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Running in Literature

From the Creation of Worlds to the Twists in Legends, Running Runs Through the Written Word. Part 2 of 5

7. Oral Cultures and the Bible

Oral cultures often include stories of great runners or feats of running.

They range around the world from stories of the great Welsh shepherdrunner Guto Nythbran Morgan, who fell dead at the end of his mightiest race in the Rhondda Valley, to the Maori legend of Te Houtaewa, who ran with giant strides the length of New Zealand’s Ninety-Mile Beach to fetch his mother some gourmet seafood from under the very nose of a hostile tribe.

The myths and legends of the Native Americans are probably the richest body of such stories. In their creation myths, running contests often decide the status, characteristics, and territory of various animals. “World around” runs at Taos preserve the mythic race when Turquoise Boy beat Deer and gave human hunters supremacy over game animals. Other myths explain geography or the cosmos. The Sacramento River arose in the wake of a runner racing inland. In California, darkness came when the Sun lost a race to Coyote. The Milky Way is the dust raised by a race between the coyote and the wildcat at the beginning of time, or the tracks left by deer and antelope in a prehistory ultra race.

Together with moral fables about running and stories of instruction in the skills of running or hunting, mythic narratives like these have been found over most of the two American continents, an important body of verbal culture, contiguous to my subject of running as it has appeared in literature. The best

-)) SS SSS Roger Robinson RUNNING IN LITERATURE i 77

introduction is in Peter Nabokov’s Indian Running (1981), which cites many other sources.

In other parts of the world, heroic running legends have passed from oral into various literary forms. In Ireland, The Book of Leinster (c. 1150) records the ancient Lugnas, or Tailteann Games, which may have predated the Greek Olympics, as well as retelling legendary sagas. Written in Middle Irish, it is recognized as key in the history of track as an organized activity.

More accessibly, the Old Testament gives a written and translated form to some running stories, notably the military running messenger, the “man of Benjamin.” After a battle in which “Israel was smitten, [he] ran out of the army, and came to Shiloh the same day, with his clothes rent, and with earth upon his head” (1 Samuel 4, verse 12; Authorized Version).

MESSAGES TO KING DAVID

The Bible gives literary form to running in some other interesting ways. 2 Samuel 18 tells of two runners who separately carry news from the battle zone to King David after the death of his rebellious son, Absalom. The drama of the story comes from their different running speeds. One overtakes the other, who started first, and reports to David in a way that tries to soften and delay the blow. But then Cushi, the slower runner, arrives and reports more directly so that the king lapses into his famous lament, “O Absalom, my son, my son!”

Another interesting running detail is that the palace watchman is able to recognize the messengers from their running action: “And the watchman said, Me thinketh the running of the foremost is like the running of Ahimaaz the son of Zadok” (2 Samuel 18, verse 27). That is a skill runners learn, and the verse should be the sacred text of all of us who have labored as TV commentators to identify a tight pack of runners on a fuzzy outdoors monitor screen on a sunny day.

The best running writer in the Bible is Saint Paul. I discovered that we shared an interest in running many years ago, when I did some school teaching. Every time I was due to travel to a major race, the colleague responsible for morning prayers chose 1 Corinthians 9 for the day’s lesson, and I would have to listen nervously again to “You know (do you not?) that at the sports all the runners run the race, though only one wins the prize. Like them, run to win!” Saint Paul goes on to develop the link between life and competitive running: “Every athlete goes into strict training. They do it to win a fading wreath; we, a wreath that never fades. For my part, I run with a clear goal before me… I bruise my own body and make it know its master” (1 Corinthians 9, verses 2427; New English Bible).

I noticed that Saint Paul turns to sporting comparisons on other occasions, including the idea hallowed by all marathon runners, that life is like a big race, challenging you to complete the distance to the best of your ability. “I have run the great race, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4, verse 7). Living a godly life, he says, is like being in full training: “Keep yourself in training for the practice of religion”’ (“exercise themselves unto godliness” in the Authorized Version; 1 Timothy 4, verse 7).

H. A. Harris, in a fascinating discussion in Greek Athletes and Athletics (1964), goes deeper than these references. Saint Paul, he shows from the Greek, habitually uses runners’ and boxers’ slang, terms for instance for being an also-ran, or competing within the rules, or being disqualified.

