Sometimes editors want a sign their writers are still out there. The deadline might have been a few months—or even years—ago, and they aren’t expecting a completed manuscript, maybe not even pages in progress, but would appreciate a ping back from emails sent into the void.
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This year is the fiftieth anniversary of Muhammad Ali’s autobiography The Greatest: My Own Story, and, about five decades ago, this seems to be the point of editorial frustration Toni Morrison reached in mid 1972 with her famous author and his co-writer, Richard Durham. Morrison fired off a series of terse telegrams. One read simply: “ARE YOU ALRIGHT STOP TONI MORRISON.” That followed the longer: “PLEASE CALL RE: MSS. SUBMISSION DATE SITUATION IS NOT GOOD,” which Morrison sent in duplicate to addresses in New Jersey and Chicago since she wasn’t sure where to reach Durham, who was holed away with Ali during a training stint for an upcoming bout.
By September 1972, the manuscript for Ali’s biography, co-written with Richard Durham, was two years behind schedule. Morrison was five years into her career as an editor working at Random House and her surviving editorial files document that this project introduced additional challenges to the typical literary manuscript. Random House’s editor-in-chief Jim Silberman and even its president, Bob Bernstein, weighed in at times. In September 1972, Silberman drafted a letter to Herbert Muhammad, a son of the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, Ali’s manager, and the man who had helped orchestrate the book deal, to ask for help, stating that “things had gotten out of hand.” (In the final letter he substituted the phrase: the project had “reached the point of fiasco”).
Morrison defends and prods her authors, acts as literary sounding board and commercial advisor, all while adapting herself both to the big egos and the fragile ones.
Ali himself responded to Silberman with an historical comparison worthy of an athlete who was able to swallow sports journalists whole (E.J. Liebling’s first piece in The New Yorker was given over almost entirely to Ali’s iambic prediction of a victory over Floyd Patterson, paced with a meter of accelerating sit-ups.) To Silberman, Ali wrote: “[T]he day you signed me up,” Ali wrote, “my next serious appointment was supposed to be the federal pen and I then felt like looking back on my life and talking about it. But suddenly they let me back in the ring. It was if you had signed up Jesus Christ to do His book just before His last Supper and then lo and behold Jesus finds out they [are] not going to hang him after all. He would do just what I did. He wouldn’t have time to talk about his old life, he’d be too eager to get out into the world to whip some disciplines back in line, let the world know who’s the greatest before the Romans changed their minds.”
When Ali signed his contract with Random House, he had been stripped of his boxing license and was facing a possible five-year prison term after refusing Vietnam War draft summons. But, as he writes to his impatient editors, he was given a reprieve. (Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong tell the improbable story, involving a junior clerk convinced of the sincerity of Ali’s claim to conscientious objector status and the late-night, close reading of Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man leading a pivotal judge to change his mind and the Supreme Court to vacate the conviction.) By the time his boxing license is finally renewed, Ali had lost three and a half prime years of his career. He set out on a hectic come-back schedule with Richard Durham in tow, traveling (as Silberman ruefully notes in one of the documents referring to the writer’s travel expenses) to Ireland, Japan, Indonesia, and parts of North and South Africa.
Richard Durham, who came to the book project from his role as editor of Muhammed Speaks, the Nation of Islam weekly newspaper, had the (un)enviable job of many celebrity ghost writers: to capture something of the inimitable Ali while satisfying the expectations of both the Nation of Islam and a mainstream publishing house. Durham also faced the challenge of transforming the book from its planned reminiscences into an account of a comeback in progress. Durham’s career had already taken some unexpected turns, from a stint with the Federal Writers Program to directing cultural programs for the United Packinghouse workers, the union representing the meatpacking industry. His radio and screen writing—for which Durham was consistently pathbreaking and poorly paid—strung together projects linked by his interest in producing public programs about Black culture and family life. Durham created Bird of the Iron Feather, an all-Black soap opera that aired on Chicago’s WTTW and the National Education Television network, and authored the scripts for Destination Freedom, a Sunday morning radio show that retold biographies of prominent Black figures like Crispus Attucks, Denmark Vesey, and Frederick Douglass. (A proposed episode on Nat Turner was spiked and the show eventually took on, after Durham’s departure, an anticommunist direction.)
