by John Clarke
‘I must be insane to do that,’ said Dali.
‘You seem to me to be as sane as the next man.’
‘Ah!’ said Dali. ‘I believe that is the problem.’
‘What makes you sure your belief system is reliable?’ asked Joyce.
‘Good point,’ said Dali. ‘Get me a doctor immediately.’
This was all very amusing but did little to stay the hand of fate. The combination of Joyce’s court-coverage and accuracy was too much on the day.
‘Great shot,’ called Matisse as Chekhov returned the first serve of their match.
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself,’ said Mailer, in the press box.
Matisse had sent down a vicious kicker into the body. Instead of moving to the right and playing a cramped shot in defence, Chekhov had drifted left, allowed the serve to move across him and then pelted it back across court as Matisse trundled in to put away the regulation volley. It was an ominous sign. In bright sunlight in front of a packed house Chekhov played Matisse like a fish for two sets. It was impossible to imagine how the Frenchman, especially in the heat, could come back from 1–6, 2–6, 0–3.
‘Wasn’t looking good,’ said Matisse. ‘I felt like a blur. I was running about like a madman but Tony is so accurate there’s nothing you can do when he’s playing like that. Whatever happens, he turns it to his advantage.’
In fact this extended even to the breaks. Chekhov plays the game at an intensity that requires intervals and he uses them brilliantly. ‘The intervals,’ he asserted, ‘are as important as the play.’
How Matisse cut his way back into this match is anyone’s guess. Exhausted and right up against it, he struggled to hold serve for 1–3 in the third and then broke Chekhov for the first time. He stopped worrying about how things looked and hit it as he felt. He sacrificed some precision but, since precision is the stock in trade of the Chekhov game, this unhorsed his opponent’s approach more than it did his own. He won the next four games to take the set and took the fourth to love. Chekhov won the first two games of the final set and a man just down from the press box looked at the woman next to him as if he’d known her for years. ‘We’re in for something here,’ he said.
Matisse promptly took three games on the trot and played his best tennis of the match. As Chekhov approached his chair at the changeover, he muttered something. ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Chekhov?’ inquired the umpire.
Chekhov turned, the faintest smile on his lips. ‘I was just saying I wouldn’t mind going to Moscow.’
At 2–5 it looked as if the Frenchman was on his way to a quarter-finals berth. But, as so often before, Chekhov’s instinct about how the play should finish was unerring. He broke Matisse twice and served it out at 7–5. Asked what he planned from here, he said, ‘Wasted opportunities. Less is more.’
He then paused, brightened, looked as if he had had another thought and leant into the microphone. ‘I was going to say something else,’ he said, ‘but I don’t believe I will.’
Russia’s Anna Akhmatova also went through to the semifinal after beating the heroic Bernhardt in a nip-and-tuck affair. Bernhardt gave a towering performance in the first set, but the patient Akhmatova insinuated herself into the second and dictated terms in the third. Bernhardt pronounced herself ‘very satisfied. There are no Germans left to beat.’
Akhmatova will play the winner of the Arendt–de Beauvoir contest, which has been postponed. Both players have refused to appear until the WTO ‘ensures Rosa Luxemburg’s safety and addresses player security as a matter of urgency’. Officials say they ‘are working through the issues and are hoping to reschedule the Arendt–de Beauvoir match in the next couple of days’.
An hour after this, however, de Beauvoir turned out on Court 3 with JPS for their mixed-doubles encounter with Wilding and Elliott, which they lost. Asked why she played, in spite of her own ultimatum, de Beauvoir replied, ‘Because he asked me.’
‘That would be right,’ said Nelson Algren from the players’ box. ‘Speak like a saint. Behave like a dog on a chain.’
Albert Einstein threw everything he had at Marcel Duchamp this afternoon and for over an hour we saw serving of such intensity that spectators were advised to turn their backs while the ball was being hit and then turn around quickly to see the result. In the first set Duchamp took evasive action and tried not to get hurt. Then Einstein served an ace which crashed into the metal railing around the base of a television tower and took out part of a corporate box before striking Duchamp on the wrist, smashing his watch.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Duchamp. ‘I don’t need to tell the time.’
