Blood On His Typewriter

There is, or at least was, a so-called “best-selling” author out there somewhere who called him or herself R.J. Avenira. He or she had a couple of books published, one of which was called Beautiful Mistakes. Avenira made a few beauties him or herself. Plugging another Avenina book, titled Blood On My Typewriter, this author quoted Ernest “Hemmingway” as saying, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” Hemingway (that is, the Nobel Prize winner with just one “m” in his surname) never said any such thing. It was the American sports writer Red Smith who kept going on about opening a vein and letting it “bleed out drop by drop”. Another variation on the theme from Smith was, “I just sit at my typewriter until beads of blood form on my forehead.” Avenira’s version was, “I have sat down at my typewriter. Watch the words form from the blood that pours forth.”

My first and most memorable encounter with the phrase “There is blood on my typewriter” came on Saturday, May 27, 1972, when it appeared on page 25 of the London Daily Mirror under the byline of Peter Wilson, described by the Mirror as “World No 1 sports writer”. Indeed, I have a sneaking suspicion Wilson, a Harrow-educated classical scholar and the doyen of Fleet Street sports writers, may have used the line as the title of his memoirs.

Filing his copy from a world heavyweight boxing title fight in Omaha, Nebraska, Wilson, left, opened his story, “There is blood on my typewriter, blood on my notes, blood on my programme. And, however long I live, I shall never forget the face of Ron Stander. The face of courage in tears.” Ronald Neil Stander, a 27-year-old former switchman on the Chicago and North Western Railway, had just been punched to a pulp in four rounds by Joe Frazier. It was  Stander’s 26th bout, and only his second against anyone more than half decent. And the Philadelphia slaughterman sure tenderised the “Council Bluff’s Butcher”. Forget the idea Robert “Rocky” Balboa was based on Charles “Chuck” Wepner. He was based on a profusely bleeding Ronald Stander. Wepner came out of the Ali fight looking like a beauty queen compared to what Frazier did to Stander. Wepner had to have 23 stitches after 15 rounds, Stander 17 after four.

Wilson wrote of Stander’s “grotesque” appearance - “But it was the nose which drew your reluctant eyes like some crimson magnet. As a clown’s nose is a parody of a normal one, so was Slander’s a parody of a clown’s. But, merciful heavens, he would have to be a sadistic satyr who could laugh at this monstrous, pulsing red cherry which seemed as if it had been harpooned by a red-hot poker – and that the poker was still burning inside it.”

Dave Anderson wrote in The New York Times, “Now that the fight is over, everybody is willing to acknowledge that it never should have occurred. Unknown to Ron Stander, a hospital room had been reserved for him. ‘We were afraid he might get really hurt,’ one of his friends disclosed … in the hours after the fight. ‘We knew he was overmatched. He was just part of a TV promotion.’ He was just part of a slaughter, too. It belonged in the stockyards here. ‘The blood was in his eyes,’ Joe Frazier said with concern. ‘He couldn’t see.’ Had the blood prompted the heavyweight champion to soften his assault? ‘The man couldn’t see, but the blood didn’t bother me. I worked in blood all my life. I was a butcher in a slaughterhouse in Philadelphia for two years. Blood has been part of my life.’ It still is, except that the unbeaten champion never has bled. His victims do.” Anderson went on to point out that Stander needed his 17 stitches to close four wounds – two above the nose, one over his right eye, another under it. “His bulbous red nose was broken.”

This year “Blood On The Typewriter” has made a return to a book cover, on Robbie Brechin’s biography of 66-year-old Australian wine writer Philip White. Unfortunately, I’m unable to say whether the contents mention typewriters at all. Gippsland-born White was diagnosed with cancer in November 2018 and told he had six weeks to live. But he has battled on well beyond that timeframe, and used some of that time the tell his life story to Adelaide journalist Brechin. White, the son of an Old Testament manic street preacher, was in Paul Kelly's first band, The Debutantes, among many other adventures. Brechin is described as a failed banker-turned-journalist who has worked in mainstream media for four decades. He has written on rock music (pseudonym Thor Fingers), nightlife and politics.

FOOTNOTE: To my embarrassment, it was only after I'd included my 2010 article about Paul Kelly's book How To Make Gravy in yesterday's post that I realised a sub-editor had, all those years ago, changed Bob Dylan's typewriter to an "American steel Remington Safari". It was, of course, a Royal, and not even a Safari at that, but a Caravan. Maybe the sub-editor got confused with Pierce Brosnan's Remington Steele? He surely couldn't have imagined I'd made the mistake?!