Ain’t nobody gonna pay nothing to see two buddies
Durham’s experience as a writer for radio programs is especially evident in the book he and Ali wrote together. Durham shadows Ali with his tape recorder, wedging his microphone between Ali and Joe Frazier as the pair drive from Philadelphia to New York. (Ali had told Frazier he was writing an autobiography and felt Joe should be in it, so the conversation was planned but Durham’s decision to include all twenty pages of it seems not to have been.) The two easily exchange verbal jabs in the close quarters of Frazier’s Cadillac, moving from how to avoid putting on weight in the offseason (“ALI: So eat unsweetened grapefruits, man. / FRAZIER: Unsweetened? / ALI: Yeah. Get you about five, six grapefruits in the box. Keep ’em cold. You wear a sweat suit? / FRAZIER: I gotta.”) to how Frazier feels about Ali’s left jab; Ali delivers a poem and a blueprint for defeating Frazier in five rounds, and Frazier offers to give him his own boxing license if it means the two could have a match. The conversation is dropped into the biography as a dialogue formatted like a screenplay:
ALI: But tell the truth, now, man. If you fought me, wouldn’t you be scared?
FRAZIER: No, man. Honest to God.
ALI: You really wouldn’t be scared?
FRAZIER: No kinda way!
ALI: I mean my fast left jab, and the way I dance?
FRAZIER: Noooooo! I’d get close to you. They talk about how fast you is, moving away. But you gonna find out how fast I am moving in.
The chapter, titled “Dinosaurs and Old Friends,” ends with their arrival in New York and Frazier pulling over to drop the pair a few blocks short of the gym. He tells Ali, “They’ll think we’re buddies. That’ll be bad for the gate,” and Ali agrees: “Yeah. Ain’t nobody gonna pay nothing to see two buddies.” (At the Random House Book launch party, Frazier shows up to sign copies of The Greatest.)
Morrison later described her relationship with Durham as “very, very warm and very professional.” She appreciated that Durham’s task meant crafting a narrative voice for one of the most-quoted men on the planet and getting his pages at least tacitly approved by the Nation of Islam. But the continued delays put Morrison under pressure, with deadlines and major bouts rolling by and Morrison chasing the two with telegrams pleading for chapter drafts. In her correspondence, Morrison uses a range of registers with her authors—she is professional, to-the-point, funny, and warm. In May 1974 though, after a meager 38 pages are dropped off by courier at her office with no note, Morrison writes a letter that lays out her “deep pain and embarrassment” with the situation.
The work of an editor is de facto collaborative, but also isolating and frequently emotionally draining. In correspondence and internal memos, Morrison defends and prods her authors, acts as literary sounding board and commercial advisor, all while adapting herself both to the big egos and the fragile ones, the nonresponsive correspondent and the one in constant contact. The status and respect accorded to highly visible legendary editors is the exception to the more general rule of blurry ambiguity. Increasingly recognized as a writer in her own right, Morrison is also at this time balancing the institutional work of shepherding a growing number of Black writers into the lists of mainstream publishing and continuing to provide often fine-grained stylistic, conceptual, and practical advice to her individual authors. In response to the long delayed and underwhelming manuscript, she writes plainly to Durham: “only my vigorous and sincere agitation has kept this contract alive…but the contempt for those efforts which you displayed in last Thursday’s scenario left me so melancholy and so hurt I believed I would strangle if I didn’t tell you how I felt.”
Loneliness is what Richard Durham thought brought he and Ali together. “He’s alone,” Durham told a reporter, “And it’s the same for a writer, no one else can help you while you’re doing it. A boxer is all alone in the ring, and a writer is all alone at the typewriter.” Ali isn’t as explicit, but when Random House proposes finding a speedier copyrighter, he is adamant that Durham stay, writing: “my manager [Herbert Muhammad] is helping me, of course, but this is my own story and what we have let go thru so far is because Dick really knows it the way I kno it.” The book must be finished, Ali concludes “the way I want it done,” and Durham is a collaborator that he trusts: “I tell it like it really is and Dick knows what I mean.” Ali gave even tighter copy when asked what he thought about completing a book by saying, “writing is fighting.”
We are in on a secret
Four years into the project, Silberman said Random House needed the manuscript before Ali took on heavyweight champion George Foreman (and then, later, absolutely needed the book before Ali’s rematch with Joe Frazier). Those deadlines too were blown. “Rumble in the Jungle” and the “Thrilla in Manila” would make it into the manuscript rather than act as occasions for publicizing the book. Also, the book would be launched into a crowded field of high-profile titles by Normal Mailer, George Plimpton, and Wilfrid Sheed.