Harris suggests (and I’d like to believe him) that Saint Paul could easily have acquired this way of thought as a youthful competitor, or as a spectator, since Tarsus had its own stadium where important meets were held in Roman times, and some Jews did apparently take part in athletics. Certainly the Epistles are enriched by the vigor of metaphors drawn from running, and they seem to come from someone who understands the demands of training and stress of competition. But since Saint Paul exhorts us to “finish the race and complete the task” (Acts 20, verse 24), I must move on.

8. Knights, Footmen, and Fiends: Literature to 1700

I took a dislike of horses at the age of 15 when one tried to kick me off the English footpath where I was innocently running. I still give a wide berth to their four sharp corners. I also blame them for the total lack of good running writing in the first few centuries of English literature. Those were the years when the horse was the ultimate status symbol, and equestrian skills were the

Roger Robinson RUNNING IN LITERATURE m 79

basis of moral as well as military codes. The very word “chivalry” means riding on horseback.

Supposedly, running was part of the education and training of upper-class males. Sir Thomas Elyot in The Book of the Governor (1531) says, “rennying is bothe a good exercise and a laudable solace,” and Joseph Strutt, in The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England (1801), says that the accomplishments of a knight included “to run with swiftness.” But “to ride well” and the associated sports of hawking and hunting got far more attention in the courtly Renaissance.

Through the great works of Chaucer, Malory, Spenser, and even Shakespeare, plenty of fine people have “many a dainty horse in stable,” or “ride a mighty wallop,” or come “pricking on the plaine” on their steeds and palfreys, but I can’t for the life of me find any decent runners.

There are odd lines in Shakespeare like, “Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible” (Julius Caesar); or Falstaff’s “I could give a thousand pounds I could run as fast as thou canst”; or Richard III’s “What needst thou run so many miles about?” But those three are spoken by an assassin, a drunken coward, and a mass murderer, so I prefer not to push the point. The one safe line from Shakespeare is “Though I look old, yet am I strong and lusty” (As You Like It), which isn’t about running but always goes down well at masters running clinics.

Messengers run in and out, of course, and Hamlet plays fox and hounds, the old running game, with the Elsinore security guards (“Hide, fox, and all after!”). But the nearest Shakespeare comes to a description of running is in his early Henry VI Part 3, when the Earl of Warwick takes a break after a battle with the lines:

Forspent with toil, as runners with a race,

Ilay me down a little while to breathe. (II 3)

It’s not much, but it’s the first appearance of competitive running as a literary metaphor since Saint Paul’s Epistles

1,500 years earlier. Shakespeare may have had running on his mind for some reason that day, as later in the same scene the Yorkist princes agree to rally their troops by promising “‘such rewards/As victors wear the Olympian games.” But the line in the scene that I still like best is when Warwick says, “T’ll kill my horse, because I will not fly.”

THE RUNNING FOOTMEN

An unexpected bonus came in the plays of John Webster (c 1580-1603), writing a little after Shakespeare. The young Webster appears as the stage-struck and bloodthirsty boy in the movie Shakespeare in Love, but he also must have been interested in the new sport of races between “running footmen” (see Roger Robinson, “The Running Footmen,” Marathon & Beyond, Vol. 3, No. 1, Jan/ Feb 1999). Webster’s little-known Roman play, Appius and Virginia (c1620), has a politician saying that those who aspire to high office should beforehand “load themselves with excuse and faint denial,” so they can then leap to power all the faster, and he draws an analogy with resistance training for a big race:

Thave heard of cunning footmen that have worn Shoes made of lead some ten days ’fore a race To give them nimble and more active feet (I, 1, 55-7)

And in his comedy A Cure for a Cuckold (printed 1661), Webster again uses “footman” to mean a competitive runner, this time as a simile for how fast your money goes on lawyers: “Your purse must run by like a footman then.” This prompts a response that implies that a litigant’s open purse is like a gasping runner, spending everything and on the edge of exhaustion: “My purse shall run open-mouth’d at thee.” Quite likely some big race had just been run in London that the actors could ham up as they spoke the lines. These references in two plays, brief though they are, sketch training in the one and racing in the other with some credibility.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678) takes a long journey on foot as an allegory of life, in a way all distance runners, including Saint Paul, will relate to; and Christian does occasionally include a little running, as when he climbs the Hill of Difficulty and falls “from running to going [i.e., walking], and from going to clambering upon his hands and knees, because of the steepness of the place.”

