The Reader in the Ring

Nearly eighty years later, my father can still recall the scene outside the Windsor Hotel in Montreal: the dashing and immaculately dressed young man in a felt hat standing by a sleek car—a Packard, probably, or maybe a Cadillac—supervising the bellhops as they loaded his luggage. The man in question was Gene Tunney. He had retired from boxing at the age of thirty-one and was on his honeymoon, having just married a Carnegie heiress from Greenwich. Even though he was watching from a distance down Piel Street, my father can also remember the aura that Tunney emitted: “very supercilious,” he says.

Then and now, my father has never really followed boxing, but that doesn’t matter. Gene Tunney had been world heavyweight champion for the previous two years. That meant, by definition, that he was one of the most famous and easily recognized people anywhere. His every move, his every utterance, was news. It’s hard to imagine it today, when only diehard subscribers to Ring magazine or the most addicted viewers of ESPN can pick the heavyweight champion, or all five of them, out of a lineup.

For a good part of the last century, boxing was a large and conspicuous presence on the American scene. Every town had its boxing clubs; in the larger cities, there were fights several times a month, or week. The members of every American immigrant community cheered on their own. Every major newspaper had a boxing reporter, or two, usually their most literate writers; floods and strikes, the journalist Heywood Broun once said, were strictly for second-stringers. Americans followed fighters in every weight division, but nothing—except, maybe, a presidential election—brought them together more than a heavyweight title fight.

Consider, for example, who sat at ringside in Chicago’s Soldier Field on September 22, 1927, the night of the second championship fight between Tunney and Jack Dempsey. Nine United States senators. The presidents of the nation’s six largest railroads. John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Douglas Fairbanks, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Joseph Pulitzer, Ty Cobb, Marshall Field, as well as assorted Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Astors. Alfred Sloan and Walter Chrysler. Admiral Richard Byrd. Dr. Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic. Bernard Baruch. Condé Nast. “Kid, if the earth came up and the sky came down and wiped out my first ten rows, it would be the end of everything,” Tex Rickard, the promoter who’d brought them all together, told a sportswriter that night. “I’ve got in those ten rows all the world’s wealth, all the world’s big men, all the world’s brains and production talent. Just in them ten rows.” But every bit as remarkable was what lay beyond, in the cheap seats: 140,000 other people—still one of the country’s largest sports crowds—representing nearly every stratum of American society.

For all its popular following, though, boxing was always an uncertain proposition, subject to changing laws and changing tastes, and the varying appeal of the best boxers. Only a few years before the Dempsey–Tunney fight, boxing had been illegal in Illinois, New York, and many other states. Since then, it has taken a major fall. The causes are many—the growing popularity of other sports, particularly football and basketball; public revulsion at its violence and corruption; changing demographics and prosperity, which caused a decline in the number of ethnic fans; television, which, by giving people an excuse to stay home, killed off the boxing clubs. But the result is clear: it is now a second-tier sport. Only Muhammad Ali interrupted boxing’s inexorable decline, and though he’s physically still here, by now he’s left and gone away nearly as far as Joe DiMaggio.

While reigning champions are now relative nonentities, the disaffection has extended even to boxing’s most storied figures. Younger sports fans, including those who could tell you how many RBIs Hack Wilson had in 1930, know and care little about Jack Dempsey or Joe Louis. The situation is apparent even in the subtitle of Jack Cavanaugh’s book. Why must we be reminded that Dempsey was “great”? Does Babe Ruth require a “great” before his name?

Only fighters fitting modern notions of political heroism, like Jack Johnson, the first black world heavyweight champion—whom white liberals have belatedly (and somewhat naively) come to admire—have grown in stature. For the rest, it’s been only shrinkage, and no one’s shrunk more than Tunney, the heavyweight champ from 1926 to 1928. For a time, he was nearly as renowned for having a son in the United States Senate as for his accomplishments in the ring. In that sense, he shared the sorry fate of another former heavyweight champion, Max Baer, who became better known as the father of Max Baer Jr.—Jethro in The Beverly Hillbillies—than for knocking out Primo Carnera, the hulking Italian who was at the time the biggest and tallest heavyweight champion in history. So completely forgotten is the good-natured, clownish Baer Sr. that he could be turned into a sadistic ogre in the film Cinderella Man, and almost no one—besides, that is, Max Jr.—complained.

