The Tournament

by John Clarke

  ‘Please,’ interrupted Freud.

  ‘I mean seriously beautiful,’ continued Matisse. ‘Now, between ourselves, I’m an arse man but is there anything more beautiful than a pair of full bulging—’

  ‘Enough already!’ said Freud. ‘Everyone can hear you. You’re talking into a microphone!’

  ‘Correct,’ said Matisse with a smile. ‘Anyone else want me to stop?’

  And, of course, as with the Frenchman’s play during the match itself, nobody wanted Matisse to stop and Freud could only watch his own dream begin to evaporate.

  ‘Sigmund has changed everything about the game,’ concluded Matisse. ‘My own opinion is that he’s better at describing his conclusions than he is at reaching them.’

  Bill Faulkner didn’t know quite how to deal with Paul Robeson. The two hadn’t met before and they tested each other out for a set and a half. Robeson is a great athlete and was in excellent touch until he was informed, at two sets up, that his American passport had been revoked.

  ‘Revoked?’ he queried. ‘Do you mean I can’t go home after the tournament?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said a US official.

  ‘Can’t get back into my own country? Why not?’

  ‘Perhaps you should have thought about that before you criticised American tennis.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I criticise the way things are done in America?’ asked Robeson.

  ‘Because America is a free country. And the cost of freedom is eternal vigilance.’

  ‘How can it be a free country,’ asked Robeson, ‘if it can’t be criticised by its own citizens?’

  ‘In order for a society to work properly,’ explained the official, ‘its citizens must be opposed to its enemies.’

  ‘A society is a group of citizens who all think the same?’ asked Robeson. ‘Could you perhaps name one?’

  ‘Don’t try to be clever. Americans are individuals. It is in your beloved Russia that everyone is forced to think the same.’

  ‘You listen here, pipsqueak,’ said Robeson. ‘I am not here playing for America. I’m playing for the black people in America.’

  He resumed the match in a quiet fury but the incident upset his rhythm and he seemed worn out. He had come so far and a great sense of hopelessness now settled on his effort. Many in the crowd couldn’t bear to look as he played out the match, magnificent at times and always with dignity but broken and disappointed. Afterwards he thanked the crowd. ‘A word or two before you go,’ he said. ‘I have done the state some service. And they know it.’

  There was also a touch of tragedy about Bessie Smith, the tall and powerful stroke-maker whose wonderful rhythm was the deciding factor in her win over Maxine Elliott. Smith said afterwards that she loved to play and especially in Paris. Elliott agreed. ‘It’s a great thing to come from some little place somewhere and end up playing in Paris in front of all these people.’

  What was the particular appeal of Paris?

  ‘It ain’t St Louis,’ said Smith. ‘Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.’

  West-Indian-born but now based in England, Jean Rhys has some experience of the heat and when the humidity went through the roof early this afternoon she must have realised she had a sliver of a chance against the solid technique of Gertrude Stein. Stein is no stranger to local conditions and was well supported. Hemingway, Picasso and Pound were all at courtside and French and American paparazzi vied with one another for position.

  Stein said later it was not the heat that beat her, but the fact that she failed to vary her play. ‘The heat. Not the heat. The heat beat. The heat did not beat,’ she revealed. ‘The play was the same. The play that was the same beat. The beat of the play that was the same beat. It was the same. It was the same beat. The play was the same beat was the same play beat was the same.’

  Rhys had a different approach. ‘I knew something of the way Gertrude worked and I tried to imagine her as coming from the same background as myself, in Dominica. Then I could understand her and work out what she was about.’ She began, as it were, to think as Stein and to make Stein think as her. Rhys was in high spirits after the match.

  An hour later she and Raymond Chandler were dug out of a bar in a nearby hotel and informed that their mixed-doubles match was about to start on Court 4. They had another quick one and got to the court looking slightly distracted but, the moment play got under way, you’d have thought they were the world champions. Their rhythm was superb, their placement was deadly and their stamina was admirable.