John Milton’s great epic of the Creation, Paradise Lost (1667), is modeled on Homer’s The Iliad, so it has to include some games, as one of the basic conventions of the epic form (see “Running in Literature,” installment 1, section 2). A story set mostly in the Garden of Eden presents limited opportunity for a track meet, and anyway Milton, as a Puritan, disapproved of competitive sports. So he put the required games in the most appropriate place he could think of: Hell. The competitors are the demons, fallen angels who have been hurled headlong flaming down to Hell after their unsuccessful rebellion against God. When Satan goes off to work his wickedness in the Garden of Eden, the rest of the fiends pass the time with races, both running and flying (as angels they have the necessary equipment):

Part on the plain, or in the air sublime Upon the wing, or in swift race contend, As at th’ Olympian games or Pythian fields. (Book 2, 528-30)

(The Pythian games were those held at Delphi.) The rest of the demons are feeling more aggressive, and they hold fierce chariot races, jousts, and mock battles, while some in rage “Rend up both rocks and hills, and ride the air/In whirlwind.” Ripping up hills could enliven the average track meet, but runners are rarely that violent. Milton does score a hit against some runners I know, however, when he says that some of the demons retire into a valley to sing, with angelical notes on their harps of “their own heroic deeds.” I thought of the talkative occasional member of our running group whom we call “My Brilliant Career.”

The last of the great epic poems on the Greek model in English was Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad (1728-43). Pope shows mastery of the conventions of the epic, then literature’s most revered form, but mocks and degrades them into a vicious but brilliant attack on the literary world of his time. So he includes the required games but turns them into scatological black comedy. The “dunces,” his literary enemies and rivals, hold a pissing championship and a diving contest into an open sewer, as well as an absurd footrace. There the leaders are two publishers and booksellers, Edmund Curll, who specialized in pornography and sedition, and Bernard Lintott, a notoriously uncouth man who had published some of Pope’s earlier works.

“Dauntless Curll” races away as fast as a poet escaping from the bailiffs. Pope then gives a cruelly comic picture of sheer bad running by the overweight and uncoordinated Lintott:

As when a dab-chick waddles through the copse, On feet and wings, and flies, and wades, and hops; So laboring on, with shoulders, hands and head, Wide as a windmill all his figure spread,

With legs expanded Bernard urged the race,

And seem’d to emulate great Jacob’s pace… . (Book 2, 53-64)

Pope was not a nice man, but few poets could conjure ungainly movement in such skillfully gawky verse.

Pope was also a learned classicist, so those who read my discussion of the races in Greek and Latin epics in installment 1 will not be surprised that, as is standard for the race leader in epic verse, Curll falls into a deep pool, this time of sewage:

But vig’rous he rises; from th’effluvia strong Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along, Re-passes Lintott, vindicates his race,

Nor heeds the brown dishonours of his face. (97-100)

Fortunately, this is the lowest point ever reached in the literary history of running, unless you count the episode in Fanny Burney’s novel Evelina (1778), where the gambling-mad gentry stage a race between two old women “proved to be more than eighty years of age.” “Feeble and frightened,” they hobble, stumble, and fall “with their whole weight upon the gravel,” provoking “unmanly rage” from one of the backers, as Burney exposes the brutal and exploitative side of the betting craze.

There is a more comic literary race in Tobias Smollett’s novel Humphry Clinker (1771), where a skinny poet races against a fat publisher, first borrowing his boots to act as a handicap. It’s soon over, as the poet takes off halfway through with the boots, and the story turns into just one of a series of ingenious con tricks by which the poet lives (Vol. 2, June 10). The fine ending of the novel is more relevant to runners, especially older ones. The hypochondriac squire, Matthew Bramble, who started the story constipated and irritable, learns from his year’s travel and adventure to value movement and exercise. “I have put myself on the superannuated list too soon, and absurdly sought for health in the retreat of laziness. . .. We should sometimes increase the motion of the machine, to unclog the wheels of life.” It’s a marvelous affirmation of what all runners believe and one of my favorite quotations.

Henry Fielding’s high-spirited hero in Tom Jones (1749) keeps the wheels of life well unclogged, and on one occasion, when obliged to go home on foot, “this he did so expeditiously that he ran upwards of three miles within the halfhour” (IV, 11). Since we have been told that Mr. Allworthy’s house is up on a hill, and especially if we know that it is Ralph Allen’s Prior Park high above Bath, that’s good running.

Another athletic feat in a novel of that era is in Henry Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765-70), when the noble young Harry joins in a village sport, clears a five-foot high jump “with a standing hop,” and then wins the pole vault, on a wooden pole, with an incredible 10 feet, “a new-risen phoenix, suspended

Roger Robinson RUNNING IN LITERATURE m 83