ENFANTS TERRIB LES
The press:
Paul Johnson on academic
and sporting prodigies
THE PRESS loves a prodigy, especially a child prodigy. Ruth Lawrence is prodigious by any standards. She got a starred Oxford first in mathematics at the age of 13, having taken only two years for the degree course. According to the Sunday Times, 'Over the 10 papers, she answered 81 questions while other students averaged a mere 32. In all, she acquired enough marks to have got her first twice over.' She covered a far wider range of subjects than other maths stu- dents, the Observer noted; 'fifteen lecture courses instead of the usual eight in Part II, 17 special subjects instead of the usual four in Part III.' She and her dad got a good spread on the front pages of last Friday's papers. It's not often that an identical photograph dominates both the Times and the Telegraph.
The trouble with prodigies, however, is that they begin by provoking astonishment and admiration but tend to get your back up after a bit. Her tutor at St Hugh's, Dr Mary Lunn, told the Sunday Times that the 'sheer bulk' of her answer-papers was `staggering'. 'Once, at a seminar,' the paper related, 'a senior academic had covered an entire blackboard with a theorem so complex that the audience struggled to grasp it. Ruth spotted a mistake and said so.' The Sunday Times's Stephen Pile, sent to interview her at Oxford, found the going difficult: 'A con- versation with Ruth is like an intellectual assualt course. . . no question is answered unless it is rigorously worded and precise. Most inquiries were either answered with another question or dismissed as woolly in a manner which cast unforgiving doubt upon the questioner.'
The trouble, as Pile discovered, was that he had to compete not only with the prodigy herself but also with her father, a Huddersfield computer consultant who gave up his job to oversee her Oxford education. Rather like Ruskin's parents, he insists on accompanying his daughter everywhere, and `One tutor even declined to teach Ruth, being unable to tolerate the ever-present, all-knowing, all-talking influ- ence of Lawrencepere.' He `wore sandals and had his trousers tucked into his socks', and Pile also accused him of 'grinning with delight at the sheer clarity of his intellec- tual processes'. He himself seems to have answered some of Pile's questions and found others a bit fuzzy. Pile concluded: `It was the most taxing conversation I have ever had and also among the least interest- ing, like a football match that is constantly stopped by the referee for technical in- fringements.'
The Observer's Laurence Marks was less severe on the Lawrences: `One's instant impression is of having wandered in on a Pre-Raphaelite and his samite-clad damozel'. 'They go everywhere together,' he added, `to lectures, to coffee parties, to the badminton courts, occasionally dining out at other colleges.' Harry Lawrence has taught his daughter at home and 'she has been deliberately denied any formal liter- ary education'. The father told him: Not only does literature not help you to live your life, it positively impedes you. I feel there is a kind of obscenity in the way most literature attempts to live people's life vicariously and purports to show their innermost feelings.'
This was an occasion, however, when a glimpse of television adds something that a newspaper interview cannot convey. Ruth struck me, when I saw her on the box, wearing her rose-decked wide straw hat, as, a curiously matronly 13-year-old, who
'The man kidnapped in Beirut says he'd rather stay than appear on TV-am.'
seemed rather older than her shy, giggly tutor. I was reminded of the arch solemnity occasionally assumed by Shirley Temple at critical points in her 1930s movies. That shot of her mounting the rear seat of her dad's tandem and pedalling off, like a couple of Fabians circa 1910, was pure cinematic nostalgia. Where, by the way, was mum? According to the Observer, while Mr Lawrence looks after Ruth, 'his wife, Sylvia, runs the consultancy back home in Huddersfield, where she is bring- ing up their younger daughter Rebecca (who has just passed 0-level maths at 11) to be a musician'. I hope it all ends happily.
It did not end happily for that other infant prodigy, John McEnroe, who was joyfully and cruelly rubbished by the press when he was humiliated at Wimbledon last week. The former `Superbrat' was now dubbed by the Sunday Mirror `Superslob'. The paper's reporter Greg Miskiw began his story: `Fallen tennis idol John McEnroe bowed out of Wimbledon yesterday nasty to the last. When I asked him politely if illness had caused him to crash out of the championship so dramatically he sneered and spat at me.' But there were some kind words from the press. Under the headline `McEnroe, Defender of the Faith', the Mail on Sunday ran an article by Richard Schnickel, author of The Culture of Celebrity, which dubbed him 'the Savonar- ola of tennis'. According to Schnickel, McEnroe is a puritan, a dedicated perfec- tionist, who seeks 'an answering purity . . . He expects the linesmen and the umpires to .perform their functions with intensity matching his. He expects journalists to bring a subtle critical understanding to his work. Being young and not particularly articulate, he has not found a way to express this point. It comes out as petu- lance.' Well, it's a theory.
The trouble with tennis, and I dare say with maths too, is that prodigies don't stay young. They grow older, and less interest- ing, and new prodigies turn up to take away the spotlight. Sportswriters are chief- ly interested in youngest and oldest. So, to a great extent, is the Wimbledon crowd. Remember how they rejoiced when old Drobny finally took the title? Last week it was all Boris Becker. He is not Superbrat but `Superboy', according to the News of the World, 'blasting his brawny way into the lasting pages of Wimbledon legend'. He is `wrecker-Becker', a 'sledgehammer on legs' (Sunday Express), 'Boom Boom Boris', the 'sensational Student Prince of Tennis from Heidelberg' (Sunday Mirror). The press played up the nationality point. 'When things go wrong,' wrote Alan Hoby in the Sunday Express, `he can be heard psyching himself up with loud Teutonic shouts.' He has, wrote the Sunday Mirror, 'carrot hair and a trigger-fast Teuton tem- perament to match'. So the build-up be- gins, and from now on it will be a roller- coaster, as McEnroe well knows. That German angle will be a godsend when the time comes for Fleet Street to give Becker the push.
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