Great Story

In many ways both Johnson and Cravan shared a certain modernist restlessness — lives striving to reach a kind of terminal velocity that might outrun the fate their births had decreed for them. As biographer Ian Carr would later say of Miles Davis, around the time the musician was recording his own tribute to Johnson, both men “beat against the limit of their talents” — Johnson with pugilistic guile and the daring to be himself in his own hostile country; Cravan repeatedly hurling himself into trouble of his own making as if to see what it looked like.

Both would die sudden deaths freighted with symbolism appropriate to the way they had lived their lives: Johnson in a 1946 car crash, after speeding angrily away from a segregated diner outside Franklinton, North Carolina, that had refused him service; Cravan disappearing in a small sailboat in a storm off the Gulf of Mexico, only to resurface in numerous conspiracy theories that he had faked his own death.--GP

This is a wonderful piece about Jack Johnson and Oscar Wilde's nephew, Arthur Craven, who fought a bogus fight with JJ in 1916.


TS