Jack Cavanaugh tries to right this slight to Tunney. His book is highly entertaining, describing as it does one of boxing’s most glorious decades, the years between Johnson and Louis, the last era in which whites dominated the heavyweight division, largely (and maybe even entirely) because blacks were banned from it. The problem is Tunney himself. Tunney was undeniably a “wondrous” boxer, a master of defense, a man who twice beat the mighty Dempsey and lost only once in his professional career. The boxing historian Bert Sugar ranks him thirteenth on his all-time list of top fighters. But as a personality, particularly a boxing personality, he is distinctly second-rate. One could even call him dull. Cavanaugh seems to recognize as much; while he likes Tunney just fine, he can’t seem to wait to get away from him, which is presumably why he has filled his book with long and distracting detours.

Such digressions are tempting, because anywhere you dip into boxing during its heyday, you find something memorable and zany. It’s no coincidence that Damon Runyon was one of its most important chroniclers (and, as Cavanaugh points out with undue prosecutorial zeal, one of its great scoundrels, too, exacting payments in exchange for favorable coverage). When you’re just settling into the Roaring Twenties, it’s disconcerting to be yanked into the Fifties or Seventies or Nineties, and hear about Mike Tyson or Jake LaMotta or Carmine Basilio or Larry Holmes. It diminishes a story which, when he sticks to it, Cavanaugh tells engagingly and authoritatively.

Most of the digressions involve Jack Dempsey, whose life repeatedly intersected with Tunney’s. It all began with a ride they happened to share on a Hudson River ferry in 1920, when Dempsey, then the champion, told the young World War I veteran, just embarking upon his professional career, how to tape his bruised knuckles together so he could still punch. Still, in every respect but their twenty rounds together in the ring, the battle between them is no match. In life—and now, for nearly three decades, in death—Tunney will always be in Dempsey’s shadow. And so he is here, as Cavanaugh regularly reminds us. Everything about Dempsey—his hardscrabble background, his ferocity in the ring, his Heathcliffian appearance, the antipathy and adulation he aroused—commanded attention; and despite his two losses to Tunney, Dempsey still ranks four notches higher on Sugar’s list. All of the best moments in Tunney have Dempsey in them; only two of them—the two times they fought—have Tunney. Tunney should have been called Dempsey and Tunney—and, one has to think, would have been, had other books about Dempsey, notably Roger Kahn’s Flame of Pure Fire,¹ not appeared so recently.

A tactician and craftsman in the ring—in the argot of the sport, a “boxer” rather than a “puncher”—Tunney was aloof outside it, a combination that Cavanaugh has difficulty turning into a lively story. Reaching for perhaps the only superlative he warrants, Cavanaugh calls him “Boxing’s Brainiest Champ.” It’s probably true: Tunney famously gave a lecture on Shakespeare at Yale while still heavyweight champion; he hung out with Thornton Wilder, and corresponded for nearly three decades with George Bernard Shaw. He was often ridiculed in the United States for his enthusiasm for books, and his lack of interest in popular celebrity made him something of an enigma and a target for sportswriters. He was more appreciated in Britain, particularly during the fourteen months he spent in Europe around the time of his marriage to Polly Lauder, the Carnegie heiress, and his literary pursuits and contacts with writers were chronicled in the British press. At a dinner party shortly after his arrival in London, Cavanaugh writes, Tunney gave a talk that made the front page of several London papers in which he

delighted the other guests with his obviously well-informed references to Shaw’s Cashel Byron’s Profession, Fielding’s Tom Jones, William Hazlitt’s The Fight, and Victor Hugo’s The Man Who Laughs, all of which dealt with boxing.

