by John Clarke
‘I’ll not be told how to express myself by a fucking sermonising misogynist eunuch,’ said Joyce.
‘Drivel from a fool!’ spat SuperTom.
‘Or is it not really the women you’re after, Tom? Is it the lads that steam the engine up?’
The height of SuperTom’s dudgeon at this point was inestimable. He walked away and stood on the service-line, waiting. Joyce wiped his nose on his shirt and sauntered out to receive. SuperTom served like a man who knew he was playing in a classic and won the second set going away. The third was a see-sawing affair in which Eliot moved away again to a 6–4 win.
If Joyce was concerned, he didn’t show it. He was still talking to people in the crowd and at 2–3 in the fourth he approached a woman about two rows back and borrowed money to continue.
In the fourth set, he talked non-stop. SuperTom bristled. He walked to the net and stared at Joyce for nearly a minute.
Joyce looked up. ‘How are you going, Tom?’ he asked. ‘I’m putting a new grip on my racquet.’
Joyce finished winding on the new grip but Eliot hadn’t moved.
‘Time, Mr Eliot,’ said the umpire. ‘Hurry along, please. It’s time.’
Eliot stood at the net, rolling up the legs on his shorts.
‘I am Lazarus,’ he said, ‘come back from the dead.’
‘And I am Molly,’ said Joyce, ‘come back from Blazes.’
‘Time please, Mr Eliot.’
When play restarted, Joyce carried on and the stream of his words continued, not loud enough for the umpire to take any action. In fact, it was rather mellifluous. His tennis was now moving at the pace of his voice and he was ‘in the zone’. He won seven straight games to take the fourth set and to break Eliot in the first game of the decider.
Eliot was now cautioned for banging his racquet on the ground and yelling ‘Jug, jug, jug, fucking juuuuuugggggg!’
He walked to the net and glared balefully at Joyce again. ‘Can you keep the interior monologue down?’
‘Tell me a tale of Jim and Tom,’ hummed Joyce to himself, ‘all of the river is flowing Jim, the river is flowing over him, the rivering under the floater Tom, the blow to just under the nose is gone, and into the afterglow is on, and go with the afterburners on, and go with the flow from here to there, and go with it knowing your man Flaubert, and everythings fine and Dante there, and then as you hit the final straight, you hammer it down the line and wait, and look at the time and consummate.’
‘I haven’t been playing well, of late,’ said Eliot. ‘Teller 3 is now available, incidentally. I’m afraid you have insufficient funds in this account.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ asked the umpire.
‘Step this way please,’ said SuperTom. ‘I think we’d better see the manager.’
‘I am the manager,’ said the umpire.
‘Very good,’ said Eliot. ‘Carry on.’
Joyce was untroubled from here and served the match out to a great reception on all sides.
Edna St Vincent Millay was in the crowd today to see the Beckett and Duchamp and Braque and Derain match. Duchamp had completed his singles match and must have wished it would all go away but he and Beckett are examplars of the ‘doing-only-what-you-need-to-do’ approach and it got them through. Braque and Derain are both strong, attacking players with good ground strokes and plenty of angles. Beckett and Duchamp rotated at the net and never let their opponents settle. The players were in high spirits at the press call and wished it known that they always knew B and D were going to beat B and D.
Philip Rahv and Mary McCarthy took the first set against Tallulah Bankhead and her current partner but from there it was all the Bankhead pairing. Whether or not her partner today was the young man with whom she performed so spectacularly in the first round against Hammett and Hellman was not known. She herself was not saying. ‘I would have to check my records,’ she confided to the garrulous young man from Paris-Match, ‘and in order to do that I would have to have some interest in keeping records which, I can reveal to you privately, is not the case. What’s your name?’
‘Gervase,’ said the young man. ‘You don’t keep records?’
‘I don’t have the time, Gervase,’ she said. ‘I’m out a lot.’
Magritte and Dali, drawn to play Chaplin and O’Neill today for the right to play the winner of the Chekhov–Miller versus Cocteau–Picasso match, upped their offer of the previous round and proposed that they play Chaplin, O’Neill, Chekhov, Miller, Cocteau and Picasso in a ‘fabulous once-only premier spectacular event’, to save time.