‘You can’t anyway,’ said Einstein. ‘Time is curved. I’m sorry about the serve. I’ll pull it back a bit.’
‘Time is curved?’ protested Duchamp. ‘I think you’ll find that’s not right.’
‘It is right,’ said Einstein. ‘I can prove it.’
‘I look forward to it,’ said Duchamp and settled in for an explanation.
Einstein smiled. ‘You probably wouldn’t understand the proof. It’s very complicated.’
‘You can prove time is curved,’ checked Duchamp, ‘but I wouldn’t understand the proof?’
‘That’s about it.’
‘What a shame.’
‘You don’t think time is curved?’ asked Einstein.
‘Of course time isn’t curved,’ replied Duchamp. ‘It’s a rhombus.’
‘Can you prove that?’ asked Einstein.
‘I can,’ said Duchamp, ‘but you probably wouldn’t understand it.’
In the second set Einstein’s serve lost some of its penetration and Duchamp began to call out, ‘Oh, that is art!’ whenever he hit a winner. Einstein learnt not to bother chasing these shots, and then after a while noticed that they weren’t all winners.
‘He had me completely fooled,’ he said later. ‘He was calling things “art” that were actually just rubbish.’ This, of course, went to the core of the French game—whether the significance of a shot lay in the shot itself or in the way it is described. A unicorn exists because we can describe it. If Duchamp says something is art, is it art, or is Duchamp fooling us? If it is art, rubbish is art. If it is not art, who else is fooling us?
By the time Einstein addressed himself to these questions, he had let a lot of points go and the Frenchman was easing away. Einstein played with great power but was simply outfoxed.
Chandler and Hammett improvised well in a tough spot created by Benchley and Thurber. ‘It all happened very fast,’ Chandler said. ‘I’d heard of these guys. Word was they knew what they were doing. Word was right. Tall one could serve. The kid at the net hardly moved. Fired a few at the tall one. Got them back hard. Pinged a couple at the kid. Got them back clever.
‘“You take the tall one,” growled Dash. “Leave the other one to me. I’ll meet you back at the car.”
‘“Wait,” I said. “Toss it in behind the kid. Tall guy will move across to cover, then we punch it into the gap where tall guy was.”
‘“This had better work,” scowled Dash.
‘“Trust me,” I said.
‘“Why should I?” he barked.
‘He had a point. I didn’t even trust myself.’
The Leavis–Lawrence combination, so strong in the first round, came apart today against Chaplin and O’Neill.
‘We were great in practice,’ said Leavis.
‘We were great in theory,’ corrected Lawrence.
‘You played well,’ said Leavis.
‘I played like a woman,’ said Lawrence.
‘Just so,’ said Leavis. ‘You’re at your best when you’re playing like a woman.’
‘You played like a stick insect,’ said Lawrence.
‘Is this irony?’ asked Leavis.
‘No, cunt,’ Lawrence assured him, ‘it is not fucking irony. It is an industrial strength piston-driven fact.’
Day 29
* * *
Stravinsky v. Mann • van Gogh v.
Orwell • Rhys v. Millay • Stead v. Smith • Waller v. Yeats • Eliot v. Wittgenstein • Lardner v. Faulkner • Auden and MacNeice v. Kafka and Muir • Sackville-West and Stephen-Woolf v. Prichard and Richardson
* * *
At the opening of the Stravinsky–Mann match, the wind swirled and eddied on court. As the gusts grew more fierce, canvas began flapping and lanyards slapped on poles. Bottles and cans rattled around in the stands.
Mann elected to serve and was waiting for a lull in the tempest when Stravinsky began running about the court with his arms spread out like wings, stamping his feet and changing direction, darting and weaving. All this movement was in perfect time with the jangling and scraping sounds, the banging of distant doors, the screeching of wire as fences strained against metal supports and dragged across uneven concrete surfaces. On and on went Stravinsky, driving himself into a fury, wheeling about in the sea of detritus.
