FFB: THE SET-UP by Joseph Moncure March (Covici-Friede 1928) as reviewed in the NYT by James T. Farrell

The other week I saw the neat little noir film The Set-Up (1949), about Robert Ryan as an over-the-hill but not finished boxer, though his wife (played by Audrey Totter) is worried he's sticking with it too long, risking too much. And things don't go well for him, nor for a number of the other folks on the match card with him and sharing a prep and fix-up room, in the small-city athletic club where most of the boxing action is set. Reportedly this was Robert Wise's favorite of the films he directed at RKO and one of his favorites among all his films. A bit heavy-handed (or gloved), not too much, about the brutality of the sport and the milieu in which it exists. 

First edition. Iconography not the most enlightened even for the time. The film makes the protagonist a non-brutish pale Caucasian.

Not quite unrelentingly grim, but the primary trainer and "cut man" (essentially the on-site medic) gets one of the more blatant bits meant to be humorous, when, after the last boxer leaves the prep room, he opens up the issue of the romance-fiction pulp magazine Thrilling Love he's been reading and settles in for more.

Art Cohn's script is loosely based on Joseph Moncure March's narrative poem. In the FictionMags Index, March's "Lyric to Baseball" is listed as a short story...perhaps because the The New Yorker's online archive lists it as a short story...but it's actually, and unsurprisingly with that title, a 12-line filler poem, at the tail end of the theater column, perhaps an intentional transition to the sports column on the facing page (how soon after Harold Ross ceased editing did TNY lose its sports column?):

"I hereby swear--expecting sneers--

That baseball bores me to tears.

While thousands shout at home run Kings,

My yawns escape on mighty wings:

When fielders muff an easy fly

And millions groan--I wonder why:

Always the one spectacular play

Comes when I look the other way:

Last, but not least--a fatal touch!--

The women I see there aren't so much.

I therefore swear--expecting sneers--

That baseball bores me to tears."

--Not so much for his lack of baseball fandom might he expect a sneer or a shrug for the doggerel. And his relative obscurity today...perhaps the film's source poem is a bit more impressive...

James T. Farrell says it is, in his 1977 New York Times consideration of March's two most famous books in verse form: 

[...] There is one interesting exception — he is known to sportswriters as the author of “The Set‐Up,” originally published in 1928, a classic about prize‐fighting. Earlier, in 1926, he had published “The Wild Party.”

These two books, especially “The Wild Party,” had been received with enthusiasm. Among those who saw value in March's work was Edmund Wilson. But even among those who agreed with Wilson there was disagreement. Were these books poetry? They were written in verse form. There was a pattern of rhymes. The language was simple, and some of the words were spelled phonetically.

“My god, Queenie; you're looking swell!”

Quoth Queenie:

“I'm feeling slick as hell”

This from the first section of “The Wild Party.” And in “The Set‐Up”:

“Yes suh!” he said.

“This shirt sure grand!

Ah held four Aces in my hand.

Got this shirt, Got this cap.

Poker suits me

Better'n crap.”

I have selected these two examples at random.

And if that's poetry, I'll eat my hat.

Both books could be described as novelettes following the general form of poetry. There are passages that rise to a poetic level. The stories are taut. In each of them tension mounts to a conclusion of tragedy. At least, they are tragic if the killing of a human because of greed or of drunken desire and jealousy, still can be called tragic. There is a strong sense of reality although some of this reality is sordid. The organization of the work can be termed cinematic. It's as if March anticipated scenario writing for sound films. But “The Wild Party” was written before the first talking picture was publicly released. And after “The Set‐Up,” March did work as a scenario writer in the film industry. In fact, he earned a number of credits as such. His ability to convey drama powerfully and quickly and his ear for dialogue helped him carry a storyline. March was an able writer. In some of his the reader all but feel the atmosphere in which his characters move, speak and act.

The Roaring Twenties was the decade for wild parties, parties where elitist youths could become “free” by drinking too much and daring too much. (In the 20's there was bathtub gin; in the present there is cocaine.) These young people have been immortalized, their anti‐conventional and frequently bizarre conduct romanticized. Few of them had read works of Nietzsche, but this didn't stop them from trying to act out his advice—to live dangerously. The fact is, of course, that wild parties and elitists who “dare” have always existed. But, in the 20's, there were many who felt that they had invented the wild party. In his book, “The Wild Party,” March did more than reflect this attitude, he brought it before the eyes of his readers. One of the popular jazz songs of the age was “I'm Runnin' Wild.” The first two lines, as I recall, of the chorus were: “I'm runnin' wild; I've lost control.” In “The Wild Party,” March developed this idea.

More of Farrell's essay at the link: 

https://www.nytimes.com/1977/04/17/archives/the-wild-party-and-the-setup-wild-party.html

And the lyrics of "Runnin' Wild" run a bit closer to this:

My gal and I, we had a fight 
And I'm all by myself
I guess she thinks now that she's gone
I'll lay right on the shelf
I'm gonna show her she's all wrong
No lonesome stuff for mine
I won't sit home, all alone
She'll soon find that I'm
Runnin' wild, lost control
Runnin' wild, mighty bold
Feelin' gay, reckless too
Care free mind all the time, never blue
Always goin' don't know where
Always showin', I don't care
Don't love nobody, it's not worth while
All alone, runnin' wild. Runnin' wild
When I first met that gal of mine
It seemed just like a dream
But when she tho't she had me right
She started actin' mean
Like mary led her little lamb 
She led me all the time
Until the worm had to turn
That's the reason I'm
Runnin' wild, lost control
Runnin' wild,…

FFB: TABOO and TABOO 2, edited by Paul Neimark (New Classics House 1964, 1965)

