by John Clarke
‘Do you think I’m doing it for the good of my health?’ O’Casey asked. ‘I’m nearly blind, you great bollocks. I’m doing it because I can’t see whether the fucking ball is in or out.’
‘The ball was out,’ said the umpire.
‘Well, it didn’t look out to me. Did you see it, Jacob?’
‘No, I’m sorry, I didn’t,’ said Epstein, ‘but I think we should accept the call.’
‘Oh, do you?’ said O’Casey. ‘Think you’re being conservative enough there, Jacob?’
‘Thirty seconds,’ said the umpire.
‘What’s this thirty seconds business?’ asked O’Casey.
‘You have thirty seconds left or you’ll incur a time penalty.’
‘You tosser,’ said O’Casey.
‘Mr O’Casey to serve,’ said the umpire.
‘Tosser.’
‘Time penalty, Mr O’Casey. 30–15.’
‘You’re a tosser,’ said O’Casey.
‘Time penalty, Mr O’Casey. 30–all.’
‘Christ, you’re playing a lot better now, Jacob.’
‘Time penalty, Mr O’Casey. 30–40.’
‘Here, have a serve, man,’ said O’Casey patting the balls towards Epstein. ‘Give the crowd something to look at.’
‘Game, Mr Epstein,’ said the umpire.
‘Up your arse,’ said O’Casey.
In the end, it didn’t matter.
Franz Kafka is technically Czech although very much a German player in style and training. Consistently refused entry to the Czech national championships, he is still to play a tournament in his native Prague. There have been suggestions in recent events that his father is somehow communicating with him on court. ‘No one knows how they’re doing it,’ said an opponent, ‘and certainly no one can prove it but, if his father is not there, K starts spraying his serve all over the place and his game falls apart.’
Very much a loner off the court, Kafka has been romantically linked with two young women, but refuses to comment on marriage plans. ‘That is not the question,’ he said.
In his first appearance on Centre Court today, Kafka came up against the flamboyant Italian Gabriele D’Annunzio in an unusual match which sometimes descended into farce. D’Annunzio grabbed an early lead and then, at 2–2 in the second set when it looked as if there would be a rain interruption, began packing his bag—but Kafka came back out and stood waiting to receive service. D’Annunzio pointed to the service line where drops of rain were falling. The umpire asked Kafka what he thought. Kafka shrugged and referred the umpire to the tournament rules. This became the subject of some discussion between the umpire and the referee, Charles Darwin, who decided that play should continue. Back came D’Annunzio, singularly unimpressed, and prepared to serve. Kafka now drew the attention of the umpire to a sodden area of the court. The adaptable Darwin was called back, another regulation was cited by Kafka, and play was halted.
D’Annunzio was very annoyed. ‘How can it be dry one minute and wet the next?’ he asked.
‘By reason of the effluxion of time,’ said Kafka.
‘What on earth are we supposed to do? Man is a creature of action. We should be doing something.’
‘We are doing something.’
‘What are we doing?’ asked D’Annunzio.
‘We are waiting.’
‘I mean something active. Man is supposed to be active. To have women. To fight.’
‘We are doing something active,’ said Kafka.
‘What are we doing?’ said D’Annunzio.
‘We are avoiding having women or fighting,’ said Kafka.
When they came back the Italian took up where he left off until Kafka pulled out four blistering returns of service to change the course of the set and the match.
The big Italian was as surprised as his supporters when it was over. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong,’ he said.
‘I didn’t do anything wrong either,’ said Kafka.
Igor Stravinsky was very much on song against Diego Rivera. The lumbering Mexican got his game working in the third set but by then the writing was on the wall. A bandaged woman in a richly coloured dress shouted encouragement to him throughout the match but eventually he asked for her to be removed. He was warned twice for racquet abuse, three times for audible obscenities and once for indecent exposure.
