Cricket
Cardus's fictions
Benny Green
The other day, enjoying the highly pleasurable experience of sitting chatting with Sir Neville Cardus, it occurred to me that it must already be several months since the last time some fathead accused him of telling lies, it still not having dawned on some of his fellow-writers that reporting the, factual truth about cricket may not altogether have been what Cardus was after. The mOment when this thought flashed through my head was when, after about half an hour, the inevitable happened and one of Sir Neville's two most inspired themes began to develop. If I say that I consider Cardus's Archie Maclaren and Cardus's George Gunn to be two of the finest creations in modern English fiction, people usually think I am being facetious, when in fact I am perfectly serious. No doubt Maclaren and Gunn were both giant characters, but it is Cardus who has been shaping them over the last half-century, bestowing on them what he would call the grace of art, endowing them with the symmetry which reality almost always fails to bestow.
These two men, Maclaren and Gunn, are of the deepest significance in relation to Cardus's view of life in general as well as of cricket in particular, for they represent the two opposing poles of his nature which he has acknowledged many times, an equal love for romantic gesture and the earthiness which deflates it. As Cardus paints Maclaren and Gunn, each is a violent contradiction of the other, the nobility of Maclaren very nearly rendered absurd by Gunn's irrepressible impulse to lampoon his own greatness. To Maclaren batting was a matter of dignity. You made the extravagant gesture because it was part of your nature, and if it cost you the game it mattered not at all, because no game's winning was worth the compromise of personal honour. Gunn, on the other hand, batted only so long as the exercise attracted him, which was by no means all the time, and would think nothing of selling a long innings to the captain who required it. Cardus sat there looking back fifty years and told of a morning when George Gunn lay abed at eleven in the morning, having forgotten that being 80odd not out at close of play on the previous day, he was due to resume his innings. And I saw that between Maclaren and Gunn there is a contradiction which Cardus never resolves, or really wants to resolve, because he is never quite sure which attitude he admires more, the one, which elevates cricket to a great romantic art, or the other, which ridicules its pretensions and reduces it to a rustic knockabout comedy.
Cardus is by no means unaware of this contradiction, and at one point in his autobiography attempts to explain it in genetic terms. Never having known his own father, and having been told nothing about him except that he had, been "tall, saturnine of countenance and one of the first violins in an orchestra," he speculates that from this shadowy figure "I suppose I inherited my feeling for music, and an unEnglish aestheticism. From my mother I inherited my ,less inhuman self and a very English love of the brave humours of the street. . . I am today austere and also a man of the world." In other words, Maclaren and Gunn, or, to express it in terms of the other half of Cardus's critical existence, Elgar and Marie Lloyd.
Although it is Maclaren who is the hero of Cardus's long life, it is only when we arrive at the astonishing figure of Gunn that we see the other side of the coin, the side which despises pretension and knows that its most effective antidote is outrageous irreverence. Cardus shows us George Gunn as a kindly man touched with genius, always smiling gently to himself, never in a hurry, even against the most intimidating fast bowling, which he is able to reduce seemingly to half-pace by some secret known only to himself. He regulates the rate of his run-making to suit his whims, and to the leonine Macdonald, one of the consummate fast bowlers of all time, he cheerfully remarks, "You, Mac, you couldn't knock the skin off a rice pudding."
Years later, having had time to cogitate on this extraordinary problem in human temperament, Cardus is shrewd enough to perceive that the anomalies inherent in George Gunn perhaps run deeper than mere flippancy of approach or eccentricity of technique. Gunn's uncle was the great William Gunn, that pillar of Victorian orthodoxy who would "have thought that a characteristic innings by George went near to blasphemy." Is it not possible, Cardus asks, "that George's whimsicality came . . . from some revolt against a tradition of decorum long respected in the family?" Instantly the reader accepts this charming suggestion, not because it is necessarily true, or if true, verifiable, but because it heightens the colours of Gunn's superb portrait.
But how far from the factual truth has Cardus really strayed with his portraiture? There exist a few fragments of evidence to suggest that, romanticised as they undoubtedly are, Cardus's characters have a firm basis in truth. In the pavilion tearoom at Lord's there hangs a photograph highly relevant to this issue, and although external evidence of this kind can be dangerously misleading, in this case it hints at certain conclusions about the people involved which are not altogether surprising to the observer who has formed his impressions through Cardus's prose.
The photograph in question is a potent one indeed, of the last Edwardians ever to sail to Australia for a Test series. There stands Woolley in his floppy hat like a dreaming poet, and R. E. Foster, within a year or two of an early death, sporting a pair of jacket lapels which are a broad hint that Savile Row is not to take up for another generation. But by far the most remarkable figure is to be found in the front row. There sits George Gunn, rendering an effect of complete and almost uncanny relaxation. The casual pose and the amused smile hint at vast untapped reserves. As he sits there in the Pacific sunlight of a lost Edwardian morning, he appears to be indulging a bunch Of schoolboys he happens to have stumbled across while taking a morning stroll, and whose solemn skylarking is no more than a useful device for whiling away an hour or two. Why does the expression oa Gunn's face seem to mock the pretensions of the holy relics in the Long Room next door? Why should the observer experience the not altogether comfortable feeling that cricket after all is a silly game hal-fib' worth an adult glance? There are no answers to these riddles, 0,..r indeed to any riddles connected with George Gunn. He once told Cardus that the whole time he was scoring his legendary 119 at Sydney, his sport vies ruined for him because over in the fal; corner of the ground where the brass beat' tinkled away during the cricket, there Was
a cornettist consistently out of tune;
Whatever the solution to the enigma ta Gunn, the photograph is not only a . hypnotic glimpse of a vanished past, but a remarkable confirmation of Cardus's vieW; Perhaps next time, with a bit of luck, might be able to steer the conversation round to Maclaren?
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