‘No,’ said Darwin, uncertain how this would evolve. ‘What would we do if you lost? We would have six winners of one match.’
‘If you accept our proposal,’ said Dali. ‘We will undertake not to lose.’
‘Thank you,’ said Darwin, not wishing to create a precedent. ‘We’ll let you know.’
Their offer rejected, Magritte and Dali won two games in the first set against Chaplin and O’Neill and sat down to discuss progress. They identified two problems. O’Neill was solid, strong and had the endurance of a clydesdale. Chaplin was confident, quick and clever like a fox.
Magritte and Dali decided to have their racquets restrung very loosely. When play started again, they found that if they didn’t ‘middle the ball’ they could bend it in unusual ways and vary its pace alarmingly. Chaplin and O’Neill protested that string-tensions should be standardised and Dali offered to ‘doctor’ their strings. The Americans decided on a policy of hitting winners but, with the ball describing extraordinary parabolas, and their opponents among the quickest in the competition, this approach was not without its problems. Chaplin’s speed and O’Neill’s slowness were increasingly manipulated to heighten the peculiar sensation that everything was happening in a new type of gravity. In the end the Americans couldn’t get off court fast enough.
Day 35
* * *
Akhmatova v. Arendt • Magritte and Dali v. Chekhov and Miller • Chandler and Hammett v. Beckett and Duchamp • Lenya and Dietrich v. Sackville-West and Stephen-Woolf • Mansfield and Hodgkins v. Keller and Sullivan • Lawrence and Mansfield v. Bankhead and partner • Astaire and Rogers v. Freud and Klein
* * *
Anna Akhmatova’s semi-final against Hannah Arendt was the Centre Court’s first glimpse of either player. Arendt walked through the first set. It was as if the Russian was unprepared, but if she had taken Arendt a little lightly she was under no such misapprehension in the second. She was still playing defensive tennis and was installed on the baseline, but she was making Arendt fight for every bit of ground and stretching her resources to the limit. At 4-all Akhmatova broke the German, won the set and settled in for a fight to the finish.
Arendt came out playing like a winner. At the other end, Akhmatova kept her nerve and waited for her opportunity. It came at 5–5. Arendt took a bit off her serve and Akhmatova hit three low returns at her feet. Arendt got it back to 30–40 with two scorching serves but it was still break point.
The next serve was even faster and wide to the forehand, taking Akhmatova out of court. She got to it and pushed a return back, almost over the umpire’s chair. Arendt waited and smashed. Akhmatova was there and somehow drove it deep into the ad court. The Arendt backhand was level to the task but it found the Russian at the net like a wolf. This was the moment that swung the match. Arendt came back and put enormous pressure on the Akhmatova service but, even though it went to deuce three times, it held for the match.
There might be someone who has played more tennis in the last fortnight than doubles semi-finalists Magritte and Dali but it would be hard to imagine. ‘Not really,’ said Magritte. ‘Not hard to imagine. Just very difficult to do.’ They were on court again against Arthur Miller and Tony Chekhov, who has also had a very full dance card. Today he was in trouble with his breathing early and as the day got hotter he needed longer and longer changeovers. Miller’s serve had won them the first set but after that the match played a
s it lay. Chekhov was assisted from the court at the finish but returned to thank the crowd.
‘I’d like to thank you all very much,’ he said. ‘It’s been realism. I’d especially like to thank Arthur, who is a great player and a good friend. Now, if it’s all the same with you, I’d like to go to Moscow.’
The Chandler and Hammett versus Beckett and Duchamp semi was another thing altogether. The Americans had spent the previous evening with Edna St Vincent Millay and looked a little tired. Millay was in the stand looking relaxed. Beckett and Duchamp had spent all night in ‘some café somewhere on the Black Bush’, so honours were even at the start and the first set had a haphazard quality. Shots were sprayed everywhere. The Americans took it when the Hammett serve started to fire, a process he described: ‘Like shelling peas. Big peas. And shelling them real fast. Wait a minute. Maybe not peas. Bigger than peas. Pumpkins maybe. It was like shelling pumpkins.’