Just what he said about these writers, however, Cavanaugh doesn’t tell us. Tunney appears to have had a grasp of English literature; in his Yale lecture on Shakespeare, he was able to quote Carlyle and Herbert Spencer without notes, while likening Ajax in Troilus and Cressida to the boxer Jack Sharkey, who was at the time a challenger to his heavyweight crown. While staying on the island of Brioni in the Adriatic, he took long walks with Shaw, whom Cavanaugh describes as an “intellectual mentor” to Tunney, but we are left to wonder what advice Shaw gave. Later, Tunney became the boxing editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

But how much of a distinction is it to be the smartest person in a world of lugs, especially when, so far as we know, he never said anything of interest about the books he read? The answer, in Tunney’s case, is not very much; in fact his bookishness seems to have further estranged him from the American boxing public. Remarkably, when Dempsey, a man who’d gotten a military deferment during World War I and had previously been derided as a slacker, squared off against Tunney, who’d spent thirteen months in the marines, it was Dempsey that many Americans preferred. “We were all for Dempsey,” Studs Terkel told Cavanaugh. “To us, he was a real fighter, a working-class type of guy, while Tunney was a phony intellectual.”

Tunney was one of the few heavyweight champions actually born in New York—to Irish immigrants, on the western fringe of Greenwich Village, in 1897. It was then a rough neighborhood, and to toughen him up for the inevitable scraps with local bullies, Tunney’s stevedore father bought his ten-year-old son a pair of cheap boxing gloves. Though he loved to read, Tunney left school at fifteen for a five-dollar-a-week job at a steamship company.

Young Tunney boxed in local clubs in his teens, trying to perfect the defensive skills that would always set him apart. “I could never see any percentage in exchanging punches on an even basis with somebody who can hit as well as you can,” he later explained. But boxing was mostly a way to help his family make ends meet. He hoped for a career with the steamship company; his parents would have liked him to be a priest. Only a sadistic drill sergeant and the promise of a day off from guard duty got him to take up boxing again while stationed in Europe during World War I. (It was also in France that he further developed a childhood interest in Shakespeare, making friends with a fellow marine who had a copy of The Winter’s Tale and explained to him the rudiments of Shakespearean diction.) Before long, and before an audience of thousands of GIs including General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, he won the American Expeditionary Force’s light heavyweight championship in Paris.

Back home after the Armistice, he continued to box, and win. Though few others would have agreed, he came to believe that with his defensive skills and finesse and smarts, he could take on Dempsey, who in 1919 had won the heavyweight crown from Jess Willard, displaying an offense that quickly became the standard by which every subsequent heavyweight was measured. (For all his detours into Dempsey, Cavanaugh inexplicably slights his victory over Willard in Toledo.)

The “Fighting Marine” continued to make his way as a light heavyweight, taking on Battling Levinsky, Tommy Loughran, and Harry Greb, who beat Tunney “to a bloody pulp,” though Tunney came back to defeat Greb in four subsequent encounters: twice officially, and twice in “no decision” contests that both the crowd and the sportswriters present agreed he’d won. Few saw him as a future heavyweight champion, or even as a heavyweight, or even as a typical boxer. Here was someone who backed off when his opponents bled—who, as he later put it, “found no joy in knocking people unconscious”—and who read Les Misérables and Of Human Bondage between workouts. He studied Dempsey in action whenever he could. That included Dempsey’s electrifying victory—later immortalized by the painter George Bellows—over Luis Angel Firpo in 1923 before nearly 90,000 fans at the Polo Grounds in New York. But Dempsey pretty much ran out of opponents, or at least white ones; he would not fight the leading black heavyweight, Harry Wills. Instead, he moved to Hollywood, where he dabbled in pictures and met and married the movie star Estelle Taylor. For three years, Dempsey sat on his title while Tunney fought nineteen times, winning fourteen of those fights (the other five were no decisions), seven by knockout. That pretty much guaranteed that when Tunney, only two years Dempsey’s junior, and, beginning in June 1925, a heavyweight, finally caught up with him, he found a man who was out of shape and well past his prime.

Their first fight took place at Philadelphia’s Sesquicentennial Stadium on September 23, 1926. Tex Rickard, the ingenious huckster who’d single-handedly brought boxing from cow towns like Goldfield, Nevada, and Shelby, Montana, to the big time, extending its appeal to society swells and women, billed the bout as a morality tale: the clean-cut easterner, the former marine, the elegant pugilist, against the roughhouse western slugger, the former hobo who disdained ring etiquette and had dodged the draft. Interest was enormous, enough to guarantee purses unlike anything anyone had ever seen: $700,000 for the champ, $200,000 for the challenger. Despite his long layoff, Dempsey was the favorite.