For fairly obvious reasons, there has been an interplay between First Amendment advocacy, bohemian writers, sexually explicit fiction and other publications, and the occasional publication of fairly serious work by houses that are better known for what was intentionally disposable literature, at best. Usually, whether we refer to such magazines as Evergreen Review or Playboy or Rogue or Eros, or to such publishers as Grove Press or Olympia Press, there was often some desire to package and present sophisticated material in every sense, even if the sophistication of some of that material was solely in the adult themes addressed by it. Thus, the Chicago-based New Classics House, which published such work as Kerry Thornley's assassination account Oswald, Albert Ellis's collection of essays Suppressed, and, in two volumes published in 1964 and '65, Paul Neimark's anthologies Taboo and Taboo 2. Not quite Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions (1967), nor DV's first form, the abortive Judith Merril anthology for Regency Books that Ellison had commissioned during his brief editorship at that paperback line (which was a corporate cousin to the more erotic Greenleaf Classics and other imprints), the Taboo volumes nonetheless managed to publish some work by notable writers, some of which remains otherwise unavailable...I'm not sure, but it's possible one or more of the stories in Taboo, at least, had been written with the Merril project in mind. (See Matthew Davis's comments, below.)

(and this, from Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review, November/December 1978:

"9-7-78 The speculation/charge that Harlan Ellison may have "stolen" the idea of DANGEROUS VISIONS from a pocketbook series titled TABOO from the early Sixties [in Scott Edelman's letter in SFR #27] has been refuted and demolished by information not-to-be-doubted received today.

"Briefly, Harlan originated the TABOO anthology idea in 1960 or so, tried to sell it to Regency, and then turned to project over to Paul Niemark in 1961. Several stories had been submitted and two of the authors went along with the change in editorship. Volume One of TABOO was published in 1964.

"It would be nice if nasty speculations and junped conclusions could be avoided in the future." 

The issue can be read here [Archive.org] and here [Fanac.org].)

Taboo, for all the hype inherent in the subtitle "seven short stories that no publisher would touch from seven leading writers", reprints two of its stories from books published by mainline publishers, Charles Beaumont's "The Neighbors" (first in his 1960 Bantam Books collection Night Ride and Other Journeys) and Ray Russell's "Take a Deep Breath" (originally in a 1956 issue of George Fox's Chicago-based Playboy imitator Tiger, probably there as a salvage market since Russell was already an editor at Playboy by that time, but perhaps Hefner or A. C. Spectorsky didn't much care for the story; Russell apparently revised it for inclusion in his 1961 Ballantine collection Sardonicus and Other Stories and here). I believe all the other stories were first published in this volume (index courtesy ISFDB) of 127pp.:

• 9 • Second Coming • short story by Robert Bloch
• 17 • The Neighbors • (1960) • short story by Charles Beaumont
• 31 • The Daddy of Them All • novelette by Nelson Algren
• 61 • Battle Without Banners • short story by Harlan Ellison
• 81 • Take a Deep Breath • (1956) • short story by Ray Russell
• 93 • Lie Still, Snow White • short story by Fritz Leiber
• 115 • The Lovers • short story by Paul Neimark [typo'd as by Paul Niemark]

As far as I've found so far, the Bloch and Neimark stories have not been reprinted anywhere, nor the Algren at least under that title (though at least one study suggests that it's a rather different, more sardonic recasting of an incident in Algren's novel A Walk on the Wild Side). As the links above will demonstrate, the other stories original to the volume have since been reprinted in at least one collection of the authors' works. Neimark was a fairly prolific writer, perhaps best-known in his time as the as-told-to collaborator with Jesse Owens on several memoirs and related books by the Olympic athlete, and the author of the novel She Lives! (1972), which was adapted as one of the more popular US telefilms of the early 1970s. It's notable that all the writers involved had some strong ties to Chicago, and most had at least occasionally published in the men's magazines based in the city. Leiber's story includes an incident of incestuous necrophilia, so the tagline was perhaps not so very misleading as to the nature of the stories, if not the facts of their publication history. 

Taboo 2 has a less stellar, if still good, lineup of writers, and, presumably as a result, is far easier to procure on the secondhand book market; the second volume includes four stories, one each by James T. Farrell, true crime writer Jay Nash, fellow prolific novelist Con Sellers (who, like Neimark, would make his biggest commercial splash in later years, with his novels set in and dealing with the run up to World War 2), and Neimark himself again--from the Miscellaneous Anthologies Index:

Taboo 2 ed. Anon. (New Classics House 7N760, 1965, 75¢, 91pp, pb)
• 7 · The Day They Cancelled Christmas · James T. Farrell · nt
• 33 · The Conversion · Paul G. Neimark · nt
• 45 · Two Triumphs · Jay Nash · nt
• 68 · Like the Best Wine · Con Sellers · nt

At least this one is held in local libraries nearby for me (interlibrary loan from mostly Chicagoland holdings for the first volume might be problematic, at best). Niemark published at least one other, nonfiction anthology with New Classics, 1964's Crisis, which includes essays from Farrell and Algren mixed with considerations of the state of the world from L. Sprague de Camp, G. Harry Stine and L. G. Alexander, along with some verse from Carl Sandburg. 

Given the importance of the contributors and the relative interest both the content and the writers in question might generate, I'm mildly surprised these two anthologies haven't been scanned and posted in such online resources as Open Library, but at least the physical copies are held by some libraries, and the books, like most published in any quantity, are available, if, again, it's far more likely one can buy a copy of 2 than the original. I would like to know what was so taboo about the Bloch story, and why it's not been included in any of his collections over the decades. 

For more first-hand accounts of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.