Day 12
* * *
Garbo v. Arendt • Pasternak v. Miró • Beiderbecke v. Malraux • Eisenstein v. O’Neill • Porter v. Borges • Faulkner v. Ray • Breton v. Isherwood
* * *
Greta Garbo, one of the most celebrated players in the history of the game, is out. She was on a plane this afternoon and we will not see her again. Seeded eighth, the Swedish ice-maiden, born Greta Gustafsson and now living in the US, departed in style and issued a statement following her match with German American Hannah Arendt.
‘I congratulate Hannah,’ the statement began. ‘She played most beautifully today and she deserved to win. I said before the tournament I would not be playing doubles with John Gilbert or with Mercedes da Costa. I am a singles player. That is my condition. Goodbye.’
This has been a shock. No one can believe it. ‘Garbo gone?’ a man said. ‘Garbo? Gone where?’
‘Huge surprise,’ said Arendt. ‘I can’t remember a time when she wasn’t at the very top.’
And how did Arendt rate her own performance today?
‘I think she let me play well,’ said Arendt.
Let you play well? Why would she do that?
‘I think she wanted to go.’
Let us get this straight. Greta Garbo threw her match?
‘She didn’t throw her match. That’s your expression. I just think she wanted to go.’
Big Boris Pasternak, carrying the hopes of Russia, ran away with his match against the Spaniard Joán Miró, who succeeded only in providing a track for the unstoppable Pasternak train. Pasternak is another player at odds with his own national administrators, and questions must be asked about whether those entrusted with the organisation of the code in Russia are fully possessed of the facts. Pasternak is power personified. He hit the ball today with such force and depth it is difficult to imagine how an opponent might approach the question of resistance. His victory, when it came, was treated by the huge crowd as the final chord in a great symphony. It met the requirements of drama, of music and of history.
Two days ago Bix Beiderbecke was backed in from 100–1 to 4–1. It is difficult to say what went wrong. André Malraux was generous in victory. ‘I didn’t think I had any chance,’ he said. ‘The Americans are just so strong. My only plan was to try to upset his rhythm.’ To be fair, Malraux is a very experienced campaigner, having won in France, China, Spain and Britain. Once banned from the German Open, he turned up under an assumed identity and won. Today he cramped Beiderbecke and put him under the hammer from the outset. Some of his cross-court passing shots were glorious.
‘I wasn’t over-confident,’ Beiderbecke said. ‘I didn’t serve badly. I made very few unforced errors. Plain fact is, the guy was too good.’
A four-hour battle was waged on Court 1 late yesterday between Russian Sergei Eisenstein and American Eugene O’Neill. O’Neill had seventeen match points and Eisenstein twelve before the weary Russian nudged a return just beyond the reach of a desperate O’Neill lunge. It was nearly ten o’clock, the air was full of fireflies and the crowd rose as the players embraced and departed, sure in the knowledge that Thermopylae was safe. When the final score was dispatched, the wire services were obliged to send confirmation three times.
Eisenstein has a day to recover before again stepping up to the plate. ‘And I’ll need it,’ he said. ‘I got so tired at one stage I looked up at the crowd in the terraces and they seemed to be moving, running up and down the steps, there were women, old men, children, there was a pram.’
‘I had a similar experience,’ said O’Neill, ‘only everyone up there was my father.’
Cole Porter
is one of the few Americans here who hits a single-handed backhand and uses a racquet with a wooden frame. He has no sponsorship and seeks none. ‘Sponsors’ clothing is hideous and their intentions are dishonourable in the extreme,’ he explained. He describes himself as an amateur professional. ‘I don’t do this for a living,’ he said. ‘I play only for money.’ His consistent, elegant tennis today overwhelmed the Argentinian Jorge Borges, who couldn’t see how he could lose.
Borges has won his own national championship a record fifteen times, has always performed well in Europe and has all the shots. ‘There are two types of Borges,’ said Borges. ‘The one who divides everything up into two parts, and the one who doesn’t. It is sometimes difficult to know which one I am being. I don’t, for example, know which of the two is making this statement.’
