Paperweight

by Stephen Fry

  Cricket, Lovely Cricket …

  Those of you not frightfully interested in cricket will probably want to skip this: reviews for The Listener of a whole crop of cricketing books.

  Leslie Frewin (ed.): The Boundary Book, Second Innings: A Lord’s Taverners’ Miscellany of Cricket (Pelham Books) £14.95

  Matthew Engel (ed.): The Guardian Book of Cricket (Michael Joseph, Pavilion Books) £14.95

  Christopher Lee: Nicely Hurdled, Sir! Two Centuries in Prose and Poetry (Elm Tree Books) £7.95

  Peter Haining (ed.): LBW Laughter Before Wicket!: 100 Years of Humorous Cricket Short Stories (Allen & Unwin) £10.95

  Bob Willis & Patrick Murphy: Starting With Grace: A Pictorial Celebration of Cricket 1864–1986 (Stanley Paul) £14.95

  Don Mosey: Botham (Methuen) £9.95

  Simon Barnes: Phil Edmonds: A Singular Man (The Kingswood Press) £9.95

  Frances Edmonds: Another Bloody Tour: England in the West Indies 1986 (The Kingswood Press) £9.95

  For every kind of person there is a kind of cricket; for every approach to life there is an approach to cricket and for every kind of cricket and every approach to cricket there is published, more than twice a week, a cricket book. Eight of these are under advisement now. Of the eight, five are anthologies or miscellanies of one kind or another, two are biographies of active players and one is the tour diary of a cricketing wife.

  The Boundary Book: Second Innings is perhaps, of the anthologies, the one I would recommend as the volume most worthy to sit alongside the Harpic, the Haze and the Spitting Image Bumper Giles Book Of Alan Coren’s Holiday Misprints in any good lavatory. The selections are of precisely the required brevity and variety for any healthy and agreeable session in the Smallest Pavilion. Indeed, there is more variation in spin, flight, pace, length, drift, trajectory and line than even John Emburey in top form can produce. There are cartoons, memoirs of great cricket figures, a wonderfully seamless flow of reminiscence of forties cricket from Harold Pinter, a riveting article on left-handedness, lyric poems of impossibly maudlin self-indulgence, a Private Eye parody of the Bodyline television series, a C.L.R. James appraisal of Bradman, alone worth the gate money, and dozens of photographs, fragments, musings and ravings from such diverse contributors as Simon Raven, Lord Olivier, G.K. Chesterton, Peter Ustinov and Umpire Harold ‘Dickie’ Bird. At £14.95 (the proceeds from which are donated to the Lord’s Taverners’ charity for disabled children and young cricketers) this wonderfully produced collection, a brilliant successor to Leslie Frewin’s original Boundary Book, is the volume I would most want to find in the cricket bag I hang hopefully at the end of my bed every Christmas Eve.

  The Guardian Book of Cricket, edited by Matthew Engel, the finest, fairest and funniest cricket journalist we have, is another excellent collection. Engel has assembled from the archives of the Guardian cricket writing which covers the game from 1826 to the present day. He has had gold to work with. A newspaper that can boast Cardus, Arlott, Keating, Woodcock and Engel as regular long-serving cricket writers and, as occasional contributors, James Cameron, Alistair Cooke, Jack Fingleton, Michael Frayn and C.L.R. James, can well justify immortalising its ephemera. Rather than giving us one long chronological survey he has grouped the writings intelligently into subjects. I was reminded of E.M. Forster’s novelists, different generations all working in the same time and place. Within a few pages we can read match reports of Jessop’s 1902 and Botham’s 1981 Tests, which show us just why the two are so often compared, and, in a salutary chapter headed ‘The Game’s Not The Same’, we are shown that the same kind of drivel about the Decline of Cricket was being written in 1904, smack in the middle of the Golden Age, as is being written now. Plus ça change …

