Munson’s Woodstock host was William Murrain Fisher, an art critic and early curator of the Woodstock Artists Association who had a cabin in the woods. He encouraged the two rivals to duke it out in the mud. “The worst fight I ever saw,” he said later. But that didn’t detract from its importance. Josephson wrote, “News of our Duel in the Mud promptly spread to New York and the press, whose literary columnists published excited conjecture and rumor about the ‘fratricidal strife’ among the literati of the ‘left wing.’ It was set down as (possibly?) the first time in the history of America that two men of letters came to blows over their opposing critical or aesthetic doctrines.”
To set the record straight, Josephson described the fight. “It was a cloudy afternoon in early November; as it had just stopped raining, the meadow where we squared off was mucky. Neither of us knew anything about the manly art. Munson, who had been convalescing for several weeks after a siege of ‘flu,’ had become very fat, outweighing me by about fifty pounds. His fists felt like pillows. He stood still; I hauled off and hit him a first roundhouse blow in the mouth that left a slight scratch…The slow-moving Munson, after a few exchanges, clinched with me and we fell to the wet ground, rolling about a while and becoming well covered with mud. I struggled to break free from him. We were both out of breath as we got to our feet and could scarcely swing at each other. Fisher, who was very good-humored about our little imbroglio, forgot to call off the rounds; and after about five minutes we both halted our hostilities. Fisher told me later that I was sitting on Munson’s chest when we stopped.”
Munson also set the record straight. Josephson “shouted for battle,” he wrote. “He was enraged and aggressive, in no mood for reason. However, he wasn’t fearsome; slightly built, he looked anything but formidable. It’s stretching a bit to call what ensued a ‘fight.’ Rather it was a scene in the theater of the absurd (or would have been had that theater then been born.) Josephson was ignorant of boxing as well as unathletic in build. The encounter was more nearly a scuffle than a fight. It’s high point — or better, the low point since it occurred on the ground — was reached when the Dadaist lay supine under the rump of the Secessionist, his body writhing beneath the weight of a convalescent who had been on a building up diet for six weeks, his arms pinioned by the knees of his critic, the dampness of the ground chilling his temper. ‘Let me up’ was the manifesto of this upsetting moment in the history of American Dadaism when instead of Dada attaining to its apex, the movement’s chief was thrown struggling beneath the podex of the opposition.”
Notice, please, who won. Need we further proof that this fight really occurred? No poet worth a memoir would admit to being pinned in the mud by a putz. When I recounted this tale to Thomas Whigham of the Woodstock Library, where this history can be found in books that probably nobody but me has checked out in years, he smiled and described the outcome as “Win-Win Poetry.” In fact, he suggested that my walking partner, Michael Perkins, and I find Fisher’s cabin to do a historical reenactment for the town history videos that he was recording for the library.
Mano-a-mano vs. Michael Perkins? Of that I wasn’t sure. I hadn’t punched anyone since my friend Steve Sheridan in third grade. Meanwhile, Michael, who was once stabbed within an inch of his life in an East Village street altercation, has written: “The man who has never experienced violence — or at least the threat of violence — has missed out on an important part of his heritage: he may have forgotten that he is an animal.” Was I ready to tangle with that kind of attitude? I told Thomas I’d get back to him.
In time all three men went on to literary careers far removed from these hijinks in their twenties. Gorham Munson taught writing at the New School for 35 years and wrote 14 books. Matthew Josephson left poetry to be a journalist for The New Yorker, which led to a series of books chronicling the economic history of the United States, including The Robber Barons, which remains pertinent as history repeats itself today. Malcolm Cowley became the chronicler of his “Lost Generation” that included Hemingway and Fitzgerald, as well as an influential editor who established Faulkner’s greatness by publishing The Portable Faulkner. In the 1950s he brought us Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and in the 1960s Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He knew that the Sixties resembled the Bohemian Twenties of his youth. What he’s not remembered for is the Homeric parody that he wrote to memorialize the Duel in the Mud.
Know, Muse, that heroes yet exist
Whose anger brooks no intercession,
And tooth meets tooth and fist meets fist
And ‘Up’ cries Munson, ‘with Secession!
Down Broom,’ he snarls, and warriors pant
Each to defend his literary slant.
All afternoon the battle wavers;
Now fortune smiles on Josephson,
Now frowns, and now stout Munson quavers,
“Broom is unswept. I’ve almost won.”
The other sneers, “Almost how splendid!”
As deep in mud both heroes like up-ended.
Yet battling on, till strength and light
together failed. Then Fisher rose,
Grimly dividing weary wight
from bleary knight and fist from nose:
So, on another fateful day,
Half-dead Achilles by half-living Hector lay.
Our Colony of the Arts may not have produced much epic poetry, but it’s a start.
Will Nixon by Carol Zaloom.
