Louisa Ackermann, Communications Officer at Birkbeck, reports on Arts Week event Wrestling with Words, a conversation between Toby Litt and Wes Brown which explored writing, fighting and being a man. 

What do we mean when we talk about masculinity? Is it an authentic sense of self, an identity, or is it a performance, carefully crafted and skillfully executed? On Friday 18 May, Toby Litt and Wes Brown joined in conversation to discuss their lives as writers and wrestlers, and how they have questioned what it is to be a man through these dual occupations.

Both have a family background of wrestling: Wes’s father was a pro-wrestler, meaning the scripted type performed in WWE, where characters are outlandish and outcomes are predetermined; while Toby’s great-great-grandfather was William Litt, a Cumberland wrestler who reigned undefeated and took home over 200 prize belts during his nineteenth-century career.

Toby, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck and author of Wrestliana opened the event with a reading from his book, which he was inspired to write in an effort to find out more about his ancestor and the fascinating life he led. William had written his own book, also called Wrestliana, which Toby used during his research process while learning to wrestle himself in a sports hall in Carlisle.

He recounted his thought process and his growing anxieties as he geared up for his first fight:

“All the way up, on the train, I read and reread the practical bits of Wrestliana and thought about how – in five hours, then four hours, then three – I could be riding in an ambulance.

“I knew fairly certainly which injuries I feared most. I’d constructed a sliding scale.

“At the very top, there was quadriplegia – a broken neck and me in a wheelchair, unable to hug my children, scanning websites for advances in robot exoskeletons. Then there was the fractured lower vertebra, keeping me away from my desk, perhaps forever. There was the ruptured knee ligament. In the days before, I had started to notice how many of the men I saw were limping as they walked. I started to walk with an imaginary limp myself, because I thought a knee injury the likeliest. I flashed forward to the serious painkiller addiction that would follow. Next, there was the broken collarbone and the dislocated shoulder. By the time I got this far down the list, I was staring to bargain. ‘Okay,’ I thought, ‘I’d settle for that.’ Badly strained wrist, yes, that would be fine – as long as it was the non-writing hand. Can we make it the left wrist?”

But much to his surprise, he not only emerged without injury but won the match, and was free to continue on his research journey asking questions about competition, success and modern-day masculinity. Indeed, it was clear that for both speakers wrestling had become something which both informed and was informed by their perceptions of their own masculinity. Wes described a struggle to feel sufficiently manly while growing up as a sensitive boy in a working-class community, where many of the men worked in manual jobs, and found that wrestling was a way to assert a type of manhood on his own terms.

Wes followed in his father’s footsteps by going into pro-wrestling, which he describes as a form of drag. “It’s men pretending to be men,” he said, “it’s a performance of masculinity. ‘Being a man’ can be cartoonish and amusing, but it can also be dangerous. There’s a macho hierarchy in wrestling, but it’s all made up…. it’s a way to be macho and be a man, without having to actually be macho and be a man.”

Asked whether his parallel careers of wrestling and writing had informed each other, he said that “both are a form of storytelling, but I don’t think wrestling has taught me anything about writing whatsoever. What it has done is give me something to write about.”

Wrestliana by Toby Litt is available from Galley Beggar Press.