  LBW: Laughter Before Wicket! and Nicely Nurdled, Sir! both, as you can see, have exclamation marks after their dreadful titles. This tells us something about the rather twee attitude towards cricket both anthologisers share. Christopher Lee (the BBC’s Defence Correspondent) ruins for me an otherwise excellent (though brief) selection of cricket writing (a great deal of which has been seen before) with irritating and monstrously prejudiced interpolations: ‘I discovered that The Game was a bond … (he insists on calling cricket ‘The Game’) … there was a common cynicism towards the antics and sometimes the motives of the professional game. Many cricket followers are reactionaries, which is no bad thing, except that modern players are not reactionaries.’ Balderdash. I shall never listen to Mr Lee analysing Superpower Summits in quite the same way again. ‘In proper cricket, that is cricket kept in sight of chestnut and church spire …’ So cricket in sight of factory chimney, palm-tree or mosque is improper cricket, is it? Thank heavens ‘The Game’ is bigger than some of the small minds that write about it.

  LBW is a rather tame collection of ‘humorous’ cricket short stories. To qualify for inclusion the authors had to have played cricket at some time in their lives, not a particularly strenuous condition to satisfy. P.G. Wodehouse who opened the bowling for Dulwich as a schoolboy contributes, not surprisingly, the best story, whose hero meets a schoolgirl who knows about cricket:

  It surprised him in a vague sort of way that a girl should have such a firm and sensible grasp on the important problems of life. He had taken his sister to Lord’s one summer to watch the Gentlemen v Players, and she had asked him if the sight screens were there to keep the wind off the players. He had not felt really well since.

  Starting With Grace is a collection of photographs mostly garnered and marshalled from the holdings of the BBC Hulton Picture Library. A good, general text by Bob Willis and Patrick Murphy accompanies photographs of cricketers from Grace to Gower. As a pictorial history it is pleasant enough, but as I don’t own what one might call a proper coffee table, I wouldn’t really know what to do with it once I had had a good look through. There is an appendix of statistics on players past and present, but to keep it for that purpose would be like buying a car because you need a spare radio.

  Don Mosey, known as the Alderman to those who listen to Radio 3’s Test Match Specials, would not, I am sure, claim to be a Cardus, but his biography of Botham does contain some dreadful inelegancies: ‘scant luck’, ‘goodly quota’, ‘He visibly bristled’. Nor can sentences like ‘There was beautiful weather for the whole of that Test and it was good to see a huge crowd in a ground which is not usually the best for support on such occasions’ encourage one to believe that this was a book which took a very long time to write. More disturbingly, this is a biography that actively dislikes its subject. Two lines in a biography of Ian Botham to describe his bowling performance at Edgbaston in 1981! Two lines! Hundreds of pompous paragraphs on ‘the relationship between press and players’, pages on how much better a bowler Trueman was, pointlessly smug attacks on anything modern from pop music to hair-styles, foolishly ignorant and ill-considered remarks on the problem of sport and politics, but two lines on Botham’s match-saving five wickets for one run in 28 balls! If he wanted to write a book expressing the glory of the past and the decay of the present then he should have done so, but to foist his miserably small-minded and platitudinous views on the kind of cricket lovers for whom Botham is as much a hero as Compton and Trueman ever were to previous generations is nothing short of disgraceful. His patriarchal clap-trap about Botham failing to heed the warnings of his headmaster and his setting poor examples to the young is of a piece with this kind of remark: ‘On any normal day they (the police) were faced with the virtually impossible job of trying to maintain law and order in an increasingly undisciplined society where, it seemed, an agitator or nut case had only to cry “police brutality” to have the allegation plastered over every front page and TV screen in the country.’ Botham may not be a saint, there may be interesting things to write about the press in modern cricket, heroes may have a responsibility to their public, but this nasty little book does nothing but drag the debate down into the squalid English regions of snobbery, self-righteousness and cant.

  Phil Edmo
nds: A Singular Man, on the other hand, is a delightful biography of one of cricket’s most delightful players. Intelligent, amusing, aggressive, ridiculously brave, athletic and scornful, Philippe-Henri Edmonds has enriched Test and County cricket for more than ten years. Simon Barnes, a witty and fair-minded journalist, has chosen as a central pivot for the book Edmonds’s awkward personal and professional relationship with Mike Brearley, his Test and County Captain for many years, the ramifications of which are presented in a sane and balanced manner from both points of view.

