Tee breaks
Benny Green
Mostly Golf Bernard Darwin, Edited by Peter Ryde (A. and C. Black £4.25) There is nothing like inflated rhetoric on the flyleaf for putting the reader's back up. Purchasers of a most welcome anthology of Bernard Darwin's essays who learn with startled surprise that 'any short list of the great prose writers of the twentieth century would surely include Bernard Darwin's name' might be excused for responding with 'Oh no it wouldn't', and smashing the book out of the nearest window, using a number three iron for the operation. Darwin was at least half as good as his editor, Peter Ryde, thinks he was—and half is enough to make the anthology as charming as any occasional volume to appear this year. Darwin specialised in the type of erudite, urbane, old-fashioned essay about nothing much in particular which is usually derided today : 'On Reading in Bed,' On Skipping in the Classics,' On the Chilterns', and so on. His way was to adopt a stance, half eccentric, half bookish, and leaven the persiflage with copious quotes from his pet authors, especially Dickens, about whom he was sometimes in danger of becoming a crashing bore.
But as the title of Ryde's selection suggests, Darwin was above all a golf phenomenon; the photograph of him on the front cover, exultant smile and bizarre cloth cap, might have come straight out of the pages of The Heart of a Goof or The Clicking of Cuthbert. Indeed, Darwin devoted most of a very long life either to playing golf or writing about it, and which of those two crimes you consider the more heinous depends entirely on how you feel about golf and about literature. With regard to the judging of Darwin as one of the 'great prose writers of the twentieth century', it helps enormously if, like me, you wish that Nicklaus and Palmer would cease from endorsing socks and underwear for long enough to disappear down one of those holes with which their lives appear to be so morbidly preoccupied. For the test of a sporting journalist, and indeed of any specialist writer, is whether he can engage the attentions of an outsider. The buttonholing of fanatics is easy; any old rubbish will satisfy them. But that Darwin should write descriptions of golf matches which convey to a reader like myself a sense of style, a feeling of urgency, an aura of affection, shows how fine a journalist he was. Ryde's book is not nearly long enough for the purpose it is trying to fulfil, and Ryde's foreword is not nearly short enough for the function which Ryde should have tried to fulfil. The book in its entirety is less than two hundred pages long, twenty-six of which are devoted to Ryde's preamble. Nor does it help when we read the editor's confession that he has 'compressed' Darwin's essay on Grace, 'The Best-Known Man in England'. Heaven forbid that he should have 'compressed' his own foreword instead. Ryde then compounds a felony by announcing that the Grace essay is soon to be republished as part of Darwin's biography of W.G. Grace anyway, in which case why couldn't we have had instead Darwin's 'The Boyhood of a Hero', which not only sketches in Grace's life with more skill, but also ends on a most affecting anecdote involving the Great Cricketer and Darwin's small daughter? I am all too well aware that those intrepid spirits who undertake the anthologising of a writer as prolific as Darwin will never be able to please everybody, so I will resist the temptation to mention my regret that a piece I once read by Darwin is not included. It was an essay about the autumnal delights of playing a round of golf in approaching darkness, and Darwin lit the page with descriptions of the lamps blinking on one by one as the lone lunatic proceeds on his way, doggedly completing his eighteen holes. I must, however, convey my puzzlement that a Darwin essay which in my edition of an old collection is called 'Hard Hitting', turns up rechristened in Ryde's anthology 'A Form of Obloquy'.
Now that I have had my grumble, I had better convey also the amount of pleasure which the reading of the book has given me. The essays should be read one at a time, preferably late at night, in bed, and if that sounds a mite too cosy for post-atomic realism, then it must be that Darwin's style is contagious. I suppose the ideal arrangement would be to begin working through the book some time in February, so that by the time the forty-nine essays were digested it would be time again for the cricket season and proper sport.
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