Talking of books
Some old flannel
Benny Green
Summer is for cricket, winter is for reading about it, and that shrinking brotherhood who beguile the close season by reading old Wisdens through a magnifying glass while crouched over the electric fire with a crumpled old club cap covering the bald spot, will surely find the long evening easier to endure because of two new cricket publications whose authors actually write as though they have read other people's books. It so happens that one of these two books is a masterpiece, and the other a work of talent buttressed by great diligence, and that the difference between them represents so fascinating a principle that I cannot resist going into detail, if only in the hope that the next time some fool is on the point of putting his name to a volume of ghosted garbage he will think again and get himself an honest job.
The prime truth about sporting literature, as about specialist literature generally, , is that unless it transcends its own specialisation, it is of no intrinsic artistic value, and it can only achieve that rare state of grace by placing the protagonists against a social, or historical, or romantic background. The precept is elementary, but not, apparently, elementary enough for those who so laboriously compile books on sporting themes. And yet the difference is so marked as to be impossible to overlook. Why, for instance, is Cashel Byron's Profession a better boxing novel than Rodney Stone? Why is A. J. Liebling's The Sweet Science eminently readable and the latest effusion by the latest fashionable champion hardly readable at all? It is not enough to answer that the likes of Shaw and Liebling have literary sensibility while their rivals do not; the vital question is, how does this sensibility manifest itself, and every time the question is posed it elicits the same answer. The enduring sport book transcends its own limitations by its own awareness of a larger context, and by so doing, obeys the golden rule, which is that a truly great sport book makes hypnotic reading even for a sport-hater, or to put it in jingo terms, what do they know of cricket who only cricket know? And the answer to that is 'Nothing'.
Here are two representative quotes from the two new books:
John Small was a good fiddler, and taught himself the double bass. The Duke of Dorset having been informed of his musical talent, sent him as a present a handsome violin, and paid the carriage. Small, like a true and simple-hearted Englishman, returned the compliment by sending His Grace two bats and balls, also paying the carriage. We may be sure that on both hands the presents were choice of their kind. Upon one occasion he turned his Orphean accomplishment to good account. Having to cross two or three fields on his way to a musical party, a vicious bull made at him; when our hero, with the characteristic coolness and presence of mind of a good cricketer, began playing upon his bass, to the admiration and perfect satisfaction of the mischievous beast.
and
Rarely did the ball travel twice in the same direction. Nobody enjoyed this wonderful spell of phenomenal scoring more than the coloured men in the ranks of the visitors. The bowlers who were being punished, and the fielders who were called upon to work as they had probably never worked before, were hugely delighted. One of them would lie down and literally
shake with laughter after a big hit, and the next minute would be making a futile effort to save another four being placed to the credit of the batsman.
The fundamental difference is that while the second extract tells us all about the cricket, the first tells us all about the cricketer, which means that somebody totally ignorant of the laws, technique and etiquette of cricket might conceivably enjoy reading it, while the second extract would mean less than nothing. Students of cricket literature will recognise the fiddling cricketer as one of the characters in that all too brief classic The Young Cricketer's Tutor* while students of the game's history will know that the laughing fieldsmen were part of the supporting cast on that day in 1900 when Gilbert Jessop, the most prodigious fast scorer in cricket history, hit the West Indies attack for 157 in an hour. The description comes from Gerald Brodribb's biography of Jessop**, one of the better-written cricketing lives of the last few years.
Brodribb is familiar enough to readers of cricket books, who will know that his great virtues are brevity and a meticulous honesty in the way of statistics. Two of his publications, Hit For Six and All Round the Wicket, are pearls of concision, besides being object lessons in how to make dry statistics palatable. But the point about those two books, which represent Brodribb's great strengths as a reflective cricket historian, is that they might as well be printed in Swahili for all the enlightenment they would give to somebody indifferent to cricket. And yet, if Brodribb only partially succeeds in making that phenomenal man, Jessop, come to life, is it reasonable to expect him to have done any better? Probably not; the thing about outstanding athletic feats is that they can never adequately be described — and yet, turn for a moment to another writer faced with the identical problem, of conveying in print the shattering physical presence of the fastestscoring batting virtuoso in history: Towards lunchtime I left my seat to buy a bottle of ginger-beer before the crowd swarmed into the refreshment-room. I was placing my money on the counter, standing on tiptoe to reach, when suddenly there was a terrible noise and crash. Broken bottles and splinters of glass flew about everywhere, and I thought that the end of the world had come and that Professor Falb had been right after all. A man in the bar soothed my fears. "It's all reight," he said, in a strong and honest Lancashire speech, "it's all reight, sonny — it's only Jessop just coom in to bat."
That description comes from Sir Neville Cardus's Autobiography, an account of his life by the one man this century to have perceived that Edwardian cricket was a vivid world in miniature, the most beguiling lilliput any social historian could wish to find. Like all faithful microcosms, it reflected every nuance of the larger life it represented, and it is the essence of Cardus's achievement that, having seen this, he rendered it whole, and so just as C. B. Fry was to Cardus "the dry light of ratiocination," so was Jessop pure melodrama, to be described therefore, in the context of melodrama, broken glass, smashings and panics and terror.
Brodribb is not capable of such flights, and indeed has never aspired to them, and he deserves credit for having put together a life of an extraordinary athlete. There are one or two curious fragments of creative writing which Jessop left unpublished, a few limerics, and a few examples of prep-school punning. Perhaps there is no more to tell, and yet after I had finished the book, 1 wondered again about the greatest enigma of them all, W. G. Grace, most eminent of Victorians, whom the so-called social historians, deskbound as usual, hardly deign to mention. Compared to writing a comprehensive biography of W. G., making
The Young Cricketer's Tutor John Nyren introduced by John Arlott (Davis-Poynter £2.00) * *The Croucher, Gerald Brodribb (London Magazine Editions £5.50) bricks without straw is child's play. I know, because! have been engaged on the task for the past three weeks. What did Grace like to do, eat, read, say, laugh at? What women attracted him, jokes amused him, songs diverted him, holidays relaxed him? What did his patients think, what were his politics, his phobias, his foibles, off the field? Nobody knows, because nobody recorded it at the time. Such lives of cricketers as exist, are partial, like a life of Disraeli which never leaves the House, or of Garrick which never leaves the stage. That is why we must be grateful for the small mercy of Nyren's fifty pages of reminiscence, whose every paragraph conjures the man before the eyes.
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