  For a gloriously insane and unbalanced view of modern English test cricket, however, we look to Phil Edmonds’ adoring wife, Frances, whose Another Bloody Tour is as refreshing to the reader of worthy, masculine cricket literature, as a tray of interval drinks on a hot afternoon. It is true that she could wear her learning a little more lightly. The over-use of sixth-form words like ‘emarginalised’ and ‘apotheosised’, not to mention unglossed tags in several of the foreign languages in which Mrs Edmonds is fluent, encourages the reviewer to be more bitchy about abuses like ‘practiced’ failing to be snapped up in the proof-reader’s slip cordon, than he would otherwise like. But this compound of tart gossip, garlicky character assassination and coy insinuation is utterly irresistible and an excellent addition to any bookshelf. There is good sense here too. Compare her analysis of the West Indian attitude to Graham Gooch’s sporting links with South Africa and Don Mosey’s ludicrously naïf nonsense on the subject. The flannelling fool first. Many feel, Mosey says, that cricketers like Gooch ‘had done nothing more reprehensible than pursuing their careers … by taking up winter employment where it was offered.’ He goes on to call the deputy Prime Minster of Antigua ‘a tin-pot, two-penny ha’penny politician’. ‘Gooch was the latest pawn to be used in the sinister game of chess being played out by political grand-masters, and he did not get the support or anything like the support he was entitled to expect from his employers.’ Frances Edmonds, however, says this:

  The cankerous tendrils of apartheid are deemed to contaminate any sportsman who has played there. Who should say whether this is right or wrong? In the West Indies it is simply inevitable. It remains part of the world where it is dangerously ingenuous to think of cricket as a mere game. Caribbean cricket forms an integral, probably even a predominant part, of a complex social, political and philosophical nexus, a web from which it is totally indivisible … international sportsmen would do well to understand it … Go to South Africa by all means. Take the loot. But let’s muster the imagination to realise that some people are bound to object.

  A breath of fresh air to blow away the cobwebs that have clung to cricket writing for too many years.

  Bernard Levin

  Such impudence in one so not particularly young. Again, for The Listener.

  Bernard Levin: In These Times, Jonathan Cape, hardback, £10.95

  I have to confess right here and now that my feelings upon being called upon to review an anthology (and it is Levin himself who says that these volumes are collections of pressed flowers, and we all know that an anthology is, if it is to be taken au pied de la lettre, nothing more, nor indeed less – and who would have it otherwise? – than a posy or, mutatis mutandis, nosegay – though no doubt the gentlemen who busy themselves with instructing us how to live and speak would have words to say, nay, shriek, on the subject of how gay or otherwise the nose may or, come to that, may not be, for as sure as eggs are graded ovular Euro-units there will lurk in some dank council cupboard a malevolent creature whose only joy in life is to tell us that ‘nosegay’ is now proscribed, look with a spot I damn it – of flowers, and if you, having followed the wild and twisting path of my clauses to a successful conclusion, can sight, in the purple distance, the welcoming beacon that promises an end to this parenthesis, then Levin is the writer for you – five hours of reading Levin and the plain English sentence is only a dimly perceived memory, if I can just find my way out of this clause, I will join you – ah, θαλαττα, θαλαττα, I choose the Attic double ταυ, note) are not unlike that of a schoolboy on being called upon to write a report on his schoolmaster.