  Yeats put Gershwin out of business quite early and there was some suggestion the American was burdened with an injury of some kind. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t feel too bad but I certainly couldn’t lift when I needed to.’

  Magritte was out today too. His ability to disguise his shots was much in evidence but he could do little against van Gogh at full pace. In the third set van Gogh got an astonishing 112 per cent of first serves in and ran from point to point as if working to a deadline.

  ‘Theo told me to play my natural game,’ he said. ‘So I did. Theo is a good man.’

  And was he pleased with the win?

  ‘What we need is not to win. Winning is nothing. What we need is to love.’

  He must nevertheless be pleased with his form?

  ‘Form? It is not form. It is work. I hit the ball and then I run to where it will land and I hit it again. I do this until it stops coming back or until I break it.’

  The mystery of Rosa Luxemburg deepened late this afternoon when Osip Mandelstam vanished following his mixed-doubles match. He was due to attend a press call with his partner but she turned up alone, forty minutes late, bruised and shaking. These occurrences cannot continue, especially at the end of a day on which the much loved American Paul Robeson was told he is not welcome in his own country. Organisers must sort it all out, and fast. They must find those responsible, remove and punish them. Security must be tightened and the players’ safety guaranteed. The future, not just of the tournament but of the game, is at stake.

  A shadow has fallen over proceedings. Faulkner caught the mood of the occasion well and was torn by the instinct to exploit it and the need to help those players who are in trouble. ‘The impossible and the inevitable became,’ he said, ‘as they must and cannot become, the things that, at that precise moment, were required by the straining of the very moment against itself.’

  Day 27

  * * *

  Millay v. Pavlova • Tagore v. Eliot • Spock v. Joyce • Mann v. Mayakovsky • Akhmatova v. Stephen-Woolf • Duchamp v. Hemingway

  * * *

  What a day to finish the fourth-round singles! The victory of Edna St Vincent Millay over Anna Pavlova has sent other players a message loud and clear. The pattern of the match was the same throughout: a fabulous display from the in-form Pavlova, followed by a brilliant tactical comeback from Millay. She came from 0–4 down to lose the first set narrowly, and from 0–3 and 0–5 down to get up in the other two. As Pavlova said in the post-match interview, ‘Edna played great today. I gave it everything but she was just too good. Can I thank the crowds? I love to play here. Thank you. You’ve been fantastic.’

  Millay was indeed too good on the day. ‘I really enjoy the doubles,’ she said. ‘I find all this singles stuff a bit of a strain.’

  On Court 1 we saw the Bengal tiger very nearly give a famous man a mauling. Rabindranath Tagore, who has been making his way quietly through the men’s draw, is a player who can serve and volley and who can, if required, stand on the baseline and take an opponent apart with tactics. He is patient and thorough. Eliot did only what he needed to do. ‘He plays like an Englishman,’ Tagore said. ‘This is all very well as far as it goes. But it is not the whole story. He also plays like an American. This is the difficulty for me. I play like an Indian. We know the English but the mysteries of America are less familiar to us.’

  So how would Tagore tackle SuperTom in any future match-up?

  ‘Hold the tour
nament in India. This is the whole problem,’ he said. ‘If we held the tournament in Delhi, the results would be completely different. Completely different. The purpose of this tournament is to establish the primacy of Western European tennis. How many Africans, Arabs and Asians are playing here? Very few indeed. Is this because of some innate incapacity among the great majority of the world’s population to stand up and hit a bouncing ball? Or is it because of the way the tournament is organised?’

  Surprisingly, SuperTom did turn up to today’s post-match press call although he refused to be drawn on the matter of cultural politics, or on politics more broadly or on religion, England, America, his childhood, his associations, other players, the match he had just finished, women generally and his own wife in particular, or drink. There wasn’t much anyone could do about this, since Eliot is the principal editor at Laver & Laver, the licensed publisher of match reports at this tournament.