As many as 145,000 people came out that rainy night—“the largest crowd of any kind since the games in the Roman Circus Maximus,” as Elmer Davis described it in The New York Times. Among them, he estimated, were two thousand millionaires. “I ain’t never seed anything like it,” Rickard famously said of the scene. In what was still a novelty, millions more tuned in by radio, with Graham McNamee doing the play-by-play. Then, as Dempsey exhausted himself stalking Tunney, missing repeatedly with his roundhouse punches, Tunney picked him apart. As the fight wore on, and Tunney captured round after round, it became evident that Dempsey could win only by a knockout, and Tunney was too smart to let him come close. Dempsey, who’d been a party to every one of boxing’s million-dollar gates, appeared finished. “Almost every story being typed out on wet copy paper…contained the adjectives ‘stunned,’ ‘shocked,’ and upset,'” Cavanaugh writes.

It was the first time the heavyweight title had changed hands on a decision, which was not how the fans liked it, and never how Dempsey had done it. Now, it belonged not to a slugger but to someone they saw as a backpedaling fancy-dan, which was not what the heavyweight champion was supposed to be. Thus, even at the moment of Tunney’s greatest triumph, the cheers for Dempsey were louder. Suddenly, people realized what they’d had, what they were about to lose, and what they were getting: “a priggish, snobbish, bookish fellow,” as Paul Gallico put it, someone who talked of “ratiocination” in a world more accustomed to “We wuz robbed.” Dempsey told his wife, “Honey, I forgot to duck,” a phrase that Ronald Reagan was to appropriate half a century later after an attempt on his life. Whether or not Dempsey was washed up, Rickard saw that a rematch would probably be even bigger and more extravagant than the original. He still had his hero and villain, only now the roles had reversed.

That brings us back to Soldier Field in Chicago, where, with freebies thrown in, the crowd might have been even larger than in Philadelphia. Once again, the consensus was that Dempsey could win only by a knockout. But that required a ten-count, and the rules had changed: in the event of a knockdown, the fighter who was still upright had to retreat to a neutral corner. The rule had been drawn up to protect against Dempsey, a notoriously dirty fighter who, along with all his low blows and rabbit punches, liked to hover over his prostrate opponents, then clobber them the moment they tried getting up. The referee restated the rule beforehand. Both men said they understood. Then the fight began.

If anything, the disparity between the two had only grown in the intervening year; Tunney won at least five of the first six rounds. But in the seventh—what Cavanaugh calls the most memorable round in boxing history—Dempsey finally got in one of his big blows, knocking Tunney off his feet for the first time in his career. Whether out of habit or confusion, Dempsey did not retreat, standing over Tunney instead. For at least four seconds he remained there, four bonus seconds Tunney could use to clear his scrambled brain. Only when Dempsey finally backed away was there a count that counted. Tunney was up at nine—or thirteen or fourteen or fifteen or sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, depending on who was doing the counting—and quickly back at his game, hitting and retreating, once more becoming, as Grantland Rice put it, the “ghost that Dempsey couldn’t reach.” Once again, he won the decision, helped by what has been known ever since as the “Long Count.” Sentimentalists charged that Dempsey had been robbed on a technicality. More likely, Tunney calculated his advantage and made the most of the extra time but could have gotten up earlier if he’d absolutely had to.

“Hello to my good friends in Greenwich, Connecticut,” Tunney told the radio audience afterward from his dressing room. It was a veiled greeting to his socialite fiancée, Polly Lauder, and her circle of friends, which had become his circle, too. But it was a reminder of how estranged from boxing’s gritty world Tunney had become. Lauder wanted him to quit the ring, and ambivalent as he’d always been about boxing, Tunney didn’t need much persuading. In July 1928, after only one title defense—against Tom Heeney of New Zealand, a fight in which Rickard actually lost money—he did. Getting out so early proved Tunney’s smarts far more graphically than being able to declaim a few lines from Othello—or from Troilus and Cressida, his favorite of Shakespeare’s plays. Never would he become one of those addlebrained walking corpses seen at every boxing convention. He married in Italy, then spent a year honeymooning in Europe, hobnobbing along the way with, among others, H.G. Wells, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Then, for the next half-century, Tunney lived the life of a gentleman farmer, occasional essayist, and corporate executive in the liquor, rubber, and construction businesses. He didn’t have to work—apart from marrying a rich woman, he’d made $11 million (in 2006 dollars) alone on the second Dempsey fight. He gradually faded from the boxing scene; only rarely would he show up at big fights to take bows along with all the other cauliflower-eared veterans. He appeared at the first Ali–Frazier fight in 1971; Dempsey, naturally, got the bigger hand. And, when the time came, the bigger obituary.