  It is the fashion amongst persons of rank and tone within the world of journalism and what is loosely called the ‘media’ (I once heard television described as ‘an immediate medium’, o tempora o mores, eheu fugaces, I’m going to run out of Latin tags and literary allusions before the season is quite out, pace Lady Bracknell) to mock Mr Levin with scorn. There is too much passion there, too much commitment, too much enthusiasm for the blasé denizens of the Street of Shame to handle. I may as well state at once that over the years I have found my views on such trivial subjects as the real threats to human freedom today and the existence of free will diverging more and more widely from those of Mr Levin, but that has never stopped me from lighting on any printed word of his with a glad cry, for the man writes like an angel, like a devil, like one whose connection between thought and word is absolute. His zest for life, his affirmative view of humanity, his belief in that simple, obvious truth that were you to lob a copy of the Sunday edition of the New York Times out of the window anywhere in the world, the chances are at least 90 to 1 in favour of it KO-ing a good person, a decent person, a friend (P.G. Wodehouse, to whom Levin’s prose owes a great deal, and I am sure he would be the first to admit it – Levin that is, not Wodehouse, Doctor Sir Pelham was too modest, and anyway he has long since been gathered to God – used, when in town, to solve the problem of the long walk to the post-office by the simple expedient of tossing his letters out of his window: his belief that the average human, finding a stamped and addressed letter on the pavement, would naturally pop it into the nearest pillar-box was never once, in decades, shown to be unfounded) have always struck a chord with me. Too few voices today are raised in chorus of that splendid truth.

  In These Times is the fourth collection of Levin’s writings; it contains his personal selection of two years of regular feature-writing for The Times under the heading ‘The Way We Live Today’ and book reviewing for the Observer. In an uncharacteristically pompous introduction he notes that over the years he has found himself returning more and more to three ‘themes’: Freedom, Responsibility and Art.

  In his condemnation of tyranny the world over his language is that of the Byron of Don Juan, entertaining, excoriating, unremitting and savagely comic. His column has often been used to raise individual cases of injustice, torture and inhumanity, particularly of course behind the Iron Curtain, and no one could have anything but praise for his tireless efforts on behalf of the abused and enslaved in all wicked regimes. This volume contains some of his very best articles about such cases, appalling stories of injustices in Lithuania, Russia, Czechoslovakia and South Africa.

  But the real bee in the bonnet that Bernard Levin has been sporting these last seasons, and its buzzing informs the majority of his articles whatever their pretext, is that of Individual Responsibility. Levin’s brand of libertarianism is founded upon an absolute belief in man’s direct responsibility for his actions. Free Will Exists! is the message that is semaphored in massive gaily coloured flags from every rise and knoll in the Levin landscape. This may ultimately be the truth, but to erect it as an Ultimate Truth from which all penal and social systems, all politics and economics should flow is to proclaim a way of dealing with our fellow man that may fall short of the ideal.

  Such is the zest of his argument that any organisations or movements that set out to put right deficiencies and imbalances provided by birth or weakness of will or human folly are contemptuously dismissed. Animal liberationists act not from a love of animals but from a hatred of mankind, from

  an unbearable rage at the very fact that there is a universe and that we are in it, for good or ill, along with the animals. I noticed, for instance, the satisfying relish with which nuclear disarmers describe the impending holocaust and its lakes of molten eyeballs, its forests of instant skeletons, its mountains of roasted flesh.

  Come, come! Tush! Not
to say, faugh! Levin has ‘noticed’ elsewhere that the most ‘strident’ feminists are the ugliest. He, a man so sensitive to the corruption for political ends of connotational language, uses words like ‘moderate’ and ‘extremist’ as his tennis balls, to be struck and bandied which way he will.

  All his unworthy observations, loaded language and fraudulent attributions of malignancy to what, let’s be frank, turn out in the end to be anyone or anything left wing or liberal, will only infuriate those who think and act differently (while they may often ultimately believe congruently) to Mr Levin and will only cause smug satisfaction in those who share his politics and social obsessions. But the latter will get all the satisfaction they require from the Scrutons and Butts and Mounts who litter the same features page of The Times as Mr Levin, but whose poisonous effusions contain not one scintilla of an iota of a suggestion of a millionth part of the wit and learning and humanity that are contained in even his most enragingly illiberal pieces.

  But I can and do, and recommend that anyone else should, ignore differences and welcome common ground. Above all there is the writing, just sit back and enjoy the prose of our best living newspaper writer.

  The Satire Boo

  A review for The Listener of books on satirical institutions.

  Tooth & Claw: The inside story of Spitting Image by Lewis Chester. Faber & Faber. Paperback. £3.95