  Ben Spock played sparkling tennis but was discombobulated by James Joyce, who is running into excellent form although not unencumbered by domestic problems. He dismissed these as ‘nothing at all’ and said afterwards he had ‘enjoyed the match today. Young Daedalus played well and I take my hat off to him. He should get his end away tonight. Unfortunately my pleasure was impaired by the presence of a couple of spavined Carmelite tub’o’guts sitting on their gravied arses in about Row F. France is like Ireland. It’s a God-forsaken priest-ridden country and the sooner we learn to shit these weevils out of our system the sooner the future can begin.’

  Thomas Mann needed everything he could muster to get past a rather desperate Mayakovsky in a thriller. Mayakovsky’s problem was that he lacked consistency. He began solidly, played spectacular tennis in the second set and struggled honestly in the third before surrendering in the fourth. Mann’s ingenuity has been a feature throughout the tournament and was a telling factor again today. He rode out the storm intelligently and played the big points well.

  ‘Pretty pleased,’ he said. ‘Mayakovsky played well and, like many others here, is monstered by the administration of the game in his own country. This is something we have to deal with, each of us. This is an international game. If we’re not careful and strong, nationalism will destroy it. I am here as a German. I don’t like what’s happening in Germany and I can announce to you today that after this tournament I will not be returning to Germany.’

  So where will he live?

  ‘Switzerland in the short term but I’m thinking of going to America. The point I want to make is that I am German, and the only way I can ensure the survival of the Germany I love is to leave. Mayakovsky will not have that choice. Some men in uniform took him away immediately after the match. Where is he now? Why is he not at this press call? Is he free to say what he thinks? You people should be asking these questions.’

  ‘We’re tennis reporters,’ said George Plimpton.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Mann. ‘What is happening to the game you’re covering? Where is Rosa Luxemburg? Where is Mayakovsky? Osip Mandelstam went missing yesterday. Where is he? His partner had been beaten up. Who did it? Robeson cannot even go back to his own country. Who are the people making these decisions? What is their purpose? What can ordinary folk do about it? What is democracy if we cannot answer these questions?’

  ‘If we write that, our editors won’t print it.’

  ‘They only want to know about the tennis,’ said Mailer.

  ‘We all have families to feed.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mann.

  Anna Akhmatova arrived on court this afternoon despite the best efforts of her own management. A promising junior, she was ruled out of the Russian selection process for many years and was banned altogether from playing in public. Re-admitted following a change in administration at the national level she quickly emerged as one of the game’s great talents. Her uneasy relationship with tennis officialdom was never more evident than it was today. She lost the first set to the intelligent play of Virginia Stephen-Woolf but when the going got tough it was Akhmatova who got going. The British press devoted more space to coverage of this match, and to Stephen-Woolf’s performance here at the tournament, than to any other single player. ‘If the match had been between two men it would have become a classic,’ bellowed The Times.

  Details of Stephen-Woolf’s preparation are the subject of feature articles, often by members of her own circle. Her matches are replayed and analysed in universities all over the English-speaking world, lists of her equipment are published on the internet, and her laundry is for sale on ebay. Similarly, students of Russian tennis have poured out thousands of pages on the play of Akhmatova in the context of tennis, women’s tennis, Russian tennis, European tennis and singles tennis.

  ‘It didn’t seem to matter what I did,’ said Stephen-Woolf, ‘Anna was awake to it and her own game is so strong it’s difficult to throw her by trying to mix it up.’

  Did Stephen-Woolf go into the match with a plan?

  ‘I think it’s important to play your own game. Only then can you vary it. Before one can do that, however, one must develop a game of one’s own. This is a great strength of Anna’s too, so I needed to be careful. First I imagined myself playing as a woman, but of course Anna was already doing this very successfully, and in a sense this was my problem. Then I imagined myself playing as a man but Anna dealt with that rather well, as Isaiah Berlin had led me to believe she would. In the end I think Anna’s determination to survive was perhaps greater than my own.’