As much as Tunney’s literacy, real or fake, separated himself from the fight public, it also gave him a break. While Dempsey was frequently faulted for not defending his title against a black man, Tunney pretty much got a pass; surely someone so cultured couldn’t possibly be a bigot. But if anything, Tunney’s record, and his rhetoric, on racial matters was much worse. While Dempsey often fought blacks earlier in his career, Tunney never did. He inveighed against “mixed matches,” as they were still called, claiming that they were “not for the best interest of boxing,” especially when the heavyweight title was at stake. To Cavanaugh, that wasn’t bigotry, but economic reality: like Rickard and others, Tunney believed fights between blacks and whites wouldn’t draw, and that if the black man actually won, it would wreck boxing. Tunney “never gave any indication of being biased,” Cavanaugh assures us; after all, Sugar Ray Robinson and Archie Moore were two of his favorite boxers.

And there he leaves it. But even a cursory review of Tunney’s conduct before the politically charged fight between Joe Louis and the German boxer Max Schmeling in June 1938, which I examine in my book about the two men,² reveals racial attitudes that were more complex, and probably less benign, than Cavanaugh claims. When, in an apparent fit of patriotic fervor, Tunney reportedly paid a top-secret visit to Louis’s training camp to help him prepare for Schmeling, it was big news in the black newspapers. Why? “Previously, Tunney has been said to have favored every white opponent Louis has met,” the Associated Negro Press explained. Tunney promptly confirmed black suspicions of him by adamantly denying he’d ever visited Louis’s camp, then wiring Schmeling to insist he hadn’t. Schmeling hardly needed such assurances. “Of course I never believed this,” he said of the report. “Gene, he not only never fought a Negro fighter, he never had one for a sparring partner.”

The symbolic significance of the Louis–Schmeling fight, pitting an African-American against Adolf Hitler’s favorite boxer on the eve of World War II, was all too plain. White Americans, even in the South, rooted overwhelmingly for Louis. Yet in his telegram to Schmeling, Tunney professed neutrality. “If the shadow of my little finger would determine the winner, I would not raise it,” he wrote. It was another interesting contrast with Dempsey, who once said that if he had to lose his title, he was pleased it had been to a countryman. Tunney, though, had no problems seeing the crown go to Nazi Germany. In fact, in one of his regular sports columns in The Connecticut Nutmeg, a journal of which he—along with Heywood Broun, Quentin Reynolds, and the composer Deems Taylor, among others—was an editor and owner, Tunney seemed dazzled by Nazi ideology. Of the two fighters, he wrote, Louis clearly had superior natural gifts, but Schmeling had built around himself what Tunney called a “spiritual fortification which may turn aside the strongest attack that Louis could launch.” What was this fortification? “The blessing of Der Fuhrer,” Tunney wrote, and “the knowledge that he carries the hopes of his countrymen. This is an immeasurable inspiration!” Schmeling “is the spearhead of what he thinks to be a holy cause,” he went on. “Such a man is going to be difficult for even the superbly conditioned, magnificently endowed Louis to defeat.”

Tunney’s article caught the eye of at least two journalists. One was Bob Considine of the New York Mirror, for whom it confirmed that the former champion truly was a cold fish; Tunney’s analysis of the two fighters, wrote Considine, displayed “all the cheery warmth of a scientist observing a tube of sleepy bacteria.” The other was Arno Hellmis, who was covering the fight for Der Angriff, the personal propaganda sheet of Joseph Goebbels. Hellmis quoted Tunney’s remarks extensively, reminding Angriff readers that the former champion had an independence rare among American journalists: the Nutmeg, he explained, “did not have to dance to the tune of Jewish big interests.” While Cavanaugh mentions the Nutmeg fleetingly (describing Tunney incorrectly as simply its sports columnist), he never analyzes anything Tunney actually wrote in it. It’s puzzling; if you’re writing a biography of someone, wouldn’t you want to know what he has to say in his own publication?