Just as abruptly, the wind dropped, the storm abated and Stravinsky slowed in his movements until, arriving back where he had started, he folded his arms, dropped to the ground and picked up his racquet. At first a few people in the crowd applauded. Others joined them. Soon the entire stadium was clapping wildly.
‘I don’t even know what it was,’ enthused a Latvian woman, ‘but it was beautiful.’
‘Never seen anything like it,’ said a man from Wisconsin.
‘We were beside ourselves,’ said a Scandinavian couple.
What the Mann from Lubeck thought of this performance was not clear, but when play began he got about his business. As with all his matches, Mann was scrutinised by German tennis officials. Their eyes followed him around the court. They waggled their fingers at him and took notes. This seemed to spur Mann on. ‘They drive me,’ he revealed. ‘I am really playing against them. As long as they are there, I will be playing against them.’
‘Vincent has a big first serve,’ said Orwell before their match on the court next door, ‘and when his ground strokes are working he generates enormous power. He gets frustrated easily, which suggests some of his battles are internal. I don’t know whether Vincent plans his matches but, if he is hitting the ball well, that won’t matter much. I respond to what is happening around me. Vincent is elemental. Today’s question is “can a boat beat the ocean?”’
This turned out to be a fair assessment. Van Gogh served fourteen aces in the first set and lost two games. Orwell hoisted storm cones and waited. Van Gogh served eleven aces in the second and lost five games. Orwell prepared himself but still lay low. In the third, van Gogh served fifteen aces and lost the set 1–6. Orwell was up off the canvas and, as Vangers said later, ‘I was hitting it well but it would not go where I wanted. I hate it when that happens.’
‘It was touch and go,’ said Orwell. ‘I thought I was down and out. But that’s happened to me here before and I got through it.’
‘Can we get a drink?’ asked Jean Rhys after dropping her serve for the second time in the first set against the dextrous Millay.
‘A proper drink,’ agreed Millay. ‘We’re not children.’
‘Can’t play without a drink,’ said Rhys. ‘I’m here to play. I’m here because I play. There seems no point whatsoever in not doing it properly.’
‘Quite agree,’ said Millay.
The pair sat down to await a ruling. After conferring, officials informed the players that the beverages in the court-side fridge had been approved in accordance with regulations and sponsorship arrangements. The players were to drink them.
‘I must go the toilet,’ said Rhys.
‘Me too,’ said Millay. ‘Is that really the time?’
Suitably refreshed, the players returned and the second set featured some stupendous tennis. Both were sharper, more energetic, and their skills were on open display; Rhys out-manoeuvring Millay and then moving in for the kill, the tactical Millay playing the big points superbly, building her strength to pull away in the third.
‘That was great,’ said Rhys afterwards. ‘I didn’t feel a thing.’
‘Thank God we got a heartstarter into us,’ agreed Millay.
‘Don’t mind if I do,’ said Rhys. ‘Just a small one.’
And how would they describe their match?
‘No idea,’ said Rhys. ‘I haven’t seen it yet.’
‘Two slatterns and a net,’ said Millay.
Bessie Smith arrived late for her match against Christina Stead and had trouble hitting the ball. During the warm-up she sat down twice, and when the first game started she waited to receive service without a racquet. Stead and Darwin had a word with her and all agreed the match should be postponed. At the press call Stead acknowledged, ‘Bessie wasn’t well. We’ve been rescheduled for tomorrow.’
‘What was wrong with her?’ asked Mailer.
‘No idea,’ said Stead.
‘Was she drug-tested?’
‘Any other questions?’
Fats Waller is a remarkable customer. When all this is over and the caravan moves on, a lot of people are going to realise they’ve never seen anything quite like him. Some will shake their heads with a smile and say, ‘Natural rhythm. Natural talent. Could do it in his sleep.’ But the more we see of Waller, the more we see of his thinking. The planning might not be obvious—today, for example, against Big Bill Yeats, he missed a lot of forehand winners in the first stanza. Time and again the ball sat up and, instead of putting it away, Waller took the pace off and just got it back in play. Later, when Yeats began to tire in the crucial fourth set, he relied on playing to Waller’s muted forehand. Waller wound up and nailed winner after winner.
