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#322 – My First Girlfriend, the History of Dueling, and a Month in a Bellagio Bathroom
I just finished reading a remarkable book, GENTLEMEN’S BLOOD: A HISTORY OF DUELING FROM SWORDS AT DAWN TO PISTOLS AT DUSK by Barbara Holland. Barbara Holland does a phenomenal job explaining the origins of dueling, the essential features that caused it to thrive in almost every significant culture in Europe and in Russia (and spread to America) for 300 years. Because of the prevalence of dueling to solve disputes, leading politicians dueled. Leading newspaper publishers and writers dueled. President Andrew Jackson survived more than 20 duels. Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Pushkin died in duels. Consequently, GENTLEMEN’S BLOOD is also a great book about the sweep of history. And the anecdotes are phenomenal – more deaths than in every movie made by Arnold Schwartzenegger.
The whole experience is a testament to the importance of serendipity in reading. Let me explain, and tell you more about this terrific book.
It started because of something I heard about my first girlfriend.
My first girlfriend’s name was Evelyn. All I remember about Evelyn now is that she was smart, pretty, skinny, and had long black hair like spun silk. I’m sure we never kissed and I don’t think we even held hands. My mom might have taken us to a movie once.
Several years ago, my mom mentioned Evelyn’s name. Maybe we were talking about my kids, who were then approximately the age at which Evelyn and I were in the same fifth grade class at Calvin Coolidge Elementary School in Livonia, Michigan. “You remember her father, don’t you?”
I didn’t, and my mom told me that Evelyn’s dad was a famous athlete at Wayne State University in the Fifties and twice represented the United States in the Olympics in fencing.
It’s probably just as well that I didn’t know this back in 1968. What would it have done for my future romantic life knowing there was even the POSSIBILITY that my girlfriend’s father was one of the world’s foremost swordsmen?
I started reading about Evelyn’s dad. He was part of a group of five Jewish men who returned from World War II to form the American fencing team. The U.S. did not have the fencing tradition of the European teams nor the institutional support that made the Soviet Union a dominant power in the sport. The 1956 team came achingly close to winning a medal in Melbourne and the 1958 team nearly upset the Soviets in the World Championships.
For a few days, this story occupied my brain and I imagined THE FIVE MUSKETEERS as my next book. I looked to see what was written about fencing and picked up a couple books. The first one, on fencing proper, didn’t attract my interest. I never looked at the second book, and I got on to some other idea and never returned to The Five Musketeers.
The second book, which sat in a pile next my bed and then in the bottom of a bookshelf in my office, was GENTLEMEN’S BLOOD. When I unshelved and then reshelved my library a few weeks ago – part of both my preparation and avoidance of writing the proposal for my next book which, though it won’t be The Five Musketeers, is still on a subject undecided – I uncovered Holland’s history of dueling and opened it up to a random page.
She told about the importance of “seconds,” the men who assist each principal and have responsibility over weapons, rules, and ground. They can also end up fighting for their lives. The page I read describe a French duel in which the seconds and “thirds” simultaneously dueled and a messenger sent by the king to stop the duel decided instead to join in, if he could please be found an opponent.
I opened another page, which described the fencing masters of old New Orleans, one of whom was so proficient that he owned his own cemetery.
It’s a lively history of violent death and disfigurement and I strongly encourage you to find a copy. I also learned how prop bets are really an extension of duels. The core of every duel-worthy dispute is honor. If someone says they can live for a month in a bathroom at the Bellagio – as came to pass between a poker player named Bellagio Jay and a couple buddies at a Kanye West show on New Year’s Eve – the denials of the buddies aren’t truly dismissing his ability. They are calling him a liar!
The stunt, which I read about in CardPlayer.com, sounds wild, interesting, and bizarre. (Brian Zemec did the same thing several years ago and Michael Konik wrote about it.) But look at how far we as a nation, as a civilization even, have come: they are settling their dispute with an air mattress in the toilet of a luxury hotel, and not underneath a cactus outside Needles with antique pistols. From the CardPlayer.com report I read, it sounded like Bellagio Jay was in trouble after just a couple days. He won’t, however, have his guts ripped out by a lead ball if he succumbs (at least, if he doesn’t order too much of Bellagio room service chili).
En garde!