Two other Americans with strong French connections, real or imagined, were up against each other today when Bill Faulkner, ‘from Jefferson County, Mississippi, get that down, not America, Mississippi’, met Man Ray, whose years in Philadelphia were followed by a lengthy period in Paris, honing new techniques. Ray has many friends here and in some respects is quite a French player. An image of him at the French Open two years ago at the northern end of the court in the late afternoon, outlined in shadow and flicking a gorgeous drive past his opponent, is still posted on the tournament’s website. Faulkner says he was also here as a younger player, with a Canadian airforce team, although there is no record of any Faulkner in the Canadian squad during the period. Ray played some exquisite tennis but Faulkner simply outlasted him.
‘I didn’t outlast him,’ he said later. ‘I beat him.’
André Breton was beaten in five by the rapidly improving Christopher Isherwood, one of the few English players at this event who has never cracked a Davis Cup berth. ‘I don’t know why,’ he said. ‘I live in LA, I’m a gay Hindu. I can’t think what might be holding me back.’ One thing is for sure. It won’t be his tennis.
Day 13
* * *
Heidegger v. Marx • Chesterton v. Auden • Rushdie v. Pound • Orwell v. Arlen
* * *
The first-round men’s matches were all completed today, roughly on schedule after some were moved to outside courts to make up time lost to rain delays.
When it comes to power serving, German Martin Heidegger is a benchmark. He has a huge shoulder turn and generates enormous height on his action. Drawn against American Groucho Marx, he peeled off a succession of aces to the obvious satisfaction of German administrators. Not much is known about Marx but late in the second set he began to pick the Heidegger serve early and hit it on the up. By the third set Marx was running around his backhand. By the fourth set he was running around his accountant. He was trying to get his accountant to run around his backhand when the match finished. Heidegger was furious and said he thought he was being mocked.
‘Smart fellow,’ said Groucho. ‘Pity we won’t be seeing more of him.’
The very dextrous Englishman Gilbert Chesterton, in the twilight of his career now, gave his countryman Wystan Auden the mother of all surprises on Court 4 this afternoon. He guessed that his best chance against Auden was to come out with his britches on fire. It very nearly worked but Auden is a volume and through-put man and, once he gets his eye in, big Wystan can hit the ball all day. At 2–5 in the third he came out smoking.
‘The way he understood the match rather than the games was interesting,’ Chesterton said. ‘I haven’t seen that before. Most players will get upset if they lose a lot of games. Auden had a much better sense of the match than I did.’
A hastily organised exhibition match between Salman Rushdie and Ezra Pound, planned for tonight and set up as a showcase for a prodigious young talent and one of the great masters of the modern game, has had to be postponed. Pound is openly reviled by many players for remarks he made on Italian radio, although the real problem is the threat from an unnamed group believed to be based in Morocco to ‘take out the entire stadium’ if any match involving Rushdie is broadcast on network television. Pound rejected a proposal to stage the fixture at another venue. ‘I’m not playing in a false beard on some up-country cow paddock just because this guy can’t keep his mouth shut,’ said Pound. ‘You people couldn’t organise a shit. In Germany they’d fill the joint stiff with uniformed police, play the match and anyone who doesn’t like it gets a faceful of footwear.’
‘I don’t think that’s altogether consistent of him,’ said Rushdie. ‘He’s hardly in a position to lecture others on how to keep their mouths shut. He’d have been rubbed out long ago if he hadn’t pleaded insanity, which, if I might assay a purely personal opinion, he’s in a very good position to do.’
‘It’s a terrible shame,’ said Nike supremo Nietzsche. ‘It looks like being one of the great grudge-matches. I’m going to be there, wherever it is.’
And would he care to pick a winner?
‘Too hard. It depends on who is faster. And who is fitter, I think,’ he added.
‘Who is younger,’ said the quietly confident Rushdie.
‘Who is silvier,’ said Pound, obliquely.
George Orwell, or ‘the artist formerly known as Eric Blair’ as he is sometimes called by the other players, beat American Harold Arlen in straight sets. Arlen played well but Orwell had too much.