In the second set, with Yeats firing them in, Waller made no attempt to get his first serves back and even asked a linesman if he could borrow a chair while receiving. ‘If I’m going to be a spectator,’ he said, ‘I might as well sit down.’
This caused great amusement but, again, there was method in it. He stood right up to the second serve and punched it low at Big Bill’s feet or drove it back past him as he came in. Yeats was being told, ‘You must get your first serve in to win the point. Miss it, and you’re in trouble.’ Pressure on the Yeats serve was being dressed up as admiration for the first serve. The percentage of first serves in began to drop. From 87 per cent at the beginning of the set it dropped to 63 per cent by the end. Waller’s own game is solid and he hustles well but he won today with self-control and smart thinking.
Yeats, who rewrote the record books as a youngster, was given a standing ovation as he left. He looked older, but heads still turn when something magnificent walks by.
When Eliot met Wittgenstein (not a bad title for a film) and they were tossing before their match, SuperTom was diffident and Wittgenstein was guarded. Eliot had heard so much about this opponent and had seen him, in practice, taking apart the sort of game he himself had spent years developing. His serve-and-volley approach would be put under serious examination and might well be shredded. For SuperTom to stay on the baseline and try to slug it out would be to flirt with catastrophe.
Wittgenstein looked at Eliot and asked him whether he would like to serve.
‘But you won the toss,’ protested SuperTom.
‘The toss is nothing,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘I’m seeking your preference because I do not have one.’
‘I don’t know that I have one either,’ replied SuperTom.
‘Not knowing you do is not the same as knowing you do not.’
‘I don’t dispute that.’
‘Not disputing it,’ said Wittgenstein, ‘is not the same as agreeing with it.’
‘Jug, jug, jug, jug,’ said SuperTom, ‘la plume de ma time and death.’
‘Thought so,’ said Wittgenstein. ‘You serve.’
‘I am not Prince Hamlet,’ said SuperTom. ‘Nor was meant to serve.’
‘Which end do you want?’ asked Wittgenstein.
‘End?’ queried SuperTom. ‘Maybe drowning.’
The match had a similarly disjointed character, on top of which, at 3–2
in the second set, Wittgenstein noticed Karl Popper in the stand and shook his racquet at him. ‘Bugger off!’ he advised.
‘Ah!’ Popper called to the crowd. ‘Aggression! Did you see that? He threatened me!’
‘Sit down, you twerp,’ said Wittgenstein.
‘Twit twit twit,’ said SuperTom.
‘Good man,’ said Wittgenstein and relaxed his grip on the matter. His concentration in the next two sets was astonishing. He hardly looked up, muttered to himself constantly and paid no attention to the scoreboard. Then, at 3–0 up in the final set, he apologised to Eliot and said he ‘had completely misunderstood the question’.
At 3.45 this afternoon Ring Lardner became the longest-priced quarter-finalist anyone in the press box could remember. He beat Bill Faulkner in four, disguising his game craftily and allowing Faulkner to think he had it won until the last. ‘I was strong at the beginning,’ Faulkner asseverated, ‘and, following the beginning was, persistently (yes) strong in that section beyond the beginning but not yet in the middle and then, when the middle, as it must, by virtue of its being the middle, without which there would be no ends, arrived, I was persistent there in my strength also. But at the last it was he, rather than I, who reached out and took the match. I persisted. He persisted. We persast.’
Auden and MacNeice then destroyed Kafka and Muir in an unparalleled demonstration of doubles play. Kafka was in sparkling form and Muir is solid in all passages, but Auden and MacNeice sometimes play like a single organism and today it was impossible to put anything between them. With the Auden serve on fire and MacNeice, proprietor of one of the best backhands in the game, elegant and deadly, they didn’t miss much.
Another great combination went through on Court 4, where Sackville-West and Stephen-Woolf, who have been playing together since they were both girls, got home despite a nasty scare. Prichard and Richardson took the first set before their more fancied opponents, who seemed rather to be hibernating, emerged into the full light of day.