‘Avocados,’ said Chandler.
‘What?’
‘Avocados.’
‘Some Californian crap is that, Ray?’
‘I was thinking of something more the size of a tennis ball.’
‘Well, don’t.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No one shells avocados,’ said Hammett.
‘Pretend I never spoke,’ said Chandler.
‘An avocado doesn’t have a goddam shell.’
‘Nobody home at the Chandler house. Please call back later.’
Beckett and Duchamp got going in the second set, taking it and the third. The fourth could have gone either way but, almost as if they had arranged it, they broke Hammett in the eighth game.
‘I sat there with Hammett in the break at 4–5 in the fourth,’ said Chandler. ‘He tried to talk. I stopped him. It’d keep. The guys up the other end didn’t believe our story anyway. Edna looked great but otherwise this boat was going nowhere. I stared at my racquet. You’d think they’d be able to come up with one of these that actually works. There were people dressed in mattresses floating about putting space stations together in slow motion on the news. And I was sitting there with technology I couldn’t even drink.’
The Americans left to a rousing reception. ‘We’ll be back,’ they said, ‘when the movie comes out.’
Lenya and Dietrich played gallantly in the first women’s doubles semi, working the room well. When Sackville-West and Stephen-Woolf disputed a line call at 3–3 in the first set, they lost the support of the crowd. Dietrich was going to play in the final come hell or high water. Her serving in the final set was supreme, and she and Lenya played the big points better.
Mansfield and Hodgkins beat Keller and Sullivan for a berth in the final. Mansfield is the one to watch here. She seems to be doing so little, but what she does is so good. She is not a great spoiler and no power player. She gets in a side door and makes off through the window like a kid with a cake. Her health is a concern, however, and the effort proved taxing. A short while later she was on court again in the mixed but it was a huge ask and the weaker she got the more Lawrence of Nottingham berated her. ‘I like my women strong,’ he said. ‘What is the matter with you?’
‘I’m not a hundred per cent fit,’ said Mansfield. ‘That’s what’s the matter. Thanks for your sympathy.’
‘You should be like a train. Driving. Onward. We’re not going to win like this. Where is your thrust?’
‘Perhaps if you got your serve in and stopped being quite so repulsive, we might get out of this.’
It was not to be. Lawrence said later that he had done what he could for women but there was ‘no helping some of them’.
The other semi in the mixed was a real upset. Astaire and Rogers didn’t want the win as badly as Freud and Klein. The Austrians concentrated on Rogers in the first set, whom Freud thought ‘a hysteric’, and on Astaire in the second, whom Klein thought ‘very charming indeed’.
Finals
Day 36
* * *
Freud and Klein v. Bankhead and partner • Lenya and Dietrich v. Mansfield and Hodgkins • Magritte and Dali v. Beckett and Duchamp • Millay v. Akhmatova • Joyce v. Orwell
* * *
Today eighteen billion viewers in 512 countries tuned in to the live broadcast of the finals.
‘This figure is staggering,’ said George Plimpton. ‘Everyone knew there’d be an audience for this thing but what we’re looking at here is the highest rating for a single event in sporting history.’
‘Not just in sporting history,’ added Norman Mailer. ‘This is an audience far beyond that of any previous television event. Far beyond.’
It is certainly an audience well north of the wildest dreams of the WTO. Nike’s Friedrich Nietzsche confirmed that sponsors ‘are now looking at a minimum of fifteen to twenty million dollars per player for an annual contract. Take Picasso—he was knocked out of the singles in the second round but he’s apparently negotiating a lifetime deal worth an estimated $400 million.’
Many players have rejected the blandishments of management and the corporates but, for those who want it, fortunes are there for the taking. Keynes, Chaplin, Hemingway, Mae West, Bill Fields, Wodehouse, Sartre and de Beauvoir, Chanel, Sackville-West, Frankie Wright, Crosby and Disney have all become millionaires.