‘Too good,’ said Arlen. ‘I tried to accentuate the positive but it was pretty stormy weather and I couldn’t get happy. Round I round I go, down and down I go, I don’t know. Somewhere, over the rainbow…what are you writing, George?’
Orwell looked up. ‘Pardon? Oh nothing. Just a children’s story I’m fiddling with. Sorry, what were you saying?’
‘Read it out,’ said Arlen. ‘What is it?’
‘It’s just a story,’ said Orwell.
‘Go on,’ said Arlen. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘Once upon a time there was a puppy called Ma,’ Orwell read, ‘and he had an idea of how to make everything in the world work nicely.
‘“Nice world,” said Ma.
‘When Ma grew up into a big dog he understood that there were other dogs who didn’t agree with him. They wanted the world to be a bad place. So Ma bit them until they died. He thought his idea was better because it had a better name.
‘“Nice world,” said dog Ma.’
‘Read it again, George,’ said Arlen.
Round 2
Day 14
* * *
Chekhov v. Grainger • Proust v. Klee • Munch v. Betjeman • Stopes v. Besant • Baker v. Goncharova • Satie v. Carnap • Gershwin v. Segovia • Chaplin v. Carmichael • Hardy v. Koestler • Steinbeck v. Waugh
* * *
The second round got under way in conditions that made things difficult for everyone. At 9 am it was 39 degrees and between 2 pm and 3.30 pm the humidity leapt off the chart. Seventeen spectators were treated for heat exhaustion and several competitors struggled with cramps.
The players did what they could and some did it better than others. Top seed Chekhov was not inconvenienced by a spectacular display of ball-striking from gifted Australian qualifier Percy Grainger, who didn’t mind being beaten. Had he got his first serve in more consistently he might have stolen the opening set but Chekhov, who has been saying in press conferences all week that he wants to go to Moscow, is a model of concentration. In fact, it is beginning to look as if his public statements may not be entirely serious. After today’s match, for example, he practised for two hours and then said, ‘There’s nothing to do here. I want to go to Moscow.’
As the temperature rose there was every chance the first casualty of the heat might be Marcel Proust who looked to be struggling even during the hit-up.
‘I was,’ he said later, ‘conscious, in that way in which an awareness exists of some sense in which the recalled and the recalling are drawn together to co-exist in time, but which also remain distinct, each from the other, perfect and imperfect, fixed and drifting, oppressive and liberating, that the day before, when I
had left the practice courts and walked across the park, I had been distracted by the water, not in its liquid movement or depth or colour so much as by the way its movement and depth and colour were forged into something else by the alchemy of being absorbed by my gaze, undirected as it was by any purpose, formal or otherwise, or any force of which I knew, beyond a sensitivity and perhaps not even a particular sensitivity but a mingling of perception and instinct which was acting not just upon me but on everyone who saw it, or who saw anything else.’
The lanky Parisian can never be written off. He has got to the quarters in an unbroken run of sixteen French Opens and you don’t do that by accident. On the other hand he has been doing a lot of his training ‘lying down’. His first thought this morning was that he might have to withdraw from his match against Paul Klee. ‘He is not strong enough,’ said the French team doctor. ‘His respiratory system cannot bear the strain.’
‘I will play,’ said Proust eventually. ‘I have come here to play and I will play.’
Results of tests should be known later tonight but it is believed the problem may be traceable to some pastries he consumed at breakfast.
Proust did just enough to go through, albeit under what must be one of the biggest injury clouds in living memory.
If Proust thought he had problems in the heat he might have spared a thought for Norwegian wraith Eddie Munch, who returned to Paris only this morning from an overnight trip to Oslo occasioned by a family bereavement. He travelled straight to the stadium for his match with John Betjeman and, as he said, ‘I caught sight of myself in a window as we came out on court and I looked shithouse. I looked at the barometer, which said 41. I looked at Betjeman who said, “Lovely day for it” and I thought, “Oh God! why do I keep doing this?”’
