Boxer. Charles Boxer.

You’d never guess Boxer, a Bloomington professor, was once a senior spy in Asia during World War II or the hero in a love story publicized around the world, says Patrick O’Meara, the vice president for international affairs and Boxer’s friend and colleague.

“Charles Boxer lived what one could call an impossible life,” O’Meara says. “He never had a Ph.D. and yet he was one of the great intellectuals and scholars of the world. He was a major who escaped death and survived a Japanese concentration camp. And then there is the remarkable romance between him and his wife. It was impossible on many levels.”

The spy

At 4:45 a.m., a coded message interrupted the routine broadcast of Radio Tokyo. It was the message Boxer had been listening for, one that warned Japanese nationals abroad that Great Britain and Japan were at war. Pearl Harbor had been attacked.

The head of British Intelligence in Hong Kong, Boxer often translated Japanese information for the military — his knowledge of Japanese (and six other languages) and their culture (he trained in kendo, the ancient martial art of sword fighting) made him an invaluable asset to the British military on the eve of war in the Pacific Ocean.

In the days that followed the attack, Hong Kong fell to the Japanese troops and Boxer, shot by a sniper, was paralyzed in his left arm and sent to a concentration camp.

With the help of other inmates, Boxer built a radio receiver from the tin foil of discarded cigarette packages, parts of an old car, and tubes from a broken radio.

The captives hid the unit in a four-gallon can with a false bottom and buried it in the camp garden.

For a time, Boxer secretly listened to the radio and disseminated news of the outside world among inmates.

Then the radio was found.

For any other officer this would have meant death, but the Japanese admired the British major who spoke their language.

Instead of execution, they sentenced him to solitary confinement.

For nearly two years, he shared a room with rats and endured torture in silence. But his waiting came to an end Aug. 15, 1945, when, reeling from atomic bombs, Japan surrendered and released the POWs.

Boxer rarely spoke of his time in captivity and declined military decorations from the British government. In his mind, he was no hero.

He was just lucky to have survived.

With the war over, Boxer had only one goal: He had to meet up with Emily Hahn.

The playboy

With movie star looks (think Leonardo DiCaprio), Boxer had a reputation as an international playboy — even though he was married. But in 1938 he met a woman with a reputation even more colorful than his.

“Emily was called the ‘Scandalous Miss Hahn,’ you know,” O’Meara says. “Cigarsmoking, tequila-drinking feminist in the fullest sense of the term. And an incredible writer.”

Hahn traveled around the world as a single woman, supporting herself by writing books and columns for The New Yorker. She lived with a tribe of Pygmies in Africa, smoked opium in Shanghai, and tiger-hunted in India. Her openness about her promiscuous encounters on her travels shocked both readers and acquaintances.

At some point in their relationship, Hahn recalled in her memoirs, she mentioned she’d like to have a child some day.

“Let’s have one,” Boxer replied instantly. “Just to make things all right, if I can get a divorce and if it all works out, we might even get married.”

Unsure if she was even capable of becoming pregnant, Hahn remained hesitant and told Boxer so.

“Yes you can,” was the empathetic response. “I’ll have you know that I always get girls in trouble.”

Carola Boxer was born in Hong Kong on Oct. 17, 1941.

When the war ended, Boxer followed his lover and their daughter to New York and — after attaining a divorce from his first wife — married her.

“It was an interesting combination, perhaps an impossible combination,” O’Meara says. “This very elegant, British military person with a great mind, and Emily, the feminist who did an engineering degree because it was there.”

Their marriage lasted until Hahn’s death in 1997.

The Hoosier

“Charles leaves England tomorrow for Indiana via Boston; he changes over and goes to Indianapolis where some trusty friend awaits him with a car for Bloomington. Bloomington, of all places. NOT what I would chose,” Hahn complained to a friend in a 1976 letter.

After WWII, Boxer retired from military life and developed his passion for academic study. The colonial expansion of Portugal was his specialty. Though he never attended college, universities off ered him many honorary degrees and traveling professorships, including one at IU.

Though Hahn deplored the lack of French restaurants in 1970s Bloomington, Boxer found the town wonderful.

“I much enjoyed my stay,” he said after his fi rst semester. “I am already looking forward to returning there.”

Every spring for 10 years, he taught a history course and advised the Lilly Library on its collections. But he would only visit Bloomington in the spring because he abhorred football season. “It was too disorderly for Charles,” O’Meara explains.

Ironic, considering Boxer lived a relatively wild lifestyle in Asia (parties, alcohol, and lovers galore) but O’Meara explains, “It’s the unexpected that is so important with Charles. There are many sides to him. The soldier, the scholar, the person who was disciplined in so many ways, but was really quite the adventurer in others.”

Instead, Boxer preferred to throw elaborate dinner parties with strawberries fl oating in the champagne. While he sought elegance, he was never one for pretention and enjoyed spending Friday afternoons at Nick’s English Hut with graduate students. (Though O’Meara says Boxer probably never played Sink the Biz, the popular drinking game. “That just doesn’t sound like Charles.”)

Boxer left IU in 1979, but not before he sold his collection of rare manuscripts to the library, which also houses his wife’s extensive letter collection.

He died in 2000 at the age of 96, leaving behind two daughters and a long list of titles: major, spy, prisoner, playboy, and scholar.

Was it an impossible life? Maybe. But impossible was not in Boxer’s vocabulary.