Gambling
Lousy punters
Jeffrey Bernard
The Psychology of Gambling edited by Jon Halliday and Peter Fuller, first published by Allen Lane in 1974 and now published by Pelican Books at 95p, has been a disconcerting read and one that has made me feel even more awful than I otherwise would have done in backing two longish shots in the St Leger neither of which ever promised to win at any stage of the race. This book is a very serious one and although I've always prided myself on having the ability to 'own up', I now realised that my owning up has always been sheer surface stuff.
For example, I never knew until now that! gambled because I really feel lousy about it and not only want to lose on the nags to punish myself for this blinding practice but, to rub it in further, also want to killmy father. Speaking as an anal retentive who thought that Her Majesty's Dunfermline would be outclassed by the likes of Alleged and the French contingent 1 aways put my punting down to the simple business of asking questions. My main, first and foremost question has always been: 'Is fate, God, luck and love on my side?' The second question has usually been: 'Can I win enough money on such and such a horse to enable me to avoid actual work?'
But I come not to knock Freud, Halliday or Fuller for they are honourable men although I wouldn't mind offering a shade of odds that none of them ever did or ever has had a bet. Heavens above, can you imagine the trouble Freud would have had betting? If, as I believe to have been the case, Freud turned up one hour early to catch a train, then can you imagine the trouble he would have had trying to get a bet on the 3.30 while the 2.30 was being run? Obviously he would have been an obsessive and compulsive ante-post plunger. And, like most obsessive and anally-orientated punters, he would have shown a marked tendency to knock the bookmakers.
What really gets my nanny tote is the clumsy way, or at least inexperienced way, that clever men, intellectuals and academic men get their teeth stuck into vicarious problems. Should you ever have the bad luck or spare time to be asked and then go to a party given by the sort of people who live in Chalk Farm and who write for the Sunday Times and then hear the subjects of compulsive gambling or alcoholism crop up, you'll find it a racing certainty that some bright spark — usually a feature writer who earns about £8000 a year and whose one assignment in the year is to take a trip to the Dordogne to find out how some poof celebrity cooks aubergines — is bound to mention Dostoievsky, , There'll then be a lot of wise shakings of the heads and at least two people with After Eight stains on their waistcoats will knowingly murmur: 'Christ yes. Did you read The Gambler? Absolutely fantastic.' No one ever seems to have tumbled that what's so bloody despicable about Dostoievsky is that he was a really lousy punter. Not just usually bad, but really awful. You wouldn't have passed the time of day with him in a betting shop.
I don't mean that to be a social worker you need to have been, a one-time psychopath brought up in a slum, but I do think that you need to have done a little more than an exam sitting. (Show me a OP who knows anything about alcoholism who isn't one.) What I'm laboriously and clumsily trying to get at is that you've got to be there to know what it's like to be there. Messrs Halliday and Fuller have written a splendid introduction —nearly half the book in fact, the rest of it consisting of some eight essays — but it's all theory. I know a historian can write about Waterloo without having fought at it, but I just don't see how two blokes can explain gambling who haven't sweated, panted and drooled over the green baize. At the begin ning of this admirably unsatisfying and fascinating book that leave's most of the questions unanswered or glibly explained a la Freud there are three quotes. To my amazement one of them reads: 'Sitting here contemplating a load of bills from various bookmakers, I can suddenly remember what made me fall in love with horseracing. There was a boy at school with a name like Tosh who gth twelve strokes of the cane and expelled for making a book. Anything you could get that lot for, I thought, can't be bad'. Jeffrey Bernard: 'A Year at the Races', New Statesman, 1 June 1973.
God forgive me for ever having been so glib about the Oedipal battleground. Now that both my parents have been long dead and the only things We have to warm us during the shortening "plays are the Cambridgeshire, the Cesare/itch and the Prix de L'Arc de Triomphe, I'm going to make a brave attempt to feel less guilty about all sorts of things. I am also resolved to make a better job of gambling than Dostoievsky did. Furthermore, I'm afraid that, as always, I shall be unable to resist buying any books that Pelican publish on depression, insanity, loneliness, alcoholism, crime, suicide or how to make the deadline when all about you are discussing the whys and wherefores of what's going to win the Mill Reef Stakes at Newbury on Saturday.
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