About fifty years ago I was lying in the bath listening to Alan Pryce Jones, formerly editor of the TLS, give his weekly radio report from New York on the Arts in America. Exquisitely spoken, Pryce-Jones was a self-confessed ‘muff ’, the antithesis of what used to be called ‘a hearty’. So I was staggered to hear him recommend an American first novel called Stay Hungry (1973), about bodybuilding in Birmingham, Alabama.
I’d never read any Faulkner, nor had I ever been south of the Mason–Dixon line, to ‘the land of the boll-weevil/ where the laws are medieval . . .’ But what Pryce-Jones said struck a chord with me because I’d lifted weights myself, not in pursuit of a six-pack, but because I was a keen rugby player and felt I needed more bulk. Gyms in those days were where you went to box, not beef yourself up. But Syd, a colleague of mine, was a dedicated bodybuilder. He took me along to the Tough Guys Club, a room full of barbells just off Baker Street that was popular with stunt men as well as bodybuilders. There was no loud music, just the clink of weights, explosive grunts and a lot of banter, the tone of which contradicted the notion that all muscle men were gay.
Pryce-Jones called Stay Hungry ‘funny and lusty’. So it is. Gaines grew up in Birmingham and he has a keen ear for the drawling inflections of ‘the yahoo, slatternly, redneck, possum-poor, country South’. But this novel is also about Class, not a subject to which American writers then paid much heed. The novel’s protagonist, Craig Blake, is a wealthy bachelor playboy who once fancied himself a poet but now gets his kicks from sniffing out, ‘like a truffle hound’, new and ‘authentic’ pursuits. One steamy summer afternoon he enters a gym in downtown Birmingham and discovers bodybuilding, tame by comparison with rodeoing and skydi
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Subscribe now or Sign inAbout fifty years ago I was lying in the bath listening to Alan Pryce Jones, formerly editor of the TLS, give his weekly radio report from New York on the Arts in America. Exquisitely spoken, Pryce-Jones was a self-confessed ‘muff ’, the antithesis of what used to be called ‘a hearty’. So I was staggered to hear him recommend an American first novel called Stay Hungry (1973), about bodybuilding in Birmingham, Alabama.
I’d never read any Faulkner, nor had I ever been south of the Mason–Dixon line, to ‘the land of the boll-weevil/ where the laws are medieval . . .’ But what Pryce-Jones said struck a chord with me because I’d lifted weights myself, not in pursuit of a six-pack, but because I was a keen rugby player and felt I needed more bulk. Gyms in those days were where you went to box, not beef yourself up. But Syd, a colleague of mine, was a dedicated bodybuilder. He took me along to the Tough Guys Club, a room full of barbells just off Baker Street that was popular with stunt men as well as bodybuilders. There was no loud music, just the clink of weights, explosive grunts and a lot of banter, the tone of which contradicted the notion that all muscle men were gay. Pryce-Jones called Stay Hungry ‘funny and lusty’. So it is. Gaines grew up in Birmingham and he has a keen ear for the drawling inflections of ‘the yahoo, slatternly, redneck, possum-poor, country South’. But this novel is also about Class, not a subject to which American writers then paid much heed. The novel’s protagonist, Craig Blake, is a wealthy bachelor playboy who once fancied himself a poet but now gets his kicks from sniffing out, ‘like a truffle hound’, new and ‘authentic’ pursuits. One steamy summer afternoon he enters a gym in downtown Birmingham and discovers bodybuilding, tame by comparison with rodeoing and skydiving, two of his previous enthusiasms, but way more stimulating than the bromide of country club tennis and golf, to which he has lately grown accustomed. If Craig Blake probably has his counterparts in the Old World, then Joe Santo – ‘Mr Alabama’, the bodybuilder whose gaudy like ness outside the gym attracts Blake in the first place – belongs unquestionably to the New. Part French Canadian, part Chippewa Indian, Joe has a body he can mould as ‘easily as a potter does clay’ and a philosophy – ‘Stay hungry, and you’ll taste more of life’ – that explains why, in his late thirties, he has no plans to settle down. ‘Being comfortable’s like a profession or a religion,’ he says. ‘You get in there and you can’t get out. You get fat.’ Gaines drops little hints that there’s much more to Joe than his muscles. He has him invoke Cézanne, to explain that ‘when you ski or shoot rapids you do to country what he did to it with paintings’. Later, recalling a time when he was in the Leeward Islands, Joe says, ‘I shoulda built me a shack on the beach like Gauguin.’ Well, yes. But when Joe quotes Keats and Walt Whitman I felt Gaines was stretching a point. Ignoring an accusation of slumming by one of his snooty country club chums, Blake soon becomes obsessed by the mystique of body building, with its esoteric language and narcissistic ritual. Just as I did, he learns about ‘abs’ and ‘lats’ and ‘pecs’, and savours what Gaines calls ‘the peculiar pleasure of organized lifting, pushing and pulling’. And when Joe not only befriends him but also makes him a present of his girlfriend, the pert and sexy Mary Tate – ‘She’s got a hundred ways to wind your clock’ – his enthusiasm for work at the family real-estate company, never high, evaporates completely, and he divides his time between bedding Mary Tate and working out at the gym. One of the posh girls Blake used to date thinks Mary Tate is ‘a cheap little thing’, but Blake can’t keep his hands off her. Even better, she can’t keep her hands off him: ‘she made him try it sitting and standing, in the tub, on floors and couches and in the rain on the fresh cut grass’. No wonder he feels ‘ten feet tall and stronger than life’. But eventually, her uninhibited ardour undoes him:Little things, little facets of the magnificent raunchiness that used to excite him filled him now with a sort of dread: her coming naked to the table for their haphazard dinners, her using the toilet without closing the door, her habit of waking him in the middle of the night with a finger under the nose that was tart with her odour.
