/ 21 November 2003

That comic, tragic thing

The preposterous notion that reading a JM Coetzee novel is less challenging than watching a cricket match has been propagated. Not quite in these austere sports pages, but in the pull-out section that accompanies the Mail & Guardian. Nonetheless, the notion must be resisted and rejected.

Shaun de Waal’s thesis (”Screening Coetzee”, Friday October 17) is that readers who want to understand the author’s work should ‘do some reading” instead of probing into his personal life. This correspondent has done some reading (and probing into his sporting life) and drawn the conclusion that Coetzee clearly assigns to cricket a far more important place in the scheme of things than De Waal does.

Is it not obvious that Coetzee is referring to watching first-class cricket in the 1980s when he writes in Waiting for the Barbarians: ‘I spend three days of sensual languor, heavy-lidded, sleekly aroused, daydreaming”?

And could that title not be interpreted as a Newlands fan (which Coetzee certainly was) fearfully expecting the next visit of Clive Rice’s ‘mean machine”?

And when the narrator in Foe complains: ‘How much of my life consists in waiting?”, surely this is the lament of a slip-fielder? The title of a 1992 collection of Coetzee’s essays and interviews, Doubling the Point (edited by David Attwell), pays clever homage to the first novel to use a cricket match as a metaphor for anti-colonial sentiment.

Anthony Trollope’s The Fixed Period was written just six years after the first Test match. The most interesting fielding position in the book being ‘double long-off”, so the cricketing reference to the title of Coetzee’s collection shines through.

Fatuous ‘readings” aside, we know from De Waal’s 1992 review of Boyhood that Coetzee was devoted to cricket as a boy. He is in good company. George Orwell had a ‘hopeless love affair” with the game. Young Arthur Conan Doyle bowled WG Grace at Lord’s (and peopled his fiction with the names of county cricketers). Charles Hamilton, creator of the immortal Billy Bunter, wanted more than anything to be a cricketer. JB Priestley stated that ‘a professional batsman is less absurd than a professional sonneteer”.

Most importantly for our discussion, novelist John Fowles has declared that ‘total withdrawal from cricket is impossible”.

For further proof of this truth we have Coetzee’s account of his days in cricket-deprived Texas. Even in the United States and together with other ‘nostalgic cast-off children from the colonies”, Coetzee played cricket. The only happy moment in Youth, when the aspirant intellectual from the colonies feels competent and assured in England, is when he plays cricket.

‘Must he, a colonial, teach them to play their own game?” the narrator asks.

Coetzee bowled off-spin, that sparest and most parsimonious of occupations. Off-spinners give nothing away, they aim to bowl maidens, there is no frivolity and umpires are seldom generous. It is a bleak, depressing trade with none of the devil-may-care, hit-me-if-you-dare attitude of the wrist-spinning tribe. And thus is the genesis of Coetzee’s prose style revealed — as an off-spinner he could write no other way.

Coetzee also attended a cricket coaching course, typically eager to understand the structure and dynamics of that which he sought to master. Perhaps he was intent on emulating CB Fry, whom Neville Cardus once described as using bowling ‘entirely for some private pleasure, a connoisseur in the dialectic of batting”.

While in Texas, the young novelist studied the prose of Samuel Beckett, concentrating, as he puts it in one of his interviews with Attwell, ‘on texts from a period in Beckett’s life when Beckett too was obsessed with form, with language as a self-enclosed game”.

What Coetzee does not mention is that Samuel Beckett is one of the very few first-class writers who ever played first-class cricket. Is this what Coetzee really means when he writes of wanting to ‘get closer to a secret, a secret of Beckett’s that I wanted to make my own”?

Beckett worked for a spell as James Joyce’s secretary and must have influenced his master. Who but a cricketer, used to the slow passing of time and countless subplots being played out simultaneously, could conceive of the idea of the stream of consciousness novel?

Like cricket, ‘life is lived on more than one level”. Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man reproduces the sound of cricket bats ‘pick, pack, pock, puck”, although this, perhaps, proves that Beckett’s ears were not as good as his eyes.

Writing for the Spectator last year, Simon Barnes invoked Joyce in arguing vehemently against the type of condescension implicit in De Waal’s comparison: ‘There is epic meaning in all trivialities — that is what Ulysses means. Sport is to be enjoyed much as novels are enjoyed: plot, character, meaning.”

West Indian writer CLR James goes far in asserting cricket’s dramatic qualities: ‘It is so organised that at all times it is compelled to reproduce the central action, which characterises all good drama from the days of the Greeks to our own: two individuals are pitted against each other in a conflict that is strictly personal but no less representative of a social group.”

James writes that a writer ‘must strive to make his individual character symbolical of a larger whole”, but he may not succeed. In cricket the game is structured in such a way that it cannot fail to produce that essential drama.

So cricket watchers are not simply observing some stylised movement, partly because, as James argues, ‘human personality is on view long enough and in sufficiently varied form to register itself indelibly”.

Cricketers are always ‘trafficking in the elemental human activities, qualities and emotions — attack, defence, courage, gallantry, steadfastness, grandeur, ruse”.

These qualities are, for James, the ‘very stuff of human life”. So watching — or as the post-modernists would have it — ‘reading” a cricket match can be hard work indeed.

Coetzee contends in one of his notes on rugby that at the moment that sportsmen accept the rules of a game, ‘sport and the arts, the two most complex forms of play, part ways, because the creative artist both composes his game and plays it”.

This is a true distinction — and a good riposte to CLR James, but does not absolve De Waal from his grievous slander on the watching of cricket.

Once the artist has written his word and the cricketer has performed his action, the audience must make what they will of what they have read or seen.

De Waal quotes a schoolteacher on Coetzee’s ‘democratic” text. By that one must assume that the text is seen to be open to interpretation. Apart from the obvious point that this is surely true of all half-way decent writing, this quality is most definitely true of cricket too.

James concedes that cricket cannot create new understandings of ‘the emotions of an age” and that cricket must repeat: ‘But what it repeats is the original stuff out of which everything visually or otherwise artistic is quarried.”

RC Robertson-Glasgow is with James, but employs a more Coetzee-like cadence in asking: ‘What has become of that earthy striving, that comic, tragic thing that was our match of cricket?”

Coetzee saw many hours of ‘earthy striving” at Newlands and knows very well the challenges presented to the cricket spectator. Far be it from this writer to suggest what Coetzee might think about any of this. And De Waal is correct when he writes that the best things in life are hard. Which is why watching a cricket match, like reading a Coetzee novel, is such a worthwhile challenge.