Baton and Bat
Autobiography. By Neville Cardus. (Collins. 12s. 6d.)
WHEN C. P. Scott promoted him from the reporters' room to the Manchester Guardian Corridor, Neville Cardus suspected that his reporting style was too decorative even for the M.G. "I entirely lacked interest in news," he says, " and though the M.G. never desired that happenings in the external universe should become an obsession, it did like a reporter to admit now and then that the external universe existed, even if only as phenomena." I should say that Cardus is still fighting a struggle against his unwillingness to get down to brass tacks. I should say that although he is now a famous name both in cricket and in music, he is an expert in neither field—expert, that is, in the sense of understanding or caring about technical intricacies. I believe that he finds it hard to bother his head about such details, that he waves them aside in search of the broad general impression. I believe that this has been and still is a handicap, standing between him and what should be his right— to be considered a great writer. Cardus writes as a painter paints, not as a photographer photographs. But lack of attention to detail can get you into trouble even in this field.
Although my father was a Yorkshireman, he took the M.G. because he was also a Liberal. Every morning I used to snatch the paper from the newsagent, and after no more than a* glance at the Yorkshire score used to plunge into the account of the Lanca- shire game ; such was the spell of "Cricketer" over my mind. But the spell was nearly broken by something " Cricketer " wrote in a description of an innings by Spooner. He described how at each boundary the little boys round the ring had chortled and weaved their hands in the air as if to attract the ball by magic to their side of the ground. Now I was one of those little boys round the ring. I had seen that innings. I knew that " Cricketer " had got it wrong. The little boys round the ring did not chortle that day nor weave their arms. Pure artistry lifted them, for once, into silence and immobility. They sat still and glowed. " Cricketer " did not observe that. He just said to himself, " Now what would boys think of this ? " And he wrote what he imagined. Later I sus- pected that he sometimes imagined his own emotions, writing not what he felt but what he imagined his public would expect him to feel. Of course, even that was readable ; Cardus always is—even when we expect an account of the Lancashire v. Gloucester match and get, instead, the purest lark-song about the summer beauty of the Cotswolds, superbly headlined " Lancashire's Steady Batting." Of course, too, his imagination often brings him effortlessly to truth, as when he says of Woolley's batting : "The lease of it is in the hands of the special providence which looks after things that will not look after themselves." That epitomises for me my feeling of insubstantial joy, joy that was too good to last—even if Woolley did take it as a reflection on his baCk-play. But so often the artifice shows through.
It showed through to Cardus himself, or perhaps he saw it through the eyes of Dick Tyldesley who, after reading a piece by " Cricketer," said reflectively : " Ah'd like to bowl at bugger scorn da-ay." At all events he began to parody his own style. " On Sattrday," he wrote, " Tonbridge was a pretty place in the sunshine, the soft light of summer, ladies on the lawns, blue sky and clouds of fleece, the chirruping of birds and the whirring of aeroplanes, and the, explosion of corks out of bottles and good business at the bar—a perfect English scene in this our land." That was long ago. And now, in this book, there is simplicity. Perhaps because he is writing of things he saw, unaffectedly, through boyish eyes, his pictures of his home in a Manchester slum, of the imaginative terror provoked in his mind by thoughts of Eternity and of Siamese twins, of the gracious loveableness of his aunt who walked the streets, of the opening of a new life as assistant cricket pro at Shrewsbury, of his days as one of Haslam Mills's young writers on the Manchester Guardian under C. P. Scott, of the first flow of music, sucked in by him like water by a parched land, all these are natural.
But there is still need for self-parody. He writes : " I have met Richard Strauss and Bradman • George Robey and James Barrie ; Delius and Jack Hobbs ; Schnabel and Tom Webster; James Agate and Gustave Agate ; Samuel Alexander (the last of the classical metaphysicians) and Emmott Robinson (also a philosopher of con- sequence) ; Sibelius and Edward Elgar and Larwood." How the young men who used to run about the columns of the austere Man- chester Guardian like monkeys from tree to tree would have parodied that. Cardus's whole life is an experience of the oneness of the world. To Cardus, of all people, that oneness should be simple and natural. Yet here he is asserting it aggressively, with strained artifice. Give me, instead, the rusty razor-blades he found littered round Barrie's bathroom.
Cardus is one of my heroes. I criticise him as sometimes he used to criticise the bowling of Wilfred Rhodes. His autobiography did to me just what it was intended to do—" on every page the reader .must be persuaded to think that what's to come is still unsure." At the end, I am still unsure of what's to come. Will it be greatness or just the giving of passing pleasure ? I believe that it will be greatness if Cardus will only choose to mix a little more with his
beloved Mary Turner, of Past Hoathly, Sussex, who wrote to her son in September, 1739: "Last Monday youre Father wag at Mr. Payns and plaid at Cricket and came home pleased anuf, for he struck the best Ball in the game and whished he had not army thing else to do he wuld play Cricket all his life."
J. P. W. MALLALIEU.
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