A MELUS Interview: Floyd Salas

Floyd Salas has for two decades been a major figure in the San Francisco Bay Area's writing scene. He is a co-director of the Foothill Writers Conference, editor of a distinguished anthology--Stories And Poems From Close To Home--that celebrates the region, and is the author of three novels. He is also assistant boxing coach at the University of California, Berkeley, which he once attended on a boxing scholarship. His most important work to date, Tattoo the Wicked Cross (1967), was remarkably successful. C. Michael Curtis in Saturday Review said it "may be one of the best and is certainly one of the most important first novels published in America during the past ten years"; it remains in print. Salas has also won many literary honors including a Joseph Henry Jackson Award, a Eugene F. Saxton Fellowship, a Rockefeller Scholarship and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Gerald Haslam, also a fiction writer, also an ex-boxer, also Hispanic, interviewed Salas in 1989. Interviewer: Most guys who box eventually hang 'em up, but you've stayed with it. How have boxing and writing related in your life? How, in fact, since so many writers at least claim to have been fighters, do you think they relate in general? Salas: Boxing and writing have been intertwined throughout my life. One of my older brothers was a prodigy who had his own professional pharmacy. He wrote professional journalism as an avocation, as well as a history of California, before he committed suicide at thirty, before he wrote the novels he planned. The other brother was amateur boxing champion of three states and of the army before turning professional and winning about his first seven fights by kayo before he lost on a cut eye and quit, really because he could never get in shape. Influenced deeply by both of them, I was a jock-intellectual in high school, with friends who were committed artists in writing, painting, and music and friends who were star basketball players and Alameda County golf champions, as well as National Amateur Boxing champions. The jocks thought the artists were fairies, meaning too feminine, mainly, like a girl, not necessarily homosexual, and the artists thought the jocks were barbarian assholes, yet I was close friends with both groups. I went to the University of California on a boxing scholarship, the very first one. Both boxing and writing need the same basic traits of character dedication, durability and courage, as well as the need to be spiritually pure and humble if you want to do well. In fighting or writing, you must be prepared to sacrifice your comfort to achieve excellence. The fighter in grueling training and dieting, sacrificing a good time for the sake of his body's shape. The writer sacrifices a good time for the sake of gaining time in which to read and write and laying off the sauce if he wants to start the mornings with a clear mind. I teach boxing the same way I teach writing: you must be pure in spirit, and if you are your fighting will be powerful and your writing spiritual, that is with the spirit you endowed it with, which is the stuff of immortality. Only the spirit lives in writing. The Samurai warriors taught that the more morally pure a warrior was the greater the warrior. I believe that and teach it to both students of writing and fighting. I also teach that both are very simple and composed of only three technical elements each, next to spirit that is. In boxing, it is the elemental jab, the cross and the hook. All punches are one of these three. In writing, there are only three elements: description, narration and dialogue. All writing is one or the other or a combination of one or two or all three of them. Interviewer: There's a spiritual dimension to what you say, yet many people think of fighting as anything but that. It's hard to explain the rush of combat to folks who haven't lived it, isn't it? Salas: In writing as fighting, I feel the same exhilaration during the peak of the battle, while I'm typing along inspired or when I'm unloading with both hands, slugging it out in a corner, and when it's over, I love my foe like a brother and I love my book and everyone in it just as much. …