Hard playing to get
Eric Christiansen
The Game of Tarot from Ferrara to Salt Lake City Michael Dummett (Duckworth £45) Twelve Tarot Games Michael Dummett (Duckworth £5.95) The Game of Tarot has been so widely reviewed by so many bewildered reviewers that there is very little more that anyone needs to know about it. But there may still be a few unsold copies at the booksellers, and perhaps a few more words may help to sell them. In any case, the problem of how to persuade anyone in his right mind to part with £45 for a printed book is a fascinating one in its own right, and presents a sort of challenge. 'This glove', I mused, as the pantechnicon that had brought it lurched off to have its springs overhauled, 'will have to be picked up.'
It is a lot of book. It is a lot of money. But in literature, so it seems, there comes a point at which the pull of mere mass on the human cheque-book no longer applies. The Bible still changes hands at less than a fiver. Something more is needed, if the mint sauce is to go on pouring. One method is to make the book a thing of rarity and beauty, which nowadays means having a stiff cover and someone familiar with the English language to correct the proofs, and, if possible, write the thing. This, Duckworth's have achieved. However, a fond expectation that books in English with stiff covers might sometimes cost less than £45 prevents my puffing even loveliness at that price.
Another method is to aim the book at a seller's market, Call it Smooth Dynamical Systems, and a slim text-book will fetch £21, because in circles where they take the texture of their dynamical systems seriously, nothing else will do. Call it Biophysical Chemistry, and you can ask a little over £60 with no risk of personal injury, because when the Prof says 'read Cantor and Schimmel', Cantor and Schimmel are read.
Dummett's book is not aimed at a small group of dedicated Tarot-card players, because in this country such a group barely exists outside his own family. On the contrary, he wants to pull in the crowds. And he still wants £45.
A possible approach is to dispose of reasons for not buying the book. If only more had been advanced! In private, some have scoffed at the author's avowed reason for studying these games: it relieved the pain which he felt on discovering, in 1968, that a Labour government was capable of imposing 'racist' legislation. This is no reason for•spurning the fruit of his labours. His fellow-countrymen ought not to laugh at him for thinking better of them than he should have. We all have these disappointments. If as many of us turned ourdisgust at the introduction of the metric system to such good use, something good might have come out of the centimetre.
Apart from this sneering in the wings, no cogent reason for not buying seems to have appeared. Admittedly. Dummett's other work has been sadly handicapped by the compliments lavished on it by Oxford philosophers, but the poor chap can't help being one of them. and even if he could, he. can't be blamed for it, since he tactfully avoids making the stuff up himself and simply explains the view of one Gottlob Frege, who never did anyone any harm as far as I know.
No: the only case for buying The Game of Tarot is that it is a very good book; and my only course is to explain why.
Card games have been a feature of European civilization for the last 600 years. Mamelukes had them, Persians had them. but since they reached the West they have been so developed and modified that they • form one of the most revealing symptoms of our aforesaid civilization. Nearly all of them, even Persian Monarchs, involve some sort of intellectual contest, and the odd thing is that it is not always the less intellectual that prove the most popular. That puzzler Otnbre, which few can now pronounce, let alone play, once and for a long time gripped a large part of high, middling and low society throughout Western Europe. The phrase 'card sense' has been invented to describe that strange sort of intellect that is brought to the fore in this sort of game, if nowhere else: but it is still head-work.
If a widespread tendency to discover and solve difficult problems is what made Europeans great, then cards deserve some of the blame. Until the introduction of compulsory education — no, forget that. Regardless of the introduction of compulsory education, it was cards that offered the best opportunity for demanding intellectual effort that was common to rich, poor, literate, illiterate, male, and female. They were cheaper, more social and more adaptable than board games. Whether the motive for play be gain, pastime, or fashion, the necessity of hard thinking could not be avoided, even by cheats.
Yet a satisfactory history of card-play has not yet been written. When it is written, Dummetes work will be recognised as an inescapable starting-point. His preliminary essay on how cards came to Europe, and how the main developments of trick-taking and trumping came about, is a masterpiece of deduction which ought to be read by all would-be historians of anything at all. In the same way, the chapters dealing with the use of the Tarot pack for fortune-telling, magic, and mystification contain the most skilful extraction of sun-beams from cucumbers that could be wished for. They are none the less intriguing for the author's entire lack of sympathy with the whole business; for his attitude towards hocus-pocus is that of John Wayne towards the concealment of spare aces in the watered silk waistcoat.
The subject is not shirked, though. The frauds and the fantasies of cartomancy and the occult are patiently described, and even here the reader will experience that rare glow that comes from the work of writers who understand a complex subject and know how to express it in plain terms. From Beckford on the care of hounds, for example, or from Marryat on life at sea.
As for the Tarot games, Dummett is a missionary. He wants you to learn them and play them, for reasons not unconnected with his championship of racial harmony and Herr Frege's philosophy. That is, he believes in cultural diversity and in intellectual variety; and he is tired of bridge. Bridge used to be the opiate of All Souls (a very competitive field for opiates) and for much of this century it prevented the Fellows from acquiring street credibility and instigating mass-action on major issues. Perhaps it was there that Dummett first flung his hand to the floor and groaned 'There must be a better way. I would rather be reading Gottlob Frege.' Perhaps not, In any case the constant danger of academical ferment makes the prospect of a yet more powerful opiate most alluring, especially when it consists of 78 pretty and exotic cards.
But there is no one game of Tarot. There is a large family of games, each associated with a particular place and some with reduced packs, and it will be difficult for English readers to plump for any one of such an attractive selection. To help them choose, Duckworth's have produced a paperback which reduces the field somewhat and presents the bare facts to the would-be player. It is still a difficult problem, because a sensitive soul will be pulled in different ways. His hope of finding other people to play with will no doubt incline him to the Tarot 'now played everywhere in France', His sense of history will direct him to the earlier Italian games, perhaps to the Ottocento of Bologna. But the sombre possibility of being stranded in BadenBaden with a 54-card pack naturally points to Cego as the prudent selection. Few missionaries have offered such a wide range of creeds to their neophytes, and it remains to be seen whether the truly broad church approach actually draws in a congregation. It is up to those who believe in diversity to make a go of it.
So, having narrowed the field of nonbuyers to monists. bridge-fanatics, philistines, and necromancers, I am obliged to admit that one other group remains outside the fold. There are those — in our society' — who cannot afford to spend £45 on a book. I should think they number somewhere in the region of 50 million people. It looks as if this Tarot-promotion is meant to be rather exclusive, after all. A pity it's such a good book.
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