Morrison anticipated these comparisons, as well as skepticism about Ali’s contribution to writing the book. (Biographer Thomas Hauser insisted on placing scare quotes around “autobiography” and claimed Ali probably never read the entire manuscript.) But for Morrison, Ali’s creative role was never in question. She liked the incorporation of long stretches of unmediated dialogue, though she also felt the book would have benefited from more “fabric”, or “some stretches with just Ali reflecting” to fill in the narrative. The style, Morrison wrote in an early memo, would be successful if it managed to capture the elusive quality of Ali’s style of self-presentation, which “has the privateness that is so public,” a contrast that heightened by “Ali’s total confidence in exposing himself along with others.”
Morrison saw the potential for Ali’s media personas to inject in the genre of autobiography a new kind of distinctly Black creative self-making.
Moreover, if successfully translated into book form, Ali’s intimate publicness (or public intimacy) might achieve what the New Journalists fell short of, weighed down by self-fascination and egos stoked by magazines at the peak of their cultural power. (Mailer, Plimpton and Hunter S. Thompson converged on Kinshasa to cover the Foreman flight, with Plimpton and Thompson supposedly meeting for the first time on the plane. Thompson got stoned and failed to make it to the fight; and as one contemporary reviewer of the highly-psychologized The Fight wrote, “Alas, Mailer on Ali…reveals far more than one cares to know about Mailer.”) Instead, The Greatest, Morrison thought, would offer what Liebling, Sheed, Mailer, or Plimpton would not, that is “The absence of the writer. You know it’s got Normal Mailer’s largeness and realism without his inability to select only that which is relevant.” Instead, Morrison hoped, the book would put “the reader in the delicious position of eavesdropping [so that “the writing of the book becomes another event, the book becomes a character almost itself…[and] we are in on a secret, as the reader.”
In mulling more over whether some of seemingly dialogue should be smoothed into a narrative, Morrison, concluded that the moments of Ali talking about writing the book should stay in the book. The hyper-quotable Ali might only be captured in process, not in a polished narrative. David Remnick would reflect two decades later that Ali was a media figure for the ages, like a politician or comedian, in command of even his most outrageous modes of self-presentation.
Morrison saw the potential for Ali’s media personas to inject in the genre of autobiography a new kind of distinctly Black creative self-making. “I think what I am trying to say, is that the “book” as part of the book would be a fantastic element to retain,” Morrison wrote, because it “places the reader on a par with the business of writing a book, [and] you know the book is not an alien thing. Here, I know, I am thinking of black people, and how much they would love that. Ali is not posturing—at being a writer, he is Making a Book.” Making a Book is both less honorific and more participatory. It is a “peculiarly Black thing,” Morrison mused, “of the book itself being a put on, and the process of making the book, like African artists are participating in the thing they are making, jazz musicians do not just make sound or music, they participate in it, the audience participates in it.” This can’t be the whole book, she concludes; there should be some more traditional “fabric” narrative stretches that connect things, “but I truly love the quality of this participation, this “living” book idea.”
When books should be born
Despite the painful process of shepherding The Greatest to publication, Morrison wrote to Durham and Ali a couple of years later, in 1978, to suggest another collaboration. The two-book deal would pair a sequel with a scrapbook of photographs, poetry, and extracts from letters, drawing no doubt on Morrison’s success in the intervening years with editing the genre-bending, historical collages, The Black Book (1974) and Railroad (1976).
Chastising telegrams evidently forgiven, Durham wrote back, “Your instinct for knowing when books should be born is uncanny. It’s been as quiet as a tree around Ali for two years but after your call, three companies are in here with book offers.” Durham mentions that he never stopped recording tapes with Ali, so he has some ready material. His sense of the sequel is that it would have “a touch of tragedy; these are The Last Days of the Greatest, the decline the fall, but the magnificence remains…[.]”
Their plans were derailed by the appearance of a similar book, Ali! Ali! The Words of Muhammad Ali, released by Harcourt Brace ostensibly without Ali’s knowledge or cooperation. But before the plans get spiked, Morrison replies to Durham. Her letter addresses contract details—the advance and whether Ali would do publicity events for the book—but ends with “one other thing—and it’s just a question.” What if Durham’s vision for the sequel could be turned inside out, undergoing a transformation like The Greatest from retrospective to comeback, elegy to unfinished story. In the last folder of archival correspondence, Morrison writes to Durham asking, “I wonder if your grasp of the book (The Last Days of the Greatest, the decline, the fall) is not perhaps too pessimistic. I mean rather than focusing on the end of an era, you might concentrate on the beginning of an era: Ali the Man as opposed to Ali the Fighter. What do you think?”