The Best Novel You’ll Ever Read About Cockfighting
Probably the Only One, Too. But Don’t Miss Charles Willeford’s 1972 Underground Classic, ‘Cockfighter’
I don’t remember where I first saw it—on some list of offbeat, oddball, underloved titles. But it stood out like a sore something. A native Californian, I’ve long been drawn to the grotesque and gothic of Southern fiction. Charles Willeford’s 1972 novel Cockfighter possessed all the basics: lost inheritance, family drama, alienation, doomed love, revenge.
Best known for his Hoke Moseley detective novels set in Miami, Willeford painted with all the same familiar colors for this portrait but chose an entirely different canvas: the cockfighting pits of Florida and Georgia.
The narrator? Frank Mansfield, thirty-something professional cockfighter. The setup?Frank starts the story with just ten bucks. His last bird dies in a fight. He needs to regroup for the next season of fights or he’s done for. The story arc? Frank needs to raise enough cash to buy more roosters, reenter the circuit, and win big at the season’s invite-only final tournament in Milledgeville, Georgia. (Yep, the very same Milledgeville Flannery O’Connor called home.)
If he succeeds, Frank stands a decent chance of being named Cockfighter of the Year, the only distinction he really cares about.
Complicating the story? The fact that cockfighting is technically illegal is the least of Frank’s worries. More problematic are such obstacles as getting the required scratch to buy more birds; navigating expectations with a fiancée dangling off the end of an eight-year commitment; collecting debts from people just as broke as he is; rousting his underemployed brother off the family farm; and doing it all having taken a vow of silence.
That’s right: Frank hasn’t uttered a word since he let his big mouth sink his prospects a few years before. He refuses to speak again until he’s redeemed himself. While he narrates the story for the reader in blunt but vivid prose, he only communicates to those around him through body language, small gestures, and the occasional scribbled note.
As Frank rebuilds his flock, Willeford conveys all the intricacies of the ancient sport: the bird breeds, their personalities, their diets, their training, their conditioning, the brutal methods used to decide if a bird is “game,” the language and techniques of the fights, the etiquette of the pits, the size and positioning of blades attached to a bird’s sawed-off spurs, how to get the jump on an opponent, and blow-for-blow descriptions of the fights themselves.
Willeford also somehow manages to make Frank sympathetic to a surprising degree. Frank is, as his name might too easily suggest, honest. And his matter-of-fact way renders him relatable, despite living in a world to which we most of us have no access—hopefully (ahem).
The humanizing happens by degrees. At first, we feel sorry for the guy with the worst luck in the world. As he begins rebuilding, the sympathy comes from the relationships Willeford depicts, especially with an old-timer retiring from the sport to save his failing heart and a former Madison Avenue ad man who chucks his career to raise gamecocks on a neighboring farm.
Willeford cares little about character development in the usual sense. Frank’s moral arc is as flat as the Florida landscape. He doesn’t grow as person, experience any epiphanies, or repent of anything. He does defy the odds and become shrewder. But the real test of his character comes down to whether he’ll break that vow of silence while trying to redeem his place in the sport he loves. Without that vow, Frank’s life would dissolve.
“It is a funny thing,” he says.
A man can make a promise to his God, break it five minutes later and never think anything about it. With an idle shrug of his shoulders, a man can also break solemn promises to his mother, wife, or sweetheart, and, except for a slight, momentary twinge of conscience, he still won’t be bothered very much. But if a man ever breaks a promise he has made to himself he disintegrates. His entire personality and character crumble into tiny pieces, and he is never the same man again.
I don’t buy it, not for a minute; people break promises to themselves all the time. But Frank believes it wholeheartedly, and the entire novel depends on his commitment to himself. The vow forms the closest thing to a moral center in Frank’s world.
As you might guess, Willeford offers no ethical guidance through this strange, even revolting world. He simply lets the story work by its own logic, unconcerned about squeamish readers, reasonable as their recoil might be. You’ll need to bring your own moral GPS to navigate this one, but you’ll never forget the trip.
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Strange premises and characters seem to be one of the major ID points of Southern American literature...
Of interest to me. I’m currently staying in the Philippines, where cockfighting is almost a national sport.