What leading boxers of that era said and did on socially charged issues really mattered. This is particularly true with respect to race: it was boxing, far more than baseball, that broke down the color line; without Joe Louis, there would have been no Jackie Robinson or, arguably, Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King. So it’s not enough for his biographer to say that Tunney probably wasn’t prejudiced and call it a day, especially in light of published information that he may have been, and since it’s one of the few intriguing things about him. Someone still has to read the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and other black weeklies of the era, as well as perhaps the Jewish press of that time—all readily available at the New York Public Library—before any fair verdict on Tunney, not as a boxer but as a man, can be rendered.

Periodically Tunney lamented that he could have handled things better, that he might have been more ingratiating and less standoffish, that he would actually have savored a bit of popularity. He said as much to Cavanaugh in 1967 in a chance encounter on a commuter train to Connecticut: “Some of it may have been my fault because of how I reacted to what some newspapermen wrote about my reading habits and what they perceived to be my aloofness.” Some writers ultimately did come to view him more sympathetically. Had he dug deeper, Cavanaugh might have found something more interesting about him.

Among those Cavanaugh draws off is the noted writer Budd Schulberg, author of the novel What Makes Sammy Run, published in 1941 and still one of the more revealing books about Hollywood. That Cavanaugh would turn to Schulberg is not surprising, for boxing has been a leitmotif in Schulberg’s long and event-filled life. I interviewed Schulberg for my book, but all too briefly: there is simply no one else alive with his experiences, his memories, and his insights into “fistiana.” For eighty years now, Schulberg has been going to the fights. His father, B.P. Schulberg, the head of Paramount Studios, first took him to bouts at the Hollywood Legion in the Twenties. The younger Schulberg kept a scrapbook on “the great Benny Leonard,” and hung the winning gloves of junior welterweight champion Mushy Callahan (né Morris Scheer) on the wall by his bed. Jack Dempsey courted Estelle Taylor at B.P. Schulberg’s house in Hollywood.

Schulberg managed a fighter who fought Floyd Patterson, looking after him when he was supposed to be working on his screenplay for On the Waterfront. (His nose still bears the mark of one of their sparring sessions.) He was Sports Illustrated’s first boxing editor. Two boxers, a flyweight and a lightweight, were the best men at one of his weddings. He hung out with Rocky Marciano at Grossinger’s while Marciano trained for his last few fights, and drove with Muhammad Ali and Angelo Dundee to Madison Square Garden for Ali’s first fight with Joe Frazier. His novel, The Harder They Fall, was turned into one of the classic boxing movies. And it was Schulberg who gave Marlon Brando the line “I coulda been a contender.”

I first discovered Schulberg on boxing through his six-part series on Mike Jacobs, the promoter who ran the fight game in New York during the Joe Louis era, written for Colliers magazine in 1950 and reprinted in Schulberg’s new book, Ringside: A Treasury of Boxing Reportage. That a major American publication would devote 33,000 words to such a character is a reminder of boxing’s popularity at the time. The article itself is witty and elegant, filled with telling anecdotes and wonderful quotes, one of the greatest pieces ever on the sport. A.J. Liebling never did anything better.

Judging from the pieces published in Ringside, Schulberg never again attempted anything so ambitious. In fact, he wrote about boxing only episodically for the next forty years, until he was given a regular column in the Sunday Herald of Glasgow. Apart from a couple of articles on nineteenth-century boxing, most are about modern-day boxers like Oscar de la Hoya, Felix Trinidad, Evander Holyfield, and Mike Tyson. Schulberg is, as usual, acute and knowledgeable in these reports, but unless you are among the dwindling few who still follow the sport, you probably won’t find them interesting.

I wish he’d said more about the boxers he had known earlier in his career, and that he’d reflected more on why a sport that is so violent (“show business with blood,” he calls it) was so popular, and what it was that drew so many gentle souls like him to sit at ringside to watch so many fighters, many of them friends of his, box themselves blow-by-blow into dementia. “Old fighters don’t fade away,” he writes. “They simply die slowly in front of our eyes.” He could also have reflected more explicitly on the fall in popularity of his “Sweet and Sour Science,” and what accounts for it; whether it could ever come back; and if we should even care. No one is more qualified to answer these questions; still writing well at ninety-three, maybe he yet will.