clip.  He told me that he had
been instantly provided with a substantial "second wind" and he
found himself moving along much quicker than during his outbound
trip.  He reached N'Sele safely, jogging by the dark compounds,
exhilarated not only by his escape but by the irresistible thought
of how highly dramatic it would have been if he hadn't made it.

I asked him what he was talking about, and he grinned shyly and
began to admit that once he had got to the safety of the compound
he had been quite taken by the fancy of being finished off right
there by the lion... all in all not a bad way to go, if one *had*
to go, certainly a dramatic death right up there with the more
memorable of the literateurs' -- Saint-Exupery's or Shelley's or
Rupert Brooke's -- and the thought crossed his mind what an
enviable last line for the biographical notes in the big dun-
colored high-school anthologies: that Norman Mailer had been killed
by an African lion near the banks of the Zaire in his fifty-first
year.

Well, his fancy had all come to dross, he went on, because Muhammad
Ali had returned from his run, his villa crowded with his people,
and Norman had not been able to resist revealing the incident of
the lion.  It was greeted first with silence, everybody looking at
him, and then the laughter started, first giggles, then hard thigh-
slapping whoops, because they had all heard the lion, too, and
heard him just about every morning, because that lion was behind
bars in the presidential compound, a zoo lion -- there weren't any
lions in the wild in West Africa anyway -- and the thought of
Norman's eyes staring into the darkness, and his legs pumping in
his union-suit track clothes to get himself out of there ("Feets,
do your stuff") was so rich that they finally asked him to tell
them about it all over again.  "Nawmin, tell us 'bout the big
LION!"

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Heather
HHENDERSON@vax.clarku.edu