Now 26, Antonia Logue started writing her recently published novel Shadow-Box four years ago while she was still in Trinity College studying English. This ambitious book is based around three non-fictional characters: the famous Jack Johnson, who became the first black boxing World Champion in 1908, to the fury of racist white America; his friend, fellow boxer and poet Arthur Cravan, whom Johnson met in Europe; and Mina Loy, modernist poet and Cravan s adored wife.
Stylistically, Shadow-Box is a real feat. Jack Johnson s story, told in the first person in the form of letters to Mina Loy, is absolutely extraordinary. Using graphic realism, Antonia describes one of the world s most violent and macho sports better than any sports journalist.
Naturally modest, Antonia says that she d been writing dire poetry and rubbishy fiction for years before she finally found her own voice.
I was reading The Annals Of Chile by Paul Muldoon, and in this massive long poem there was a mention of this guy Arthur Cravan and his wife Mina Loy. They d been called the pugilist poets. I stayed up all night reading it and the next morning, the second that the library opened in Trinity I went in and I put the name into the computer to see what they came up with.
In the library, Antonia found a load of biographical information as well as Cravan s collected poetry, written in French. (Antonia lived in Brussels during her teens, with the result that she speaks fluent French, an absolute prerequisite for the huge amount of research that went into Shadow-Box . The love letters between Cravan and Mina, for example, were all written in French.)
Whilst researching Cravan s life, Antonia came across Jack Johnson. Intrigued, she turned her attention to him. The more I read about Jack, she enthuses, the more I fell completely in love with what I could do with him, the challenge of trying to get him down on paper. Doing him seemed really, really worthwhile.
Arthur Cravan and Jack Johnson were both boxers and they were both chancers. Cravan was this larger than life figure that everybody knew and talked about, and was basically the man to know. The two of them attracted each other, and became really good friends in Europe around 1913. But in real life, they never saw each other after that.
What triggered the novel in my head was the fact that later on in Jack s career he wrote a letter to Cravan from Mexico. He was in real trouble, and said why don t you and I get together, we can tour around the place and do loads of exhibition matches. We ll make loads of money, why don t you come over? And Cravan never did. But I just thought, what if he had, and what if their relationship had continued?
Like every good novelist, Antonia knows her fictional characters and the real people they were originally based on as though they were members of her own family.
Arthur Cravan, she exclaims, genuinely seemed to be someone who just didn t give a damn. Everybody cares so much about what other people think of them even when you think that you don t, the fact that you re thinking it means that you do! And he just genuinely did not seem to give a damn about anyone or anything at all. And then he fell head over heels in love with this woman Mina Loy, extraordinary in her own way, and he suddenly did care about something. And then he disappeared. And it was the fact that he disappeared, and the love story, and the fact that he was just such a headcase in so many ways that drew me to him.
And then Jack s life I couldn t walk away from Jack s life once I discovered it. The racism and the way he dealt with it. A weaker person would ve been bent, completely buckled by the pressure that was put on him, and he just thwarted it at every single turn.
With what Antonia calls her mini silver spoon life , London-born poet Mina Loy couldn t be further removed from Johnson. What I liked about Mina in terms of writing her, explains Antonia, was that she was basically a little princess. She didn t have a tough life, she was born into a family with money. Her mother was a complete bitch, and Mina had lots of emotional problems, and she just moaned about everything. Everything was just not right. She let herself be married off to this complete imbecile, her first husband, and eventually got out of that. It was how she could so easily have been like everyone else of her period did what she was told, be completely repressed, and be completely uninterested in the big wide world and she went and she overcame that as well, and she got through it.
But she was just the most unbelievably selfish person I ve ever read about in my whole life. She had four children one of them died when she wasn t around she just basically handed them over to people and went off around the world being Mina Loy the poet and famous beauty. This spectacular selfishness!
Antonia Logue works from Castletownsend, a tiny beautiful village along the coast of West Cork, where she lives with her partner Eamonn Sweeney, also a novelist. A dedicated writer, Antonia is well along the road of her second novel. And if Shadow-Box is anything to go by, this young novelist s future work is well-worth keeping an eye on.
Shadow-Box, published by Bloomsbury, is now available at Stg#15.99.