  Akhmatova thanked Stephen-Woolf and said the other person she wanted to thank was Osip Mandelstam. ‘Osip and I came through the junior ranks together and he taught me a great deal. Russian tennis authorities are very efficient. They will know where Osip is and they will be proud today that so much international attention is being paid to Russian tennis. I invite you all to be here in an hour. They will bring Osip Mandelstam here. We will thank him together.’

  There is a powerful sense of foreboding now about where this tournament is going. The tennis and the event itself are struggling to stay in touch with one another. Some say only the tennis is real and nothing else matters. Others say the tennis is nothing; a distraction; an escape from reality. The play has been of the highest quality but there is no hiding the fact that the game faces serious problems. There is no word about the condition of Mayakovsky. Osip Mandelstam did not reappear this afternoon after a Russian official announced that he has ‘a hamstring problem’.

  Paul Robeson has declared he will travel to Russia where he will play in a series of ‘exhibition matches’. This has been described at the American Tennis Activities Hearings as ‘absolute proof of exactly what we were saying, whatever it was’.

  ‘I am a black American,’ said Robeson. ‘I can do anything except go to my own country and be free.’

  Dmitri Shostakovich, through to the second round of the men’s doubles with compatriot Prokofiev, is nowhere to be seen either. Russian officials say he is ‘nursing a strained shoulder’.

  There is still no clue to the whereabouts of Rosa Luxemburg.

  Spanish customs officials announced today that Walter Benjamin, the German who played so well here earlier, had been found dead near the border. Friends say Benjamin did not want to return to Germany.

  And then there was the Duchamp–Hemingway match. Hemingway arrived, unshaven but splendid after a photo-shoot for Life magazine holding a bull scrotum between his firm white teeth. He seems to have substituted a wider public appeal for the group of private supporters who attended his earlier matches though his entourage today was somewhat depleted. Neither Agnes, Hadley, Pauline, Martha nor Mary was there. Sherwood Anderson was not there and neither were Fitzgerald, Pound and personal trainer Max Perkins. Gertrude Stein was present but seemed distracted and when she offered advice Hemingway turned to her and said, ‘Thank you. I’ll take suggestions from people who are still in the draw.’

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked him.

  ‘I’m exhibiting grace under p
ressure,’ he replied, ‘and if necessary I shall continue to do so.’

  ‘You’ll have to,’ she replied, ‘if you keep playing like that.’

  By contrast Duchamp almost sneaked onto the court, touched his toes a couple of times and waited for his opponent to make a move. At 4–4 in the first set he hit three winners from the Hemingway serve and the crowd sensed the initial rituals in a blood sacrifice to be played out in the sun.

  Round 5

  Day 28

  * * *

  Dali v. Joyce • Matisse v. Chekhov • Akhmatova v. Bernhardt • Einstein v. Duchamp • Chandler and Hammett v. Benchley and Thurber • Leavis and Lawrence v. Chaplin and O’Neill

  * * *

  Salvador Dali did something today which has never been done before in open competition. He called for the official tournament doctor and asked to see a psychiatrist because, he said, he wanted to find out whether he was insane. It was half-way through the second set and he thought he could hear voices.

  ‘Of course he can hear voices,’ said his opponent Joyce. ‘We all do. The place is full of them fifteen-love thirty-love thirty-fifteen thirty-all its like a river of peoples talk the scores the riddle of steeples torque the whores the fiddle of Jesus baulk the cause the middle of deepest Cork the floors.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Dali. ‘If you don’t mind I’ll go with the possibility of my own insanity.’

  ‘You’re not insane,’ said Joyce. ‘You’re Spanish. You come from a priest-addled slut bastard of a country like Ireland.’

  ‘I am a sex god,’ said Dali.

  ‘You cannot be a god of any kind,’ said Joyce. ‘There is no God.’

  ‘I must be insane then, to imagine I am one.’

  ‘Not at all,’ replied Joyce. ‘The idea of God is used to manipulate people. That’s what you’re trying to do now.’