Mary Tate is from the wrong side of the tracks, so who can blame her if she moves in with Blake, whose well-appointed mansion in the hills above Birmingham, inherited from his parents, seems to her like a palace. ‘God I love it,’ she says. ‘It’s all perfect.’ But what does Joe, who fought in Korea and has had to make his own way, see in an entitled phony like Blake? I can’t remember now whether this bothered me in 1973, but I suspect that in those unregenerate days I didn’t demur at the idea that a chap might ‘gift’ his girl to a friend. Though he probably wouldn’t admit it, Blake thinks of Joe and Mary Tate as trophies that he can show off to his peers. An opportunity for this arises when he learns that in addition to bench-pressing four hundred pounds, Joe can sing. He persuades the organizer of a pretentious party at the country club that Joe is the ‘awthintic’ entertainer she’s looking for. Of course it all ends in tears. Instead of the applause he feels he deserves, Blake is blamed by all and sundry for what turns out to be a fiasco. Joe becomes a ‘spectacle’, but not in the way Blake had hoped. As for Mary Tate, she dies fighting off a rapist. But before that she sticks it to Blake:She was staring at the wall opposite them with unhealthy con centration. ‘Those pictures. All those animals and fish. They’re experiences, you said. You own ’em, you said. What you want is me up there.’ She said this flatly, rapidly, her voice like a growl . . . ‘Both of us. Joe too. I loved you,’ she screamed at him and stood up. ‘I’m no motherfucking picture, and neither is Joe, you bastard. I want to go home, home, home.’
A British reviewer thought that the ‘ugly and punitive death’ Gaines allots Mary Tate was ‘undoubtedly the worst thing in the book’. I too think it’s gratuitous, which is, I suppose, a sort of back handed compliment to the author for creating a character you care about. I doubt many readers give a damn about Blake, who after an extended vacation discovers a new hobby: breeding gundogs. This allows Gaines, an ‘outdoorsman’ as well as a gym bunny, the opportunity to expatiate on field trials. You can’t help wondering whether, like Blake, he’s inclined to ‘fall in love with ways of doing things, as they were suggested to him by little gestures and postures and sounds’. And as with, say, a baker ‘stretching and shaping dough’, so with the way women ‘crossed their legs or fingered their hair’. This reminded me a bit of Stendhal’s ‘crystallization’ theory, once described by a friend of mine as ‘falling in love with someone because of the way they tied their shoelaces’. Another British reviewer, Derek Mahon in The Listener, described Stay Hungry as ‘larger than the sum of its parts. The cult of fitness, innocent as it seems here, is related, Gaines seems to suggest, to the “social Darwinism” of American society, of which Birmingham is presented as a microcosm.’ Hmm. But it does seem odd to me now that given the time (1968–9) and the place (Birmingham, Alabama) there is no mention of either the civil rights movement or the Vietnam War. Or is Gaines trying to convey how detached from such episodes were the city’s upper crust? An American reviewer said Stay Hungry had put bodybuilding on the map. I think it would be truer to say that it put Gaines on the map: he very nearly won a National Book Award and has been a full time writer ever since. What put bodybuilding on the map was Gaines’s second book, Pumping Iron, an illustrated guide to the pursuit. Up until then, recalled Gaines, ‘bodybuilding was the least glamorous sport in the world. Promoting it was like trying to pro mote midget wrestling.’ A film of Pumping Iron launched the career of Arnold Schwarzenegger, who also played Joe Santo when Stay Hungry was filmed. Schwarzenegger, who rose to become Governor of California, recently published a primer called Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life. I wonder if he urges his readers to ‘Stay hungry’?Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 91 © Michael Barber 2026
About the contributor
Michael Barber still works out, but his lats won’t widen, and his pecs have long since ceased to peak.
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