On the other hand, men’s singles finalists Orwell and Joyce have constant money worries and have only been able to compete here through the assistance of friends. Van Gogh has to give lessons to kids in Arles to buy bread. ‘There’s a lot of money about,’ said Nietzsche, ‘but it’s not well distributed. Anyway, in terms of the individual, the money isn’t the point. The title is the thing.’
Roland Barthes ‘wasn’t surprised’ by the huge popularity of the event, elaborating that it ‘depended on what you mean by “the event”. The original event has been colonised by its own discourse. Discourse is now the event.’
Oscar Wilde mourned the tournament’s popularity as ‘a requiem for genius. We stand on the threshold of idiocy and the army of commerce is advancing.
‘All men kill the thing they love
In deciding to be bought.
Some do it very early
And some as a last resort.
The coward does it through endorsements
The brave man, on the court.’
Were there other trends which worried him?
‘All trends give rise to the gravest possible concern,’ Wilde said. ‘A trend is a lack of imagination masquerading as an idea. It has neither the appeal of the former, nor the rigour of the latter. There was a trend to fidelity in marriage at one point. It almost completely destroyed conversation.’
Was he concerned about the trend to nationalism?
‘An excellent example. Either these flags go, or I do.’
As the mixed-doubles final got under way it was evident that Freud and Klein had done some homework on Bankhead and were playing to a plan. What was less obvious was that Bankhead had done some homework on Freud and Klein and was playing to another plan altogether.
When Bankhead and her partner took the first set, Freud said he regarded this as aggressive behaviour.
‘Really?’ said Bankhead. ‘I thought we were rather demure.’
‘You think we are your parents,’ announced the Doc, ‘and we are engaged in the primal scene. This enrages you and you want to kill us.’
‘You are my parents?’ checked Bankhead. ‘And what is it that enrages me so?’
‘We are engaged in the primal scene.’
‘Goodness, how interesting. And what is that?’
‘The act of sexual congress. Children have in their heads an image of their parents in congress. Do you know Plato’s theory of forms?’
‘I spent an evening with Chico Marx once. We spoke of little else.’
‘Plato’s idea of “form” is that certain ideas, or “forms”, exist in our minds, and that if they did not we wouldn’t recognise objects in the real world.’
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re very attrac
tive?’ crooned Bankhead.
‘Very interesting,’ said the Doc. ‘In what way?’
‘Not you,’ said Bankhead. ‘You, Melanie.’
Freud was grim when play resumed. He stood at the net like a customs official, jumping on anything he could reach and confiscating it. He glowered and he focused, and every time he drifted towards the centre Bankhead and her partner put the ball past him down the line. Freud then decided he should be behind Klein and they changed places. He couldn’t stay out of the action, though, and every time he strayed towards the net Bankhead and her partner put the ball behind him. The matter was wrapped up in two sets, the players waved to the crowd and left the arena. Bankhead refused to say who her partner was but said she’d be thanking him later. She said she had enjoyed the match, ‘Except for that little man who wanted to talk about sex. Good grief. I’m only playing tennis for a rest.’
The mixed-doubles final had been an anti-climax and the organisers were anxious. Freud, one of the great authorities on doubles play, had just blown a great opportunity and the identity of one of the winners remained a mystery. (It was apparently not Douglas Fairbanks jnr.) In addition, the women’s doubles final was a marketer’s nightmare. It featured the twelfth seeds who were two little-known New Zealanders, one of whom struggles with injury and has changed hotels four times. Like many players, Katherine Mansfield suffers from respiratory complaints and is vulnerable to changes in the weather.
When the players emerged, the professionals Lenya and Dietrich went about their preparations with teutonic efficiency. Mansfield and Hodgkins appeared bewildered and had, in any case, very little to prepare. Each had one racquet and each hung a cardigan over the back of a chair before wandering onto the court. Dietrich was on song early and Lenya can hold her own in any company. Mansfield sat slumped during the breaks, coughing. It didn’t look good.
The Europeans raced through the first set and it was 3–3 in the second before there was any indication this wasn’t going to be a cakewalk. With Hodgkins playing superbly at the net, the Kiwis broke Dietrich and hung on. Dietrich left the court and changed her dress for the next set, returning in a figure-hugging wet-look creation which did a great deal for internet service providers.